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Life Arts    H3'ed 11/27/22

American Indian Hunter-Gatherer-Foragers of Minnesota (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 27, 2022: In 1990, President George W. Bush proclaimed the month of November to be the national Native American Heritage Month.

Accordingly, I write today in the spirit of celebrating our Native American Heritage in Minnesota as passed on to posterity by the Ojibwe Medicine Doctor Paul Peter Buffalo (c.1900-1977) of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in the extensive tape recordings he made for posterity over the last twelve years of his life, which the anthropologist Timothy G. Roufs of the University of Minnesota Duluth diligently transcribed and annotated and eventually published in three volumes containing some 1,900 pages in 2019. Roufs also selected the photographs from the Minnesota Historical Society and other illustrations scattered throughout the three volumes.

The overall title of the three volumes is Gabe-Bines: "Forever Flying Bird": Teachings of Paul Peter Buffalo. His Ojibwe name is anglicized here as Gabe-bines. His name means "Forever Flying Bird." But he is also known as Paul Peter Buffalo.

Volume 1 is subtitled "Year-Round in the Early Years."

Volume 2 is subtitled "Wenabozho and the Way We Think About the World." Wenabozho is a trickster figure in Ojibwe stories.

Volume 3 is subtitled "Living Amongst the Whites . . . the Best We Can."

Each volume comes equipped with an "Index."

Now, in Roufs' "Introduction" (pp. ix-xxi in each volume), he says, "Believing this writer to be the person his mother dreamed of, Paul Buffalo began what became a twelve-year process of systematically recounting his life experiences" (p. x).

In Roufs' "Introduction," he also says, "The individuals of Paul's generation - as the last hunter-gatherer-foragers of the upper Midwest - looked on at and were drawn into the new lifeways and new ways of making a living" (p. xi).

In addition, in Roufs' "Introduction," he says, "In the spirit of earlier books setting forth the traditions of North American Indian people - books such as Crashing Thunder [1926], Black Elk Speaks [1932], Cheyenne Memories [1967] - the following memoirs aim to provide for 'people who want to listen' a personal account of the early life of a modern Anishinaabe Medicine Doctor" (p. xii).

Now, Billie Annette, who identifies herself as a Citizen of the White Earth Nation, provides the "Foreword" (pp. vii-viii in each of the three volumes). In it, she says, "The ethnographic biography of Paul Peter Buffalo is a treasure trove of information about the Ojibwe people of Minnesota. . . . This biography delves into Indian life in Minnesota; there are pictures inserted courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society that richly add to the narrative" (p. vii).

In Annette's "Foreword," she also says, "Every chapter reads like the storytelling my mother (who was raised on the White Earth Reservation and whose first language was Ojibwe) shared with me. It is personal, heartfelt, and truthful. Over and over the narrative presents meaningful gifts or nuggets of wisdom on how to live a good life, how everyday life was lived, how disputes were settled, how kids were disciplined, how spirituality and science were understood, and why meetings are important ('to understand one another . . . a meeting was not held to say that a person was wrong or right . . . when you get through a meeting, you feel good . . . you are able to see things differently because you heard something . . . you learned something by other talking')" (pp. vii-viii; her ellipses).

Annette is here quoting Paul Buffalos' statements in chapter 5: "Chiefs and Councils" (pp. 69-87; at p. 75).

Wow! I'd never before heard anything quite this positive about group meetings! These snippets reminded me a bit of Pope Francis' emphasis on church synods. So let's look at Paul buffalo's chapter 5: "Chiefs and Councils."

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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