These are the stories of the manitous--the spirits who inhabit the supernatural world of the Ojibway (the Native American tribe of the Great Lakes and central Canada region). Harvested by an eminent expert from an ancient oral tradition, these sacred stories introduce wily tricksters, fearsome giants, timorous tree spirits, seductive maidens, and wise grandmothers. Here, a coward masquerading as a hero becomes one; a powerful warrior is riled and routed by a younger sibling with a gift for dancing and disguises; and the ever-hungry evil weendigos--evil manitous--haunt the land. In...

Rarely accessible to the general public, Ojibway mythology is as rich in meaning, as broad, as deep, and as innately appealing as the mythologies of Greece, Rome, and other Western civilizations. In Ojibway Heritage Basil Johnston introduces his people's ceremonies, rituals, songs, dances, prayers, arid legends. Conveying the sense of wonder and mystery at the heart of the Ojibway experience, Johnston describes the creation of the universe, followed by that of plants and animals and human beings, and the paths taken by the latter. These stories are to be read, enjoyed, and freely...

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, theyhad 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 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." 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...

This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnston's family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver's school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury. "Spanish It was a word synonymous with residential school, penitentiary, reformatory, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks, slaps, all rolled into one," Johnston recalls. But despite the aching loneliness,...