Honour the Sun

by Ruby Slipperjack

In northern Ontario, dotted along the C.N.R. line, are many small, isolated, Native communities. A long time ago, some of them had been trading posts and had attracted past generations of Indian people from different reserves. Among them, were those people who had intermarried and had never returned to their respective reserves. In Honour the Sun, Ruby Slipperjack creates one such community where her character, a ten-year old girl called The Owl, writes seasonal diaries, beginning in the summer of 1962. She writes of the warm, moving, carefree, often humourous, events of her childhood. Upon reaching her teen years, she feels the first sorrow as an ominous climate of change seems to overwhelm her circle of friends, and then, a deep despair, as it includes even her mother, once her source of strength and security. With helpless frustration, she watches, unable to understand why her mother seems to suddenly succumb to alcohol. As a sixteen-year-old who has had to leave her community for further schooling, she returns for a summer visit, and realizes that despite all the changes, despite the alienation, her mother's words will always be with her: "Honour the Sun, child. Just as it comes over the horizon, honour the Sun, that it may bless you, come another day..."

Genres: Indigenous, Fiction, Canada

211 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1987

About the author

Ruby Slipperjack was born in Whitewater Lake, Ontario, where she was raised on traditional stories and crafts. Slipperjack attended Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie and high school in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She earned her B.A. and B.Ed. from Lakehead University in 1989. Slipperjack is also an accomplished painter. Ruby is from the Fort Hope Indian Band in Ontario. Currently, she is a faculty member in the Department of Indigenous Learning at Lakehead University.

Reviews

[Lollita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book I loved the writting style, the story was well crafted and told through the thoughts of 10 to 16 year old. So strange reading about how people in these small northern Canadian towns live even during the 60s seems more like a life one would experience in the 20s. I think the book is focused towards a more YA audience but some things that happen are a little hard or depressing to read especially from that view point, assaults, alcoholism, animal deaths etc.

[Prof.laxmi Shanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Native men live amidst trouble and turmoil.They are in fact living ambigously between their own culture and the new cultures brought into their lives by colonialism and Post-colonialism and Canadian modernity.

[Shawn Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

very , very good

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well crafted tales