Dreamcatcher
A small hoop netted like a spider’s web, hung over a baby’s cradle or a bed. In Ojibwe tradition it catches harm and bad dreams and lets good dreams through, and Ojibwe families still make it and teach its meaning.
Meaning
The dreamcatcher is an Ojibwe charm, and its Ojibwe name, asabikeshiinh, is also the word for spider. The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary at the University of Minnesota gives asabikeshiinh as “a spider”, built from asabike, “s/he makes nets”, and a part meaning a small creature. Georgian College in Ontario gives asabikeshiinh, in its inanimate form, as the dreamcatcher’s name, and a second name, bawaajige nagwaagan, “dream snare”. Ojibwe families make dreamcatchers for their own children. Millie Benjamin of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe told the Associated Press that she slept under one as a child and teaches her children what it means; Martha Jourdain, born on the Coutchiching reservation in Canada, had one over her cradle and made them for her own children with ceremonial rites taught by her ancestors.
Origin and history
The oldest detailed record is in Frances Densmore’s Chippewa Customs, published by the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology in 1929. Chippewa, Densmore explained, was the government’s name for the people, which the older members of the tribe had never adopted: they called themselves Ojibway. She wrote that two “spider webs” were usually hung on the hoop of a child’s cradle board, and she was told that “they catch everything evil as a spider’s web catches and holds everything that comes in contact with it.” They were small wooden hoops filled with an imitation web. In older times the web was nettle-stalk twine dyed dark red with bloodroot juice and the inner bark of the wild plum; by Densmore’s time it was dark-red yarn. She noted a similar Pawnee charm, in which the netting stood for Spider Woman, a deity who controlled the buffalo.
Ojibwe teaching tells how the web came to people. In the version Georgian College gives, a grandmother, Nokomis, stops her grandchild from killing a spider. In thanks the spider spins her a web to hang over her bed, which lets good dreams through its centre and holds bad dreams in its threads until they vanish at first light. Bev Longboat, director of the Niwasa Head Start program at Six Nations, told a workshop in Edmonton in 2001 of a Spider Woman who was responsible for the children and webbed dreamcatchers over their cradle boards; when there were too many children for her to reach, she passed the webbing on to the aunties, grandmothers and mothers.
By then the dreamcatcher had travelled well beyond the Ojibwe. Alberta Sweetgrass, an Indigenous newspaper, reported in 2001 that ten years earlier it had been one of the most popular and marketable Native craft items. The Associated Press found makers that year among other nations: a Lakota storyteller from Pine Ridge who had learned to make them from a Cree woman three decades before, and a maker from the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe whose dreamcatchers sold everywhere from a Paris boutique to a strip mall in Sioux City, Iowa, mostly to non-Native buyers ordering more than 100 at a time.
What does a dreamcatcher mean?
In Ojibwe tradition a dreamcatcher protects a sleeping child. The Associated Press summed up the tradition in 2001: the web filters out nightmares and lets only good dreams through to the child below. Bev Longboat describes the small opening at the centre of the web letting the good dreams pass and filter down the feathers into the child’s dreaming mind. Densmore’s account casts the net wider: the webs catch “everything evil”.
Points, beads and feathers
Makers give the parts meanings, and they differ. Bev Longboat told Alberta Sweetgrass that in the original story the web was tied to the hoop at eight points, for the spider’s eight legs. Others use seven, for the seven grandfathers or the seven prophecies; five, for the five sky shapes; 13, for the moons; or 28, for the lunar month. A traditional dreamcatcher, she said, was between three and a half and five inches (9 to 13 cm) across. Alice Noah, from Walpole Island in Ontario, puts three beads on hers for the Three Fires, the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Chippewa nations. Some makers use a single feather, for knowledge or wisdom. “Just about everything you put on there has a significance, depending on the person doing the webbing,” Longboat said. Before willow is picked for the hoop, an offering of tobacco or cloth is made to the spirit world.
Mass-produced dreamcatchers, in Native makers’ words
The dreamcatcher made for sale divides Native opinion, and the people the Associated Press spoke to in 2001 said so in their own words. The Associated Press described a dreamcatcher as made in ceremonial steps that include giving thanks for the spirit of the wood; Gerald White, of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, said those steps fall away when someone buys a kit from a discount store. “The dream catcher, to us, is a sacred item,” White said. “It’s lost a lot of meaning, even in our own tribe.” Millie Benjamin objects to seeing dreamcatchers worn as earrings, hung from windshields and sold as keychains in convenience stores: “It has gotten out of hand. It’s disrespectful for our people. It means something to us, it’s a tradition.” Martha Jourdain, a cultural assistant with the Fond du Lac tribe in Minnesota, thinks dreamcatchers should be given away, not sold: “It’s kind of like they’re making a mockery of it because it’s a sacred item and sold in convenience stores all over.”
Others make them to sell. Ruth Garbow, who is Ojibwe, makes the dreamcatchers sold in the gift shop of the Mille Lacs museum, and says it matters that customers understand what they mean. Dark Feather Red Eagle, a Lakota storyteller and elder from Pine Ridge, sells them too, though he would never sell medicine pouches or ceremonial pipes; of the dreamcatcher he said “that’s not something that’s meant to be sacred.” White acknowledged that dreamcatchers are an important source of money for some Native people.
See also
Spider symbolism, Evil eye (nazar), Lucky cat (maneki-neko), Italian horn (cornicello), Four-leaf clover.
Sources
- asabikeshiinh (na), Nora Livesay (editor) and John D. Nichols (founder), The Ojibwe People's Dictionary, University of Minnesota, entry “asabikeshiinh”
- asabike (vai), Nora Livesay (editor) and John D. Nichols (founder), The Ojibwe People's Dictionary, University of Minnesota, entry “asabike”
- Chippewa Customs (Densmore, 1929), Frances Densmore, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 86, 1929, Smithsonian Institution, via Internet Archive, pp. 5, 52
- Origins of the dream catcher, 3 December 2018, Georgian College (Barrie, Ontario), blog post
- Dream-catcher marketers catch flak, Associated Press, 24 December 2001, Deseret News, article
- Where did the Ojibwe dream catcher come from?, Terry Lusty, Alberta Sweetgrass, vol. 8, 2001, p. 19, Aboriginal Multi-Media Society (AMMSA), p. 19
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research