Jennifer S. H. Brown - Ojibwe Stories of the Upper Berens River

This book owes its first debt to A. Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth and to their collaborator, Chief William Berens. For many hours and days in the summers of 1938 and 1940, they worked to record and translate the dozens of stories that Adam told about his life, his family, his ancestors and their relatives, and the other-than-human personages with whom they all interacted. Next in importance is the American Philosophical Society, recipient of the Hallowell Papers upon the anthropologists passing in 1974. I was privileged to work with the papers during a few intensive visits from 1986 to the mid-1990s and to photocopy materials that I have read and mined with great joy and satisfaction ever since. I recall especially the knowledgeable and patient assistance that I received from Martin Levitt and Beth Carroll-Horrocks during those visits.

In 1990 and 1996 I ordered photocopies of the folders holding Hallowells handwritten transcripts of Adams stories, written down at Little Grand Rapids, Manitoba, in the summers of 1938 and 1940. I knew they would be interesting, but for the next two decades I was absorbed with teaching and other duties, and with working on other Hallowell materialspublishing his long lost manuscript monograph on the Berens River Ojibwe (1992), gathering the transcripts of William Berenss stories and dreams into a book (Berens, as told to A. Irving Hallowell, 2009), bringing Hallowells scattered Ojibwe articles into one comprehensive volume (Hallowell 2010), and other undertakings. Adams files sat largely unread until after my retirement, and until I was able to complete some other long-standing projects. When I finally began to read Hallowells manuscript pages, I realized how important the material was and began transcribing and organizing it. In this I was encouraged by the warm interest and support of Timothy B. Powell, director of the APS Center for Native American and Indigenous Research ( CNAIR ) and Brian Carpenter, senior archivist, CNAIR . Keen to see Adam Bigmouths stories published, they also located a few texts I did not havestories that resided in Hallowells folders entitled Myths and Tales, a rich compendium of Berens River Ojibwe stories, largely unpublished. Brian helped me to assemble the Hallowell photographs that appear in the book and arranged their transmission to the University of Nebraska Press. Charles B. Greifenstein, associate librarian and curator of manuscripts, facilitated the process of granting APS permission to publish the material.

This project has also relied greatly on the research that Mennonite schoolteacher Gary Butikofer carried on while teaching Ojibwe children at Poplar Hill, Ontario, from 1970 to 1990. Butikofer learned the language well and was deeply interested in Berens River family and community histories. He kept copious notes of his interviews, did research in the Hudsons Bay Company Archives, and consulted treaty pay lists and numerous other sources. He also visited Hallowells widow, Maude Frame, who allowed him the use of Hallowells papers and lent him Berens River photographs so that he could ask Ojibwe peoples help in identifying who was in them. In the early 1990s Maureen Matthews, the CBC radio journalist with whom I was collaborating on Berens River research, and I visited Gary at his home in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and he kindly allowed us to photocopy his hundreds of pages of handwritten notes and use them for research. In 20082009, funds from my Canada Research Chair, under a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, made possible the transcribing of these invaluable materials in the Centre for Ruperts Land Studies at the University of Winnipeg, under the supervision of my research associate Susan Elaine Gray and assistant Jennifer Ching.

As Gary Butikofer found, Adam and his Ojibwe relatives are a challenge for research because they were often known by different names, both Ojibwe and English. Where questions arose, I turned to Gary, who very carefully read an earlier version of this work, and to Winnipeg researcher Anne Lindsay, who checked the treaty pay lists and Manitoba census data to verify name correspondences and familial relations. My warmest thanks also to Maureen Matthews for the rich collaboration and support that she brought to our several trips to Red Lake, Pikangikum, Poplar Hill, Little Grand Rapids, Pauingassi, and Berens River in the early 1990s and for her exhaustive research on Hallowells Berens River photographs and her work with the descendants of the people appearing in his pictures. Her colleague, Ojibwe linguist Roger Roulette, began working with us in the early 1990s when we brought him Maureens recorded Ojibwe interviews from our early trips to the Berens River communities that Hallowell visited in the 1930s. Ever since then, he has been a wise and insightful consultant on Ojibwe language, concepts, and modes of thought. He has carefully gone over the Ojibwe names and words in the text, providing authoritative advice and guidance on both orthography and meanings. His work and knowledge made possible the glossary of Ojibwe personal names that appears at the end of the introduction.