Motorcycles and Sweetgrass

“‘Everybody used to talk about me. Now they talk about him. I don’t understand. What’s he got that I don’t. He’s so depressing. What’s his name again?’

‘Jesus.’

[…] ‘I thought you would stay here. With me. But you don’t care. Nobody cares. Choose that guy then, I don’t care.’

Once again, the man dove into the water, a fair distance from the girl. Far beneath the surface, the sunfish saw him disappear into the weeds, swimming like he had been born underwater.”

The prologue introduces two unnamed characters swimming naked in Otter Lake. Taylor does not reveal their names because the next time they appear, they will have new ones: Lillian sacrifices her Anishnawbe name as demanded by the Catholic school and Nanabush disguises himself as John. This passage reveals the childish moodiness characteristic of the trickster god. It also depicts several motifs key to the novel: anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human behavior and thoughts to animals, and immanence, or the presence of divine beings in human life.

“Then, from the recesses of his damaged mind, she appeared. The face that had once stopped him from wandering the country, the body that made him forget all others (at that time anyway) and the smile that had made him hold his breath. […] This was more than a flashback. It was more than an idle memory. This—she—was real. For some reason, he looked out the window again, this time to the horizon, his eyes gazing to the far north where he had once roamed the forest, and had swum in the lakes. Something was calling to him.”

Suffering from his drunken debauchery, Nanabush suddenly perceives a summoning from Lillian, the girl with whom he swam in Otter Lake. Taylor implies that the demigod’s wretched condition is the result of losing inspiration: No one had prayed to him, leaving him no sense of purpose. Lillian’s appeal begins a chain of events that will renew his spiritual calling.

“The Otter Lake First Nation had recently bought a huge chunk of land adjacent to the Reserve, and this had introduced a whole whack of problems into Maggie’s political life, which far too often drifted into her personal life. […] And of course the idea of Native people getting more land was an absurd concept to most non-Natives. Five hundred years of colonization had told them you took land away from Native people, you didn’t let them buy it back.”

When the Anishnawbe purchase 300 acres adjoining their tribal Reserve, Maggie bristles at the irony of Indigenous people having to purchase land stolen from them by white colonists. More galling is that the descendants of these colonists do not trust the Anishnawbe nation to make its own decisions about the land and resent losing the tax revenues the land would generate.