Strangers to Relatives: The Adoption and Naming of Anthropologists in Native North America

4 Effects of Adoption on the Round Lake Study

When I was asked to write about how my adoption influenced my research , it seemed appealing, partly because this is a pleasant memory, partly because I’d never explored the idea directly, either in the field or in documents. A new focus on the data and the fieldwork experience could be fruitful. From the beginning, my work in anthropology has been frustrated by the question, How can we presume to “know” and to write about alien cultures (that is, different from our own), when there is no choice but to filter our observations and inquiries through the lenses of our own culture? Focusing in now on the particular problem of differing concepts of adoption, the discovery that the Round Lake data yielded no specific insight into adoption came as a shock. How to make a scholarly paper from anecdotal memories? How to tell the personal side without this becoming a recital of “what fieldwork did to me”? How to pin down the facts of my adoption, as I perceived them at the time: the who, where, when, how, and why? What about these facts as the Round Lake people perceived them? Clearly, I needed to understand the customs and beliefs concerning adoption, as held in this community. A what fact would have to be added. the round lake study The Round Lake Study has been a field-and-archival investigation of the Northern Ojibwa/Swampy Cree hunting people surrounding the area of Weagamow Lake (formerly Round Lake), which is located in 99 4 Effects of Adoption on the Round Lake Study Mary Black-Rogers subarctic Ontario west of Hudson Bay.1 The study is both longitudinal and long term. It was begun in 1958 by Edward S. Rogers as a oneyear field assignment. Rogers was accompanied by his first wife, Jean, and small daughter, Corinne. (Jean accomplished a linguistic account of the hybrid language spoken by Round Lakers when nearly 100 percent of the population was monolingual [J. H. Rogers 1963]). In 1968 Ed saw my dissertation and recruited me for a two-year field restudy.2 He was then head of the Ethnology Department of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. We later worked together in the field during his sabbatical, then explored this people’s history and ancestors in archives and in the literature , and hired a research assistant, eventually doing much of the work at home—having married during the 1970s. Data ballooned in every direction, continuing to extend the boundaries of the study. Our special interests and training were complementary: his was in the environment , material culture, and technology/subsistence, while mine was in cognitive culture, language as entrée to culture, and belief systems . (Both of us envisaged nothing less than complete ethnographic coverage, as a result.) We created an electronic database with a wide array of information fields from diverse sources, including field data, government censuses and lists, fur trade documents, genealogies, vital statistics, residence mapping, recorded legends and accounts—all checked and rechecked against each other. Its initial period (1770–1970) was also being extended forward a generation. When Ed died in 1988, following a yearlong battle with cancer, our book and database were barely half completed. the so-called facts Who I was adopted by an elderly woman of Weagamow Lake. She had had eight children, by two marriages, and after childbearing age she had legally adopted a baby girl through the Children’s Aid Society of Canada . She obviously desired children around her, and she had them until her death in 1994 at the approximate age of 91. Her name was Meme. She had become one of my favorite people long before I knew she was my adoptive mother. 100 | black-rogers Where I was adopted while carrying out a field assignment with the Round Lake people at their boreal forest location just inland from the Coastal Crees of the Hudson Bay Lowlands. The Round Lake dialect is now termed “Oji-Cree.” In 1968 the people said they spoke Cree, but the linguists said Northern Ojibwa, specifically Severn Dialect (J. H. Rogers 1963; Todd 1970; Valentine 1995). Whatever its label, no one there spoke anything else, save for the children who were learning English in school. Round Lake was still a decidedly “bush” fly-in community when I arrived that year. The livelihood was largely hunting, fur trapping , and fishing. A Hudson’s Bay Company post...