Trauma
The central event in this autobiography involves a drunk uncle and a ten-year-old niece who is babysitting his three-year-old daughter. The fact that the author never really knew for sure whether this man was genuinely related by blood or just one of those close family friends referred to in the avuncular sense only serves to underscore the horrific context of being left alone to face the disastrous decision by someone to trust her with him. The trauma of sexual assault never goes away and lingers in ways that impact life from the smell of beer on lovers to her connection with all the invisible female ancestors who were left alone with the wrong person at the wrong time throughout the past. Individual trauma is inextricably tied to cultural trauma experienced by the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest once the European settlers began arriving in droves. Personal history is always a story of cultural history among survivors of the tribal genocide.
How Setting Impacts Character Development
To a much more significant degree than is often found in autobiographies, the setting plays a major thematic role in this story. The Pacific Northwest becomes a place that feeds the cultural cross-cutting between the author's indigenous heritage and American pop culture. The darkness and mysterious qualities of a region dominated by enormous trees and mountain shadows are made more tangible for many readers through the author's obsession with the cult TV series Twin Peaks. Her rebellious streak is underscored by the punk rock movements which took hold in the region in the 1990s, ranging from riot-grrrl punk to grunge rock. Less familiar to most readers, most likely, is the patina of specific Coast Salish native cultural heritage associated with the area such as the deeply ingrained acceptance of communal living and the essential quality of salmon to the diet. The subtitle of the book—"The Ancestral Biography of a Coast Salish Punk"—intensifies the central significance of the theme of how setting contributes to personality.
Nomadism
The author traces her Coast Salish lineage back to the earliest nomadic members of tribes that called the West home centuries before any European stepped foot on the continent. The very first words of prose in the book assert "We were a hunter-gatherer society. We were nomadic." This nomadic lifestyle was mandated by the simplest of necessities: finding food and shelter. A few pages later she writes "My parents were also nomadic" and proceeds to explain that modern-day nomadism is necessitated by the modern-day equivalency of finding massive schools of salmon. Her family faces the common problem experienced by other indigenous people trying to assimilate into American life. Their story is one of moving from one low-paying job to the next and always looking for a place to settle down and call a permanent home. The author's story is one in which she is never anywhere long enough to tangibly make it home. The personal nomadic lifestyle is also culturally connected to the more historically expansive need for indigenous people to move according to what American society has imposed upon them.
