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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cultural Maintenance vs. Loss
Grief and Trauma
Colonialism and Land Use
Stories and Religion
Humor
Summary
Analysis
At the funeral reception, Virgil discusses the strange man with his cousins, while Maggie wards off a faux-radical activist trying to talk to her about what to do with the new land. She is hounded constantly by these proposals, and she wonders if she should have had more sympathy for Clifford’s marital inattentiveness when he was chief. Maggie and her siblings discuss Wayne, whom they regard as an eccentric mystic and whom they doubt will leave his island. According to local legend, Wayne attacked five white men who trespassed on his island and tried to build a bonfire. He drove them off the island single-handedly, and none of them could recount exactly what had happened. Virgil leaves, assuring his mother that he’s eaten. When Maggie promises that she’ll make him dinner another day, she realizes she has made that promise many times before.
Maggie cares about the land and what happens to it, but rather than granting her increased power to decide, her role as chief makes her beholden to the conflicting desires of her community. Her complicated feelings about her role as chief are intertwined with her complicated feelings about her late husband. When Clifford was chief, she resented how he prioritized his work over his family, but now she finds herself doing the same thing to Virgil.
Themes
