Sacred gift: Bois Forte Chippewa delight in return of scrolls (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Sacred gift: Bois Forte Chippewa delight in return of scrolls

By LARRY OAKES Star Tribune of Minneapolis
The Associated Press - Tuesday, December 12, 2006
TOWER, Minn.
http://www.wctrib.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D8LUO9UO0

For those who believe in spiritual forces, the story of the sacred
scrolls of the Bois Forte Chippewa offers a wonderful affirmation. For
those who believe we walk alone, the story offers an amazing
coincidence.

In September, members of the northern Minnesota tribe gathered at Spirit
Island on Nett Lake for a ceremony. There, according to witnesses, a
drumkeeper named Shane Drift recounted his recent dream that forgotten
stories and songs of the tribe would somehow "come back to us." About
two weeks later, in early October, the phone rang at the new Bois Forte
Heritage Center and Cultural Museum, next to Fortune Bay Casino.

The caller was Raymond Cloutier, a physician in Bowling Green, Ky.
Cloutier said that hanging in glass cases on the walls of his study
were 42 birch bark scrolls inscribed with symbols and pictures.

Cloutier said the scrolls had come with a letter saying that some of the
scrolls were more than 200 years old, and all originated "at Nett Lake
on the Bois Forte Reservation."

The letter - a report from a historical society that had sought
interpretation from Ojibwe medicine men - said the scrolls depicted
ceremonial songs "concerning the most fundamental laws and needs of the
(Ojibwe) people."

Cloutier told the astounded museum curator, Bill Latady, that he had
cherished the scrolls for decades, but he had come to believe they
belonged with the tribe. Last week the band announced that the scrolls
are back at Bois Forte, in a climate-controlled museum room, after
untold decades away.

A group of elders has confirmed that they are long-lost records of the
Bois Forte lodge of the Midewiwin, or Grand Medicine Society, a
selective Ojibwe religious order that preserved its rites on birch bark
and was driven underground for most of the 20th century, when Indian
religions were outlawed by the U.S. government.

"Spiritually, this is probably the most important thing that has ever
happened (to the tribe)," said Rose Berens, the tribe's preservation
officer. "I was awe-struck."

The Bois Forte Reservation is largely in Koochiching County in far
northern Minnesota.

The band's elders decided the scrolls cannot be photographed, or even
seen, by anyone who doesn't belong to the religious order, except for
curator Latady.

Berens says that even she has not seen them, and won't until she is
initiated into the order next spring in a ceremony on the Red Lake
reservation.

Cloutier said his grandfather, Dr. Herbert Burns, acquired the scrolls
when he was superintendent of Ah-Gwah-Ching tuberculosis sanatorium
near Walker in the early 1900s. Bois Forte leaders speculate that
poverty-stricken ancestors might have bartered them for treatment.

Cloutier isn't so sure. He said Burns was a "Renaissance man" with many
interests and collections, including a trove of Indian artifacts, most
of which eventually went to a museum in Walker. Cloutier suspects his
grandfather bought the scrolls and the authentication letter
accompanying them, probably from another non-Indian.

A few years after Burns died in 1949, the scrolls, packed in cardboard
drums, went to Cloutier, then only about 12.

The scrolls range from 9 by 3 inches to 6 by 2 feet, according to
Latady. The drawings are on the brown side of the bark, some drawn with
charcoal and others applied with red paint. Some images are carved, he
said.

Out of respect to the band's wishes, neither Latady nor Cloutier would
describe the drawings, but experts who have studied similar scrolls say
they most often contain "mnemonic," or memory-aiding symbols, to recall
songs among a people with no written language.

"The coming of the gods is portrayed bestowing creation of men and other
creatures upon the land and in the waters of the earth," says the Bois
Forte scrolls' accompanying report, written in the 1930s by the Becker
County Historical Society. "The heralds of these gods, half land and
half water spirits, serve the gods as ambassadors. ... Another song
relates how the gods give the Indians the privilege of for the first
time eating meat."

Cloutier said that in the 1990s he became aware of a law requiring
institutions that get federal funds to return sacred artifacts to
Indian tribes. The law didn't apply to him, but he said a nagging idea
grew in him: "The people the scrolls came from were not some dead
Indians from a dead culture; they were still there, and they may have
been suffering somewhat for having lost part of their culture. About
the time I realized this, I stopped being an owner and became a
guardian."

He found the Bois Forte band's Web site, saw that a museum had opened in
2002, and decided to return the scrolls. His only stipulation was that
the band retrieve them; he didn't want to risk shipping them.

A few days after hearing from Cloutier, Berens, spiritual adviser Vernon
Adams and Bois Forte elders Myra Thompson and Phyllis Boshey drove to
Kentucky, dined with Cloutier and his wife, Joyce, and left with their
precious cargo.

"Once I got over the damage to my greed, it made perfect sense to return
these things," Cloutier said. "Unfortunately, most of the time, these
things were taken from their owners in ways that probably wouldn't make
us proud today."

Tribal Chairman Kevin Leecy wrote to Cloutier that his "thoughtfulness
is deeply appreciated by everyone ... from the elders who listened to
the songs and stories in their youth to their children, grandchildren
and great-grandchildren, who will once again have that opportunity due
to your generosity."

Adams said he now wonders if the strange journey of the scrolls was
fortunate. Similar scrolls were destroyed by missionaries and others
during the century that the Midewiwin was outlawed.

"To me, they took a path they were meant to take," Adams said. "They
left, were preserved and now have come back. It's exciting to see. This
is where our past meets the future."

___

Information from: Star Tribune, http://www.startribune.com