Evan dreams of his children, all grown up and living on the land once again. At home, Evan's young children discover that they don't need the television to pass the time suddenly they are more excited, curious, and fulfilled than ever.

If the Anishinaabe on the reserve are to survive the winter, they'll need to rely on traditional ways of hunting and trapping. But for Rice, and for Evan, the end of the world offers an opportunity also. The elder in the passage above makes that explicit: our world ended, she says, when white Europeans destroyed the land and forced us northward. Who said that indigenous people have already experienced all the things we are afraid of when we write post-apocalyptic fiction? Pandemic, exile, violence, genocide, disappearance. The Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) on the reserve are suddenly an outpost of civilization in a world where civilization has disappeared. But when a pair of local boys who've been away studying in college arrive with stories of looting, violence, and social dissolution, everyone realizes this is more than a temporary outage. When the power goes out, he's a little annoyed, but used to it: living so far away, the tribal council is more than prepared to survive a few weeks, perhaps even the whole winter, without internet, without television, without food shipments from the south. We learned to live out here.'Įvan Whitesky is an Anishinaabe man living on a reserve in Ontario's far north with his wife and children.

This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already know how to hunt and live on the land. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that's when our world ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders anyway.'Įvan nodded, giving the elder his full attention. I can tell you there's no word like that in Ojibwe.

Moon crusted snow