Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (review)

Historian Michael D. McNally has written a book that he describes, and rightly so, as half history, half anthropology. The first part of the book relies primarily on archival records and print publications to document Protestant missionaries’ introduction of Christian hymns to Minnesota Ojibwes (also Chippewas or Anishinaabeg) in the late-nineteenth century. The second part of the book, derived from the author’s fieldwork on White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota, follows a group of Ojibwe hymn singers to their public performances and to funerals held on the reservation and in the Twin Cities. McNally’s thesis is that these Christian hymns sung in the Ojibwe language provide glimpses into the “colonial politics of domination and resistance” (p. 114).

His thesis seems most suited to explaining the role hymns have played in the past twenty years, beginning in 1983 when a group of White Earth elders first formed a singing group to revive a tradition they remembered from their childhood. Many of the hymn singers were active in the Camp Justice movement, which organized to protest the perceived injustices of the tribal government then in power at White Earth Reservation. And the hymns themselves, as McNally argues, when sung today seem intended to evoke pride and attachment to Ojibwe language and identity among the singers and listeners. “Resistance” to “domination” is less apparent in the hymns’ nineteenth-century history. McNally’s discussion of how non-Indian and Ojibwe missionaries worked to translate English-language hymns into Ojibwe is a perfect example of religious syncretism. Although this chapter, which closely compares the texts of hymns made ready for Ojibwe proselytization with their English originals, is by far the most interesting and enlightening chapter in the book, McNally seems disappointed in not having found much evidence of nineteenth-century Ojibwes articulating subtle messages of resistance when singing Christian hymns. Instead, many Ojibwes incorporated the new style of singing into their customary practices and developed traditions of singing hymns, in the Ojibwe language, at funerals, beside sickbeds, and while traveling.

McNally’s disappointment speaks to this book’s major weakness, which is the frequent, heavy-handed deployment of theory. It is especially disturbing when McNally describes a funeral or wake in vivid detail, revealing to us the grief and pain of the deceased’s relatives and friends, and then analyzes the event with references to Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, Connerton, or Geertz. The resort to theory in these contexts seems intrusive and made me, in the position of reader, feel implicated in an act of gross insensitivity. Perhaps some places, like funerals, should be off limits to intellectuals making objectifying remarks about why people do what they do, say what they say, or sing in a certain way.

Despite these unsettling reading moments, I found McNally’s book thought-provoking and informative. I particularly commend his focus on hymns and his having collected so much information on this one aspect of religious practice. Most scholars studying the influence of Christian missions on Native communities look at religion generally. McNally’s approach benefits from its attention to both micro and macro levels. Hymns were only one element within a larger, comprehensive package of Christian missionization initiatives. At the same time, McNally convincingly argues that religion cannot be treated as a separate domain of human experience cut off from society, politics, family, and community.