LSC Associate Professor Theresa Schenck has a new volume of the writing of Edmund F. Ely out this week from the University of Nebraska Press. 

In the book, The Ojibwe Journals of Edumund F. Ely, 1833-1849, Schenck contexualizes a collection of journal writings by Edmund F. Ely, a former divinity student from New York State who in 1833 became a missionary and teacher to the Ojibwe of Lake Superior.

“During the next sixteen years, Ely lived, taught, and preached among the Ojibwe, keeping a journal of his day-to-day experiences as well as recording ethnographic information about the Ojibwe. From recording his frustrations over the Ojibwe’s rejection of Christianity to describing hunting and fishing techniques he learned from his Ojibwe neighbors, Ely’s unique and rich record provides unprecedented insight into early nineteenth-century Ojibwe life and Ojibwe-missionary relations. Theresa M. Schenck draws on a broad array of secondary sources to contextualize Ely’s journals for historians, anthropologists, linguists, literary scholars, and the Ojibwe themselves, highlighting the journals’ relevance and importance for understanding the Ojibwe of this era,” writes the publisher on the volume.

Schenck’s publications include William W. Warren: The Life, Letters and Times of an Ojibwe Leader and the annotated edition of Warren’s History of the Ojibway People. In 2010 she published a volume on the Chippewa Mixed-Bloods of the Treaty of 1837, entitled All Our Relations. Her current work focuses on the conflict between traditional Ojibwe religion and fundamental Christianity in the 19th century.

For more information on The Ojibwe Journals of Edumund F. Ely, 1833-1849, visit the University of Nebraska Press here.