I imagine that he wrote them for himself and his own people. I don't imagine that the author wrote these stories for some white woman to 'examine'. I lifted the barrel and pressed it firmly under my chin.' The trees that defined this community and housed the ancestors I never knew, nor would ever understand. And so we are devastated to hear him say, But, we want him to be okay, to find his way, to have his place. Our hearts ache for that little boy who only felt truly loved when his parents were acting at happiness at the beginning of the evening as they held him on their laps, before the beer is drunk and we watch as he grows and despair for him as all hopes for 'normalcy' wither away. The reader intimately knows the little 6 year-old boy who plugs his ears and runs to his bed when his drunken parents start fighting, because we know he knows what the 'clank of those twenty-four brown bottles meant' as soon as they came into the house. What this book does in its 85 short pages is bring the reader as close as possible to understanding what modern life is like for people on the reserve without having lived it. No one should have to experience that.' Yet, I don't think I truly understand. I can hear of some atrocity happening on the reserve or in the residential schools and say and mean, 'That's terrible. Even when I read or hear true stories, despite a real desire to understand, I think I am protected by that personal detachment. Interested yes, but with a certain amount of objective distance. I am a white woman and when I read aboriginal fiction, it is, I think, like a someone looking on or in, examining. But what was strikingly authentic, crystal clear and true were the stories shared by the participants. We are in a sweat lodge afterall the steam and glow from the grandfathers wafts and shimmers throughout the book. That is not to say that the book was lacking in spirituality and native culture. Oh he might have been in there, but I didn't notice if he was. Well having read all 85 pages of this book, I didn't notice any trickster. I have this idea that when I figure out the role this character plays, the better I will understand native culture and spirituality. I usually find it challenging I'm always grappling with that trickster dude.

Waub rice book