The Silence

Karen Lee White holds the torch brightly as a new and powerful voice, her style and sensibility encompassing the traditional and the contemporary. In The Silence, with the Yukon as a canvas, she engages in a deep empathy for characters, emergent Indigenous identity, and discovery that employs dreams, spirits, songs, and journals as foundations for dialogue between cultures. Leah Redsky is a Salteaux/Salish woman living in Vancouver who struggles with identity and the difficult intercultural dynamics of having a non-Indigenous boyfriend and working for the government. Often conflicted, at odds with her past and current life, things unravel and she suffers a breakdown—the unexpected life twist that is the key to coming to terms with her past. Through a diary, she discovers something terrible happened, yet what that is is unclear until she begins to have dream encounters with Tlingit/Tagish spirits who she knew in the north when she lived a traditional life on the land. Leah...