87-летняя писательница из племени оджибве выпустила мемуары о детстве в хижине из битумной бумаги

DULUTH — Growing up in a tar paper shack on the Fond du Lac Reservation in the 1940s, Fond du Lac elder and author Sharon Doolittle Shuck, 87, feels like the life she once knew would be virtually unrecognizable today. Born in 1939 in Brookston, Shuck’s childhood is the subject of her new memoir “A Porcupine for a Pet: Stories of an Ojibwe Childhood 1939-1947.” The memoir looks back on her life as told through 15 autobiographical stories spanning 25 pages. ADVERTISEMENT “We have to keep these stories alive and pass them on. The storytelling, we have to keep doing that,” Shuck said. “It’s being lost.” Shuck’s memoir recalls her early life as the United States came out of the Great Depression and was thrust into World War II and how it was felt in the backwoods of Brookston. Shuck was born to a tar paper shack built by her father, which she shared with her five siblings. There was no employment, money was scarce and the family routinely had to ration to support the war effort. Sharon Doolittle Shuck will discuss her new book at the Cloquet Public Library at 5 p.m Thursday, Aug. 20. “That was during the war years, and that's what I started writing about it because we were very very poor, but everybody was poor, and the rez was dotted with tar paper shacks back then,” said Shuck, who now lives in Duluth. However, Shuck said her childhood wasn’t all scarcity and hardship. It was colored by love, family and a connection to the natural world that is rapidly dissipating, she said. Clothing was largely handmade, often from repurposed flour sacks. A favorite childhood treat, made possible by war rations, was lard and sugar spread on a homemade bread. Otherwise, food was largely foraged and preserved. Shuck’s father — who worked in Duluth making World War II warships — would often catch catfish out of the nearby St. Louis River. ADVERTISEMENT Shuck’s grandparents, who spoke Ojibwe as their first language, lived down the road. Most of the family's produce was grown in Shuck’s grandfather’s garden. The book’s namesake comes from the time Shuck’s uncle found a baby porcupine in the forest and brought it back to her grandfather’s home, where Shuck raised it as a pet. Although porcupines are widely not recommended as a pet, Shuck said it was a remarkably well-behaved porcupine who loved fruit and never once shot its quills. “We'd bring that porcupine in the house, and it would eat up,” Shuck said. “We'd feed it raspberries.” Shuck started writing in 2005 after she and her siblings went down to Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to aid in humanitarian efforts. “I didn't know how to put it on paper. I could see the devastation there, and then I started taking writing classes,” she said. But she later found her niche writing about her family and Indigenous culture. In 2019, Shuck released “Grandfather's Blood Memories and Unbroken Spirit," which documents her grandfather Frank Doolittle’s upbringing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through boarding schools and a stint in the Federal Correctional Institution, Leavenworth. ADVERTISEMENT Shuck was able to assemble Doolittle’s biography by sifting through records from his time in prison, which she said was over the illegal sale of a bottle of whiskey. When Doolittle was a child, he was taken from his home on the Bad River Reservation to the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania that forced assimilation policies and tried to erase the culture of Native American children from across the United States. “(I) wanted people to know because he was a boarding school person, and I'm a survivor of my grandparents. My grandparents and my parents were all boarding school students, and that's another history that was bad,” Shuck said. “There's not enough people out there that are writing about it.” The respect Shuck and her siblings had for her parents and grandparents ran deep. “When we were growing up, if we were told to do something we didn't question our parents or our grandparents. We just did it.” she said. “The respect was there, and that's where that nurturing came in.” Although life today may be different in just about every way, Shuck feels that the knowledge and lessons she learned from her family on the Fond du Lac Reservation tell a timeless truth she hopes to share with future generations. “I think the younger ones (need to) understand what it was like growing up back in the '40s,” Shuck said.