PREFACE 
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This report on the Social and Religious Life of the Parry Island 
Indians is the product of seven weeks’ investigation on that island during 
the summer of 1929. The principal Indians consulted were: 
Francis Pegahmagabow: an Ojibwa of about thirty-seven years of age, 
apparently full-blood, whose father and grandfather had been chiefs 
at Parry island. His father died when he was a child, and he was 
raised by a relative at Shawanaga reserve, 18 miles farther north, 
but later attended a school in Parry Sound. He enlisted in a local 
battalion at the beginning of the Great War and served until the 
armistice, winning the military medal, with two bars, and other decora- 
tions. During the two years preceding the war, and for two years 
afterwards, he cruised around the Great Lakes as a seaman on a 
vessel belonging to the Department of Marine and Fisheries that 
was inspecting the lighthouses, and during this period he came into 
contact with other Ojibwa bands. Being of profoundly meditative 
temperament, he began to write down the lore of his people, but later 
lost the notebooks in which he had jotted down their customs and 
traditions. He was elected chief of the Parry Island Indians after 
he returned from the war and held the position for two years, when 
he stirred up some opposition by urging the old men and women to 
narrate in the council house the earlier customs of the people. 
Although comparatively young, and more travelled than most of the 
Indians, he was more saturated with their former outlook on life than 
the majority and more capable of interpreting the old beliefs. 
Occasionally his interpretations may have been a little more advanced 
than the average Indian would have given, yet they were a logical 
development of the lay beliefs such as were possible to any philo- 
sophically minded Ojibwa before the coming of Europeans. 
John Manatuwaba: also an Ojibwa, native to Parry island, about seventy 
years of age and apparently full-blood. 
Jonas King: a Potawatomi Indian whose grandfather, a French-Canadian 
half-breed, had fought in the war of 1812, and had then led a band 
of his tribesmen into Canada, where they settled in the neighbourhood 
of lake Simcoe. Later they moved to Christian island, and about 
fifty-five years ago some of them moved again to Parry island. Jonas 
himself was bom at Angus, near Barrie, but resided on Parry island 
from his youth upward. He was a frank pagan, very keen and active, 
although in 1929 he was over eighty years old. He and his cousin, 
Tom King, a man of about fifty-five years, were the only surviving 
Indians on the island who had been initiated into the Midewiwin or 
