In 1974, when Paulette Jiles was first sent by the CBC to work as a journalist in Big Trout Lake, a village without radio or television in remote northern Ontario, she didn't know a bush plane from a backpack.

North Spirit is based on the seven years Jiles spent working with the northern Cree and Ojibway peoples, who call themselves Anishinabe.  This lyrical, witty and reflective book evokes a time when new technology is beginning to clash with the traditioinal culture.

At its center is the author's search for the meaning of the remote and sometimes terrifying Oda-Ka-Daun, or Stern Paddler, who moves his cosmic vessel through the heavens.  As she seeks to unravel this mystery, Jiles recounts her many adventures among the Anishinabe people and reveals the enduring legacy of their northern mythology.

PAULETE JILES was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and moved to Canada in 1969. She spent eight years as a journalist for the CBC in northern Ontario. She is the bestselling author of Enemy Women, a New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Women Writing the West’s Willa Literary Award. She has also won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Paulette Jiles lives in the Texas hill country near San Antonio.

Paulette Jiles' profile page

"North Spirit is a book full of riches- riches of humour, riches of observation, conveyed in prose as clear and hard as the winter light of northern Ontario."
                -Philip Marchand, The Toronto Star

"What a gifted writer Jiles is: she writes as naturally as breathing, and yet with passages that soar into the most eloquent and beautiful poetry.  And the story she tells here is fascinating.  I loved this book."
           -Sharon Butals, author of The Perfection of the Morning