| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion. By Michael D. McNally. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xvi, 248 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-19-513464-8.)

Part history, part ethnography, Ojibwe Singers is an impressive book, incorporating Western scholarly traditions and Ojibwe concepts of knowledge. It is cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, thoughtful, and heartfelt. The author also acknowledges the book is "avowedly fragmentary, local, interested, collaborative, and accountable." Michael D. McNally uses hymn singing as a vehicle to understand Ojibwe or Anishinaabe religion and cultural change, focusing on singers primarily from one village, within Minnesota's White Earth Reservation. There he came under the tutelage of singers who, among other things, taught him the Ojibwe language. The book tracks the process by which Christian missionaries introduced Ojibwe-language hymns in the 1830s to hasten conversion and acculturation. Over time, however, Ojibwe people have made the hymns their own, whereby singing them becomes a ritual that some Anishinaabe use to retain, and distinguish, their identity from others. What began as an innovation to hasten the extinction of Ojibwe culture has become a tradition that helps sustain it. . . .

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