1 of 6
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.
share this page
RSS Feed
