With compelling stories of sacred places, beloved people, myths, legends, and treasured memories, Gichigami Hearts is a moving tribute to the Ojibwe past.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

Gichigami Hearts is for fans of history and story alike.

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.

Genre-defying . . . Sharing stories and histories, Grover lyrically reflects upon her community’s relationships to the land, the culture and one another.

There is so much to explore in this collection, with stories that connect us all.

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.

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.

Grover does an excellent job of illustrating what her forbears lost—and what they discovered—as they were moved to reservations and sent to boarding schools, and as they clashed against a culture that sought to ‘solve’ their own way of life. There is no grievance or malice in the way she tells these truths. Grover takes her role as storyteller seriously and keeps a consistent tone of reverence for the