Branch Road Nine
Abstract
When the Ojibway band that owns Crow Island reclaims it from the cottagers who have been leasing it for decades, Mag returns to her family cabin to help her grandparents move off the island. Investigating a violent incident her late mother committed against an Ojibway woman, Mag develops a complicated friendship with the woman’s daughter, Eden, and attempts to untangle her inherited guilt and grief — and the mystery of Eden and her mother — through story. Limning the ethical borderlines of access to voice and story, Branch Road Nine explores the discourse of guilt, apology, and reconciliation on a narrative level, interrogating Mag’s personal desire for truth and redemption from both the violent history inherited from her mother and the history between her family and the Ojibway band whose land they leased. Branch Road Nine confronts the paradox of responsibility and guilt entangled in these issues, enacting a narrative response to the question of how non-First Nations writers can approach the topic of Canada’s colonial past and present: with an eye turned toward the perils of appropriation, yet proceeding with a belief in the absolute necessity to try to represent these issues in all of their complexity.
Description
Keywords
Literature--Canadian (English)
Citation
Hedley, C. (2014). Branch Road Nine (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25162