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The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba is the posthumous work of A. Irving Hallowell, who died in 1974. Originally, Hallowell had wanted to study the Swampy Cree, but through his growing friendship with William Berens, chief of the Berens River Ojibwa community, was sidetracked into seven summer field trips between 1930 and 1940 to the east shore of Lake Winnipeg. In later years Hallowell worked his field notes into a final text, completed in 1967. En route to the publisher, the manuscript was lost in the mail. In 1989 Professor Jennifer S.H. Brown discovered an edited draft of the text among Hallowell's papers. It is this draft, with an introduction, extensive notes, and a list of references prepared lovingly and with great skill by Jennifer Brown, that is the subject of this review.
Irving Hallowell was in the same mould as some other great field anthropologists who worked in northern Canadian Native communities, such as Franz Boas and Frank Speck, under whom he studied, and, more recently, Ed Rogers. The approach taken by these scholars was essentially an ecological one: a thorough understanding of the natural environment of their study area; an understanding of the formation and development of the community over time, based on the collective memories of its occupants and a reading of a few principal historical sources; a discussion of some of the main past and present agents of change; and, finally, a skilful fusion of the economic, social, religious, and decision - making aspects of culture that permit the reader to understand how their subjects relate to each other and to the natural environment they occupy.
The book is divided into two sections, each comprising three chapters. The first section introduces the Historical Perspectives, while the second and longer section, Adaptation, Culture and Religion, is an analysis and explanation of the Berens River people as Hallowell found them between 1930 and 1940.
In the first chapter, Hallowell introduces the Ojibwa as he knew them, with something about their life and his field work among them. What this reviewer found particularly interesting was how the Natives, through their chief William Berens, gradually transformed Hallowell from an anthropologist interested in the present to one that had to understand the past in order to...