Lisa's resistance results in a crisis when she blames herself for her grandmother's death and she runs away from the ancestral homeland to the big city, where she sinks into a cycle of hedonism and self abuse. I was reminded of Graham Joyce's Toothfairy when I read about Lisa's visitor.
When something terrible is going to happen she is visited by a little red-headed man. But when it comes to the "gift" of foresight, she tries to ignore it. Lisa is a feisty teenager with a tendency to confront rather than flee. It seemed to me when I read this book that the magic realism here was as much about Lisa's psychology as a cultural clash. But, as I have noted elsewhere in this blog, there is also a role for magic realism in the portrayal of psychology. It is generally accepted that an important element in magic realism is the portrayal of a world in which the spiritual life of an indigenous people comes up against the dominant rationalist beliefs of the colonizer. But the tragedies that have scarred her life and ultimately led her to these frigid waters cannot destroy her indomitable spirit, even though the ghosts that speak to her in the night warn her that the worst may be yet to come. From her beloved grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, she learned of tradition and magic from her adored, Elvis-loving uncle Mick, a Native rights activist on a perilous course, she learned to see clearly, to speak her mind, and never to bow down.
A volatile and precocious Native girl growing up in Kitamaat, the Haisla Indian reservation located five hundred miles north of Vancouver, Lisa came of age standing with her feet firmly planted in two different worlds: the spiritual realm of the Haisla and the sobering “real” world with its dangerous temptations of violence, drugs, and despair. A young Native American woman remembers her volatile childhood as she searches for her lost brother in the Canadian wilds in an extraordinary, critically acclaimed debut novelĪs she races along Canada’s Douglas Channel in her speedboat-heading toward the place where her younger brother Jimmy, presumed drowned, was last seen-twenty-year-old Lisamarie Hill recalls her younger days.
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