William Whipple Warren

William Whipple Warren (May 27, 1825 – June 1, 1853) was an historian, interpreter, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. Of Ojibwe and European-American descent, he lived in two cultures. Because his father was white, he was not considered Ojibwe, but an Ojibwe "relative", because in the Ojibwe patrilineal culture, inheritance and property were passed through the paternal line. His mother was Ojibwe and he learned her culture from her family. He is the first historian of the Ojibwe people in the European tradition.

In the fall of 1845, Warren moved at the age of 20 from Wisconsin to Crow Wing in present-day Minnesota. He worked as an interpreter for the fur trader Henry Mower Rice.

Bilingual and educated in the United States style, Warren started collecting stories from the oral tradition of the Ojibwe to tell their history. He drew from oral history to tell about the people prior to their encounter with Europeans, and combined it with documentation in the European style. After suffering from tuberculosis for many years, he died as a young man of 28 from a hemorrhage on June 1, 1853 and was buried in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His history was published posthumously in 1885 by the Minnesota Historical Society. A revised, annotated edition was published in 2009.

William Whipple Warren was born at La Pointe, Michigan Territory (present-day Wisconsin), on Madeline Island. He was the son of Mary Cadotte, an Ojibwe and the daughter of Ikwesewe or Madeline Cadotte, daughter of the headman of the high-status White Crane clan of the Anishinaabe, and her husband Michel Cadotte, a major fur trader of Ojibwe-French (Métis) descent. Her parents had both been important to the fur trade on Madeline Island, named after her mother in 1828. His father was Lyman Marcus Warren, an American fur trader and descendant of Richard Warren in New England.

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