The Ojibwe dreamcatcher: Spider Woman's web and its travels
The true origins of the dreamcatcher: Ojibwe culture of the Great Lakes, the legend of Asibikaashi, Frances Densmore's accounts and its modern spread.
A hoop of flexible wood, a fine net resembling a spider's web, a few feathers hanging below: the dreamcatcher is today one of the most recognisable objects associated with the Native peoples of North America. Its origin, however, is specific. It comes from the Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe, culture of the Great Lakes region, a vast territory stretching across what are now the United States and Canada.
Asibikaashi, the Spider Woman
In the Ojibwe language the spider is called asabikeshiinh, and the story of the object is tied to this creature. Oral tradition tells of Asibikaashi, the Spider Woman, who cared for the children and the people of the nation. When the Anishinaabe spread over an ever larger territory, Spider Woman could no longer reach every cradle; so mothers and grandmothers began, it is said, to weave nets like her web to protect the little ones in her place.
According to traditional explanations, the net holds back bad dreams and harmful influences, while good ones find their way through the centre and slide down to the sleeper. Early dreamcatchers were small, made of willow or other flexible wood and of plant fibres or sinew, and they were hung on cradles and cradleboards. They were not meant to last for ever: in time the wood dried and the net loosened, as if following the child's growth.
The first written accounts
One of the best-known descriptions appears in the work of the American ethnologist Frances Densmore, who documented Ojibwe culture at length and published the volume Chippewa Customs in 1929. Densmore describes spider-web nets hung on cradleboards, believed to catch anything harmful that might be in the air, just as a web holds whatever touches it. Chippewa is the name by which the Ojibwe were often designated in official United States documents.
From local symbol to global icon
Between the 1960s and the 1970s, within the movements that asserted a shared identity among Native peoples, the dreamcatcher was also adopted by nations other than the Ojibwe and became a pan-Indian symbol. In the same decades New Age culture and the souvenir market turned it into a decorative object, often large and adorned with beads, coloured feathers and synthetic materials far removed from the originals.
This diffusion has provoked mixed reactions. Many Native craftspeople continue to make it with pride and to sell it as an expression of their own culture, while others complain that industrial copies, produced with no connection to the communities of origin, empty the object of its meaning. The debate over cultural appropriation has made clearer the importance of knowing where it comes from and of supporting those who keep the tradition alive.
Looking at a dreamcatcher with informed eyes means recognising, behind the fashion item, a family story made of cradles, grandmothers and tales handed down by word of mouth. It is a charm born for children, tied to a specific people and landscape, that of the lakes and forests of the North. Remembering its Ojibwe origin is the simplest way to respect its value and to avoid reducing it to a mere exotic ornament.