The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life-World

📦 Product Details

• Author: Theresa S. Smith
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication Date: July 1, 2012
• Edition: Illustrated
• Language: English
• Print Length: 236 pages
• ISBN-10: 0803238320 
• ISBN-13: 978-0803238329
• Item Weight: 450 g

📖 About the Book

The Island of the Anishnaabeg explores the traditional Ojibwe worldview, focusing on the important relationship between people, the natural world, and spiritual beings. Theresa S. Smith examines traditional Ojibwe understandings of Thunderers and Water Monsters, powerful beings that occupy an important place within Anishnaabeg religious thought and storytelling.

The book looks at how these beings and their stories reflect broader ideas about nature, spirituality, sacred places, community, and the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. Through the traditional Ojibwe life-world, the book offers insight into an Indigenous religious and cultural perspective in which the natural environment is deeply connected with spiritual life.

It is an engaging resource for readers interested in Native American religions, Indigenous studies, Ojibwe culture, mythology, anthropology, and religious studies.

In this study, Theresa S. Smith explores the lived experience of the contemporary Ojibwes (or Anishnaabeg) amid the remarkable revival of both belief in and practice of the Ojibwe religion. Scholars have contended that traditional Ojibwe religion was gradually lost during the three centuries following Euro-American contact. And yet even though traditional religion no longer exists as a plausibility structure for a hunting-gathering culture, historic and contemporary accounts and a revival in the arts attest to the changing and vital nature of Ojibwe religion. The Island of the Anishnaabeg is a nuanced look at traditional Ojibwe religion and its structure, interpretation, and revival among contemporary Ojibwes.
The Ojibwe life-world, as experienced and described through religious symbols, beliefs, and practices, is alive with the presence of other-than-human people, known as manitouk. This book is the first thorough and systematic interpretive treatment of the relationship between Thunderers and Underwater manitouk. Smith&;s work reveals the Thunderers and Water monsters as determinative beings and symbols in the Ojibwe world and explores how their relationship inscribes a dialectic that both reflects the lived reality of that world and helps to determine the position and existence of the human subject in it.

👩🏫 About the Author

Theresa S. Smith is a scholar whose work focuses on Native American religion, Indigenous traditions, and Ojibwe/Anishnaabeg religious thought. Her research examines Indigenous understandings of spirituality, sacred relationships, and the natural world.

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