Moon of the Crusted Snow
Moon of the Crusted Snow
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Waubgeshig Rice on Moon of the Crusted Snow
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
One blackout, two very different communitiesThe book began on a specific afternoon in August 2003, when a Northeast blackout cut power across much of North America. Rice was housesitting in Wasauksing First Nation at the time, and what struck him was not panic but a kind of practiced calm. The people around him already knew how to read the land, and that knowledge made the darkness feel manageable rather than catastrophic.
We inventoried all the food, we thought about all the people in our community who we could help if they needed help, or who we could go to for help. And it was very comforting to know that we were surrounded by people with land-based knowledge, who would be okay if the power didn’t come back on. [paraphrased from audio]
A few days later, back in Toronto, Rice watched the city’s very different response to the same event. That gap between land-based readiness and urban dependency became the premise he carried for more than a decade before he wrote it down.
Reading Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” eventually gave the idea a genre home, but it left Rice with an absence he felt compelled to fill. He came away less interested in the book than in the question it failed to ask.
I really enjoyed that novel, but it left me wishing for more stories like it from an Indigenous perspective. I felt that because Indigenous nations have already endured apocalypse and largely exist in relative dystopia, a book about the end of the world that’s centred on an Indigenous community would reflect a different spirit.
The phrase “already endured apocalypse” was not rhetorical for Rice. It traced back to conversations with his grandmother at Wasauksing about the community’s forced displacement from its homelands on Georgian Bay. When the book’s elder Aileen tells the protagonist Evan that Indigenous people have survived multiple apocalypses, Rice was drawing on what his grandmother had put into words for him long before he started the novel. He also named the character after her.
This book was my chance to look at how Indigenous people could reset their relationship with the land around them and maybe ultimately be liberated by this cataclysm.
How he wrote it
The stranger at the party, the call to his dadThe manuscript was written in fragments, squeezed around a full-time job as a TV reporter at CBC in Ottawa. Rice took a couple of short leaves from the broadcaster to finish drafts, but most of the work happened in whatever hours were left over.
It was basically a sprint to get as much written as possible in those short windows.
One of Rice’s earliest structural decisions was to withhold the cause of the blackout entirely, and he never reversed it. The reasoning came partly from McCarthy: because the characters in a remote First Nation would almost certainly never learn what triggered the collapse, inventing an explanation would betray their reality. He took the logic a step further.
My plan was always to keep the cause of the blackout a mystery. In fact, only I know what that is. My editor doesn’t know. Neither does my wife!
Justin Scott, the novel’s antagonist, was in the story from early drafts, but Rice wasn’t sure the premise would hold. Would a white man from a collapsing city really seek out a remote First Nation as his refuge? Unexpected validation arrived at a Halloween party in Ottawa, when a stranger described, without any prompting, exactly that plan.
He eventually revealed that his plan for an urban collapse was to find the nearest rez and survive there. That was all the validation I needed! Also, how presumptuous that he’d just expect to be welcomed to live there. And thus, Justin Scott became much clearer.
The Windigo, a figure from Anishinaabe oral tradition representing a person so consumed by greed and hunger that he preys on his own community, was never in Rice’s conscious plan for Scott. Rice only recognized what he had written after the first draft was finished, and he traced it back to stories he had absorbed as a child without knowing they were shaping his imagination.
After I came up with this Justin Scott character and then when I was done the first draft, I was like, holy, this is a Windigo. And I called my dad up and I was like, hey, this is like what I came up with for the story. He was like, yeah, that’s just the stories you heard when you were a kid, you know, it’s just come out that way. [paraphrased from audio]
The word “Windigo” never appears in the novel itself. Rice added it to the acknowledgments after the fact, once he understood what the character had become.
During revision, Rice’s publisher pushed to cut passages explaining the community’s history of colonial displacement, arguing they slowed the pace. Rice refused, on the grounds that the novel’s moral logic depended on readers understanding that history.
I’d say we have to keep this in the novel because people are not going to understand the background of this community... Every single community has a history of being colonized. They have their own journey to where they are today. And it’s largely against their will. There is an education that has to happen, especially if you are writing fiction about a marginalized community.
On what’s at stake
Dystopia is not hypothetical for everyoneScott’s function in the plot is straightforward: he arrives, exploits the community’s hospitality, and consolidates power. But Rice had a longer frame in mind for who Scott was and where the pattern he represents comes from.
On a deeper level, he’s an analogy for settler colonialism as it has historically shaped the country that’s now Canada. He’s a white man who ironically sets his sights on an Indigenous community displaced by colonization and a people whose culture has been brutalized by the ruling order. Now that the country of Canada has collapsed, the reserve becomes desirable as a safe haven and a land of opportunity. The cycle of colonialism continues through Scott in an ironic way.
For most readers in Canada or the United States, a societal collapse is a thought experiment. Rice’s insistence throughout the book is that this framing is a product of privilege. For many Indigenous communities, the political and cultural structures of that collapse arrived generations ago.
That apocalypse for Indigenous people, for a lot of nations and communities has only happened within like the last 100 years or so. This is very much dystopia for a lot of Indigenous nations, the everyday life that we live through here in Canada, or in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, or wherever else.
Rice also wanted the book to counter a specific, durable misrepresentation. Coverage of First Nations communities in Canadian media, where he had worked for nearly 14 years, tended to catalogue dysfunction and poverty while ignoring the functioning social fabric underneath. The community in the novel was a deliberate correction.
I wanted to remind readers that most First Nations are healthy, functioning communities, and that the problems that can plague them are a direct result of being displaced and brutalized by colonialism.
What he wants us to sit with
The land was always the answerThe novel’s central argument about survival is not about stockpiling supplies or restoring power. Rice built the story around a different premise: that the community best positioned to outlast catastrophe is the one that never fully abandoned its relationship with the land.
Overall this crisis is an opportunity for this community to renew itself, and while there are some very difficult challenges at first, I think the key to survival becomes clearer to the characters as the story develops — it’s in the land and culture.
Rice wrote the book partly to remind himself of something he felt he had lost. Two decades in cities had eroded the land-based knowledge he had grown up with at Wasauksing, and the novel was, among other things, a private reckoning with that distance. The community on the page modeled what he was no longer sure he could do himself.
A personal reason for driving this message home was to remind myself to reconnect with the land. I grew up on the rez with lots of land-based knowledge, but I’ve lost a lot of that since I’ve lived in cities for two decades now.
When Rice describes who he most wanted to reach, he names Anishinaabe readers first. The novel was not written outward toward a settler readership in need of education, even though it does that work too. It was written inward, toward the community whose story it tells.
If fellow Anishinaabeg can relate to what they read in Moon of the Crusted Snow, then I’ll have succeeded with this story. That’s the feedback that means the most to me.
Rice closes many conversations about the book with a formulation that resists the finality his genre usually offers. His ending is not redemption or restoration but something rawer: the premise that ruin is also ground.
The image Rice returns to when asked what he wanted readers to carry away is not one of recovery or triumph. It is something smaller and more conditional, a possibility rather than a promise.
There are shreds of promise in what’s smouldering. The ends of some things can be opportunities to start over.