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Abuse and Historical Trauma
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Monkey Beach, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Growing up as an indigenous girl in Canada, Lisa yearns to be a warrior like her Uncle Mick, who put his body on the line for indigenous rights with A.I.M. and has the scars to prove it. As members of the Haisla community, a history of abuse and terrorism at the hands of white supremacy and imperialist ambitions marks their lives. Mick’s experience attending a residential school inspired him to join the A.I.M., but ultimately, he finds that both places just expose him to pain and violence and make him indifferent to the rules and mores of society. Throughout his life, he struggles to maintain a job and dabbles with alcohol and drugs. Initially, Lisa wants to emulate Mick’s belligerent example, singing profane protest songs in her social studies class as a form of protest. Yet, when she asks Mick about the time he got shot, he tells her that his fighting earned him nothing but scars—the physical scar tissue from his bullet wound and the emotional damage of losing his wife, Cookie, whom Josh strongly implies was murdered for her activism.
Initially, Lisa ignores this lesson, and she tries to make her way through the world—and the painful experience of her life—through fighting. She insults her cousin Erica, gets into fistfights with classmates, and tussles with her brother Jimmy. She exerts herself physically to escape the emotional pain of Uncle Mick’s untimely death. Yet acting out doesn’t assuage the pain and confusion she feels over her losses. Instead, considerable trauma and suffering, including a rape and nearly getting attacked by a group of angry white men, accompany her youthful phase of indiscriminate fighting. As her losses mount (and her maturity increases), Lisa ultimately learns to refocus her energy on coming to terms with pain and growing into the powerful, spiritually connected woman that she has become by the novel’s present. In much the same way that Mick finds purpose and hope by reconnecting with his family and participating in Lisa’s education and character development as she grows up, Lisa must also come to terms with the suffering in the world by picking her battles, accepting that there are some hardships she cannot control, and learning how to use her energies productively.
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Protest and Power ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Protest and Power appears in each chapter of Monkey Beach. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Protest and Power Quotes in Monkey Beach
Below you will find the important quotes in Monkey Beach related to the theme of Protest and Power.
Chapter 2: The Song of Your Breath
Quotes
“Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one—guess she was fourteen then—this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, bitch, and I’m proud of it.’” He laughed and shook his head “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”
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“Oxasuli,” she said. “Powerful medicine. Very dangerous. It can kill you, do you understand? You have to respect it.” She handed me the root and I put it in the bucket. There were some more oxasuli bushes around, but she said to let them be. We slogged some more, found two suitable plants, then Ma-ma-oo declared we had enough. “You put these on your windowsill, and it keeps ghosts away.”
“How?”
“Ghosts hate the smell. It protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine. Here, you break off this much and you burn it on your stove—”
“Like incense?”
“What’s incense?”
“Like cedar and sweetgrass bundles.”
“Oh. Yes, yes like that. Smoke your house. Smoke your corners. When someone dies, you have to be careful.”
“Why?”
She paused again, frowning. “Hard to explain.”
Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.
In a time distant and vague from the one we know now, she told me, flesh was less rigid. Animals and humans could switch shapes simply by putting on each other’s skins. Animals could talk, and often shared their knowledge with the newcomers that humans were then. When this age ended, flesh solidified. People were people, and animals lost their ability to speak in words. Except for medicine men, who could become animals, and sea otters and seals, who had medicine men too. They loved to play tricks on people. Once, a woman was walking along the shore and she met a handsome man. She fell in love and went walking with him every night. Eventually, they made love and she found out what he really was when she gave birth to an otter.
Chapter 3: In Search of the Elusive Sasquatch
Quotes
Remove yourself from the next sound you hear, the breathing that isn’t your own. It glides beneath the bushes like someone’s shadow, a creature with no bones, arms, or legs, a rolling, shifting, worm-shaped thing that hugs the darkness. It wraps its pale body around yours and feeds. Push yourself away when your vision dims. Ignore the confused, painful contractions in your chest as your heart trip-hammers to life, struggles to pump blood. Ignore the tingling sensations and weakness in your arms and legs, which make you want to lie down and never get up.
