Monkey Beach: Chapter 2: The Song of Your Breath Summary & Analysis

Like Mick, Trudy, and Josh, Cookie survived the residential school system, but not without consequences. She seems to have a warrior spirit, like Mick and Lisa. Her unwillingness to quietly bow down to abuse and mistreatment earns her a tough reputation, but her almost reflexive need to fight also betrays the trauma she suffered. The fight over the sweat lodge points back towards Indigenous Peoples’ traditions, but also captures a moment where the ties to these traditions had been severed and a new generation of people tried to figure out how to revive them for their own modern context.

Barry’s refusal to describe the protest and Cookie’s death reminds readers of Lisa’s youth and inexperience—she’s not mature enough to know everything yet. But his reticence also suggests it was particularly bad, pointing towards the ongoing trauma suffered by Indigenous communities from historical abuses.

One of the horrors of the residential school system was the way it systematically attempted to destroy Indigenous communities by breaking up families. The results of this awful policy are on full display here—although only Mick and Trudy went to the schools, their time there affected their relationships with everyone in the family and it continues to cause strife and pain even years later. And Trudy and Josh also seem incapable of forming a healthy relationship with each other.

Lisa’s recreation of Ma-ma-oo’s ritual asserts the thinness and permeability of the line between living and dead, even though she doesn’t feel connected to Mick in a meaningful way. Her description of Mick’s corpse recalls the enigmatic sign of the halibut they caught in their crab trap; cut off from the traditional wisdom of her community, Lisa struggles to interpret the spirit world’s messages.

The huge net of salmon seems like an apology gift from the ocean for taking Mick—or possibly a message he tries to send from the spirit world that he's safe and happy there. But it also ironically makes his trip to the net—and his death—seem pointless. The spirit realm holds power, this scene suggests, which people cannot fully understand, interpret, or control. 

Like the little man, the oxasuli root that Ma-ma-oo finds represents the raw power of the spirit world. Without the proper knowledge of how to channel it, the raw power of the spirit realm can be either helpful or harmful. The root thus offers a reminder to Lisa of the need to control her power and not lash out indiscriminately. And the loss of passed-down knowledge yet again points towards the long-term effects of historical attempts to destroy Indigenous cultures.

Ma-ma-oo teaches Lisa what she knows of the traditional ways, but her knowledge and experience remain limited by historical attempts to destroy Indigenous cultures. Mom’s experience tracks these attempts: she had a connection to the spirit world, just like Lisa. But her adult assimilation to modern culture means that she has lost—or denied—it.

Haisla medicine—the mystical practice and traditions people once used to contact the spirit world and to guide their actions in the everyday world—died out because of a project of cultural genocide on the part of the Canadian government. The violence of the past continues to resonate in the present. But Lisa and her mother have the same natural connection to the spirit world as Lisa’s great-grandmother. History limits their understanding and use of that powerful connection.

The raven represents a trickster figure to the Haisla and other Indigenous Peoples; remembering a story about Weegit’s pranks at this point in her journey should warn Lisa to take care as she proceeds, because the rules of the normal, waking world will soon cease to apply.

The period after Mick’s death goes from bad to worse for Lisa and she begins in a state of numb, nearly catatonic grief. She finds relief in physical exertion, as befits her warrior personality. But she lacks the wisdom—or the proper guidance from her elders—that would allow her to work through this trauma in a productive way. Instead, she tries to hide from the pain by ignoring it (like Frank’s bullying) or running from it—quite literally at first.

After Mick’s return, Jimmy ceased to be an important focus of Lisa’s life; after Mick’s death, she notices her brother again. Stealing the car seems out of character for Jimmy, as if he’s trying to pull her out of her funk like a supportive family member. But it also points towards a somewhat impulsive streak in Jimmy, who seems willing to break the rules for the people he loves. This will come back into play with the circumstances of his disappearance, when Lisa describes them in greater detail later in the book.

The episode where Lisa and Jimmy steal Dad’s car marks the first time in months that Lisa has felt something through the numb layer of her grief. This teaches her the unfortunate lesson that deviating from healthy behavior can help her to feel power again, which will lead directly into her increasingly problematic behavior.

Ma-ma-oo continues to be Lisa’s sole source of traditional knowledge, but her lessons focus on acquiring and preparing food. Ma-ma-oo doesn’t have the same connection to the spirit realm as Lisa and Lisa’s maternal ancestors, so she can’t help her granddaughter in the area where she most needs it. However, she continues to model the way memories bridge between the living and the dead; her sister Mimayus died tragically young (like Mick) but lives on, in a way, in Ma-ma-oo’s stories.

Lisa seems to be receiving signs from the spirit realm in the patterns of natural life around her—the crows, harbingers of good and bad luck, lurk with the seagulls around what seems to be a dead animal.

The second section of the book features Lisa’s direct addresses to the reader, one set of which focuses on how to contact the dead, and the other on the anatomy and physiology of the heart. This section will also feature Ma-ma-oo’s heart attack, after which Lisa learns as much as she can about the workings of the human heart. These passages thus foreshadow that event. They’re also, as readers will find out shortly, one of the ways Lisa tries to distract her anxious thoughts on the trip to Namu. These descriptions suggest the almost magical properties of the human body, pointing towards the myriad sources of magic and power in the world.

Consciously or subconsciously, Lisa has put herself on the path towards a supernatural experience by boarding the boat all by herself and setting off down the channel. She’s isolated from her family—whom she now regrets failing to support in their fear and grief—and she’s abstaining (by necessity, if not by choice) from her usual distractions. Isolation and fasting are common elements of practices designed to provoke contact with the spiritual realm across cultures, so readers should expect Lisa to do so soon.

Lisa’s grief in the wake of Mick’s death almost completely overwhelms her; she doesn’t know how to handle it or how to move forward in her life without her beloved uncle and best friend. This section follows Lisa as she slowly and painfully comes to terms with that loss. In contrast, Jimmy’s life seems to be on an excellent track.

In donning the mask and playing this prank on Jimmy, Lisa seems to be trying to adopt a trickster role like Mick. She dons the costume of a monster, thus living up to her—and Mick’s—nickname. Yet, she’s still a child and she hasn’t yet worked through her loss of Mick. Lashing out with the prank doesn’t make her feel any better—or feel anything, really; it’s mean-spirited and impotent.

Lisa just lashed out at Jimmy with the sasquatch prank, and now she beats up a bully and mocks her cousin. She’s moved from feeling numb to finding power by hurting others physically and emotionally. Her pain and rage give her power, but she uses it indiscriminately, like a bully—and like Frank.

After pranking Jimmy, then falling into back-to-back fights with Frank and Erica, Lisa firmly embraces her new identity as a fighter, even though the power that fighting makes her feel proves to be fleeting and temporary. Without being directed towards a larger purpose or her personal development, exercising her raw power leaves her stuck in her grief and further isolates her. Her experience suggests that indiscriminately used power brings pain instead of relief.

The book pointedly contrasts Lisa’s increasing social isolation in the land of the living with the community of friendly ghosts Ma-ma-oo cultivates. Ma-ma-oo quietly continues to teach Lisa that death isn’t an impermeable barrier, that the dead—especially family members—live on if they’re remembered.

Ma-ma-oo explains Lisa’s connections to her ancestors, even people whom she never knew, like Ba-ba-oo. She also acknowledges her grief and explains some of the ritualistic ways she’s expressed it. Rituals like cutting hair, visiting the dead, and singing prayers can give shape and purpose to Ma-ma-oo’s grief in ways that Lisa’s indiscriminate lashing out cannot. In part, they do so because they remind the living of the inevitability of death.

Although Mom feels—and can’t help but express—horror at Lisa’s decision to cut her hair, she respects her daughter’s expression of grief. Lisa’s family continues to be a source of love, safety, and support, even when she’s too lost in her rage and pain to fully recognize it.

Lisa’s ritual provided her with the peace that lashing out did not. But power, the book claims, can be used for good or ill, and Lisa’s use of her power for destructive ends continues to haunt her. Having started down that path, she doesn’t know how to extricate herself—and this foreshadows how her foray into the spirit world at the end of the book will go. In an ominous development, after Lisa shows herself to be a bully, she earns the friendship of the other bullies, Frank and his friends. 

Frank and his friends invite Lisa to join them, and they cement their new friendship with a fierce snowball fight. Lisa has crossed from the world of the girls to the world of the boys in much the same way she wants to be able to bridge between the world of the living and the dead. But although only thin barriers separate them, this memory suggests, she can only fully belong to one world at a time.

Despite Ma-ma-oo’s warnings that Lisa should be wary of her gift, since historical cycles of cultural violence have deprived her of the proper teachers, these asides to the reader show that she has tried to develop the skills to use it regardless. And they point towards the reasons it’s dangerous: the spirits will attend even when inexperienced mortals call.

Lisa demonstrates the care and affection that makes her family a safe, secure place when she worries about Dad getting seasick while searching for Jimmy. As Lisa revisits recent events, she slowly adds context to her worry about her recurring, insistent visions of drowning: although readers must wait to learn the specifics, Lisa reveals that she has reason to believe that Jimmy might have done something to endanger himself and Josh.

Lisa gains a certain degree of power by acting out and joining up with the class bullies, but not over her brother. Her family sees her essential character, even glimpsing it through the way her unprocessed pain makes her behave. In contrast to her excess of feeling, Jimmy seems to have been moved by very little.

As with the butchered haircut, Lisa’s mother and father support their daughter despite her increasingly uncharacteristic behavior, showing how important a stable family can be to the process of growing up and processing grief. In contrast, by implication, this highlights the trauma suffered by Mick, Trudy, and others whom the government stole from their families.

Although her grief and immaturity make her focus exclusively on her own pain following Mick’s death, with the benefit of hindsight, Lisa’s memories point toward the ways in which no one in her family remained untouched by the trouble; Mom starts cutting hair to make up for the loss of Dad’s job. Although Lisa earlier attributed this employment shift to on-the-job stress, its proximity to Mick’s death implies that this may have contributed as well.

This memory shows Ma-ma-oo continuing to grieve the death of her son, Mick; her celebration of Lisa’s birthday feels more like a funeral or a wake in his absence. Yet, because only a thin, porous line separates the living and the dead, Lisa hears ghosts on the porch that night. It seems as if Mick—or other spirits—want to visit her, but she’s not yet ready for them.

Later in the book, Lisa will explicitly connect “Screwy” Ruby with one of the magical creatures from her grandmother’s stories; in this encounter, Ruby seems simultaneously harmless and powerfully alarming. In this way, she seems to offer yet another metaphor for Lisa’s spiritual gifts, which can be used well or dangerously. And she tries to insist that Lisa embrace her power rather than run away from it. But Lisa isn’t ready yet.

Lisa returns home from her grandmother’s—where she heard ghosts or spirits on the porch—and her encounter with Screwy Ruby to a third reminder of the thin line between life and death. Alexis the prodigious hunter reminds Lisa—and everyone else, especially the local mice—that death is an ever-present fact of life. Fighting this truth, as Lisa tries to do, won’t make it go away.

Lisa explains the normal functioning of the heart. If it’s working well, it does its job without fanfare or drawing attention to itself, quietly supporting the body’s life and movement. It only becomes noticeable when it fails to fulfil its function. Yet few people bother to wonder at this almost miraculous muscle; life itself is a kind of magic, Lisa reminds readers in these passages. These passages seem curious, too—why does Lisa know so much about the heart?—and thus they create a vague sense of dread, foreshadowing events that will teach her about the heart’s functions, and its failures.

Lisa continues to remember the traditional knowledge Ma-ma-oo taught her about finding food—and avoiding becoming food. She ties this memory to a reflection on the incursion of white settlers on traditional Haisla lands. Like them, she must learn Haisla as a second language, because the policies their descendants eventually enacted tried to sever her community from its history.

Lisa’s memory reminds readers that violence and cultural coercion against Indigenous Peoples isn’t something that happened in the distant past; it happened within living memory. And its effects continue right up to the present moment; Mom’s refusal to discuss her grandmother implies unacknowledged or unprocessed discomfort from this recent history.

The unsorted photos imply the fluidity of time and mirror the looping, meandering order in which Lisa’s memories link different times of her life to each other. Sharing the nickname Monster creates another point of connection between Lisa and Mick and further suggests the ongoing connection between the dead and the living. In a way, Lisa continues Mick’s legacy in the world. The ongoing enmity between Ma-ma-oo and Trudy points towards the ways in which historical cycles of abuse continue to affect the present—the past never stays fully in the past.

Although Lisa looks to the past to make sense of the world—and to maintain her feeling of connection with Mick through her memories—she cannot escape the march of time. She and her friends approach adulthood, but remain immature. And Frank’s lovelorn looks hint at awkward rearrangements of their friend group to come. When Lisa runs into Tab, her cousin seems impossibly grown up, with her piercings and tattoos (even though she’s probably only in her early teens at this point). Despite this façade, Tab immediately falls back into the childhood diversion of the gingerbread house. In part, the book implies, it’s because she sorely misses this kind of care and affection from her own mother.

Tab’s reaction to an unknown presence in the room—which turns out to be the cat—hints at traumas she’s suffered in the months since Mick’s death. Trudy’s past traumas render her vulnerable to maladaptive coping mechanisms like alcohol abuse; the violence she suffered in the residential school system reverberates into her daughter’s life. Tab feels lucky to have access to a reprieve of relative normalcy with Lisa’s family.

Like Lisa, Trudy wants to present a tough-girl persona to the world, but this façade merely covers the pain, trauma, and suffering she experiences in her life. Her current lifestyle also shows how a history of violence and abuse reverberates through time: Trudy’s trauma and unstable life in turn traumatize and destabilize Tab. Still, Tab finds—and tries to provide—mutual support in the context of the larger family.

Tab’s refusal to discuss her life at home and her evident distress over being forced to return to Vancouver and her mother hint at deep troubles there. Her family has become a site of pain and confusion instead of the mutual supportive community a family can and should be, and the book implies that it’s because of the way that the residential school system systematically and purposefully broke up Indigenous families. The traumas of the past continue to reverberate in the present. 

The myths, legends, and stories that Ma-ma-oo tells Lisa teach her lessons about life, even though it takes her time—in some cases, many years—to understand them. When Lisa asks about Ma-ma-oo’s youth, Ma-ma-oo tells her instead about shapeshifters, who can transition from animals to humans and back. These stories suggest that even as life events shape and change an individual, their core self stays the same. It’s also telling that Ma-ma-oo’s stories include one where a victimized spouse punishes an abusive partner—since Ma-ma-oo herself suffered violence from Ba-ba-oo.

Mick’s death drastically reshapes the Hill family, leaving nothing—even formerly festive occasions like Christmas—untouched. But although Lisa continues to ignore the pain of this loss—like the family ignores the tree—she cannot escape its presence.

Lisa’s lessons carry an air of authority, although the book has yet to give readers any evidence that she has learned to control her gifts in any meaningful way. After all, a history of violence and cultural destruction means that she has no available teachers. This suggests that readers should approach her lessons with caution. Only her assertion that ghosts are everywhere and nowhere, present and hard to see, aligns with her own experience and Ma-ma-oo’s lessons.

The book claims that the traumas and abuses of the past cannot be undone, but that younger generations can find hope through forging their own unique connection between the past and the present. In a small way, Lisa’s refusal to use leaves when she pees in the bushes—she prefers toilet paper—illustrates her attempts to forge her own path based on, but not trapped in, the past.

Lisa’s memories of Mick dominate the first section of the book; the second section focuses more on Ma-ma-oo. Although this memory appears to be from Lisa’s earlier childhood, before Mick’s death, it comes after the account of Mick’s death in the narrative because that was the point at which the center of her family life shifted from beloved uncle to wise grandmother. This memory shows some of the reasons why Lisa loved being with Ma-ma-oo, whose wisdom connected Lisa to her Haisla heritage and whose patience and kindness gave Lisa the space to express herself and explore the world.

The airplane and the tourists pointedly remind readers that although Kitamaat Village remains remote, it isn’t isolated from the rest of the world or stuck in the past.

Lisa’s conversation with the young white man emphasizes both their similarity—they both struggle with their parents’ and society’s expectations—and their differences. He smokes recreationally, and so does she, but she can’t shake the lesson learned from her grandmother that tobacco creates a connection with the spirit world—a connection she longs for and needs in this moment of uncertainty and fear. Lisa also confronts her fears in this moment, albeit glancingly: the obvious reason for the spirits to be cagy with her about Jimmy is that he’s dead. 

The much-needed nicotine buzz draws Lisa back into memories of her past, especially during the year Mick died and she began hanging out with Frank and the others. Many of the kids in their generation suffer the results of intergenerational trauma as a result of programs like the residential schools and other policies that subjected Indigenous communities to increased levels of poverty, mental health issues, and other social ills. Cheese doesn’t respect the spirit world, but Lisa instinctively treats it with caution, given her spiritual gifts.

This memory describes a time when Lisa seems to have provoked a message from the spirit realm, thus suggesting her power. But while the little man’s warning and her vision clearly indicate some danger to Jimmy, they fail to give her a sense of what she needs to do to protect him. In the end, despite her gifts, Lisa remains as powerless over life and death as everyone else. Yet she resists this powerlessness and lashes out against death in ways that bring her more suffering than relief.

Lisa’s vision suggests the rather obvious truth that her brother, like everyone else, is mortal and subject to death. Yet so close to the loss of Mick, she's unwilling to consider his mortality or anyone else’s, at least not directly. She also imposes herself on him as if her mere presence can stave off death—a belief she’s held since Mick’s death. She believes that she could have prevented Mick’s death if she went with him to the net, although she really has no way of knowing that’s true.

Lisa’s connection with the spirit world gives her power of a sort. But without the knowledge or training to use it, she can only apply it bluntly, as she does here when she follows Jimmy around and hounds him at school or has her friends essentially kidnap him. In part, this arises from her immature failure to recognize or admit that she, like everyone else in the world, can do nothing to escape that which she fears the most: death and loss. 

The gang’s kidnapping of Jimmy represents another misapplication of power exercised out of Lisa’s fear and pain. But Jimmy doesn’t seem to mind after Karaoke—his crush since childhood, readers should remember—shows up. Lisa’s references to Karaoke’s and Ronny’s rough reputations also contribute to the book’s exploration of the ways in which Indigenous Communities have been subjected to intergenerational cycles of trauma and abuse.

The little man’s messages remain murky. While Lisa may have saved Jimmy from the mumps, her hovering also sets him on the path to an Olympic career and reintroduces him to Karaoke, two elements that figure prominently in the leadup to his later disappearance at sea. Thus it’s unclear whether Lisa’s actions in response to the little man’s message helped or harmed Jimmy.

The Ouija board presents another avenue of connection to the spirit world, yet as Lisa learns in this memory, it doesn’t provide any more clarity than the ambiguous, silent warnings offered by the little man. Importantly, neither her worldly nor spiritual attempts to locate Alexis work, suggesting the limits of her power, especially when it comes to death. This scenario provides Lisa another opportunity to come to terms with her human powerlessness, yet in her youth and immaturity, she’s still not ready to acknowledge death’s power.

Much of the book traces Lisa’s struggle to accept the reality of death; she has just finished a desperate attempt to keep Jimmy safe from his inevitable demise. Her desire to remain in childhood represents a wish to hold time still and prevent the losses she will inevitably face as her grandmother, then her parents, then she herself grow older. But her increasing awareness of the romantic games her peers play suggests the impossibility of her wish.

Finally, in a desperate attempt to avoid pain and suffering, Lisa attempts to reject the little man’s warnings. Yet as this experience shows, ignoring the warning won’t stop the bad thing from happening. Life—and death—continue at their own pace and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do to change that fact.

Ma-ma-oo’s heart attack gives context to this section’s asides about cardiac anatomy. The desire to understand how the body works represents another attempt to control or stave off death, as if Lisa and Mom believe that knowing how Ma-ma-oo’s heart should work will allow them to help her keep it in tip-top shape forever, even though that’s not the way the body—or life—works.

After Ma-ma-oo’s heart attack, the family rallies around to make sure that she’s being taken care of—and taking care of herself. No matter how much she would like to ignore or resist it, Lisa can’t help but notice the changes in her grandmother, although she also slowly learns to appreciate what stays the same—their hikes on good days, and the strength of their relationship on bad ones. 

Life continues to change for Lisa no matter how she resists acknowledging it. And her attempts to resist the truth—that people grow up, then grow old and die—only cause her more pain, as when she ignores Frank’s clear attempt to ask her to 8th grade graduation. But while he focuses on growing up, Lisa and Pooch fixate on the idea of death.

As Lisa struggles to deal with her losses, she begins to act out to feel powerful. This includes smoking more blatantly, which gets her in trouble with Mom. Yet this ultimately makes her feel less powerful, since the true path to power lies in accepting realities like loss and death. This memory illustrates Lisa’s growing sense of anger over her powerlessness, yet shows how the love and support of her family—in the form of her relationship with Ma-ma-oo—can provide meaning and comfort.

Lisa reacts even more negatively to Cheese’s interest than she did to Frank’s. In part this arises from her unacknowledged attraction to Frank. But a second boy showing interest in her merely confirms what she fears most: time continues to flow onwards, she grows up, and the people she loves will all die someday.

The three white guys present a serious danger to Erica and Lisa, pointing towards the results of historical cycles of violence and abuse, like the fact that Indigenous women and girls are still far more likely to face violence and death than their white peers. But this provides another example of Lisa fighting without thought, and her uncontrollable anger and rage threaten her safety rather than give her real power in this moment. She cannot, in one act of standing up to these men, undo the entire history of violence and suffering of people like her.

In Mick’s absence, Lisa’s relationship with Ma-ma-oo grows more important, in part because Ma-ma-oo allows Lisa to express herself completely. But in this moment, Lisa still shows an immature desire to run away from uncomfortable or unenjoyable situations, something that she must grow out of in order to live a fulfilled adult life.

The comparison that Tab and Lisa make between their lives shows that nothing’s perfect. Both have struggles they must overcome on their way to adulthood. However, Lisa has the benefit of a stable family, unlike Tab, who must deal with the long legacy of the residential school in her mother Trudy’s life. And, finally, Trudy explains a little about the horror of that experience, how painfully and harmfully the school staff treated the children they were allegedly educating and caring for. Finally, Lisa barely notices the little man anymore, suggesting the depth of her depression and hopelessness at this point in her life, following Mick’s death.

Lisa’s family has been trying to look out for her—they’ve offered her many a sternly worded warning about the dangers posed by men like the one she encountered in Terrace and her own reckless behavior. Pooch’s brother takes a more direct approach and simply denies Pooch access to situations that might be risky. But at this moment, there’s no one to look out for Lisa. Readers may remember Tab’s earlier warnings about Cheese—warnings which Lisa ignored in her depression and also her naiveté and desire to feel connected to a friend group. 

One of the important functions of a family, the book claims, is to look out for each other; in this moment, Tab tries to look out for her cousin, even though her attempts don’t begin to address the violence Lisa just suffered. Lisa chides the little man for his inability to stop bad things from happening—but that’s never been his role. As a messenger, he can only provide a warning. It’s her responsibility to make choices about her life from that point on.

Like Mick’s death, Lisa tries to push through the trauma of her rape on her own; she wants to burn all reminders of the night and then pretend it didn’t happen. But as she will learn—and as she perhaps already realizes from Mick’s death—life doesn’t work that way. She can’t just ignore the pain and hope it will go away. She has to deal with the tragedies and suffering that come her way, moving through them in order to grow up. This experience also introduces the forest voices, which seem to be malicious—or at least dangerous—even though they ostensibly offer her help. The crows—symbolic of changes in luck for good or bad and bearers of secret messages—reinforce the idea that the voices come from the spirit realm. The eerie circumstances, with the crab and the dead animal, imply danger. And after all, the voices demand meat as a sacrifice for their help. Although the book doesn’t specifically identify Cheese as Lisa’s rapist, it’s clear that she has drawn that conclusion from his reputation for sexual perversion (stealing girls’ underwear), the fact that she recently rejected him, and the drugged drink at the party.

Cheese’s subsequent boasts about his sexual conquest of Lisa—conveniently painting her as a willing participant—confirm his role in her rape. Frank’s concern that Lisa may be interested in Cheese points towards his own unacknowledged feelings for her. Lisa retreats, in this moment, into her familiar warrior posture, ready to lash out at the things and people that hurt her.

Ma-ma-oo and Lisa—and every other member of the Hill family, each in their own way—continue to grieve Mick’s death. A change that drastic requires a lot of time to get over. But Lisa’s ongoing refusal to face this painful fact, her turning of her energies outwards into being angry at the world, the spirits, and the little man, makes it harder for her to accept the loss and move on with her life in a way that honors Mick and creates less pain for her. The loss isn’t even total, the book asserts: Mick’s presences suffuses the trip, both in the form of Lisa’s memories of the oolichan fishing trip when he was alive, and in the suggestion that harmless ghosts visit the living.

Lisa’s sleepwalking clearly points towards the trauma she has suffered from being betrayed and raped by someone she believed to be her friend. The waking world doesn’t seem trustworthy any longer. But the spirit world has always been equivocal, holding out hope and danger in equal measure. Lisa’s gift of prophecy connects her to the past, to her mother and great-grandmother, to traditions that have been interrupted and destroyed by cycles of violence against indigenous people. And her inability to focus or use her gift effectively points towards the legacy of that violence.

The sections in which Lisa muses about the heart and its functioning point towards Ma-ma-oo’s heart attack, after which Lisa learned as much as she could about this vital organ. They also suggest the magic and mystery that surround people not only in the world, but in the marvelous ways their own bodies function. And her knowledge of the various ways a heart can malfunction uncomfortably suggests that Ma-ma-oo’s first heart attack may not have been her last.

Lisa could stop over at Skinny Point and rest at a house. Choosing to go on towards Monkey Beach represents a conscious choice to avoid the mundane world and to go to the wildest places, the ones with the most connection to the spirit world. The legends of sasquatch point toward the magic in the world and offer another point of connection between Lisa and her beloved but ghostly family members.

Lisa and Jimmy have different interests; Lisa loves being outdoors and in nature and finds the artificial nature of the swimming pool—enclosed, chlorinated—claustrophobic compared to the land around the village. In contrast, Jimmy doesn’t like fishing or hiking or any of the outdoor activities Lisa enjoys. But Lisa still loves her brother, still feels caught up in her family’s hopes and ambitions for his career. She still worries about his safety—especially when he’s in the water. This section shows Lisa aligning herself with her family again, especially after her friend group dissolves in the wake of her rape by Cheese.

The soapberries’ flavor points towards the bittersweetness of life and Ma-ma-oo quietly offers Lisa a lesson in this memory. Only by continuing to eat the uh’s does Lisa come to accept both the bitterness and the sweetness. Only by moving through painful experiences can their bitterness become softened and manageable. But Ma-ma-oo’s reticence about Ba-ba-oo nevertheless suggests that she may not have fully learned to live the truth of her own lesson, either—it's not easy to learn to cope with tragedy.

The visit to the therapist confirms how badly Lisa struggles in the wake of Mick’s death (and her rape, which no one in her family knows about) and suggests that her parents see more of her pain and struggle than she lets on in her recollections. And indeed, the vision of the frightening creature can be read two ways: it may just point yet again to Lisa’s connection to the spirit world. But it could also show just how badly she’s dealing with her life psychologically at this point. This vision, unlike the rest of the ones Lisa describes in the book, doesn’t connect to any warning, message, or specific impending event, so its meaning is ambiguous.

Lisa’s musings here describe how the heart—and thus a person—will die if it sustains too much damage. Metaphorically, this suggests a question about how much pain and heartbreak—the metaphorical kind, not the physiological, medical kind described here—a person can take before they succumb. This uncomfortably suggests an impending disaster for Ma-ma-oo (and thus another personal tragedy for Lisa). More subtly, it points towards Jimmy’s disappearance and suggests that Lisa may be about to suffer more emotional trauma in the very near future.

Despite her young age (remember, Lisa’s only 19 as the book begins), Lisa knows a lot about the Douglas Channel and Haisla lore; she shows how much she learned from Ma-ma-oo and Mick and proves (without realizing it, perhaps) how much of their legacies remain alive in the world through her. Death isn’t the final word; the dead and the living continue to nourish each other across the thin barrier between the spirit and waking worlds.

Lisa’s life continues to spiral out of control, even years after Mick’s death. Her parents try to provide loving support, but their lectures about school don’t address the fundamental issue—Lisa hasn’t yet learned (or been taught) how to handle the suffering and loss that happen in life. Until she does, she will stay stuck at this point. In fact, her parents’ attempts at dissuasion seem to have the opposite effect—learning about her family’s brief careers at the cannery encourages her.

Lisa runs with a crowd of disaffected and vulnerable teens; Karaoke’s reputation for fighting aligns in some ways with Lisa’s. The needs of this population point towards broader and systemic issues affecting the community, many of which can be linked to the systemic and historic abuses perpetrated against indigenous communities—even though readers will have to wait to learn more about Karaoke’s backstory. In neither her case nor Lisa’s, however, did indiscriminate fighting make them feel better.

Even before her rape, Lisa found the burgeoning romantic interests of her peers inexplicable and repellant; she finds Jimmy’s popularity among the girls similarly inexplicable. In part, this seems to point towards her difficulty sustaining meaningful relationships after Mick’s death, as if she associates emotional closeness with impending loss. This shows one of the ways in which she becomes stuck in her life until she learns to work through the grief that attends the inevitable losses in life.

Pain and suffering continue to follow Lisa and those she loves; they form an inevitable part of life that she must learn to accept in order to grow and mature. She also realizes that knowledge can be power: even through the little man’s warnings didn’t spare her grief, they at least mitigated shock. Too late, she misses what she had. Lisa’s brief reflections on her grades also point towards the way in which her family and broader community tried to support her through her troubles, even though she doesn’t seem to have really noticed it at the time.

Lisa recalls this Christmas gathering in acute detail, suggesting its importance to her and thus foreshadowing the impending death of her grandmother, which has loomed large over this section of the book. Dad denies Ma-ma-oo salt in a fruitless effort to extend her life. For her part, Ma-ma-oo knows that she must go when her turn arrives. Death holds no fear for her, and she tries to impart this hopefulness to Lisa. But Lisa isn’t ready for it yet. 

The storms and winds in the channel represent the power of nature over human lives; death is as inevitable and inescapable as the winds. Fighting or raging against this fact won’t change it. Pooch faces the same potential devastating loss as Lisa since they both have elderly, infirm grandmothers. If anything, Pooch seems to be facing a worse loss, since with his grandmother he will also lose his home, family, and sense of safety.

The narrative focuses on Lisa and her struggles, but occasionally her memories yield evidence that she isn’t the only one who struggles to make sense of her life as she grows up; Jimmy has had a crush on Karaoke for years. But despite his evident popularity and sex appeal, he can’t bring himself to talk to Karaoke. Perhaps his easy life isn’t as easy as Lisa thinks. And in this moment, Lisa chooses to support her brother.

The little man no longer visits Lisa, but she remains connected to the spirit world, and the presence of the ghosts should warn her of Ma-ma-oo’s impending death—especially since Ma-ma-oo can now see them (earlier she told Lisa that the living—at least those who lacked Lisa’s spiritual gifts—can’t see ghosts). And Lisa seems to witness the moment of her grandmother’s passing in the woods, where the sounds of whistles and footsteps—like she heard on the porch at Ma-ma-oo’s soon after Mick’s death, and like she heard in the tent at Kitlope Lake with Ma-ma-oo in the spring—indicate the presence of ghosts.

In combination with her ghostly visitation in the woods, the fire alarm lets Lisa know that something bad has happened to her grandmother. Her visions of Ma-ma-oo’s death may be the construction of her own imagination, based on what she believes happened. But, given Lisa’s connection to the spirit world, it certainly seems that she interprets these as visions of the event as it happened. In the visions, Ma-ma-oo doesn’t fight death, consistent with her claim that a person must go when it’s their time. It’s the living who must live with the pain of that loss, like Aunt Kate and Lisa herself.

Lisa’s depression and disinterest in the life that she feels has brough her so much pain only intensifies in the wake of Ma-ma-oo’s death. But her grandmother continues to support her from beyond the grave in ways financial and—as Lisa will reveal in the next section—spiritual as well.

Monkey Beach has been the focus of Lisa’s spiritual and physical quest in the book—it’s the place where she believes she will find answers to her questions about Jimmy, but more broadly, about life itself. The subsequent sections will show if she has learned the lessons she needed, or not.