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
Evan fights back tears as he and Tyler pull Aileen’s body across the snow. She died in bed, in her sleep. Aileen was like a grandmother to Evan, and he feels numb. The ground is too hard to dig a grave, but the family still conducted several days of ritual singing to prepare Aileen for her journey to the spirit world, and they adorned her body with medicines and tools for her afterlife. Struggling to recall the final stages of the ritual, Evan thinks that they need to smudge around her body before they place her in the garage with the other frozen bodies. As they approach the garage, the mood is deeply somber.
In struggling to remember the burial ritual, Evan reveals that a lot of Aileen’s traditional wisdom and indigenous knowledge died with her, which compounds his grief. He’s grieving Aileen, but he’s also grieving the death of all the indigenous knowledge that she hadn’t yet passed on. Evan’s grief over losing Aileen during this harsh winter represents the painful cultural losses of First Nations people under colonialist oppression.
Themes
Tyler looks around and realizes that they need to rearrange the bodies to make more room. Evan agrees. If he can’t bury Aileen, he wants to at least give her “the dignity” of some space around her body. Evan walks through the bodies, remembering the details of each death and thinking wearily about the 23 graves he’ll have to dig in the spring. They move over to Jenna’s body, to begin restacking the bodies closer together. Evan reminds himself that Jenna’s spirit has left, and this is just her body. As he lifts her stone-like corpse, he thinks about how beautiful and intelligent she was. Evan and Tyler move down the line, feeling suffocated by loss.
While Aileen’s death more broadly represents the losses that First Nations people have endured over centuries, Jenna’s body represents people who died young in conflicts with European settlers. Scott (who represents those European settlers) didn’t directly kill Jenna—but his aggression intimidated Evan, leaving him unable to protect Jenna from her untimely death. Evan’s overwhelming sense of loss reflects the grief, trauma, and regret that First Nations people carry with them today as a result of their community’s painful past.
Themes
Evan and Tyler reshuffle three rows of corpses and move Aileen. Suddenly, Evan notices that a body is missing, and he immediately guesses that Scott took the body. His mind swirls as they move Aileen into place; he knows they’ll have to search Scott’s house. Tears well up in Evan’s eyes—it doesn’t feel right to not bury Aileen. Tyler wonders if they should talk to Walter about the missing body, but Evan is against the idea, thinking that they’ll just have meetings about it without acting. He knows that this is up to him and Tyler.
Evan continues to feel overwhelmed by his sense of loss, and his grief clouds his judgement: instead of consulting the elders, as he would typically do, he decides to take action himself. His decision to rashly confront Scott will likely lead to a disastrously violent confrontation, if his most recent dream is any indication of what is going to happen. This suggests that the intergenerational trauma caused by colonialism persists over time, as it continues to influence First Nations people’s judgement and actions.
Themes
