Ignatia broker biography list

Ignatia Broker, who died

Ignatia Broker — was an Ojibwe writer and community leader from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is best known for the novel Night Flying Woman , published in , which tells the story of Broker's great-great-grandmother and her family's life before and after contact with white explorers. She was an enrolled member of the Ojibwe tribe and the Ottertail Pillager Band.

In she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. There, she attended night classes and worked at a defense plant during World War II. She later described the war years as "unstable" and wrote about the racial discrimination the Ojibwe community in Minneapolis faced. After the war, she met and married a veteran. They had two children together, and lived in St.

Paul, Minnesota. Broker's husband went back into military service, and died in the Korean War. The death of her husband together with the discrimination she often faced, Broker wrote, prompted her to become involved with various Native American social advocacy groups, including the American Indian Center of Minneapolis.

Night Flying Woman , Broker's only novel, was published in In the preface, Broker writes that her motivation for the novel came partly from her own children, who wished to know more about the past experiences of the Ojibwe people. The theme of keeping the past alive through passing down stories in the oral tradition is important in the book.

After opening the book with some details of Broker's own life, the story mostly focuses on the experiences of Broker's great-great-grandmother, Ni-bo-wi-se-gwa, or Oona, who lived from the s to the s.