Bois Forte Band of Chippewa

We clothed the royals. We fed the worker. We guided the traveler. We abetted the soldier. We are not afraid to love. So begins Carl Gawboy's groundbreaking graphic history of the Fur Trade Era. From 1650 to 1850, the Ojibwe Nation was the epicenter of the first global trading network. Trade goods from Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America flowed into the Great Lakes region, floating along Ojibwe waterways in birchbark canoes paddled by mixed-race Voyageurs. Gawboy offers a fresh perspective on the fur trade era, placing Ojibwe technology, kinship systems, cultural paradigms, and women at the heart of this remarkable era, where they have always belonged.

Additional Information
202 pages | 8.25" x 11.00" | Hardcover 

A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history.

When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know—and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.

Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial—at once figurative and painfully real—of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget.

As the past returns to haunt those involved, Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family’s land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor—much as Grover spins another tale of Mozhay Point, weaving together an intimate and complex novel of a place and its people.

Reviews
"A sprawling, poignant chronicle of struggle and survivance."—Kirkus Reviews

"With its powerful, atmospheric descriptions of the natural world, A Song over Miskwaa Rapids resembles an Indigenous family saga in miniature, couching memory and mystery in a potent spirit world."—Foreword Reviews

Additional Information
128 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | Hardcover

Award-winning author Linda LeGarde Grover interweaves family and Ojibwe history with stories from Misaabekong (the place of the giants) on Lake Superior.

Long before there was a Duluth, Minnesota, the massive outcropping that divides the city emerged from the ridge of gabbro rock running along the westward shore of Lake Superior. A great westward migration carried the Ojibwe people to this place, the Point of Rocks. Against this backdrop—Misaabekong, the place of the giants—the lives chronicled in Linda LeGarde Grover’s book unfold, some in myth, some in long-ago times, some in an imagined present, and some in the author’s family history, all with a deep and tenacious bond to the land, one another, and the Ojibwe culture.

Within the larger history, Grover tells the story of her ancestors’ arrival at the American Fur Post in far western Duluth more than two hundred years ago. Their fortunes and the family’s future are inextricably entwined with tales of marriages to voyageurs, relocations to reservation lands, encounters with the spirits of the lake and wood creatures, the renewal of life—in myth and in art, the search for meaning in the transformations of our day is always vital. Finally, in one man’s struggles, age-old tribulations, the intergenerational traumas of extended families and communities, and a uniquely Ojibwe appreciation for the natural and spiritual worlds converge, forging the Ojibwe worldview and will to survive as his legacy to his descendants.

Blending the seen and unseen, the old and the new, the amusing and the tragic and the hauntingly familiar, this lyrical work encapsulates a way of life forever vibrant at the Point of Rocks.

Reviews
"With compelling stories of sacred places, beloved people, myths, legends, and treasured memories, Gichigami Hearts is a moving tribute to the Ojibwe past."— Carolyn Holbrook, author of Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify

"With stories of the essence of land and people, Linda LeGarde Grover weaves a generational history of a sacredness inseparable from place, of the unbroken chain of Anishinaabe existence in Missabekong. Her powerful prose and ethereal poetry wash over the pages like waves along the shore of Lake Superior, revealing a strength of survival that goes beyond memory and reminding us to watch, listen, and breathe."—Gwen Westerman, Minnesota State University, Mankato

"In Linda LeGarde Grover’s Gichigami Hearts, we are given the gift of an intensely personal, and at the same time brilliant, walkthrough of Grover’s part of the Anishinaabe universe. Just a tremendously lovely and unique book."—Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse

Educator Information
Contents

Part I. Point of Rocks

Gabbro

An Old Story

Bimosewin: From the Bethel to the Union Gospel Mission

From the Rocks to the Docks

Anishinaabe Relatives and Holy Places

Grandparents

Life Among the Italians

The Beanbag

Rain, Fog, Ghost, Spider

Part II. Gichigami Hearts

Waawaashkeshi

Mooz

Lake Hearts

Lake Spirits

Sea Smoke on Gichigami

Barney-enjiss

The Stone Tomahawk

Part III. Rabbits in Wintertime

Listening and Remembering By Heart

Rabbits in the Snow

Niizh Odain: The Wolf and the Rabbit

The Harbor: Nanaboozhoo’s Brothers of the Heart

Woods Lovely, Dark, and Deep

Rabbits Watching Over Onigamiising

Part IV. Traveling Song

The End and Renewal of the Earth

Redemption

Mishomis

Grandfather-iban Gi-bimose

Places Remembered, Though Some Have Changed

Homeland

Traveling Song

Acknowledgments

Additional Information
200 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 8 Black and white illustrations | Paperback