Gichigami Hearts
Stories and Histories from Misaabekong
Linda LeGarde Grover
finalist for the 2022 heartland booksellers award in nonfiction
BOOK DISCUSSION GUIDE
Award-winning author Linda LeGarde Grover interweaves family and Ojibwe history with stories from Misaabekong (the place of the giants) on Lake Superior
Long before there was a Duluth, Minnesota, the massive outcropping that divides the city emerged from the ridge of gabbro rock running along the westward shore of Lake Superior. A great westward migration carried the Ojibwe people to this place, the Point of Rocks. Against this backdrop—Misaabekong, the place of the giants—the lives chronicled in Linda LeGarde Grover’s book unfold, some in myth, some in long-ago times, some in an imagined present, and some in the author’s family history, all with a deep and tenacious bond to the land, one another, and the Ojibwe culture.
"With compelling stories of sacred places, beloved people, myths, legends, and treasured memories, Gichigami Hearts is a moving tribute to the Ojibwe past."
—Carolyn Holbrook, author of Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify
Long before there was a Duluth, Minnesota, the massive outcropping that divides the city emerged from the ridge of gabbro rock running along the westward shore of Lake Superior. A great westward migration carried the Ojibwe people to this place, the Point of Rocks. Against this backdrop—Misaabekong, the place of the giants—the lives chronicled in Linda LeGarde Grover’s book unfold, some in myth, some in long-ago times, some in an imagined present, and some in the author’s family history, all with a deep and tenacious bond to the land, one another, and the Ojibwe culture.
Within the larger history, Grover tells the story of her ancestors’ arrival at the American Fur Post in far western Duluth more than two hundred years ago. Their fortunes and the family’s future are inextricably entwined with tales of marriages to voyageurs, relocations to reservation lands, encounters with the spirits of the lake and wood creatures, the renewal of life—in myth and in art, the search for meaning in the transformations of our day is always vital. Finally, in one man’s struggles, age-old tribulations, the intergenerational traumas of extended families and communities, and a uniquely Ojibwe appreciation for the natural and spiritual worlds converge, forging the Ojibwe worldview and will to survive as his legacy to his descendants.
Blending the seen and unseen, the old and the new, the amusing and the tragic and the hauntingly familiar, this lyrical work encapsulates a way of life forever vibrant at the Point of Rocks.
Awards
Finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award in Nonfiction
Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards honorable mention, nonfiction category
$14.95 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1193-5
$14.95 ISBN 978-1-4529-6625-0
200 pages, 8 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, October 2021
Linda LeGarde Grover is professor emeritus of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her books The Road Back to Sweetgrass, Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year, and In the Night of Memory, all from Minnesota, have earned numerous awards, including the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award; Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards for Poetry, Memoir, and Fiction; and a Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Her book of stories The Dance Boots was the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.
With compelling stories of sacred places, beloved people, myths, legends, and treasured memories, Gichigami Hearts is a moving tribute to the Ojibwe past.
Carolyn Holbrook, author of Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify
With stories of the essence of land and people, Linda LeGarde Grover weaves a generational history of a sacredness inseparable from place, of the unbroken chain of Anishinaabe existence in Missabekong. Her powerful prose and ethereal poetry wash over the pages like waves along the shore of Lake Superior, revealing a strength of survival that goes beyond memory and reminding us to watch, listen, and breathe.
Gwen Westerman, Minnesota State University, Mankato
In Linda LeGarde Grover’s Gichigami Hearts, we are given the gift of an intensely personal, and at the same time brilliant, walkthrough of Grover’s part of the Anishinaabe universe. Just a tremendously lovely and unique book.
Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse
This thoughtful book—parts memoir, history, poetry, myth—presents Duluth and North Shore from the point of view of those who lived there long before white people. Grover, a prizewinning writer and enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe, brings to vivid life the neighborhoods around Duluth’s Point of Rocks, the town of Chippewa City and places in between.
Star Tribune Magazine
[Grover’s] own layering of family history, creation stories and tribal lore makes this book a complex map of a place and its people in intimate, worldly and otherworldly terms.
Star Tribune
Gichigami Hearts is for fans of history and story alike.
Book Riot
In Gichigami Hearts, one does not read a story only once and walk away. With each new telling, more is revealed. Every story connects with another, back and forth in time.
Colors of Influence
Genre-defying . . . Sharing stories and histories, Grover lyrically reflects upon her community’s relationships to the land, the culture and one another.
Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine
There is so much to explore in this collection, with stories that connect us all.
Superstition Review
A blend of the amusing and tragic, the spiritual and the embodied, the indigenous and the immigrant, these stories portray life lived in the light of Anishinabbe ways.
Ely Winter Times
Gichigami Hearts flows like beadwork: each piece of prose, or poetry, or photograph is applied to the background of history, of place, of memory, or of kinship, with a vine of connection unifying seemingly disparate elements.
American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Contents
Part I. Point of Rocks
Gabbro
An Old Story
Bimosewin: From the Bethel to the Union Gospel Mission
From the Rocks to the Docks
Anishinaabe Relatives and Holy Places
Grandparents
Life Among the Italians
The Beanbag
Rain, Fog, Ghost, Spider
Part II. Gichigami Hearts
Waawaashkeshi
Mooz
Lake Hearts
Lake Spirits
Sea Smoke on Gichigami
Barney-enjiss
The Stone Tomahawk
Part III. Rabbits in Wintertime
Listening and Remembering By Heart
Rabbits in the Snow
Niizh Odain: The Wolf and the Rabbit
The Harbor: Nanaboozhoo’s Brothers of the Heart
Woods Lovely, Dark, and Deep
Rabbits Watching Over Onigamiising
Part IV. Traveling Song
The End and Renewal of the Earth
Redemption
Mishomis
Grandfather-iban Gi-bimose
Places Remembered, Though Some Have Changed
Homeland
Traveling Song
Acknowledgments
About This Book
Related Publications
Related News & Events
Duluth Reader Best of the Northland 2021
Lit Hub: Linda LeGarde Grover on Community Storytelling in the Ojibwe Tradition
New Books in Folklore interview with Linda LeGarde Grover
Duluth Reader Best of the Northland 2021
Linda LeGarde Grover is a professor of American Indian Studies at UMD, a novelist and former Reader columnist. “Gichigami Hearts” is her fifth book, a collection of stories, legends, poetry, and memoir set in Duluth and spanning history over hundreds of years, from a Native American perspective. The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls it an “artful weaving of family, history, myth and magic.”
Lit Hub: Linda LeGarde Grover on Community Storytelling in the Ojibwe Tradition
In this episode of the I'm a Writer But podcast, Alex and Lindsay talk with Linda LeGarde Grover about making a book that is fiction, memoir, myth, truth, and poetry; the many wonders of Duluth and Lake Superior; the “ghost presence” in her book; showing a sense of time and change in her work; and more!
New Books in Folklore interview with Linda LeGarde Grover
Stephanie Khattak speaks with Dr. Linda Legarde Grover, an award-winning author whose latest book interweaves family and Ojibwe history with stories from Misaabekong (the place of the giants) on Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong.