The Anishinaabe, otherwise named the Ojibwe or Chippewa, are famous for their lyric songs and stories, particularly because of their compassionate trickster, naanabozbo, and the healing rituals still practiced today in the society of the Midewiwin. The poems and tales, interpreted and reexpressed here by the distinguished Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, were first transcribed more than a century ago by pioneering ethnographer Frances Densmore and Theodore Hudson Beaulieu, a newspaper editor on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.

This superb anthology, illustrated with tribal pictomyths and helpfully annotated, includes translations and a glossary of the Anishinaabe words in which the poems and stories originally were spoken.