Celia's Song
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4.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Mink is a witness, a shape shifter, compelled to follow the story that has ensnared Celia and her village, on the West coast of Vancouver Island in Nuu’Chahlnuth territory.
Celia is a seer who — despite being convinced she’s a little “off” — must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews.
While mink is visiting, a double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the village decades earlier, has left his terrible influence on Amos, a residential school survivor. The occurrence signals the unfolding of an ordeal that pulls Celia out of her reveries and into the tragedy of her cousin’s granddaughter.
Each one of Celia’s family becomes involved in creating a greater solution than merely attending to her cousin’s granddaughter.
Celia’s Song relates one Nuu’Chahlnuth family’s harrowing experiences over several generations, after the brutality, interference, and neglect resulting from contact with Europeans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This novel is the seventh work of fiction from one of Canada's most acclaimed aboriginal authors and critics. Maracle, author of Ravensong and Daughters are Forever, is an elder from Sto:lo Nation (The People of the River) on the West Coast of Canada. This story is narrated by Mink, who bears witness to the crisis that follows the suicide of dreamer-seer Celia's son, Jimmy. The structure takes on the character of Celia's dreams, "scattered moving pictures, disconnected from current time," a format that Maracle expertly uses to tell of the history of contact with the Europeans. Beginning with Celia's great-great-grandmother being renamed Alice in exchange for medicines, Celia's visions trace the effects of colonization, beginning with the medicine that did nothing for the small-pox that came with the newcomers blankets, through the horrors of residential schools, down to the present day. Mink insists that bearing witness to the past and present is of great importance, and unflinchingly does so, along with Celia and her nephew Jacob. Celia's scattered images coalesce into a hauntingly beautiful narrative and eventually into a way forward from the pain. Maracle in no way suggests that the answers to Canada's colonial past are clear, but she tells a fiercely honest and wonderfully compassionate story.
