Leech Lake (drawing)
Title/Subject: Leech Lake
Artist: Anna Jane Wright (American, 1850-1938)
Date: 1870
Type: drawing
Medium: graphite on paper
Dimensions: 10 3/8 x 25 1/4 in.
Collection: Sela G. Wright Papers (RG 30/192)
The Indian Agency at Waker, Minnesota on the West shore of Leech Lake is the subject of Anna Jane Wright's 1870 drawing. Anna was a student at Oberlin College at the time, visiting her family at Leech Lake among the Ojibwe (Chippewa). Her father, Sela G. Wright, was one of the first from Oberlin to feel compelled to bring education and Christianity to other cultures. Other Oberlin missionaries at the time worked primarily in China. Sela Wright began his mission at Leech Lake in 1843. It was not terribly successful; it dissolved in 1859 with few converts. An uprising forced him and his family to flee back to Oberlin in 1862. In 1867 he returned to government service in Minnesota as a teacher, establishing a boarding school. He and his family remained there until 1883. Sela Wright compiled a dictionary of Ojibwe terms for teaching purposes, never published, part of the Sela G. Wright Papers in the Oberlin College Archives. It was the focus of a 2011 digital project with the Ojibwe tribal elder, an Ojibwe professor, and the Oberlin College Archives and Library. While some Ojibwe communities in Canada have fluency rates in their own language of 100%, those in the U.S. number only about 1,000 speakers. For the tribe, Wright's dictionary brings to light long-lost Ojibwe language terms, a tool for recovery of their culture.
Anna Wright's drawing is amateurish yet detailed in its depiction of structures, stock fences, trees and stumps, the lakeshore and a steam barge. The buildings would include the agency building, post office, trading post, and dwellings for staff, surrounded by a small palisade. What the drawing lacks in artistic value is outweighed by its documentation of an Ojibwe settlement impacted by American policy and missionary work in the late nineteenth century.
Description of drawing provided by Dr. Anton Treuer, Executive Director, American Indian Resource Center, Bemidji State University.
Sources
Sela G. Wright Papers (RG 30/192)
Sela G. Wright Digital Collection