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The Orenda Q4: The Narrator
The Orenda is divided into three parts, each of which is prefaced by the voice of a narrator (with text in italics). At the end, the narrator concludes the book with this paragraph:
And so when the crows arrived to caw that our orenda was unclean, at first we laughed. Aataentsic [the Sky Woman and mother of the Wendat] did, too. But she didn't laugh for the same reasons. She'd already foreseen the nests the crows had begun to build as they plucked the odd feather from our hair or begged a strip of hide from our bundle even as we looked into their eyes. Aataentsic laughed because she is just as imperfect as we are. She laughed because we couldn't see our own demise coming.
But hindsight is sometimes too easy, isn't it? And so maybe this is what Aataentsic wants to tell. What's happened in the past can't stay in the past for the same reason the future is always just a breath away. Now is what's most important, Aataentsic says. Orenda can't be lost, just misplaced. The past and future are present.
Who is the narrator. What are they trying to say about the past and the future?
Comments
I had assumed Snow Falls, but then she died (I suppose there's nothing stopping narration by a dead person, but it seems out of character for the book). Then I assumed Gosling. Wiki thinks Bird, but to me it reads more as a female perspective than male.
I think that at least one of the things that she/he is saying is that the Indian tribes brought this on themselves, partly by deliberately seeking out alliances that would support their ancestral feuds (rather like what happened in India at the start of British rule there), and partly because they underestimated the catastrophic effect of the new arrivals to their way of life.
And maybe the author (as opposed to the internal narrator) is making an ironic point about how some American Indian spirituality (presumably minus the torture and brutality) seems to resonate more with a lot of folk today than the Jesuit one of that era?
I thought that narrator was the Orenda. Was interested to find out that the two main indigenous groups talked about in the novel are both speaking an Iroquoan language, but were opposed politically. So they have a lot in common, but our other narrators seem to find that unimportant.
I also didn't realize both groups were Iroquoian. I had assumed the Hurons were Algonquin. Which tribes, perhaps strangely since they occupied Southern Ontario, don't make much of an appearance in this book. Gosling is, I think Ojibwe from further north. But where are the Mississaugas?
One review of the book by a native person says that the narrator is The Sky People, which I think means 'Wyandot Nation' since Wyandot (Wendat) creation myth has them coming originally from the sky. So I take it to mean it's the voice of Wandat wisdom or elders. It might also be construed as the voice of the author, who is equating himself with the sky people. This may be one of the reasons behind some of the objections over the author's authenticity.
This whole read was a big learning experience for me - and just the beginning, really.
I'm not sure if the narrator was the generalised spirit of the Wendat, or a descendant of the Wendat who lived through the events described and has the benefit of hindsight. Either way, I don't think the inclusion added much to the story. If anything, it pulled me out of the very in-character presentation of the rest of the book.
I presumed the narrator was the author and thought no further of it, but that was merely an assumption.