The Ojibway Indians' sense of humor sparkles through these stories set on the fictional Moose Meat Point Indian Reserve, connected by a dirt road to the town of Blunder Bay. If some of them seem "farfetched and even implausible," Basil L. Johnston writes, "it is simply because human beings very often act and conduct their affairs and those of others in an absurd manner." ø These twenty-two stories were originally collected under the title Moose Meat and Wild Rice. Among the most memorable of the stories is "They Don't Want No Indians," in which all attempts are made to circumvent bureaucratic red tape and transport a dead Indian to his home for burial. One of the funniest is "Indian Smart: Moose Smart," which pits a moose in a lake against six Moose Meaters in two canoes. "If You Want to Play" and "Secular Revenge" are the result of misunderstanding or imperfect communication. Still other stories, like "What Is Sin?" and "The Kiss and the Moonshine," reveal the clash of different cultural approaches. All show the warm-heartedness and good will of the Ojibway Indians. If they are gently satirized, so are the whites who would change them, and with good reason. Government ineptitude and rigid piety are foisted on the Moose Meaters, who have only thirty thousand acres to move around in.

For young readers, the collected wisdom and traditions of Ojibway elders.

Rarely accessible beyond the limits of its people, Ojibway mythology is as rich in meaning and mystery, as broad, as deep, and as innately appealing as the mythologies of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and other civilizations. In Ojibway Heritage, Basil Johnston sets forth the broad spectrum of his people’s life, legends, and beliefs. Stories to be read, enjoyed, dwelt on, and freely interpreted, their authorship is perhaps most properly attributed to the tribal storytellers who have carried on the oral tradition which Basil Johnston records and preserves in this book.

Ojibwa Narratives presents a fresh view of an early period of Ojibwa thought and ways of life in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the south shore of Lake Superior. This fascinating collection of fifty-two narratives features, for the first time, the tales of three nineteenth-century Ojibwa storytellers-Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jaques LePique-collected by Homer H. Kidder. By the late nineteenth century, typical Ojibwa life had been disrupted by the influx of white developers. But these tales reflect a nostalgic view of an earlier period when the heart of Ojibwa semi-nomadic culture remained intact, a time when the fur trade, together with seasonal roving, traditional transportation, and indigenous practices of child rearing, religious thought, art, and music permeated daily life.

Fifty-seven Ojibwe Indian tales collected from Anishinaabe elders, reproduced in Ojibwe and in English translation.

The Ojibway Indians were first encountered by the French early in the seventeenth century along the northern shores of Lakes Huron and Superior. By the time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized them in The Song of Hiawatha, theyøhad dispersed over large areas of Canada and the United States, becoming known as the Chippewas in the latter. A rare and fascinating glimpse of Ojibway culture before its disruption by the Europeans is provided in Ojibway Ceremonies by Basil Johnston, himself an Ojibway who was born on the Parry Island Indian Reserve. Johnston focuses on a young member of the tribe and his development through participation in the many rituals so important to the Ojibway way of life, from the Naming Ceremony and the Vision Quest to the War Path, and from the Marriage Ceremony to the Ritual of the Dead. In the style of a tribal storyteller, Johnston preserves the attitudes and beliefs of forest dwellers and hunters whose lives were vitalized by a sense of the supernatural and of mystery.

A uniquely personal history of the Ojibwe culture.

In the accounts of the lives of several generations of Ojibway people in Minnesota is much information about their history and culture.

"Explains Ojibwe history and highlights Ojibwe life in modern society"--

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.