Dedication for THE FIREHANDLER

For my grandparents.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

         I never knew my grandparents. All four were gone before I was old enough to investigate my roots. Would they have taught me about Love, Respect, Bravery, Truth, Honesty, Humility, and Wisdom? I’d like to think so, but like many modern Americans, my heritage is like seed scattered on rocks—my roots are shallow. The Great Melting Pot left me with little understanding of my German, Irish, French, English, or Norwegian ancestry. My family records indicate that I traveled a very similar path as the Anishinaabe, beginning in eastern Canada, passing through the Great Lakes, then out onto the prairie, before settling amongst the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota, but this is a legacy that is foreign to me.

         In this regard, The Fire Handler is a story that goes beyond a summer of self-discovery to an epic journey into understanding legacy and heritage. The characters in this novel, and series, come from contrasting heritages. Minnesota’s heritage has the blood of the Dakota, Anishinaabe, French, and countless other settlers and immigrants. While history records the conflicts between these cultures, I hope to show the shared beliefs. As an English teacher, my favorite topic has always been mythology, for in myth, we can find common ground.

         So even though this tale begins in 1897 Minnesota, it is a fantasy involving monsters, heroes, and quests. Like my characters, you’ll learn about a horned serpent, known by such names as the Mishi-Ginebig, the Unktehi, Jormungandr, and Leviathan, depending on who you ask. The Little Men of the Forest? Oh yes, they’re known as the Memegwesi to the Ojibwe, Pukwudgee to the eastern Anishinaabe, Canoti to the Dakota, Puck to William Shakespeare, Fossegrim to the Norse, Leprechauns to the Irish, and for lack of a better word, demons in the Bible. So while my characters come from diverse backgrounds, the only way to survive conflict is joining together. As a writer of fantasy, I want to share similarities rather than differences.

         I first met my character Lily Weber during a research unit in my English 10 class. Paired with a unit on Native American folklore, my research unit included a variety of historical articles on Minnesota history. Having grown up in South Dakota, I knew details about the Dakota Conflict of 1862, but I’d never even heard of the Battle of Sugar Point in 1898. As I’m reading about the Dawes Act, logging rights, boarding schools, and the arrest of Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, I encountered an anecdote about a young woman in a single canoe paddling between the Anishinaabe sharpshooters and General Bacon’s soldiers at Bear Island on Leech Lake.

Who was she? Where was she going?

Why was she willing to risk her life?

During my time as a student and teacher, I’d met plenty of teenagers whose personal problems overshadowed any “real world” issues happening around them. So from the chaos of Bear Island, Lily Weber came to life in my mind. Although I have no tribe or clan, I’ve spent a lifetime attempting to understand my Lakota classmates from South Dakota, and upon moving to Minnesota, my Anishinaabe neighbors. When the State of Minnesota introduced Language Arts standards that covered Native American literature and nonfiction, I was ready to teach them (with gusto). While most of my students were descendents from pioneer families, each year, I’d have a handful of students with Native American ancestry, most of whom preferred just to fit in with their peers. While I avoided shining a spotlight on my students during these units, I discovered that while they knew their indigenous ancestry, many were generations removed from the myths, legends, and folktales I’d studied.

Even though this is essentially a fantasy, set in a fictional county, with an invented clan and heritage, I wanted to still include some realism. Governmental policy in the 1890s, from mandated boarding schools to the dissembling of reservations, created the very real crisis at Sugar Point on Leech Lake. Just as the Seven Fires predicted, an entire generation of Anishinaabe children was lost to the boarding schools, and the horrors of this practice are still coming to light today. As a child, I was shown cliché portrayals of Native American life; as a teenager, I met public school classmates transitioning from a boys reformatory school who’d come out of the modern reservations in South Dakota who experienced real horrors instead of fantasy horrors. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, William Kent Krueger, and Angeline Boulley have already captured these issues, and while my invented reservation is closer to Hogwarts than Pine Ridge, I have included issues like racism, domestic violence, rape, murder, and broken families to keep this fantasy grounded in reality.

As you will soon discover, Lake Manitou is filled with many types of horrors and monsters, but it is also a place of magic, family, and friendship, where legends come to life in the shadows of the trees. It is a place where the past connects to the future, and the future of all depends on the choices made by our youth.

“What the people believe is true!”

–Jason Lee Willis