Residential School Haunting

Haunting has long served as a metaphor for how the past continues to influence the present in subtle and unseen ways. From Jacques Derrida’s hauntology to Avery Gordon’s study of the sociological role of haunting, ghosts have been interpreted as manifestations that signal a reinscription of responsibility to lingering historical injustices and social violences, demanding redress (Derrida Specters xix; Gordon xvi). If the residential school system “haunts” Indigenous writing, the “Residential School Gothic” has sedimented as a “narrative genre of our present” (Henderson 127).⁷ There are no ghosts in Monkey Beach that metaphorically embody the history of the residential schools, but this legacy looms over the characters in the story like a pervasive, albeit unspoken, specter. It persists as a subtext that is only brought to the surface in the last ten pages of the novel, when Lisa finds something that belongs to her brother’s girlfriend, nicknamed Karaoke. It is an old black-and-white photograph of a priest and a little boy—Karaoke’s uncle, Joshua—with a note on the back: “Dear Joshua […] I remember every day we spent together. How are you? I miss you terribly. Please write. Your friend in Christ, Archibald.” A cut-out of Joshua’s adult face is pasted over the priest’s while Karaoke’s face overlays that of little Joshua’s, conveying the cyclical re-enactment of sexual abuse. When Lisa’s brother Jimmy takes a fishing job on Joshua’s boat after expressing his wish to propose to Karaoke, Lisa believes it is to earn money for the wedding. She does not understand the meaning of the collage because she lacks knowledge of the abuses perpetrated in this colonial institution. Only later, when she performs a blood offering to the spirit world and is shown a vision, does she understand that Jimmy killed Joshua and sunk his boat to avenge Karaoke’s abuse, drowning in the process.

What haunts this novel and its protagonist is left suspended, as in “most hauntings in Gothic fiction” (Punter 57). Yet, unlike conventional Gothic narratives, the uncanny and traumatic return of the repressed in Monkey Beach is not embodied in ghostly figures but resides in the material and ongoing effects of colonialism (Castricano 802). Even though residential school history is unintelligible to Lisa, and her family refuses to speak about it, she witnesses intergenerational trauma in the form of alcoholism and erratic behavior exhibited by her Uncle Mick and Aunt Trudy, both of whom are survivors of residential schools. The effects of the residential schools seep into the family, from Trudy’s resentment of her mother to Mick’s anger at the Catholic Church which he redirects towards family members: “You’re buying into a religion that thought the best way to make us white was to fucking torture children—” (110). Through abundant use of ellipses, as in this case, Robinson systematically prevents her characters from voicing the psychological, ideological, and physical abuse that occurred in state-led and Catholic-run institutions. Unable to comprehend the broader socio-historical context that shapes her community’s experiences as well as those of her family, Lisa is left vulnerable. For example, when a group of white men harasses her cousin Erica and Lisa intervenes, she does not anticipate the dangerous consequences of deeply ingrained racism. Her aunt Trudy tries to explain that as an Indigenous woman, Lisa faces a prejudiced system that often blames the victim rather than the perpetrator: “There were tons of priests in the residential schools […] that ‘helped’ themselves to little kids just like you. You look at me and tell me how many of them got away scot-free”. Trudy’s stark reminder of unchecked abuses underlines their continuity, but Lisa mistakes her family’s protection and awareness of systemic injustices for blame: “I didn’t understand why I was the one getting blamed for some assholes acting like assholes” (255). This conversation suggests that Lisa’s bravery is fraught with risks she has yet to fully understand.

Robinson sets her novel in the 1970s and 1980s, when the horrific truths about residential schools were still largely suppressed, unacknowledged in public discourse and hidden beneath the surface of mainstream awareness. By 2000, when Monkey Beach was published, residential schools had begun to emerge much more prominently in societal consciousness. In the 1990s, the “principal source of outrage” driving condemnation of the residential school system pertained less to the violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples and more to the violation of human rights, particularly the sexual victimization of children (Niezen 29). This is reflected in the novel insofar as sexual violence in a residential school triggers the plot and, more broadly, in the Canadian Gothic and its preoccupation with child sexual abuse in dehumanizing institutional settings (Henderson 131). But if gothic portrayals confine settler colonial injustices to the Indian Residential School System and to acts of sexual violence against children, as Henderson argues, in Monkey Beach settler power is not presented as monolithic. Through various narrative threads, Robinson interweaves a broader examination of the enduring impact of colonialism on Indigenous communities by delving into interconnected issues including racism, damaging policies of assimilation, epidemics, colonial gendered violence and domestic violence, land theft, resource extraction and environmental contamination, as well as the emotional toll of activism and Indigenous rights advocacy.

Robinson makes clear that the legacy of residential school abuse impacts Lisa despite her not being directly involved—neither she nor her parents attended residential schools—because collective trauma is ubiquitous. Lisa becomes entangled in the cycle of violence as a victim of rape; that the abuser, Cheese, is one of Joshua’s nephews emphasizes this. Cheese may be another of Joshua’s victims, and his crime against Lisa may be perhaps too readily attributed to the legacy of residential schools.⁸ But I am more interested in an ambiguous trail of suggestions that Robinson leaves regarding another of Joshua’s nephews, Pooch, who is also Lisa’s closest friend and who tragically commits suicide. In an exchange observed by Lisa from a distance, Pooch, Joshua, and Karaoke have a tense interaction involving an envelope that may contain the photograph Lisa discovers at the novel’s end. Robinson creates narrative ambiguity at every turn by crafting characters whose motivations and actions are difficult to pin down: Joshua grabs Pooch by the neck and steers him out of view when he rejects the envelope, while Karaoke retrieves it and hands it back to Pooch (288). Later in the novel, Pooch shoots himself, re-enacting his father suicide. Karaoke almost brings truth to the surface when suggesting that “we all know why he did it”, but her cousin Frank silences her. Karaoke’s frustrated response, “Yes, let’s not talk about it. Josh didn’t—”, conveys her rebellious attempt to push the truth out into the open, but Robinson’s use of ellipses again underscores the overwhelming silence surrounding the traumatic events within the community (319). If violence within Indigenous communities is often interpreted though a lens of deficiency, seen as the product of “inherently abnormal and defective” peoples, as Cindy Holmes and Sarah Hunt (Kwagiulth) have observed and criticized (16), Robinson emphasizes self-harm and community violence as colonial phenomena, and the legacy of residential schools and oppression which manifests in complex ways in the novel’s present.

Unnarratability in the novel has received considerable critical attention, and Sam McKegney has examined how repression is thematized through water metaphors of submersion to illustrate how trauma affects individuals when it is pushed beneath the surface and hidden from conscious recognition. Gaertner has argued that if the “ocean and what lies beneath it” represent “a topography of repression”, then Lisa’s descent into the water can be read as a resurgence (8). I would extend McKegney’s and Gaertner’s readings to suggest that the recurring motif of descending to the bottom of the ocean serves as a metaphor for truth-seeking. In the novel’s beginning, six crows speak to Lisa in Haisla and, with the imperative “La’es”, tell her to “go down to the bottom of the ocean” (1). This is an early indication of Lisa’s mission, an anticipation of her brother’s fate and also, on a symbolic level, an invitation to come to terms with what has been kept hidden by uncovering trauma and reconnecting with Haisla spirituality. Lisa consistently erects emotional and cognitive barriers, though, resisting whenever she encounters challenging information, as exemplified by her response on learning about domestic violence within her family, specifically her grandfather’s physical abuse of Ma-ma-oo and her decision to send Mick and Trudy to residential school to protect them. Lisa cannot understand why Trudy perceives her mother’s decision as selfish, or why Ma-ma-oo might have deemed it safer for her children to be away. Neither can she entertain the possibility of Ma-ma-oo’s involvement in her husband’s death after enduring his abuse for years, as another of Lisa’s aunts suggests (254). Robinson returns Lisa to this pivotal moment in her family history by having her witness her grandfather’s death in a dream where Ma-ma-oo sits at the kitchen table, bruised and battered, and hears a noise in the bathroom—her husband slipping in the shower—and remains frozen (356). On awakening, a gravitational force pulls Lisa towards the beach where she finds herself wading in the water, drawn to something floating in the half-submerged grass by the shore. Her initial thought that it resembles “a baby in a christening outfit” presages a haunting presence tied to unresolved residential school trauma, but it turns out to be “just a bucket”, suggesting that the past can be addressed: “I should catch it before it’s lost”. When Lisa attempts to catch the bucket, however, “something” yanks her underwater, troubling the promise of resolution (356–7). “Something” highlights a narrative gap that the narrator does not fill retrospectively, leaving room for interpretive engagement by readers. The unseen force pulling Lisa underwater is likely one of the menacing, “worm-like” entities that Lisa encounters throughout the narrative, usually lurking outside of her immediate field of vision. This exchange exemplifies what one critic reads as dangerous “figurative hauntings” and their animation of residential school trauma, as distinct from the familial “humanoid ghosts” that are articulations of traditional knowledge (Stunden 391). However, spirits in Monkey Beach defy such easy classification because Robinson emphasizes their multifaceted nature, portraying them as deeply ambivalent.

Haisla Wonder

Whereas gothic conventions presuppose a Christian polarization of good and evil, dichotomizing imperatives collapse in Robinson’s portrayal of the spirits in Monkey Beach. Robinson’s ghosts are closer to the shape-shifting trickster of North American Indigenous cosmologies, a figure that Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor describes as “a comic and communal sign” that is “never tragic” and “never the whole truth” (11). In Monkey Beach, Robinson revisits Weegit, the raven trickster from traditional Haisla origin stories. In Gordon Robinson’s Tales of Kitamaat, Weegit’s actions showcase a blend of wit, deception, and occasional benevolence. From stealing the moon to manipulating a bullhead fish with his cunning, Weegit’s tales reflect themes of greed, violence, and the consequences of one’s actions. Robinson draws inspiration from her uncle’s book but reimagines the trickster in his old age, living in a “comfortable condo downtown” and sipping low-fat mocha while reading “yet another sanitized version of his earlier exploits” (296). If this portrayal highlights continuity with traditional stories, it also establishes the trickster’s relevance in modern times. Weegit’s deliciously outrageous endeavors transcend morals, yet he often positively influences human lives: motivated by boredom, he creates the world and humans, and his theft of the sun and moon, though driven by personal convenience and the search for food, brings light to humankind (295). Benevolence is only “incidental,” Gordon Robinson clarifies in his text, because Weegit’s “main interest” is to play tricks and pranks (viii). The vignette of Weegit acts as a thematic prelude to Part Three of Monkey Beach which traces Lisa’s tumultuous period of addiction in Vancouver and safe return to Kitamaat following her cousin Tab’s intervention. Struggling to recover from the trauma of rape and tragic deaths of Uncle Mick and Ma-ma-oo, Lisa becomes ensnared in a cycle of self-destructive behavior in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area known for high rates of homelessness and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. She is found semi-conscious in a motel bathroom by Tab, who chides her: “Some people aren’t wallowing in misery like they’re the only ones on earth who’ve ever had someone die on them” (300). An argument ensues, but when Lisa tosses Tab a pack of cigarettes, it goes “right through [Tab’s] body” (301). The ghost shakes Lisa from numbness: “You and your fucking problems. Get your act together and go home” (301). A literary trickster herself, Robinson invokes a familiar trope from horror stories—a tragic twist whereby a ghostly presence signals the loss of a loved one—only to subvert it entirely: as Lisa later learns from Tab’s mother, her cousin is not dead (305). Lisa suspects she has hallucinated her presence, and a gothic interpretation of the text would require no alternative explanation.⁹ A lens of wonder opens the narrative further to suggest that a shapeshifting spirit has tricked Lisa by masquerading as Tab, thereby saving her from a terrible fate, as Lisa also acknowledges: “I would have stayed that way for years if it wasn’t for Tab” (297). Whether Weegit, the red-haired little man from Lisa’s childhood—she notes that Tab’s hair is dyed red—or a different spirit, the shapeshifter deceives Lisa by leading her to believe that Tab has been brutally murdered, “bumped off by a couple of boozehound rednecks” (301). If this is a prank, the scenario of colonial gendered violence it creates is believable and serves to impart a lesson. The lies are also admonishments and lead Lisa to reconsider her situation and return home to Kitaamat.

In Monkey Beach, Lisa grapples with an epistemological tension between the spiritual and the psychoanalytical, often dismissing her encounters with the spirit world as signs of mental illness. This response can be partly traced to the history of colonization and indoctrination, predominantly through schooling—an issue Robinson addresses in the novel.¹⁰ Lisa’s parents, Gladys and Al, also minimize the significance of her spiritual connections. When Lisa confides that a murder of crows has delivered a message in Haisla, Gladys jokingly remarks that it is “clearly a sign” that she needs Prozac, an antidepressant, and when Lisa’s visions intensify, her parents entrust her to a psychiatrist to “normalize” her (3, 274). Cara Fabre interprets Gladys and Al’s embrace of a capitalist and utilitarian worldview as a rejection of traditional Haisla teachings (128). In my reading, although a positivist and pathologizing mindset may influence Lisa and her family, colonial conditioning does not fully define their reality. Lisa’s uncertainty about the nature of ghostly encounters resonates with a Haisla worldview, where spiritual understanding requires ongoing learning and interpretation. She learns to navigate the spirt world through trial and error by harnessing Haisla principles of experiential learning where teachings are “shown and told over and over” to be absorbed at different stages of life, as emphasized by Haisla scholars Jacqui, Mary, and Ray Green (71). Through ghostly encounters made credible within the narrative, Robinson encourages belief in the veracity of these phenomena so that Lisa’s attempts at rationalization often appear forced and unconvincing, marked by denial and self-diagnosis. In this way, Robinson subverts a Western literary-critical model wherein first-person perspectives that involve “supernatural” occurrences are indicators of a narrator’s unreliability.

Critical analyses of Monkey Beach often focus on Lisa’s struggles to integrate Haisla and Euro-Canadian cultures (Fabre, Buffoli, Soper-Jones) and examine how Robinson’s writing merges Western and Indigenous storytelling traditions (Lane, Lacombe, Howells), sometimes invoking a postcolonial notion of hybridity. Much of the novel’s complexity derives from Robinson’s articulation of the tensions between different interpretive models, but a framework of cultural hybridity risks trapping Indigeneity in essentializing definitions of “authenticity.” Hybridity presupposes a pure Indigenous identity, with tradition static and confined to the past, when, as Walter Mignolo contends, the distinction between modernity and tradition is “part of the larger strategy of the denial of coevalness, the creation and reproduction of colonial and imperial differences, and, more generally, of building and maintaining the colonial matrix of power” (174). Notions of authenticity construct “real” Indigenous peoples as “always Other,” relegating contemporary Indigenous experience to a “reduced shadow” of “former greatness” (Justice 147).¹¹ Robinson challenges such false dichotomies by depicting Haisla knowledge and tradition as dynamic, innovative, and capable of adapting to changing circumstances.

Adaptation and innovation are at the heart of nuyem, a term that can be understood as encompassing Haisla epistemology, ethics, worldviews and ways of being. More than a set of static regulations, nuyem is a living, adaptable legal system that remains relevant and vital to contemporary Haisla life (Green et al. 57). In The Sasquatch at Home (2011), Robinson illustrates the concept of nusa, traditional protocols for teaching, sharing, and preserving nuyem, when recounting a visit to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis, with her mother: “I was glad we’d come here together. You should not go to Graceland without an Elvis fan. It’s like Christmas without kids—you lose that sense of wonder. […] More importantly, as we walked slowly through the house and she touched the walls, everything had a story, a history. In each story was everything she valued and loved and wanted me to remember and carry with me. This is nusa” (11; emphasis mine). Wonder is at the heart of nusa, a storytelling method in which personal connections, values, and experiences are entwined as knowledge, and traditional protocols are continuously integrated into everyday life. This sense of adaptation permeates Monkey Beach.

Lisa’s encounters with a little red-haired man exemplify the dynamic reinterpretation of Haisla spiritual traditions in the context of her personal struggles and contemporary realities. A spirit of the “chief trees” traditionally used by medicine men to craft canoes for traveling to the land of the dead, his presence signals Lisa’s destined journey to the spirit realm (152–3). That this journey is undertaken by Lisa not by canoe but by a speedboat highlights the enduring significance of a traditional practice in a contemporary setting.¹² When Lisa is a child, the little red-haired man visits her in anticipation of tragic events, to warn and to comfort her. Although she initially rejects him as “a variation of the monster under the bed or the thing in the closet, a nightmare that faded with the morning,” his gestures exude an otherworldly tenderness: he blows her “sad kisses that sparkled silver and gold in the dark and fell as soft as confetti” (27, 132). Following Mick’s death, Lisa feels guilty for having ignored the sprite’s warnings. Her attempt to contact the dead through Voodoo for beginners, a book emblematic of the commercialization of spirituality, invites the little man’s return in a far more sinister guise: “he was hanging by his neck from a yellow rope, smiling at me as he swung back and forth” (222). This eerie manifestation, paired with a vision of Jimmy and a dead crow, leaves Lisa consumed by dread that “something bad was going to happen to Jimmy” (223). One critic interprets this apparition as a “death sending” foretelling the rape Lisa endures (Rudd 89), but this reading fails to account for his later reappearance to warn Lisa about the assault, and his final departure at her request. The little man’s unsettling apparition following Lisa’s consultation of Voodoo for beginners may instead reflect the playful, unpredictable nature of Haisla spirits. Lisa’s realization, after days guarding Jimmy, that “all that fuss and I’d saved my brother from the mumps”, underscores the trickster-like qualities of the little red-haired man (229). Projecting a gothic sensibility onto the little man obscures the delightfully mischievous nature of Haisla spirits. Ma-ma-oo’s observations that the little red-haired man is “a guide but not a reliable one” is a reminder that his role lies not in providing certainty but in challenging Lisa’s understanding of both tradition and the spiritual world (153).

Ma-ma-oo’s teachings about traditional Haisla cultural practices provide Lisa with nuyem, a set of values and beliefs that help her contextualize what she experiences, giving positive meaning to what is otherwise seen as problematic, unspeakable, or false. Within this framework, Robinson weaves a narrative of gynocentric spirituality because Lisa learns that she has inherited the gift of vision from her mother Gladys, whose mother, in turn, was “a real medicine woman” (154). Ma-ma-oo speculates why Gladys is persistently dismissive: “She doesn’t tell you when she sees things. Or she’s forgotten how. Or she ignores it” (154). Gladys’ denial of her spiritual gift is to be understood as the result of systemic repression of Indigenous practices and knowledge systems, and as a survival mechanism in the face of the profound trauma during her formative years. Ma-ma-oo tells Lisa about the epidemics brought by colonizers that decimated the village and were still rampant when Gladys was a child, including tuberculosis and influenza, diseases previously unknown in the community. That she could foretell death underlines the traumatic effect, but Gladys does not reject her culture entirely. She teaches Lisa how to make oolichan grease, a typical Haisla delicacy, shares traditional stories rooted in the land, and teaches her the value of reciprocity during a visit to the Kitlope river: “you be polite and introduce yourself to the water,” instilling in Lisa a sense of wonder sparked by a willful connection, “so you can see it with fresh eyes” (112). Ma-ma-oo and, in different ways, Gladys, teach Lisa to negotiate, establish connections, and make offerings to plant, animal, and spirit nations.

Lisa’s journey in Monkey Beach is defined by her struggle to navigate the complexities of the spirit world without the guidance of ancestors with knowledge of traditional protocols, as Ma-ma-oo’s laments, “people who knew the old ways” are “gone” or practicing in secret (154). Central to the novel is Lisa’s gift of vision, described by Ma-ma-oo as a “powerful medicine” capable of both healing and harm, akin to oxasuli (veratrum viride or Indian hellebore), a potent plant used in medicinal and ceremonial practices. Ma-ma-oo’s cautionary advice, that it is “best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing”, becomes painfully clear at the end of the novel when Lisa’s attempt at a blood offering nearly costs her life (370). In exchange for knowledge about her brother, Lisa offers herself as a sacrifice, a dangerous encounter with the spirits that leaves her powerless and sinking to the bottom of the ocean. In a semi-conscious state, she is saved by the ghost of Jimmy and reaches the land of the dead, fulfilling her calling. Here, the spirit of Ma-ma-oo reminds her of the responsibility that comes with her gift: “Unless you know how to use it, it will kill you” (371). By the novel’s close, then, Lisa still needs to learn how to interact with the spirits. Robinson leaves her at a crucial juncture, emphasizing that learning and cultural resurgence are ongoing processes that cannot be fully completed.

Spirits in Monkey Beach are members of nonhuman nations with whom Lisa enters into complex relationships. In Indigenous literatures, spirits are not necessarily “figures of uncanny terror,” and although they can be “malevolent”, they are also ancestors and “figures of healing, ceremony, or political action” (Cariou “Haunted Prairie” 730). Wendat scholar George Sioui stresses that spirits are part of a web of relationships and they should be considered “quite simply, relatives” (24). A broad spectrum of relationality encompasses more than the ghosts of dead family members to include b’gwus, the little man, and even the ominous worm-like spirits indiscernible from their environment who promise Lisa vengeance against her abuser and knowledge about Jimmy in exchange for an offering of meat. Lisa’s interactions with spirits involve a negotiation process marked by reciprocity and obligations. This aligns with Lee Maracle’s (Stó:lō) view that Indigenous peoples engage in social contracts with “all beings” (113). Focusing on pre-colonial treaty negotiations between humans and animals, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Anishinaabe) emphasizes that such contracts involve both rights and mutual responsibilities: a treaty represents an “ongoing reciprocal and dynamic relationship” which, when nurtured in perpetuity, ensures “peaceful coexistence, respect, and mutual benefit” (35). Social relations encompass humans and animals, plants, stones, ecosystems, celestial bodies, spirits, and energies, all understood as sentient, agential, and aware. Kim TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) defines this as “the knowing relatedness of all things” that is encapsulated in “Indigenous metaphysics” (191). A principle of non-interference and respect for differences is at the core of reciprocity, and one that Robinson emphasizes. She has Uncle Mick encapsulate this epistemology during a fishing trip when he inadvertently catches a halibut in a crab pot, which he describes as a “magical thing,” cautioning Lisa: “You aren’t supposed to touch them if you don’t know how to handle them” (99). Ma-ma-oo emphasizes incommensurability with nonhuman realms when she tells Lisa that “everything in the land of the dead is backwards” and that she should not trust the spirit world without reservations because “they think different from the living” (140, 153). At the same time, Robinson makes clear that a lack of total understanding is not an obstacle to relationships: “you don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand” (265). Thoughtful reciprocity, rooted in respect, and cautious engagement with the unknown foster a sense of wonder.

In Monkey Beach, wonder lies in a profound connection that is at once intimate and enigmatic. In Haisla nuyem, this is encapsulated in nolaxw which, when repeated three times, acknowledges the spirit of a place and conveys a sense of wonder, admiration, and awe (Green et al 70). Robinson conveys nolaxw imaginatively in interactions in which the unexpected and unexplained awaken a sense of a deep connectedness in her characters. Wonder emerges through relationships with the land and nonhuman inhabitants, including the animals that enliven the landscape: sea otters, seals, wolves, bears, frogs, and orcas. When Lisa witnesses Jimmy swim in the open ocean with orcas, she observes that “[t]he water looked so much more magical when they were swimming in it,” which captures a sense of wonder that is deeply relational (353). Nolaxw is experienced as a moment of ecstatic connection, wherein fear and awe merge, and a sense of deep respect is evoked. A profound engagement with the environment opens the way to ecological visions though which Lisa can perceive the wonderful interconnectedness of all life:

When I dreamed, I could see things in double exposure—the real world, and beyond it, the same world, but whole, with no clear-cuts, no pollution, no boats, no cars, no planes. Whales rolled in and out of the water […] Some of them were large, dark grey whales. Some of them were smaller and black. Hundreds of birds I’d never seen before squawked and chirped in the air, on the beaches, in the trees (265).

This window into a world unspoiled by colonial impact suggests a holistic ecosystem before industrialization and environmental degradation. For some critics of the novel, it is a “spatial distortion that occurs for the Haisla protagonist as she simultaneously occupies two worlds: her pre-colonial inheritance and the colonial reality of the everyday.” This juxtaposition is expressed through a “colonial doubling” in names, such as Lisamarie Michelle and the town of Kitamaat/Kitimat, that signifies cultural and epistemological tensions arising from Lisa’s inhabiting of two worlds and cultures (Gaertner 6, Buffoli 159). Through a lens of wonder, however, the double exposure emerges less as a “spatial distortion” whereby the colonial encounter determines Lisa’s experience as fragmented, and more as a glimpse into a world of wholeness and interconnectedness wherein putative boundaries between temporalities dissolve, and a new vision can emerge. Lisa’s encounter with a great blue heron by Kitlope lake at night is another moment of temporal transcendence and connection conveying nolaxw: “The bird’s long thin beak pointed towards me as it rolled one yellow eye then the other, checking me out […] while I watched it disappear in the distance I thought I was watching a pterodactyl straight from the Dinosaur Age” (118). With each interaction, Robinson evokes a timelessness that transcends colonial disruption, inviting Lisa and, through her, her readers into a space where past and present, human and more-than-human, are fluid and interconnected.

***

Any critical engagement with Monkey Beach must contend with silence and unspeakability as a result of colonial trauma stemming from the long history of residential schools. For example, one critic reads the novel as a “fictional testimony” with readers as active witnesses, suggesting that Robinson is as concerned with exploring how “a necessary national truth has been hidden” as she is in telling it (Stunden 394). In my reading, residential school suffering is not all that is silenced; through ellipses and narrative gaps, characters are precluded from speaking about any traumatic experience. In the case of Mick, a former activist in the American Indian Movement, it is impossible to articulate the emotional and psychological cost of his activism, including PTSD and his wife’s murder, and his utter disillusionment with the movement: “fighting didn’t get me anything but lots of scars” (96).¹³ As Fagan suggests, Monkey Beach “raises many questions about what constitutes appropriate speech,” including whether it is “necessary” for the health of individuals and communities to speak out about trauma (223). Robinson grapples with the responsibility of storytelling within the Haisla community, mindful of traditional protocols: nusa. She has said she feels a sense of self-censorship and fears reprisal from living community members and spirits: “I had one poke me in the butt”, and another “so pissed at me – yelled and shouted. Gave me nasty dreams all night” (qtd. in Methot). Haisla elders emphasize that in order to preserve nuyem “some things cannot be shared” because “there are aspects of our traditional perspective and values that non-Haislas would never be able to understand” (Robinson The Sasquatch 13). Writing Monkey Beach was, Robinson has confessed, “incredibly tricky” because it required striking a balance between what to explain to people outside of her community and staying true to her story (qtd. in Patrick). Robinson crafts a narrative that simultaneously tells and eludes telling, compelling readers to navigate a landscape where truths are implied, and imagination is a prerequisite for discerning them.

Elusiveness is embodied in the figure of the b’gwus and in what Gaertner describes as the “slippage between ghosts and humans” that sparks a “sense of wonder and fear” (6). Symbolized by the b’gwus’ mask—crafted by Lisa’s grandfather, worn by her father and finally gifted to Jimmy—this “slippage” is also suggested in tales where the human origin of b’gwus is contemplated (The Sasquatch 34–5, Monkey Beach 211). But beyond his appearance and habits, it is the b’gwus’ voice that encapsulates in-betweenness in Monkey Beach: “close, very close, a b’gwus howls—not quite human, not quite wolf, but something in between” (374). The narrative concludes with the haunting sound of the b’gwus and the distant noise of a speedboat. Robinson’s finale is less about Lisa’s harmonization of modernity and tradition and more about forging meanings and connections from stories, oriented towards the future. If testimony is a sensory dialogical experience encompassing speaking, listening, and understanding as relational practices, it is not confined to the human voice. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson summarizes, Indigenous peoples have been “in constant dialogue” with the land and waters, and “for many of us, the sound waves of our voices, vibrations made from the instrument of the body, are an affecting force in their universe” (“Listening”). The b’gwus’s howl, then, is non-verbal testimony, the sound reverberating ancestral knowledge, because listening is crucial to approaching the truths of Monkey Beach, even when understanding might be elusive. By transcending linguistic confines and embodying interconnectedness between land, ancestors, and community, this form of testimony slips beyond the limitations on speech imposed by colonial trauma, opening spaces for healing and resurgence.

Challenging myopic colonial perspectives that portray Indigenous peoples as clinging to the remnants of a lost past, Monkey Beach is a wonderwork that celebrates “creative and visionary” Indigenous individuals and “new practices, relationships, and cultural forms” (Justice 55). Robinson dramatizes ambivalence—“something in between”—not as a marker of hybridity, but as a site of continuity and adaptation, a space of wonder where transformation can occur (374). Through double exposure, ambiguity and uncertainty may scare, comfort, or excite but they are always cherished. When the novel is read through Daniel Heath Justice’s lens of wonder, encounters with the spirit world are expressions of radical hope. For Kim TallBear, “radical hope” may be an opportunity to realign “the emotional, intellectual, and (un)ethical baseline and narrative of those who hold power,” and weave stories that do not entail “redeeming the state” but “caring for one another as relations” (“Caretaking” 34). When Lisa reaches the land of the dead and witnesses the spirits of her relatives dancing and singing around a bonfire, they compel her to envision alternative imaginings and pathways. Ma-ma-oo tells her, “go home and make me some grandkids,” while Mick urges her to “go out there and give ‘em hell. Red power!” (373). Jimmy’s message to “Tell her” is a haunting echo of his final goodbye, carrying both an affirmation of love for Karaoke—“Tell her I love her”—and an unspoken plea to bring truths to the surface (363, 374). The spirits sing about “leaving and meeting again”; they chant, “aux’gwalas” or “take care of her yourself, wherever you’re going” (374). Robinson’s use of an ambiguous object pronoun opens possibilities for interpretations, suggesting a plurality of interconnected meanings, all of which emphasize relational care. Wonder brings forth Indigenous understandings of relationality and the multidimensionality of worlds, signalling potential for profound transformation and new possibilities for the future rooted in place-based relationships with the land, humans, and more-than-human beings.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Sharon Monteith for her comments on drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback, and to the editorial board for their support.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.