“We've had that over and over. But we always survived. We're still here.”— Waubgeshig Rice — Moon of the Crusted Snow, 2018
Photo by Joe Wong on Unsplash
In Waubgeshig Rice's novel, a community loses power in the dead of winter.
The younger characters call it an apocalypse. One of the elders corrects them, gently. Apocalypse, she says — there isn't even a word for that in her language. Because for her people, the ending already happened. It came generations ago, when strangers arrived on their shores and took what was never theirs to take.
Everything since has been living after the end, not toward it. So when the lights go out and the radios go silent, the community doesn't panic the way visitors from the city do. They already know how this story goes.
Rice, who is Anishinaabe himself, isn't imagining collapse.
He's writing what his own community has already lived through, and survived, more than once.
What has your family or community already survived — and what does it mean to keep living, not toward an ending, but after one?
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