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The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba-Ethnography Into History

By Irving A. Hallowell,

128 pages, $25.95 (pb.)

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Our voyage begins in 1930 with anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell boarding a steamboat and venturing up Lake Winnipeg-destination Norway House.

Eighty kilometres to the east is a new railroad to Churchill, opened the previous year. A grain elevator, capable of storing two million bushes of grain, had been erected there.

But while contemporary civilization seemed only a stone's throw away, Hallowell saw nothing of it. He was in a world of dark lakes, rushing rapids, swarming mosquitoes and muskeg-the home of the northern Manitoba Ojibwa Indian.

A chance meeting at the mouth of the Berens River led to the making of this ethnography. A man named William Berens, who would become Hallowell's guide and interpreter, told of the Ojibwa people living along the Berens River, who despite the influences of European politics and the efforts of enthusiastic missionaries, remained un-Christianized and living a traditionally Indian life.

Berens promised to take Hallowell to Lake Pikangikum, where the inland Indians still lived in birchbark-covered dwellings, still beat the water-drum, and still sought help for serious problems from other-than-human sources with the nightfall ceremony of the shaking tent.

William Berens was the son of Jacob Berens, made first chief of the Berens River region when he was elected to sign the Lake Winnipeg Treaty 5 on behalf of his people.

Jacob was an Indian of the 'new order', working for the Hudson's Bay Company, learning English, marrying a white woman, and leaving behind much of his Indian past. With the help of his son, William, a man with one foot in each culture, Hallowell was able to collect gems of information for his study.

During the time he spent with the inland Ojibwa, Hallowell was privy to a world destined for oblivion despite a stubborn resistance to change.

The information collected by the man gives us valuable insight into Native life, before true acculturation.

Hallowell writes as one would expect any academic to write, without much thought to the layperson or casual reader. If the journey up the Berens River to Lake Pikangikum was difficult for Hallowell, the reading of his findings once there is as difficult a portage.

There is much in this book that the general reading population would find interesting, but these little nuggets of information that are scattered throughout this slim book are so suffused in other detail it takes a hearty does of tenacity to weed them out.

I for one found myself nodding off in spite of a determined effort to see the book through.

This is a text book, make no doubt about it. If you are accustomed to the language of academia and you have a real interest in ethnography, this may be a truly fascinating read.

For the rest of us, however, I suggest waiting until the movie comes out.