On Canada Day, I decided with a degree of irony to write about Waubgeshig Rice’s award-winning novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. “Chilling in the best way possible,” says the cover quote from novelist Eden Robinson. I would say chilling and warm and distressing, although that’s a bit of a mouthful to put on a cover, and who wants to read a distressing book in what’s already a distressing time? 

Even though one should.

With more and more unmarked graves of children found around the sites of residential schools, with the increased publicity throwing residential school survivors back into post-traumatic stress, with Indigenous communities deep in mourning and goodhearted non-Indigenous folks wanting to stand in support; with climate change causing record heat in western Canada, and the heat causing elderly people to die alone; with COVID raging in Africa and other low-vaccination areas, meaning most of the world…

Well, Happy Canada Day.

Waubgeshig Rice is a writer and journalist from the Wasauksing First Nation. Moon of the Crusted Snow is set in an isolated Anishinaabe community in the north. The story is apocalyptic, although Rice very cleverly keeps it within such tight boundaries that the end of modern civilization is implied rather than described. 

One day in autumn, cellphones suddenly go dead on the rez. The power soon goes off as well, and communication is cut to the cities to the south. No one knows why, and at first people assume it’s a glitch and things will get back to normal before long.

Another of the ways in which Rice’s book is clever is that “normal” isn’t normal for the people on the rez. As the book opens, Evan Whitesky is hunting a moose, a moozoo. He’s successful, obviously a practiced hunter. Yet as he says a prayer, it’s clear he’s feeling his way forward. 

“’Miigwech for my family. And for my community. Miigwech for our health. Chi-miigwech for the life you have allowed me to take today, this moozoo, to feed my family.’ He still felt a little awkward, saying this prayer of thanks mostly in English, with only a few Ojibwe words peppered here and there, But it still made him feel good to believe he was giving back in some way.”

Rice also makes it clear that, historically, this harsh northern country wasn’t the land of Evan’s people. They originally lived further south, around the Great Lakes, where the climate, soil and hunting were better. But colonialism turfed them north to a place they didn’t know, and in between the lines of the novel lies the anguish this has caused for generations.

Yet we meet Evan and his partner Nicole McCloud at a point when they’re working to reclaim a traditional indigenous identity. Although they have European colonial names themselves, English and French, they have named their children Maiingen and Nangohns. They’re learning Ojibwe as well as studying the traditional religious practices, stories and skills with the elders who remember them. 

This puts them further down the road of coping with the end of Western civilization than settlers to the south, whose trauma we glimpse only once. Two young men from the rez who have been away attending college ride into town on snowmobiles. With them they bring traumatic stories of riots and starvation in the small university town where they’ve been living. After seeing the first deaths, they have fled north seeking refuge.

Not everyone in the community has embraced traditional knowledge, and even when it becomes obvious they should hunt for winter food supplies, they rely on handouts from the community council. There’s a stockpile of canned food that might last until the spring and enough diesel to power the reserve through February, although no longer. Denial needs to give way to self-sufficiency, but Rice makes it clear that this isn’t easy, and people start to die in the community, too.

Then four whites arrive on snowmobiles, led by a large well-armed survivalist who takes advantage of traditional hospitality to establish himself and his followers in the community. Justin Scott is a quasi-mythological figure, at once an evil windigo and a recognizable modern-day psycho. (He would have voted for Trump.) Scott personalizes the apocalypse, divides the community into factions and provides alcohol to those already struggling.

It is the job of Evan and his family to model an alternative and lead people into a better future. The novel exudes longing for a world without settlers where traditional knowledge is brought back into practice, although there is no sense in which Rice makes this look easy. The central struggle in the novel is between the powerful pull of a well-armed settler like Scott and the quieter, smaller, warmer and admirable Evan Whitesky.

In our quasi-apocalyptic moment of unmarked graves and plague and climate change, of deepening inequalities and the forced retreat of women in what has been called a she-cession—speaking of my own identity—this can be a hard book to read. Especially if, like me, you sometimes have trouble sleeping lately and pick up a book to pass the midnight hours. This might not be the book to turn to, although the horror is more powerful for most often being implied. (Not always.)

Technically, though, I found it interesting even at 2 a.m. to think about the understated way Rice approaches his story. He writes in simple declarative sentences. I don’t know Rice, although Moon of the Crusted Snow was published by my publisher, ECW Press, and we share a much-admired editor in Susan Renouf. That means I don’t know whether his writing style comes from his background in journalism (“Just the facts, please”), a desire to reach the widest possible audience by keeping the prose simple and classic, or because it’s an early book and he’s still feeling his way, putting one foot in front of another.

That’s certainly true of my first two books. I’ve been re-reading them lately as I get ready to release both as e-books: Hard Travel, a collection of short stories, and Poor Player, my first novel. I hadn’t looked at either of them in years before deciding to get them back out online. When I did, I found that both are shorter and more closely-focused than anything I write these days, although it’s been interesting to discover that my preoccupations remain the same. Poor Player, for instance, is set in Mexico, where I lived for several years, and it’s a story narrated by a foreign reporter about human rights violations.

It was all I could do at the time to tell my story, which is what makes me wonder about Waub Rice’s stylistic decisions. He’s signed a big-time contract for his next novel, and I’ll be interested to see the evolution of his work, what he retains of that simplicity, and what grows. 

Yet this book remains a necessary read, especially now.

“’Our world isn’t ending,”” an elder tells Evan. “’It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished out all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.’

“She became more animated as she went on. Her small hands swayed as she emphasized the words she wanted to highlight. ‘But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this… what’s the word again?

“’Apocalypse.’

“’Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.’”

You can order Moon of the Crusted Snow here.