Earth Elder Stories: The Pinayzitt Path

John Steckley teaches in the Human Studies Program at Humber College in
Toronto. He is the author of Beyond Their Years: Five Native Women’s
Stories.

Alexander Wolfe is a Saulteaux elder who was the keeper of his
family’s oral history. The stories in this collection were told to
Wolfe by the brother of his mother’s father (and thus, in traditional
terms, one of his grandfathers). They do not, as editor Harvey Knight
claims in the preface, “serve as a starting point and a guide in the
development of written histories of indigenous peoples.” Others have
done that job since Earth Elder Stories was first published in 1988. As
well, the book would have been more useful to a variety of audiences if
it had been written with Saulteaux on one side and English on the other,
with editorial notes providing much-needed context.

To its credit, Earth Elder Stories does provide a necessary piece of
the historical puzzle that is the Saulteaux or Ojibwa of Western Canada,
a people about whom too little has been written. It will be of interest
as a reference work to tribal historians and other scholars who are
motivated enough to add the pieces the editor failed to supply.