Summary
At breakfast, John is in Betty Lou’s hoping to overhear some useful gossip. He overhears three men complain about taking their children to museums and plays, and one of them—a tattooed man named Dan—insults John’s motorcycle. John leaves the restaurant, but he quickly returns, punches Dan in the face, says to never disrespect the Indian (the motorcycle brand), apologizes to Elvira, and leaves again. He goes to the Band Office and asks Maggie to play hooky at work, skipping a call with an MP to ride into town and get Thai food with him. She says no, and he’s childishly disappointed; Maggie thinks that maybe it’s a good thing to learn about his impulsive/moody nature now, before getting too serious with him. He kind of is acting like Nanabush from legend, she smiles.
John rides toward town. He wanted to share his plan with Maggie, but this is fine; he has other friends (especially Dakota), confidence, and a patience born of the land. After a 2.5-hours’ ride, he’s outside the dry cleaners he used to live across from, when he was an old Indian drunk. He sets a fire in the dumpster, convinces the owner to leave the store, then gets the address of the beautiful Native woman he saw (and spat a tooth at) a few days ago. He goes to her house, introduces himself as John Savage, seduces her, and leaves while she’s in the washroom. Revenge complete, he leaves to deal with the rest of his plan.
Disheartened by their afternoons (Virgil might have to repeat grade seven; Wayne apologized to Maggie), the two men ponder whether Nanabush existing means other gods—both Ojibway and from other cultures—exist as well.
John visits the museum, where he observes the layout and makes plans, but he’s distracted by his curiosity about the exhibits. He ends up yelling about the canoe exhibit’s lack of authenticity, escorted out by security, giving them the name “John Smith.” Once he’s outside the museum, he recalls tricking many Europeans about many things, including where canoes were from and who made them. Perhaps this exhibit’s inaccuracy is partly his fault, but “fuck them if they can’t take a joke" (242).
In Maggie’s backyard, Wayne describes and demonstrates his Aboriginal martial art to Virgil: Aangwaamzih, or “watching out for yourself.” Virgil promises his mom to write a good essay so that he can graduate from grade seven on time.
John waits until nightfall, then sneaks into the museum, where he steals many things that are currently off exhibit. Maggie can’t sleep, worrying about John, Virgil, Wayne, and the big press conference about the land deal tomorrow. Sammy has horrific nightmares of his abuse at the residential school, as he does every night. John returns to Otter Lake, saddlebags full of stolen artifacts, and he brings a giant thunderstorm specifically to Lillian’s grave, fulfilling his promise to her when she was a teenager. Then he heads to the controversial 300 acres of purchased land—the rain-softened ground is perfect for what he’s about to do.
After a tense breakfast, Maggie, Virgil, and Wayne split up for the day. At Sammy Aandeg’s house, John is fast asleep. He usually avoids dreaming (too powerful and complex) but he finds himself trapped in a dream, where he talks to Jesus. Sammy, awake, wishes John would leave—he knows John isn’t a normal man. The Liberal MP, Crystal Denise Park, drives to Otter Lake for the press conference. Her assistant, Kait—who’s also her daughter, though she insists Kait call her Ms. Park instead of Mom—is working on her speech about the land deal, and Kait worries it’s not going to go over well. At school, Virgil does some research on the library computer, and he’s annoyed that Dakota is asking about John. He advises her to stay away from him, and she gets angry and leaves, saying she’ll find John later. He follows, and the librarian notices he had five tabs open about Native legends and Tricksters.
Analysis
John continues to act in the most Trickster of ways. He wants Maggie to neglect her duties as chief to play hooky with him and cannot understand why she refuses to do so. His petulant response is indicative of how selfish he is, and it’s one of the first times Maggie perhaps intuitively understands who she is dealing with. After Maggie’s refusal he decides he needs to get revenge, and seduces another Native woman. And finally, he goes to the museum.
His experience at the museum is amusing, as most of his adventures are, but it’s also a commentary on the reductive treatment of Indigenous peoples. John notices that some of the exhibitions have problematic information, and begins to loudly rail against them. He says at one point, “Look at that stitching! That’s not Algonquian! That’s Odawa. Who curated this exhibit anyway? And look at the shade of the pitch on that boat, what does the label say? Woodland Cree! Like hell, the colour’s too dark. I’ve seen that colour pitch on canoes myself. That’s one hundred percent Saulteaux” (241). The narrator says that eventually security is called, “and even though John protested and ranted about his expertise on the subject of canoe recognition and the rampant mistakes being perpetrated on the public, the museum staff were not inclined to believe him” (241). John’s indignant response is a reflection of how even so-called experts conflate various tribes’ artifacts because they have not taken the time to study these communities in a real way.
Even though the raccoons do not play a large role in this set of chapters, it’s worth considering their role in general in the novel.
Daniel Heath Justice writes about them in his scholarly piece, explaining first and foremost that in Nanabush’s earliest days he was part of a world where the animals also had power. Now both the animals and divine presences like Nanabush are reduced, and must struggle to survive in this new world. When John takes form, it’s ironically only the raccoons who immediately recognize him for who he is, and "he doesn't relish the consequences of that particular acknowledgement. Throughout the novel, the raccoons appear again and again, confronting him with their memory of a darker time when he killed and ate a raccoon who had stumbled into his camp during a storm. He is a creature of appetite, and his hunger that night led him to inhospitality and cruelty…” John is frustrated by the raccoons’ presence throughout the novel, but eventually feels pushed to atone for his actions and “makes amends through an acknowledgment of his long-denied crime and a gift of food in a fitting recompense to the needy raccoon he’d killed.”
Justice offers analysis of the important role the animals play in the text beyond their humorous ability to vex John. He explains, “In Taylor’s novel, as in so many Indigenous works about the interweaving of ages, worlds, and beings into our current time, the raccoons don’t become something else—they remain fully raccoons. They aren’t miniature humans; they behave largely as raccoons do, although for the purposes of Nanabush’s comeuppance they gather in far greater numbers than would their nonfictional counterparts. They see clearly, far more so than Maggie or other residents of Otter Lake: as we are reminded, “the land does not forget; it is in fact the memory of all who live on it. In today’s world, raccoons live closer to the earth than most people, so their memory too is longer.” Their memory is longer, and their language, too, is old—far older than those of their human neighbours. While it’s clear that the raccoons speak to and are understood by Nanabush, we never hear them speak a human tongue, either English or Anishinaabemowin. Instead, it’s Nanabush who speaks Raccoonish. Their world, not ours, is the baseline context for understanding.”
