Summary
The prologue opens with a narrator asking in italics, Hey, wanna hear a good story? Supposedly it’s a true one. A sunfish observes a young Anishnawbe woman and a slightly older man swimming naked in the sunfish’s pond. The girl has to leave tomorrow to go to a residential school, and the man is unimpressed and jealous of this new guy, Jesus. The man is capable of more-than-human feats—as much as this Jesus fellow, he says—but everyone is talking about him nowadays. Jealous, he dives into the pond and disappears; the girl looks for him and cries, saying she doesn’t want to go, but the next day, she goes to the White school.
At the White school, run by People in Black—the Nuns and the Priests—the girl is given a Christian name, Lillian, told to speak only English or Latin, and instructed to stop laughing. A year after her arrival, she hears that her cousin, Sam Aandeg, has been sent to the shed for being mouthy again. In the shed, Sam reads Hamlet, which he’s being forced to memorize—it is actually very easy for him, but he’d never let Father McKenzie know that.
After a cold, hard night, Sam wakes up to Lillian, who brings him some toast and jam, and she admits that she kind of likes learning here, and she doesn’t mind this Jesus guy they talk about. She does believe, though, that the best thing for Sam is to escape, and she’ll help him if she can.
An unspecified length of time later (but around 60 years), a man wakes up, confused and in pain, in a filthy apartment. He’s a panhandler and a drunk; his past life is locked, in his mind, behind a security door. He splashes water on his face, is frightened by a cockroach (the cockroach itself feels a kind of kinship with this man), and then he sees a beautiful Native woman at the laundromat across the street. He waves hello to her, but when her expression is one of disgust and pity, he yells “Fuck you” at her, accidentally spitting a tooth out as well. This triggers the man’s memories, and he reflects that he used to be great—the creator of creatures, the chief troublemaker and champion of Canada’s Native People. Memories of past lives lead to memories of a particular woman, and he knows she’s still alive somewhere. He feels a new purpose—he has an appointment to keep. But first, he vomits.
Elsewhere, 76-year-old Lillian Benojee has collapsed and is dying. Her grandson, Virgil—one of 18 grandchildren—sits outside her busy house, watching the activity inside. His mother, Maggie Second, is the chief of Otter Lake, after his dad (the previous chief) died in a boating accident three years ago. Virgil is a good kid, but he’s bored, not especially great or terrible. He’s joined by one of Lillian’s other grandkids, Dakota, who brings him corn soup.
Far to the south, a birdhouse seller named Bruce Scott sees a mysterious figure ride by on a large, old, red motorcycle. Just outside the Otter Lake Reserve, two young girls playing ball are intrigued but frightened by the same figure. And from his perch atop the Otter Lake welcome sign, a crow watches the figure ride into town, stopping to give the crow a caw that means “I’m back.” All through the woods, raccoons—who have long memories and love revenge—wait for the figure, watching him drive by with pleasure. The Otter Lake Debating Society sees the figure enter the town of Otter Lake, and for once, they’re struck speechless.
Maggie Second, Virgil’s mom, arrives at Lillian’s house. It’s Saturday afternoon, and she’s already had a long day of work. The reserve recently bought a parcel of land from Canada, which was complicated on its own, but now everyone on the reserve has very loud opinions about what to do with the land. She talks to her mom, who says that no one is happy—not Maggie, not Virgil, not the town—so she’s called on someone to help. They could all use a little magic. Maggie asks who, but Lillian said she wouldn’t get it—it’s an Anishnawbe thing, and while Maggie might be her daughter, she’s First Nations, not true Anishnawbe, the way they used to be.
The mysterious figure on the motorcycle arrives, enters Lillian’s house, and hears her two dying requests. Though he now has blond hair and blue eyes, Lillian recognizes him as the man from the pond all those decades ago. Virgil—who thought the man was beyond cool—and Dakota sneak to Lillian’s window to watch, and Virgil sees the man kissing Lillian passionately.
Lillian Benojee’s funeral is attended by almost everyone on the reserve, and she’s well-loved and remembered by many. The mysterious man attends as well, drawing Virgil’s and Dakota’s attention. The man sees Sammy Aandeg—now a strange, dirty, old drunk—and knows he’s a good place to start whatever Lillian’s final wish was. He also admires the beauty of Lillian’s daughter, Maggie.
Maggie hopes her son is doing okay, and cannot help but feel guilty. Clifford, her husband who had died years back in a fishing trip accident, has his headstone in the same graveyard. He’d been a workaholic, the leader of the community and barely present in his wife and son’s lives. Now Maggie is the head of the Band Office and understands all of the responsibilities and burdens and crippling paperwork.
Lillian’s favorite son, Wayne, doesn’t attend her funeral; he’s been in self-imposed isolation on an island on Otter Lake for the last four years. He had not wanted to watch his mother die like that, and he knew she knew he loved her. He will go to mourn her soon.
Analysis
Motorcycles and Sweetgrass is a contemporary Indigenous novel that aims to do multiple things: present Indigenous life as it is actually lived, rather than dwell exclusively in the past or present a picture of squalor and victimhood; engage with aspects of Indigenous history, myth, and culture and how those things interact with contemporary, Westernized life; and comment upon universal themes of love, friendship, family, growing up, and more.
One of the important historical moments in Indigenous history that Taylor engages with is the residential schools, which many young Native people were sent to in order to civilize them under the auspices of caring for them. Lillian is anxious about going off to the school, where she is eventually given the name of Lillian and told to speak only English, but she is intrigued by Jesus and his teachings. Sam, her cousin, has been there for a while and will be there for more years during which he will be beaten, abused, and psychologically destroyed. Taylor’s third-person narration says wryly of the Canadian schools, “the [on-reserve school] could only take kids so far, which is why the Canadian government had built these other schools where their welfare would be better maintained on a reserve. Manifest Destiny, as the White people to the south believed, dictated that this little Anishnawbe girl be removed from her home and sent away to be taught about the Battle of Hastings, dangling participles, and how to draw a pie chart” (5). Taylor can barely contain his disdain, and later in the novel when he narrates what happens to Sam and how the man is utterly ruined by the experience, can barely contain his rage.
Between 1883 and 1997, more than 150,000 children like the fictional Lillian and Sam were taken from their homes and placed into these schools. The focus was ostensibly learning about Christian religion and Western culture but also included exhausting manual labor. Malnutrition and disease were common, and many children died. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded the schools were “a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples,” and ultimately “a cultural genocide.”
Lillian seems to have the fortitude to withstand the residential school and represents the most healthy way of reconciling Western religion and culture with her Native religion and culture. She decides that she will behave at the school, learning the language and following the rules, and will maintain her sanity by “deal[ing] with the present by concentrating on the past and the future: remembering the family she had just left, and imagining the family that she would someday have” (11). She admires her cousin’s resistance but will not do it herself. She says before she goes off to school that she is intrigued by Jesus’s “fancy tricks and things” (6) and comes to embrace his teachings, but worries that there is no longer any magic out there in the world.
As an adult, we learn that Lillian had a sort of syncretic religion and culture; Taylor describes her bedroom as having not only pictures of her family and quilts, but also Bible quotes on the wall. Most telling, “High above Lillian’s wrought-iron bed frame hung a picture of a penitent Christ, clasped in prayer. Right beside it was an elaborate dreamcatcher, with several pictures of grandchildren attached” (40). These are two powerful symbols of two very different faiths, come together in the figure of one woman. She defends the Bible, which she tells Maggie did not itself cause what happened to Sam (men did), and reminds her that Native men behave badly too. When she summons Nanabush to her bedside to ask him to help her daughter and son find a bit more magic in their lives, she rebukes him for his petulant comments about Jesus and urges him to realize “There was room for the both of you” (52).
