The Birchbark House

The whole town attends an annual gathering held in the dance lodge. Everyone eats, plays, dances, and has a wonderful time. In the middle of the festivities, a pale visitor enters with his crew of voyageurs. The visitor is extremely ill, and he sits by the fire while Ten Snow and some of the townsfolk tend to him. A local family brings him to their home.

The next morning, news spreads that the man has died of smallpox. The disease is highly contagious and dangerous, so everything that he has been in contact with is quickly incinerated, including the home of the family who took him in. The village soon comes down with smallpox.

Angeline is the first of Omakayas’s family to fall ill. Mama insists on taking care of Angeline in the cabin, and the rest of the family members build a birchbark lodge outside the cabin for themselves. Mama catches the disease next, and Nokomis enters the cabin to care for her. Pinch falls ill and enters the cabin, and Deydey begins to work extra-hard, chopping wood and gathering food. Finally, Neewo catches smallpox. As Deydey carries Neewo into the cabin, Omakayas realizes that he is ill as well, and although she herself is healthy, Omakayas decides to join her family: “If they were all to die together, then let it be so” (147).

Omakayas helps Nokomis to tend to the family. It is exhausting work. Nokomis tells her to hold Neewo, and Omakayas clings to the baby day and night: “She held him when he died” (149). Omakayas falls into despair and exhaustion, but she continues to help Nokomis with caring for the family. She learns that Angeline’s friend Ten Snow has also died. Despite her grief, she takes comfort in the knowledge that Ten Snow will help Neewo’s spirit to find the way into the next life.

Nokomis falls ill of exhaustion, not smallpox, and Omakayas must care tirelessly for her entire family. At one point, in a feverish delirium, Deydey attempts to escape the cabin. Omakayas can only stop him by knocking him out with a club to the head. When he wakes up, his fever has finally broken. One by one, the family members get better under Omakayas’s care. They learn that eighteen members of their village have died, and Fishtail attempts suicide over the loss of his wife, Ten Snow. He survives, and Ten Snow and Neewo are buried together.

Omakayas, unable to move on from the loss of Neewo, sinks into a deep depression and refuses to eat. Angeline’s face has become scarred from the smallpox, and she discovers that she is no longer beautiful. Mama is “dull and angry with sorrow” (159), and also consumed with grief, and can’t help her daughters. At last, Angeline smashes her mirror and finds the courage to show her new face in town, determined to learn how to write.

Omakayas’s depression persists, and Old Tallow visits to try and rouse her spirits. She forces the young girl to eat some stew and urges her to go outside. Omakayas, still dispirited, pretends to fall asleep until Old Tallow leaves her alone, but the justice of the old woman’s words has an effect. Omakayas finally decides to go out into the sunshine.

With the family recovering from smallpox and Omakayas starting to eat again despite her depression, the next crisis they face is hunger. Deydey is still too weak to hunt, so he challenges the local trader to a game of chess. Pretending to be bad at the game, Deydey coaxes the trader into raising the stakes higher and higher. In the end, Deydey wins easily and brings home the food he’s won from the trader.

Old Tallow, visiting the family’s cabin, blames the spread of white people for the suffering of her people and the land. She banters teasingly with Deydey, who is himself part-white, but she treats him as though he were fully Anishinabe.

As Omakayas continues to feel depressed and apathetic, Nokomis decides that it’s time to put charcoal on her face and invite the spirits to give her a dream vision. Omakayas fails to dream the first and second times she tries. The third time Omakayas goes to bed with charcoal on her face, she dreams about a conversation with a bear spirit woman. The bear spirit greets Omakayas and explains that she once helped the girl’s great-grandparents. She tells Omakayas, “I feel sorry for you, and I love you” (170). Omakayas describes her dream to Nokomis, who explains that the bear people will help her so long as she offers tobacco to the bear spirit.

As the winter drags on, the family members amuse themselves with stories. Nokomis tells the story of Nanabozho, the comical teacher of the Ojibwa, who made the Earth with a muskrat’s help. Nokomis says that there was once a flood, and the waters rose so high that Nanabozho was almost overwhelmed, even as he stood on the highest branch of a tall tree on top of a hill. Nanabozho asked the help of an otter and then a beaver, requesting that they dive down to the bottom and bring some dirt up so that he could make an island. Both animals drowned before they could reach the bottom, but Nanabozho revived them. He then asked the humble muskrat, who also drowned, but Nanabozho found some grains of dirt in the muskrat’s grip. He revived the muskrat, made islands out of the dirt, and the animals joined him on the land.

Nokomis concludes the story by stating that the efforts of even the smallest ones can make a big difference: “As if he had understood Grandma’s story, Andeg made his own effort” (175). Andeg helps the family by hunting mice and leading the family to a squirrel’s food cache. The nuts and acorns in the stash feed the family, and they reward Andeg for his good work.

Omakayas decides to go hunting for more squirrel caches with Andeg the next day, but she is still weak from grief and hunger. She meets Old Tallow’s vicious yellow dog in the woods, and the dog attacks her. Old Tallow rescues her, and the old woman kills the yellow dog. Omakayas stumbles back to her cabin with no food.

A few days later, Nokomis dreams that the deer One Horn is waiting in a specific location to help the family. Nokomis tells Deydey exactly where to find the deer, and Deydey dresses in his finest outfit for the hunt. He finds One Horn, kills the deer with a single shot, and saves the family from starvation. Omakayas reflects on One Horn with gratitude and respect as she eats her food.

That night, Pinch accidentally sets his pants on fire and gets stuck when he sits in a water bucket. This comical sight sets the whole family, including Pinch, into a fit of laughter: “The great deer had saved their bodies, and Pinch’s absurd jump had saved their souls…” (185). Their spirits revive thanks to this laughter.