Making It Their Own: Severn Ojibwa Communicative Practices

John Stanley is a policy advisor at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

This work is based on the author’s work with the Ojibwa of Lynx Lake,
an isolated community of 350 situated 250 miles north of Thunder Bay.
The Ojibwa speak Severn Ojibwa, the most populous and distinctive
dialect, and theirs is one of the few “truly viable” Ojibwa speech
communities.

Valentine clearly demonstrates how Christianity can become a Native
tradition when it is developed according to the needs and desires of a
Native community. She shows how the people of Lynx Lake have made the
local Anglican church their own. They run it themselves, exclude other
denominations, and, largely because Cree is their liturgical language,
have achieved a nearly 100 percent literacy rate in Cree syllabics for
both Cree and Ojibwa. Valentine makes questionable assertions concerning
the “more Native” Ojibwa religious traditions of the Mide, which she
refers to as a “new religion,” and the aatisoohkaanan or legends,
whose traditional religious significance she casts doubt upon. While the
book’s analysis is sound and insightful, it could have been more
firmly grounded in empirical data.