Book review: The Great Bear: Book Two of the Misewa Saga
Reviewed by Karl Hele
The Great Bear: Book Two of the Misewa Saga is the second book of the Misewa Saga that expands on the adventure of Morgan and Eli in the other-world known as Askí. This novel explores the importance of overcoming fear, supporting and working together with your relations, and most importantly, how past actions do not always determine your future – simply, animal beings, like people, can change.
Similar to the first volume, Morgan and Eli’s adventures in Askí offer life lessons that are applicable in the modern world. After the Barren Grounds’ ending, Eli draws a picture of a young Ochek. While debating the possibility of time travel, Morgan and Eli use the drawing to venture into Askí’s past, before the White Time in this continuation of the Misewa Saga. In the Askí past, Morgan and Eli meet a teenage Ochek as well as a younger Arik together with other animal-human-beings. Together, the friends once again save Misewa.
The Great Bear is a good read. It is not as complex or compelling as Barren Grounds, yet it delivers a good modern Indigenous story. In reading The Great Bear, while aware of the controversy surrounding the novel being pulled from library shelves in the Durham District School Board in Ontario, I failed to grasp what would prompt its temporary removal. The novel offers lessons on the importance of community, the effects of bullying and how to overcome bullying, the importance of Cree traditions and language, the impact of the foster care system on Indigenous children, as well as a growing understanding of the importance of relationship based on respect, love, and caring in creating a vision of ‘all my relations.’ If anything, when compared to the Barren Grounds, lessons about tradition and Cree concepts of ‘all my relations’ are far more subtle in The Great Bear. Perhaps it is the subtlety and craftsmanship of the novel in centring Indigenous children through an Indigenous cultural context and contemporary experiences that is the issue. Whatever resulted in the attempted censorship of a wonderful story, I am passing the book onto my daughter and heartily recommend that adults and youth read the novel, enjoy the story, and await volume three.
David A. Robertson, The Great Bear: Book Two of the Misewa Saga. Toronto: Penguin, Random House, 2020.
ISBN: 0735266158