Motorcycles and Sweetgrass

Prologue-Chapter 6

Reading Check

1. A residential school; a Catholic boarding school (Prologue)

2. Lillian (Chapter 1)

3. Dakota (Chapter 3)

4. A tribal land deal and what to do with the new land (Chapter 6)

Short Answer

1. Memorizing Shakespeare is part of a punishment he has been given. (Chapter 1)

2. She gives him a pitying, disgusted look and leaves without speaking to him. (Chapter 2)

3. Lillian thinks that the job demands too much from Maggie and that she deserves to be able to focus on her own life and on her son. (Chapter 4)

4. Wayne is Maggie’s brother and Virgil’s uncle. He lives on an island by himself because he wants privacy to practice the Indigenous martial art he has created. (Chapter 5)

5. Maggie spends long hours working on behalf of the tribe, and she often fails to follow through on things like making dinner for Virgil. (Chapter 6)

Chapters 7-14

Reading Check

1. Trains (Chapter 7)

2. A church (Chapter 9)

3. A raccoon (Chapter 10)

4. His uncle Wayne’s (Chapter 14)

Short Answer

1. John helps Maggie with her flat tire, rescuing her from potentially being stranded for a long while. But later, he is revealed to be the one who punctured the tire in the first place, just so that he could stage a rescue. (Chapter 8)

2. There is a carving resembling a petroglyph. It features a man and a woman on a motorcycle, headed west toward the setting sun. (Chapter 10)

3. He is staying with Sammy Aandeg, the young distant relative of Lillian’s with whom she attended boarding school years before. (Chapters 1 and 11)

4. John has a boombox playing loud music of a kind that Virgil has never heard before. John is doing a peculiar dance that Virgil finds strange enough to be alarming. (Chapter 12)

5. He claims that he knows Anishinaabemowin because of a failed love affair with a Native woman when he was younger. He says that it was Lillian who comforted him over the loss of this relationship. (Chapter 13)

Chapters 15-22

Reading Check

1. A totem pole (Chapter 15)

2. Dakota (Chapter 16)

3. Asleep on her dock (Chapter 18)

4. A chickadee (Chapter 21)

Short Answer

1. John tells Maggie that her mother, Lillian, used to come to Beer Bay and go skinny-dipping with boyfriends. (Chapter 16)

2. They see John arguing with a group of raccoons. The fact that John seems able to speak with and understand the raccoons causes Wayne to realize that John is in fact Nanabush. (Chapter 17)

3. The two men argue about John’s motorcycle: Dan makes fun of it for being older, saying that modern Harley Davidsons are superior. John settles the argument by punching Dan in the face and telling him that newer does not necessarily mean better. (Chapter 19)

4. Nanabush criticizes the way the provenance of many canoes is listed incorrectly. Later, he recalls that he himself is likely the source of this misinformation because of the tricks he played on earlier English collectors. (Chapter 20)

5. Virgil researches information about Nanabush. To be promoted to the next grade at the end of the year, he must turn in a lengthy essay on some aspect of Native tradition, and he is working on both this project and his personal project of getting rid of John. (Chapter 22)

Chapter 23-Epilogue

Reading Check

1. Wayne (Chapter 23)

2. A bone sticking up from the ground (Chapter 24)

3. At the rock near the railroad tracks (Chapter 25)

4. Wayne’s martial art (Chapter 26)

Short Answer

1. He feeds them several bags of groceries and all the food he can find in Sammy’s cabin. (Chapter 23)

2. He confesses that he is the one who seeded the new land with bones stolen from the museum. (Chapter 24)

3. Nanabush tells Virgil that there are no dead ends, only people who find dead ends. (Chapter 25)

4. Maggie decides that she needs to accept a little chaos and stop wasting time and energy trying to keep everything under control. (Chapter 26)

5. Mukwa claims that on the day John left the reserve, he saw a motorcycle being driven across Beer Bay. The rider waved and then popped a wheelie before driving away across the water. (Epilogue)