Chippewa Customs

Frances Densmore's Chippewa Customs, published as Bulletin 86 of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology in 1929, is an early twentieth century ethnographic study of Ojibwe cultural and religious practice compiled by Densmore, an outside ethnographer, from fieldwork among Ojibwe communities. Its strength is that it is a detailed, documented period record of practices, ceremonies and material culture, useful for what Ojibwe life looked like at the specific time Densmore observed it. Its limit is exactly that positioning, an outside observer's record from a particular era rather than the tradition's own contemporary voice, produced within the assumptions of early twentieth century salvage ethnography, and some of Densmore's readings have since been revised or corrected by later Ojibwe and Anishinaabe scholars writing from within the tradition, so a claim about current Ojibwe practice or self-understanding should be checked against that more recent scholarship rather than taken from Densmore alone.