Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

3.5

This is Nishnaabeg storytelling that isn't worried about making concessions to me. But there's enough here to grapple with, familiar snippets of Southern Ontario wrapped in beautiful poetry.

This is American Gods where the ancient deities move among us, not as rarefied icons bathed in golden light and imbued with glamour, but trudging among us looking for tarps to go on sale at Canadian Tire, cutting coupons, struggling with sobriety, hoarding knick-knacks. But still bigger, containing deeper histories.

There's sly humour here too, playing up stereotypes, winking at my need to see Indigenous peoples as tuned to the natural world, reading about trees ability to pull stress out of a body. But there's also riding around on a grey ten-speed Supercycle pulling an old kid's trailer to hold old toilets and sinks collected from rich neighbourhoods to place randomly on the reserve.

This isn't for me, but I loved it just the same.