The names of all 202 children known to have died in Vancouver Island Residential Schools.Īn article about WIllie Blackwater, a student who stood up to an abuser at Alberni. Tseshaht First Nation commemorates the closing of Alberni Indian Residential School. Our episodes on other texts we mention: The Autobiography of Malcolm X Purgatorio Middlemarch Iliad. The CBC recently checked in with Eden Robinson. The new film of Monkey Beach premieres Thursday at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Other books by Eden Robinson: Blood Sports, Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift, The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols and Modern Storytelling. And her own search for her brother, Jimmy, leads Lisa into the past and even-like Dante’s narrator-into the spirit world of the dead.

The education that the narrator, Lisamarie, receives from her uncle and grandmother on the lands and waters (both salt and fresh) of the Pacific Northwest is a powerful counterbalance to the trauma of the residential school that has damaged the community so painfully. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.Įden Robinson’s debut novel Monkey Beach is a coming-of-age story that has elements of horror and magic realism, but is deeply rooted in the writer’s own Indigenous Haisla and Heiltsuk culture. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. To be absorbed in a movie, a game or work is to enter a light trance.

In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness.

Monkey beach by eden robinson