Late in the fall, my son and I traveled north, heading for the Leech Lake Reservation, one of seven in Minnesota belonging to the Ojibwe tribe. We were going to meet “Ojibwe singers,” Native Christians who chant traditional Protestant hymns in their own language, in settings quite different from anything imagined by the 19th-century missionaries who brought the songs of worship to them.
We left St. Paul under crystal blue skies and mild temperatures, but farther north the cold began to bite. I could tell we were getting close to the reservation when we started passing through towns like Hackensack (population 285 or 245, depending on which way you were traveling), Jenkins (pop. 287), and Fort Ripley (pop. 74). We drove by stores advertising used work clothes and fender skirts. Hoss’s All-American Liquors was on our left, and the Northern Lights Casino on our right—”May your cup overflow,” the sign said.
In Cass Lake, the biggest town on the reservation, we checked into the Palace Hotel and Casino. The decor in the lobby was an eclectic mix of Indian kitsch, tropical themes, and gaming enticements. Teepee lampshades. Aquamarine and coral carpets. Blinking lights and ringing bells. “Rake in the Cash.”
Everything smelled like smoke, with undercurrents of fumigation and upholstery cleaner. The gaming rooms were dark, illumined only by the red, white, and green blinking lights of the slots and orange neon signs flashing “bingo.” Songs about pickup trucks and girls in red shoes served as background music for gray-haired ladies in polyester pant suits shuffling down the carpeted hallway connecting the hotel to the casino.
Jon and I checked in with an hour of daylight left. He said, “Do you want to take a walk in the forest with me?”
We hiked across a grassy field to the wood behind the hotel with Jon leading the way. I quickly learned forest protocol has no room for ninnies. The sun sinking to our left, a bracing wind in our faces, he beat a path through saplings, dried sticks, and falling branches that more than once whipped my face. I asked him to stop doing that. He said, “When you walk through the forest you’re not supposed to be close enough to the person in front of you to get hit by branches.”
“Still,” I protested.
“Let’s not talk about this. We’re in the forest,” he said.
The sun broke through the clouds low in the western sky, catching the few remaining gold leaves at the treetops. The floor of the wood came alive in yellows and purples and burnished bronze. A dog barked in the distance. It occurred to me we might be on someone’s land, and it was hunting season. The Ojibwe are active hunters, and we weren’t wearing those bright orange vests.
We took a different path on the way back, stepping out of the wood into a meadow. The last rays of the sun illumined the brown grasses.
Jon took a swim in the indoor pool later that night and returned downcast. “I was the only one in the pool who wasn’t fat. Fat Indians, that’s depressing.”
What brought us to Leech Lake was a book, Michael D. McNally’s Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion.1 McNally’s book is the fruit of eight years of research, two of which were spent at the Ojibwe White Earth Reservation. It offers a case study of Native American Christianity that is sharply at odds both with prevailing secular accounts—in which Christianity is an alien creed imposed by force on Native peoples, with whose traditions it remains fundamentally incompatible—and with the missionary triumphalism that persists to a degree in the evangelical subculture, though it’s increasingly hard to find in the field.
The story McNally tells is more complex. At the heart of it is the trauma and disorientation Native people faced when the rhythms of their world went helter-skelter with the arrival of the colonists and missionaries and, eventually, modernization. It is easy to idealize the pre-contact world of Native America, and McNally doesn’t entirely resist that temptation. The “ultimate concern” of the Ojibwe, he writes, was to live “a full life in a beautiful and proper relationship to the land and the human, natural, and spiritual communities that intersect there.” How that played out in everyday terms is not clear, but a quick review of human societies—anytime, anywhere—suggests some possibilities. Still, the coming of the Europeans disrupted an entire way of life.
In the early days, before the settlers and missionaries arrived, the Ojibwe, or Ojibwa (also known as the Chippewa and—in their own language—the Anishinaabe), inhabited the northern Great Lakes region. Daily life centered on seasonal activities like berrying in the summers, ricing in the fall, hunting in the winter, sugaring and harvesting medicines in the spring. They excelled in hunting and fishing and eventually played a major role in the fur trade.
Even before the negative consequences of encroaching colonization, the fur trade itself began the process of tribal fragmentation for the Ojibwe. Trading brought together many different Ojibwe “bands” that had settled in various locales throughout the region, which McNally calls a “culturally diverse polyglot [of] native villages.” As a result, rather than remaining in the context of tribal life, many Ojibwe settled on or near trading centers. Whites and Ojibwe intermarried with increasing frequency. Trading also meant competing with neighboring tribes for trapping lands, resulting in conflict and inter-tribal hostilities.
Full-scale missions to the Ojibwe began in the 1800s, both Catholic and Protestant, the latter from denominations represented in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), including Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. These low-church denominations focused their efforts on teaching Scripture and showing Natives the way to attain a disciplined Bible-centered life (as Baptists and Presbyterians are prone to do).
The Ojibwe were not hostile to the missionaries. Records indicate they welcomed them into their lodges and heard them out, though they didn’t always allow them to read the Scriptures in the lodges. But the way of life that was second nature to the missionaries did not sit well with the seasons-oriented Ojibwe. “A life lived in step with the Book,” McNally writes, “was to bring private property, square frame houses, fenced fields, chairs, tables, beds, short hair, and Anglo-American gender norms.” The Ojibwe were unwilling to adapt to those terms, which proved a disappointment to the Protestant missionaries. McNally quotes one missionary who noted: “There is no moving yet among the dry bones . …They seem as insensible as the rocks which are washed by the waves of their native lake.”
One area where mission efforts elicited a positive response, however, was in hymn singing. For the missionaries, who placed reading and appropriating Scripture at the center of religious expression, hymn singing was a secondary blessing. Nevertheless, when they realized these songs were arousing a spiritual resonance with the tribe, they changed their emphasis. Hymnody was able to do “the cultural work of stirring the heart and mind to accept the preached Word,” notes McNally. By “cultural work” he means finding common ground between the tribe and their cultural grid and the teaching of the missionaries, who had another. Music was that meeting ground.
Over the long haul, the low-church Protestants grew frustrated with the Ojibwe, who—even in their singing—clung to the modes of religious expression familiar from their traditional rites, known collectively as the Midewiwin. Over time, the influence of the ABCFM dwindled and the high-church Episcopalians stepped up. They took note of the successes associated with the hymnody of the low-church evangelicals and found it “compelling and useful,” writes McNally. In fact, the Episcopalians took the singing a step further, training Ojibwe clergy who had embraced the gospel and were well suited to make full use of music to reach other members of the tribe.
Their singing embodied more than “making a joyful noise unto the Lord,” though that was certainly part of it. “Song was one of the principle means of access to the sources of power that animates life,” notes McNally. Connection to the natural world was essential to their sense of spiritual, physical, and social wholeness. The Ojibwe, McNally says, made no sharp distinction between the natural and supernatural realms—another one of those generalizations often encountered in studies of indigenous peoples, badly in need of nuancing but not to be rejected wholesale. And the preeminent conduit between these realms, McNally suggests (of course even the notion of a conduit implies differentiation), through which the Ojibwe made a conscious, temporal connection to the supernatural, was music. By singing, they kept the rhythms of life intact. They sang dream songs, love songs, moccasin game songs, dance songs, war songs, begging songs, gifting songs, and lullabies. Or, as McNally puts in the academic dialect, “Certain songs were called on for help in negotiating health and survival by means of access to life-giving powers at the heart of existence.”
For the Ojibwe (as for oral cultures generally), spoken words carry sacred power. They are a force. Songs carried the same power: “Songs did things.” The repetition that typifies much Native music reinforced that power. And the power, especially in times of suffering, became transformative. Thus as the Ojibwe experienced the loss of much that they had known, they found that the singing enabled them to navigate hard times and yet retain a strong spiritual identity. Through the hymns, they owned the power of God the missionaries taught them but preserved their indigenous vision about how to apprehend that power.
The story is another testimony to the protean translatability of the gospel. But among the Ojibwe, as among the Christian societies from which the missionaries came, transformation was partial, incomplete, sometimes woefully so. “Missionary accounts of the 1840s and 1850s bear witness to the drinking and violence that plagued Ojibwe communities,” writes McNally. In 1863 a preacher at the trading settlement of Crow Wing observed:
Since my arrival here there are eight men killed and since my last letter … two more killed of Leech Lakers and one chief of Red Lake about dying inflicted upon him by Gull Lake indians during drunkenness . …Since last May I have counted twenty five killed among themselves—nothing else just by the effect of ishkotawahboo (firewater) and on nights since three barrels of whiskey was taken or sold to the indians on the other side of the Mississippi in one night only.
Some Ojibwe tried to resist the missionary onslaught and force the Episcopalians from Leech Lake and Gull Lake in 1862. Others felt that participation in mission schools and mission life was the only hope for survival. McNally quotes a leader from Gull Lake: “We feel as though we and our children were all going to die very soon, and our only hope is to have a teacher to show us how to live and how to follow the rules of the Great Spirit.”
All the while, hymn singing persisted. Eventually, it became the primary vehicle through which the Ojibwe expressed their grief, sadness, and disorientation. At the same time, the singing became a means of lifting a banner of hope in a manner consistent with their Midewiwin. In reservation life, the power of the singing persisted, especially in the context of mourning and burial rituals.
Approximately 4,000 Ojibwe live on the Leech Lake reservation today out of the nearly 8,000 who are registered members of the Leech Lake band. Gaming provides about half the employment on the reservation. The members of the tribe I met with during my trip counted the gaming industry a blessing. (Gaming, as opposed to Las Vegas-type gambling, carries more governmental restrictions.) James Allen, Jr., whose parents were key leaders in hymn singing before they passed away two years ago, says the opportunities afforded by casinos have created more jobs than there are people to fill them. “They are shuttling in people who live off the reservation to take some of these jobs,” he says. “We’d be starving by now” without the casinos, he says.
As far back as Allen can remember, Leech Lake has taken the lead among other Ojibwe bands in modeling and upholding the hymn singing tradition, due in large part to the leadership of his parents, James Allen, Sr., and Vina Jones. His sister, Margaret Allen Thunderhawk, remembers going to prayer meetings and wakes as a little girl, and being encouraged by her parents to “pick up the book and learn the songs,” she says. “I remember once we were singing at home and my mother said, ‘Just sing out, project your voice.'” Everyone, tone-deaf or operatic, was encouraged to sing because the authority and purpose of the song did not reside in its sounding good. “It is being part of the group,” she says.
“I asked my dad one time,” says James Allen, ” ‘Why don’t you tell me what I’m singing? I feel foolish singing these words when I don’t know what they mean.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Just sing them.'”
The Allens attend St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, in Cass Lake, where average attendance numbers around a dozen on a Sunday morning. Church attendance is very low on the reservation, Allen says, but when the hymn singing takes place in other contexts, particularly at wakes, the numbers double and triple. “This is where Ojibwe singing takes its role,” he says. “Church is symbolic of white culture. Hymn singing is not.”
The Leech Lake hymn singers have found themselves at a critical juncture. “We’ve dwindled down,” says Allen. “We lost my mother and father [two years ago] and one of our other stable group members two months ago. So we’ve lost the heart of our singing group in the last two years. The words are true now, when our parents said ‘we’re not going to be here forever, so learn what you can now.’ White Earth and Red Lake [reservations] look to us to fulfill our role in taking over our leaders’ positions. It’s our own self doubts that hold us back.”
An emerging Ojibwe singer who may assume leadership is a woman named Gloria Dudley, who also attends St. Peter’s. “It has always been part of our life,” she says. “Our parents passed it through the generations. When we would get together, all the adults sat at the singing table. As a younger person you would have to see if there was room enough at the table for all the adults first. We waited for that little gesture telling us to come to the table to sit with them. Sitting at the table with your parents, having that security sitting next to them, makes you feel comfortable singing. Sitting together meant you were always part of the group.”
“They wanted us to be there,” adds Margaret Allen Thunderhawk. “We knew what was expected of us. My father was a prayer leader. He always said we need people to join the singing group and to be prayer leaders as part of the Ojibwe hymn group to carry that tradition. Many of us are feeling this is our time to take this role.
“I remember sitting next to my mother and we’d come to a part I knew was going to get high. She’d look at me. I knew I should sing louder to be with her, so we could make it through the song. It was a good feeling to have that sense of singing spiritual songs. We are singing the songs of praise—that’s why we sing.”
McNally says “ritual performances are narratives, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” They succeed, he says, only when the story they tell is “a coherent and persuasive one.” The hymns, as appropriated by the Ojibwe, have remained a part of their life, coherent and persuasive because they express Christian theology in Native categories. A verse from Charles Wesley’s classic hymn, “Oh, For A Thousand Tongues To Sing,” is a case in point:
He breaks the power of reigning sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the sinful clean,
His blood availed for me.
The Ojibwe, McNally says, do not possess a doctrinal concept of “the depravity of humanity,” instead measuring alienation from God in terms of things done wrong—hence this retranslation of Wesley’s lines as rendered in an Ojibwe hymnal of 1910:
He is able to do it, throw it [all] away
The sins/things done wrong
It cleanses/purifies [people]
That blood of Jesus.
Here, alas, as in many accounts of differences between varieties of Native Christianity and the classic Christian tradition, important issues are raised without sufficient exploration. On the one hand, McNally suggests that there is a significant difference between the classic understanding of sin and the Ojibwe understanding (a recurring theme in Native American theologies). On the other hand, he observes that to understand that difference one must go beyond the texts of the hymns themselves. But we don’t then get any substantive account of the ways in which the Ojibwe understanding of sin shapes their experience. We’re left without that essential part of the story.
At first, you’re not sure they are hymns at all. The timing is different and they are sung a cappella, with lots of guttural transitions. Sometimes you’ll hear a low, resonant harmony, like the drone of a bagpipe, that lends the songs a plaintive aspect. The women’s voices are high-pitched and bell-like, complementing the throaty voices of the men. The singers hurl their voices at the higher octaves, and then ease them to the lower ones; there is pleading in their voices. Their singing is “a ritualized enactment of hope,” as McNally writes, “a bold and beautifying assertion made in the wake of death that the story did not begin there and will not end there.”
The Ojibwe still hunt, and you can find chokecherry and other jams in local stores from their berrying. Some still harvest medicines, like cedar tea, and they remain among the nation’s top producers of wild rice. So not all their traditional activities have been lost. Still, fundamentally, so much else has been.
I don’t know what it feels like to pattern your life around the rhythms of the seasons, only to have those patterns forcibly reordered until casinos become the hope of the future. I don’t know what it feels like to sing songs like they do, in the company of others whose cry draws its strength from yours. I heard the singing and sensed the longing in their voices, like a prayer that weeps and worships in the same breath. I did recognize one tune: “I Need Thee Every Hour.” The cadence was slow, only fitfully familiar. But power arose from that song. It seemed to speak to the wind and move a mountain.
Wendy Murray Zoba is the author of Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul (Brazos Press) and Sacred Journeys (Tyndale).
1. Oxford Univ. Press, 2000. McNally is assistant professor of history at Eastern Michigan University.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
