First of all, it;s got beautiful prose. The author, Margaret Craven, really has a gift with words. These would be words to read over and over in the hope that the cadence of them would seep into my own writing and make it beautiful as well.
"The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man for his country, his town, or even for his own bit of land. His village is not the strip of land four miles long and three miles wide that is his as long as the sun rises and the moon sets. The myths are the villagae, and the winds and the rains. The river is the village, and the black and white killer whales that herd the fish to the end of the inlet the better to gobble them. The village is the salmon who comes up the river to spawn, the seal who follows the salmon and bites off his head, the bluejay whose name is like the sound he makes - 'Kwiss-Kwiss.' The village is the talking bird, the owl, who calls the name of the man who is going to die, and the silver-tipped grizzly who ambles into the village, and the little white speck that is the mountain goat on Whoop-Szo."
The author divides the village into a number of groups: the vicar, who is dieing but doesn't know it, and among the Indians there are the Elders who see the decline of their tribe with pain, the respectably middle-aged, and the Young, who increasingly are going over the bridge to the white man's world. They go for education, but in gaining an education they loose something of themselves. This division is extremely thought-provoking.
What is it that transmits a culture from one generation to the next? What keeps our village from disintegrating the way that the Tsawataineuk of Kingcome did? How do we educate our children, and how do our choices for their education shape the way our culture is - or is not - transmitted to them? This book is a thinker, and worthy of a second and third read.
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