Fire Keeper's Daughter Review 7

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Book: Fire Keeper’s Daughter Review 7

Author: Angeline Boulley

Publishers: Henry Holt and Company

Reviewed by: Nonqaba waka Msimang


The reader is mad. At the FBI. Do publishers force the FBI angle on writers? I think they do, because of cinema. Such movies are the same. You might as well leave with the rest of your popcorn because you know how the movie will unfold.

This is the infamous FBI which failed to detect that Donald Trump followers were going to invade Congress on 6 January 2021, to stop Biden from being crowned U.S. President.

I digress from the review of Fire Keeper's Daughter. Daunis, our host in the book lives on the mainland with her mother and grandmother. They are Zhaaganaash, white in Ojibwe. Daunis also spends time on Sugar Island with her aunt and grandmother who are Anishinaabe, which means indigenous people.                   

Daunis is a hockey player just like her Ojibwe father. What is the book all about? I’m a reader. I do as I please. That’s why I say it is about hockey and mushrooms, but let’s hear from Daunis, the storyteller, the narrator, our host. There’s a problem.

“I wanted to find out who was involved in the meth madness, that took Lily and Uncle David. Robin and Heather too. And the kids in Minnesota who got so sick from meth X.” Page 392.

Drugs in professional sports? We see it in the news all the time, when players are suspended because they failed drug tests. Daunis misses her mother’s brother, Uncle David, whose death is also linked to meth, a hard drug.

The reader is mad at the author because the FBI is an intrusion, a distraction, a parasite like a mushroom that feeds on its host. I once got scared when I saw a big yellow mushroom on the base of a tree.

Daunis does not need the FBI. She can solve the problem on her own because she understands mushrooms on two levels, their scientific names and where they are found, Sugar Island, the Indian reservation, where her father’s people live.

Secondly, Daunis is a hockey player, she knows when something about a hockey stick is not right. Thirdly, she loves math and science so she understands the properties of a hard drug like meth.

But most importantly, Daunis and her best friend Lily, who was killed by Travis, her ex-boyfriend, used to hang out on Sugar Island with elders. So, she knows some Ojibwe beliefs and what the Anishinaabe call, bad medicine.

I haven’t finished the book, but I still believe we do not need the FBI, a Hollywood script. Daunis can do it on her own because of where she was born and why.

Miigwech. Thank you in Ojibwe.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang, author Sweetness, a South African novel.

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