In the first ninety-five years of her life, Dorothy Dora Whipple has seen a lot of history, and in this book that history, along with the endangered Ojibwe language, sees new life. A bilingual record of Dorothy’s stories, ranging from personal history to cultural teachings, Chi-mewinzha (long ago) presents this venerable elder’s words in the original Ojibwe, painstakingly transcribed, and in English translation to create an invaluable resource for learning this cherished language.

The events of Dorothy Dora Whipple’s life resonate with Ojibwe life and culture through the twentieth century, from tales of growing up among the Anishinaabeg of the Leech Lake Reservation in the 1920s and 1930s to an account of watching an American Indian Movement protest in Minneapolis during the 1970s. In between, we encounter modern dilemmas (like trying to find a place to make a tobacco offering in an airport) and traditional stories (such as the gigantic beings who were seen in the waterchi-mewinzha). Dorothy’s own recollections—sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant—offer insight into the daily realities, both intimate and emblematic, of Native American life.

Dorothy remembers an older sister coming home from boarding school, no longer speaking Ojibwe—and no longer able to communicate with her siblings. This collection resists such a fate, sharing the language so critical to a people’s identity and offering a key text to those who would learn, preserve, and speak Ojibwe.

“A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love.”—The Spectator

Written in 1953, the last book by best-selling novelist Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance is a quietly gripping story about the destruction of a marriage. Ellen is “that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife” who loves her life in the English countryside. She tends her garden, dotes on her children, and, when she remembers, visits her cantankerous mother-in-law. This domestic bliss, however, is shattered when her husband, in a moment of weak mid-life vanity, runs off with a French girl.

Dorothy Whipple is a superb stylist with a calm intelligence in the tradition of Mrs. Gaskell. In her preface, Nina Bawden states, “it is a great gift to be able to take an ordinary tale and make it compulsive reading. It is all in the telling and Whipple is a storyteller—an art that cannot be taught, cannot be learned, an art only a few writers are lucky enough to be born with. . . . Someone at a Distance is a brilliant account of frailty and folly.”

Born in 1893 in Lancashire, England, Dorothy Whipple wrote nine extremely successful novels, two of which were made into films. She also wrote short stories and two memoirs. She died in 1966.