Little Wigwam on the Lake: The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence by Louise Erdrich

Insightful reviewers have likened Louise Erdrich's novels of an Ojibwe family in the mid-1800's to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, and for good reason. Both document life on the developing frontier in the upper mid-West, with detailed descriptions of the tasks and tools of daily life, the warmth and demands of family relationships, soft, evocative pencil drawings, the hardships of life in a harsh environment, and the push and pull of living near the "other" people of the frontier. For Laura Ingalls, it is the Indians who frighten and fascinate, and for Omakayas it is the chimookomonag, the white settlers who threaten the bond to their land.

In her first book, The Birchbark House, Erdrich introduces Omakayas, a seven-year-old Ojibwe girl living on the shores of Lake Superior in 1847. Omakayas has strong parents, an older sister who is beautiful, sometimes kind and sometimes belittling of her tag-along little sister, a thoroughly annoying little brother, Pinch, and a baby brother, Neewo, which she loves deeply. Omakayas is loved and taught by her kindly grandmother Nokomis and her cousins and aunt.

As the family moves from fishing camp to rice camp to winter cabin, Omakayas observes matter-of-factly the increasing encroachment of the white settlers nearby. When the settler's small pox epidemic reaches Omakayas's group, she and her family hover near death, and Omakayas is saved by the attention of a solitary woman, Old Tallow, who takes her apart and nurses her to health. Although most of her family live, Omakayas' beloved baby brother Neewo dies. Before the family can deal with their grief, a bitter winter almost kills the weakened people by starvation. At last spring comes and with it healing and hope:

Omakayas...closed her eyes and smiled as the song of the white-throated sparrow sang again and again through the air like a shining needle, and sewed up her broken heart.

In the sequel, The Game of Silence the family is camped in their summer birchbark house when a raggedy, starving group of Ojibwe approach the island in waterlogged canoes, bearing the news that their entire tribe is soon to be removed into the lands held by their feared Lakota and Dakota enemies. As the strongest men of Omakayas' clan set forth to find out their fate, the family waits though summer and fall to learn the nature of their future.

Eventually, the travellers return with word that the people must indeed leave their ancestral home and make their way into the western lands allotted to them by the settlers. Heavy-hearted with sadness, Omakayas goes out to the forest to seek her spirit helper who sends a dream vision of her life to come in the new land in the West. Omakayas resolves not to look back as their canoes enter the unknown river that takes them out of sight of their old home:

The children bit their lips and held their tongues, for they all understood...that the game of silence was now a game of life and death.

Omakayas gazed into the crush of green. Here, after all, was not only danger but possibility. Here was adventure. Here was the next life they would live together on the earth.

As Laura left each homeplace behind to take her seat in the Ingalls' wagon, so does Omakayas turn her face toward a new life to the west. Both series tell a vital part of the story of our people from the clear eyes and with the true voice of two young girls of their time.