Colonization, Oppression, and Loss Theme Analysis

In Night Flying Woman, author Ignatia Broker narrates North America’s colonization, as told from the perspective of her Native American great-great-grandmother, Oona. Oona is born in a flourishing Ojibway community in the mid-1800s, in a vast forest that eventually becomes part of the Midwestern United States. By the time Oona is 80 years old, however, she lives on an urbanized reservation in Minnesota, and the last remnants of traditional Ojibway life exist only in her memories. Oona’s life story highlights the losses that Native Americans endure when white settlers begin displacing them and causing widespread deaths through a smallpox epidemic (which the characters call the “sickness”). As Oona grows up, settlers begin to ban Native traditions and force Native children into Christian schools, causing them to lose touch with their own culture. Moreover, Oona’s descendants face discrimination and poverty when attempting to settle into urban life outside their reservation. Oona’s story thus stresses the profound losses that Native Americans have endured since the 19th century—their homelands, culture, and livelihoods, and even their lives.

Oona’s early childhood experiences highlight Native American people’s displacement from their lands and their experiences with illness and death, exposing the unjust physical losses that they endure under colonization. The story opens with the Ojibway community discussing white colonists who are displacing many Native American tribes. The Ojibway consistently refer to white settlers as “strangers,” emphasizing that settlers are not indigenous to the land and are therefore stealing it from its Native inhabitants. In the course of taking indigenous land, white settlers force Native Americans onto crowded reservations, where many contract a mysterious, deadly “sickness.” The “sickness” refers to the smallpox epidemic that ends up killing 90 percent of the Native American population. By introducing smallpox (to which the Native Americans have no natural immunity), settlers cause widespread illness and death among indigenous people who’ve already been forced from their homes. Even though Oona’s family minimizes contact with other Native Americans, choosing to live on the remote edge of the reservation, Oona’s mother still dies from the sickness, suggesting that even when Native people resist destruction of their homes and lives, colonialism still exacts unjust losses.

Even on Native reservations, white settlers force Native Americans to change their language, religion, and lifestyles, leaving no space for Native culture to thrive. This highlights the unethical way that colonists attempt to erase Native American culture. The United States government bans many Native cultural traditions, such as using herbal medicine and hunting in the wild without expensive licenses. This effectively forces Native Americans to live in a non-traditional way, even on land that the settlers have designated for them. Native Americans thus have little remaining space or freedom to embrace their own culture. As a result, traditional indigenous culture disappears from their daily lives little by little. Compulsory schooling further displaces Native traditions from people’s lives. When settlers force Oona’s cousin David to attend Christian school, David learns English, takes a Christian name, and “learn[s] the new ways” (meaning he learns how to live like the settlers do). David’s experience shows that forced schooling effectively indoctrinates children by replacing their own language and traditions with the settlers’ culture. As a result of cultural loss and forced schooling, Native people are increasingly hindered from passing down their traditions. As an adult, Oona notes that many Native children don’t know their own language and traditions, demonstrating the intergenerational effects of oppressive policies. Government bans and schooling thus cause widespread cultural erasure among Native American communities.

Even when Native Americans like Oona and her descendant Ignatia try to integrate into the settlers’ society, they are treated like unwelcome outsiders and experience ongoing discrimination and poverty. When Oona, her husband Michael, and her brother-in-law Little Brother leave the reservation to spend time in the wilderness, they pass white people’s homesteads while remaining “very careful and quiet” because they don’t “want to be seen by the pale strangers.” Their caution suggests that when they venture off the reservation and onto settlers’ land, they feel unwelcome and even unsafe—an instinct that’s proven valid when some settlers kidnap the trio, and they barely escape with their lives. Oona’s descendent Ignatia describes the pervasive discrimination that Native Americans face when they try to build lives off the reservation in the 1950s, showing that even generations later, Native Americans struggle to integrate into the United States. When Ignatia looks for jobs, many white people tell her that they “don’t hire Indians” and believe that Native Americans have a poor work ethic.  Ignatia’s experience shows that racism and unfair stereotypes hobble Native Americans’ attempts to claim a place within the dominant culture.

This struggle shows the effects of losses accumulated across generations—having had their land and traditions taken from them, Native Americans now fight to survive within a society that leaves little room for them. Broker thus prompts the reader to empathize with Native Americans, acknowledging a history that has been suppressed for too long.