In March and April 2024, St. Croix 360 published a three-part article about the life and teaching of Miskobineshii, a respected elder of the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. We later shared the news that she was battling health issues, which included broken bones, pneumonia, and COVID. Several readers made generous contributions to a fund to help her.

Miskobineshii passed on at age 91 on September 17, 2024 at her home on Gaa-waawiyegamaag, Big Round Lake, surrounded by her family. It’s been hard to put those words down and I have regrettably waited too long to publish this. She was honored with Ojibwe ceremonies and buried at the Johnstown Cemetery near the shores of the lake.

Born in a wigwam near Cumberland in 1931, Miskobineshii was raised with her people’s old ways, including speaking the Ojibwe language exclusively until age seven. She led a remarkable life, bringing six children into the world, traveling extensively, living closely connected to her people and her home, and working for decades to keep her language, traditional skills, and culture alive. She was widely recognized in recent years for her contributions to her culture.

“Miscobinayshii was a highly influential and respected Tribal Elder, with a vast knowledge of traditional Ojibwe customs and language,” the St. Croix Tribe said in a statement. “Her loss will be felt immensely.”

(There are multiple ways of spelling her name. It means red bird, which she said referred to a scarlet tanager she saw in a dream.)

After I wrote the article about her last winter, I met with Miskobineshii a few more times, continuing our conversation in hopes it would lead to more lessons, and more to write and share with the wider world. She is gone now, but her words remain. Her daughters Cindy and Susan graciously reviewed this article and I was also assisted by Dr. Wendy Makoons Geniusz of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

On March 6 last year, I arrived at Miskobineshii’s house to deliver the draft of my first article for her to read. The last time I had been there, in December, we had a long one-on-one conversation that I recorded and based my writing on. Today would not be like that.

It was a warm afternoon with hope of spring’s first signs of life, and the feeling of a winter’s pent-up energy released. When I arrived that Wednesday midday, it looked like there was a party underway. The driveway was packed with cars and trucks and several people were busy outside the house. It turned out to not be a party, but a couple of kinds of work were underway.

As I went inside, I saw that the wooden walkway to Miskobineshii’s front door was torn up, and a crew from the tribal construction company was rebuilding it. In the house, it was another hive of activity. Her daughter Susan was there, and her granddaughter Sarah, and a young woman at the counter was eating soup. People were constantly coming, going, and passing through. At one point, a construction crew member, an old friend, came inside and asked about a leaking bathtub and broken door lock, and headed off to make the repairs. The tribe was taking care of Miskobineshii.

I sat and we talked a little, I handed her the draft article. Soon, her daughter Cindy came in from outside, carrying a plate with bark shavings on it. She explained to me that a teacher and elder from the Red Cliff Reservation was out back, sharing how to prepare early spring’s medicine. We went back outside to visit a small group sitting around a fire.

Walking through the small pavilion where Miskobineshii hosted wild rice camp every year to teach the youth about harvesting and processing it, we came to near the lakeshore. Two women were seated, hunched over their laps, scraping the fine red bark off bright red twigs of willow. Richard, the teacher, answered questions, and everyone talked and joked.

They recounted how they had harvested the wood from a swamp that morning, late winter being the only time of year to collect it. The women had ventured after a hard-to-reach bush and broken through the ice, their legs going into the water and mud up to the knee. They laughed about that a lot.

Richard told me that the conversation while working was an important part of the process to create kinnickinnic, a material smoked alone or mixed with tobacco. This is medicine that heals body and spirit, and carries prayers to the Creator, and the process of its production was critical. Richard mentioned the old saying “laughter is the best medicine,” and explained that the group’s laughter while working would impart that healing power into the kinnickinnic.

I went back inside after a while and talked with Miskobineshii and her family a little more. The saws and drills outside continued to sound. People came and went. It wasn’t conducive to an interview, but that was okay. I’d delivered my draft and learned enough for one day.

A week after that festive afternoon, I was back to talk about the article and anything else. It was a gray day, there still wasn’t any snow on the ground, the Straight River was wide open under a sun climbing higher off the horizon. The land was beginning to break loose. A neighbor had been keeping Miskobineshii informed about how much maple sap they were collecting in the sugarbush, and brought her a jar from the first boil. Her son had come fishing one night as soon as the ice was out, and she had enjoyed fresh fillets for dinner. The woods and waters were providing life and sustenance as they long have.

We sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by sewing supplies and books and notes. I asked her about what Richard had said about laughter while working, putting good medicine into the willow bark they were preparing. I told her I had noticed Miskobineshii were always telling jokes and laughing.

“Every time you go somewhere, somebody is laughing or they’ll make you laugh, say something to you to make you laugh,” she said. “And I don’t know, sometimes I wonder if that’s just a cover up from all the pain we had, from suffering all that trauma in the past.”

The United States government has taken a lot from the St. Croix Tribe, but laughter is one of the things that could never be stolen. The people are still here, still thriving, still laughing.

”It’s good that you can laugh,” she said. “It a good healer, laughter.”

Miskobineshii said the trauma remained in her people’s hearts, though she was also hopeful, predicting it would dissipate in another 20 years or so. “But I won’t be here,” she said.

Miskobineshii was still making moccasins last spring. She had learned the craft from her grandmother, having sewn countless pairs over the years.

“I watched my grandma making some moccasins when I was just learning to talk,” Miskobineshii said. Her older sister, Margaret, was being instructed in many of the old ways, and that meant Miskobineshii saw it all at an early age. She told me that the long fringes around the collar of the moccasins weren’t for decoration. “If you were out somewhere and you needed to tie something, you’d rip off one of those fringes to use,” she said.

Miskobineshii was one of the few people who still made going-home moccasins, the footwear that carry the deceased on their journey to the next world. Someone had just called from St. Paul asking her to make a pair, and came to pick them up a few days later in time for the funeral. She’d had people come from as far away as the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.

”Usually I tell them it doesn’t cost anything, but I would prefer that if they’re going to pay me anything, to just give me the money for the leather, so it can go towards buying another deer hide,” she said.

Many times, the people who requested going home moccasins had gotten her number from her friend Lee Obizaan Staples, a tribal elder from Minnesota who conducted funerals and other Ojibwe ceremonies and an author of several books, who also strove to preserve and share his people’s knowledge.

One day while I was there, Obizaan called Miskobineshii. He was in a hospital in Pine City, suffering his own health problems. They chatted a few minutes, she was happy to hear from him. They had both been raised in the old ways, helped pass on their culture to the next generations, and had a great mutual respect and friendship. Obizaan passed on March 6, 2025, five months after Miskobineshii.

She told me going home moccasins are usually fairly plain, unbeaded, simple. They don’t need to look flashy, but carry the wearer on a long journey.

Even as Miskobineshii follows her path to the world beyond, her life continues to influence her people and her homeland. In April this year, she was honored by early childhood teachers in northwestern Wisconsin. Miskobineshii had worked for the past five years with Wendy Geniusz, who uses her Ojibwe name Makoons, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, on curriculum materials for people teaching Indigenous languages to young people. They first met and then worked together at Anishinaabemowin Gabeshiwin, an Ojibwe language camp held on the Red Cliff Reservation on the south shore of Lake Superior.

“She just produced an awful lot of language content for learners and she also had really different ways of thinking about how to teach language,” Makoons said.

Keeping her language and culture alive was one of Miskobineshii’s greatest passions. She saw it as a big part of her role as an elder in the St. Croix Tribe. She had worked with Makoons for the past several years on a book project (or projects) which Makoons says will be released in the future. Miskobineshii believed it was time to document as much traditional knowledge as possible, to preserve it for future generations.

“She was even willing to write stuff down in her old age, that she wanted to continue past her,” Makoons said. “That’s a huge thing to be willing to do because there are people that are against writing down stories, there are people that are against writing down a ceremonial description. She really had to think about it and what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it, and she even checked every so often with other elders. People were supportive of what she was doing, which was really wonderful, and that made her continue.”

Makoons said that the book she worked on with Miskobineshii is different than her previous book, which was primarily autobiographical. The work-in-progress has much more information about Ojibwe culture. It includes stories in the Ojibwe language with English translations, a couple of which are sacred stories that can only be told in winter. Most of the stories though are Miskobineshii’s own, many of which she wrote with Makoons as part of their language education efforts. Stories were part of teaching the language.

There are a lot of reasons it’s important the Ojibwe language continues to be spoken. One of the highest priorities is prayer. Praying in the Ojibwe language was critical for retaining their connection to their culture, the land, religious beliefs, and more.

“There are a whole bunch of people whose real goal in learning the language is to learn how to pray,” Makoons said.

Teaching people how to pray has its own challenges, since it’s one of the topics which many Ojibwe have been reluctant to write down. The religion does not have standard prayers that can be memorized, much less written.

Another reason might be because all Native Americans were banned from practicing their religion until 1978. The Ojibwe had been forced to practice in secrecy. I once heard a white woman, who had grown up near Miskobineshii’s birth community in the 1950s, say she said her family had been honored to be invited to a religious gathering—but were urged not to tell anyone about it.

“We talked about it,” Makoons said. “It was like, well, this is how people are going to learn. So, through the language classes there were people who could pray if they wanted to every morning or whenever they want to pray. And that was a really important thing.”

Makoons and her husband spoke in Miskobineshii’s honor at the Northwest Connection Family Resources early childhood education conference in Hayward. They led the group in a prayer: standing and facing the four directions, using the Ojibwe language. They also dedicated a new resource for teacher in Miskobineshii’s memory, a list of words used to praise others, especially children.

“She really wanted praise words,” Makoons said. “She wanted little babies to hear wonderful things.”

The list includes compliments like “I believe in you” (Gidebweyenimin), “You’re doing good things” (Giminochige), and “I’m proud of you” (Gidapiitenimin). The materials will be used by teachers across Wisconsin for years to come.

Miskobineshii’s work on the early education language resources was strategic as always. For the youngest learners, the preschoolers, the emphasis was not just on positivity, but also introducing some of the language’s unique phonemes. Getting the general sounds of Ojibwe words in the heads of children at a young age has been found to be very helpful as they learn more of the language later in life. The brief phrases Miskobineshii wrote also introduce the basic structures of the Ojibwe language.

“Phrases are one pattern and they’re in the praise words because it’s like, ‘I’m proud of you.’ That same pattern goes in all these other phrases,” Makoons said. “Anything I can do to you is in that pattern.”

Last March, one of the last times I saw her, Miskobineshii told me how Ojibwe people sent their relatives on the journey to the next world:

“They put a little minute piece of rice or meat, in a little lunch box, and put it in the coffin… Because when they’re talking about them at the wake, they tell them what they’re going to see when they’re traveling.

“They’re going to travel for four days, four nights. They can’t, no matter how fast, how slow, they’ll get there at the same time. In four days time. The first night they tell them, they give them a little blanket to lay down and cover up with if they want. They got a lunch box they can eat from.

“And then they got tobacco. They have four, five tobacco ties.

“The first gatekeeper they come to, they give them tobacco. To let them through. So on with the second and third and fourth.

“Each time, they go through one doorway, they’ll see lots of flowers and fruits and vegetables. They’ll see blueberries and they’ll pick them and throw them over their shoulder so the ones they left behind will have plenty to eat.

”And then they when they get to their destination, they come into a big wigwam. And I suppose they get a debriefing or something,” she chuckled. “Because they said they don’t see their folks right away, the ones that left them. They go through some certain ceremony and then they go out to the crowd.”

A visitation for Miskobineshii was held at the Maple Plain Community Center last September, a few hundred yards from where she was born nine decades earlier. There were a lot of people there, and there was a lot of food. Prayers were said, tobacco was burned, the smoke carrying words and thoughts up to the Great Spirit, the Creator.

Then everyone lined up to walk down a long line of folding tables covered in dishes. I filled my plate with several styles of wild rice, fry bread, and some Jell-O salad. There were quiet conversations, hugs. It had been several months since I had seen Miskobineshii. I silently wished her well on her to the next world. Her family gave her, food, tobacco, and other gifts to help her on her way.

Driving home, I passed a rumbling thunderstorm. My route let me slip north of it and watch it roll over undulating forests, fields, wetlands, and lakes. It was a crackling cloud above a quiet landscape, blowing and drenching everything it passed over.

Somewhere beneath it, a red bird found shelter in a tree, and watched over everyone she loved.

Mii gwayak
That’s right

Gigotaamigoz
You are a good worker

Niminwendam omaa ayaayan
I am happy you’re here

Gidebweyenimin
I believe in you

Giwiidookaage
You help others

Ginibwaakaa
You are smart

Ginitaa-bizindam
You are a good listener

Giminochige
You’re doing good things

Gidapiitenimin
I’m proud of you