For you. To avenge you. It really is as simple as that. When the pain of you not being beside me in bed at night is too strong, I can do nothing but walk and walk until I find them and kill a few. A hundred will die for each member of my family taken by them. Three hundred will die before I consider resting.
The novel upon an act of extreme violence. Bird is a Huron warrior whose family has been slaughtered by members of the rival Haudenosaunee tribe. Although this sounds like the beginning of a Canadian version of a Park Chan-wook vengeance movie, the movement toward revenge is only the beginning of what expands outward to become a far more dense and complex work about home and family and identity.
We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can seem something I've not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to makes sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.
The theme of identity comes into play with the arrival of the French into wilderness of Canada. The concept of family has already been stitched out of the relationship which develops between the Huron warrior Bird and a young girl named Snow Falls who belong to the Iroquois tribe. They have as a result of the horrific violence which commences the novel established a problematic familial relationship which will soon become even more complex placed within the context of understanding that to these new visitors with the white faces, all tribes are the same. They are all of one family, one might say.
Just one more reflection for now, something I find both fascinating and appalling. In matters of the spirit, these sauvages believe that we all have within us a life force that is similar, if you will, to our own Catholic belief in the soul. They call this life force the orenda.
The novel is told through the eyes of three narrators. The third is a Jesuit missionary from France named Christophe. And it is he introduces here the concept of the title. What is the orenda? There it is, spelled out: the tribal spirit known as the soul. Christophe will also not leave the reader in the dark concerning what might possibly be considered appalling about the primitives sharing the superior Christians’ concept of a soul. Get ready now because it truly is shocking and appalling: “What appals me is that these poor misguided beings believe not just humans have an orenda, but also animals, trees, bodies of water, even rocks strewn on the ground.” This, from a man whose religion dictates that God personally created every animal, tree, drop of water and rock on the planet. This is a story of conflict which leaves no mystery as to the source of that tension.
