DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

As Sacred to Us

Simon Pokagon's Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts

Blaire Morseau editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Michigan State University Press

Published:31st Oct '23

Should be back in stock very soon

As Sacred to Us cover

Originally published in 1893 and 1901, Simon Pokagon’s birch bark stories were printed on thinly peeled and elegantly bound birch bark. In this edition, these rare booklets are reprinted with new essays that set the stories in cultural, linguistic, historical, and even geological context. Experts in Native literary traditions, history, Algonquian languages, the Michigan landscape, and materials conservation illuminate the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that Pokagon elevated in his stories. This is an essential resource for teachers and scholars of Native literature, NeshnabÉ pasts and futures, Algonquian linguistics, and book history. 

As Sacred to Us unfurls the complexity of Simon Pokagon’s work and the meaning his publications still hold for readers today. As Pokagon Potawatomi acts of bookmaking, his words and the material presentations of them are important intercultural artifacts. Simon includes several languages spoken by members of his community across the generations and gives insight into Anishinaabe philosophy, geosciences, and theology. This reprinting of his narratives allows the land his ancestors knew as “wawkwing dash Au-kee” (heaven on earth) to remain part of the way we understand the southwest shores of Mi-shi-gan (Lake Michigan) today." - Margaret Noodin, cocreator of www.ojibwe.net, author of two bilingual collections of poetry in Anishinaabemowin and English

ISBN: 9781611864625

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 272g

166 pages