When Mystery and Mythology Collide

The act of writing is already a deeply personal endeavor. We sit at our desks or on our couches, at kitchen tables or back patios, and we pour out of us the stories we hope will resonate with readers. For young readers, they’re often looking for answers to a world in which they’re actively becoming themselves.

Being a kid, in many ways, is a mystery. How do you interpret how it feels to grow up, the changing dynamics within one’s own family, the fear that accompanies adolescence and the unknown? For middle-grade authors, gaining a readers’ trust is paramount. But how do you do that when the story’s purpose is a mystery even to the main character? How do you introduce an origin of cultural significance? Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson knows this first-hand and tackles it head-on with her latest middle-grade novel, combining fiction with mythology to broaden her readers’ understanding of the world and help them through the ever-treacherous waters of growing up.

Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson is a tribally enrolled Iñupiaq author and illustrator, born and raised in Alaska. She studied studio art at Cal Poly Humboldt, as well as philosophy and marine biology. With several careers to her name, including documentarian and schoolteacher, her focus has always been on reclaiming Indigenous culture and creativity. This she succeeds at in Eagle Drums.

“I really want for the people who are not from my culture to take away that we exist, and our stories are interesting and fun. Maybe they could see our world the way we see it.” —Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson

Writer’s Digest

Eagle Drums (middle-grade magical realism, September, Roaring Book Press) is the story of Pina, a young hunter who must travel up a mountain to collect obsidian to shape through the process of knapping—the same mountain where his two older brothers disappeared and likely died. When he reaches the mountaintop, he is stopped by an extraordinary and terrifying eagle named Savik. Savik gives Pina a choice and an answer: Come with me or die like your brothers. What follows is trial after trial put upon Pina, with no clear reason as to why, if he’ll ever go home, and what he might gain from the experience.

Interwoven through the narrative are Hopson’s own illustrations—works of art in colored pencil and ink that show Pina and the eagle Savik, of Pina’s lemming friend, of shadowed, mysterious figures who would, in time, reveal themselves to Pina and the reader. The interplay of visual storytelling and traditional storytelling add to the sense of timelessness and history that Hopson hopes to convey throughout. “It’s a middle-grade adventure story based off of traditional Iñupiaq myths and mythologies,” says Hopson. “I took that myth, and I filled it with actual culture. It’s a mix of fiction, mythology, and real Iñupiaq values and activities.”

Eagle Drums incorporates what it means to experience loss and grief, of growing up and finding confidence, and ultimately the importance of community, forgiveness, and moving forward. But originally, it started as a story that was hardly three paragraphs long. “It was extremely brief,” she says. “It started with the mythology itself, and not a whole lot of this story survived Christianity, modernization, and colonization of our people.” To expand the story into what it is today, Hopson found inspiration through her husband’s relationship with his brothers and incorporated those dynamics into the book. This, she says, helped create necessary stakes and gave the story a certain sense of urgency. “I had to add in that dynamic to explain why this boy would stay with the eagles. You would imagine that given the chance, he would run. But adding that backstory gave him a reason to stay.”

Eagle Drums, by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson

Roaring Brook Press

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For Hopson, there was the added challenge of not only maintaining reader engagement when the characters’ purpose isn’t entirely clear, but also in introducing them to something that is already resonant and culturally significant to her. She did so by dialing into universal truths of what it means to grow up. “It’s a relatable experience,” she says. “They go through it with school and growing up, they’re learning things and not always getting the big picture, where they’re not too sure why they’re learning things. That helps to keep their attention and their interest.

“There’s a lot of things that are common with kids in the story,” she adds. “Like family dynamics, relationships with parents, relationships with siblings if they have them, and how that changes as they mature. I think that helps because every kid goes through it. I see it as taking that relatable experience and I kind of coat it in chocolate or something unique and different, and a point of view that hasn’t really been seen in books their age, and that’s my culture and my experiences and our mythology.”

Eagle Drums acts as an origin story for what is known as the Iñupiaq Messenger Feast, a Native Alaskan tradition that continues today. It’s a piece of historical oral storytelling the author grew up with, and when considering introducing it to readers, she dialed into the child version of herself. “I imagined the reader I was writing to was myself,” she says. “I was lucky enough to grow up with a couple of traditional storytellers. I grew up hearing these stories and telling my younger cousins when I was in high school all these stories. These stories had the most impact on me, so when I think of these stories and I tell these stories, it is automatically in that age range.”

Her hope is that readers will walk away with a better understanding of her culture. “We exist and we are a modern part of this world,” she says. “We’re still going, we’re still thriving, the Eagle Feast is still going on to this day, so we’re still here. I grew up in the 1990s, and I’ve experienced running into people from the Lower 48—which is the lower 48 states—where they didn’t believe our culture, the Iñupiaq, were real. They thought we were mythological creatures like centaurs, and that we’re just made up. That stuck with me my whole entire life. I really want for the people who are not from my culture to take away that we exist, and our stories are interesting and fun. Maybe they could see our world the way we see it.”

But more than her hope for readers at large does she hope that future generations of Iñupiaq recognize their value and uniqueness when reading Eagle Drums. “For our own children, I hope that it brings a little bit more pride and the knowledge that we have cool things and that we are expressive and exciting, and the things we grew up on are neat—and that they are neat.”

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