Bookstores aren’t supposed to be perfect, and neither are writers.

Our bookstore isn’t sleek or cute - we’re kind of scruffy, in fact. We’re grateful to the people who supported us - they got us through that time. I became closer to everyone there during the pandemic, customers included. I’m very fond of my staff of young people - they feel like relatives - and the store’s as collaborative as possible. At Birchbark, I sign and sort books and check in or joke around with everyone. Two of their artists - Dyani White Hawk and the Hmong American Pao Houa Her - are in the Whitney Biennial this year. Sometimes I walk a few doors down to Bockley Gallery, whose focus is also on Native artists. We have a handmade canoe hanging from the ceiling, and an old confessional that’s now a forgiveness booth, where instead of confessing you just touch it and are absolved. The store itself was made from cedar wood and bark-on birch logs that fell after a winter storm. I wanted to have a bookstore where we could also sell the extraordinary things made by Indigenous people - so we have jewelry, beadwork, baskets and medicines.

We’re a tiny general-interest shop with a concentration in Native American or Indigenous writing: fiction, poetry, history, politics, food, memoir and material that supports Indigenous language revitalization, particularly the Ojibwe and Dakota languages. (My tribe is Turtle Mountain Chippewa.) The store’s on Dakota land. In 2001, I opened Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, named because some of the first books in North America were written on scrolls of bark by the Anishinaabe people. Maybe by then I feel the pull of the bookstore. I switch to drinking black tea with honey. Adults and children smoke a pipe.For lunch? Whatever I can find. There are a couple of references to alcohol.

It's not graphically described, but it still may shock sensitive readers. There are several moments of violence: A moose is shot through the head, there are several fights, children are punished with a switch, some people die from eating bad meat, and a woman's frostbitten finger is amputated with a hatchet. The authors's charming pencil drawings add to the atmosphere. government forcing them and their fellow villagers to migrate west. It's set on Madeline Island in Lake Superior in 1850, and traces a year in the life of 9-year-old Obijwe girl Omakayas and her family, culminating in White settlers and the U.S. Parents need to know that The Game of Silence, by Obijwe author Louise Erdrich, is a sequel to her 1999 novel The Birchbark House. Adults and children smoke a pipe.ĭid you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

The birchbark