The Porcupine Year by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Omakayas Growing Up Louise Erdrich’s third Birchbark House series novel, The Porcupine Year (2008) takes place in 1852 two years after The Game of Silence left off, with now 12-year-old Omakayas and her family still in exile, still traveling the forested Minnesota lakes by canoe looking for a new home while trying to avoid the hostile Bwanaag (Dakota/Lakota), having given in to US governmental pressure to leave their ancestral Wisconsin home at the end of the previous book. As this one opens, Omakayas and her irritating younger brother Pinch are doing a little nighttime river deer hunting in their canoe with torch (Omakayas) and bow and arrow (Pinch) when the powerful current of a surging river joining their mild one carries them off downstream, clinging to each other, through such formidable rapids that when the siblings later see them in daylight, they are struck dumb by the realization that “Whatever had saved them was beyond and greater than any human strength or skill.” How the kids get by insultingly supporting each other until they may reunite with their family is neat. During that process Pinch gains a new medicine animal, a porcupine, and a new name, Quill, in a humorous and nice way: “You look like you were in a battle with a thousand miniature warriors. And they hit you with their arrows. Tiny ones.” Omakayas twisted her face to stop her laughter, but a snort escaped. She pretended to control herself. “My brother, I am in awe of the great deed you did today.” “Then I’m making a fire,” said Pinch. “Give me your striker. If our enemies discover us, I’ll quill them to death. I am not Quillboy, but Quill. Just Quill. The great Quill! We’re going to feast on my courage now.” The book goes on to depict for Omakayas and her family a “year of danger and love, sacrifice and surprise—that porcupine year.” By the end of the Porcupine Year Omakayas, who is transitioning between girlhood and womanhood, will suffer hunger and cold and separation, gain a new appreciation of her goofy but maturing younger brother Quill, love her baby brother Bizheens more and more, develop her relationship with Animikiins (aka the Angry Boy), feel an “ancient” hatred and then a sudden sympathy for her fierce cousin Two Strike, learn why her father doesn’t trust white people and how Old Tallow stopped being Light Moving in the Leaves and became Old Tallow, and enter the woman lodge. By the way, despite Deydey’s painful story about when as a boy he met his white father for the first and last time, Erdrich does not exclusively depict white people as villains. Auntie Muskrat’s husband Albert LaPautre is a pathetic alcoholic who does Omakayas’ family an almost fatal bad turn. As with the other Birchbark House books, this one is full of fine writing and appealing, interesting, and complex characters. It is also full of vivid details of daily Ojibwe life in the mid 19th century, including cutting and drying venison, making pemmican, getting a new name, making a sweat lodge, becoming a woman, dating while chaperoned, etc. It is also full of storytelling, as grandmother Nokomis, family friend Old Tallow, and father Deydey tell various stories, from realistic biographical vignettes featuring abandonment, abuse, compromise, and canine justice to fantastic moral legends featuring bears becoming humans and left and right arms fighting. It is also full of humor and pathos. And what happens when the family finally encounters some of their fearsome, if handsome, enemies the Bwanaag is scary, funny, and somehow magnificent. Erdrich again displays her awareness of the psychology of kids, as when Omakayas and Quill are both jealous when Two Strike starts taking Animikiins out hunting with her every day, or as when, in a wonderfully suspenseful and funny scene, Bizheens (the family’s beloved toddler) goes out on some dangerously thin ice, far too thin to take the weight of anyone older than him, and takes such pleasure in the terrified and appalled reactions of the family stuck on shore that he goes out on the ice further still. As in her other Birchbark House books, Erdrich incorporates Ojibwa words, providing a glossary at the end of the novel but also usually defining the words in her text, as when Omakayas’ baby brother Bizheens says to her, “Giizhawenimin. Giizhawenimin. . . I really love you.” Readers who like young adult historical fiction, especially well-written work centering on Native American girls with charming illustrations by the author, should find much to like here. I am looking forward to future books about Omakayas and her family. View all my reviews
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