I loved that the author embellished a piece of oral tradition and published it! This is a great idea, especially for mebers of a fairly small tribe, to preserve tales handed down from generation to generation.
The amount of courage and determination in this book was astounding. I, for one, don't think I would care to get up and find wood and set traps and preserve food and travel long distances by foot- just to get up and do it all over again indefinitely, after every member of my family and all of my friends had turned their backs on me, with no hope of ever seeing any of them again. I would have stayed in the snow and let myself fall asleep.
However, I found it a bit surprising they don't also leave the infants, who must be carried, need more food, and cannot contribute any knowledge or skills, such as the old women did working with hides and sewing. I wanted to meet these women myself. It would be amazing to live with them and learn about survival and resourcefulness- how many modern men can kill a squirrel from a distance with a well-timed fling of an axe? They also had amazing life stories: one had the audacity as a young woman to stand up to the chief and lived alone for years because of it, before finding a man who was similarly shunned. The other was forced to wed an older man in the tribe, resulting in what I assume was a lackluster marriage.
The morals of the book were 1) Don't complain or people will think you're useless, and 2) take care of/listen to/respect your elders.
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