Researching CREATING ESTHER, Part II

My research for writing Creating Esther wasn’t limited to documents. I also dragged Roland along on a trip through Ojibwe country in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to visit museums and reservations and the shells of former Indian boarding schools.

It isn’t always possible to take research trips to the sites in our fiction, but it has always been worthwhile for me when I had the opportunity. And this one kept me from falling into the pitfalls created by regional differences.

I already knew, of course, that different tribes had different customs and ways of life. But I didn’t know that a few hundred miles could make a difference within a tribe.

The main elements of Ojibwe life and history were the same at each location. Every exhibit we saw referred to the Ojibwes’ seasonal way of life: collecting maple syrup in the spring, fishing and berrying and planting gardens in the summer, harvesting wild rice in the fall, and hunting in the winter. (Actually, fishing and hunting took place all year long, but they were more predominant at those times.) Families moved from one place to another for these seasonal activities but tended to return to the same spot every spring, every summer, every fall, and every winter. In all regions, the members of the tribe also had the same clan system (although not always the same clans) and the same teachings passed down through their oral history.

But they didn’t all live in the same type of birch-bark housing.

Before we left, I thought all of the earlier Ojibwe lived in birch-bark wigwams with the rounded shape shown in the museum exhibit above. On the research trip, I learned that the construction materials varied somewhat depending on the season. Woven birch-bark mats covered the frame in the hot summer months, which allowed the wall coverings to be raised so that air could circulate through the lower part of the frame. In the winter, the walls were insulated with moss and the floors used a radiant heating system.

All of that was helpful new information, and none of it surprised me.

What did surprise me was that some Ojibwe used a birch-bark teepee during the winter. We saw no evidence of this in Michigan or Wisconsin, where winter dwellings were built using the wigwam shape. But that changed when we got to Minnesota. A guide at the Mille Lacs Indian Museum told us that the teepee shape keeps the dwelling warmer. (Since heat rises, the smaller air space near the ceiling would keep more of the heat down by the floor.) During the warmer months, there were no regional differences—all dwellings were built as wigwams. But the winter shape seems to have been modified as members of the tribe moved farther west and closer to the plains Indians, who lived in animal skin teepees.

I’m very glad I took that trip and learned about Ojibwe regional differences. They don’t show up in the book because I kept the settings in Wisconsin and Michigan. But without location research, I could have gotten it wrong.

And I’d rather be true to the culture.

__________

I took the first picture at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabek Culture and Lifeways at Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and the second at Grand Portage National Monument in Grand Portage, Minnesota.

__________

This post was repurposed from the September 22, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Researching CREATING ESTHER, Part I

My research for any historical novel begins with reading as many first-person accounts as I can. This is especially important when writing outside my culture, as is the case with my newly released middle-grade historical novel. Memoirs are usually the best source, although diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper stories are also good.

As I said in my last post, Creating Esther is about an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19^th Century. There are plenty of memoirs about the Native American boarding school experience, but few come from the right perspective. Most took place several decades later, when the students knew what to expect. Others came from the male perspective or that of a white teacher.

The three most helpful memoirs were (1) three essays by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), which can be found in her American Indian Stories; (2) No Turning Back: A Hopi Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds by Polingaysi Qoyawayma (Elizabeth Q. White); and (3) Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood by John Rogers (Chief Snow Cloud). The Zitkala-Sa essays tell about her experiences as a Native American student and teacher shortly before the time of my story, but they are short on details. No Turning Back begins at about the right time and provides a few more specifics, but it spans a number of years and is written by a woman from a different tribe than my protagonist. Red World and White gives a reasonably detailed look at Ojibwe (Chippewa) reservation life around the right time but gives little information about the male author’s boarding school experience.

I also read a number of academic books about the Native American boarding school experience or the Ojibwe tribe. Putting all this information together with what I learned from location research, I believe I have portrayed an accurate picture for my readers. But it wasn’t easy.

Next month I’ll talk about the location research that helped me understand the broader picture.

__________

The photo at the head of this post shows one of the abandoned buildings from the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. I took the picture on my research trip in 2015. And before you ask, I wasn’t intentionally trying to make it look old. Somehow I set my camera to grayscale and didn’t notice it until later.

__________

This post was repurposed from the August 25, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Creating Esther

After numerous submissions to publishers and agents, I decided to self-publish my second middle-grade historical novel. Once that decision was made, it took over a year to get it out there, primarily because of problems with the cover. The first cover designer I hired was over-committed. Then, after I found somebody else to do the front cover art, medical issues slowed the process down. But I’m happy to announce that Creating Esther is now available for purchase from Amazon and other retailers, and you can also read it on Kindle.

Here is the back-cover blurb.

Twelve-year-old Ishkode loves her life on an Ojibwe reservation, but it is 1895 and the old ways are disappearing. Can a boarding school education help her fight back, or will it destroy everything she believes in?

And don’t get confused when you see the author’s name. I use Kaye Page for my middle-grade fiction.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to repurpose former blog posts from when I was researching and writing Creating Esther. I’m not fool enough to claim that they aren’t intended to promote the book, but I’m also smart enough to know that my blog readers desire—and deserve—more. By giving you insight into my writing process, I hope to educate and inform my readers about some of the tougher decisions a writer has to make—especially when writing outside her culture.

Next week I’ll start by describing my reading research.