delphi | (Reply)

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No kidding, what a small world! A part of my family is Anishinaabe—some branches of Ojibwe, but mostly Algonquin. I found myself thinking about my grandmother a lot while I was reading this. She would have been more in Ma-Nee's mother's generation, but she was the one in our family who made a similar transition from a more traditional childhood in an area where multiple peoples met to living in a small northern city as adult. For a long time, she firmly did not talk about her youth, but she started to share more stories in bits and pieces as she got older, and I've always wished I'd been able to ask her better questions and invited her to share more if she wanted to (but I was a dumb teenager and we were living in separate parts of the province by ten).

The book—and the explanation in the afterword about how much time and special organization it took to tell these stories, even for someone who'd been meaning to write a memoir for a long time—really got me thinking about how to be a better listener for the elders in my life, and how to make more space for storytelling.