Sunhawk's Reviews > The Peacekeeper

This one pushed me, thereby enlarging my comfort envelope. Not many books do that. The first few paragraphs almost made me put it down . . . and then I realized that I was resisting the new language that I was being asked to learn: long names, not Tim and Jane, but Baawitigong, Chinebashi, Anish-inaabewi-gichigami. Offended my cultural arrogance! Maybe it's a good time for all of us to lower our guards against other cultures. I never got comfortable with the long names (and appreciated the glossary of Anishinaabemowin terms *after* reading the book. For me, letting unfamiliar names and words wash over me, trying to infer their meaning from context, is the best way to learn.)
So for me this was a learning book. Big clue: no police, but peacekeepers. "They lived by the principle of minobimaadiziwin -- the good life: be good to one another, be good to nature, and live healthy in both mind and spirit. They took care of each other and, in doing so, took care of themselves." [p61] This book is about a very different civilization, maybe the one that would have developed on the North American continent if the bloody Brutish hadn't colonized? That's never explained, and needn't be; the ideas of reconciliation and making whole instead of incarceration and punishment have a lot of resonance for me.
[sidenote: Kindle frustration. There's a map at the front of this book that I want to see BIG. Very cool revisioning of a familiar continent. I found it a little bigger on Amazon in the Look Inside, but I'd like to see it higher rez and bigger.]