The Center for Great Lakes Culture has presented the award for the Best Non-Fiction Book on Great Lakes Regional History and Culture in 2001 to Michael McNally for his book, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). In this study, Michael McNally, who is professor of history at Eastern Michigan University, explores how the Ojibwe people of northern Minnesota and the Great Lakes region took missionary Christianity and remade it in their own religious idiom through the ritualized singing of missionary hymns. In the early nineteenth century, Episcopalian and other Protestant missionaries promoted translations of evangelical hymns into the Ojibwe language, regarding this music as a shared form of worship but also as a sharp tool for rooting out the "indianness" of native people. For many Minnesota Ojibwe today, however, the hymns have emerged from this history of material and cultural dispossession to become emblematic of their identity as a distinctive native people. Chanted by groups of elders according to distinctive rules of ritualized performance, the songs have become a kind of "tradition" at funeral wakes and other charged moments in the life of the community. They provide a rich resource of language and cultural memory that helps make possible the survival of Ojibwe people in the modern world. Ojibwe Singers takes hymn singing as a sharply focused lens through which to view culture in motion. McNally shows how Native American peoples have creatively drawn on the resources of ritual to make room for survival, integrity, and a distinctive cultural identity within the tight confines of colonialism. Grounded in the author's archival research and two years of fieldwork in Minnesota, this book traces the historical development of ritualized singing and shows how the practice has been put to different uses at various moments in Ojibwe history.

Ojibwe Singers was selected as the best book from a field of books nominated by regional and campus advisors of the Center for Great Lakes Culture. Books were judged by members of the steering committee for how well they supported the mission of the Center for Great Lakes Culture and how well they interpreted significant aspects of the cultural diversity that shaped the history of the Great Lakes region. All nominated books had to have a copyright date of 1999 or 2000. Ojibwe Singers was judged to have made an important contribution to the understanding of an episode in the history of the Great Lakes region that continues to evolve and shape the region to this day. The importance of a major international press publishing a study of regional and cultural history was also significant.

The CGLC award for Best Non-Fiction Book was presented by Frederick Bohm, Director of the MSU Press at the CGLC Conference, "Mapping Great Lakes Identity: Past, Present, and Future," at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center in East Lansing on February 17, 2001. Accepting on behalf of Mr. McNally was Peter Berg.