As for Me and My House: Zhaawanaash and Methodism at Berens River, 1874–1883 JENNIFER S. H. BROWN University of Winnipeg When Canada’s numbered treaties were signed, they named certain Aboriginal men as chiefs, giving them a place in Canadian history. Sometimes a man who was already a leader of his community retained and enhanced his position in becoming a treaty chief, as did Tapastanum of the Cree community of Pimicikamak (Cross Lake) when Treaty 5 was signed at Norway House (Manitoba) in September 1875 (Lindsay 2012). In other instances, leadership changed with the treaty-signing, and the men who had previously led their communities became less visible as others gained new prominence. Such was the case for a senior Ojibwe chief when Berens River, Manitoba, and its surrounding communities entered Treaty 5. On 20 September 1875, four days before Tapastanum was designated as treaty chief at Cross Lake, the people of Berens River saw the leadership of their community pass from Zhaawanaash (‘He Who Soars or Flies on the South Wind’) to Jacob Berens, his nephew, then entering his forties. Zhaawanaash was not mentioned in the treaty, and passed into obscurity. He emerges from the shadows as a dynamic presence, however, if we look more closely. The juxtaposition, for this paper, of several dispersed and little known documents provides glimpses of his roles and character during a brief but highly significant transitional period. (My thanks to John Nichols for help with the orthography and meaning of “Zhaawanaash.”) When Jacob Berens became chief at Berens River, the shift was more a succession than a supplanting, for Zhaawanaash was the younger brother of his father, Bear (‘Makwa’). Zhaawanaash had succeeded Bear as leader a short time before, since Bear had recently died, probably early in 1874. Jacob, born in the mid-1830; he was Bear’s eldest son. In turn, Bear and Zhaawanaash were the sons of Yellow Legs, a powerful medicine man who was the progenitor of the Moose Clan people in the region, and of 79 80 JENNIFER S. H. BROWN several family lines that later assumed different surnames, Berens and others (Brown 1998; Hallowell 1992, Chapter 1). Although Zhaawanaash is much less known than Jacob Berens, the writings of the local Hudson’s Bay Company employees, Methodist missionary Egerton R. Young in the 1870s, and anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell in the 1930s all tell us something of his life. Young and Hallowell also recorded details that go beyond facts, telling us of a man who in his last decade of life actively engaged with the changes surrounding him in the 1870s and left some strong memories both among his own people and with the sojourners in his community. Zhaawanaash exemplified familial continuities in leadership, being one of a chain of leaders reaching from his grandfather, Yellow Legs, down to his grandnephew, William Berens, who served as chief from 1917 to 1947. William, born in 1866, worked closely with Hallowell through the 1930s as collaborator, interpreter, and guide, and powerfully conveyed to Hallowell his ancestors’ prominence and their stories (Berens 2009). Hallowell’s posthumously published ethnography, The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba (1992), outlines the Berens genealogy, from Yellow Legs down to William Berens and his family, across four generations. Yellow Legs, by Hallowell’s estimate, was born in the mid-1700s (1992:11). He must have been one of the first Ojibwe people to take up residence on the west side of Lake Winnipeg. His eldest son, Bear, was probably born in the 1790s, and Zhaawanaash perhaps around 1800. When Zhaawanaash died at Berens River in the winter of 1882–83 (about one year later than Tapastanum), he was described as the “oldest member” of the Methodist church there (Ross 1882–83). William Berens told Hallowell a few interesting things about Zhaawanaash and mentioned him also in his reminiscences, which Hallowell wrote down in 1940. One of Berens’s earliest memories, dating from about 1870–72, was of attending a Midewiwin ceremony held at the mouth of the Berens River. As he told Hallowell, “I saw my grandfather [Bear] in the Midéwi·win once. It must have been the last one ever held at the mouth of the river. My grandfather was the headman. I had a small piece of dog meat passed to me that time and I ate it” (Berens 2009:42). Zhaawanaash assisted in leading the ceremony, and Berens showed Hallowell “the spot where the lodge had been erected.” Hallowell added that after Bear died, Zhaawanaash converted to Christianity “and joined the Protestant church” AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE 81 (Hallowell 1936:49). But in fact, the course that Zhaawanaash followed in the years 1874 to 1877 was not quite so simple. A closer look at Berens River before and during those years illuminates the complex changes with which Zhaawanaash and his kin were coping. The mouth of the river was both a natural place for Ojibwe people to settle and a regular stopping point for travelers up and down Lake Winnipeg. In the 1700s, French and later North West Company fur traders from Montreal, and Hudson’s Bay Company traders venturing inland from the Albany River watershed and from the York Factory region, all passed by and sometimes built trading posts there and upriver. Fur resources in the region were depleted by the time that the Hudson’s Bay and North West companies merged in 1821, and fur trade traffic in the interior diminished (Lytwyn 1986). But Lake Winnipeg was still the great inland lake on which everyone traveled when heading north to Norway House, or the Saskatchewan River and the Athabasca country. The Ojibwe became quite familiar with the newcomers, the log and timbered structures they built, the goods they brought, and some of their curious ways. In the 1840s and 1850s, new kinds of outsiders were increasingly seen in the area. Some of the first missionaries to Red River, arriving by York Factory, had traveled down the lake in the 1820s. But the founding of Methodist missions at Norway House and other inland posts from 1840 onward brought a new stream of churchly visitors traveling both north and south, some of whom paused at Berens River. In the summer of 1854, the Rev. John Ryerson, a Methodist from Upper Canada, paid a visit and thought the locale a favorable site for a mission. He received a mixed reception when he tried to interview some of the Ojibwe residents, however. As he recorded, “the two Indians who acted as the spokesmen for the rest, were, as I afterwards learned, medicine men or conjurors, who derive a profit from their craft, and are therefore opposed to whatever may endanger it” (Ryerson 1855:81). In turn, the “medicine men” were not favorably impressed by their visitor. The following year, another Methodist clergyman, Thomas Hurlburt, stopped by. The Berens River chief (probably Bear) told him bluntly that neither he nor his predecessor had followed proper Ojibwe protocol, if they wished to address them seriously. “When I visited the Indians of Beerin River in the summer of 1855,” Hurlburt recalled, “they thought it an unheard of indignity for me to request the privilege of speaking to them on the subject of religion without first 82 JENNIFER S. H. BROWN making them a donation. The head man said to me, ‘the big black coat that passed here last summer insulted us greatly by requesting to speak to us, and only gave us a piece of tobacco each about so long’—measuring on his finger about the length of half a plug. ‘We expect that when anyone comes to speak to us that he will place before us a considerable quantity’ ” (Hurlburt, 17 Feb. 1858, writing from Garden River to the Christian Guard- ian, reference courtesy of Donald B. Smith). The offering and acceptance of tobacco were key symbols in establishing a mutual willingness to com- municate about important matters. Berens River people themselves often traveled widely around Lake Winnipeg. Those who worked as tripmen in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) frequently visited Norway House, and some of them visited the Methodists at their nearby mission village of Rossville. Successive ministers at Rossville baptized numbers of Berens River people from the 1840s to the 1870s when Berens River acquired its own semi- permanent mission station. Most notably, Jacob Berens, son of “Mahquah” [Bear], was baptized by the Rev. George McDougall there on 25 February 1861, the first of his family to take that step (Wesleyan Methodist Register of Baptisms, Norway House, no. 1110). We have no record of why Jacob, then in his mid-twenties, made this decision. But his senior relatives already provided models of adaptability and flexibility, as when his grandfather’s family moved from northwestern Ontario to the west side of Lake Winnipeg. Jacob probably saw the church, at least initially, as a new and helpful source of spiritual power that could coexist with the religious practices of Yellow Legs, Bear, and Zhaawanaash. A striking piece of advice that Jacob gave to his son William, which William always treasured, expressed his outlook well: “Don’t think you know everything. You will see lots of new things and you will find a place in your mind for them all” (Berens 2009:38). Another personal factor in Jacob’s life at this time may have been his courtship of Mary McKay. Mary was the daughter of a Scots-Cree HBC trader, William McKay, whose father had taken him as a boy to Scotland, probably for schooling. Jacob’s baptism and his taking of a Christian name could have helped reconcile McKay to his daughter’s marriage to an Indian, and indeed McKay later lived out his last years with the Berens family (Berens 2009:41, 204n12).