About this item
In this stirring collection of linked stories, Linda LeGarde Grover portrays an Ojibwe community struggling to follow traditional ways of life in the face of a relentlessly changing world. In the title story an aunt recounts the harsh legacy of Indian boarding schools that tried to break the indigenous culture. In doing so she passes on to her niece the Ojibwe tradition of honoring elders through their stories. In “Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth,” this same niece comes of age in the 1970s against the backdrop of her forcibly dispersed family. A cycle of boarding schools, alcoholism, and violence haunts these stories even as the characters find beauty and solace in their large extended families. With its attention to the Ojibwe language, customs, and history, this unique collection of riveting stories illuminates the very nature of storytelling.
About the Author
Linda LeGarde Grover is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her work - fiction, nonfiction, and poetry - recounts stories of Ojibwe life in northeastern Minnesota individuals, families and communities set against the backdrop of indigenous tradition and impacts of historical and current events.Awards: Grover's novel The Road Back to Sweetgrass has received the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers 2015 Fiction Award; The Dance Boots received the Flannery O'Connor Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; her poetry collection The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives received the Red Mountain Press Editor's Award and the 2017 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Grover's essay collection/memoir Onigamiising: Seasons of An Ojibwe Year received both the Minnesota Book Award and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award.
