Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Moon of the Crusted Snow, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Technology, Society, and Survival
Colonialism, Oppression, and Trauma
Selfishness vs. Selflessness
Gender, Power, and Wisdom
Summary
Analysis
Nicole lights a small gas lamp as the family sits around the house. Soon enough, they’ll have no fuel left to light the lamp. They’ve stared living communally with Dan and Patricia to conserve fuel. Nangohns and Maiingan play on the floor, and Dan begins telling a story about a character named Nanabush, who’s been too lazy to gather food over the summer. Nanabush walks around in search of geese, worrying that they’ve already flown south for the winter. But suddenly, he hears the geese having a party in the bushes.
Dan’s Anishinaabe myth about Nanabush entertains the family without modern technology. Rice suggests, through Dan’s story, that it makes sense to embrace traditions like storytelling that have stood the test of time and sustained people for countless generations. Rice thinks it makes far less sense to rely on technology. Although it can entertain, it's far less reliable—it didn’t even lasted for one generation on the reservation.
Themes
Nanabush teaches the geese a dance, and as they dance, he breaks their necks. Nanabush cooks one and then takes a long nap. When he wakes up, the geese have been stolen. Feeling angry, Nanabush puts his bottom in the fire. When it burns, he slides around cooling it on the rocks, and that’s how moss came into the world. Evan asks Maiingan and Nangohns what they think the moral of the story is. They reply, “don’t be greedy,” and “always prepare for the winter.”
Dan’s myth also educates the family by encouraging them to cultivate a survival-oriented mindset. As before, Rice subtly suggests that technology is problematic because its infrastructure demands a lot of resources, encouraging people to exploit nature. The story, in contrast, argues that depleting the Earth’s resources actually threatens people’s survival: because Nanabush is greedy and kills all the geese (even though he only needs a few to survive), there’s no food left to sustain him when they’re stolen, and he ends up worse off.
Themes
