Monkey Beach Study Guide

Eden Robinson was born and grew up in Haisla territory near Kitamaat Village. She and her siblings were raised in a mixed-heritage home by a Haisla father and a Heiltsuk mother. After earning a B.A. from the University of Victoria, Robinson moved to Vancouver and took a series of low-status jobs that enabled her to write in her free time. Her first collection of short stories, Traplines, was published in 1995. Monkey Beach, her first full-length novel, followed in 2000, and upon its release it was quickly shortlisted for several prestigious literary awards. She has also written a second stand-alone novel, Blood Sports, and the Trickster trilogy. Robinson’s fiction explores themes of Native traditions and the troubled history of relationships between indigenous people and white colonialist settlers and the Canadian government; she also advocates for expanded government services for indigenous people in Canada.

Monkey Beach engages with themes of social and political protest during its era as well as some of the darker chapters of Canadian history, especially as it relates to the government’s treatment of Indigenous Peoples. Lisa’s Uncle Mick participated in the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.), founded in the United States in 1968 to bring attention to the plight of Indigenous Peoples who faced discrimination, systematic poverty, and widespread abuse of their territorial sovereignty. The book depicts Mick’s participation in two A.I.M. protests—the Trail of Broken Treaties and the Occupation of Wounded Knee—which garnered widespread media attention but failed to achieve their stated ends of reopening treaty negotiations or improving the circumstances of Indigenous Peoples in the United States. In addition, several characters in Monkey Beach experienced abuse and trauma in the Canadian residential school system. When Canada became a country in the 1880s, its newly founded government absorbed and expanded schools founded by Christian missionaries to teach Indigenous children European languages, religions, and customs. Often, the government forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and communities with the intent of completely eradicating the social and cultural heritage of Canada’s Indigenous Nations. Sexual, emotional, physical, and psychological abuse were rife in the residential school system, which did not formally end until the closing of the final school in 1996.

Eden Robinson strongly identifies with her role as a Haisla and Heiltsuk author and thus her work shares ties with the writings of other indigenous Canadian writers. Monkey Beach gestures toward the residential school system and its horrific abuses, which form a key component of Richard Wagamese’s 2012 novel Indian Horse. Later adapted into a movie, this book tells the story of an Ojibway boy who survives the residential school system in the 1960s and grows up to become a talented ice hockey player before the traumas of his childhood catch up to him. Lee Maracle’s 1993 Ravensong shares themes of indigenous women’s experience and the important role of the trickster in the myths and tales of indigenous people with Monkey Beach. Looking farther south, in terms of its use of magical realism, its exploration of the cyclical and repetitive nature of history, and its fluid sense of time, Monkey Beach shares key elements with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude.