Firekeeper's Daughter

Teddie tells Daunis they are having an “intervention sweat.” The sweat-lodge ceremony is a ritual that is practiced to right oneself, where one can pray and experience a rebirth. Teddie doesn’t know what’s going on with Daunis, but she senses that Daunis is beginning to forge her own way ahead. Teddie wants to make sure that Daunis is equipped with what she needs to see clearly and make the right decisions about who she lets into her life. During the ceremony, Teddie reveals a little more of her past and the toxic relationship she had before Art. Teddie credits her ability to finally “see” Art clearly and fall in love with him with her experience of getting right with herself and deciding that love is not control, that when someone tells you they love you they should love all of you. Teddie is the person that Daunis looks up to the most and she helps Daunis see that one need not be perfect to be good, strong, loving, and courageous. Daunis realizes that this “Auntie has shown me how to be a strong Nish kwe—full of love, anger, humor, sorrow and joy. Not as something perfect: She is a woman who is complex and sometimes exhausted but mostly brave” (328).

On the ferry ride home, Daunis decides to destroy the last few pages of her uncle’s notebook in order to keep the FBI on the mushroom trail and away from looking into any of her community’s other sacred medicines. After thinking about the last exchange between Travis and Lily—where Lily tried to let Travis go in order to take care of herself and Travis in turn chose to kill Lily instead—Daunis thinks she might know what made meth-X so powerful. 

Daunis thinks back to the end of Travis and Lily’s relationships. Their on again/off again love included Travis trying every romantic gesture to get Lily back once he wasn’t allowed at her house anymore. Daunis remembers the beginning of the ultimate end happening on Valentine’s Day when Travis offered Lily “love medicine,” which Lily refused. The “love medicine” that Travis offered Lily is one of the “bad medicines” that Teddie has warned Daunis about; she realizes that when Lily refused Travis’s offer, he put the bad medicine in the meth he was making. This explains why the kids in Minnesota had the group hallucination and were overcome by their insatiable desire for more meth. This ingredient, added to meth-x, was born out of Travis’s warped understanding that to love Lily meant to possess her.

The next morning, on Daunis’s birthday, Jamie joins her on a run. He tells her that he knows she is keeping things from the investigation. Jamie could tell in their last conversation that she was concealing her emotions too well, and he also noticed that her uncle’s notebook is missing the last five pages. Daunis asks Jamie if he can trust her. She then tells him that what she is concealing isn’t meant for the FBI. Jamie responds by saying, “Can you trust me?” (337).

Daunis suits up for the benefit hockey game and receives a text from Teddie that says, “Not sure I can watch you play. I get why but it’s still foolish” (338). At this point, Teddie is the only person that knows about the lasting impact of the surgery that Daunis had last year in order to correct her injured shoulder. This game forces Daunis to confront her injury in a more serious way after she gets checked into the boards and has to sit the rest of the game out. Everyone else, including her brother, assumes that her shoulder pain is from an old injury that has left her shoulder prone to popping out of its socket. Jamie is impressed by Daunis’s performance on the ice—she is a fierce competitor and a skilled skater.

After the game, Daunis learns that the tribal council approved her membership. She hears this from Grant and immediately feels troubled by his interest in tribal affairs. Everyone is excited for Daunis to have been granted enrollment early, on her actual birthday. Meanwhile, Levi harps on the team’s performance instead of what the game was really about, which is Robin. When Daunis thinks about Levi’s obvious lack of care for Robin despite his friendship and intimacy with her, she considers again the conversation she had with Robin at the school right before she died. Robin said to Daunis, “No guy should have that kind of power over you. No matter who he is or how much everyone adores him. Or how much you might still want him” (243). Daunis thinks about Levi’s reputation. He will often “snag and brag,” so Daunis wonders if Robin’s coded message that day was actually about her brother. After the game, Daunis gets Jamie to drive her to the emergency room, where he learns that her injury is far worse than everyone but Teddie actually knows. She doesn’t need her shoulder popped back in place—her arm is completely numb from the elbow up. 

Daunis reveals to Jamie the truth behind her shoulder pain. Before her senior year started, she had a surgery to correct her chronic shoulder instability, what Levi referenced after the game about her shoulder popping in and out of its socket. She did this to ensure her ability to play for the year and to make sure she was ready to play on U of M’s hockey team the next fall. Daunis knew the risks of the surgery and knew her mother wouldn’t want to sign off on it, so she got Teddie to pay for it and take her to the surgery, where she was able to use the medical power of attorney Daunis’s mother gave to her in case Daunis ever needed it. The surgery went poorly, and after Daunis sustained two injuries during the regular season that left her with decreased feeling in her arm, she knew her hockey career was over for good.

When the doctor tells her that she risks further nerve damage every time there is a trauma to her shoulder, Jamie questions her decision to play at all. Daunis says that playing hockey is when she feels the closest to her dad, and when she is able to express and experience unchecked emotion and power. After the hospital visit, Jamie and Daunis take a picnic to the river, where they have sex for the first time, and where Jamie subsequently confesses his love for Daunis. Jamie’s proclamation enrages Daunis. She thinks it is hurtful and cruel to promise something like love when they both know that he can’t fulfill that promise right now with everything going on with the investigation. Jamie’s proclamation complicates things for Daunis in a way that she didn’t want. She accuses Jamie of lying to her, and this experience dredges up the last time she saw her dad, how he promised to come back to her soon, and how their lives would be better than ever, when in fact he died away from home and she never saw him again.