Powerful stories of indigenous women
Novel captures harsh realities many aboriginal women face
Following years of demands and denials, the federal government in August launched a public inquiry into the number of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. First Nations women are three times more likely to be the victims of violence than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. They account for one-third of the female prison population.
Those are the statistics. In “The Break,” the debut novel from Métis writer Katherena Vermette, we find the stories. Page after page, with heartbreaking beauty, Vermette captures the reality behind those numbers.
Vermette, whose book of poetry, “North End Love Songs,” won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2013, is from Winnipeg. Some of the stories in this collection, too, examine the aboriginal ghetto of the city’s North End.
In the area’s cold heart, Stella looks through her snow-fogged window one night into the empty lot next door to witness a scene of violence. She contacts the police, who are reluctant to take her report seriously.
From the shifting perspectives of the women in Stella’s family, this gripping story unfolds. There is Flora, Métis Stella’s kookom, the family matriarch who must find the strength to face another family tragedy. There is Cheryl, Stella’s aunt, an artist whose own life has been marred with alcoholism and violence that trickled down to her daughters, Louisa and Paulina. Paul is helpless as fate defies her efforts to protect her own daughter from the streets where she herself once ran scared.
For Lou, a social worker who has had a front-row seat to the intergenerational trauma, the attack is a mean reminder of the circuitous path of violence.
“I look at my files, all the poor, young children already with epic stories, their mothers mean or sad. The empty space where their fathers are supposed to be,” she thinks before her own family is swept up in one of those everyday tragedies.
All takes place under the lingering presence of Stella’s mother, Rain, who herself died a violent death.
Through the eyes of the young victim, the fury-filled perpetrator, a naïve Métis police officer caught between two worlds, this agonizing story and the agonizing history of a people are told.
As the blood is buried under falling snow, Stella tries to make sense of the violent event that, it turns out, will hit much closer to home than the neighbouring lot where the attack took place. And, as the truth emerges, Stella is forced to contend with a lifetime of stories and secrets, from her cousins, her mother, the women throughout her life.
“Her past. Hers. She knows what he meant, what he knows, what she’s shared with him in the dark nights filled with memories and restlessness. She thinks of each time, every instance. One by one. It’s really the past. Not even hers. Just stories that really belong to other people but were somehow passed to her for safekeeping, for her to know, forever,” she thinks early on, as even her own husband, like the police, doubts Stella’s recollection of the event that drives the story forward.
Full of richly drawn, perfectly imperfect characters, and as difficult as the subject matter is, “The Break” is impossible to put down. In writing as beautiful as it is stark, Vermette brings the reader inside the world where thousands of indigenous women in this country have gone missing or been murdered.
Vermette paints a bleak picture of the racism, both overt and subtle, that takes its toll.
The reader can’t help but remember that the setting is Winnipeg, after all, the city where two years ago the body of 15-year-old foster child Tina Fontaine was fished out of the Red River wrapped in plastic; the city where a couple of months later 16-year-old Rinelle Harper was sexually assaulted and left for dead on its banks.
But Vermette does not shy away from the violence visited upon indigenous men and women from within their own community. She casts her unwavering writer’s gaze equally upon the gang violence, family dysfunction and abuse that are the dark legacy of poverty, residential schools and community breakdown.
The cycle of violence comes full circle in this dark family saga, but not without hope.
In Vermette’s poetic prose, “The Break” offers a stark portrayal of the adversity that plagues First Nations women in this country — and the strength that helps them survive.