This loss and the experience of violence mark each character forever. They are also decisive stories about loss, trauma, and survival, in which each character loses what is most important to them. There are narratives about how each character escaped persecutors and came to live in the bush with the rest of the group. Throughout the novel, the main characters share what are called coming-to stories. As Chi-Boy remarks: “Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to live it.” Coming-to Stories (Motif) Even if Minerva does not get the opportunity to see this future, she is nourishing this hope for future generations. They also symbolize the hope of a future in which they will once again be able to fully practice their culture and to dance and make noise joyfully. Yet Minerva made the jingles to hold on to her beloved culture. But in their present situation, the only way to survive is to remain as silent as possible.

These jingles used to hang from women’s dresses to make noise during powwows.

When the Recruiters take Minerva, the group finds improvised jingles that Minerva made from can lids. As a result of his respectful decision, Frenchie “gets” the moose in a different way, since the animal visits him in his dreams, perhaps to share insights. In so doing, he chooses to be different from those-like the Recruiters-who extract resources from the land and from Native peoples in a short-sighted, destructive manner.

He chooses to respect nature rather than waste its resources. Frenchie feels it would be unjust to kill this grand animal only to waste a large portion of its meat. Braiding becomes a powerful symbol of the desperate effort to preserve their lineage, as Frenchie says that he braids his hair to “remind myself of things I couldn’t quite remember, but that, nevertheless, I knew to be true.' The Moose (Symbol)Įven though Frenchie decides not to kill the moose, “n a way, I got that moose” because “e visited me in my dreams.” In this way, the moose comes to symbolize a respectful relationship with nature. One way they attempt to do this is by braiding their hair as their ancestors did. Frenchie and his peers long to connect with the cultural identity that most of them have lost.

French braid summary