Summary

The epigraph in Part 3 tells the tale of Sounding Feather, a Shawano ancestor who used her own to urine to make dyes whose unique colors depended on her behavior. One day, after she had “resented and sought revenge of her sisters, slapped her husband and screamed at her child”, she produced a blue dye which was “unusually innocent, lovely, deep, and clear” (175).

Chapter 16 tells the story of Cally and Deanna’s birth and the present-day consequences of a hospital mix-up. Ojibwe culture demands that a baby’s umbilical cord be kept to guide the child through life. However, when the twins were born the nurse threw their umbilical cords away. Grandma Noodin was able to recover them, but there was no way to know which cord belonged to which twin. She never told anyone, but she “secretly worried” because “if the cords...