Algonquin author Karen McBride explores grief, language, land claims and why home is medicine in Crow Winter

By Hailey McCue

TIMISKAMING FIRST NATION— Karen McBride is an Algonquin author from Timiskaming First Nation, Quebec, whose debut novel, Crow Winter, explores themes of grief, the healing powers of home, and the magic behind the cultural stories of the Anishinaabe.

“I took the basics of our legends and played with them,” says McBride. “Our stories have always been oral and these living, breathing things and that’s what I wanted to do with the stories in my book, is give them new life and modernize them.”

While the story is non-biographical, the novel derives from McBride’s own relationship with grief after the passing of her father in 2013.

Crow Winter centers on the story of Hazel Ellis, a young Algonquin woman who has returned to her home, Spirit Bear Point First Nation, to find roots that will help her connect to her culture and find comfort after the passing of her father. During her time home, the Algonquin demigod and infamous trickster Nanabush, who takes the form of an old crow, visits Hazel. With Nanabush’s help, Hazel crosses in and out of the Spirit World to unravel the secrets surrounding an untouched quarry left by her late father.

Along with being a newly published author, McBride has a few degrees tucked under her belt. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in music and English and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Ottawa. Before pursuing her true passion of writing, she spent some time teaching grades five, seven and eight at Kiwetin Kikinamading, in her home community. Most recently, McBride graduated with a Master of Arts in creative writing at the University of Toronto.

In addition to her various degrees, McBride is also an illustrator. Her work is available throughout Crow Winter.

McBride’s academic and creative achievements, while impressive, have been met with some transitional challenges in the beginning. Not unlike many other Indigenous students who leave their community to pursue an education away from home.

“That first year is hard not only academically but personally. You’re away from home for the first time. Especially if you’re coming from a small reserve and if you’re close to your family, it could be really tough, that sense of community is lost,” McBride says, noting that she was often the only Indigenous person in the room. “It’s shocking, first and foremost, for anyone to be leaving home. I had a lot of support from my family so that really helped. I think sometimes if we don’t have strong enough connections, it can be really difficult. But also, it’s really an individual struggle, where at the same time that individual experience can make it into a really great triumph. It’s a learning process.”

For Hazel, McBride explained, her individual struggle with grief is what brought her back home.

“It’s a different kind of experience for her, it’s the healing powers of home that she needed in order to find roots in her community to help connect her to the culture,” McBride says.

“Home can be medicine. Whether it’s the magical healing powers of sage or a gross shot of NyQuil – it might be tough, or it just might be amazing and heal you.”

Together with its central themes of home and grief, the novel also illustrates the cultural significance of land claims, a universal affair for many Indigenous communities. Land claims is the process of restoring and settling disputes between the government and Indigenous communities’ rights to land and to the use of land.

“I think it’s really important that we understand the complexity of land claims and settling claims. A lot of people will say that we want our land back, which is a no brainer, but the process of doing that is really difficult,” says McBride.

Through her experience working as a student for multiple summers at the Algonquin National Secretariat, McBride gained an understanding of the process and how it can take many years to implement the elements of a land claim agreement.

“It’s important that it’s talked about, to decode the colonial belief that it’s just as simple as signing a document,” says the author.

The resurgence of language is another culturally important feature of Crow Winter.  The use of Anishinaabemowin, the dialect of McBride’s home of Timiskaming First Nation, throughout the novel plays a significant role in her own life, as well as her characters’ lives, as an act of decolonization and reclaiming the culture.

“Letting that back into our lives as a day-to-day thing is important and is an act of self-love as an Indigenous person,” McBride adds.

McBride has been nominated for Author of the Year; Crow Winter has been nominated for Book of the Year at the 2020 Ottawa Awards by Face Magazine; and has been featured in CBC’s list of Best Canadian Fiction 2019. Fans of the author can follow her on Instagram: @kmcbridewrites, as they await her second book, which she is currently in the process of writing.