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Title:
Kyass

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Summary:
Annie Downes has drawn upon her father's unpublished collections of Cree lore in presenting this book. In so doing she honours the heartfelt tribute he paid Adam and the many other Indian friends in Sleeping Island. These strange tales are made all the more otherworldly by the prints that accompany them, for Annie Downes's brilliant woodcuts express an imaginative and emotional affinity with the spirit world of the Woodland Cree.

Title:
The legend of the Mimigwesseos

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Summary:
Talking bears; Moose that lived under the water; the trickster god named Wisakyjak, who created the animal kingdom; the blackened, lipless, fanged cannibals known as "witigos"—all these beings and others as wonderfully strange once inhabited northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the homeland of the Woodland Cree. So too did "mimigwesseos." They lived among rocks on islands and in the ledges and cliffs of lakes and rivers; elf-like creatures with flat, noseless faces, they were sometimes helpful but were dangerous to meddle with. This book is about them.

Title:
The Story of Chakapas

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Summary:
"The Story of Chakapas" is an excellent example of the Cree belief in animism; it concerns the heroic efforts of the Least Mouse in releasing the Moon from an unhappy snare. This story comes from an unpublished collection entitled Kyass: The Stories of Long Ago, that P.G. Downes made in 1949. These tales were originally recorded as notes in his journals from his summer travels to the North, starting in 1936. Adam Ballantyne—the old Cree medicine man, who once heard the story from his grandfather and told it to Downes—is the narrator. "This story is about the days before the white man came among us. It is of long ago."