The Birchbark House

The close relationship that Omakayas and her family enjoy with nature is emphasized through their interactions with animals. Many of the animals Omakayasencounters during the book offer her unique gifts that help her on her spiritual and emotional journey, cementing for the reader the interconnectedness of the natural world and human society.

Omakayas meets a family of bears three times in the novel. In each case, she finds herself speaking with the bears as if they understand her. Omakayas’s special relationship with the bears takes on spiritual significance when the girl puts charcoal on her face to invite a spirit dream. In her dream, Omakayas meets a bear-like woman in a cave who says, “I’m going to help you […] I feel sorry for you, and I love you […] I’m the bear spirit woman” (170). Confirming Omakayas’s feeling that the bear mother would be her guardian, Nokomis tells the girl, “These bear people want to help you […] She’s with you, your lady. She’s going to help you. She will be looking out for you in this world” (170).

The specific nature of the bears’ aid becomes apparent when Omakayas meets them during maple sugar time. She advises the bear cubs to avoid hunters, and she makes an offering of tobacco before surprising herself by asking of the bears, “Will you give me your medicine?” (202). With this, Omakayas begins to learn the ways of healing, and she hears the plants of the woods speaking to her, thanks to the bears’ gift.

A similarly practical gift comes from the buck One Horn. When Omakayas and Angeline first meet the deer, they stumble upon him on a path, and he shows no fear of them: “His graceful, leaf-shaped ears tilted forward as though he could hear their hearts beating. His brown eyes were commanding and kind. He took a step toward them and stopped […] ” (55). Omakayas remembers this remarkable encounter later, when her family is nearing starvation. Nokomis dreams that One Horn is waiting for Deydey to hunt him: “Had [One Horn] known, at that time, that they would need his very existence? Again, Omakayas remembered the proud, soft radiance of his brown eyes […] [and] thanked the animal for saving her life” (183-85).

The white-throated sparrows offer Omakayas a gift that she does not grasp at first: comfort. Their importance to Omakayas is hinted at in the Prologue, when thetraders decide to abandon the baby girl: “Birds were singing, dozens of tiny white-throated sparrows. The trilling, rippling sweetness of their songs contrasted strangely with the silent horror below” (2). Omakayas enjoys their song elsewhere in the novel, but their significance doesn’t strike her until Old Tallow reveals the girl’s origins on Spirit Island. Although she should have been too young to remember any of it, Omakayas says, “I remember the birds, the songs of the birds […] They kept me alive […] I remember their song because their song was my comfort, my lullaby” (237). The life-saving power of the birds, and their implied connection to the spirits of loved ones, serves Omakayas one last time in the closing passage of the book when Neewo speaks to her: “The little birds called out repeatedly in the cold dawn air, and all of a sudden Omakayas heard something new in their voices. She heard Neewo. She heard her little brother as though he still existed in the world” (238-39). Through the birdsong, Neewo delivers a message of hope to Omakayas that helps her recover from her grief, just as the birds in the Prologue gave her the strength to carry on.

In Anishinabe culture, with its spiritual connection to the natural world, every encounter with an animal is also an encounter with a spirit. The gifts these animals offer to Omakayas show the importance of honoring this connection.

Like animals, dreams provide the characters with a link to the spirit world. Many deeply meaningful as well as comically meaningless dreams occur throughout the book. We see the importance of dreams in Anishinabe culture early in the novel when we learn about naming dreams and putting charcoal on a child’s face.

After her first encounter with the bears, Omakayas becomes introspective and often experiences dizzy spells. These symptoms tell Nokomis that she is special to the spirits, and Mama expresses a desire to “give her the charcoal” (39). This ritual entails smearing charcoal on a child’s face and having the child fast until they experience a vision. Later, when she stops eating out of grief for Neewo, Omakayas finally puts the charcoal on her face and dreams of her spirit guide, the bear.

We also learn early on that baby Neewo does not yet have a real name. There are several people on the island who possess the power of dreaming names: “Mama had asked, and each of them had tried. But not one of them had yet dreamed about a name for Neewo” (39). Auntie Muskrat, who has this power, tries to bring the dream on, but she explains that it just won’t come. This inability to dream a name for Neewo hints at his tenuous place among the living. Babies remain unnamed for a time because they are at a higher risk of death, and Neewo’s delayed naming foreshadows his own early death.

Dreams can predict the future and send important messages. Nokomis’s dream of One Horn, which helps her guide Deydey to the precise spot where he can hunt the deer, saves the family from starvation. The narrative also expresses the predictive power of dreams for comic relief, such as whenever Albert LaPautre has a dream. LaPautre’s earnest gullibility makes him the unwitting butt of Deydey’s jokes whenever a dream strikes. When we first meet LaPautre, he tells Deydey about a dream in which he has lice and is planning a dance gathering. Deydey offers an absurd interpretation: “From now on when you dance […] you will dance hard enough to shed lice” (78). Later, when the big-headed LaPautre tells Deydey about a dream in which he gets his head stuck in a kettle, Deydey responds, “It must have been a very big kettle” (123).

Auspicious and comical dreams help to illustrate the degree of connection characters share with their spirituality. Nokomis and Omakayas, with their strong spiritual powers, experience dreams that bring help and advice; by contrast, Neewo, whose life is tenuous, does not get a naming dream, and LaPautre, who is simple-minded, entirely lacks the ability to communicate with the spirits.

The Birchbark House is named after the sort of house Omakayas’s family lives in during the summer, which is also known as a wigwam. The women of the family build this shelter every year. In the colder months, they live in a permanent log cabin in town, built by Deydey. The contrasting circumstances associated with each of their homes illustrate the contrasting cultural influences within the family.

The women of Omakayas’s family—she, Nokomis, Mama, and Angeline—build their birchbark house together in the first chapter of the book. The home is suffused with Anishinabe culture, with Nokomis offering a prayer and tobacco to the birch tree before taking its bark, saying, “we need your skin for our shelter” (7). The family’s happiest times occur in the birchbark house, like when Omakayas bonds with Neewo, when Deydey shares gifts and stories, and when Omakayas befriends Andeg.

The family’s move into their cabin for the winter marks the beginning of their suffering. The cabin is built in the style of white settlers because Deydey is part-European. When smallpox strikes Angeline, Mama instructs Deydey to take the children outside the cabin: “Build a bark lodge outside, good and warm […] Nokomis will take care of the children. You stay out there, too” (144). As each member of the family falls ill, they move one by one from the healthy birchbark shelter back into the diseased cabin. Finally, when Deydey and Neewo catch the fever and move, Omakayas elects to die with her family in the cabin: “Omakayas acted without hesitation. She put out the little fire in the birchbark house” (147).

The winter cabin is home to the family's unhappiest events, like when Neewo dies, when Omakayas falls into depression, and when the family nearly starves. The suffering continues practically the entire time the family persists in their cabin. Omakayas’s true healing only comes in the final chapter, which opens with the family moving back into their birchbark house.

The two types of shelter, the birchbark house and the cabin, represent for the family the cycle of the seasons as well as the two cultures that occupy their land. As much of the family’s suffering is due to disease brought by white settlers and occurs within the walls of a European-style cabin, the family’s houses symbolize a contrast between the peaceful Anishinabe culture and the encroachment of European settlements.