SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice

 

Moon of the Turning Leaves is the stand alone sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, an earlier short novel by Waubgeshig Rice. That novel featured a post-apocalypse world where all electricity and communications devices went out and focused upon an Anishinaabe community who had to come together to survive in a dangerous winter, utilizing their old almost forgotten customs and facing hostilities from white interlopers who have their own more greedy ideas about how to survive. It was a really effective short novel.

Moon of the Turning Leaves is stand alone and takes place years later, when the community has been settled for a generation but is now suddenly realizing that the natural food supplies of fish and game in the area are running low. And so we have the story of a scouting party led by prior book protagonist Evan and his teenage daughter Nangohns, who is the village's best hunter and has known almost nothing but the Anishinaabe way of life that their village has promoted, as they search to see what else is out there and if their people's old homeland might still be suitable for them to relocate. None of the story that results will be that surprising to readers or feels that original and yet it is very well told and infused with the Anishanabe culture of the author and the characters, so it's well worth reading.
Plot Summary:  

Twelve years have passed since a massive power and communications failure, seemingly on a global scale, cut off a community of Anishinaabe people in Northern Ontario from the rest of society. During those years, they have leaned into their old culture and relearned their ways, and after that rocky first winter, they have thrived and allowed a new generation to start to be born in the place they now call Shki-dnakiiwin. For Evan Whitesky, who helped lead his people through the conflict in that first winter, it has resulted in him seeing his teenage daughter Nangohns grow up to become a wonderful hunter steeped in their heritage the way he wished might've grown up and in seeing the birth of his grandchild.

But Evan and Nangohns can see that natural food sources - game and fish - in Shki-dnakiiwin are becoming less and less fruitful and that staying there for too much longer may not be an option. And so the two, along with four others, are chosen for a scouting party to see what's rest of the world...and to see if their old ancestral homeland might be ready for them to come back. But others sent out on similar scouting missions in the past have never returned and the group will soon find out that what's left in the post-electrical lands of Canada are full of potentially hostile men: men who are racist and greedy and aren't quite willing to let indigenous people like them return to their old home.....

Moon of the Crusted Snow was an excellent book of an indigenous community - an Anishinaabe community (an indigenous people originally from the Great Lakes adjacent regions of Canada) - coming together in the face of a post apocalyptic disaster to rely upon traditional practices to survive and thrive.  It also featured that community running up against White interlopers, one of whom essentially becomes the antagonist of the novel as he tries to take control with his greedy power-hungry and selfish ways.  This was kind of predictable in how it played out to some extent, but it worked because it fit the history of how White people and indigenous communities have interacted (and the imperial/colonial ways of the former) and Rice really wrote the Anishinaabe soul of the community and its protagonists really well. 

Something similar happens with Moon of the Turning Leaves.  As you might imagine, the main characters here - Evan and Nangohns, plus the other four less prominent members of the scouting party - run into both indigenous and White peoples out there in what used to be Canadian civilization, and the way that the White people act: particularly a group who has responded to the loss of electricity by forming a racist militia.  It's nothing you wouldn't expect or have seen before, really, and I was almost waiting for it to come to pass sooner than it did (it takes a long long while) in the book.  

And yet, that doesn't take away from the effectiveness of this novel, as it describes the world that the protagonists explore from their Anishinaabe perspectives, shows them interacting with each other, with nature, and with other indigenous peoples they come across in their journey.  This is especially demonstrated by the two different generations who form the protagonists of this novel: Evan, who remembers still the world before and the trauma that first winter in the last book inflicted before they survived and came together to form their current community, and Nangohns, who was only a few years old and barely remembers any of it and is really someone who was born in this new world.  So the exploration of the world comes from someone who has always been enveloped in Anishinaabe culture, and in some ways is naive because of it (although that naivete never really leads her to do anything dumb thankfully, this is not that kind of book), and someone who remembers the worse times before the apocalypse.  And this combination of perspectives really works.  

So yeah, this is a very effective novel using its post apocalyptic setting to show the perspective of its Anishinaabe perspective, just like its predecessor.  Well worth your time.