The Muskrat Symbol Analysis

Thomas’s last name, Wazhashk, comes from wazhashk, which means muskrat, a “lowly, hardworking, water-loving rodent.” Muskrats are common, and they aren’t necessarily the most glamorous animals, Thomas thinks, but they are essential. When Thomas visits his father, Biboon, and asks for the story of his name, Biboon says that in the beginning, the world was covered in water. The creator lined up the best divers and asked them to dive, but none could reach the bottom. Then came the muskrat. The muskrat dove too, as far as it could, and when it came back up, it had drowned. But in its hand, it held a tiny bit of silt from the very bottom, and from that, the creator made the whole earth. This journey is, in some ways, similar to Thomas’s fight against Senator Arthur V. Watkins. Thomas works as hard as he can, dives as deep as he can go, and, as a result, Thomas has a stroke. Unlike the muskrat of the story, though, Thomas recovers, and he—along with all the others who fought alongside him—ultimately succeeds in defeating Arthur Watkins’s Termination Bill, just as the muskrat returned with silt from which the creator made the earth. With that in mind, the muskrat is a symbol of the unsung heroes in the background who do the often unglamorous but industrious work necessary not just to make the world keep going, but to protect what is valuable and to make lasting and vital change.