What do you think?
Rate this book
Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales: And Their Relation to Chippewa Life
Tales concerning such topics as animals, spells, magical powers, and human transformations are presented and analyzed from psychological and sociological perspectives
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1977
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 6, 2021
A collection of stories recorded in the early 1940s, in Lac du Flambeau and Lac Court Oreilles, by several anthropology graduate students; and published several decades later by one of them (Barnouw).
The stories themselves are entertaining, although the subject matter can sometimes be disgusting. If you don’t want to read stories about a man sitting in a hole who fills the hole all the way up to his mouth with his own diarrhea; or a man who strings his own intestines from a tree as food for his aunts; or a snake killing a moose by crawling into its rectum and eating it from inside; then this is not the story collection for you.
For each story, the original storyteller (and translator) is identified, and at the back of the book there are autobiographical sketches of several of the primary storytellers. A great many collections of Native folklore do much less (sometimes nothing at all) to recognize the storytellers, so that’s a very welcome inclusion here.
Barnouw also provides a great deal of his own commentary on the stories. His comments are a mixed bag. Some of his comments point out ways in which the stories reflect Chippewa society; some of them identify which other Native groups tell the same stories, even providing maps to indicate how widely distributed certain stories are across North America. That information may not be too interesting for casual readers, but people with a serious interest in Native folklore will appreciate it.
On the other hand, Barnouw has an unfortunate penchant for psychoanalyzing the stories through a Freudian/Jungian lens. Some readers might appreciate that, but I found much of the psychoanalysis extremely suspect. The most egregious example of that concerns a storyteller who went by the pseudonym “Tom Badger”.
In 1944, Badger was in his 70s and a Medicine Dance priest. (I’ve no idea whether ‘priest’ is the best term; it’s the one Barnouw uses.) Barnouw had the bright idea of not only recording Badger’s stories, but also having him take a Rorschach test and make two Draw-a-Person drawings; then he sent the drawings to a psychoanalyst who hadn’t met Badger for a blind interpretation.
The psychoanalyst noted several features of the drawings- most prominently, the fact that the lines had a “stuttering” quality, with continuous interruptions, and were not pressed down very firmly on the paper. He “suggested that Tom Badger was probably a passive, dreamy person, with sexual inhibitions and that perhaps frustration in the sexual sphere resulted in a transfer to the oral region.” Rather reluctantly, though, Barnouw concedes that there may be another explanation for the weak lines of the drawings: “Tom Badger was illiterate and not accustomed to holding a pencil.”
Yeah, I think I favor that explanation.
Bottom line: if you have an interest in Native folklore, or in the Chippewa (Ojibwe) specifically, this book is well worthwhile. But don’t be too surprised if you find yourself skipping over much of Barnouw’s commentary.
The stories themselves are entertaining, although the subject matter can sometimes be disgusting. If you don’t want to read stories about a man sitting in a hole who fills the hole all the way up to his mouth with his own diarrhea; or a man who strings his own intestines from a tree as food for his aunts; or a snake killing a moose by crawling into its rectum and eating it from inside; then this is not the story collection for you.
For each story, the original storyteller (and translator) is identified, and at the back of the book there are autobiographical sketches of several of the primary storytellers. A great many collections of Native folklore do much less (sometimes nothing at all) to recognize the storytellers, so that’s a very welcome inclusion here.
Barnouw also provides a great deal of his own commentary on the stories. His comments are a mixed bag. Some of his comments point out ways in which the stories reflect Chippewa society; some of them identify which other Native groups tell the same stories, even providing maps to indicate how widely distributed certain stories are across North America. That information may not be too interesting for casual readers, but people with a serious interest in Native folklore will appreciate it.
On the other hand, Barnouw has an unfortunate penchant for psychoanalyzing the stories through a Freudian/Jungian lens. Some readers might appreciate that, but I found much of the psychoanalysis extremely suspect. The most egregious example of that concerns a storyteller who went by the pseudonym “Tom Badger”.
In 1944, Badger was in his 70s and a Medicine Dance priest. (I’ve no idea whether ‘priest’ is the best term; it’s the one Barnouw uses.) Barnouw had the bright idea of not only recording Badger’s stories, but also having him take a Rorschach test and make two Draw-a-Person drawings; then he sent the drawings to a psychoanalyst who hadn’t met Badger for a blind interpretation.
The psychoanalyst noted several features of the drawings- most prominently, the fact that the lines had a “stuttering” quality, with continuous interruptions, and were not pressed down very firmly on the paper. He “suggested that Tom Badger was probably a passive, dreamy person, with sexual inhibitions and that perhaps frustration in the sexual sphere resulted in a transfer to the oral region.” Rather reluctantly, though, Barnouw concedes that there may be another explanation for the weak lines of the drawings: “Tom Badger was illiterate and not accustomed to holding a pencil.”
Yeah, I think I favor that explanation.
Bottom line: if you have an interest in Native folklore, or in the Chippewa (Ojibwe) specifically, this book is well worthwhile. But don’t be too surprised if you find yourself skipping over much of Barnouw’s commentary.
September 20, 2025
A recurrent structural aspect of the Matchikwewis-Oshkikwe stories is the formula Interdiction/Violation/Consequence, which is related to Lack/Lack Liquidated. Matchikwewis wants something which she shouldn’t want; she gets it and then is punished, while Oshkikwe is rewarded, or at least not punished, for abstaining from the tabooed action. The interdiction is often unstated but implicit. The following violations and consequences occur: Matchikwewis takes off her dress and loses it. She wishes for a young star husband but gets an old one, while Oshkikwe is paired with the handsome young man. Matchikwewis looks out of the bag, which she was told not to do, and the bag falls into a tree. She urinates on the wolverine and breaks her leg. She wants to marry her sister and is pushed under the ice.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews