(Im)materiality and Practice: Craft Making as a Medium for Reconstructing Ojibwe Identity in Domestic Spaces

Through interviews with thirteen Ojibwe, members of a Native American tribe in Minnesota, this article explores how home-based practices relate to the material and immaterial worlds and how they are impacted by a home's spatiality. Conceiving activities as processes that foster social, spatial, cultural, spiritual, and temporal connections, the analysis elaborates on how activities embedded in the craft making tradition are supported or suppressed by the domestic environment; how they relate, as well as how notions of home, culture, and identity are constructed. We conclude by highlighting culturally sensitive solutions and approaches that ease the tension between (im)materiality and the practical limitations of housing conditions.