Chippewa Child Life and Its Cultural Background by M. Inez Hilger (review)

BookReviews 251 followsthe third edition thus has its counterpart in a degeneration of Whitman's style" (192). Michael Moon, on the other hand, is more interested in Whitman's "example" to the AIDS generation, specifically with the way "Whitman's representations of sexualityin Leavesof Grassanticipate this crucially important gaypolitical movement in a number of ways" (56). Here, as in all areas, Whitman's genius is shown to lie in saying or thinking the unconventional. He refuses to project his own death in a traditional sense, thinking of it more as a dissemination, disintegration, or dispersal. Moon relates this to the contemporary writer David Wojnarowicz, who has criticized the way AIDS sufferers and their friends and allies have prescribed certain ways of dealing with the loss of loved ones. A feminist perspective on Whitman is offered by Alice Ostriker in "Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of America." Ostriker writes about what it felt like as a girlto read Whitman and to recognize the power of the erotic. "He permitted love. That was the primary thing I noticed. The degree and quantity and variety of love in Whitman are simply astonishing" (222). It is as if Ostriker is saying that she received her sex education from Whitman, except her point is that Whitman goes beyond sex: "The erotic was not 'sex.' It had nothing to do with conquest. It was a means of knowledge" (227). Ostriker also writes eloquently about how Whitman enables all women poets, and not just in the obvious programmatic way of making woman one-half of a dichotomy: "It isnot his claim to be 'of the woman' that speeds uson our way but his capacity to be shamelessly receptive as well as active .... The omnivorous empathy of his imagination wants to incorporate All and therefore refuses to represent anything as unavailably Other'' (228). The quality of these and the other essays in the volume is uniformly high, making this an important addition to Whitman studies. Martin has succeeded in his goal of reflecting a dynamic rather than a static Whitman. W.G. Heath Lakehead University •••••• M.Inez Hilger. ChippewaChildLife and Its CulturalBackground.St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1992. Pp. 204. As an F.nglish professor, I am equipped to review this reissue of a 1930s anthro· pological study only in the interests of an increasingly apparent need for inter- or 252 Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies cross-disciplinary information. I present this review in all modesty, claiming no specialist 's knowledge of the subject or the field, but rather from the perspective of a reader of contemporary Native literature. The problematics of the anthropologist's relation to aboriginal communities are well known. Anthropologists have been recently disdained for their Eurocentric perspectives and values, despised for interfering with tribal integrity and exploiting sacred trusts, or mocked for accepting the most arrant nonsense from infonnants (see Gerald Vizenor's Crossbloods:Bone Courts,Bingo, and OtherReports [University of Minnesota Press, 1990], especially "Crossbloods and the Chippewa: Treaties, Bingo and Tribal Simulations"). Most of the time these charges are valid; but aboriginal writers are likely to be scrupulously just, and I have heard alternative perspectives as well. Salli Benedict, an Akwesasne Mohawk, at a Canadian Association of American Studies panel of Native women writers in Toronto in 1989, spoke of the loss of her people's language over the course of a generation. When her own generation wished to recover it, the anthropologists ' linguisticmaterial was there for their use. I cannot anticipate whether this volume could have similar value, but its attention to specific detail in practical matters of food preparation or snowshoe making, for example, make it possible. Where ChippewaChildLife (Ojibway, on the Canadian side of the border!) has its greatest value for this reader is in the context of its new introduction by historian Jean M. O'Brian. O'Brian provides an historical and political framework from which the importance of Sister Mary Inez Hilger's ethnography can be assessed. Assimilation procedures and land grabs were intensified in the late 1800s and the General Allotment Law of 1887and the Nelson Act of 1889conspired to reduce the amount of Indian-owned land by sixty-fivepercent between 1887 and 1934 (xv-xvi...