The Chippewa’s, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi’s were nomadic in the sense that their communities were built in temporary structures and not fixed in one place during a year or short period of years. This was a necessary and nomadic cultural practice required by their sedentary form of hunting, gathering, and gardening culture and economy. The community had to be moved seasonally or periodically when the game for hunting became scarce, the soils lost fertility for gsthering and gardening, and disease became problematic due to the accumulation of pests and sanitary degradation. As in many nomadic cultures, the communities rotated the campsites for their communities and lodges within a geographic region that shifted along with the changes in territorial dominance among the bands, clans, tribes, and confederations.
The Pre-Columbian and early colonial contacts with Europeans resulted in these people migrating away from their territories along the shores of Eastern North America to and around the Great Lakes region. This mass migration of the culture seems to coincide with one or more pandemics resulting from contact with Old World diseases and possible indications of a Pre-Columbian New World diseases such as forms of hemorhagic fevers found in such places as present day Mexico City and its valley.
These mass migrations were negotiated with their brother Mi’kmaq and father Abnaki peoples, and were made at the expense and conquest of the Iriquois, Sioux, and Fox among others. So, they were in fact a nomadic and migratory Neolithic culture.
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