Motorcycles and Sweetgrass

Partly because he sees Jesus as having stolen Lillian from him, Taylor’s Nanabush conceives of himself as a rival to Jesus—competing with the Christian deity for the affections of his people. Taylor’s Nanabush is an updated depiction of the trickster demigod figure common in North American Indigenous peoples’ mythologies. Taylor’s characterization of the mythical Nanabush contains the hallmarks of the trickster: He is a shapeshifter, changing names and eye colors—and, at the end of the novel, transforming from a blonde-haired, white man to an Indigenous one. Nanabush interacts with nature and all living things—though he is not always in control of the forces he contacts: He can call forth a thunderstorm but must contend with mosquitoes and yield a long-running feud with raccoons.

Nanabush is neither good nor bad—instead, he can take on the role of hero and villain in quick succession, revealing the hollowness of those archetypes and suggesting that morality is contingent on context. He meets Maggie when he rescues her from a hopeless flat tire—but then reveals to the reader that he caused that flat tire in the first place. Nanabush often deflates what at first appears serious or portentous, puncturing self-importance with wit and earthy humor. He scrawls seemingly meaningful petroglyphs on a rock that shake Virgil out of his disaffected stupor, only to explain that the mysterious marking is just a sex joke about taking Maggie to a motel. Maggie refers to Nanabush as a “man-boy”—a surprising but not inaccurate way to describe a divine being. In the residential school, Lillian and Sammy were indoctrinated in Christian theology in which supernatural beings are either wholly good or wholly evil, and in which human believers are expected to strive toward divine goodness by eliminating aspects of themselves that the church considers sinful. Nanabush represents a radically different faith tradition—one in which divinity can be synonymous with capricious unpredictability, human appetites, and a sometimes childish outlook. In Nanabush’s cosmology, none of these human traits is excluded from the divine.

The novel puts Nanabush in direct comparison, and thus on an equal footing, with Jesus, whom the novel frames as a demigod figure from the Christian tradition. By showing these deities engaged in casual conversation, Taylor allows Anishinaabe theology to speak back to the Christian dogma that has tried for centuries to supplant and erase it. Taylor’s Jesus is not synonymous with the oppressive ideology enacted in his name at the residential schools, but he does come across as somewhat oblivious to the politics of faith. When Jesus says to Nanabush, “Your people are my people too,” Nanabush responds, “Tell that to all your priests and ministers who used to look after my people. Tell it to Sammy Aandeg” (268). Despite Jesus’s profession of universal love, in other words, those who claim to be his representatives on earth have not treated Indigenous people as equals.

Jesus tries to distance himself from the actions of these priests and ministers, saying, “blame free will and all that,” but Nanabush better understands that free will is of little use without political power: “Well, they had more free will than Sammy did” (268). White colonizers decimated the Indigenous populations of North America in the name of the Christianity that Lillian embraced as a teen, and though Nanabush, on waking from his dream, thinks to himself “That Jesus guy didn’t seem so bad after all,” there is no separating him from the violence carried out in his name. In Nanabush’s dream, when Nanabush claims the Indigenous nations as his own, Jesus claims them as well—an erasure that Nanabush wants to undo in the waking world.