Honoring Elders: Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion (review)

In the course of researching and writing his first book, Ojibwe Singers (2000), Michael McNally observed that Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) society accords a different stature to elders, both male and female, and to eldership as a stage of life generally than does American society despite more than a century of acculturative programs and the acceptance by many Anishinaabeg of Christianity. While acknowledging that the significance and authority of old age and eldership have changed over time, he finds that today's Anishinaabeg still "lay claim to the social space that Anishinaabe ideals have made available to them" (xiii) in a manner that validates their experiences and knowledge, both beneficial and harrowing, as they transform into teachers and transmitters of the particular Ojibwe cultural tradition of the day. McNally's probing of the meaning of eldership is comprehensive, examining not merely the "significance of aging in an Anishinaabe understanding of the life course" but also the authority elders exercise in Anishinaabe society, seeking to "put the elder in its rightful place in the sociology of religion adjacent to the priest, the prophet and the shaman, and to create a fuller appreciation for age as a category of analysis in the study of religion" (3). Indeed, while McNally's work will be of some value to historians as they increasingly come to grips with the sociohistorical meanings of aging, the brunt of this work shows his central grounding as a scholar of religious studies and deals with theoretical questions more central to that field. Of particular interest is his reframing of the polarized discussion between scholars who espouse the position that many modern expressions of American Indian religious expression comprise "invented traditions" and those who instead assert the continuity and sovereign roots of such traditions. Rather, McNally looks to Weber's insight that traditional authority is "less the authority of tradition than the authority of those who are authorized to speak on tradition's behalf" (27). By defining elders as the arbiters of tradition, tradition becomes "what elders say it is" (4) as they continue to exercise a culturally recognized and historically held role in negotiating what will remain "traditional" in the face of the enormous pressures for change that have buffeted Anishinaabeg society from reservations to allotment to boarding schools to casinos. Because eldership is itself a tradition of authority, any shifts they approve must therefore also be traditional and not regarded as "invented." Further, McNally recognizes that not all aged persons are Elders with a capital E. Only those superannuated persons who have community recognition are elders. Since one of the key identifiers of such individuals is their generosity and humility, a true elder will never claim to be one or demand recognition of rank. As stated in a community adage quoted in the text, "anyone who says they are an elder, isn't" (280).

Having thus defined elderhood, McNally explores various responsibilities and experiences of this life stage in six densely packed and often theoretically driven chapters, ranging from the role of linguistic fluency and other markers of eldership to role modeling and teaching personal ethics and the validating actions of elders who underwent Christian conversion in a nineteenth-century Ojibwe community. However, his examination of these events from a historian's point of view is weakened by a lack of attention to the historical and sociopolitical context within which these conversions take place and the generalization of the denominations competing in the religious marketplace for Ojibwe converts as generically Christian. The scholarship of Melissa Meyer and Rebecca Kugel have demonstrated the degree to which denominational decisions were driven by socioeconomic factionalism within the Ojibwe population itself. While McNally is correct to stress the sincerity of Ojibwe conversions to perhaps correct the implication that these decisions were merely opportunistic, this does not change the fact that particular denominations, in this case Episcopalians, were attractive to Anishinaabe people based on the degree to which the denomination worked to help the Ojibwe people achieve...