Moon of the Crusted Snow

When the ancestors of these Anishinaabe people were forced to settle in this unfamiliar land, distant from their traditional home near the Great Lakes, their culture withered under the pressure of the incomers’ Christianity. But people like Aileen […] had kept the old ways alive in secret. They whispered the stories and the language in each other’s ears, even when they were stolen from their families to endure forced and often violent assimilation at church-run residential schools far away from their homes. They had held out hope that one day their beautiful ways would be able to reemerge and flourish once again.

His rough, meaty palm dwarfed Evan’s. The handshake was half goodwill, half intimidation.

“Well, you make sure you spend some time with her. Go for a walk in the bush. When the spring comes, ask her to show you some of the medicines. She'll know a lot now, if she remembers all the stuff from when I used to take her and all the young girls out there. It will be important if we don't get any new supplies in from the hospital down south.”

“You know, when young people come over, some of them […] say that this is the end of the world. The power’s out and we’ve run out of gas and no one’s come up from down south. […] There’s a word they say too […] Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. […] Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash [white person] came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. […] But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That's when our world ended again. […] We've had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we'll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”

She had been his surrogate grandmother, his go-to elder whenever he had questions about the old ways, and he had loved her. […] The smell of sage smudge lingered in his nose, and the travelling song her family had sung for her rang in his ears.

“No, they won’t listen to us. They’ll just call another damn meeting and do nothing. This is up to us.”

Their ancestors were displaced from their original homeland in the South and the white people who forced them here had never intended for them to survive. […] But they refused to wither completely, and a core of dedicated people had worked tirelessly to create their own settlement away from this town.