William Whipple Warren (May 27, 1825 – June 1, 1853) was a historian, interpreter, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. The son of Lyman Marcus Warren, an American fur trader and Mary Cadotte, the Ojibwe-Metis daughter of fur trader Michel Cadotte, he was of Ojibwe and French descent. William lived in two cultures, because his father was white, he was not considered Ojibwe, but an Ojibwe "relative", because in the Ojibwe patrilineal culture, inheritance and property were passed through the paternal line. His mother was Ojibwe and he learned her culture from her family. He is the first historian of the Ojibwe people in the European tradition.
In the fall of 1845, Warren moved at the age of 20 from Wisconsin to Crow Wing in present-day Minnesota. He worked as an interpreter for the fur trader Henry Mower Rice.
Bilingual and educated in the United States style, Warren started collecting stories from the oral tradition of the Ojibwe to tell their history. He drew from oral history to tell about the people prior to their encounter with Europeans, and combined it with documentation in the European style. After suffering from tuberculosis for many years, he died as a young man of 28 from a hemorrhage on June 1, 1853 and was buried in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His history was published posthumously in 1885 by the Minnesota Historical Society. A revised, annotated edition was published in 2009.
Early life and family
William Whipple Warren was born in 1825 in La Pointe, Michigan Territory (present-day Wisconsin), on Madeline Island. He was the son of Mary Cadotte, an Ojibwe and the daughter of Ikwesewe or Madeline Cadotte, daughter of the headman of the high-status White Crane clan of the Anishinaabe, and her husband Michel Cadotte, a major fur trader of Ojibwe-French (Métis) descent. Her parents had both been important to the fur trade on Madeline Island, named after her mother in 1828. His father was Lyman Marcus Warren, an American fur trader and descendant of Richard Warren in New England.
As the Ojibwe had a patrilineal system, children were considered to be born into their father's clan and lines of descent. Those born to a non-Ojibwe father had no clan or formal place within the tribe, unless specifically adopted by a man of the tribe. They and their mothers could usually find protection within the tribe. Such multiracial children of the period often also faced discrimination by European-American society, whose people considered them more "Indian" than white, regardless of the lines of ancestry.
Lyman and Mary had a second son Truman (named after his brother) and daughters Julia and Mary. (The senior Truman Warren had married a sister of Mary Cadotte, so the families were doubly linked. Truman Warren and his wife had twin sons Edward and George Warren, a few years younger than William.)
After attending Protestant mission schools at La Pointe and on Mackinac Island, in 1836 young Warren traveled back East with his paternal grandfather Lyman Warren to Clarkson, New York to live. There he attended Clarkson Academy. He next attended the Oneida Institute near Whitesboro, New York, a Presbyterian college founded for the education of Native Americans. It combined liberal and what was called industrial or artisan education. The director was Beriah Green, an abolitionist. In 1840 at the age of 15, Warren returned to his family in La Pointe.
Career
Warren liked to sit with his mother's people and hear the Ojibwe stories. At age 17, he started working as an interpreter, as he was bilingual. At the same time, he made notes on the stories and history of the Ojibwe when he could. In the fall of 1845, he moved to Crow Wing, Wisconsin Territory (now Minnesota) to work as an interpreter for the trader Henry Mower Rice. Warren continued collecting stories and began to write a history of the Ojibwe.
A man of two cultures, Warren was considered a mixed-blood. "He knew he would not be considered an Indian by the Indians, nor did he dare declare himself Indian. Still the Ojibwe considered him their relative ... and relied on him for his counsel and his honesty." He considered that he had a unique position for collecting and writing the history of the Ojibwe.