The Birchbark House

In the same way that Anishinabe culture helps to highlight the love within Omakayas’s family and community, makazins (and the making of them) function as a particularly strong symbol of this love.

The force of this symbol emerges in the Prologue, when the fur traders arrive at Spirit Island to find a baby girl who is the sole survivor of a smallpox outbreak. They notice that “her new makazins were carefully sewn. It was clear that she had been loved” (1). The notion that the Anishinabeg (plural for Anishinabe) express love through the creation of makazins is then picked up in the first chapter when Omakayas is reluctant to scrape the moose hide:

Omakayas knew how important it was to tan the skin, how her mother would […] sew on the winter’s makazins all summer. She pictured her mother finishing them with lovely, soft toe puckers so the girls’ feet could twitch and dance […] Yes, it was an important task, but Omakayas still didn’t want it (17).

The careful, loving details that Mama pours into the family makazins are contrasted with Omakayas’s petty unwillingness to perform her chore. After she has encountered the bears, Omakayas scrapes the hide so diligently that Mama promises to make her an extra-special pair of makazins.