Firekeeper's Daughter

“Anglerfish. That’s what I call the hockey girlfriends. A bottom-dweller fish that bites its mate and fuses with it. A parasitic appendage unable to exist separately.”

Daunis harbors many judgements about the people around her in the beginning of this story and the hockey girlfriends are one such example. Because Daunis doesn’t know who she is exactly, she has developed her understanding of herself by pitting herself against who she knows she “isn’t.” Daunis believes that she is better than the “anglerfish” and therefore knows something about herself based on her knowledge that she isn’t like “them.” 

“If you know the story of her regalia—who and where and why each item came to be—then you know her.”

In this scene, Daunis and Jamie are at the powwow together watching the Jingle Dress dancer. Daunis is explaining to Jamie that each part of the Jingle Dress dancer’s regalia is acquired piece by piece over time by her family. Her dress is made up of parts that represent who she is as a whole. This moment is significant because it foreshadows Daunis in her Jingle Dress regalia at the end of the book, where she shows and represents her whole story including her own experience with sexual and domestic abuse. It also represents the theme of seeing and knowing a person’s “whole story,” instead of just the individual parts.

“In that moment I was pissed that you were so eager to go. I hate going, but I thank Creator each time that you’re not with me. I keep hoping your privileges will keep you safe. Your last name. Your light skin. Your money. Your size, even.”

Teddie is explaining to Daunis why she snapped at her when Daunis begged to attend the Blanket Party. Daunis didn’t understand why Teddie got so upset at the time, but Teddie explains that there are certain things she is excluded from in her Native community that are actually privileges of her status in her half white/French family who are wealthy and powerful. So far, Daunis has been protected from some of the things that people like her friend Lily—who presents Native, comes from a poorer family, and lives on the reservation—haven’t been protected from. Teddie is both grateful for the layer of protection that Daunis has and also resentful that her own young daughters, who are Black and Ojibwe, will grow up without any of that protection themselves.

“I am proud to come from people who serve their community in this way.”

Daunis thinks this as she sees Art tending the fire on the first day of Lily’s journey into the next world. The theme of familial and communal responsibility is woven through this book with the idea that everyone has their individual part to play in service of the community. Daunis hasn’t yet been presented with what the FBI is going to ask of her. Her recognition that she too wants to serve and protect her community will be the catalyst for her decision to become the CI for Ron and Jamie.

“A few minutes ago, I was sitting next to Lily, racking my brain about how little I know about Jamie’s true identity and whatever this investigation is. Now I’m in a car with Jamie and Ron, but all I can think about is Lily. It’s as if Jamie and his investigation are lodged in my brain’s left hemisphere with facts, logic and analysis. Lily is in my right brain, part of my imagination, intuition, and feelings. Between the two hemispheres is a divide as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon.”

Daunis is reminiscing about how much has changed so quickly. She is beginning to feel like her life is parsed into two separate parts more than ever, and that holding the knowledge of what is going on with the FBI investigation means keeping it sectioned off in the “logical” and “scientific” part of her brain. What Daunis will come to realize is that she is most helpful in the investigation when she is using both sides of her mind, both sides of her “self,” and letting her “imaginative Lily” side of her brain mingle with her scientific and logical brain. At this point, Daunis feels that the only way to manage life and its confusing and sometimes conflicting parts is to keep things separated. She will come to learn that she is most powerful when she finds a way to live her whole self at all times.

“I say my morning prayer and ask for gwekowaadiziwin. Honesty. Walking through life with integrity means no deceiving yourself or others.”

Every morning when Daunis offers her prayers, she asks for a foundational virtue of her culture. This morning, the morning after she makes her decision to help the FBI as a CI, she asks for honesty. Daunis doesn’t know yet how she will be asked to deceive others in her time as a CI, how her own deceptions of herself will be challenged, and how she will uncover heartbreaking deceptions committed by others, but she feels that something in her life is about to be altered forever and she isn’t wrong. Daunis knows that the truth, telling it and being able to look at it when it is presented to her, is going to be a vital part of the success of this investigation. 

“I don’t know what to do with Jamie’s thoughtfulness. It’s easier for me when everything is black-and-white.”

When Daunis first begins helping the FBI, she decides that whatever connection she felt to Jamie was fake because she didn’t know who he really was. Daunis has made up her mind that nothing real exists between them because they are only in proximity to one another due to the meth investigation. Daunis struggles to see how complex relationships can be, and how more than one thing can be true at the same time—that it can be true that Jamie cares for her and also true that Jamie’s initial interest in her was only because of her connection to the meth investigation. Jamie’s care and concern for Daunis makes it difficult for her to write him off as an FBI agent who is just doing his job in working with her.

“But my mother is always moving the line so that I never know what will make her crack. All I know is that her fragile emotions are like pond ice during spring thaw.”

Daunis lets her mother care for her after she finds Heather Nodin’s body on Sugar Island. The two spend the next day watching movies, where her mother is ultra-sensitive to Daunis’s traumatic experience. Daunis is short with her mother’s sensitivity and thinks about how her mother is the only person in her life with whom she doesn’t have what she calls a “push/pull” relationship—one where each person knows where the limits of their ability to push the other fall. Daunis has always felt like she is tiptoeing around upsetting her mother, whose sensitivity is ever changing and unpredictable. This passage shows that Daunis doesn’t really know or understand her mother as well as she thinks she does, or as well as she would like.

“I’m the only person looking at the whole person, not just the wound.”

On the way to the Edwards’s Sunday dinner, Daunis tells Ron and Jamie about the BB gun incident, as she knows it. When they scold Daunis for withholding relevant information, she accuses them of only wanting “the dirt” on her loved ones. Daunis bristles at the idea that Jamie and Ron are looking for her to be a gossip and a snitch and accuses them of having preconceived ideas that all of these people are guilty of something based on a few bad stories that they might know about them. Daunis feels like she is the only person out of the three who can see these people as people, not as possible suspects based on a few things they’ve done wrong. Daunis is right about this, of course, but she will see that her protection of those she loves will also cause her to initially overlook what is really going on.

“I thought I knew Mike Edwards. My Brother’s goofy friend and teammate. My former teammate. The tech-savvy guy who set up my new phone tonight. I know that guy. But the one who kissed me and refused to listen to any of my refusals? I don’t know who that person is.”

Daunis contemplates this after Mike tries to kiss her and she has to turn down his advances multiple times to get him to stop. Mike’s lack of consideration for Daunis’s consent in this moment is a warning sign to her that maybe Mike can’t be trusted in the way she thought he could. Daunis’s experience with Mike foreshadows the reality that there are more people in Daunis’s circle than just Mike who aren’t really who they seem to be.

“My whole life, I’ve been seeking validation of my identity from others. Now that it’s within my reach, I realize I don’t need it.”

Daunis feels conflicted when Teddie approaches her with the forms to apply for tribal enrollment before her 19th birthday. While on one hand Daunis has wanted this her whole life, she also knows that the status of being a card-holding member of the tribe won’t actually change the fact that some people will still see her as an outsider and that she will sometimes even feel like one. It is important for Daunis to have this moment of recognition for what the card actually means and doesn’t mean for her. Teddie knows Daunis is resistant and reminds her that while enrollment won’t change anything about her true identity, it will help her children and grandchildren in their status as future members of the tribe. Granny June reminds Daunis that this is the kind of decision that she wants to think seven generations ahead for, and when she does she knows it is the right thing to do.

“Maybe it’s even more important for me to be part of the investigation because I’m the only one thinking seven generations ahead.”

Before saying yes to the tribal enrollment application, Daunis remembers what Ron said about it being beneficial to the investigation if she were an enrolled member. Daunis feels bad for considering how this might help her secret work as a CI but then realizes that her decision to become a member is greater than the temporary help it might offer to the FBI in their investigation. Daunis feels that Ron and Jamie aren’t thinking ahead to what the impacts of the investigation might have on her community, but she is, and as that is the case, her involvement and even enrollment is more important than ever.

“My thoughts are racing. I haven’t forgotten Jamie’s views about the FBI’s role and the community’s role. Am I helping the FBI or am I helping my community? I had doubles from the start that it was the same thing. The more enmeshed I become, the farther apart my investigation is from theirs. It’s no longer on two parallel tracks. For the rest of the bus ride, I sequence the steps I will take when I return.”

On the bus ride home from the first Supe’s game, Ron tells Daunis what was reported as being on Heather Nodin’s person when her body was found. Daunis knows that something happened between when she saw Heather around the fire and when she was murdered because Heather didn’t have meth on her at the party. Moreover, it’s suspicious to Daunis that Heather’s bra, underwear, and shoes were all missing when she was found. This a turning point for Daunis in that it’s the moment she decides she is truly going rogue in this investigation. She can no longer treat the FBI investigation and her own personal investigation into what is happening in her community as two separate yet side-by-side endeavors; she has to fully commit to one over the other.

“In the Before, I usually relied on science and math. Linear thinking. But does that mean I should ignore my gut instincts? Is it like a pie chart where making one slice larger takes away from the other slices?”

Daunis has just called the bank and learned about the shocking amount of money that Levi has in their shared bank account. Daunis tries to reason with herself, believing that Levi’s money doesn’t mean that he is involved in something shady, but she still has a bad feeling about it. Daunis recalls how her mother was the only one who believed that her Uncle David didn’t relapse, that something bad had happened to him instead. Daunis wonders how she can use both her scientific brain and her gut instincts at the same time. She can and she will in the future, but right now it seems like she must use one or the other and not both.

“Some Nishnaabs blend their religious faith and traditional Ojibwe spirituality, like adding sea to the incense during mass. Others, like the Baileys, maintain a clear division.”

Daunis attends Robin Bailey’s funeral mass, where she thinks about her own mother and grandparents sitting in this church. Daunis stopped attending St. Mary’s when she was a sophomore after she heard GrandMary make a comment about how converted Catholic Natives are “less Catholic” than the “originals.” Daunis has examples of those around her who are able to walk in their differing cultures and religions without conflict, but she doesn’t see that example in her own family, so it is difficult for her to imagine. Daunis will have to forge her own path if she desires to blend her inherited family history, because up until this point she, like the Baileys, has found it easier to just stick to one or the other.

“Once your mother is feeling better, I hope you’ll rethink staying home. I know Indian kids struggle in college because they’re not prepared academically or socially, but Daunis, you’re not like them.”

The secretary at Daunis’s old high school, Mrs. Hammond, says this to Daunis after she lets Daunis into Uncle David’s old classroom to go through some of his things. Daunis has told Mrs. Hammond that she is looking for some of her uncle’s things in order to cheer her mom up. Mrs. Hammond’s racist comment is met by silence from Daunis. This moment is an example of the many types of racism that someone like Daunis has to face due to having a diverse racial background. She experiences the implicit bias from the white community, which sees her as being “better” than “them” (Natives), who they automatically assume are inferior in some way. Daunis also experiences instances of prejudice from her Native community, which sees her lighter skin and family wealth as proof that she is “not Native enough.” 

“There is ceremony inside the madoodiswan. Healing. Returning to balance. Madoodiswan means ‘Mother Earth’s womb.’ You enter your mother and leave reborn.”

Teddie calls an “intervention sweat” because she knows something is going on with Daunis, even though she doesn’t know what specifically. Teddie sees her role as Daunis’s relative and mentor as being one who can help Daunis on her path while also trusting that Daunis is an adult who will make her own decisions, and at times, even have secrets that Teddie doesn’t know. In order to support Daunis in what seems to be a time of challenge and change for her, Teddie has Art pour a sweat for them with the hopes that the ceremony will cause Daunis to see her current experience with new and clear eyes, and that she will reset herself for the challenges ahead.

“Please be careful. Not every Elder is a cultural teacher. Not all cultural teachers are Elders. It’s okay to listen to what people say and only hold on to the parts that resonate with you. It’s okay to leave the rest behind. Trust yourself to know the difference.”

After their sweat, Teddie tells Daunis that she’s noticed her inquiring about the “old ways” and traditional medicines from the elders at the center. Teddie tells Daunis that while it is okay to learn about bad medicine, she hopes Daunis is not seeking any bad medicine out. Teddie tells Daunis that just because someone is knowledgeable about traditional medicine doesn’t mean they’re someone she should be learning from. Teddie wants Daunis to trust the gut instinct part of herself that she can’t always explain or understand.

“‘Not yet, Ojiishingwe,’ I say. ‘Once we’re on the other side of this. Someday.”

While Jamie and Daunis are dancing at the gala, Daunis whispers “Chi miigwech, Ojiishingwe” in Jamie’s ear, which translates to “thank you, he has a scar on his face.” Jamie then asks Daunis what her spirit name is, to which she says, “not yet.” Daunis holds off on telling Jamie her spirit name because she doesn’t even know Jamie’s real name. She also knows that there is much to learn about each other still and she wants to take her time before giving so much of herself to him.

“Nibwaakaawin. Auntie told me the translation, breaking down each part of the word so it made perfect sense: to be wise is to live with an abundance of sight.”

Daunis is shocked by what she found in Levi’s room. When she gets back to her house, she is sick to her stomach. Daunis thinks about the quality of “having an abundance of sight” that she’s always looked up to in Teddie. Daunis has always wanted to be like Teddie but never before realized that all of Teddie’s wisdom and insight has, at times, come at a very painful price. Daunis hasn’t wanted to believe that Levi is involved with the meth making and dealing, but now she has no choice but to see the truth and reality in front of her. 

“Mom’s first smile is the overall image. Her second is for my father. After twenty years, she remains besotted with him. I’m torn between seeing her devotion as a triumph or as an anchor weighing her down. Can it be both? I don’t see how.”

Daunis doesn’t understand her mother’s willingness to stay present and rooted in her past when the past is so painful. Until this moment, where Daunis is showing her mother the photo Levi gave her of them and their dad, Daunis has only ever considered her mother’s ever-present love and grief over her father to be a flaw in her way of being. Now Daunis wonders at the strength required to live in the ever-present memory of a loved one. Daunis wonders if her mother’s ability to continue living in the love for Daunis’s father, who both betrayed her and is gone, can be both a celebration and a grief at the same time. The answer, Daunis will later learn, is yes.

“My brother leaves out his own role in why Travis wasn’t on any league team.”

When Mike and Levi first come back to the trailer after kidnapping Jamie and Daunis, Levi explains how the meth business started. As he is telling the story of Angie and Travis Flint’s roles, he leaves out some key details as to why either of them got involved in the first place. Especially egregious to Daunis is the fact that Levi leaves out the reason Travis was bored and sitting on the sidelines at hockey to begin with, which was because he took the fall for Levi’s BB gun incident. It’s possible that if Travis was still involved in the team he may not have been as susceptible to drug abuse. This moment is another example of how a person’s “whole story” is only told in pieces, which leaves out some of the key reasons for the visible “wound” as Daunis calls it.

“Not everyone gets justice. Least of all Nish kweag.”

Daunis is devastated when she learns that the US Attorney’s office won’t be pursuing or pressing charges against Dana for kidnapping Daunis or Grant for raping her. While Daunis has known, intellectually, that Indigenous women are statistically more likely to experience both domestic violence and sexual abuse that goes unreported and unprosecuted, now Daunis has become a part of that statistic and feels it in a personal way.