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A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history—now available in paperback
 

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.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Award-winning author Linda LeGarde Grover interweaves family and Ojibwe history with stories from Misaabekong (the place of the giants) on Lake Superior

Long before there was a Duluth, Minnesota, the massive outcropping that divides the city emerged from the ridge of gabbro rock running along the westward shore of Lake Superior. A great westward migration carried the Ojibwe people to this place, the Point of Rocks. Against this backdrop—Misaabekong, the place of the giants—the lives chronicled in Linda LeGarde Grover’s book unfold, some in myth, some in long-ago times, some in an imagined present, and some in the author’s family history, all with a deep and tenacious bond to the land, one another, and the Ojibwe culture.

Within the larger history, Grover tells the story of her ancestors’ arrival at the American Fur Post in far western Duluth more than two hundred years ago. Their fortunes and the family’s future are inextricably entwined with tales of marriages to voyageurs, relocations to reservation lands, encounters with the spirits of the lake and wood creatures, the renewal of life—in myth and in art, the search for meaning in the transformations of our day is always vital. Finally, in one man’s struggles, age-old tribulations, the intergenerational traumas of extended families and communities, and a uniquely Ojibwe appreciation for the natural and spiritual worlds converge, forging the Ojibwe worldview and will to survive as his legacy to his descendants.

Blending the seen and unseen, the old and the new, the amusing and the tragic and the hauntingly familiar, this lyrical work encapsulates a way of life forever vibrant at the Point of Rocks.

A collective memoir in poetry of an Ojibwe family and tribal community, from creation myth to this day, updated with new poems
 

Reaching from the moment of creation to the cry of a newborn, The Sky Watched gives poetic voice to Ojibwe family life. In English and Ojibwe, those assembled here—voices of history, of memory and experience, of children and elders, Indian boarding school students, tribal storytellers, and the Manidoog, the unseen beings who surround our lives—come together to create a collective memoir in poetry as expansive and particular as the starry sky.

This world unfolds in the manner of traditional Ojibwe storytelling, shaped by the seasons and the stages of life, marking the significance of the number four in the Ojibwe worldview. Summoning spiritual and natural lore, award-winning poet and scholar Linda LeGarde Grover follows the story of a family, a tribe, and a people through historical ruptures and through intimate troubles and joys—from the sundering of Ojibwe people from their land and culture to singular horrors like the massacre at Wounded Knee to personal trauma suffered at Indian boarding schools. Threaded throughout are the tribal traditions and knowledge that sustain a family and a people through hardship and turmoil, passed from generation to generation, coming together in the manifold power and beauty of the poet’s voice.