85 pages • 2 hours read
Louise ErdrichThe Birchbark House
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: "Dagwaging (Fall)"
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Fishtail’s Pipe”
Summer is ending, and Omakayas always has her pet crow, named Andeg, for the Anishinabe word meaning “crow,” with her. Andeg has become a useful member of the family, even chasing off a raccoon that tries to steal food, and he always sleeps near Omakayas.
Deydey spends the fall and winter making trips to traps and bringing furs home. One day, his friends Albert LaPautre and Fishtail arrive. Angeline and Omakayas hide in the bushes to eavesdrop on the men, who begin discussing the problem of white people (chimookomanug) encroaching on their land. LaPautre, known for reading too deeply into his ridiculous dreams, tells the other men about a dream in which he had lice, and the town was planning a dance gathering. Deydey tries to play a joke on LaPautre by suggesting an absurd interpretation, but LaPautre thinks the dream means that he must move his family out west to escape the white people.
The three men agree that they will likely have to move west someday, to Omakayas and Angeline’s dismay. Deydey observes that “[chimookomanug] are like greedy children. Nothing will ever please them for long” (79). They discuss the difficulties they would face in Dakota territory and fall into a pensive silence.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Pinch”
In this chapter, we learn the story of Pinch getting into trouble. One day, Mama gathers a large number of berries and lays them out to dry, instructing Pinch to keep birds away from the berries. The family members go about their various tasks, leaving him alone, and Pinch grows bored and hungry. As Andeg watches from nearby, Pinch eats a lot of the berries, then falls asleep. Mama angrily wakes him up, and Pinch blames Andeg for eating the berries. In her fury, Mama throws a stick at Andeg and scares the bird away.
Remorsefully, Mama tells Omakayas what happened and promises to help recover Andeg. Pinch develops a pain in his stomach, and Mama realizes that he was the one who ate all the berries. She chastises Pinch, then takes Omakayas into the woods to find Andeg.
Hearing Andeg calling in the woods, Omakayas advances while Mama stays nearby. From a short distance, Mama sees two bear cubs approach Omakayas. The girl speaks to them, saying, “Ahneen, neshemay[greetings, little brothers] […] You’ve gotten fat!” (90). The mother bear approaches and continues past Omakayas without showing any threat. Omakayas gives some bannock, or flat bread, to the cubs, and they follow their mother.
Andeg returns home that evening, but he never quite trusts Mama again. Still, he remains helpful to the family, and as they prepare to move into their winter cabin, he clears the building of mice.
The family must now harvest the wild rice that grows on a nearby island. Everyone boards the family canoe together, and Omakayas must watch Pinch, although she would rather be in charge of Neewo. As the adults paddle, Pinch tries to pull out Andeg’s tail feathers. Everyone keeps saying “Gaygo [stop it], Pinch,” until he finally succeeds in grasping a feather. Andeg surprises everyone by saying, “Gaygo, Pinch!” (93). Pinch cries in alarm and behaves for the rest of the canoe trip.
The family arrives at the island, and although the rice crop is poor, Omakayas is excited to play with her cousins, who have also come to help with the harvest. One cousin, the tomboy Two Strike Girl, has obtained permission to “dance the rice,” or the ritual of dancing on the rice to free it from its husks, even though this job is normally reserved for boys.
Omakayas and Two Strike Girl help with the harvest and weave mats for drying the rice. Two Strike Girl despises “women’s work” and says, “I can’t take this anymore! […] If I have to work, at least I’m going to have some fun at it!” (98). She breaks away from her task to dance the rice. She invites Omakayas to help, and the two dance and jump gleefully on the rice for days. Unfortunately, the family fails to gather as much rice as they need for the winter.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Move”
The family prepares to move into their winter cabin in town. They carefully assemble a food cache, which Nokomis blesses with a prayer. Her prayer expresses her fear of hunger and disease, and when she finishes, the entire family stands in solemn reflection: “Baby Neewo was the first to make a sound, and that sound was a sudden cry” (102).
After a final night in the birchbark house, the family packs up their possessions and moves into the cabin. Omakayas helps Nokomis to carry some medicines, and as the girl examines them, Nokomis asks if they are talking to her. Omakayas says “no” and is puzzled by the suggestion, yet she acknowledges that the bear cubs talk to her. Nokomis replies, “Listen to them” (104), and the old woman is so serious in her advice that Omakayas remembers this moment for the rest of her life.
With the move complete, Omakayas sits near the warm hearth and falls asleep next to Nokomis. Waking in the middle of the night when the fire has died down, Omakayas feels chilled. For the rest of the night, she can’t warm up and is too cold to sleep.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “First Snow”
The family wakes up to see that the first snow has arrived. Old Tallow comes over for a visit, bringing her fierce dogs, but Omakayas is too cheerful to feel frightened this time. As Angeline and Omakayas play in the snow, Pinch throws a snowball with a rock in the middle. Omakayas chases him down and buries his face in the snow, and as the two girls run off into town, Pinch prepares a pile of snowballs for their return: “At the heart of each, he packed a stone. Stones he hoped would sting his sisters until they cried!” (109).
In town, Angeline and Omakayas walk toward the Catholic mission school, which Angeline would like to attend in order to learn how to read. Nokomis has already told the girls that they may learn to read if they like so long as they never forget their true culture. As class lets out for morning recess, Angeline and Omakayas see Fishtail leaving the school with books and papers tucked under his arm. Since Angeline’s best friend, Ten Snow, is married to Fishtail, Angeline summons the boldness to ask Fishtail why he is attending school. Fishtail replies that he wishes to learn to read chimookoman letters so that “they can’t cheat us with the treaties” (112). Angeline and Omakayas return home in a thoughtful mood, only to be greeted by Pinch’s mostly-melted snowballs.
As more snow falls and winter approaches, Angeline gets a new dress. She is beautiful and admired by many men. One day, Old Tallow brings over some beavers she has trapped and asks Mama to prepare them. Tallow watches Omakayas stirring the fire. At first, Omakayas feels irritated by Tallow’s watchfulness, but then she notices that the old woman’s gaze holds “true affection” (115). Omakayas realizes that Tallow would protect her with her life. Mama prepares a delicious stew, and Deydey returns from his trapping trip just in time to eat.
Part 2 Analysis
The fall chapters feature a sense of impending troubles—both natural, with winter approaching, and man-made, with white settlers, or chimookoman, encroaching on Anishinabe lands. In both cases, the book’s characters are essentially helpless against these threats.
This section of the book begins with a serious discussion between Deydey, Fishtail, and LaPautre about the threat of expanding European settlements in the area. Chimookoman means “big knife” in Ojibwa, and the white men’s destructive force is reflected in the Anishinabe men’s knowledge that they will soon be compelled to leave their own land. LaPautre, who is part-European, has no compunction about equating the chimookoman with lice in his inauspicious dream, believing that the only way to rid himself of their threat is to move west. Even Deydey, who also has European blood, says that “we hear the chimookoman ax ring in the woods, chopping a tree. We should be gone before the tree falls” (79). Fishtail provides the most ominous observation when he says that “west is where the spirits of the dead walk. If the whites keep chasing us west, we’ll end up in the land of the spirits” (79). Over the course of this conversation, white settlers progress from an annoyance (lice) to a mortal threat against the Anishinabeg (plural of Anishinabe) as the men realize the seriousness of their situation.
Following this conversation, more signs of European influence in the characters’ lives is exhibited, particularly through the mission school in town. Here, the townsfolk can learn to read, and Angeline is attracted to this idea. Fishtail, on the other hand, is inherently suspicious of the white settlers. He learns to read as a means of self-preservation and pursues literacy so that the white men “can’t cheat [them]” (112).
The threat of white settlers, while considerable, is not as immediate to the story’s characters as the threat of winter. The seriousness of the winter’s danger is apparent as soon as the family begins to move into their winter cabin. After supervising the creation of their winter food cache, Nokomis prays to the spirits for protection from disease and hunger: “Come to us, especially, during the harshest moon…when so often meat is scarce...when disease breaks us and the windigo spirit, the Hungry One, comes stalking from house to Anishinabe house” (101-02). The family members all stand in silence after the prayer, chilled by the dangers about to come, until baby Neewo breaks the silence with a sudden cry. This moment foreshadows the tragic events of the winter, where Omakayas’s entire family suffers from illness and Neewo dies.
The foreshadowing continues when the family spends their first night in the cabin. Omakayas is at first warm and comfortable near the hearth. She falls asleep and wakes in the cold, after the fire has gone out. Although she pulls up a blanket and nestles near the sleeping Nokomis, Omakayas notices that “there was something odd in the ferocity of the cold that continued to deepen as the night went on” (105-06). Considering the depth of the suffering that is to come, this foreboding cold proves to be a sign of the winter’s impending trials.
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