In his time, Simon Pokagon inhabited two worlds. Speaking and writing in Anishinaabemowin and English, he wove together worlds of lived experience and cultural meaning through careful construction and nuanced interpretation. Words and language became the thread, and he worked to stretch past and present tense into a perennial tapestry of human experience. Simon was a gifted storyteller and writer who sought to connect readers and listeners of all races, and to bring to the fore of American thought his personal perspective on Native American life.
Born in the year 1830 in Berrien County, Michigan to father Chief Leopold Pokagon and mother Elizabeth, Simon would know and speak only his native language until he was 14 years old. He learned English while attending Notre Dame school near the current site of the university, and later Oberlin College in Ohio. He soon became an outspoken advocate for Native American rights and the preservation of heritage language traditions held by his tribe. Pokagon believed his people to be vanishing, and so fought for their recognition through speech, prose, and political action.
In the months following Simon’s death in 1899, one of his works was published with the help of his longtime friend C.H. Engle. The novel Ogîmäwkwě Mitigwäkî (Queen of the Woods) holds to the boundless expression of his native Anishnaabe language while at the same time interposing English as a reflection of the way Simon walked through the world. “It has been said that Greek is the language of the gods,” writes Pokagon in the book’s introduction, “that Latin is the language of heroes, and that French is the language of lovers and novelists; and Pokagon might consistently add that the Algaic language is the three in one, symmetrically interwoven in nature’s great loom.”
References
Pokagon, S. (2011). Ogîmäwkwě mitigwäkî (Queen of the woods): A novel (P.J. Deloria, Ed., J.N. Low, Ed., M. Noori, Ed., K.M. Vigil, Ed.). Michigan State University Press.
Simon Pokagon and The Red Man’s Rebuke/the red man’s greeting. (n.d.) Beyond the White City. Retrieved November 12, 2025, from https://www.beyondthewhitecity.org/simon-pokagon-rebuke
Leopold Pokagon. (1910, August 8). New Era, Vol. IV(13), p. 7). https://michianamemory.sjcpl.org/digital/collection/p16827coll8/id/9992/rec/1
Chicago History Museum. (2024, Nov. 4). Simon Pokagon letter: Voice of a Potawatomi leader. Chicago History. https://www.chicagohistory.org/simon-pokagon-letter-voice-of-a-potawatomi-leader/
Blaisdell, H. (2021, Nov. 2). Birchbark, the 1893 World’s Fair, and native resistance. Newberry Library. https://www.newberry.org/blog/birchbark-the-1893-worlds-fair-and-native-resistance
