Book Review: Clothed-in-Fur and Other Tales
This is a revised version of a book review of Overholt and Callicott’s Clothed-in-fur and Other Tales : An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View submitted for a course, Native Worldviews, in the Indigenous Learning Program at Lakehead University in the fall of 2014.
The first reaction of many for whom these stories are not part of their own upbringing is probably one of ‘strangeness’. The word ‘strange’ contrasts with ‘familiar’, of course, the latter suggesting intimacy and acquaintance as if moving about within a family circle or familiar neighbourhood. By being unfamiliar, the strangeness perceived speaks most likely to a violation of expectation, or an inability to form expectations at all, an inability to recognize a familiar pattern. As a result, one option for exploring these stories is to move along the threshold of that strangeness, as if moving along an unfamiliar shoreline. Keeping in mind, at all times, that, although we have the original Anishnabemowin text available, it is the English translation which forms the basis of this interpretive essay.
However, to pursue the analogy, becoming familiar with the unfamiliar will be shaped nevertheless by pre-existing experiences and expectations, goals and desires. What is noticed and what is important, will change depending upon the standpoint of the one doing the noticing. If you are lost and hungry and far from ‘home’, one is likely to have different expectations and experiences than if one has simply taken a different path than one’s normal path where loss, hunger and home are not really matters of grave concern. In which case, perhaps idle curiosity or imaginative speculation comes to the fore. In other words, to understand the stories, we need to understand the context in which we encounter them.
The editors tell us, the stories were collected, transcribed and translated by William Jones from 1903–1905, west and north of Lake Superior. This is, of course, the region where ‘we’ are living today (Lakehead University is located in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, to use the colonial designations of location.) And yet, the stories are largely presented as stories belonging to an ‘Other’ which accounts for the accompanying discussions about worldviews and cultural relativism. In other words, we are sent plenty of signals by the editors to the effect that we are not supposed to understand these stories. They belong to another culture, another time, if not another place (insofar as place is only the same within a cultural context of similitude and recognition), to people who do not think or act like ‘us’. So for the editors, these stories do not concern matters of cultural necessities or matters of substantial concern necessary to reproducing ‘our’ existence, rather they are more like trinkets of curiosity which we can attend to without interrupting our more fundamental, social relationships with reality.
By hearing the stories in this way, confident about our relationship to reality as being other than what these stories tell, have we in fact not thereby possibly or likely cut ourselves off from any meaningful understanding of them. In other words, unless we are prepared to truly wager our expectations and experiences of what is reality, is the reality of the ‘Other’ likely to reveal itself here in these stories? For example, if we cling to the realities found in the worldviews of empirical science and technology, or the spiritual cosmology of the Judeo-Christian tradition, can we possibly understand the realities found in these stories?
Like Nanabushu, who mimics without truly understanding, who fails to feed his children, because he fails to heed what he has been told, what will we be able to take from these stories if we fail to heed what ‘we’ are being told? So can these stories speak to ‘us’? Can they feed us and our children, or are we doomed to wander about like Nanabushu, mimicking without understanding, pretending without knowing, acting without being?
What would it be to heed what is being told in these stories? What needs to be risked and wagered? Is it enough to wager a few marks in a university course to successfully achieve the valued constructed identity within a colonial education system? Given the colonizer’s claim to sovereignty and an exclusive universal reality, how would we make a wager of vital experiences and expectations within the worldview of this ‘Other’? Or another way round, how far do we have to venture from the colonizer’s castle along the shoreline of strangeness in order to heed what is being told in these stories? Like some of the characters in these stories, do we need to forget ‘our’ parents, when we come to live with ‘our’ grandfather, the Bear?
In a number of the Nanabushu stories, Nanabushu and his poor family are always hungry, largely, because Nanabushu fails to do what is needed to feed his family. Most often, Nanabushu is prone to distraction or doing precisely what he has been warned not to do, his exasperated wife seemingly resigned to her lot with Nanabushu. Nevertheless, his ‘relatives’ often take pity upon him and his lot is not as bad as it might have otherwise been.
What seems clear is the conditions that operate throughout these stories are not empirical conditions from which a response of technological reason affords a solution to any given predicament Nanabushu finds himself in. Rather conditions are simply presented as conditions, instructions are simply presented as instructions, and heeding them or not leads to different outcomes for the protagonist. Nanabushu is seldom in control of the conditions.
However, despite, his characteristics of ineptitude and questionable moral character (Nanabushu often indulges imprudent motives), Nanabushu has creative powers. Many of the stories involve the creation of creatures with certain characteristics. However, despite his creative and shape-shifting powers (including human characteristics), Nanabushu is not necessarily the most powerful manitou or creature in the universe of stories we are invited into here. Although there is some sense of derivative status, for example, where relations of being younger or older seem to play a role at times in terms of relations of deference or order, there is, nevertheless, no strict hierarchy of power and authority. There is no crowned and crowning moral being adjudicating, rewarding and punishing all the underlings. Rather the world is much more poly-theistic. There are simply many beings with various powers in various circumstances, and the life-situations we are presented with are simply a protagonist navigating a path through this roiling universe of possibility and actuality.
This brings us to some of the key differences we might note along the shoreline of the Christian-Judaic tradition in which Europeans were living when they first happened upon Turtle Island.
Although there are many dramatic episodes in these stories, where characters are being pursued by apparently malevolent forces (often manitous) and will be aided by grandfathers or grandmothers (also often manitous) who take pity, offering food, medicines and powerful ‘tools’ (non-empirical, non-technological tools), yet there is no ever-present, all-powerful, spiritual authority who, through his hierarchy of morally disciplined followers, offers a strict path or rule book of salvation to those who follow his commandments.
Rather, the world of manitous, malevolent or beneficent, appears to be a much more wide-open competition of powers. There is no ultimate moral arbiter, although the drama of well-being is nevertheless ever in play. There is no looming Apocryphal final judgement. How the drama of well-being will unfold may take many forms. Depending upon the circumstance, a particular creature or collection of creatures may intercede on behalf of the protagonists in opposition to those creatures interceding to threaten the protagonists.
Food and survival are central themes of many of the stories.
Malevolent manitous are often the source of the dramatic tension. However, it is also often the case that death is not permanent. In the midst of the dramatic tension of life and death struggles, the dead will simply rise again because a manitou with the power to do so has interceded to make that happen. Until, as is sometimes the case, that power runs out and they fail to come back to life…at least for the particular story being told. However, the lingering implication is that this flow of power, malevolent or beneficent, from the point of view of the given protagonist, is never a closed or finished process with an absolute arbiter.
There is simply the never-ending flow of manitou powers, flowing throughout the world of relatives. The forms of relationships are not organized into any kind of fixed hierarchy along a fixed timeline. Humans become beavers, beavers become humans, humans marry beavers, beavers marry humans. The unfolding drama offers no kind of glimpse of a fixed beginning or end. The grandmothers and grandfathers, found often by travelling “straight to the west”, do not seem to represent any kind of fixed beginning point or fixed end point in time. If arriving at the end of the story and the end of a drama, whether it is the wicked mother who leaps over the horn-grebe and falls into the sea, or Mashos who slides off a cliff and seemingly into oblivion, there is no suggestion of an absolutely final ending place or time.
The world of the manitous and the world of humans and all the other creatures simply co-exist in an ever-present, inter-penetrating world of dramatic encounters. This is not the world of empirical objects, linear time-lines and the fixed laws of science. Nor is it the moral universe and linear moral history of the Christian-Judaic god. So as we shuffle along the shoreline of the Christian-Judeo tradition, there is nothing comparable to heaven and hell, or even the Greek underworld for that matter. There is no God the Father and there is no Satan, nor any kind of dualistic battle of good and evil between the moral super-powers of the universe. And no final standing before the gates of heaven or hell.
And Nanabushu certainly makes for a very strange Jesus. If Nanabushu is a teacher, then his primary technique is laughter and he is often the object of our laughter. Not a mean-spirited laughter, but a shaking-your-head can’t-believe-he-did-that laughter, recognizing the need to offer a little pity, for someone who we recognize as perhaps as flawed as we often are. In fact, it might be a very interesting imaginative, worldview exercise, to develop a scenario, where Nanabushu finds himself nailed to a Roman cross, charged with the crimes Jesus was charged with, and then, in a manner more true to the character of Nanabushu himself, see how the story might unfold.
Having been raised a Catholic, and so, raised to attend Sunday sermons and a Catholic lower-school education, it strains the imagination somewhat to think of the congregation, breaking out with roars of laughter as Nanabushu deals in likely comedic fashion with his Jesus-predicament up on the cross. The dark, earnest dualistic moralism of the Old and New Testament gospels just does not seem the likely result of the Indigenous mind, soul and culture that gave us the stories of Nanabushu.
So what would Nanabushu have been up to before the gizzard of the ruffed grouse was hung aloft if we came upon him in such a Jesus-predicament in an episode of one of his stories?
