My Grandfathers Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation Ojibwe Their letters

Their letters

Combining Zitkála-Sá's childhood memories

each chapter draws on a range of voices to limn its tales

Louise Erdrich—winner of the 2012 National Book Award and a writer of astonishing insight and skill—discovers the universal within the particular moment and gives full-bodied expression to that most common and yet most mysterious of all human tasks: the passing on of life

the story's main character

My Grandfathers Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation Ojibwe Their lettersWhen Ojibwe historian Brenda Child uncovered the Bureau of Indian Affairs file on her grandparents, it was an eye opening experience. The correspondence, full of incendiary comments on their morals and character, demonstrated the breathtakingly intrusive power of federal agents in the early twentieth century. While telling her own familys stories from the Red Lake Reservation, as well as stories of Ojibwe people around the Great Lakes, Child examines