This means "our people" in the Algonquian language used of the many people inhabiting the North-East of Canada/USA before the arrival of Europeans in the early seventeenth century CE.
Variants on the fundamental Algonquian language dialects are spoken by the various tribes of the Council of the Three Fires, which opposed the Iroquois Confederacy during the trade wars of the English and French three hundred years ago.
The Algonquian culture embraces the Chippewa, Ojibway, Ottawa, Cree and Pottawatomie peoples.
All these so-called 'traditional' cultures created sophisticated and elaborate psychologically-based rituals to help their people in the process of living.
A particular focus was placed on the young. The changes within childhood, adolescence, growing into adulthood, young maturity and parenting, maturity, aging and the approach of death all were understood within a deeply internal psychic process.
This compassionate approach has provided thoughtful people of all ethnicities and origins with new opportunities to understand their inner lives despite the pressures of contemporary mainstream industrial culture.
