The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

The narrative returns to the 1996 timeline. While resting after dinner, Father Jude Miller and Father Damien receive a visit from Lulu Nanapush. Jude becomes immediately captivated by the woman’s intense gaze and realizes that he is falling in love for the first time in his life. Lulu boldly recruits him to speak to her culture class before departing.

A week later, Fathers Jude and Damien discuss the sainthood case for Sister Leopolda. Damien argues strongly against the possibility of beatification and cites the many instances in which Pauline/Leopolda caused great harm. He also reveals his deep disillusionment with the entire missionary project and explains that he only remained on the reservation to mitigate the damage that colonialism and the Catholic Church had done to the Ojibwe people. He declares, “I believe even now that the void left in the passing of sacred traditional knowledge was filled, quite simply, with the quick ease of alcohol. So I was forced by the end to clean up after the effects of what I had helped to destroy” (239).

Meanwhile, Father Jude, shaken by his own unexpected romantic feelings, resolves to interview Lulu about her mother, Fleur, as a pretext for seeing Lulu again.

This chapter details Lulu’s first-person account of her childhood to Father Jude, describing how her mother, Fleur, abandoned her in a government boarding school for Indigenous children. (Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, Fleur was intent upon exacting a complex form of revenge upon John James Mauser, who had stolen her lands.) Nector Kashpaw, who was also sent to the school, comforted her during the journey. At the boarding school, older children threw the young Lulu into a deep hole behind the dormitory, where she remained for two terrifying nights, finding strength in the visit of a spirit. An older girl named Rose Pentecost eventually rescued her from the hole.

When Lulu learned that she could not return home for the summer, she attempted to escape by hiding on a metal shelf underneath the school bus. The metal burned a permanent scar down her torso before she was discovered and caught. The separation and trauma caused her love for her mother to harden into bitter resentment. Years later, a wealthy and stylish Fleur (who had, in the intervening time, contrived to seduce Mauser) arrived to reclaim her daughter. However, Lulu repeatedly denied her, declaring that Fleur was not her mother.

During the span of years from 1921 to 1933, Agnes learns from the Bishop that Fleur has married a wealthy man in the city. Over the years, she attempts to send Fleur letters, and although Fleur never replies, she sends a series of gifts to the Church and to Nanapush and Margaret. Eventually, Fleur returns to the reservation with a strange, pale, apparently nameless son, whom the Ojibwe people soon realize is “the son of the ravenous man in the tuxedo suit, the one who had stolen [Fleur’s] land” (262). Fleur and her son arrive in Little No Horse around the same time as Sister Leopolda. Lulu continues to reject Fleur’s attempts at reconciliation, even as her mother rebuilds her cabin on their ancestral land.

As Lulu matures and shows a pattern for moving from one romantic relationship to another, Father Damien recognizes that Lulu will never live a staid, traditional life in the company of one man, so he counsels her to find a profession that will allow her to support herself throughout her life.

In a flashback to 1945, Father Damien visits Lulu and observes her ingenious baby harness that lifts her infant son safely into the air. The narrative then shifts back to the earlier timeline, when Sister Leopolda confesses to Damien that she strangled Napoleon Morrissey with the barbed-wire rosary. When Damien denies Leopolda any form of absolution unless she confesses publicly to the crime, Leopolda threatens to expose Damien as a woman. This threat leaves Agnes terrified about the potential destruction of her carefully maintained identity.

Fleur’s mysterious son becomes known as Awun, or “the Mist.” He is recognized for his silence and his purposeful nature. Sister Dympna arranges for him to haul wood for Mary Kashpaw, and Awun becomes infatuated with Mary, growing entranced by her physical strength as he watches her expertly chop wood. That night, he sneaks into her shack, harnesses himself to her sleigh bed, and pulls her out into the woods while she sleeps.

Mary awakens to find herself being hauled away by Awun and cuts the towlines with her ax, freeing herself from the makeshift harness. After a moment of hesitation, she chooses to follow Awun into the darkness. They walk off together, beginning a relationship that will produce a son, eventually lead to a decline in Mary’s mental health, and end with her returning years later to care for the aging Father Damien.

Margaret Kashpaw, Nanapush’s wife, spots a moose, and the elderly couple pursues it by boat across the water, knowing that its meat will sustain them through the winter. Nanapush successfully ropes the animal but delays killing it, hoping that it will tow them home first. Instead, the moose bolts onto the land, dragging Nanapush behind, as the old man has become tangled in the boat due to the fishhooks firmly embedded in his buttocks. The moose drags Nanapush on a painful two-day tour of the entire reservation. A rescue party eventually kills the moose, but by this point, its meat is ruined and nearly inedible.

For the entire winter, Margaret punishes Nanapush for the escapade with the moose, denying him sex and feeding him bad moose meat and undercooked beans that eventually cause fatal digestive problems. Upon finding him apparently dead in the bed beside her, Margaret immediately regrets her cruel treatment of him. Seeing that he has an erection, she harbors a desperate hope that he may merely be deeply asleep rather than dead, so she attempts to have sex with him in the hopes of reviving him, but to no avail.

At Nanapush’s wake, an explosion of gas erupts from his corpse, and he unexpectedly revives. After telling the gathered mourners about the spirit world, he dies and revives once more, determined to reconcile with the remorseful Margaret. That night, they make love tenderly, and Nanapush dies peacefully afterward. Margaret honors Ojibwe tradition by burying him in the old way, placing his body in a tree rather than in the ground. In the long, silent years after his death, she misses him deeply and wonders why she had been so determined to keep him at arm’s length throughout much of their time together.