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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Night Flying Woman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonization, Oppression, and Loss
Storytelling, Knowledge, and Culture
Deforestation and Urbanization
Money, Sharing, and Community
Summary
Analysis
When Oona is 15, Mother falls ill with the sickness. After several months, Mother dies. Father stops joking and smiling, and Oona knows that he will not live much longer either. The weather rages, and Oona knows that the earth is angry. That year, Father dies, and the family buries him next to Mother in the Christian burial ground. Oona goes into the forest, but she can’t hear the trees rustling, and her heart is heavy. Eventually, Oona dreams that she sees Mother and Father happy together. When she wakes up, she can hear the trees rustling again. They sound like they’re crying.
Even though Oona’s family took great precautions to avoid the “sickness” (smallpox), it still reaches them, showing how widespread and ongoing the epidemic is. Oona’s parents’ sickness and deaths exemplify the physical losses (from death and disease) that Native Americans endure under oppression. Oona’s grief makes her feel disconnected from the forest, which deepens her sadness even more. Her grief represents the emotional suffering that oppressors cause her people (by forcing the Ojibway to disconnect from their habitat and culture). In noting that the earth and trees feel sad and angry, Broker suggests that from a Native perspective, this suffering pervades the natural ecosystem, affecting many species and not just humans.
Themes
Oona visits Grandfather and Grandmother to ask about Mother’s past. Grandfather explains that he found Mother alone in the woods when she was a little girl, next to a dead woman. He took her in as his own and raised her. He tells Oona not to worry: her parents were good people, and they handled a difficult time of transition very well. Soon after, Oona marries a man named Michael, who’s half Ojibway. When Oona moves to Michael’s farm, she takes her whole family with her. She also takes in E-quay, whose husband died while working on a logging plant.
Even as she grows up, Oona continues to learn from the stories her grandparents tell her. Here, Oona’s grandfather communicates the importance of supporting those in need. Oona heeds this advice, taking in many people from her community. This, in turn, helps her farm thrive. The wisdom contained in her grandparents’ stories thus continues to serve Oona and her community, even as they face unfamiliar circumstances. This underscores the stories’ value.
Themes
The whole family works hard to make the farm thrive. Oona is too busy to meditate and stops dreaming. But one year, when Michael leaves to go hunting, Oona wants to go with him so that she can revive her dreaming skills in the wild. The family worries about Oona leaving the reservation. They’ve heard about fearsome battles at places like Little Big Horn, and they’re afraid of strangers catching and killing Oona. But she insists, and because she’s a dreamer, the family respects her wishes.
Broker emphasizes that Oona works much harder on the farm than she would have if she lived in the forest: so much so that she has no time to meditate and dream. She is only able to reconnect with her dreaming ability by going into nature, showing, as before, that the natural environment has strong spiritual significance for the Ojibway. Despite integrating into settler culture, the family still faces threats of violence from settlers, showing that oppression is unavoidable.
Themes
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Michael, Oona, and Michael’s brother (Little Brother) head into the wild, stealthily avoiding strangers’ homesteads. They hunt and meditate peacefully. When they are heading back to the reservation, some soldiers catch them. The soldiers tie Little Brother to a horse—they want to drag him to death. But every time they set the horse off, Oona shouts a word, and the horse stops moving. Eventually, she shows the soldiers some birch bark from her bag, and the soldiers recognize the bark as the Ojibway people’s peace symbol, so they stop. Instead, the soldiers keep Oona, Michael, and Little Brother captive in a tent.
Oona, Michael, and Little Brother have to sneak around when they leave the reservation. Even though they’ve completely changed their lifestyles, they’re still not welcome in settler culture and face violent threats when they attempt to roam freely about the land. The birch bark in Oona’s bag represents the Ojibway’s peaceful cultural values: traditionally, they only strip the bark from trees, instead of killing the whole tree. The settler violence they face now—marked by disregard for the value of human life—contrasts starkly with the Ojibway’s respect for all living things.
Themes
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That night, Oona dreams and asks Gitchi Manito for fog. By dawn, a thick fog surrounds the tent. Oona, Michael, and Little Brother escape, hidden in the fog. Instead of heading north to the Ojibway village as the soldiers would expect, they travel west, because Oona saw herself walking toward the setting sun in her dream. Eventually, they find a lodge where an old Ojibway man sits inside. He explains that he is also a dreamer, and he summoned Oona to take him to the Ojibway village, as he’s too old to make the journey himself. The four of them leave together, traveling slowly and stealthily, and they make it safely to the village.
Being in nature enables Oona to connect with her spirituality and save her family. As before, Broker emphasizes that dreams have deep spiritual significance in Ojibway culture, as the Ojibway believe that dreams guide their actions in life-saving ways. Oona continues showing her community spirit by helping the old man back to the reservation. As before, the group must hide when they travel home, emphasizing how unwelcome they are in settler territory and how much danger they face off the reservation.
Themes
