A Song over Miskwaa Rapids: A Novel

by Linda LeGarde Grover

Overview

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.

 

 

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517914622
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	417,548
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Beginning with her award-winning debut story collection The Dance Boots and continuing with her novels The Road Back to Sweetgrass and In the Night of Memory, both published by Minnesota, Linda LeGarde Grover has created and explored the imaginary Mozhay Point Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota. She also wrote the poetry collection The Sky Watched and a book blending memoir, history, and Ojibwe tradition, Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong. She is professor emerita of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe.

Table of Contents

Contents

Niijiwag gaye Indinawemaaganag

Waking Song

Part I. Naanoomaya, 2022

Half-Dime Hill

The Scattering

Part II. Mewinzhaa, 1972

The Dionne Fork

Bekaa Boweting

The Etienne Store

Part III. Noongoom, 2022

The LaForce Allotment

Ishpiming (Heaven)

Opiichii Nagamo Minawaa

Editorial 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

 

From the Publisher

2023-08-26
Past and present collide and conspire in the northern Midwest.

In her third novel, Grover elaborates a narrative world involving multiple families rooted in Mozhay Point, a fictive Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota. The protagonists include Margie Robineau, who struggles to defend Sweetgrass, her family’s land allotment, from developers; Michael Washington, a tribal council member whose political fortunes are imperiled by the chance discovery of a moldy corpse; Dale Ann Dionne Minogeezhik, who has lived for decades with the burden of losing a child and failing to prevent her former lover’s death; and a group of mindimooyenyag-iban, the spirits of female elders who watch and occasionally intervene in the unfolding action. The book shifts between the present and decisive events a half-century earlier, revealing communities haunted by trauma yet sustained by ancestral connections. The past’s definitive power in the lives of individuals is skillfully rendered here, and the plot moves briskly and suspensefully toward its climax. Like many of the novels of Louise Erdrich, an obvious influence, this work generates much of its aesthetic force from the gradual revelation of its characters’ complex relations. Particularly effective are the interplay between the spirit elders and the living and the ultimate disclosure of the circumstances behind a young man’s ill-fated attempt to escape the misery he has created for himself and others. An elegant circularity in the storytelling reinforces a sense of historical spirals and the inevitable imbrication of all personal and communal fates. We encounter here, finally, a rich sketch of the endurance and achievements of the Aandakii Anishinaabeg, “the original, good people who had been created by the Great Spirit and gently lowered to the Earth. And then displaced to live elsewhere.”

A sprawling, poignant chronicle of struggle and survivance.

Kirkus Reviews