1 In her insightful article “Code-Switching Humour in Aboriginal Literature,” NunatuKavut scholar Kristina (Fagan) Bidwell discusses how Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinaabe), Louise Halfe (Cree), Tomson Highway (Cree), and Thomas King (Cherokee) resort to “code-switching” in their poetry and fiction both to amuse and to confuse their readers. According to Bidwell, these authors use words and phrases from their ancestral languages in texts written in English to “create both anxiety and laughter in their audience” by “refusing to let readers see language as a transparent mode of communication” and ultimately to challenge “the dominance of any one language” (288, 289). Bidwell compares the purpose of code-switching in literary texts to the common practice of Indigenous writers introducing themselves in their ancestral languages at the beginning of a public reading: “[I]t maintains the writer’s resistance to English as the only public language,” and “it reaches out to those in the room who also speak the Aboriginal language, encouraging a sense of community and communicating a respect for the language” (290). In other words, the public use of Indigenous languages in these situations serves as a tool for both resistance to the colonizing hegemony of the English language and enhancement of community among Indigenous Peoples.

2 Building upon Bidwell’s important work on code-switching — that is, the playful, humorous, and unsettling shifting between English and an Indigenous language — I will explore the more explicitly political and nation-centred use of Anishinaabemowin in recent texts by Lesley Belleau (Anishinaabe), Cherie Dimaline (Métis descended from Manitoba Road Allowance People and Anishinaabeg from Georgian Bay), and Karen McBride (Algonquin Anishinaabe) as it contributes to language revitalization and resurgence.¹ I argue that these authors, whose first language is English, draw on Anishinaabemowin in their texts to connect to ancestors and literary predecessors as well as to affirm Indigenous Peoples’ right to live free of colonial violence on their own lands. Through their exploration in their literary texts of how Anishinaabemowin disrupts the flow of English,² these authors not only address the tremendous harm caused by continuing settler colonialism but also emphasize resilience and hope for the future by drawing attention to the shortcomings of the discourse on reconciliation. Scholar, poet, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, one of the most outspoken Anishinaabe proponents of “radical resurgence,” explains that

Simpson points to the Ogimaa Mikana (“Leader’s Trail”) Project in Toronto — which, among other things, has been inserting Anishinaabemowin “into the urban spaces of downtown cores” (194) — as an example of an act of resurgence that promotes both decolonization and healing.³ According to Simpson, Indigenous aesthetics in artistic practice as a means to “‘disrupt the noise of colonialism,’ to speak to multiple audiences, and to enact affirmative and generative forms of refusal” (200) is also a form of resurgence. Keeping her observations in mind, I will discuss how the use of Anishinaabemowin in Belleau’s poetry collection Indianland (2017), Dimaline’s young adult novel The Marrow Thieves (2017), and McBride’s novel Crow Winter (2019) is intimately linked to decolonization, renewal of land-based practices, and language revitalization.

3 The use of Indigenous languages in literary texts by Indigenous authors has attracted astonishingly little commentary from literary scholars. In his essay “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King refers to “interfusional” literature “to describe that part of Native Literature which is a blending of oral literature and written literature” (41). Author, literary scholar, and environmental activist Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx) discusses a similar technique in her essay “Land Speaking,” in which she describes “Rez English” as a form of North American colloquial English that facilitates “construct[ing] bridges” (192) between English and N̓syilxčn̓. She describes Okanagan Rez English as having “a structural quality syntactically and semantically closer to the way the Okanagan language is arranged” (193). Armstrong believes “that Rez English from any part of the country, if examined, will display the sound and syntax patterns of the indigenous language of that area and subsequently the sounds that the landscape speaks” (193).⁴ King’s interfusional and Rez English can be compared to what the authors of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures identify as “interlanguage,” which they define as “the fusion of the linguistic structures of two languages” (Ashcroft et al. 65), or “syntactic fusion,” the “adaptation of vernacular syntax to standard orthography” (69) — both strategies of decolonization in postcolonial writing (58). Two further strategies of “installing cultural distinctiveness in the writing” (71), namely “untranslated words” and “code-switching,” can be compared to the use of Indigenous words in English language texts. I would argue that, in addition to emphasizing “cultural distinctiveness,” the insertion of Anishinaabemowin into the texts discussed here has several other functions. Untranslated words might convey private messages to those who do speak Anishinaabemowin, excluding those who do not, in an attempt to undermine the hegemony of English. The use of Anishinaabemowin in these texts might also encourage readers to become students of the language. Indeed, the three authors have benefited from the revitalization of Anishinaabemowin on reserves, in rural communities, and in urban environments over the past few years. By incorporating the language into their literary texts, the authors perhaps intend to give back to these communities in a reciprocal way and, in doing so, reinforce efforts at language revitalization. Moreover, Indigenous writers who reclaim ancestral languages might do so to become “good ancestors” (Justice 113). Daniel Heath Justice concludes his chapter “How Do We Become Good Ancestors?” thus: “[I]f anything, that’s the true wonderwork, the truest realization of being a good ancestor, and one worthy of deepest gratitude: imagining beyond the wounding now into a better tomorrow, working, writing, and dreaming a future into being” (156). As I will show in this essay, reclaiming Anishinaabemowin in poetry and prose activates the potential for such transformative change.

4 In the way in which they promote language revitalization as part of cultural and political resurgence, Belleau, Dimaline, and McBride — all avid learners of Anishinaabemowin — follow in the tracks of Louise Erdrich, a prominent Anishinaabe literary predecessor. According to poet and playwright Heid E. Erdrich, “we [Anishinaabeg authors] follow our literary ancestors — not with a destination in mind, not with intent to claim territory, but because we want to know who has gone before us, who now guides us. We take comfort in their signs of presence along our way” (14). Although Louise Erdrich uses Anishinaabemowin in almost all of her books, she talks most explicitly about its role as a place-based practice and tool for resurgence in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, a memoir of her journey to Lake of the Woods in southern Ontario in the company of her eighteen-month-old daughter, Kiizhikok, to visit the sites of rock paintings. By drawing attention to the pictographs and petroglyphs as reminders of the precontact presence of the Anishinaabeg in this area and teaching her daughter her ancestral language with the help of picture books, in which Erdrich has substituted the English words with their Anishinaabemowin counterparts, she makes a powerful connection among past, present, and future.

5 This multifaceted text can be read, among other things, as an introduction to how Anishinaabemowin works grammatically and to Anishinaabe culture and ways of knowing more generally. It can also be read, as literary critic Joёlle Bonnevin claims, as “a tool for the cultural (re)construction of the Ojibwe nation” (40). Although the Anishinaabe side of the narrator’s/Erdrich’s family is from North Dakota, her daughter’s father, Tobasonakwut Kinew, a pipe carrier, traditional healer, sun dancer, member of the Anishinaabe Midewiwin, and fluent speaker of Anishinaabemowin, was born on a trapline near Niiyaawaangashing, Lake of the Woods, the land “that once belonged, and by treaty rights should still belong, solely to the Ojibwe” (Louise Erdrich 34). The third and middle chapter of the book, also the most substantial, describes the reunion between Louise and Tobasonakwut and their exploration of the lakes by canoe, the traditional Anishinaabe way of travel and a reminder of the symbolic role of the canoe in representing the respective First Nation in a wampum belt that records a relationship of mutual respect between that nation and the British crown.

6 The company of her mentor and language instructor inspires Louise to share insights into Anishinaabe language, culture, and epistemology with her readers. She emphasizes the intimate connection between the language and the land, which holds all knowledge of life and death and is a constant teacher. In this way, Anishinaabemowin is generated by the precise geography of “Ojibwe country”: that is, the territory where it is spoken: Michigan, Minnesota, Ontario, Manitoba, and North Dakota (5). As her ruminations on the language demonstrate, the distinctive way in which Anishinaabemowin reflects and expresses this precise geography affects how its speakers view the world and how language is related to ongoing presence in place. The text thus promotes, at least in the imagination, a united Ojibwe country. However, Ojibwe sovereignty is undermined by the physical presence of the border between Canada and the United States. The narrator’s crossing of the border back into Minnesota to visit an island in Rainy Lake, where Ernest Oberholtzer’s⁵ voluminous library is housed, is traumatic. In disrespect of the Jay Treaty, which guarantees Indigenous Peoples unrestricted passage across the border, the border guard asks Louise for proof that Kiizhikok is her daughter. The text thus links the colonizer’s disregard for the intimate bond between mother and child to the trauma of the residential school/boarding school experience and the injustices of the child welfare system.

7 Books and Islands addresses many other acts of colonization, including the racist defacement of the rock paintings, the renaming of ancient geographical landmarks, harmful environmental interventions such as overfishing of sturgeon by settlers, “the buffalo of the Ojibwe” (75), and the destruction of wild rice beds by the government’s raising of water levels. As Bonnevin explains (44), Erdrich points to Tobasonakwut’s and her own line of Anishinaabeg ancestors to affirm the Anishinaabeg claim to the land. Erdrich also highlights recent successful acts of resurgence such as the sturgeon conservation program (76), Tobasonakwut’s efforts to raise money to rebuild a Midewiwin lodge (37), Anishinaabe poet Al Hunter’s work on disputes over Indigenous title “that has had promising results” (99), and the accomplishments of Nancy Jones, “fiercely devoted to Ojibwe culture” and language revitalization (116). Erdrich concludes Chapter 3 by emphasizing the vitality of Anishinaabemowin and drawing attention to its innate resilient qualities:

With these examples, Erdrich demonstrates that the polysynthetic nature of Anishinaabemowin — lexical expansion is attained not with loan words from other languages but by creating news words with Ojibwe morphemes — which contrasts sharply with the analytic nature of the English language, makes it highly adaptable, and enables it to represent relationships in a much more creative and nuanced way than English.⁶

8 Lesley Belleau also draws from this fluidity and relational capacity of Anishinaabemowin as a tool for resurgence in Indianland, which takes its title from the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge sign “This Is Indian Land” on the Garden River First Nation. The message serves as a powerful reminder that the sign is located on land owned by First Nations as recorded in the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850. Belleau, from Garden River First Nation (Ketegaunseebee) near Sault Ste. Marie in northern Ontario, includes several poems in Indianland that explicitly address settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance linked to language.

9 In an interview with Ryan Patrick, Belleau comments on her writing process as follows: “When I write, I think a lot about image and about ancestral culture. The Ojibwe language is a language that is an image in itself. One word could be an entire story. I looked at things that way to add some additional layers and elements within it” (“How”). In the poem entitled “Elijah Harper,” in memory of the former member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba and chief of the Oji-Cree Red Sucker Lake community, Belleau juxtaposes the English word no with the Cree word Mo’na, which means “no,” in the opening line. By voicing his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord, citing the lack of adequate participation and recognition of Indigenous Peoples in the process, Harper helped to inspire a new generation of Indigenous leaders. Using both a Néhinaw word and the Anishinaabemowin word migizi, which means “eagle,” in reference to the fact that Harper expressed his resistance by holding an eagle feather, Belleau recognizes inter-Indigenous solidarity in the common struggle against colonization. The poem’s concluding lines celebrate this resistance:

In the poem that opens the collection, “This Is Indian Land,” the speaker addresses the lawsuit in which Garden River First Nation has been engaged with the federal and provincial governments over the western boundary of the reserve since 2003:

The poem speaks to continuing conflicts over Indigenous title across Canada and the burnout that individuals and communities suffer from ceaseless fights for legal justice. The final stanza of the poem links the disputes over land with other violent acts of colonization such as residential schools, the racist child welfare system, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls:

Whereas the sign on the CPR bridge stands defiant, the sign “Remember Oka” that the speaker’s father in “Oka Eyes” puts up in front of his house in memory of his participation in the 1990 standoff at Kanesatake and Kahnawake eventually blows away in a storm. At the heart of the “Oka Crisis,” which changed Indigenous-settler relations in Canada in many ways, was the proposed expansion of a golf course and development of condominiums on disputed land that included a Mohawk burial ground. The resistance proved to be particularly successful in that the golf course expansion and condominium construction were cancelled, and the federal government eventually purchased plots of land for Kanesatake. The so-called crisis has been responsible for greater awareness of the territorial rights of First Nations and inspired Indigenous Peoples across Canada to take action. The speaker explains the significance of the sign as follows:

That the sign in memory of Oka eventually disappears seems to suggest that disagreements between the government and Indigenous Peoples have been part of everyday reality in the decades following the standoff and that Indigenous Peoples cannot afford to let their guard down when celebrating partial victories. The disappearance of the sign also speaks to the tremendous emotional toll that participating in the standoff took on individuals like the speaker’s father.

10 The image of salmon migrating upstream is evocative within the context of the colonizer’s greed since salmon, along with sturgeon once a staple of the Anishinaabe diet, have been fished to extinction in the Great Lakes. In the interview with Patrick, Belleau explains that Indianland “can almost be seen like a river, where you can stream through time. I relied on the images of water. Nibi is the Ojibwe word for water. I wanted it to remain that way, without having to categorize it a lot. It’s circular and free flowing” (“How”). The poems “The First Swimming” and “Niibinabe,” for example, are connected through similar water images. The image of the sturgeon, to which Louise Erdrich dedicates a section in Books and Islands, has particular significance in Belleau’s poetry as well. In Erdrich’s text, the narrator’s and Tobasonakwut’s encounter with an old sturgeon while paddling their canoe in the middle of the lake prompts the narrator to contemplate the cultural importance of the sturgeon to the Anishinaabeg:

In “The First Swimming,” Belleau plays with the two different meanings of the Anishinaabemowin word name. The noun name means “sturgeon” in English, whereas the transitive animate verb name’ means “find/leave signs of somebody’s presence”:

The notion of name’ is thus closely related to resurgence in that it connects the present to the past in an act of biiskaabiyang, which Simpson defines as “the process of returning to ourselves, a reengagement with the things we have left behind, a re-emergence, an unfolding from the inside out” (17). In “The First Swimming,” name, meaning “sturgeon,” the English word name, and name’, meaning “leaving signs/traces,” are brought together in a web of relationships:

The poem juxtaposes the two images, the one of the sacred fish and the one of leaving traces on a page, alluding to the fact that the paint used in the creation of pictographs was a mixture of powdered hematite and sturgeon oil. The sturgeon, ancient writing, and blood memory — the ancestral or genetic connection to language, spirituality, and teachings — are thus intricately linked.

11 In “Niibinabe,” which can be translated as “mermaid” or “water woman” and refers to the Anishinaabe water spirit, the speaker connects the challenges that contemporary Indigenous female writers face with regard to readers’ expectations and with the difficulty of expressing Indigenous reality in the dominant language:

In this poem, the disruption of history and story is linked to the fate of hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In the face of such colonial violence, the speaker asks

The poem joins images of Mother Earth violated by resource extraction, murdered women whose assaulted bodies have been found floating in rivers, and sturgeons slaughtered to satisfy white settler greed:

The text thus signals that the political objectives of land justice — that is, right to the land and right for the land — and resurgence cannot be separated from gendered violence, cultural genocide, and environmental injustice.

12 The revitalization of Indigenous languages as an act of resurgence in the face of colonial violence is also a major topic in Cherie Dimaline’s young adult novel with crossover appeal, The Marrow Thieves. The narrative follows a group of eight Anishinaabeg, Cree, Métis, and Mi’kmaq children and young adults on their five-year-long journey north in the company of two Elders: Minerva, the Anishinaabemowin keeper, and Miigwans, the two-spirited warrior and knowledge holder skilled in land-based practices. The group, whom Miigwans has adopted as his “family” (121) after losing his husband, Isaac, in one of the new residential schools, is on the run from recruiters hunting Indigenous Peoples for their bone marrow, which holds the ability to dream. As Miigwans explains, “dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there” (18). All of these young people themselves are survivors and have lost their families to this brutal form of colonialism. The narrative, set in the decade after 2049 (176), closely connects the history of the residential school system with this new form of colonial violence against Indigenous Peoples. The facilities (in the buildings of the old residential schools) in which bone marrow is extracted from Indigenous bodies are run by the Canadian government’s Department of Oneirology (4) with the help of churches.

13 With its main action set in the future, The Marrow Thieves joins other recent futurist, speculative, or postapocalyptic Indigenous novels such as Waubgeshig Rice’s (Anishinaabe) Moon of the Crusted Snow, Rebecca Roanhorse’s (Okhay Owingeh Pueblo-African American) young adult trilogy, and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s (Palyku) young adult series. As Roanhorse observes in “Postcards from the Apocalypse,”

Although Dimaline uses only a few Anishinaabemowin words in The Marrow Thieves, they are all connected to the idea of hope for the future, resurgence, building community, “honoring of caretakers and protectors” (Roanhorse), and sovereignty. Regaining fluency in the ancestral languages — Anishinaabemowin and Cree in The Marrow Thieves — along with storytelling is the key to achieving these goals. As Dimaline explains in an interview, “I purposely made the Indigenous language in this book, when it is used, rudimentary to show that even when you use a word or a phrase as a beginner, as long as you are fighting for its survival, language is powerful, that it encompasses an ideology and life that is worth protecting at all costs” (“Cherie Dimaline”). In The Marrow Thieves, Miigwans and his family are on their way north to “the old lands” (9) after settler greed has caused catastrophic environmental degradation. One effect of the environmental crisis is the constant rain because the glaciers are melting (87). This has led in turn to a lack of pollinators and a proliferation and mutation of rodents and insects (8). The Great Lakes are poisoned (11), and pipelines “snapped like icicles and spewed bile over forests into lakes, drowning whole reserves and towns” (87). The environmental crisis has had devastating physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual effects on the settlers: “[H] alf the population was lost in the disaster and from the disease that spread from too many corpses and not enough graves. The ones that were left were no better off, really. They worked longer hours, they stopped reproducing without the doctors, and worst of all, they stopped dreaming” (26). Because of their resilience having survived previous apocalypses, their land-based practices, and their continued ability to dream, Indigenous Peoples are in a much better position to survive. Potawatomi philosopher and environmental justice scholar Kyle Powys Whyte explains how Anishinaabeg have faced environmental crises for a long time:

Dimaline emphasizes the links between environmental apocalypse and cultural genocide facilitated by the residential school system, which killed thousands of Indigenous children¹³ and disrupted the intergenerational passing on of language skills and cultural knowledge.

14 Language revitalization in The Marrow Thieves is thus closely related to the healing of land and the building of community. As Dimaline points out, “cultural survival is as imperative as physical survival, and in fact is intertwined” (“Cherie Dimaline”). The first word that Minerva teaches the group is nishin, which means “good” in English (Dimaline, Marrow Thieves 38). By choosing this word for the young women’s first language lesson, Minerva emphasizes the importance of dreaming and hoping and building community based on love and care rather than survival. It is also significant that none of the words that Minerva chooses is a noun. The anti-materialist ideology of the family of Miigwans contrasts with the materialism and wastefulness of settler society as portrayed in the novel. Moreover, they manage to be self-sustaining by foraging, bow hunting, trapping, and snaring. While roasting a couple of ground squirrels, Minerva teaches the young people the word abwaad (109),¹⁴ one of many Anishinaabemowin verbs to refer to a specific way of preparing food. Commenting on the link between language and food, Anishinaabe scholar and “language warrior” Anton Treuer observes that

When the group meets two Anishinaabeg recruiters — according to Miigwans, “not every Indian is an Indian” — he asks them “aandi wenjibaayan?” (Dimaline, Marrow Thieves 55).¹⁵ As Frenchie explains, “playing Indian geography meant you could figure out who was who before you even saw them. And for Miig, I could see why it was doubly important to establish nationhood” (120). Language skills and nationhood are thus shown as closely connected and as playing an even greater role in the described environmental crisis and renewed outbursts of colonial violence. The notion of kiiwe (210, 211, 212), which means “he/she goes home,” is synonymous with going north in the novel.¹⁶ Returning home physically, and culturally in the sense of biskaabiyang, becomes more challenging after Minerva is shot by the recruiters.

15 Dimaline further emphasizes the importance of Indigenous language by portraying it as the “key” (213, 227) to destroying the new residential schools and ultimately settler colonialism. When taken to one of the marrow-draining facilities, Minerva “brought the whole thing down” by calling “on her blood memory, her teachings, her ancestors” (172). Her special gift is that every dream she has ever had has been in Anishinaabemowin, which causes the wires and probes of the machines to malfunction (172). After her death, Isaac, who (unknown to Miigwans) has escaped physically unharmed from the school, replaces Minerva as the one with the key to bring down the colonial system since he dreams in Cree (228). The group of Indigenous people whom Miigwans’s family joins at the end of the novel has been working on reviving traditions, ceremonies, and language in a well-organized fashion. The group has been putting together picture books in Cree and Anishinaabemowin to “start passing on the teachings right away” (214) and developing the tools needed to heal the land. As the leader explains, “we have the knowledge, kept through the first round of these blasted schools, from before that, when these visitors first made their way over here like angry children throwing tantrums. When we heal our land, we are healed also” (193). In “Earth-Bound: Indigenous Resurgence and Environmental Reconciliation,” Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows explains that legal practice “starts with understanding our language and drawing analogies from the earth,” which means that moral standards can be found in the natural world as described in Anishinaabemowin (51). It is no coincidence that The Marrow Thieves embraces the future by showing how the community celebrates the fact that one of the young couples is expecting a child. The manifestation of a future generation makes the group’s efforts to revitalize language and gain food sovereignty even more pressing.

16 Like The Marrow Thieves, Crow Winter emphasizes the healing power of both land and home. Home for Hazel Ellis, the novel’s protagonist, is the fictive Spirit Bear Point First Nation reserve. She continues to grieve the death of her father, who died a year a half earlier of cancer. In an interview with Shelagh Rogers, Karen McBride explains that she wanted to portray the reserve as a “real place” and to write about all kinds of trauma in her characters’ lives, such as the death of a loved one, not just trauma as a result of colonialism. But home is more than the house in which Hazel grew up and to which she has now returned after completing her “very White, very male-centric” (McBride, Crow Winter 15) degree in English literature. Home also means a return to ceremony — she participates in a sweat lodge encouraged by her childhood friend Mia — as well as refamiliarizing herself with her ancestral language. Like the characters in The Marrow Thieves, Hazel thus engages in what Simpson refers to as biskaabiyang. Simpson describes her own “flight to escape colonial reality” as a “flight into Nishnaabewin” (18). Like Simpson, Hazel is aware that there is no escape from colonial reality in her everyday life: “[T]he Trans-Canada cuts right through the reserve, which means there’s always traffic. The only gas station runs out of gas so often that it’s more of a corner store. Sometimes we have to boil our water before we drink it, but that’s only if pipes burst. Spirit Bear Point is far from perfect. But I don’t care. It’s home” (McBride, Crow Winter 9). What Simpson argues in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance and what McBride shows in her novel are that the time has come for Indigenous Peoples to disengage from the colonizers’ tools and reconnect with their own cultural teachings to be able to revive land-based practices and protect the Earth by taking moral guidance from Anishinaabemowin.

17 Crow Winter also shares with Indianland and The Marrow Thieves the preoccupation with Indigenous rights to land and with colonial resource extraction. Hazel grew up believing that the site of the abandoned silver mine belonged to her father and, after his death, was handed down to her brother and her. However, as she finds out, her father struck a deal shortly before his death with the land developer Thomas Gagnon believing that reopening the mine would benefit both his family and the community. Gagnon, an astute businessman, sees himself as an Indigenous ally. He seems to be aware that his ancestor, from whom he inherited his company, treated the Spirit Bear Point First Nation unfairly and claims that he wants to make amends, assuring Hazel’s father that he “wouldn’t want to do anything that would disrupt the community” (McBride, Crow Winter 167). Her father was happy to hear that his community would not be hurt by the development and that Gagnon seems to be a harbinger of a more respectful relationship between settlers and Indigenous Peoples. Her father also believed that the community would benefit from the money and be able to build a better future (168) and dismissed Gagnon’s fear of potential backlash from his people. This scenario uncannily resembles that of colonialism dividing communities by pitting hereditary chiefs against band council chiefs, as in the recent protest of the hereditary Wet’suwet’en Nation chiefs against the construction of the Coastal GasLink in northwestern British Columbia. As Simpson observes, “by far the largest attack on Indigenous Knowledge systems right now is land dispossession, and the people that are actively protecting Nishnaabewin are not those at academic conferences advocating for its use in research and course work, but those who are currently putting their bodies on the land” (170). In the chapter of Crow Winter titled “Sasagiwichigewin,” which means “sacrifice,” Hazel literally puts her body down on the land to save it in an attempt to right her father’s wrong.

18 Although the novel emphasizes the role that colonialism has played in “breaking” (105) Indigenous Peoples, it expresses hope that Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples might find a way to collaborate respectfully with each other. Gagnon is willing to learn from his mistakes and, even more importantly, to make financial reparations. But it almost costs Hazel her life to get him to that point. This plot detail gestures to the fact that Indigenous people are still doing most of the heavy lifting with regard to “reconciliation.” Unknown to Gagnon, one of his ancestors altered the map to make it appear as if the relevant lot was surrendered. Hazel attempts in vain to convince Gagnon of the fraud. Her father appears to her in a dream to implore her to right his wrong (274), and to put him at peace, and to buy more time for her brother to locate an archival copy of the surveyor’s map to prove her claim, Hazel jumps off a cliff into the quarry to discourage the workers from blasting its walls. When she wakes up in a hospital bed, her brother tells her that, once Gagnon received proof that the lot in question had never been surrendered because it is on sacred ground, he abandoned the project immediately (316).

19 Whereas her brother searches the archives for evidence of the sacredness of the site, Hazel uses personal and spiritual approaches such as dreams and visions. Upon her arrival home, she learns that she has a special gift: she is able to cross into the Spirit World. She also begins to converse with Nanabush, the Anishinaabe shapeshifter and transformer, whom coincidentally she sets free (177) and who has been following her around ever since in the shape of a crow. It seems to be fitting that Hazel is associated with the western doorway, according to Anishinaabe teaching “the direction from which darkness comes. It is the direction of the unknown, of going within, of dreams, of prayer and of meditation. The West is the place of testing, where the will is stretched to its outer limits so that the gift of perseverance may be won. For the nearer one draws toward a goal the more difficult the journey becomes” (Teachings). The Seven Grandfathers (Wisdom, Love, Respect, Bravery, Honesty, Humility, and Truth), given the responsibility by the Creator to watch over the Anishinaabeg, and whose teachings guide them to lead a healthy and morally “good life” (mino-bimaadiziwin), have struck a deal with Nanabush. They will allow him to return to his human shape as a reward for helping Hazel to overcome her grief and restore the quarry to the community.¹⁷ Nanabush takes Hazel back into the past to show her how her father came to an arrangement with Gagnon and how his ancestor forged the map for his own financial gain. According to Simpson, Nanabush as a non-conformist and idiosyncratic teacher plays a major role in Nishnaabewin (Anishinaabeg intelligence) because he “continually shows us what happens when we are not responsible for our own baggage or trauma or emotional responses” (163). In Crow Winter, Hazel finds out about the sacredness of the quarry site by overhearing a conversation between the Seven Grandfathers and Nanabush. She learns that the clearing, where she and Mia come to pick medicines and seem to hear strange “humming” or “thrumming” (196) sounds, is the western doorway, “the door closest to the Spirit World” (41), which will be destroyed if the mining project goes ahead (235). Hazel is confused by the fact that the Seven Grandfathers seem to be able to predict the future. But Nanabush explains to her that their ability has nothing to do with “story-book magic with a crystal ball”; rather, it is “heightened intuition” (263), a reference to Anishinaabe ways of knowing. By telling this new Nanabush story in her novel, McBride contributes to keeping the stories viable. According to Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence W. Gross, “variant versions and readings [of the Nanabush stories] can be seen as a sign of continuing cultural sovereignty. This is especially indicated by new myths and new presentations of old myths in the modern period” (250). Knowledge of the language is a prerequisite for storytelling. As McBride explains in the interview with Rogers when asked about her use of Anishinaabemowin in the novel — the book includes a glossary of approximately sixty words — Anishinaabemowin is instrumental in reclaiming the connection to culture: “[I]t needs to be seen, and it needs to be heard” (“Why”).

20 The texts that I have discussed in this essay take an Anishinaabecentred approach to language revitalization since it is intricately connected to a return to Anishinaabe stories, traditions, and ceremonies as a path to resurgence. The first chapter of Crow Winter, “Homecoming,” opens with Hazel’s musings about the nature of the trickster/transformer who suddenly appears in her life: “I always thought it would be Raven” (3). But then she asserts that neither Raven, “who found the first People on the beaches of the West Coast (3),¹⁸ nor the Cree Wisakedjak belongs to Spirit Bear Point. “Anishnaabeg call him something else”: Nanabush (4). She wonders why Nanabush — with his contradictory qualities of one moment being teacher and spirit guide and the next moment playing the fool — had come to her: “[H]e’s looking for a chance to rewrite his history” (5). The texts that I have analyzed here discuss this kind of transformation and resurgence from within Anishinaabe cultural paradigms with an emphasis on “a re-emergence, an unfolding from the inside out” (Simpson 17). They go beyond what Simpson refers to as “cultural” resurgence by addressing issues of Indigenous title and the need for Indigenous Peoples in general, and Anishinaabeg in particular, to reclaim stewardship of their own lands. They do so by paying respect to ancestors, literary and otherwise, and by emphasizing the importance of language revitalization.