BOOK REVIEW: THE ART OF TRADITION - Sacred Music, Dance, and Myth of Michigan's Anishinaabe

Native American tribe in a period of change

THE ART OF TRADITION - Sacred Music, Dance, and Myth of Michigan's Anishinaabe by Gertrude Kurath, Jane Ettawageshik, and Fred Ettawageshik; edited by Michael D. McNally; Foreword by Frank Ettawageshik. Michigan State U. Press, East Lansing, MI; www.msupress.msu.edu; reaume@msu.edu. 2009. 469+xlviii pages. $79.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-87013-814-0. map, music scores, notes, bibliography, index.

This is the first book edition of a 450-page typescript anthropological work on the upper Midwest Native American Anishinaabe tribe done in 1959 (whose three authors are now all deceased).

The 1950s were a crucial and in some ways transformative period for these Native Americans as well as others. They weren't trying to modernize nor adapt. Despite the tribal changes inevitably taking place in the changes in U.S. society and culture coming after World War II and the realization that the tribe could not survive isolated or indifferent to the mainstream, maintaining tribal identity was the primary aim. As McNally's Introduction explains, "[T]he materials [the authors] collected are anything but timeless traditions frozen in amber as museum pieces on the eve of their disappearance. Nor are they documents of what anthropologists of the time identified as the stuff of 'acculturation,' evidence of tradition's erosion by the forces of assimilation."

The anthropological material of songs, dances, lore, myths, and such are a "rekindling" (as McNally describes it) of the Anishinaabe identity. Thus this study is not an anthropological attempt to record a dying culture mainly from oral history of tribal elders, but is a record of how tribal members of all generations engaged in the "artful work of...breathing new life into traditions...often in venues and contexts that were anything but traditional." How traditional Christian hymns were rendered into Ojibwe and Odawa language to "count as Native American music" is an especially instructive artful work of appropriating dominant mainstream cultural elements into tribal traditions and identity.

Though focused on a particular Native American tribe, the content nonetheless has a place in the general field of Native American studies. For the Anishinaabe's "artful work [of] rekindling" fundamentals of their tribal culture as well gives insight into the ever-present tension between mainstream culture and indigenous ethnic culture.