Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1)

by Waubgeshig Rice

for decades, despairing men had gotten drunk and beaten their partners and children, feeding a cycle of abuse that continued when those kids grew up. It became so normal that everyone forgot about the root of this turmoil: their forced displacement from their homelands and the violent erasure of their culture, language, and ceremonies.

This protocol had once been forbidden, outlawed by the government and shunned by the church. When the ancestors of these Anishinaabe people were forced to settle in this unfamiliar land, distant from their traditional home near the Great Lakes, their culture withered under the pressure of the incomers’ Christianity. The white authorities displaced them far to the north to make way for towns and cities.

At the end of this road was the Northern Trading Post, owned by the biggest grocery chain in the country, who had a monopoly in First Nations in the North. Not only was this general store the only outlet for food, it also supplied all the hardware, household supplies, and other domestic necessities. While prices were better than they had been before the road was built, they were still outrageous compared to what people paid in the South. A two-litre carton of milk usually cost ten dollars. Sometimes it went up to fifteen.