Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention.
"The world isn't ending," she went on. "Our world isn't ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. 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. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already know how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live out here."
Evan Whitesky is an Anishinaabe man living on a reserve in Ontario's far north with his wife and children. 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. 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. The Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) on the reserve are suddenly an outpost of civilization in a world where civilization has disappeared.
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 elder in the passage above makes that explicit: our world ended, she says, when white Europeans destroyed the land and forced us northward. But for Rice, and for Evan, the end of the world offers an opportunity also. If the Anishinaabe on the reserve are to survive the winter, they'll need to rely on traditional ways of hunting and trapping. 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. Evan dreams of his children, all grown up and living on the land once again. Moon of the Crusted Snow inverts the old historical tale; here, the end of the white world means rebirth for the Anishinaabe.
Into this promise comes a white man, Scott, looking for refuge from the world to the south--although you would think he'd be safe enough with the number of guns he's carrying. (Why don't they demand he give up his guns in exchange for safe passage?) Scott is brash, cocky, not entirely realistic, but he does animate the novel in a way it badly needs. He's a representation of white violence and greed; although he promises to pitch in by hunting and trapping, he makes vague and insidious threats about finding other ways to keep from starving, threats we understand to be suggestions of cannibalism. Evan dreams of him as a horrible, black-eyed monster, as the Wendigo. Can one white interloper ruin the promise of the Anishinaabe's rebirth?
Moon of the Crusted Snow offers a compelling vision of the "apocalypse." I don't take any joy in saying it, but I wish the writing were better. To work, the novel needs to show in vivid, real-seeming detail how the Anishinaabe are different from their white neighbors to the south, but instead there are a lot of paragraphs like this one:
Despite the hardship and tragedy that made up a significant part of this First Nation's legacy, the Anishinaabe spirit of community generally prevailed. There was no panic on the night of the first blizzard, although there had been confusion in the days leading up to it. Survival had always been an integral part of their culture. It was their history. The skills they needed to persevere in this norther terrain, far from their original homeland farther south, were proud knowledge held close through the decades of imposed adversity. They were handed down to those in the next generation willing to learn. Each winter marked another milestone.
Too much of the novel seems like pamphletese, a primer on Anishinaabe life that says nothing of real substance because its primary function is not mimesis but public relations. What's the use of a paragraph like this one, when the novel opens with a patient, plainspoken description of Evan stalking and killing a moose? Those paragraphs say all the one above says and much more, and I wish the book had had more like them.
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