Honour the Sun: (Extracted and Revised From the Diary of the Owl)

In northern Ontario, dotted along the C.N.R. line, are many small, isolated, Native communities. A long time ago, some of them had been trading posts and had attracted past generations of Indian people from different reserves. Among them, were those people who had intermarried and had never returned to their respective reserves. In Honour the Sun, Ruby Slipperjack creates one such community where her character, a ten-year old girl called The Owl, writes seasonal diaries, beginning in the summer of 1962. She writes of the warm, moving, carefree, often humourous, events of her childhood. Upon reaching her teen years, she feels the first sorrow as an ominous climate of change seems to overwhelm her circle of friends, and then, a deep despair, as it includes even her mother, once her source of strength and security. With helpless frustration, she watches, unable to understand why her mother seems to suddenly succumb to alcohol. As a sixteen-year-old who has had to leave her community for further schooling, she returns for a summer visit, and realizes that despite all the changes, despite the alienation, her mother's words will always be with her: "Honour the Sun, child. Just as it comes over the horizon, honour the Sun, that it may bless you, come another day..."