Some Aspects of Puberty Fasting Among the Ojibwa

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The subject of fasting among the North American Indians, although it has been touched upon frequently by a number of writers, has never been made the object of a special study as yet. In the present little essay the writer will make no attempt to study the subject of fasting in any exhaustive manner, but will merely attempt, on the basis of a number of some of the fasting experiences, to point out features that, in his Opinion, seem distinctive of Ojibwa puberty fasts. He hopes to reserve a more exhaustive study of the same for his report on the ethnology of this tribe itself. The fasting experiences will be given first and the discussion will then follow. The writer has only selected a few of the accounts he has obtained, but the five chosen seem to contain all the characteristic features of the fast, although in certain details they, of course, differ from some of the others. It might be stated, before proceeding to give the accounts themselves, that in only two cases did the experience represent that of the informant himself, and that in the other cases they referred to relatives of the informants. I do not believe that this in any way detracts from their value, but, of course, it may have led to the omission of a detail here and there.