Firekeeper's Daughter

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. In North America, the Ojibwe are one of the largest tribal nations among present-day Indigenous peoples with roughly 320,000 members across the United States and Canada. Are you familiar with the Ojibwe community? What do you know about their culture and practices?

Teaching Suggestion: Students’ knowledge of the Ojibwe – also known as the Chippewa – may be sparse. If students cannot answer the questions, they can deepen their knowledge of the Ojibwe by reviewing the links below and investigating additional resources they discover on their own.

• Eddie Benton-Benai, a member of the Ojibwe trip, shares the legacy of his people in the video “Ojibwe History“ created by PBS.
• The Milwaukee Public Museum offers this overview of Ojibwe history on their website.

Differentiation Suggestion: For those students who might have trouble absorbing the Ojibwe-specific terminology and phrases, you may want to pre-teach students a list of challenging vocabulary from the book. This vocabulary could include specific words/phrases in the Ojibwe language (refer to this NativeTech website ) as well as general language important to know about Indigenous cultures (refer to this terminology guide prepared by the Library and Archives of Canada).

2. Angeline Boulley, author of Firekeeper’s Daughter, is an enrolled member of the Sault St. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Her writing often focuses on the Ojibwe community on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Why is it important for Indigenous stories to be written by members within the community? What can happen when Indigenous stories are told by white individuals?

Teaching Suggestion: To help students better understand the importance of Indigenous stories being written by Indigenous people themselves, it may be useful to discuss how, when written by white people, problematic stereotypes and incomplete or incorrect information about Indigenous culture can be embedded into the stories. (The Little House on the Prairie book series is one such example.)

• In this Entertainment Weekly article, Angeline Boulley discusses how she draws from and preserves her Indigenous culture through storytelling.
• Utah Public Radio explains the importance of Indigenous stories in their segment “Storytelling Is Vital to Many Indigenous Cultures, But Preserving Oral Traditions Can Be Challenging.”

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the novel.

Reflect upon a time when you had a “gut feeling” about a situation or a decision you had to make but ended up going against your intuition for some reason – perhaps a friend convinced you, or perhaps you second-guessed yourself. How did the situation turn out? What did the situation tell you about your relationship to your intuition? 

Teaching Suggestion: Reflecting on this personal experience will get students thinking about the importance of Trusting One’s Sense of Self and how this functions as a larger theme within Firekeeper’s Daughter.

• Trusting yourself begins with knowing yourself. In this School of Life video entitled “How to Know Yourself,” challenges that arise from not knowing oneself are explored.