Gina Plumer
Night Flying Woman Assignment
American Indian Social Welfare Perspective The book that I decided to read was Night Flying Woman by Ignatia Broker. The tribal identity in the book was Oibwe from the White Earth Band. Ms. Broker started out the book from the present day in Minneapolis where she grew up. There wasn’t much culture to be seen, and the younger generations were getting too lost in the new world. Ms. Broker made sure to mention that she still taught her children the Ojibwe ways, and told them the stories that her grandmother had once told her. Throughout Ignatia Broker’s introductory chapter, we got a sense of the amount of respect she had for you great-great grandmother Oona, or Night Flying Woman.
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It seemed as though they all had each other even though their lives were changing drastically. Oona’s grandfather once said “the forests have never failed us”. I don’t think that they ever did, but the new settlers and their new ways definitely did. It wasn’t a choice for Oona’s family to adhere to the new way of life, but the decision was already made for them by the new settlers. I think that as hard as it sounded, the family coped with the changes very well. In the book, it was before federal and state policy was made. Although, tribal reservations were in the making, and the segments of land that were being saved for the Indian people was laid out. When a white man shows up with a paper that must be obeyed, it was required the people to move to the White Earth reservation. It was government policy at that time, in the 1840's, to move all northern Midwest U.S. Indians there in a kind of concentration camp. They were able to resume their traditional life until the boarding school era began. This was when the United States was becoming more unified, and the land was being distributed among the new settlers and the Ojibwe people. When the reservations were made, this was the only place where the Native Americans could hunt, fish, rice, sugar, plant, and pick berries. They could no longer set up summer and spring villages off the reservation to go about their traditional ways. Ms. Broker made reference to the bad eating habits that