The Road Back to Sweetgrass: A Novel

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Set in northern Minnesota, "The Road Back to Sweetgrass" follows Dale Ann, Theresa, and Margie, a trio of American Indian women, from the 1970s to the present, observing their coming of age and the intersection of their lives as they navigate love, economic hardship, loss, and changing family dynamics on the fictional Mozhay Point reservation. As young women, all three leave their homes. Margie and Theresa go to Duluth for college and work; there Theresa gets to know a handsome Indian boy, Michael Washington, who invites her home to the Sweetgrass land allotment to meet his father, Zho Wash, who lives in the original allotment cabin. When Margie accompanies her, complicated relationships are set into motion, and tensions over "real Indian-ness" emerge.Dale Ann, Margie, and Theresa find themselves pulled back again and again to the Sweetgrass allotment, a silent but ever-present entity in the book; sweetgrass itself is a plant used in the Ojibwe ceremonial odissimaa bag, containing a newborn baby's umbilical cord. In a powerful final chapter, Zho Wash tells the story of the first days of the allotment, when the Wazhushkag, or Muskrat, family became transformed into the Washingtons by the pen of a federal Indian agent. This sense of place and home is both tangible and spiritual, and Linda LeGarde Grover skillfully connects it with the experience of Native women who came of age during the days of the federal termination policy and the struggle for tribal self-determination."The Road Back to Sweetgrass" is a novel that that moves between past and present, the Native and the non-Native, history and myth, and tradition and survival, as the people of Mozhay Point navigate traumatic historical events and federal Indian policies while looking ahead to future generations and the continuation of the Anishinaabe people.

Reviews

"With the grace of a dancer lifted by spirit and grounded in the well-worn earth beneath her feet, Linda LaGarde Grover tells a circular tale of life on and off the Reservation. Generous, ironic, and often gut-wrenching, The Road Back to Sweetgrass is at its large heart a book about the power of home and the inexorable connections between land, people, and stories." Danielle Sosin, author of The Long-Shining Waters
"History, humanity and humorthese things always impress me when I read Linda LeGarde Grovers fiction. In this deeply moving and healing book, we are drawn into a communally told story that shows generations violently separated yet held together by the cord of place and culture and by many, many acts of love." Heid E. Erdrich, author of Original Local
"Through the character of Margie Robineau, Linda LeGarde Grover has created an Ojibwe everywoman who not only births a daughter Crystal, but also revitalizes the small township of Sweetgrass by making family with her would be father-in-law. Grovers novel tackles genealogy and kinship, Indian allotment and traditions, and ultimately love. A gorgeous read, an extraordinary novel!" LeAnne Howe, author of Shell Shaker
"The overall theme of longing and belonging affects us all, and in this story Linda brings us into the grand circle." Lake Superior Magazine

"The events that define these characters and their world, the births and deaths and binding loves, unfold with gentle pathos and wry humor, the cadences of minute detail and the sweep of history a matter of quiet confidence and unshowy grace for this gifted storyteller." Star Tribune

"At heart this is the story of the womens longing for home, with traditions of pow-wows, fancy dancing and wild ricing, and of coming of age when the Anishinaabe struggled to preserve their culture in a changing world." St. Paul Pioneer Press

Author Bio

Linda LeGarde Grover is a member of the Bois Forte band of Ojibwe andassociate professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The Road Back to Sweetgrass has been awarded the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award; Grover has also received the Flannery OConner Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, whose previous recipients include Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, and Toni Morrison.