“No, it was a girl. A woman”: A Study of Indigenous Resilience and Girlhood in Katherena Vermette’s The Break

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Early work from this article was presented at the ACCUTE conference in 2022.

² See Hanson for a detailed analysis of the different kinship networks of Phoenix and Emily.

³ See de Finney, 2015.

⁴ A claim that echoes Emily’s great grandmother who condemns the perpetrator of Emily’s attack as “another monster” (329).

⁵ See Birkwood for further analysis on Phoenix’s photographs, memory, and displacement.

⁶ The only exception seems to be small children, such as her sisters or cousins, who in her eyes deserve compassion and love – something she rarely received in her own childhood.

⁷ Although this article does not focus on Indigenous boys or masculinity studies, similar levels of care are offered to Ziggy’s brother and Emily’s male cousins. The young men, like the girls in the novel, are also struggling with notions of resiliency, toughness, and perseverance under colonial and lateral violence structures.