The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, United States federal policy sought to forcibly assimilate Indigenous peoples by dismantling their political, cultural, and spiritual systems. This strategy was pursued through two primary methods: land privatization and religious conversion. The General Allotment Act of 1887, or the Dawes Act, broke up communally held tribal lands into individual parcels. According to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, this policy resulted in the loss of nearly 90 million acres of Indigenous territory by 1934 (“Land Tenure Issues.” Indian Land Tenure Foundation). In the novel, this historical dispossession is embodied by the predatory lumber baron John James Mauser, who exploits the system and steals valuable timber by having Ojibwe landowners “declared incompetent” (106).

The second arm of assimilation arose from religious and educational means, with Christian missionaries establishing churches and boarding schools as a way to eradicate traditional beliefs and languages. This ideological pressure is central to the novel’s plot, as the real Father Damien’s journey to Little No Horse represents a prime example of the Catholic Church’s infiltration into Ojibwe communities and culture. When Agnes takes on the identity of the deceased Father Damien and arrives at the Little No Horse mission in 1912, she embraces this new life without fully appreciating the role that she will inevitably play in the erosion and eventual erasure of the Ojibwe people’s way of life. With the ideological clashes between Ojibwe culture and Church doctrine, the community’s spiritual landscape is deeply complex, caught as it is between traditional Indigenous practices (such as households with multiple wives) and the “deadly conversions” imposed by the Church (57). As time goes on, characters like Nanapush use traditional stories to satirize and resist this outside pressure, and Father Damien’s own life becomes a testament to the difficult, often syncretic, faith that emerges from this period of intense cultural and economic assault.