Review by Choice Review
This thoroughly researched study based on archival materials and two years of participant observation on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota examines processes by which the 19th-century Ojibwe took missionary Christianity and remade it into their own religious idiom through the ritualized singing of hymns. McNally (history, Eastern Michigan Univ.) skillfully outlines the place of music within Ojibwe culture and contrasts Ojibwe ideas concerning music with the place of hymnody in the culture of 19th-century evangelical Protestants. He convincingly argues that performance of translated musical texts gave 19th-century Ojibwe a distinctive idiom for religious expression. But by the middle of the 20th century, Ojibwe hymn singing was all but forgotten. In the 1880s a small group of elders resurrected hymn singing as a way of remembering Ojibwa identity through ritual performance. Contemporary hymn singing provides a rich resource of language and cultural memory that promotes Ojibwe cultural survival. McNally addresses the theories of Clifford Goertz, Catherine Bell, and Pierre Bourdieu concerning how rituals "work" and applies these theories to his own observations of Ojibwe ritual. He also addresses a central issue in the analysis of Amerindian religions: To what extent can Native American Christianity be considered "indigenous?" Highly recommended. S. D. Glazier University of Nebraska at Kearney
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
