🔊 Click any bold native word in the story panels to see its pronunciation and hear it spoken. The "Hear it" button uses your browser's speech synthesis (synthesized, not a native speaker). For recordings by native speakers, click "Dictionary" — it links to entries with real audio where available.
Setting the Scene
Grandmother is a medicine woman — a practitioner trained in traditional plant medicine. Makwa spends a week as her helper, learning the Ojibwe words for body parts, ailments, and healing plants. She discovers that many body parts in Ojibwemowin are animate — and that the Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Society, kept this knowledge alive through centuries of suppression.
1Into the Medicine Garden
They walk into the forest edge where grandmother keeps her medicine plants. Mashkiki
🔊 = synthesized speech · Dictionary = recorded native speaker
— Grand Medicine Society — is the keeper of healing knowledge and spiritual law. When Christian missionaries tried to suppress it, ceremonies went underground. The birchbark scrolls encoded ceremonies that survived to today.
🔊 = synthesized speech · Dictionary = recorded native speaker
— You will be well. These are not magic formulas — they are expressions of intention and relationship. The words align the healer with the patient's wellbeing.