As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts (American Indian Studies)

As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts (American Indian Studies)

Blaire Morseau (Editor)
$24.95
Publication Date: October 1st, 2023
Publisher:
Michigan State University Press
ISBN:
9781611864625
Pages:
166

Description

Originally published in 1893 and 1901, Simon Pokagon’s birch bark stories were printed on thinly peeled and elegantly bound birch bark. In this edition, these rare booklets are reprinted with new essays that set the stories in cultural, linguistic, historical, and even geological context. Experts in Native literary traditions, history, Algonquian languages, the Michigan landscape, and materials conservation illuminate the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that Pokagon elevated in his stories. This is an essential resource for teachers and scholars of Native literature, Neshnabé pasts and futures, Algonquian linguistics, and book history. 

About the Author

Blaire Morseau is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She was the first archivist for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, where she is an enrolled citizen.

Praise for As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts (American Indian Studies)

As Sacred to Us unfurls the complexity of Simon Pokagon’s work and the meaning his publications still hold for readers today. As Pokagon Potawatomi acts of bookmaking, his words and the material presentations of them are important intercultural artifacts. Simon includes several languages spoken by members of his community across the generations and gives insight into Anishinaabe philosophy, geosciences, and theology. This reprinting of his narratives allows the land his ancestors knew as “wawkwing dash Au-kee” (heaven on earth) to remain part of the way we understand the southwest shores of Mi-shi-gan (Lake Michigan) today.

—Margaret Noodin, cocreator of www.ojibwe.net, author of two bilingual collections of poetry in Anishinaabemowin and English

 

Other Books in Series