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Intro
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, priests and Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers take Clara, Maisie, Kenny, Howie, Lucy, Wilfred, and Edna from their families and send them to the Mission School at Arrowhead Bay. There, Sister Mary, Brother, Father Levesque, and others subject them to psychological, emotional, mental, physical, and sexual abuse. During one session, Brother beats Howie so severely he requires hospitalization. After he recovers and returns to the school, Kenny helps him escape. Howie and his mother Sagastis flee to the United States. Soon afterward, Kenny also escapes. But when he returns to his village, he finds that his mother Bella has fallen victim to alcoholism and despair. Unable to help either her or himself find redemption, Kenny soon leaves home.
A few years later, on her 16th birthday, Lucy is discharged from the school. Sister Mary gives her $25 and bus fare to Vancouver. In the city, a pimp named Walt tricks her into going home with him, but she quickly escapes and finds her friend Maisie. Maisie turned 16 and left the school a year earlier, and although she was sent home, she no longer felt like she fit in there, so she came to the city to make her own way in life. She has a nice boyfriend named Jimmy but works at a seedy motel called the Manitou and can’t escape the demons of her past abuse at the hands of Father Levesque. Soon after Lucy arrives, Maisie takes her own life.
Two years later, after a chance meeting with her brother, Wilfred, Kenny goes to Vancouver to find Lucy. She’s still working at the Manitou, where she’s befriended Clara, another former inmate of Arrowhead Bay. But she’s also taking night classes to finish her high school equivalent and plans to go to nursing school afterward. They’re happy to have reunited, but Kenny still feels compelled to leave almost immediately. When he does, Lucy is pregnant with his child, although neither of them knows it yet.
Because she’s unmarried, the nursing program kicks Lucy out when her pregnancy becomes apparent. She moves in with Clara, and after Kendra is born, they start renting a little house on Francis Street. Around this time, Clara meets George and Vera. She becomes involved in their American Indian Movement activism, traveling south to the United States to help them with a covert operation. She is seriously injured in the process and barely escapes back over the border, where friends of George and Vera take her to Mariah, a Cree healer who lives in an isolated cabin. Mariah helps Clara to reconnect with her Indigenous heritage and to begin to work through the anger and guilt she’s carried since her friend Lily’s death at the residential school. When she returns to Vancouver, she decides to become a Native Courtworker so that she can advocate for other victims of the residential schools.
After escaping the school, Howie and his mother live in America for many years. When he had to return to Canada—and the school—for paperwork, he beat Brother nearly to death, earning himself a lengthy prison sentence. His mother dies before he’s released. Afterward, he tries to make a new life in Vancouver. But in a moment of crisis, he steals a crucifix form a Catholic cathedral and tries to pawn it. He meets Clara after his arrest, when she is assigned as his Native Courtworker advocate.
Kenny visits Lucy and Kendra as often as he can bring himself too, but he never manages to stay for long, even after he and Lucy get married. Lucy understands and forgives him, but Kendra resents her father’s ongoing abandonment. By the time she’s in her early 20s, she barely wants anything to do with him. On one visit around then, Kenny learns about the lawsuit survivors of the residential schools are bringing against the government. At an informational meeting, he reunites with Howie. Kenny decides to join the lawsuit, but telling his story to the lawyer retraumatizes him. Afterward, he drinks himself into a stupor and dies in the night. From the threshold of the afterlife, he watches his family and friends conduct his funeral. He follows his mother’s spirit into death, where she promises he will find peace. After his death, Lucy learns that she is the beneficiary of his $300,000 life insurance policy. She uses the money to buy a nice house for Kendra.
Over subsequent months, Howie goes to Saskatchewan, where he grew up, to rehabilitate his childhood home. He and Clara stay in touch by mail, and their feelings for each other intensify. Eventually, he decides to testify in the victims’ lawsuit, for himself and for those, like Kenny, who can no longer speak for themselves. Clara goes with him as a support person on the day of his testimony. Then, she returns to Mariah’s cabin, where she finally finds peace in her soul about Lily’s death. She decides to move to Saskatchewan to make a life with Howie.
