Nanabijou is a mythical giant of Ojibwe legend. According to myth, Nanabijou protected the Ojibwe people but warned that if they ever revealed the location of local silver deposits to white settlers, something terrible would happen. When a Sioux infiltrator revealed the location during a night of drinking, Nanabijou collapsed where he stood, forming the rock formation now known to many as the “Sleeping Giant” in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Get the entire Seven Fallen Feathers LitChart as a printable PDF.
Nanabijou Character Timeline in Seven Fallen Feathers
The timeline below shows where the character Nanabijou appears in Seven Fallen Feathers. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Prologue
An Ojibwe legend describes the story of a giant named Nanabijou. By stomping around the large body of water called Gichigami, Nanabijou created valleys and rock...
(full context)
...need of help. In reality, the Sioux man was a spy who’d heard stories about Nanabijou’s precious metal and longed to take it for himself. He befriended the Ojibwe and waited...
(full context)
...man until he revealed where the silver was. As soon as the Sioux man betrayed Nanabijou’s secret, Nanabijou fell down and turned from flesh and blood to stone. The Ojibwe were...
(full context)
...sown—and decades of apathy toward Canada’s Indigenous population have allowed those seeds to grow. As Nanabijou slept, the “white face of prosperity” flourished, while the “red face” was forced to stand...
(full context)
Chapter 8: River, Give Me My Son Back
...Christian suffered a breakdown. He got drunk and went down to the river to curse Nanabijou; he begged the rock formation to give him his son back. Police picked him up...
(full context)
