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KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 17 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [17], (1) Lines: 0 to 39 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [17], (1) 2. Fields of Dreams Revisiting A. I. Hallowell and the Berens River Ojibwe jennifer s. h. brown The boreal forests of Canada have been the setting for diverse dreams and visions—those of Northern Algonquians who have resided there for centuries and those of a long series of questing newcomers who, experiencing their personal “first contacts” with the inhabitants, have recurrently framed those experiences in tropes that foster exotic illusion. In July 1998 the Winnipeg Free Press featured an article headlined, “Heart of Magic: Up the Berens River, Time Has Stood Still.” The journalist author, Bill Redekop, and a friend had flown to the Ojibwe reserve community of Little Grand Rapids, Manitoba, from Winnipeg, and then spent a week canoeing downriver to the Berens River reserve on the east shore of Lake Winnipeg. Redekop vividly described how, leaving behind such things as tvs, computers, and cell phones, they “entered a region where Ojibway stories and superstitions of hundreds of years ago were still told . . . total wilderness, as if travelling back in time” (Redekop 1998).1 These outsider dreams reaffirm the relevance of Johannes Fabian’s critique of Western travelers’ habits of constructing and distancing exotic Others, including those living today, as belonging to some other time or as situated in “a system of coordinates (emanating . . . from a real center— the Western metropolis) in which given societies of all times and places may be plotted in terms of relative distance from the present.” The habit of locating “remote” spaces and peoples in some other temporal universe is symptomatic of an underlying “cosmological myth of frightening magnitude and persistency” (1983:26, 35). Fabian’s analysis awakes us from the dreaming in “Heart of Magic.” Of course, the Ojibwe along the Berens River live in the same calendar year as everyone else and are just as subject (or more so) to pressures and problems of “our” times. They are not as remote as city types make them out to be; scheduled air flights reach KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 18 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [18], (2) Lines: 39 to 51 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [18], (2) them every day, and for three months a year winter roads across frozen lakes and muskeg allow transport on a large scale. Their community band offices and schools have telecommunications and computers and people who know how to use them. And their time has never stood still; to say so is to overlook a complex past, full of changes, and in essence to deny them a history. Ironically, however, Redekop drew upon a source that I had provided to him when he expressed geographic remoteness in terms of temporal distance. His canoe trip came about partly because of his interest in the people whom anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell met on the Berens River in the 1930s. Some years ago, I drew his attention to one of Hallowell’s books, The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba: Ethnography into History; written in the 1960s, it was finally published in 1992, eighteen years after his death. Hallowell entitled its first chapter “The Living Past in the Canadian Wilderness,” and a journalist caught by that image could easily miss my gentle caveat about such phrasings in my afterword to the book (Brown 1992:112). Similarly, the Winnipeg Free Press article’s title, “Heart of Magic,” nicely evokes the exotic distancing of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), published almost a century earlier. As Robert Brightman points out in his chapter in this volume, Hallowell’s portrayals of Ojibwe bands as “growing increasingly ‘traditional’ [and remote from ‘civilization’] as one ascended the Berens River into the boreal forest interior” readily call forth such imagery. Given that these journalistic and...

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