The Birchbark House

The Birchbark House is a novel for young readers by the American writer Louise Erdrich, published in 1999. It was her first book for children and the opening volume of what became a five-book sequence about one Ojibwe family.

Omakayas is seven, and her name means little frog because her first movement as a baby was a hop. She lives on an island in Lake Superior with her parents, her grandmother and her brothers and sisters, in a household organised by the turning of four seasons: Neebin for summer, Dagwaging for autumn, Biboon for winter and Zeegwun for spring. The community hunts, fishes, builds and gathers according to what each season asks of it, and Omakayas takes her share of the work and resents some of it.

Erdrich draws on her own family's history to tell the story from inside an Ojibwe community, with decorative pencil drawings, a map and a glossary of Ojibwe words. The novel follows the household through the year and into a winter of smallpox, when Omakayas discovers the meaning of a recurring dream and learns why she is one of the few who does not fall ill.