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CHAPTER III 
MAN AND NATURE 
It is impossible to comprehend the daily life of the Parry Island 
Ojibwa (or indeed of any people) without some knowledge of their 
religious beliefs, and their religious beliefs are unintelligible without an 
understanding of their interpretation of what they saw around them. They 
lived much nearer to nature than most white men, and they looked with 
a different eye on the trees and the rocks, the water and the sky. One 
is almost tempted to say that they were less materialistic, more spiritually 
minded, than Europeans, for they did not picture any great chasm separat- 
ing mankind from the rest of creation, but interpreted everything around 
them in much the same terms as they interpreted their own selves. 
How then did they interpret themselves? Man, they believed (and 
still believe) consists of three parts, a corporeal body {wiyo) that decays 
and disappears after death, a soul ( udjitchog ) that travels after death to 
the land of souls in the west ruled by the great culture-hero of the Ojibwa, 
Nanibush, and a shadow {udjibbom) that roams about on earth but 
generally remains near the grave. The body {wiyo) needs no further 
explanation, but the nature and functions of the soul and shadow require 
closer definition. 
The soul is located in the heart, and is capable of travelling outside 
the body for brief periods, although if it remains separate too long the 
body will die. This is what happens in many cases of sickness; for one 
reason or another the soul is unable to return to the body and the patient 
either dies, or, in a few cases, becomes insane. For the soul is the 
intelligent part of man’s being, the agency that enables him to perceive 
things, to reason about them, and remember them. An insane man has 
lost his soul and, therefore, has no reason. A drunken man, or a man 
just recovering from a bout of drunkenness, is temporarily in the same 
condition; his soul moves at a distance from him, so that he consists of 
body and shadow only and remembers nothing of what occurred during 
his drunkenness. In his son this disharmony between soul and body may 
take the form of stuttering, especially if the father lay torpid and memory- 
less for a day or two after each bout. In the same way a man who 
tortures animals, and thereby, as the Indians believe, tortures his own 
soul, may cause some disability in his children, such as stuttering, or 
susceptibility to frequent illness. Evidently the Parry Island Ojibwa 
vaguely recognize the operation of heredity factors in the mental as well 
as in the physical sphere, although they are naturally unable to develop 
any genuinely scientific explanation. 
Besides being the intelligent part of man the soul is the seat of the 
will, A weary Indian dragging his toboggan up a slope may feel that 
something is helping him along, pulling on the toboggan with him; it is 
his soul that has come to his aid. So, too, it is the soul that experiences 
