Rainy River Lives: Stories Told by Maggie Wilson (review)

Providing new insights into an episode in collaborative anthropology that happened eight decades ago, this book contributes fresh material to our understandings of Native women's lives in the early twentieth century. In 1932 two women—Ruth Landes, a young graduate student anthropologist from New York, and Maggie Wilson, an Ojibwe grandmother in northwestern Ontario—formed a remarkable association that led to significant contributions to Ojibwe studies. Landes (1908-91), as Sally Cole recounted in a fine biography of her (2003), was a student of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. She went on to conduct research in Brazil and elsewhere. But her first, seminal field research was in a three-month period from July to September 1932, working intensively with Maggie Wilson, a woman of unusual qualities on the Manitou Rapids reserve near Fort Frances, Ontario. There Landes developed a research focus on women's lives and perspectives that continued for the rest of her life.

After their months together, during the years from 1932 to 1935, Wilson mailed to Landes 119 stories written in pencil on stenographers' pads. Her scribe was her daughter Janet, who wrote them down in English, with occasional Ojibwe words. Landes paid Wilson at the rate of fifteen cents per double-sided page. The collection of stories was later misfiled among another anthropologist's papers at Columbia University. Through archival detective work it eventually found its proper place among Landes's papers at the National Anthropological Archives in Washington, DC, but only after Landes had died without knowing where the collection had gone. In this book Cole brings us a rich selection of these stories, to complement her biography and Landes's own major works on Ojibwe society, women, and religion.

A substantial introduction and a short section on historical context and chronology set the stage for the stories. Cole outlines Maggie Wilson's family history and her life and provides an overview of the many drastic changes that had affected Ojibwe people and their livelihoods in the area by the time Landes arrived—the signing of Treaty no. 3 in 1873, the coming of surveyors and the trans-Canada railway, the founding of reserves and of Anglican and later Catholic missions and schools, Indian Act rulings controlling economic and ceremonial activities, the destruction of Native sturgeon stocks through pollution and commercial overfishing. Within fifty years new political, economic, social, and environmental forces had brought irreversible shifts in Ojibwe economic, social, and cultural life.

Wilson, however, was strong in her Ojibwe culture. At Manitou Rapids in 1914 she began to have powerful dreams of thunderbirds who taught her songs and a drum dance and gave her instructions for conducting the ceremony that they brought. The drum dance took on special meaning for the local community throughout World War I, as it was seen to offer blessings, healing, and protection, especially for young soldier relatives fighting overseas. The local Indian agent supported the giving of the dance, doubtless for its patriotic elements (xxxix-xl). But the ceremony also had deeper and broader Ojibwe connections that outsiders did not recognize, and which Cole does not note. Wilson's drum dance had strong affinities to the Ojibwe dream dance that had begun to spread from Wisconsin and Minnesota two or three decades earlier (Vennum 1982). It reached the upper Berens River at about the same time as Wilson had her vision; at Pauingassi and Poplar Hill, the ceremony of Fair Wind (Naamiwan), who had his vision in about 1912, was locally famous and was described by A. I. Hallowell in the 1930s (Hallowell 2010, chapter 22 [1940]; see also Brown and Matthews 1993). Cole's book includes a photograph (fig. 5) taken by Frances Densmore in 1920 at Manitou Rapids, which shows (without comment) a dome-shaped open-work pavilion that remarkably resembles Fair Wind's drum pavilions on the Berens River.

The core of the book offers a selection of thirty of Wilson's stories...