Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig loses Eddie Benton-Banai

Dr. Bawdwaywidun has left the Sault.

Better known around the Sault as Grand Chief Eddie Benton-Banai, pioneer of culture-based education and major figure in the early years of the American Indian Movement, the founding academic and spiritual advisor at Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig/Shingwauk University has returned to his home on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in northern Wisconsin.

""He gave us a good eight years of his life," Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig President Darrell Boissoneau said today, announcing Benton-Banai's departure at a funding announcement for the National Chiefs Library, currently under construction across Queen Street from Algoma University.

The massive 19,179-square-foot library will become the new home of Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig, the evolving Anishinaabe university that currently offers a four-year Bachelor of Arts degree in Anishinaabe studies through Algoma University.

"For the last eight years we had Eddie Benton-Banai, Dr. Bawdwaywidun, teach with us – who we all consider the preeminent of Anishinaabe knowledge," Boissoneau said.

"He had suffered some health setbacks over the winter months. He really got lonely and wanted to go home."

"So he's gone back to spend time with his children and his grandchildren. That's important, to be surrounded by family."

"The success of all that is the students and their classes, the pride and confidence that he built in them."

"We want to continue on with that, with the Anishinaabe world view," president Boissoneau told today's gathering.

Boissoneau also used the occasion to announce the return of Jerry Fontaine, who was director of indigenous initiatives at Algoma University from 2004 to 2008 but left Algoma and Shingwauk to complete his Ph.D. in indigenous studies at Trent University in Peterborough.

His doctoral dissertation included studying the leadership style of chiefs Tecumseh, Pontiac and Shingwauk.

Nephew of former Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine, Jerry Fontaine served as chief of Sagkeeng First Nation for a dozen years and ran unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Manitoba Liberal Party in 1998. 

The departed Dr. Benton-Banai is presiding grand chief of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge.

Benton-Banai founded the Red School House, an Indian-controlled elementary and secondary school in St. Paul, Minnesota based on his belief that education should incorporate heritage and cultural identity with strong emphases on creativity, spirituality and cultural pride.

In a 2009 interview with SooToday's Carol Martin, Benton-Banai downplayed his widespread reputation as a founder of the American Indian Movement.

"The American Indian Movement was saying something that I thought was very important, so I went there," he said.

"The FBI says I was a founding member... but I don't take credit for that. It would be a lie for me to say I am the founder. It came through inspiration. It came through revelation - if you want - and through the willingness to pick it up."

There is no question, however, that Dr. Benton-Banai served as the movement's spiritual advisor, imparting teachings that included the prophecies of the Seven Fires that foretold the coming of light-skinned people 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

The prophecies included predictions of rivers turned poison and fish unfit for human consumption.

"In the classes that I teach, I have yet to run across either a teacher or a student who gives any credence to Anishinaabe theology, philosophy or history, except that which they read in books written by the conqueror," he told SooToday. "These books are often hate-filled and ignorant. But while I describe that, I also describe our own people because they are often as ignorant as they are."