Velma Wallis
Velma is the author, first-person narrator and central protagonist of the book. She tells the story of being the sixth in a family of thirteen children raised in a two-room log cabin along the Yukon River in Alaska. The strange word in the title of the book, “Gwich’in” refers to cultural heritage and language of those generations that came before, but starting with the generation of her parents came the forced transition to speaking English as the native tongue had been forbidden from being spoken in schools.
Barry
A family tree is provided as prefatory material in the book and beneath the picture of the author’s brother Barry is the quote, “In every life there is one special being. Our was Barry. His death made us stronger.” She will later confess that Barry’s demise in 1996 was an event which stimulated in her the heretofore unknown desire to stop telling stories and turn to a life of silence. Although the usual terminology is never directly addressed, it is strongly alluded that Barry’s problems stemmed from dealing with being homosexual.
Auntie Nina
Nina is Velma’s aunt on her father’s side, being the oldest of his sisters. Having spent a great deal of time with her aunt while she was younger, she eventually goes on to become her companion. The time together combined with Nina’s experiences opens Velma to the world of stories and in the family tree she credits Auntie with the potential to have become a great storyteller if she’d ever had the ambition to become a writer herself.
David Wallis
The early origins of the life of the author’s grandfather is shrouded in mystery, but the details are known are interesting enough to be a book by itself. He was adopted by an Englishman named George Wallis, moved from Canada to Alaska for reasons unknown, entered into an arranged marriage with a liberated indigenous woman who failed to conform to his expectations of subservience and so thereupon engaged in a series of affairs more than tolerate by his disinterested spouse and that remained illicit until Nina happened to catch him in the act one day when she was still a child.
