The Ojibwa have lived in Ontario longer than any other ethnic group. Until now, however, their history has never been fully recorded. Peter Schmalz offers a sweeping account of the Ojibwa in which he corrects many long-standing historical errors and fills in numerous gaps in their story. His narrative is based as much on Ojibwa oral tradition as on the usual historical sources. Beginning with life as it was before the arrival of Europeans in North America, Schmalz describes the peaceful commercial trade of the Ojibwa hunters and fishers with the Iroquois. Later, when the Five Nations Iroquois attacked various groups in southern Ontario in the mid-seventeenth century, the Ojibwa were the only Indians to defeat them, thereby disproving the myth of Iroquois invincibility. p>In the eighteenth century the Ojibwa entered their golden age, enjoying the benefits of close alliance with both the French and the English. But with those close ties came an increasing dependence on European guns, tools, and liquor at the expense of the older way of life. The English defeat of the French in 1759 changed the nature of Ojibwa society, as did the Beaver War (better known as the Pontiac Uprising) they fought against the English a few years later. In his account of that war, Schmalz offers a new assessment of the role of Pontiac and the Toronto chief Wabbicommicot. The fifty years following the Beaver War brought bloodshed and suffering at the hands of the English and United Empire Loyalists. The reserve system and the establishment of special schools, intended to destroy the Indian culture and assimilate the Ojibwa into mainstream society, failed to meet those objectives. The twentieth century has seen something of an Ojibwa renaissance. Schmalz shows how Ojibwa participation in two world wars led to a desire to change conditions at home. Today the Ojibwa are gaining some control over their children's education, their reserves, and their culture.

The pre-1960 history of print culture and libraries, as they relate to the First Peoples of Canada, has gone largely untold. Paper Talk explores the relationship between the introduction of western print culture to Aboriginal peoples by missionaries, the development of libraries in the Indian schools in the nineteenth century, and the establishment of community-accessible collections in the twentieth century. While missionaries and the Department of Indian Affairs envisioned books and libraries as assimilative and "civilizing" tools, Edwards shows that some Aboriginal peoples articulated western ideas of print culture, literacy, books, and libraries as tools to assist their own cultural, social, and political aspirations. This text also serves to illustrate that the contemporary struggle of Aboriginal peoples in Canada to establish libraries in communities has a historical basis and that many of the obstacles faced today are remarkably similar to those encountered by earlier generations.

The Ojibwe or Anishinaabe are a native American people of the northern Great Lakes region. 19th-century missionaries promoted the singing of evangelical hymns translated into the Ojibwe language as a tool for rooting out their "indianness," but the Ojibwe have ritualized the singing to make the hymns their own. In this book, McNally relates the history and current practice of Ojibwe hymn singing to explore the broader cultural processes that place ritual resources at the center of so many native struggles to negotiate the confines of colonialism.

The story of how Great Lakes Indians survived the early reservation years

Canada's Indian policy has, since the 1830s, consisted mainly of attempts at cultural replacement. Although rarely practised, cultural synthesis of native and western cultures has been advocated as an important alternative especially in the last ten years. This book is a study of E.F. Wilson (1844–1915), a Canadian missionary of British background, who experienced, promoted, and advocated both approaches to native policy during his lifetime. On the one hand, he practised cultural replacement at the Shingwauk and Wawanosh Schools which he founded at Sault Ste. Marie; on the other hand, he advocated programs of cultural synthesis and political autonomy which were a distinct departure from the paternalist notions of the 1880s and 1890s. His support of such ideas was fostered by the influence of leading anthropologists such as Horatio Hale but also by his own extensive travel and observation of Indians, particularly the Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma. This book describes the efforts of a nineteenth-century Canadian missionary who entertained radical notions of Indian self-government and cultural synthesis, as well as more conventional ideas of native assimilation and cultural replacement.

"The book also features cross-references throughout, a bibliography accompanying each entry, an elaborate appendix listing biographies according to particular categories of interest, and a comprehensive index."--BOOK JACKET.