124 pages • 4 hours read
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Valentine breaks up with Barnes, and he goes home to listen to an opera record.
Patrice is the only one allowed in Thomas’s hospital room since she is a relative. She speaks in her mother’s language as he sleeps. Eventually, she goes with Millie to her apartment to get some rest. While they talk, Patrice asks if she has a boyfriend. Millie says no and asks her the same question. Patrice says that she’s been thinking of Wood Mountain, and Millie says she’s beautiful but doesn’t really understand why.
Patrice then suggests that she adopt Millie once Vera returns. Millie agrees, but, for some reason, she feels “unsettled and left wanting by what Patrice had offered. It was as if a marvelous design had flashed before her, and disintegrated, before she could grasp the figures it conveyed” (415).
Thomas drifts in and out of consciousness. As he dreams, he thinks of how Patrice swam to his boat after her encounter with Bucky. He knows what happened and would have beaten up the boy if Bucky’s face had not physically changed due to an unknown condition.
He feels like he is in the bottom of a well, remembering his time digging one on the reservation. He was terrified when he dug. Now, he feels unafraid because “[n]othing could harm him” (421).
Patrice asks Millie how to become a lawyer.
That night, she wonders how she will know if she loves Wood Mountain. She thinks that she will be able to figure it out once Vera returns, a belief she has not once questioned. In a moment of doubt, she worries, but as she looks out the window, she feels like the world is telling her that Vera is alive.
Vernon tells Elnath that he is done with Grace. Later, they try again to convert LaBatte, whose personality contrasts what they were told about Indigenous people, that they “were teachable, meek, open in their hearts” (425). After he refuses them, they start to walk to the next town, and Louis gives them a ride.
Louis picks up Thomas, Patrice, and Millie from the Cities. Thomas tells him about how he saw a flock of snowy owls as he was falling from his stroke and believes they kept him safe. Louis tells him that LaBatte took his shifts at the factory until an owl scared him away. Now, LaBatte has been going to church every day.
Thomas says that he misses the owl that “nested in the barn bones of the roof,” forgetting the word “rafters” (428).
Wood Mountain comes to see the baby, who he greets as “Archille.” Vera tells him that the baby’s name is Thomas. When she picks the baby up from where he is playing with the adult Thomas, he tries to get back to Wood Mountain, who notices how beautiful Vera is. They each recognize that they named the baby for someone important to them. He continues to visit, most often while Patrice is gone. Sometimes Vera calls the baby Archille.
Patrice understands what’s happening, and when Wood Mountain comes to talk to her about it. She isn’t upset, saying that she sensed that they both love the baby in the same way. After their conversation, she feels lighter, knowing that “[s]he would embrace anyone and anything that could help put together Vera’s demolished heart” (432).
Millie is typing up a master copy of Thomas’s report for the tribe and then makes copies of it using the duplicator. With each copy, a spirit of someone who signed the first Turtle Mountain census is released.
Once she finishes, she asks Juggie if she heard voices, who replies that “They’re looking after us. […] Those dancing spirits” (434).
The women of the jewel bearing plant have signed a petition to get their coffee break back, and Valentine agrees to present it.
On the way home, Patrice thinks about asking for a raise, especially now that she has a family of four to support. Wood Mountain takes a job driving school buses. He will marry Vera, and they will work on the cabin. Millie has received a grant and wants to pay Zhaanat for her help with her study. The money will help Patrice go back to school.
Together, Patrice and Zhaanat toast the birch sap the latter has drawn.
Roderick missed the train back home but found other Indigenous ghosts, many of whom had come to Washington for the same reason that the Turtle Mountain delegation had. He finally has company.
At work, Thomas follows his normal routine and writes cards, signing as “the muskrat” with a small image of one drawn below. He doodles more, sometimes having trouble finding the word he’s looking for because of his stroke. He worries that the fight against termination had cost him his mind.
As he dreams, he sees muskrats, prairies, and grass. When he awakes, he eats, returns to his letters, and makes his last round of the night.
Erdrich switches to a historical account here, noting that “[t]he Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was not terminated” (444). She also notes that her grandfather recovered from his stroke, wrote a history of the Turtle Mountain Band, advocated for improvements to the reservation school system, and created a Turtle Mountain Constitution. He retired from the jewel bearing plant in 1970.
In 1955, the woman of the jewel bearing plant tried to unionize, but this ultimately failed. However, there were pay increases and workers got their coffee break back.
The final chapters offer some resolution for each of the characters, though Thomas will long feel the lasting effects of his stroke.
Patrice she continues to put her family first by encouraging Wood Mountain to pursue Vera. However, her conversations with Millie also offer her a way of doing something for herself. Through Millie, she learns about going to college. Mille’s grant (used to pay Zhaanat) also relieves Patrice of some of the financial burden. Patrice has grown to and through adulthood in the novel, and it seems that she will finally be able to do something for herself. Her connectedness with the earth persists through the end, when she listens to the trees and feels herself “sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud” (439).
Roderick also finds resolution in staying in Washington, DC., where he finds a new community of Indigenous spirits with whom he can stay. This offers him some final peace after the trauma of his experience in boarding school. It also demonstrates the many ways that Indigenous peoples have been harmed by the federal government killed because so many linger in the nation’s capital.
Erdrich ends the book on a historical note, emphasizing that the struggles faced by the characters in the book, while not entirely factual, are also not entirely fictional either. Erdrich’s grandfather won victory in defeating House Concurrent Resolution 108. The workers of the jewel bearing plant too resisted, gaining a pay raise and their coffee break back. This historical information helps highlight the struggle for survival that Indigenous peoples continue to face.
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