By Louise Erdrich
A full year with Omakayas, a seven-year-old Ojibwe girl on an island in Lake Superior in 1847, from the summer she helps build the birchbark house to the winter a sick stranger brings smallpox to her family.
Omakayas is seven. She lives on an island in Lake Superior with her grandmother Nokomis, her older sister Angeline (beautiful and maddening in equal parts), her little brother Pinch who ruins everything, and the baby, Neewo, who she carries everywhere and loves best of anyone. The story follows one whole year and it is in no hurry: peeling birchbark for the summer house, a crow who learns to talk, a close call with a mother bear and her cubs, Old Tallow with her pack of dogs and her knife, bringing in the corn, the move to the winter cabin. Then a stranger walks into the winter camp sick and dies, smallpox moves through the family, and everything the book has spent two hundred pages making you love is suddenly in danger. And Omakayas finds out why she is the one who never falls ill.
This is the pioneer story turned around to face the other way. A child who has read the Little House books has spent hours inside a settler family who see the land as empty and the Ojibwe as something to fear at the edge of the firelight. This is the same decade in the same part of the country, told from inside the family who were already living there, and Erdrich wrote it on purpose as that other view. What keeps it from feeling like a lesson is that it never argues. It is just Omakayas's year, and she is a real, slightly maddening seven-year-old with a sister she envies, and the everyday Ojibwe life around her — how a house goes up, how the corn comes in — is shown so patiently that your child stops watching a culture and settles into a home. By the last quarter, that ordinary home is the thing you are afraid of losing.