Making a Living

• Main Author: Littlefield, Alice
• Format: Book
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of Illinois Press 2017
• Subjects: anishina*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037153.003.0003

This chapter records Michigan Anishinaabe women's long history of occupational mobility and creative adaptation against the impositions of federal policies, from women's earliest involvement in the global fur trade of the seventeenth century to waged and entrepreneurial service in tourism of the Upper Peninsula. Enriched by interviews conducted in the early 1990s with women of the Saginaw Chippewa, the chapter focuses on the postwar-era generations of women and their efforts to gain entry to postsecondary education and subsequently to white-collar and professional labor. It shows how they secured opportunities unavailable to their mothers but only because foremothers were so resourceful and persevering.