Telling Our Stories: Omushkego Legends and Histories from Hudson Bay, and: The Spirit Lives in the Mind: Omushkego Stories, Lives, and Dreams, and: Omushkego Oral History Project (review)

Louis Bird is a distinguished Omushkego (Swampy Cree) scholar, collector, and teller of stories that illuminate the world view and history of the Omushkego on the west coast of Hudson Bay and James Bay. A member of the Winisk First Nation and resident of Pewanuk, ON, Bird has been collecting his people's stories for over forty years. 'It is my wish and my hope,' he writes, 'to save the stories that have been told to us when I was young and that have been passed on to us by our grandfathers and their grandfathers and so on and so on' (http://www.ourvoices.ca/index/louisbirdbio). In 1999 he began working with a team of scholars at the Centre for Rupert's Land Studies at the University of Winnipeg to digitize his collection of audio cassette recordings, create new recordings of his stories, and make them available to English and Cree audiences in a variety of formats. Bird and his collaborators have published two books and a website.

Bird's collection of over 100 stories is extensive, rich, and multi-thematic, providing a window into a relatively unexplored aspect of Canadian history. Although this material can be hard to access and understand for those unfamiliar with Cree history or with using oral traditions and stories as historical sources, it is useful for scholars, students, Aboriginal people, and the Canadian public to find accessible paths into this material. Bird's stories contain valuable insight into the Omushkego world view and history that would benefit not only classrooms and research projects, but also courtrooms, government offices, and disciplines such as Aboriginal studies, literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, environmental studies, material culture, law, geography, and land claims research.

I recommend that novices first approach Bird's material through Telling Our Stories (2005), edited by Jennifer S.H. Brown, Paul W. DePasquale, and Mark F. Ruml. This English-language volume contains a brief biography of Bird, a glossary of Cree terms, seven chapters on substantive themes in his collection, and an overview by Bird of his thinking on the dissemination of his collection of stories and the state of his community. Each thematic chapter contains selected stories, a scholarly introduction, and annotations, and is edited by an expert in the chapter's topic. In the first, Paul W. DePasquale sets up a fine apparatus for understanding Bird's creation stories. In the following two chapters, Mark F. Ruml explores shamanistic and mi-tew power. Next, Jennifer S.H. Brown frames stories about outsiders visiting the Omushkego, including Europeans and stories of first contact. The story 'The Wailing Clouds,' introduced by Anne Lindsay, explains the devastating impact of diseases and Omushkego strategies to combat them. Roland Bohr takes on the theme of technologies and methods for combat and hunting big game in the chapter on arrows and thunder sticks. In the last chapter Donna Sutherland discusses Bird's story about his great-grandmother's conversion to Christianity. The book also contains a helpful bibliography, an index, maps, and illustrations. The result is an impressive collaboration that provides readers with multiple entryways into Bird's collection and sufficient discussion to explain how to pull out the layers of meaning in each story.

Next I would recommend turning to the 2007 book, The Spirit Lives in the Mind, edited by Susan Elaine Gray. Here Bird and Gray keep the overt scholarly apparatus to a minimum by providing only a brief preface and...