WIIJIWAAGANAG: More Than Brothers, a "what-might-have-been" tale of life in a residential school

WIIJIWAAGANAG: More Than Brothers
PETER RAZOR
Makwa Enewed
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Niizh Eshkanag is a member of the first generation of Anishinaabe children required to attend a U.S. government boarding school—schools infamously intended to “kill the Indian and save the man,” or forcibly assimilate Native students into white culture. At the Yardley Indian Boarding School in northern Minnesota, far from his family, Niizh Eshkanag endures abuse from the school staff and is punished for speaking his native language.

After his family moves him to a school that is marginally better, he meets Roger Poznanski, the principal’s white nephew, who arrives to live with his uncle’s family and attend the school. Though Roger is frightened of his Indian classmates at first, Niizh Eshkanag befriends him, and they come to appreciate and respect one another’s differences. When a younger Anishinaabe student runs away into a winter storm after being beaten by a school employee, Niizh Eshkanag and Roger join forces to rescue him, beginning an adventure that change their lives and the way settlers, immigrants and the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes think about each other and their shared future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a lot to be said for reliving one's past...only better. The late Peter Razor (While the Locust Slept, 2002) was a former inmate of the successor institution to the Residential Schools. He had skin in this game and he was not going to sit quiet while the world kept not knowing what really happened to boys like him.

Having written a very powerful memoir (it's Kindleable for under $10!) he turned, as many elders will, to making his past a better place than it actually was. Only difference is, he wrote fiction instead of telling tales. He's aimed the resulting fantasy retelling of the past at young adults, wisely, and was in the process of writing it when he died at 90. His family have completed and edited the book, and retained his use of his native tongue and included for the white people an Ojibwemowin-English glossary at the end of the book. As there is no real issue with understanding most of what is said in either language, I'd say it's a feature more useful for completists who would like to gain a sense of the Ojibwemowin language's bones.

That said, I know many readers find it very difficult to immerse themselves in the story if a not-English language is present. Understand that is where you're headed, then, and decide to come on the trip or not. It is a trip...the two boys, Niizh and Roger, go on a quest to find a younger student who ran away from the school after a beating delivered by a staff member.

The hijinks that ensue aren't belief-stretching, what with white people having collywobbles that this Indian is in company with a white child! shockhorror! and so on and so forth. It's a YA story, aimed that way, so it's no surprise to anyone that the results are all good, the mean people who beat the one child are sad and redeemed of their cruel, cruel ways, that kind of thing.

I did not read this book for its story. I read it for its heart. A man whose early life was truly, tragically scarring wrote a lovely revamp of his experience of the world, extending it to the future with a smile and a tear. "It can be better, it should be this way not how it was...not ever again," says this story in its very existence. And that being a message I agree with completely, and support entirely, I wanted to read the story from someone whose standing to tell it is impeccable.

What Author Razor did not have was a writer's experience. It's not a knock against him. He had no reason to develop such a talent through practice and skill-learning. And exactly how would he have done that? So it's not a question of "come back when you're more practiced at your craft," it's a fact of life: The story, as told, has little suspense and not a lot of finesse.

Those are not reasons to pick it up. Learning what a Native American of the Anishinaabe people thought of his childhood, and what by extension others should learn from those shared feelings, those are reasons to pick up the book. Hearing, in your mind's ear, the cadences of the not-English language, and learning its broad outlines. Understanding the pain and the injustice inflicted on an official Government policy of "kill the Indian, save the man," and reckoning with the diseased thinking that could come up with such flimsy lies to cover the real purpose of assimilation. These are the reasons to pick up the book, and to gift it to early teenagers whose world-views are even now hardening. We can not afford to perpetuate the divisions that capitalism instils to ensure its profits. The world is in a genuine, verging on existential, crisis and we need each and every mind, eye, and hand operating at peak capacity to avoid horrific disaster.