Jennifer S. H. Brown - Böcker

From 1930 to 1940, A. Irving Hallowell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, made repeated summer fieldwork visits to Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, and to the Ojibwe community at Berens River on the lake's east side. He traveled up the Berens River several times to other Ojibwe communities as well, under the guidance of William Berens, the treaty chief at Berens River from 1917 to 1947 and Hallowell's closest collaborator. Contributions to Ojibwe Studies presents twenty-eight of Hallowell's writings focusing on the Ojibwe people at Berens River. This collection is the first time that the majority of Hallowell's otherwise widely dispersed essays about the Ojibwe have been gathered into a single volume, thus providing a focused, in-depth view of his contributions to our knowledge and understanding of a vital North American aboriginal people. This volume also contributes to the history of North American anthropology, since Hallowell's approaches to and analyses of his findings shed light on his role in the shifting intellectual currents in anthropology over four decades.

In Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River Jennifer S. H. Brown presents the dozens of stories and memories that A. Irving Hallowell recorded from Adam (Samuel) Bigmouth, son of Ochiipwamoshiish (Northern Barred Owl), at Little Grand Rapids in the summers of 1938 and 1940. The stories range widely across the lives of four generations of Anishinaabeg along the Berens River in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario.In an open and wide-ranging conversation, Hallowell discovered that Bigmouth was a vivid storyteller as he talked about the eight decades of his own life and the lives of his father, various relatives, and other persons of the past. Bigmouth related stories about his youth, his intermittent work for the Hudson’s Bay Company, the traditional curing of patients, ancestral memories, encounters with sorcerers, and contests with cannibalistic windigos. The stories also tell of vision-fasting experiences, often fraught gender relations, and hunting and love magic-all in a region not frequented by Indian agents and little visited by missionaries and schoolteachers.With an introduction and rich annotations by Brown, a renowned authority on the Upper Berens Anishinaabeg and Hallowell’s ethnography, Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River is an outstanding primary source for both First Nations history and the oral literature of Canada’s Ojibwe peoples.