Motorcycles and Sweetgrass

I must say I was apprehensive when I picked this book up from the library. I was not sure about the brand of humor hidden within it's pages. In cases where I am doubtful, I usually trust my gut.

This has turned into a great library pick-up by all accounts. I was in a vague mood. Both depressed and disillusioned. This book drew me in with the mystery and magic it dished out in equal measure, both  inflicted like a ripple that spread through me and burst forth flood fresh, with the insight that it brought me of the fictional Anishnawbe community, Otter Lake community.

Maggie is the Chief who is unhappy in her current position, and Virgil her juvenile delinquent son unhappy with school. Lillian the recently departed grandmother heralds the arrival of John of the ever changing surnames.

It marks subtly and with humor the fallacies that reservations face in the education of their children, the fast fading culture of Native Indian language as presented by Virgil's lack of understanding of the Anishnawbe language. His human apprehensions of John, are of someone who might take his mother away from him.

I love the initiation of John in the novel, his arrival on the big Red Indian Chief Motorcycle.

He is given the nuance of a mystery man, he rides into the story, rumbles in and draws together the caricature of an entity half man, half devil, half playful, half destructive, and lingers in that green space between myth and reality.

Is he a Nanabush a Trickster, out to wreck mischief in their lives.

As Virgil sees it he needs help, this stranger unsettles him, he looks for help from an even stranger character than John, his uncle Maggie's brother, and grandmother Lillian's favorite offspring Wayne. This is someone I could easily relate to Wayne, he was someone I would love to be at this juncture in my life, someone on an island by himself, learning, and understanding the truths of this life.

There is a sentence in the book where Wayne wishes that he should have attend his mother's funeral, but consoles himself knowing that his public presence would have been more to satisfy the public comfort of society, than to balm his own personal grief.

In the midst and discreetly interwined in this novel is a 300 acre piece of land, that is to be handed over to the Otter Lake community, the legal documentation is to be handled by Maggies department which annoys her no end, it marks the arrival of the racoons, and brings into the story the craziness of an old man whose profound knowledge of Anishnawbe causes him to speak it with iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, laced with a touch of a dark past.

This excerpt on Drew Hayden Taylor the wonderful author is taken from the PEI Writers Guild.

'Drew Hayden Taylor  is an Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations, Ontario. He has worn many hats in his career, including comedian, playwright, journalist, fiction writer, television scriptwriter, and documentary film maker Throughout his prolific career and international travels, he has tried to educate and inform the world about issues that reflect, celebrate, and interfere in the lives of Canada’s First Nations.  He is now an internationally renowned author and playwright with 23 books and over 80 theatre productions to his name. This contemporary storyteller’s down-to-earth tone and humor-infused tales educate listeners and celebrate Canada’s First Nations peoples.'

Please do read this wonderful novel if only for an infusion of the love of humor and a tiny glimpse of the wonderful myths and magic than encompasses First Nation tradition.