Motorcycles and Sweetgrass

Two Anishnawbe youths, a boy and a girl, swim naked in a pristine lake. The boy, who is Nanabush, the Anishnawbe trickster god, frightens the girl by diving and holding his breath longer than she thinks he can. When she dives, looking for him, they come up laughing. The boy criticizes her willingness to attend a Catholic residential school. As he puts it, she is leaving him for some strange man named Jesus. Because she won’t promise to stay with him, the boy dives under the water and disappears. The following day, “the girl went to school” (7).

Once at the residential school, the Anishnawbe girl must change her name to Lillian. She may not speak her first language or mingle with other children without permission. The second night she is there, she and another girl are told not to have fun: “Stop that laughing—it is rude and not acceptable in a house of God such as this” (10). Lillian learns that her cousin Sammy, who continually gets in trouble at the school, is isolated in the punishment shed—put there by a vicious priest. She finds him memorizing Shakespearean soliloquies. Sammy conceals the fact that he is very bright. He tells Lillian he will run away, and they have a lengthy debate about whether the school is good or bad.