Pegahmagabow of Parry Island: from Jenness Informant to Individual
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
PEGAHMAGABOW OF PARRY ISLAND: FROM JENNESS INFORMANT TO INDIVIDUAL John Steckley Liberal Arts and Sciences Humber College Toronto, Ontario Canada, M9W 5L7 Bryan Cummins Department of Anthropology McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Canada, LaS 4L9 Abstract I Resume Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibwa from Parry Island, is the most deco rated Aboriginal soldier of the World Wars. After he returned home from World War I, he acted as chief informant of government anthropologist Diamond Jenness, in the latter's writing of his important work: The Ojibwa of Parry Island, Their Social and Religious Life (1935). Information about Pegahmagabow can be gleaned from this work that will enable us to have greater information about him as a soldier, and as a man. Francis Pegahmagabow, un Ojibwa de Parry Island, est Ie soldat autoch tone Ie plus decore pour sa participation a la Premiere Guerre mondiale. Ason retour au Canada apres la guerre, il est devenu Ie principal infor mateur de I'anthropologue gouvernemental Diamond Jessess au cours de la redaction de son .livre important, The Ojibwa of Parry Island: Their Social and Religious Life (1935). On peut y recueillir quelques rensei gnements au sujet de F. Pegahmagabow qui permettront de mieux Ie connaitre a titre de soldat et d'homme. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies XXV, 1(2005):35-50. 36 JohnSrec~ey/B~anCummms Introduction Individuality is part of ethnography. Both ethnographers and their informants have individual social locations, consisting of components such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and positions of authority within their societies. Both have particular personalities and proclivities, particular personal histories. In ethnography, as in other ar eas of the study of human beings, allowing or giving permission for sub jectivity to be seen enables the visibility of the individual, including that of the ethnographers and of their informants. Claiming objectivity, on the other hand, can make all individuality disappear, even that of the ethnographer. When the individuality of informants is not seen, then it is relatively easy for ethnographers to sell the idea of a consensus they invisibly impose on the culture, at the cost of the contesting opinions of informants that do not neatly fit into the cultural norms thus imposed. It can generally be said that throughout most of the history of an thropology as a discipline, objectivity was stressed. It is only since we have learned from Foucault (1978, 1980 and 1994) and critically minded anthropologists (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986, Jackson 1996 and Tedlock 1983), that knowledge is produced, is a cultural construct, and that the processes of that production of knowledge have to be made visible for an anthropological work to be trusted or critiqued, that the discipline has put the visibility of informants and ethnographers at the forefront. That does not mean, however, that early anthropologists always suppressed the individuality of their informants. In the authors' study of Diamond Jenness (1886-1969), we have found this not to be true. Jenness exhibited in his ethnographies (1920, 1923, 1928, 1929, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938 and 1955) a distinct tendency to allow for the indi vidual voice of his informants to· ring loud and clear. While this may be due,in part, to the short periods of time he spent in anyone study in the field (with the notable exceptions of his Copper Inuit and New Guinea work), there is also a measure of choice involved, for which he should be justly praised and appreciated. One benefit of allowing the voice of his informants to speak comes from the fact that much can be written about those people as individu als, something which Jenness, in fact, did with "Old Pierre" (Peter Pierre) in The Faith of a Coast Salish Indian (1955). This was originally part of a broader ethnography that was never published. In addition, the first publication of his work with the Carrier (1929) dealt for a few pages pri marily with one informant. One case in which an 'individualization' of this sort can be done is with the Ojibwa Francis Pegahmagabow, in cluded in Jenness' ethnography of the Parry Island Ojibwa, published in Pegahmagabow of Parry Island 37 1935. Pegahmagabow emerges from this ethnography in a way that can permit us to know him significantly as an individual, and also be able to assess the nature of the information he gave. This information would not only appear, accredited to Pegahmagabow, in the Parry Island eth nography, but also anonymously in Jessess' more general works, most notably his Indians of Canada (1932)-the canonical work in Native. stud ies in Canada for most of the last century. Francis Pegahmagabow Who· was Francis Pegahmagabow, and why is he significant? He was the·most highly decorated Canadian Aboriginal soldier of World War I, being awarded the Military Medal plus two bars, one of only 39 men in the entire Canadian Expeditionary Force to be so rewarded. He enlisted in August 1914, was part of the First Contingent that went over seas, and experienced all the horrors of the first battle in which deadly chlorine gas was unleashed upon unsuspecting Canadian troops. He proved to be a deadly sniper on the frontlines, probably the most deadly efficient at that task, with a 'kill' score sometimes, unofficially, recorded as high as 378. With phone lines often being cut, he became an effective "runner" carrying messages across the mudded, wired, killing fields of battle. He captured German prisoners, and rescued his countrymen. He was one of the few Canadians to fight the war virtually from beginning to end. Nor surprisingly, his story will be prominently featured in the Cana dian War Museum, which is currently under construction. In the words of the museum's recent (August 27, 2003) press release: Francis Pegahmagabow...a key figure for explaining and interpreting the Canadian First World War experience. His photo and medals will be displayed in the Last Hundred Days section of the First World War gallery. In this section, the Canadians, along with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force, are shown advancing to victory against the German defenders; however, they did so at a terrible cost, as the Canadian Corps lost 45,000 men in the last hundred days of the war. Pegahmagabow will be one of the persons used to show the human face of battle. As one of five Canadian sol diers prominently featured in this section, his story will pro vide visitors with a better understanding of the important contribution of Aboriginal soldiers to the Canadian. war ef fort. ( -consulted Sept. 30, 2003) In part, we feel the importance of this paper comes from the simple fact that telling stories about Aboriginal Canadian soldiers fighting in 38 John Steckley / Bryan Cummins world wars is not quite the same thing as telling the stories of non-Abo riginal soldiers. The authors of this paper learned, when writing a book about Aboriginal policing (Cummins and Steckley 2002), that there are some areas of Native studies that fall between the cracks of disciplines. We learned that, generally speaking, people (particularly anthropologists) who write about Aboriginal people do not tend to research and write about policing, and, similarly, people who research and write about po licing do not typically have the anthropological training necessary to write about Aboriginal policing. The same seems true about Aborig'inal soldiers. If Pegahmagabow's story is going to be told in the important venue of a new, national museum, the Ojibwa culture and its impact on Pegahmagabow must be interwoven into the storytelling. Similarly, the impact of World War I must be another thread in the story. It is not just as a soldier that Pegahmagabow has significance for his people. He was chief of the Parry Island Band from 1921 to 1925, and a band councillor from 1933 to 1936. Just as important, he greatly val ued the traditions of his people, and worked to preserve them. Concerning this latter point, in his biographies of his informants (of which Pegahmagabow's was by far the largest), Jenness wrote the following: Being of profoundly meditative temperament, he began to write down the lore of his people, but later lost the note books in which he had jotted down their customs and tradi tions. He was elected Chief of the Parry Island Indians after he returned from the war and held the position for two years, when he stirred up some opposition by urging the old men and women to narrate in the council house the earlier cus toms of the people. Although comparatively young, and more travelled than most of the Indians, he was more satu rated with their former outlook on life than the majority and more capable of interpreting the old beliefs. Occasionally his interpretations may have been a little more advanced than the average Indian would have given, yet they were a logical development of the lay beliefs such as were possible to any philosophically minded Ojibwa before the coming of Europeans. (Jenness 1935: v) As can be suspected from the latter part of that quotation, Pegahmagabow was significantly younger than any of the other inform ants: John Manatuwaba (about 70), Jonas King (over 80), Jim Nanibush (about 90), Mary Sugedub (about 50), and James Walker (about 75). It is not difficult to understand why Pegahmagabow was included with the others, who would more usually have been thought of as Elders. There would be an easy relating of the two men, Pegahmagabow and Pegahmagabow of Parry Island 39 Jenness. Both men were of the same generation. When Jenness did his fieldwork at Parry Island, in the summer of 1929, Pegahmagabow was 41 (Hayes 2003:14)1 and Jenness was 43; both were World War I veter ans.