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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
Ignatia gets off the bus and walks toward home. When she moved to this neighborhood in the 1950s, it was larger and more diverse. Now, it’s surrounded by freeways and is only a few blocks wide. When Ignatia first moved here with her children, they were the only Native American family trying to blend in among a community of Latinx and white people. Ignatia imagines the time when her people still possessed the land, and she imagines everyone else trying to blend in, instead of her. When she tells her children traditional stories about their Ojibway culture, it seems foreign to them. Their lives are saturated with American culture and rock and roll.
Ignatia Broker, the story’s author and narrator, describes the extent of urban sprawl in her neighborhood. Her reflections highlight that there are few forests left (in contrast to the 1850s, when the book’s central narrative takes place). Ignatia’s struggles to blend in reveal that she feels like an unwelcome outsider in the United States, even though she is indigenous to the land. The fact that traditional Ojibway stories feel foreign to her children suggests that her children are disconnected from their heritage, which makes Ignatia sad.
Themes
Ignatia closes her eyes and thinks back to the past. Her story begins when she’s 22. She leaves her reservation and moves to the Twin Cities in Minnesota in 1941, the year Pearl Harbor is attacked. It's hard to find work, and a lot of people discriminate against Native Americans. She ends up living with six other Ojibway people in one room with three beds. The landlady is supposed to charge five dollars a week for the whole room, but she collects five dollars a week from each person. Despite how crowded it is, Ignatia and her roommates often squeeze in other Ojibway people who need shelter.
In describing her financial and employment struggles, Ignatia highlights the oppression that many Native Americans experience when they try to integrate into United States society, despite being indigenous to the land. Many white Americans underpay and cheat them, forcing them into poverty. At the same time, Ignatia reveals that her community shares resources and helps each other, despite how little they have. This communal support helps them survive their oppression and get by.
Themes
Ignatia feels like she’s in an alien materialistic culture, but she feels more at home among other Ojibway people. After the war, many Native Americans struggle to find work, as white people are reluctant to hire them. Ignatia meets her future husband, an Ojibway veteran who’s returning from the war. Ignatia works as a cleaner, while her husband works on the railroad. They move to a poor neighborhood in St. Paul, where the houses are more like shacks, and they have two children. Public services officials are reluctant to help Native Americans integrate into urban society (even though that’s their job), so the Ojibway people in Ignatia’s neighborhood help one another.
Ignatia continues highlighting the oppression that Native Americans experience in the United States. Despite being educated and qualified, Ignatia and her husband must subsist on low-income manual labor, causing them to remain in poverty. The public service officials’ reluctance to help Native Americans also shows the discrimination they experience. Ignatia also stresses that sharing their resources and supporting each other enables Native American communities to survive their oppression, both physically (through food, shelter, and possessions) and emotionally (in providing a community support network that makes people like Ignatia feel less isolated).
Themes
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After Ignatia’s husband dies in the Korean War, Ignatia starts clerical training and works in a health clinic. Eventually, she forms an agency to help other Native Americans integrate into urban society. Her work connects her with many Native Americans, and she feels less lost in modern society. Many Native children who are born in urban society want to know more about their history. So, Ignatia tells them the old stories that her grandmother told her. Ignatia is glad that young Native children want to learn about their culture. She’s happy to pass on the philosophies and lessons contained in Ojibway stories, so that the young generation can keep passing them on.
Ignatia’s efforts to help her community highlight the Native American ethos of sharing resources, working communally, and supporting each other. As noted earlier, this ethos helps Native Americans overcome some of their oppression and their feelings of being unwelcome or isolated in society. Ignatia also thinks that storytelling will help to keep indigenous knowledge alive, which suggests that Native American stories contain important information about indigenous culture and values.
Themes
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Ignatia begins telling the reader her story, explaining that the Ojibway are forest-dwellers who live in harmony with many other forest tribes. Nobody owns the land—instead, all the tribes share its bounties. When strange people from foreign lands began arriving, many Ojibway people befriended them, but Ignatia’s family moved deeper into the forest. Ignatia thinks about her great-great-grandmother, Ni-bo-wi-se-gwe, or Night Flying Woman. Her nickname was Oona.
The reader learns about the importance of forests in Ojibway culture: their indigenous society and lifestyle is designed for living in forests (rather than tearing down forests to set up towns and local infrastructure). Broker also introduces the story’s protagonist: her ancestor Oona. The strange people are European settlers who are colonizing the United States. From the outset, Oona’s family worries about the settlers’ intentions, uncertain what the settlers intend to do.
Themes
When Oona was young, more strangers arrived. They made the Native Americans sign treaties, and then they chopped down the forest for lumber. As more settlers arrived, they surrounded the Ojibway people, pushing them into smaller pockets of land that eventually became reservations. The settlers also wanted the Ojibway people to change their culture and follow the advice in the settlers’ books. Oona grew up with all this going on around her.
Broker highlights that displacing Native Americans, destroying their habitat through deforestation, and attempting to change or erase their indigenous culture is highly oppressive. The reader learns that Oona’s life story will capture these difficult experiences, which many Native Americans experienced under colonization.
Themes
