Grief, Tradition, and Settler Colonialism: Recommending Karen McBride’s Crow Winter

Presenter: Daniel Green, English Language and Literature Faculty Supporter: Professor Petra Fachinger. Students reading Indigenous texts is (or should be) of increasing priority in schools across Canada. As we look for Indigenous narratives to assign, “accessibility” for young, non-Indigenous students, should be considered, as well as what will allow for a non-didactic learning experience. My presentation focuses on why Karen McBride’s Crow Winter would be the optimal text to recommend to a teenage relative or friend. While plenty of other texts explore certain aspects of Indigenous lived experience from a more explicitly anti-racist perspective, Crow Winter will teach students about Algonquin Anishinaabe culture as well as life in general. Overall, McBride’s linguistic talent and her engagement with grief, loss, and death is riveting and universally comprehensible, thereby making it most accessible largely because of its focus on said universal themes. The novel does not aim to push an agenda, or explicitly educate about Indigenous Peoples—the learning experience and educational aspects of Crow Winter are seamless. By the end of the novel, I found that I had learned more about Anishinaabe tradition and ceremony from Crow Winter than from any other text. I would recommend Karen McBride’s Crow Winter to a teenager because of her use of Nanabush, the compelling portrayal of the effects of settler colonialism, and her powerful expression of grief.