From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge.

We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy, the one facing what we do to the enemy.

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.

Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.

There's the concept that dreams are as important - if not more important - than reality. The attention that one pays to those things in the shadows is very much a part of the Indian experience.

There's a few scholars that object to how the italicized sections suggest that Native people are to take some part in the blame for how colonization occurred. But I say, "Yes they are." Not nearly as much blame as the colonizers, of course. But we are not just victims. I hate this idea that we are all just victimized and oppressed and etcetera etcetera. It's dehumanizing in its own way.

The history needs to serve the story, not the story the history. But at the same time you can't stray too far.