After honoring our veterans and eating our Giving Thanks feast on Thursday night, November 17, Dr. Brian McInnes (Education Department, UMD) will be doing a reading and discussion of his new book Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow (Michigan State University Press).
The event begins at 7:00 p.m. in the amphitheater and is especially appropriate for the evening because Mr. Pegahmagabow, Dr. McInnes’ great grandfather, served overseas as a scout and sniper during World War I. For his acts of bravery, Mr. Pegahmagabow is Canada’s most decorated Indigenous soldier, and he remains the most accomplished sniper in North American military history.
After his military service, Pegahmagabow (1889-1952), an Ojibwe of the Caribou clan, returned to the Georgian Bay and became a member of the Brotherhood of Canadian Indians, an early national Indigenous political organization. He served a term as Supreme Chief of the National Indian Government, retiring from office in 1950.
The stories in Sounding Thunder are written in Ojibwe as well as English, merging Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and family stories to paint a more complete picture of Francis Pegahmagabow and his legacy of military and public service. Sounding Thunder is presently being adopted in both secondary and university-level programs in the United States and Canada.
It will be a night of interesting stories about an exceptional man. It will also be a night where the Ojibwe and English languages meet on the page and in the speaker.
With the publication of Sounding Thunder, Dr. McInnes, an assistant professor in the UMD Education Department and an enrolled member of the Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, Ontario, Canada, joins a long list of contemporary Anishinaabe writers from this northern region, including Jim Northrup, Louise Erdrich, Linda LeGarde Grover, David Treuer, and Anton Treuer, to name only a few.