The Narrator

The narrator is an unnamed Inuit girl in Nunavut, growing up in the 1970s and 80s. As the tense shifts between present and past throughout the novel, the narrator shifts from a young girl narrating events as they happen to her to a woman recounting events from her youth. She lives with her parents in her childhood home until the end of the novel, at which point she and her children move in with Best Boy and his grandmother Helen.

The narrator acts as an archetype for Indigenous girls dealing with colonialism in the Arctic. She is a human, as illustrated through the first person perspective and the intimate sexual and traumatic experiences which she narrates. However, because she is nameless and because of the ambiguity of time in the novel, she also acts as a symbol for Indigenous girls going through the same experiences across time...