Ojibway Heritage

Basil Johnston was an Ojibwe writer, educator and fluent speaker of the Ojibway language who grew up within Anishinaabe oral tradition, and this McClelland and Stewart book is his own account of Ojibwe traditional culture, cosmology and oral narrative, told from inside the tradition rather than through an outside ethnographer's lens. Its strength is exactly that position, direct inheritance of the oral tradition and fluency in the language it was carried in, giving access and interpretive nuance that outside academic study often cannot fully reach. Its limit is that as one storyteller and knowledge keeper's own retelling, it represents his particular community's version of a tradition that, across the many distinct Ojibwe and Anishinaabe communities, is naturally varied rather than a single fixed text everyone would tell identically.