“Noopiming”

 

Noopiming  is a book about many things. It’s more like a collection of poems than a novel, but it also has characters — vivid characters — and social history about the life of Native Americans in Canada, both rural and urban. Here’s a wonderful passage about birds:

“It is a place where birds congregate because there is no other place left. There are more than three hundred species there and so it is well known by ornithologists and birdwatchers, and in the fall and spring the migrating songbirds and shore birds stop on their way to something better. … Asin watches the boreal owl hunt for voles at dusk, and then Asin rides back to their apartment. The boreal owl is antisocial and nocturnal, like Asin. They are a sit-and-wait predator the size of a robin. They sit fifteen to twenty feet above the ground in trees, close to the trunk. The summer is their breeding season. While there are considerably fewer species of birds than there used to be, birds are still engaged in the building blocks of their nation, and they work to reproduce not just their bodies, but all the structures, behaviours and beliefs that enable large-scale survival. There are large-ish colonies of double-crested cormorants and black-crowned night-herons. Asin does not have a life list of birds they have seen, because unlike most other birders, that’s not why Asin is here.“ (pp 110-113)

Boreal owls (from google)

Of course there are lots of passages about food as well. Here is one of my favorites: 

“In the spring, Adik, Akiwenzii and Sabe ate duck and turtle eggs. In the summer, they picked buckets full of berries, tended the garden and fished. In the fall, they were the busiest. They riced. They harvested the garden and cached it away for later. They hunted ducks and geese. They hunted deer and moose, dried meat and tanned hides.” (p 178)

This is an unconventional book. so I can’t write a conventional review. I checked, the reviewers at the time the book was published didn’t do it justice, in my opinion. It’s hard to read, but it’s worth the effort.