[6] Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

BOOK: Moon of the Crusted Snow
AUTHOR: Waubgeshig Rice
YEAR: 2018
PUBLISHER: ECW Press

SUMMARY
Indigenous people know what it is like to have a world end. Winter is approaching as a small Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario is cut off. No power. No communication. No end in sight. Life becomes more complicated with the arrival of unexpected visitors from the south. Tensions and panic rise in the community as the harsh winter progresses and food becomes scarce. How does community survive when disaster strikes and infrastructure collapses?

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgehsig Rice is the sixth book in the LAX LAB climate fiction book club and our first book of 2021. It is a dystopian tale told from an Indigenous perspective. Many of you have expressed interest in reading fiction by Indigenous authors, and I hope this is one of many that we may read together. Waubgeshig Rice is an author from Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, Ontario in Canada. He is part of a growing collective of North American Indigenous authors writing science-fiction, horror, and dystopia. I hope that this book will open up opportunities to reflect on colonialism, upon resilience and how communities respond to crisis, and on the dominance of Eurocentric voices in climate fiction and associated genres.

THEMES
Colonialism
Community
Food security
Indigenous
Resilience
Survival

REFERENCES
Articles, essays, and other non-fiction
The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary

‘“We’ve already survived an apocalypse”: Indigenous writers are changing sci-fi’
Alexandra Alter, New York Times, 14 August 2020

‘“I'm indigenizing zombies”: behind gory First Nation horror Blood Quantum’
Charles Bramesco, The Guardian, 28 April 2020

‘Why Waubgeshig Rice wrote a dystopian novel about the collapse of society from an Indigenous perspective’
Ryan B. Patrick, CBC, 9 October 2019

‘"Speculative fiction is a powerful political tool": from War of the Worlds to Terra Nullius'
Veronica Sullivan, The Guardian, 22 August 2017

'Anishinaabe writer Waubgeshig Rice hopes popular novel will be adapted for the screen'
Denis Ward, APTN, 26 May 2020

Fiction
Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman

Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Son of a Trickster* by Eden Robinson
*Recently adapted into a television series Trickster on CBC

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

Film and video
Blood Quantum* (trailer for Indigenous horror zombie film written and directed by Jeff Barnaby)
*Content warning: Violent and graphic imagery

Trickster (CBC television series, an Indigenous Gothic coming of age story)

Music and other audio
Moon of the Crusted Snow playlist by Waubgeshig Rice

A Tribe Called Red (2013) by A Tribe Called Red

Animiism by Tanya Tagaq (2014)

‘Why writing a post-apocalyptic novel felt more fact than fiction for Waubgeshig Rice'
The Next Chapter, CBC Radio, 3 December 2018