This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from ThruLine and NPR.

I'm Ramtin-Arab-Louis.

Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago.

Up until this point in the series, we've been talking about the birth of the United

States as a nation and how different groups of people pushed for the expansion of what it meant

to be American. But the reality is, native people inhabited the land that we now call the United

States long before Europeans set foot on North America. And as the U.S. continued to grow

and expand, Native peoples had different experiences and relationships with the strangers that

arrived on their shores. Today on the show, NPR reporter Sequoia Carillo and throughline

producer Anya Steinberg bring us the story of the Ojibwe people

and how in the face of U.S. westward expansion, they created a nation to try to preserve their land and way of life.

That story after a quick break.

The story goes back over a thousand years to how Ojibwe people first came to the Great Lakes region.

It feels different when your family has been buried in the same place longer than America has been a country.

This is Anton Troier. He's a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University.

For him, the story of how the Ojibwe people ended up calling these lakes home is a personal one.

Yeah. people ended up calling these lakes home is a personal one. At one point in time, just a couple thousand years ago, we lived on the East Coast,

Atlantic Coast, which was a land abundant in small game, big game, well suited for indigenous agriculture, lots of fish

in the sea, lots of fish in inland lakes.

We can track the beginning of Ojibwe people to Algonquian language tribes from the east

coast.

We had prophets who appeared and said, move west to the land where food grows on water.

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