Asibikaashi and the Web of Protection

Asibikaashi watches over the children.

She has always done this — from the time the first Ojibwe people came to the Great Lakes country, she has woven her webs in the places where children sleep, the small geometric patterns of silk and dew that appear in the morning at the corners of the birchbark lodge. Her webs are not decorative. They are functional: the web catches bad dreams, holds them in its spiraling threads until the first light of morning destroys them. The good dreams — the ones that carry teaching and comfort and vision — pass through the center hole and down the feathers to the sleeping child.

She has many children to protect.

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As the Anishinaabe people spread across the vast country of the Great Lakes — the forests and rivers and shores that stretch from Lake Superior to Lake Huron to Lake Michigan — Asibikaashi cannot be everywhere at once. She is one spider grandmother. The territory is enormous.

She comes to a grandmother woman and explains the problem. She shows the grandmother her web: the spiral woven from the outside in, the single hole at the center, the pattern that she has always made. She says: I am teaching you. Take a willow branch and bend it into a circle. Fill it with sinew or plant fiber, woven the way you see mine, with the hole at the center. Hang it where the children sleep.

I will be in every web you make.

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The grandmother weaves the first dream catcher.

It is a willow hoop, the size of her palm, filled with a web of sinew in the spider pattern. She hangs it over the sleeping place of her youngest grandchild. In the morning the child wakes happy. The grandmother looks at the web and sees something changed in it — a quality in the threads that wasn’t there the night before, a fullness where the bad dreams have been caught and are waiting for sunlight to release them.

She teaches the other grandmothers.

The dream catchers spread through the villages, each one a translation of Asibikaashi’s web into human materials, each one carrying the spider grandmother’s presence in its pattern. The feathers that hang from the bottom are chosen with care: eagle feathers for boy children, owl feathers for girls. The feathers carry the good dreams down to the sleeping child the way the web holds back the difficult ones.

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The dream catcher became, in the late twentieth century, one of the most widely produced and sold objects in North American craft markets — made in factories in China, reproduced in plastic, sold in gas stations, reduced to pure decoration.

The Ojibwe relationship to this is complex.

The object’s reproduction does not dilute the original. Every dream catcher woven by an Ojibwe grandmother for her grandchild carries Asibikaashi’s protection, regardless of how many plastic replicas exist. The sacred is not diminished by counterfeiting; it is simply more visible in its genuine form than in its imitations.

Asibikaashi is still weaving.

The dew-caught web in the morning corner of the birch trees is still there, if you look for it before the sun gets high enough to burn it off.

The children still sleep safely beneath it.