Sugar Bush Babies
Stories of My Ojibwe Grandmother
Janis A. Fairbanks’s reverential family memoir recounts her Native American childhood in Minnesota, wherein love outweighed poverty.
Fairbanks belongs to the Fond du Lac band of the Lake Superior Chippewa people. She grew up the fourth of seven children in Bena, Minnesota, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. When she was five years old, her nuclear family moved to Duluth, where she came into contact with more white people than before.
Fairbanks ran away from kindergarten until her mother promised she could spend all school holidays with her grandmother, Cecelia. Though she felt unimportant in her large, busy family, her grandmother made her feel significant. Meals and conversations were signs of love, and rituals made life extraordinary. Cecilia even started a tradition of serving toasted raisin bread on Fairbanks’s birthday because the family couldn’t afford a cake. Forty-five years later, Fairbanks celebrates her birthday with that same snack.
Fairbanks’s special relationship with her grandmother even sustained her after her parents’ divorce. Contrasting city living with her vivid experiences on Cecilia’s homestead, Fairbanks notes that wildflowers and lake scenes still remind her of her grandmother, who had an intimate connection with nature and spotted the sacred in the everyday. Memories of the steps of doing laundry in the washtub pair with a bevy of black-and-white family photographs, piquing interest as they depict family members in Native regalia and at powwows. One photograph, of the interior of Cecilia’s three-room tar paper shack, vivifies the “little palace,” which Cecilia preferred living in even after her tribe built her a new house with running water and electricity.
A spirited and tender memoir, Sugar Bush Babies is about a midcentury Native American girlhood and the beloved grandmother who illuminated its spaces.
Reviewed by
Rebecca Foster
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
