Two Ojibwe women shaped Minneapolis' Indigenous history

In 1926, Winnie Jourdain joined a wave of Ojibwe who left their homes in the quiet woods of northwestern Minnesota's White Earth Reservation and moved to Minneapolis. She was 26, recently widowed and hoping to find work to support her 7-year-old son, Berman.

"Everyone told me I would starve to death down there, but what could I do? There was no work on the reservation," she said years later. "I told them I wouldn't starve as long as my knees could bend and there were floors to scrub."

Another White Earth descendent, Emily Peake, was born in Minneapolis in 1920. After graduating from Central High School and serving in the Coast Guard Women's Reserve, she completed a psychology degree at the University of Minnesota and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Along the way, she learned Ojibwe, French, German and some Russian and hosted a weekly TV program on Indian issues.

"People are taking a look at the environment and are discovering that after several thousand years the American Indians left it in pretty good condition." Peake said in 1974.

Jourdain and Peake are featured in a new anthology about urban Indians published by the University of Oklahoma Press, "Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization" (tinyurl.com/UrbanIndians).

"The White Earth Ojibwe community persisted and thrived in the urban landscape," thanks in part to the social activism Jourdain and Peake championed from the 1940s through the 1960s, writes Sasha Maria Suarez, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Suarez, a White Earth descendant who grew up in Minneapolis and received a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota, maintains that the organizing work of Jourdain, Peake and other Indian women merits more attention.

"I was immediately hooked by the tremendous work they did to support our community," Suarez said in an e-mail, "and how little their work is talked about outside of our community — and sometimes even within it."

Suarez writes that Jourdain and Peake "indigenized the landscape of an urban environment that was supposed to hasten their assimilation … [and] shaped the community and the very landscape of the city itself."

The book points out that 70% of Indigenous people in the United States have lived in cities for the last 50 years, yet there's a gap in scholarship about their urban experiences. American Indians shouldn't be known as "frozen relics of a pre-industrial past or exclusively as residents of rural reservations," said Kent Blansett, a University of Kansas professor and co-editor of the book with Cathleen D. Cahill and Andrew Needham.

Suarez details how the families of Jourdain and Peake "acted as a point of entrance" for Indian people moving to Minneapolis. "The city was full of prejudice," said Jourdain, who helped Indians find work and housing "for many years ... because my people needed help, not because I wanted recognition."

Born in 1900 in a White Earth log house with a wood stove and kerosene lamps, Jourdain was forced to attend a culture-stripping boarding school in Flandreau, S.D., as a teenager, then was widowed at 25 when her husband died of tuberculosis.

Standing just 5 foot 1, Jourdain first found work at a laundry and eventually became a leader for Minneapolis' growing population of Indigenous people in the mid-20th century. Mayor Hubert Humphrey appointed her to the human rights commission, and she famously stared down City Council members in 1971 while lobbying for the Minneapolis American Indian Center at Franklin and Bloomington avenues.

"You took this whole country from us," she said. "All we want are a couple of acres."

Jourdain eventually remarried, had a second child and opened her home to Indians seeking work and housing in Minneapolis. She helped Indian children stay in school, finding them tutors and selling homemade quilts to buy them books and eyeglasses. After 50 years in Minneapolis, Jourdain moved back to White Earth — where she was simply known as Ma — and died there in 2001 at age 101.

Jourdain "prevailed through everything," said Winona LaDuke, a White Earth activist and two-time vice presidential candidate, when she died. "She illustrates the resourcefulness of our community."

Peake served on the Minneapolis human relations and housing commissions, helped launch the Upper Midwest American Indian Center and spent 17 years as its director. She served on the National Indian Council on Aging and taught Indian history and culture in public schools.

"Indian people have strong philosophies and family ties that help see them through life," she said in 1980.

When Peake died at 74 in 1995, her successor at the Indian center recalled her keen interest in preserving Ojibwe history.

"She wanted to see the positive contributions of American Indians in the schools," Gertrude Buckanaga said. "She wanted our American Indian elders to be a part of that process."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.