Morrison, Eliza. A little history of my forest life; an India-white autobiography.

Ladyslipper Press (15075 County Line Rd., Tustin, MI 49688; ladystipperpress.com). 208p. maps. illus. bibliog. index. c2002. 0-9702606-2-8. $19.95. SA

Editor Victoria Brehm happened upon the manuscript of this autobiography by Eliza Morrison (1837-1921) while researching an anthology of Great Lakes American Indian literature. The original, housed at the University of Minnesota, "had been written as a series of letters to Catherine Gray, the grandmother of William Gray Purcell, a Prairie School architect in the Twin Cities." Mrs. Gray had employed Morrison when the Grays, residents of Oak Park, Illinois, spent summers at Iron Lake near the Apostles. The rough, mostly English-language manuscript was filed as Morrison had written it, though the University of Minnesota had published a portion, editing the language lightly (sentences went on for pages). This fortuitous find led to more than three years of careful scholarly work during which Brehm had to deal with passages written in the difficult Chippewa/Ojibwe language. In shaping the published version, she had to please both general readers who want to know Morrison's story and scholars who may want to know her exact words. Brehm retained as much as possible of Morrison's style of writing, including syntax and spelling. She didn't force the text into a rigid scholar's style. For purists, she gives the address at which the original is available.

Morrison, of mixed race called metis, lived in northern Wisconsin on Madeline Island, one of the Apostles Islands, and wrote in 1894. In her autobiography, she tells of her life at a time of great change. She is a keen observer and a good storyteller, and she has a fine sense of what a reader would want to know about her personal life and what it was like to live in a quite primitive setting in a land of harsh winters. The autobiography itself takes up only about half of this book. Brehm, with great care, wrote the interpretive material that constitutes the remainder and which makes this an especially valuable volume. There is historical context, a chronology, lists of names and places, a glossary that Native American readers endeavoring to reclaim language will find especially interesting, maps, and b/w pictures drawn from a wide range of sources. Boxes recap the fur trade, treaties, the Wisconsin death march, the Chippewa-Dakota war, letters, and cultural matters such as mat making, sign language, the drum dance, totems, and spoken language. For general readers and collections that deal with Native Americans, their history, and their stories. Edna M. Boardman, Bismark, ND