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Manitous: The Spiritual World Of The Ojibway
Abstract
A collection of legends and spiritual teachings that depict the mysterious manitous, mystical beings who are divine and essential forces in the spiritual life of the Ojibway. From the rich oral culture of his own Ojibway Indian heritage, Basil Johnston presents a collection of legends and tales depicting manitous, mystical beings who are divine and essential forces in the spiritual life of his people. In this collection, the first by a Native American scholar, these lively, sometimes earthy stories teach about manitous who lived in human form among the Ojibway in the early days, after Kitchi-Manitou (the Great Mystery) created all things and Muzzu-Kummik-Quae (Mother Earth) revealed the natural order of the world. With depth and humor, Johnston tells how lasting tradition was brought to the Ojibway by four half-human brothers, including Nana'b'oozoo, the beloved archetypal being who means well but often blunders. He also relates how people are helped and hindered by other entities, such as the manitous of the forests and meadows, personal manitous and totems, mermen and merwomen, Pauguk (the cursed Flying Skeleton), and the Weendigoes, famed and terrifying giant cannibals. BASIL JOHNSTON is an Ojibway scholar who lives in Ontario, Canada, on the Cape Croker Indian Reserve. A recipient of the Order of Ontario and an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto, he speaks and writes in both Ojibway and English, and he is the author of numerous books, including Indian School Days, Ojibway Ceremonies, Ojibway Heritage, Ojibway Tales, The Bear-Walker and Other Stories, Mermaids and Medicine Women: Native Myths and Legends, and Crazy Dave (forthcoming from MHS Press, April 2002). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Praise for The Manitous: "An extraordinary glimpse into a rich and meaningful mythology." -- Kirkus Reviews "Both exemplary original scholarship and a delightfully, even charmingly written set of stories that, although written for adults, can be appreciated by those of any age, for, based in oral tradition, they read as if they have voices." -- Booklist "The stories are rich in detail and cultural meaning, and quite literally cast a spell." -- Books in Canada
... Although the Weendigo is an exaggeration, it exemplifies human nature's tendency to indulge its self-interests, which, once indulged, demand even greater indulgence and ultimately result in the extreme-the erosion of principles and values. (Johnston [1995(Johnston [ ] 1996 Potawatomi author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass, specifically contrasts the windigo to non-human animals: ...
... Although the Weendigo is an exaggeration, it exemplifies human nature's tendency to indulge its self-interests, which, once indulged, demand even greater indulgence and ultimately result in the extreme-the erosion of principles and values. (Johnston [1995(Johnston [ ] 1996 Potawatomi author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass, specifically contrasts the windigo to non-human animals: ...
... For Johnston and Kimmerer, it is not immersion in the non-human world that causes the transformation but alienation from the non-human world. Johnston writes that humans become windigos due to their failure to respect "the rights of animals who dwel[l] as their cotenants on Mother Earth" and to offer "signs of gratitude and goodwill" to Mother Earth (Johnston [1995(Johnston [ ] 1996. ...
The windigo is a generally malicious figure in several Indigenous cultures of the land currently administered by the governments of the USA and Canada. In traditional narratives, the windigo is generally associated with hunger, greed, winter, and cannibalism. In this paper, I discuss how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers have used the figure of the windigo to critique and challenge environmental injustice. While some windigo stories present the being as a terrifying monster of the “wilderness”, others use the figure as an embodiment of environmental destruction and the injustice that comes with it. Windigo stories also highlight three further aspects of colonial violence: military violence, sexual violence, and religious violence. Although some stories depict windigos being defeated through violence, many stress the importance of care and healing to overcome the windigo affliction. In fact, storytelling itself may be part of the healing process. Windigo stories, I argue, can be a useful way to interrogate the injustices created by colonialism and environmental destruction, and the stories can also offer hope for healing and for an environmentally just future.
... Many of the Anishinaabeg and Oji-Cree stories are divided into dibaajimowinan (stories, personal narratives, anecdotes from lived experience) and aadizookanag (sacred or historical stories). Many of these contained gikinoo'amaagoowinan, "teachings", that relied on Other-Than-Human Beings to shape cultural values and establish social norms (Johnston 1995;Pawłowska-Mainville, forthcoming). Shapeshifters, Weesakejak, Sasquatches and Memegwesiwag (Little People Who Live in the Rocks), and Buhnaabeg (Water Beings) are just some of the personas who exist in Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree narratives. ...
... Shapeshifters, Weesakejak, Sasquatches and Memegwesiwag (Little People Who Live in the Rocks), and Buhnaabeg (Water Beings) are just some of the personas who exist in Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree narratives. Likewise, Mishu Bizhew, Animikiiwag, and the Wiindigog are beings which teach humans about respect, responsibility, and their role in the world (Johnston 1982(Johnston , 1995Benton-Banai 2010;Bouchard, Martin 2010). The Wiindigo, in particular, has generated interest in Euro-Canadian popular culture, and the creature, as we will see shortly, has permeated the horror film genre. ...
... The Wiindigo, in particular, has generated interest in Euro-Canadian popular culture, and the creature, as we will see shortly, has permeated the horror film genre. For the Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree, the Wiindigo is a combination of spirit, animal, and human nature, all of which evoke narratives of mankind's power, cleverness, strength, and resilience as well as Anishinaabe principles and values (Johnston 1995). Depending on the cultural dialect, the Algonquian name for the Wiindigo is also spelled Wendigo, Windigoo, Weendigo, and Wiitiko. ...
This paper will discuss the Wiindigo, a cannibalistic character among some Indigenous peoples of North America. Illustrated through the Anishinaabeg and Oji-Cree, two Algonquin-speaking Indigenous groups, the Wiindigo serves as a personification of fear and hunger, and alludes to the cultural heritage elements of the boreal forest food system as well as the differing legal systems in Canada. In examining the Wiindigo from the Indigenous cultural and historical perspectives related to the author by several knowledge-holders, as well as from EuroCanadian popular culture representations, the paper illustrates the importance of the Wiindigo to Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree world views, customary governance, and contemporary lived experience.
... While the insatiable hunger of the Pangkarlangu is in part related to the extreme heat of Australia's desert region, the freezing subzero temperatures affect the Windigo's ability to find enough to eat. In both cases, scarcity of food, especially meat, is the common factor that partially accounts for their cannibalism (Johnston [1995(Johnston [ ] 2001Podruchny 2004). According to the Ojibwe scholar Johnston, ...
... While the insatiable hunger of the Pangkarlangu is in part related to the extreme heat of Australia's desert region, the freezing subzero temperatures affect the Windigo's ability to find enough to eat. In both cases, scarcity of food, especially meat, is the common factor that partially accounts for their cannibalism (Johnston [1995(Johnston [ ] 2001Podruchny 2004). According to the Ojibwe scholar Johnston, ...
Monster Mash: What Happens When Aboriginal Monsters Are Co-opted into the Mainstream? Christine Judith Nicholls
Growing up in the 1950s at Mannum on the Lower Murray in South Australia, where our family home overlooked the river, I knew of the Mulyewongk, an amphibious monster inhabiting the southeastern sector of the River Murray, including its tributaries, lakes, swamps, and caves. Mulyewongk is the local Ngarrindjeri name for a close relative of the Bunyip, which, for the most part, are underwater dwellers camouflaged by mud, algae, or other subterranean fluviatile detritus and slimy plant life. Further downstream the creature was also said to emerge as a terrifying terrestrial monster at times—still swathed in aquatic slime (see Bell 1998; Karloan cited in Berndt et al. 1993: 423).
This monster—best known today as the Bunyip—is a primary focus of this chapter. My main concern is to examine its status loss as a direct result of the British colonization of Australia. This discussion is contextualized by my consideration of another monster that I learned about in adult life: the Pangkarlangu from Central Australia (see also Musharbash, this volume).
In the 1980s, I moved to Warlpiri country in the Northern Territory to take up a position at Lajamanu, working first as a linguist and then as the principal of the bilingual Warlpiri and English school. During that time, I was regaled with narratives about Warlpiri Kinki (a generic term meaning “monsters” in the hominid classification), especially the desert-dwelling Pangkarlangu. A giant cannibalistic hominid, characterized by the absence of a neck, grossly enlarged genitals, a hirsute body, and dangerous talons (as demonstrated in Figure 5.1), the Pangkarlangu preys upon, steals, and executes human infants. Toward the end of a successful “kidnapping” day, the Pangkarlangu builds an open fire on which he barbecues his kill. After feasting on chargrilled babies’ delicious, tender flesh, come nightfall he sleeps off his tasty repast. Pangkarlangu also roam in groups, wielding enormous wooden clubs and fighting one another in bloody battles. Warlpiri woman Molly (Jinjilngali) Napurrurla Tasman explained to me that from a Pangkarlangu perspective this is a form of recreation.
Years later, in 2017, I had an uncanny encounter with an inorganic Pangkarlangu. It took place in an entirely different context: at a visual art exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. There, I came across furniture designer and academic Trent Jansen’s Pankalangu [sic] Wardrobe—one piece among Jansen’s repertoire of aesthetically pleasing Pangkarlangu furniture (see Figure 5.8).
To see the Pangkarlangu in such an entirely foreign mise-en-scène—represented as bespoke fine art and designer furniture destined to inhabit the domestic sphere— was for me an other-worldly experience, given its absolute disconnectedness from its epistemological and ontological places in the world. The Pangkarlangu’s realm is its vast desert homeland, where it roams unbridled. To encounter it in this haute- bourgeois, sandstone institution typical of colonial architecture was unheimlich and rendered me virtually speechless.
These experiences in my early and later life have indirectly led to my exploration of the differing sociocultural and historical trajectories of the Bunyip and the Pangkarlangu. Both will then be discussed in relation to the Windigo, which inhabits the terrain of Algonquian-speaking North Americans, to compare the ways in which these different monsters are faring in the contemporary colonial context.
Each of these three anthropophagous monsters occupies an extensive demesne, encompassing a range of different language and cultural groups. Differences in language use and how these monsters are represented as they traverse their vast terrain are important matters for the traditional owners of the narratives pertaining to each respective being. Furthermore, their terrains differ ecologically: the Mulyewongk/ Bunyip exists along a considerable stretch of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray–Darling, the Pangkarlangu cuts a swathe through the vast Australian Central and Western Desert regions, while the Windigo traverses the freezing North American tundra and boreal forests.
... 79 However, in defining the "middle ground" as an abstract, but general geographical, space, White has missed the real significance of the physical space and the Aboriginal peoples special understanding of place as meeting grounds. 80 82 It has been said accurately that a "cultural characteristic may be rendered nebulous by its very ubiquity." 83 Along with hunting, Aboriginal trade and trading are two one of these cultural characteristics that have been rendered nebulous by the European new-comers to Turtle Island. ...
... In Anishinaabe traditions, Wendigo is perceived as a hideous monster with a heart of ice and voracious appetite for human flesh [50]. Wendigo is depicted as physically large yet emaciated, and always starving regardless of how much they consume [50,51]. The character Moloch represents a similar precautionary character in mainstream metacrisis discussions, particularly warning against the perils of unbridled progress [52,53]. ...
The impetus for this paper emerges from the growing interest in leveraging inner transformations to support a global shift in ways of seeing and being. We caution that without sufficient individual and systemic maturity, inner transformations will be unable to hold the whole story and that attempts to drive paradigmatic shifts in ill-prepared systems will lead to insidious harms. As such, interventions for inner change will not have sufficient protected niche space to move beyond the boundaries of best practices towards wise practices. Drawing on Indigenous trans-systemics, we offer the metaphor of pearls as an invitation to recontextualize how inner transformations are conceived and approached in the metacrisis. To further develop this notion, we share a story of Wendigo and Moloch as a precautionary tale for the blind pursuit of inner and outer development. Weaving together metaphor, story, and scientific inquiry, we bring together Anishinaabe and Western knowledge systems for the purposes of healing and transformation. We hope that this paper will create space for wise practices—gifts from Creator to help sustain both Self and the World—to emerge, establish, and flourish. We invite readers on an exploration into the whole system of systems that are endemic to Anishinaabe cosmology, and a journey of reimagining new stories for collective flourishing amidst the metacrisis.
... He relates stories that center women within the society as being in partnership and having complementary relationships with men. Johnston (1995) describes the Ojibway worldview as a world based on spiritual and physical realities that involved the maintenance of these relationships. xxviii For example, like ...
Research paper for National Center on First Nation's Governance on Dodem (clan) Governance.
... 10 Over and above their concerns for ecosystemic integrity, they care about the viability of their land-based subsistence way of life and the distinctive sense of sovereign peoplehood it sustains. A complex system of reciprocal interactions between humans and more powerful "other-thanhuman-persons" has been documented as a central component of Anishinaabe human-environment relationships (Hallowell 1975; see also Johnston 1995;Nesper 2002). Living as part of a natural world that is simultaneously social, spiritual, and economic, Euro-American distinctions between environment, culture, and politics make little sense (see Willow 2009Willow , 2012. ...
Critical observers of the international environmental movement have found that indigenous-environmentalist alliances have often been predicated upon reproductions of an asymmetrical political status quo, thereby perpetuating indigenous peoples' systemic disadvantages and predestining promising partnerships for eventual disintegration. Spotlighting the relationship between Grassy Narrows First Nation and Rainforest Action Network, this article describes how indigenous-environmentalist alliances are being constructively re(con)figured in the context of recent anti-clearcutting activism in northwestern Ontario. An analysis of the positive interpersonal relationships cited by participants as key to the coalition's success reveals the significance of (1) a social setting conducive to imagining membership in a diverse community united by an emplaced interest in boreal forest protection and (2) a transformed conceptual framework that redefines the environment to include human activities and concerns. I argue that this dynamic socio-discursive context not only facilitated the development of a strong alliance and an effective conservation campaign, but may also ultimately empower indigenous communities to participate in environmental protection on terms that are closer to their own. When environmentalists refigure the categories that guide their relationships to the places they seek to protect, they also reconfigure the power structures underpinning their alliances with the indigenous groups who call those places home.
... Since time immemorial, the Nawash people have lived in their traditional territories and participated in wild harvest management activities for sustenance, ceremony and commerce (Lytwyn 1990;Johnston 1995;Borrows 1997;Blair 2000). Nawash harvests have included a high diversity of wild food/medicinal plants, as well as fishes (including lake whitefish, lake trout, lake sturgeon, herring), birds (including ducks, ruffed grouse, geese), and mammals (including white-tailed deer, northern raccoon, black squirrel, North American porcupine, snowshoe hare, eastern cottontail rabbit). ...
The Ontario Orangeman Thomas Scott has long been known as one of the most ignoble figures in Canadian history, being widely considered the epitome of chauvinism and xenophobia. Scott owes his notoriety almost entirely to getting himself killed by Louis Riel’s Métis-dominated provisional government at Red River in 1870, but his misfortune has not garnered him much sympathy. On the contrary, his reputation was so soiled after the Second World War that it became permissible to level the vilest allegations against Scott, even that he was a vicious killer. However, there has been a critical change in the narrative since then, with some writers and scholars suggesting that it was not Scott but Riel who was most responsible for the devastating consequences of the Orangeman’s killing.
In one sense, Part III’s focus takes us to the point furthest out from modern Western and Christian conceits to the forces gargantuan and minute that shape and mentor us from within and without. Chapter 6 waxes both galactic and microscopic in continuing the turn away from human narcissism and self-fetishizing that exercises these essays to ask about “matter” as ultimate mater. Here the interlocutory reference will be contemporary notions of “wholeness” or what the biblical tradition apostrophizes as “salvation” (from Latin salvus: “hail, hearty, whole”). Yes, as we shall consider, we are entangled with stone and metal in our embodiment and need to bring such actively into our wrestling with Spirit. But in actual fact and in great mystery, just what is it that enwombs and “mothers” us and all of reality? The entire dance of thought here entertained hallows a primal hollow (or “hole-low”) as the “aperture underneath” the level of either certainty or math—and within even rock and steel—that gives rise to all that is . . . and ever has become. In such an excursion, it is not only Land as primal matrix or mater that refocuses our attention, nor the great Ocean Mother and the amniotes who 350 million years ago first carried Her waters ashore as birth-wombs inside animal mothers. But even further back and deeper down, we honor the micro-cleft at the heart of quanta as indeed the macro-throb of Black-Hole-vacancy that births the magic we call “matter.” And this wide-angle tracery also waxes a bit more self-confessional—in a confession tracking away from self-fixation—to insist that wholeness is never a gestalt convenable inside a body, whether individual or galactic. My own white male middle-class formation, crosscut with supremacy and settler-colonial inanity, is not only “hollow” in virtue of a history of theft and predatory plundering of what belongs to others. But even in the prospect of some kind of radical “healing” (or move to “wholeness”), I would still need confess a necessary centering in what is finally a mysterious void around which flux muons and Mars alike, neutrinos and neutron stars. The chapter traces such an itinerary across historical “hollows” as traumatized and halo-ed as inner-city Detroit at the hands of global capital and first century Galilee under the Roman boot, the Great Lakes Strait stripped naked by settlers and Transjordan wadis crosscut by nomad water battles. And then probes the “Halloween Cave” and Holy Well (“Holy Hollow”) mystique of my own Irish-Celtic ancestry to sketch a “creative riffing”—both spatial and seasonal—beyond the edge of everything substantial that neither oppression nor temporary realization (as a living body or rocky cliff or crystalline lattice-work) has ever yet subdued. What might it mean to re-imagine “wholeness” as ever-and-always improvisational, temporary, and interdependent—and in human form, especially, symbiotic with all else in a given local eco-zone and echoed with greatest magnificence precisely where struggle has been most trenchant and reprehensible? And all of it emergent from and disappearing back into a mothering void?
Chapter 3 camps out on the recent emergence of a “shot across the bow” of our species’ aggrandizement on the globe in the form of a tiny “syllable” spoken by the bat community. Or more accurately, an adaptive “improv” lancing out from the microbial zone of innovators we label “viruses” without quite being able to grasp their input as either living or inanimate. Here the RNA Prince (“Coronavirus”) will be tracked in advent from natural habitat among wingeds to routinization in our own species’ articulation of a regime of plunder and decimation epitomized in global capital. Innocuous within its habitat of origin, the virus was effectively weaponized in our racialized political and healthcare systems such that poor and BIPOC peoples and the Global South inordinately experienced infection and demise. But for a historical millisecond, this micro-creature shut down the macro-monster of a globalized economy! This chapter continues the probe of the word and the reality, tracing medieval eucharistic exhibitions of a Jesus rendered plant-human-mineral-astral “Presence” in a monstrance—an entire ecozone concentrated in a wheat-wafer consumed by an eye—through a backwards trek to the apparent Proto-Indo-European (PIE) origins of the word “monster” in a cluster of related concepts including “memory” and “premonition” and monument (among others), and forward to a more generalized consideration of monstrous epiphanies in indigenous languages and mythologies. By way of our own “monstrance-showing” of what such an interdependent promiscuousness looks like when our eyes revolt against colonial reductions and begin to register some of the wonder otherwise eclipsed, we conclude the foray by profiling the amazingly monstrous symbiosis orchestrated by whales with the aid of plankton and krill in southern oceans and the milk-culture miracle of steppe peoples for 3000 years buoyed and fed by a monstrous microbial complex of diary preparation, yurt cooking, wooden-barrel storage, sheep-gut processing, etc.—in spite of being lactose intolerant and minus the requisite gene!
This paper reflects on an elementary school hoop dance project organized by awhite music teacher, taught by an Indigenous hoop dancer, and guided by the Anishinabek goodlife teachings. It suggests that the hoop dance project, and specifically the hoop dancer’s teaching approach, allowed students to experience new, unique, and beneficial learning that engaged the first goodlife teaching: Zaagi’idiwin (love). Furthermore, the experience was a valuable exampleof Indigenous educational practice, centering relationship and participation. The research argues that current educational realities can impede these best practices and run counter to healthy, holistic and culturally based learning.
In this article, I reflect upon the question: In what ways did a seven-week hoop dance unit, taught by an Indigenous performing artist and facilitated by a white music teacher, contribute to reconciliation in an elementary school classroom in Ontario? The unit responds to the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 2015) and is theoretically organized around the seven good life teachings of the Anishinabek (Toulouse, 2008, 2011). Ultimately, I argue that although reconciliation is complex, the collaborative nature of the hoop dance project inspired valuable conversation and learning.
During the Hopewell era, no material was so widely spread or employed across the midcontinent as copper. Large deposits of copper artifacts in the Ohio Scioto Hopewell mounds, in what are usually deemed as status and ritual contexts, have colored subsequent interpretations of copper utilization during this period. Subsequent research documented copper's distribution across the midcontinent in Hopewell mortuary practices, while focusing on its significance as a distant import from the western Great Lakes. Until regional Illinois habitation copper-use studies were undertaken, in the 1980s and 1990s, mortuary copper dominated discussions of Havana Tradition Hopewell connections. However, examinations of avocational collections and metal-detecting surveys of 82 Havana habitation sites have yielded an array of copper tools and scrap revealing the presence of an extensive copper-working industry. It has become clear that regional Havana Tradition people were involved in the active production of utilitarian copper tools and ornaments, suggesting that the industry was based on local drift copper deposits. This harkens back to earlier regional patterns of copper tool production, while emphasizing the exotic character of the few copper mortuary inclusions—such as ear spools, headplates and breastplates, panpipes, and so forth—thus suggesting two very different systems of copper valuation.
This essay pertains to the discovery of legal concepts and principles within Indigenous and French Canadian oral folk stories to develop greater dialogue across legal traditions. This is done in two parts. The first part focuses on the literary study of Indigenous and French Canadian folklore. It is argued that oral folk stories are legitimate and relevant object of law in literature study as they constitute dense and potent source of legal principles, concepts and notions. The second part directly engages an archetype of Indigenous and French Canadian folktales. It looks to find legal principles, concepts and notions through the supernatural characters of windigo and werewolf.
The intention of the article is to examine Stephen Graham Jones’ most recent novel The Only Good Indians (2020) from combined ecogothic and postcolonial perspectives. The central concept informing the analyses is that of Third Space, as formulated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, and adapted by the spatial turn critic, Edward W. Soja in Thirdspace. Marking the onto-epistemological condition of in-betweenness, openness and ambivalent cultural identities, Third Space will be employed here to interrogate hybrid interspaces and generic dislocations in Jones’ new novel. As will be argued, Jones rewrites the Gothic slasher with a view of unsettling the inherited paradigms of thought, identity and representation. The writer reclaims the conventions and tropes of the genre, such as supernatural figures and events, the return of the repressed past, delayed revenge, and excessive acts of violence, and fuses them with the Native American settings, temporalities, tropes of spirituality and modes of storytelling. Jones’ novel, as we would like to propose, undermines any claims of a coherent identity and turns the Gothic mode into Third Space, characterized by an excess of ambiguous signification and revealing entangled ontological, ethnic, ecological and cross-cultural locations of horror.
This article presents the utilization of an Anishinaabek Research Paradigm (ARP) that employs Indigenous Intelligence as a conceptual framework for qualitative Anishinaabek analysis of data. The main objective of the research project examines critical insights into Anishinaabek’s relationships to N’bi (water), N’bi governance, reconciliation, Anishinaabek law, and Nokomis Giizis with predominately Anishinaabek kweok, grassroots peoples, mishoomsinaanik (grandfathers), gookmisnaanik (grandmothers), and traditional knowledge holders. Drawing on Anishinaabek protocols, the enlistment of participants moved beyond the University requirements for ethics. This also includes “standing with” the participants in the act of inquiry, in knowledge, and continued relationships. The ARP for research emerged from Indigenous ways of seeing, relating, thinking, and being. This approach did not call for an integration of two knowledge systems but rather recognizes there are multiple ways of gathering knowledge. The article explains how “meaning-making” involves Indigenous Intelligence through Anishinaabek protocols holding the researcher accountable to the participants, the lands, the ancestors, and to those yet to come.
This chapter focuses on the cultural dimensions of worldviews: the stories, master narratives, sacred texts, teachings, and ethical principles embraced by various worldviews. It highlights the various rituals and symbols that define beliefs, values, and behaviours of various worldviews. It emphasizes social and communal gatherings that shape or strengthen the beliefs, values, and behaviours of individuals and groups of individuals. Insights gleaned from disciplines such as religious studies, scriptural studies, theology, sociology, psychology, and anthropology shed light on how these cultural dimensions shape and influence a variety of worldview beliefs and actions, views, and behaviours.
This article coins the term “transcultural trauma fiction,” proposing that it constitutes a useful conceptual lens through which to examine the Finnish author Katja Kettu’s 2018 novel, Rose on poissa (Rose is Gone). Set in a Minnesotan world of mixed Ojibwe and Finnish heritage, Rose on poissa narrates a story of historical, intergenerational, and individual trauma, focusing on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis. The term “trauma fiction” has been in use since the 2004 publication of Anne Whitehead’s eponymous monograph, which applies Caruthian trauma theory to representations of trauma in contemporary novels. My use of the modifier “transcultural” before “trauma fiction” highlights the status of Rose on poissa as a text written by a cultural and ethnic outsider to any Native American heritage about traumas experienced by Ojibwe women and their indigenous and mixed daughters. I argue that Kettu’s literary strategy of transcultural hybridity seeks to acknowledge and mitigate problems potentially posed by the outsider’s gaze and by the risk of exploitative cultural appropriation accompanying it. Rose on poissa is a distinctly hybrid text that draws on both Ojibwe and Finnish cultural influences and intertexts as it depicts white-indigenous relations in the Great Lakes region.
This chapter engages comparative theology in imaging how liberation theology might be informed by spiritualities and worldviews from the First Peoples of North America, referencing teachings, treaties, and ceremonies from the Six Nations of the Grand River Nation. The liberation hermeneutic of “see, judge, act” is informed, in turn, by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum, the Two Row Wampum, and the Condolence Ceremony. Liberation theology thus contextualized will involve seeing with “all my relations” in service of earth-justice, judging in a way that pairs thought and feeling/intuition attentive to the whole, and acting in a fashion whereby peace refuses to demonize oppressors, using power that is balanced with harmony for the sake of a righteousness that knows that there is no justice without language of justice and justice for language. This instance of comparative theology takes its cues from a land-based religion, and so its hermeneutic is shaped in situ such that it cannot be exported without further ado. As such, it invites other liberation projects to engage local land-based religions which will school those who desire to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk in a good way with the Creator in a way appropriate to their territory.
This thesis can be viewed in its entirety here:
https://publikationen.sulb.uni-saarland.de/bitstream/20.500.11880/27281/1/Indigenous%20Popular%20Culture_Dissertation_Seibel.pdf
The horror story writers of the early 20th century presented various views on the surrounding reality. Howard P. Lovecraft and Montague R. James, for their part, rejected the mere possibility of phenomena regarded as supernatural, contrary to other writers, such as Arthur C. Doyle, Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood, who were members of theosophical or occultist societies. The writers differed also in the level of their education. Lovecraft was an erudite interested in science, notwithstanding the fact that he did not receive formal education. James was a respected medievalist, a specialist in the history of Christianity. Blackwood, educated abroad (in Germany), explicitly differed in his artistic output from Machen, a Welshman, who left the United Kingdom only to pursue his journalistic career. The aim of the article is to present the haunted places in the literary works of the chosen authors and to juxtapose their narratives with their scholarly achievements and their views on the surrounding reality. Based on the New Historicist approach, the study shows that the roots of horror in the haunted places presented by the authors in their works were more “material” than “supernatural”—what accounted for their choices of haunted places, story characters and haunting horrors were personal attitudes and life experience of each of the writers.
This Chapter concentrates on two very different novels by Native American authors, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995) and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996). The Indian Adoption Project (IAP 1950–1967) promoted the transracial fostering and adoption of Native American children especially by white American, middle-class couples. This usually not only entailed a break from tribal values and traditions, but also either hampered the children’s formation of their Indian identity or led to its erasure. Solar Storms and Indian Killer delve into the problems of their young protagonists, who suffer from the consequences of the IAP. Hogan’s protagonist, Angel, was sent away to a series of white foster homes as a young child, but returns to her ancestral lands at the age of 17. The protagonist of Indian Killer, John, was adopted as a newborn baby, and lives alone as a young man in Seattle. I discuss the diverse identity processes of the two protagonists by drawing on critical race studies. My reading of the novels pays attention to the intersecting identity categories of race, gender, and class. Hogan’s novel also invites an ecofeminist approach. Focusing on the colonization of Native Americans as the primary form of their historical oppression, I argue that, in spite of their different political aims, the novels link the individual adoption trauma of their protagonists to various forms of intergenerational traumas. These traumas were collectively experienced by Native Americans at different periods, and are ultimately connected to the traumas of colonialism and colonization.
This article provides an overview of the Algonquian manitow concept. Manitow is often translated as spirit, god or mythical being, but reflects more complex and culturally grounded ideas about power in animist ontologies. The article suggests that manitow should be translated with care, with attention to a range of meanings. The authors refer primarily to Cree examples from Alberta, Canada, but also take a broader view to consider examples from other Algonquian contexts. Beginning with a discussion of definitions, the article then turns to the concept’s theoretical career. The article provides data on the contemporary dynamics of the manitow in the context of Cree religious pluralism, as well as on the emplacement of manitow relations through toponymy, particularly as seen around lakes named manitow sâkahikan.
A nuclear facility is arguably the most difficult industrial facility to site, especially with regard to public acceptance. Public resistance to such facilities is a complex blend of emotion-laden imagery coupled with a risk perception process that is diametrically opposed to the scientific process by which scientists define nuclear risks. While much of the literature that deals with risk perception and public acceptance considers the problem (and any offered solutions) for a single societal standpoint, the issue becomes more complex when the community is made up of many different cultures—especially when the set of cultures includes aboriginal people (“Aboriginal,” for the purposes of this paper, is meant to represent all First People, regardless of what they or their governments call them, including Native Americans and Eskimos (US), First Nations and Aboriginal People (Canada), the Maoris of New Zealand, the Aborigines of the Australian Outback and any other culture that predates Western discovery. No disrespect is intended by this simplification.) for whom there is a traditional and spiritual relationship with the land. The level of success that owners have when attempting to site a nuclear facility appears to be correlated with the homogeneity of the host community population. This paper offers insights for successful public outreach and acceptance when dealing with more diverse local cultures, based on lessons learned, in part, from the efforts of Ontario Power Generation’s permit to construct and operate a Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) for low- and intermediate-level waste at the Bruce Nuclear Site in the Municipality of Kincardine, Ontario, Canada.
In 1844 a debate took place between a venerated Anishinaabeg orator and an ambitious Jesuit priest over who possessed the authority to harvest timber from Walpole Island. Though scholars have taken notice of this unique debate recorded in the Letters from the New Canada Missions the circumstances and backgrounds of the central orators, Anishinaabeg ogimaa Oshawana and Jesuit priest Father Pierre Chazelle, has not been analyzed. The debate centered on how each society viewed the natural world and the natural resources necessary for survival. The power struggle represented by each man in the Canadian borderlands highlighted the differences between European Jesuit understanding and First Nation Anishinaabeg understanding of their place and relationship to the greater world. How each society understood power and how to wield said power was illuminated in the contested discussion between the two men. Thus the debate, while containing strong themes of religious and spirituality, has much to say about the larger goal of Euro-Canadians to “civilize” First Nation peoples while providing an equally compelling argument made by Oshawana for cultural pluralism and a defense of First Nation sovereignty.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a rise in public performances by Native American writers and activists. From performance poetry to oratory to historical pageants, dramatic texts offered unique political and cultural possibilities for Native artists in what has been referred to as the “era of assimilation.” Among these performances were dramatic interpretations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha by Ketegaunseebee Anishinaabe actors from the Garden River First Nation in Ontario. These pageants, designed for non-Native tourists on the railways and steamships traveling through the Great Lakes region, were performed every summer for decades beginning in 1899. While Longfellow’s poem itself seems antithetical to a vibrant Native presence, and the participation in its dramatization by Native actors may make them appear as unsophisticated pawns in Euro-Western literary nation-building, the Anishinaabe Hiawatha demonstrates how tribal communities transformed the stage into a site of political possibility left unrealized on the printed page. Moving beyond the script to study the entire constellation of performance—including the oral traditions at the heart of the plot, the set design, and the economic networks that sprang up around the performances—this essay reveals how the Ketegaunseebee Anishinaabe used the pageant to claim the US-Canada borderlands as Native space and pass on vital cultural knowledge to the next generation. Moreover, it challenges scholars of Native literature to read beyond the written archive to deepen our understanding of creative resistance to settler colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Working with the notions of ethics and sovereignty developed in the field of Indigenous literary studies in North America, this article examines the uses of the legend of the windigo in contemporary Indigenous creation, more specifically in a francophone context. In contrast with the Western construction of the windigo psychosis, this article focuses on the conceptualization of a recurring violence in the short fiction film Windigo by Anishnabe director Kris Happyjack-McKenzie.
The extensive and enduring commitments to nationhood within Native American Studies have unsurprisingly engendered in the field extensive and enduring resistance to transnational theoretical and methodological frameworks. This is largely because scholarly transnationalism fundamentally seeks to unmoor intellectual work from national(ist) affiliations. This, of course, directly contradicts the commitments to nationhood within Native Studies. Yet even while conventional transnational modes of critical inquiry present trajectories and objectives that threaten to undermine the core commitments of Native American Studies, the judicious use of particular aspects of conventional transnationalism and the development of innovative conceptions of transnationalism can serve the field. While conventional transnationalism seeks to decenter the nation in any form-and therein maintains a strict opposition between nationalism and transnationalism-the mode of indigenous transnationalism that Bauerkemper and Stark propose decenters the settler-state while recentering Native nationhood. Maintaining Native American Studies' commitments to nationhood, this mode of inquiry intentionally and self-consciously underscores the boundaries that distinguish Native nations as discrete polities. Through an analysis of Anishinaabe law and diplomacy, this mode of inquiry serves to lay the groundwork for recognizing the transnational flows of intellectual, cultural, economic, social, and political traditions between and across the boundaries of distinct yet often-though not always-allied and mutually amenable Native nations.
Since 1906, a series of Federal Acts have been passed to ensure the protection and preservation of cultural sites throughout the United States. Despite these measures, scholars continue to report ongoing destruction of diverse publically and privately managed heritage sites. This article explores the interdigitation of the natural and cultural formation processes (sensu Schiffer 1983) underlying heritage management theory and praxis, as well as the critical role of cultural production (sensu Bourdieu 1993) in potentially catalyzing site preservation or destruction. We utilize the case study of a pictograph site in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to chronicle the formation processes associated with a cultural site's physical degradation from the middle of the nineteenth century through the present (Skibo and Schiffer 2008:9). We consider criteria for evaluating the natural and cultural dimensions of heritage praxis and discuss the need for the expansion of consultation, collaboration, and co-management with local indigenous communities.
Après plusieurs participations à des projets de recherche menés par Daniel Arsenault, divers financements ont permis de mettre sur pied ce projet de recherche sur les sites à peintures rupestres de la partie orientale de l’Ontario. Quatre missions d’étude, d’une durée totale de vingt-cinq semaines, ont permis d’étudier et de relever soixante-quinze rochers ornés en Ontario. Le présent article présente les éléments découverts lors de ces recherches. Outre plusieurs panneaux qui avaient échappé aux observations précédentes, trois rochers ornés furent découverts. Les auteurs étudieront ensuite deux sites dont la localisation et le support sont particuliers et termineront par la découverte d’un type d’offrande jusqu’à présent non répertorié, ce qui permettra une brève synthèse de l’importance de l’offrande dans le contexte algonquien.
This article builds on the extensive literature regarding the Algonquian belief in the windigo, a cannibal spirit, by examining how traders of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) viewed this phenomenon from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. As native people brought windigos to posts for care or sought help from HBC employees to protect their families, traders responded to this disorder based on their company's economic interests and their adherence to Enlightenment thought as well as on indigenous expectations of reciprocity. The fur trade and the windigo disorder were linked historically, so that the passing of the one marked the fading of the other, as the economic and cultural ties that shaped relationships between Algonquians and outsiders underwent a profound change in the early twentieth century. An imperial context ultimately determined how most Canadian institutions responded to the windigo, as colonial authorities created narratives around this disorder designed to increase their control over Cree and Ojibwa communities.
Archaeologists trained in Western canons of knowledge are accustomed to using onto-epistemological categories that codify the world into animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman realms of experience. Consequently, the presence of artifacts possessing personhood, exemplified by and articulated in object agency and the New Animism, present unique challenges to the researcher. Based on the analysis of culturally and naturally modified trees from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we investigate how the interpretation of certain artifacts and archaeological contexts are shaped by the onto-epistemological frameworks (the study of being, and of what knowledge is and how it is possible) through which data are analyzed. Employing the approach of conceptual pathways based on principals of behavioral archaeology, we identify repeating performance characteristics among modified trees utilized for the commemoration of individual and social memories among Ojibway communities.
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