Fire Keeper's Daughter Review 3

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Book: Fire Keeper’s Daughter

Author: Angeline Boulley

Publishers: Henry Holt and Company

Reviewed by: Nonqaba waka Msimang


Canadians know a lot about hockey, the arena for Angeline Boulley’s novel set in an American town near Canada.

Daunis, the main character was born in Montreal Canada, where her white grandparents sent her mother, when she got pregnant for an Ojibwe hockey player from Sugar Island, an Indian reservation.

Daunis, an avid hockey player and science geek deals with identity in the book. “I don’t always feel like I belong. Each time my Fontaine grandparents or their friends have seen my Ojibwe side as a flaw or a burden to overcome.” Page 33.

Canadians maybe hockey afficionados but they seem to know less about money the Anishinaabe (indigenous people) receive from the government. Daunis calls it per cap. This leads to the jaundiced view that they only use it to buy booze.

“Auntie says per cap isn’t good or bad. People judge how a few members spend their money and say petty stuff. But there’s a lot of good things happening too. Families travel. Buy a nice car or put a down payment on a house. Go to college.” Pages 59- 60.

Another misconception in both Canada and U.S. is that most Ashininaabe (indigenous people) live on reservations, places of doom and gloom.

The book has Sugar Island, a rez (reservation). It has some bad stuff going on, but Daunis also provides the good aspects like elders, the landscape, fauna and flora, and of course mushrooms in Duck Lake, Sugar Island.

Mushrooms and hockey, two worlds that co-exist, not to co-exist, like Daunis and her parentage. That is Fire Keeper’s Daughter, the book, 488 pages. That’s why it has instalment book reviews.

Miigwech. Thank you in Ojibwe.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.

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