Through Indigenous Eyes

Ojibwe - Fair Wind's Drum

This remarkable story recounts how an Ojibwe Medicine Man named Namiwin (‘Fair Wind’) brings his grandson, Charlie George Owen, back from the world of the dead using a sacred drum. The first voice you hear is that of Charlie George Owen who describes the vision given to Fairwind that helped him create the drum. With Margaret Simmons and Roger Roulette translating, Owen describes “walking down a beautiful road” in the spirit world and seeing his deceased ancestors. Finally, he recounts waking from a dream state to see Fair Wind, with a sucking bone in his mouth, calling him back from the spirit world. A. Irving Hallowell took the black and white photographs in the Pauingassi and Little Grand Rapids First Nations communities in northern Ontario in the 1930s, where he met Fair Wind. Dr. Maureen Matthews, an anthropologist who developed “Fair Wind’s Drum” for the Canadian Broadcasting System, made the color photographs and recordings and all of the recordings.

This project provides a powerful example of how the collaborative efforts that went into creating these materials has given rise to a mutually beneficial partnership based on what the American Philosophical Society calls “digital knowledge sharing.” When Maureen Matthews and Roger Roulette, an Ojibwe linguist, came to the APS as part of the Building Bridges conference, they identified many people in the Hallowell photographs who were previously unrecognized in the catalogue record. Dr. Matthews subsequently donated more than 700 hours of audio recordings to the APS, much of which augments the research done by Irving Hallowell. Hallowell’s photographs and Matthews’ recordings are now being used by the Pimachiowin Aki corporation—a coalition of five Ojibwe First Nations, the provincial governments of Manitoba and Ontario, and the Canadian government—to submit a UNESCO World Heritage Site grant that would preserve more than 40,000 square kilometers of the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe’s ancestral homeland as well as the cultural landscape. The exhibit pays tribute to this partnership. We are thankful to be working together and for the knowledge of scholars and First Nations' people in helping the APS to realize that its collections can play such an important role in cultural preservation and revitalization.