Spoilers ahead

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice is a post-apocalyptic story set in a reserve in Northern Ontario. One day, the cell phones and satellite TV stop working. No big deal, that happens sometimes. They’ll probably come back in a day or two. The next day, the internet is down. That’s odd, but again, not really abnormal in this remote village. The next day, the power goes out. It used to go out all the time, but that hasn’t really happened in the last three years, not since the big hydro project connected them to the main grid. Then when a week goes by and the power still hasn’t returned, and winter is looming, the town has to figure out how to survive.

I’ll be honest about my bias here: I grew up in a village in northern Manitoba, and no book has made me feel more at home than this one. The community relationships, the way the characters talked to each other, even referencing “The Northern Store” as the only grocery store in town, is super reminiscent of my hometown. Rice absolutely nailed the feeling of what a remote northern community feels like.

The writing in the book made me feel right at home. On the Rez, in this community of Anishinaabe in northern Ontario, away from the cities, the locals manage to live their lives, feed their families, and some try to keep their heritage alive. some of the language, the rituals surrounding hunting, and looking out for the elderly. Things aren’t always perfect, some people are more content to play video games all day rather than going hunting to fill their freezer for the upcoming winter. And they’ve had their share of tragedies, but life goes on here, even after the lights go dark. The band tries to keep people calm as a low sense of panic sets in. The store shelves are pretty much empty the next day, but no worries. A delivery of food is scheduled for next week, everyone has enough food to keep them until then.

A dump of snow blankets the community in white, then two college students return home from the city of Gibson via ski-doo, and tell the community that power is out everywhere, and society is crumbling. There will not be any help from the outside world any time soon. Thankfully, the band has an emergency generator, a byproduct of the time before electricity was reliable in this area. But there is only so much gas to keep them going as winter is upon them. They tell everyone to ration their energy use, and most do. Some don’t, and that’s their choice. The band also has an emergency reserve of rations, and they begin sharing the food with anyone who needs it on a weekly basis. Evan, the main character is a bit dismayed at how few people managed to hunt before the winter. The community comes together to make it through this crisis.

Things begin to get haunting as a handful of people arrive from the south. They grapple with their fear of intruders with the human desire to offer aid where they can. After all, the community has enough resources to make it through the winter, what’s adding one more person to the town? Justin Scott is a large white man with a sled full of supplies. He fancies himself a survivalist and offers his skills to help the town. He quickly inserts himself into the town meetings, and sets up his own home and begins exerting his influence on those around him, including shooting another outsider as they come up to the edge of town.

There was one moment in the book, as Evan is stoking the furnace for one of the elders in the community. They talk about how everything is different, how some people are using the world apocalypse. She delivers this emotional gut punch:

“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here… But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this . . . what’s the word again?” “Apocalypse.” “Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”

I really enjoy how the book doesn’t focus on the apocalyptic event itself. We never really get an explanation for what happened, or a answer about what’s going on in the rest of the world. Instead, it focuses on the reserve as they try to survive the winter. How the band starts to divvy out emergency rations. How the able-bodied men hunt and provide for those who are unable to do so. How they have to grapple with their fear when strangers, white men, show up at their borders asking for sanctuary. How these interlopers then cause trouble.

It’s a fascinating departure from most present-day apocalypse stories, which are usually about the crumbling of societal structures and social order. How the Lord of the Flies rules and “might makes right” quickly takes over. These stories always have us watching characters suddenly lose access to the systems they and their parents and grandparents have used their entire lives, like electricity and indoor plumbing, or a local grocer as a supply of food. We watch characters try to figure out how to survive without them, and defend themselves from those who want to take what they’ve built.

But Moon of the Crusted Snow has a different point of view. The ‘apocalypse’ comes on slowly and things only kind of fall apart, because the Anishinaabe community is already separated from traditional society, they’ve already survived multiple world shattering tragedies, this is just another world shifting event. Perhaps even less terrible than the ones that came before.

Losing power and phone service doesn’t immediately incite mass chaos and triggers everyone base survival modes, because they’re already used to going without those amenities. The culture of preparing your home for the cold winter still lives on in some people, so when the grocery stores go bare, the already have the skills and habits required to survive. The older generation just scoffs as the youngers panic, and remind them they didn’t have electricity for their entire childhood, and they turned out just fine.

While there is an ever-present looming sense of danger, I found the narrative of the community staying together and adjusting to this new way of life a much more interesting apocalypse story than simply watching civilization collapse. It made me think about my uncles in my home town who would deliver caribou meat to my house in the fall, and how that small town that I was so keen to leave is probably better off in the event of a disaster.

Moon of the Crusted Snow was just a great, haunting story. I really enjoyed it, and I’m really looking forward to reading the next book in the series. More than anything, though, I appreciated how familiar this book felt to me. Obviously, I don’t have the lived experience of the Anishinaabe characters in this story, but I do know what it feels like to live in a little northern community where the nearest city is hours away, where everyone knows everyone, where the only grocery store is the Northern Store, and where a power outage isn’t necessarily an emergency, it was probably just a racoon climbing into a transformer again. Hydro will be out in the morning to get it fixed. Probably.

If you want a little fictional glimpse into what life in a northern reserve kind of feels like, give Moon of the Crusted Snow a read.