"Combining socio-legal and ethnohistorical studies, this book presents the history of doodem, or clan identification markings, used by Anishinaabe on treaties and other legal documents from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. These doodem images reflected fundamental principles behind Anishinaabe governance that were often ignored by Europeans, who referred to Indigenous polities in terms of tribe, nation, band, or village - classifications that failed to fully encompass long-standing cultural traditions of political authority and alliances within Anishinaabe society."-- Provided by publisher.