LA RONGE JOURNAL, 1823
George Nelson
[Transcriber's Note:
Produced by Owen O'Donovan.
(Includes additional materials: List of some other publications of his
work; editing notes; an example of a music scroll; details of Nelson's
fur trade career; table of contents; page images of handwritten
manuscript; references.)]
ALSO BY GEORGE NELSON
Peers, Laura & Schenck, Theresa (eds.). _My First Years in the Fur Trade:
The Journals of 1802-1804_. St. Paul. Minnesota Historical Society
Press. 2002.
The La Ronge journal of 1823 has also been published in hard copy in
an extensively researched work by Jennifer S. Brown and Robert
Brightman in 1988. This work contains extensive additional analysis of
the mythology, the shaking lodge ceremony, medicines and religious
practices of the Northern Algonquin peoples. Additional commentaries
from aboriginal perspectives on the Nelson text are given by Stan
Cuthand and Emma laRoque.
Brown, Jennifer S. H. & Brightman, Robert (eds.). _"The Orders of the
Dreamed": George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth,
1823_. Winnipeg. The University of Manitoba Press. 1988
EDITING NOTES
Nelson's manuscript is a handwritten first draft for a work on North
American aboriginal belief systems completed in June, 1823. Nelson
had intended to edit and publish it at a later date. The first
publication did not occur until 1988 in _"The Orders of the Dreamed":
George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823_
where it is given a comprehensive, analytical and contextual
treatment by Jennifer Brown and Robert Brightman with contributions
from other authors.
The goals for this edition of Nelson's La Ronge Journal of 1823 are to
make Nelson's work accessible to a wider audience and ensure its
preservation and availability in digital format. It is presented in
three parts.
Part 1 provides a lightly edited version of the manuscript. Nelson's
text is an excellent example of common English usage in early
nineteenth century North America. Idiosyncratic misspellings are
generally corrected; archaisms and localizations have been
maintained. Where the spelling of names is irregular or abbreviated,
a consistent spelling is chosen. Punctuation has been somewhat
modernized.
Editorial interjections, including section and subsection headings not
in the original, are enclosed in brackets. Nelson occasionally used
brackets in the text for parenthetical remarks; these have been
replaced with braces.