Firekeeper's Daughter

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Braiding Meaning: A Three-Pronged Exploration of Ojibwe Poetry, Ojibwe Culture, and the Themes in Firekeeper’s Daughter”

Through a study of contemporary Ojibwe poetry, students will deepen their understanding of themes in Firekeeper’s Daughter involving community, self-trust, and Ojibwe culture and create poems of their own

As told to Poetry Magazine in this article, three Ojibwe poets, Kimberly Blaeser, Molly McGlennen, and Margaret Noodin, used a “braid-like collaborative process” to jointly create the poems in “Meshkadoonaawaa Ikidowinan: Exchanging Words.” The process would begin by one of the poets writing an opening line to the poem; then, another poet would add to this opening line with a line or two of their own, sometimes shifting the entire direction of the poem; they’d continue to take turns in this way among the three of them, sometimes adding in new lines and other times shuffling around existing words in the poems. Ojibwe words (known as the Anishinaabemowin language) are woven into the poem.

Mirroring the braiding process of the Ojibwe poet, this exercise will be broken into three parts:

• First, you will spend time analyzing and responding to “Meshkadoonaawaa Ikidowinan: Exchanging Words.” Spend approximately 10-15 minutes freewriting a few paragraphs or brainstorming a list in response to the poems: How they made you feel, what struck you as interesting or useful, and how they enhanced your understanding of Ojibwe culture.
• Second, spend approximately 20-25 minutes creating an imagined conversation between Daunis, Daunis’s mother, and Daunis’s father, in which they discuss how each of them feels about Trusting One’s Sense of Self.
• Third, break into groups of three to discuss your findings and reflections from the first two exercises. Be sure to keep in mind the key themes of Firekeeper’s Daughter as you move through your discussion. Finally, in your small group, you will create 3 short poems using a collaborative process similar to the one used by Kimberly Blaeser, Molly McGlennen, and Margaret Noodin, reflecting on what you learned about Trusting One’s Sense of Self in the novel. You may opt to incorporate the novel’s other themes in the poems as well.
• As time allows, each small group might read their resulting poems to the entire class and discuss together how the process of collaborative poetry differs from other writing experiences.

Teaching Suggestion: For the first portion of the activity, it may be useful to provide students with a brief primer on how to analyze/think about poetry, using Teach for America’s “How to Analyze a Poem in 6 Steps.” For the second part of the activity, you may want to provide students with some ideas on what Daunis, Daunis’s mother, and Daunis’s father would talk about in this imagined conversation, posing questions such as: Would Daunis’s mother and father provide any words of wisdom to Daunis on this point? Did Daunis’s mother and father trust themselves, from what we know of them in the story? How did Daunis’s mother and father suffer by not trusting themselves?

Differentiation Suggestion: For ELL and different learners who may be intimidated by the scope of this exercise, you may want to consider simplifying the activity through participation in only the third portion in which they reflect upon the theme of Trusting One’s Sense of Self with collaborative poem-writing. Adding an audiovisual element to this activity may benefit ELL and different learners as well; these videos feature each of the Ojibwe poets mentioned in the introduction to the activity:

• “Refractions (for Bill Harold)” by Kimberly Blaeser
• “To Do List Before Writing a Poem” by Molly McGlennen
• “End of the Beginning” as recited by Margaret Noodin