• 1 Lyle Longclaws is an Indigenous activist and social worker. This sentence appears in the epigraph t (...)

Before the healing can take place, the poison must be exposed.
Lyle Longclaws1

• 2 Alexie was born near Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, in 1957 to the Tetlit Gwich’in people, (...)
• 3 Alexie’s novel is part of a body of literature that emerged when IRS survivors started to share the (...)
• 4 In the Canadian North, there were very few Indian residential schools but there were mission day sc (...)

1Robert Arthur Alexie’s2 2002 novel, Porcupines and China Dolls, is one of the very few Canadian Indian residential school (IRS) fictions written by survivors.3 Alexie initially wrote it during a rehabilitation programme as he was trying to overcome his many addictions. One of his counsellors sent the story to a literary agent who then made arrangements for its publication (Covello 83). The plot unfolds between the fall of 1999 and July 2001, and focuses on a group of Gwich’in characters born in the late 1950s who attended an Anglican mission school4 located hundreds of miles away from their native community. The title refers to the changed appearance of the children after their hair is cut at the school, making the boys look like small porcupines while the girls resemble Indian china dolls.

• 5 Wagamese identifies as a direct intergenerational victim since his parents attended an IRS, not him
• 6 Large-scale removal of Indigenous children from their communities through the 1960s to put them for (...)
• 7 The word “consolation” is seldom used in conversations about the IRS experience. Only Pope Francis (...)

3While the two other works of fiction written by a survivor5 of the IRS system or of the Sixties Scoop6—namely Nehiyaw/Cree writer Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) and Anishinaabe novelist Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse (2012)—are concerned with reasserting the power of Indigenous languages and storytelling, with finding a consolation of sorts in the ability to redefine the language through which colonial trauma is articulated (Miroux 77-103), Alexie’s narrative seems to resist consolation. In fact, the very idea of consolation sounds problematic when dealing with IRS narratives as there is a biblical resonance to the notion in Western societies (Ignatieff 10) that is clearly at odds with North American Indigenous epistemologies. This is compounded by the fact that the text discussed in this article focuses on a system that relied on Christian doctrines to obliterate Indigenous identities.7 While resolutely engaging with the notion of consolation, this paper will try to adjust it to Indigenous worldviews. It will therefore insist on more secular meanings of the term while bringing into the debate the idea of healing, a concept which, as will be shown, seems more in line with Canadian Aboriginal understandings of interpersonal relationships and personal development. As its Latin root suggests, the term “consolation” implies making someone feel whole again (Julliand 181). British scholar David James underlines that it also involves the notion of soothing (8-9). As Michael Ignatieff contends, consolation offers a means to find solace together, to search how to keep going, how to recover the belief that life is worth living even if pain endures (1). To him, it involves making peace with our losses, accepting what they have done to us, and not letting them cloud our future (1, 7). At first glance, Alexie’s novel, with its traumatized and self-destructive characters, its bleak settings, and its apparent “no future” stance seems to offer the opposite. And yet, as will be shown in this paper, the main characters do experience some degree of relief in the course of their gruelling journey. To start with, this paper examines the impossibility to eradicate pain when irremediable loss is at stake. It then studies the shortcomings of the characters’ escapist strategies when confronted with trauma as their attempts to find temporary comfort seem to prevent consolation. In a third part, it emphasises the difficulty to articulate trauma, highlighting the potential and the limits of telling as a key stage in the healing/consolatory process as defined by western epistemologies. To conclude, it contends that although inconsolability is a core issue in a narrative essentially concerned with the acceptance of loss, re-membering the dislocated community provides, if not permanent consolation, at least temporary solace.

• 8 References to Alexie’s novel will appear as PCD followed by page number.

4Right from the beginning, the reader is aware that Porcupines and China Dolls is a story about the difficulty to deal with irretrievable loss and move beyond intolerable suffering. In the foreword, Alexie presents his novel as a narrative of resilience, of empowerment, as a quest for answers and meaning. “Why” is indeed a recurring question throughout the novel as the characters struggle to make sense of the events that took place years before at the hostel (PCD 128). Their constant need for answers, however, may be a first hindrance to consolation. Indeed, as Anne-Dauphine Julliand argues, rather than questioning the reasons for their misery, people in pain tend to question the very meaning of life after a traumatic event. As a result, the sense of emptiness triggered by irremediable loss is often exacerbated (127, 164). This is exactly what happens to James Nathan when he is about to commit suicide. As he starts wondering “Why?” in the prologue (PCD 2)—a question that becomes “Why me” in the last chapter (PCD 284)—he is unable to articulate a full sentence. The reader is only given access to the young man’s thoughts rendered in italics. Furthermore, his quest for answers meets with complete silence, which reinforces the sense of extreme loneliness and isolation he has felt ever since he was removed from his family and sent to mission school (PCD 2). James learns that pain cannot be shared or accounted for; that although the experience at the hostel was part of a policy targeting an entire community, the pain it generates is an individual experience, not just a collective one, an endless source of solitude as Julliand highlights (25). In the end, his desperate attempt to explain what resists explaining fails and only brings more pain.

• 9 A fictional band identified as Tetlit Gwich’in living on a fictional reservation, Aberdeen, located (...)

5As French philosopher Michaël Fœssel writes, summoning loss in a narrative is a means of acknowledging it and dealing with it (26). This is what Alexie purports to do in his novel as various instances of loss are alluded to. In the opening chapters, which focus on the history of the invasion of the land of the Blue People, territorial, cultural and spiritual dispossessions are core issues.9 Alexie retraces the history of an intrusion and of the destruction of a language, a culture, and the bonds that kept a whole community together (PCD 6-7, 13). Additionally, the emotional void in which the children are left when they are sent to mission school alerts the reader to an even greater absence, the absence of prospects of development for an entire people:

• 10 This story appears in short, italicised paragraphs at the beginning of each chapter of Part 2.
• 11 Alexie uses gender-specific pronouns when referring to the wolf.
• 12 This is made plain when the narrator uses the same sentence to refer to the wolf’s and James’s beha (...)
• 13 In Gwich’in mythology, as in those of many Indigenous peoples of Canada, the wolf is an animal deem (...)

6What Alexie highlights in these first chapters is the fact that by removing the children from Indigenous communities, the Canadian Government was depriving them of their past but also of their future. Additionally, the inability of language to name the place or to find words to recount what happened there (“it”) reflects the scale of the trauma suffered at the mission school. The extent of the loss experienced in the assimilation process is thus immense, creating a gap that cannot be bridged. James’s feeling of utter alienation and loneliness in his adult life is a sign that the damage done to the survivors and their communities cannot be mended—is beyond redress. The story of a lone male wolf, which runs parallel to the main plot10 before the two finally intertwine, illustrates the extent of the misery in which the Blue People have been left. The old wolf has been banished from his11 pack and readers follow his journey, as he is wandering across the tundra in search of the great caribou herd, trying hard to survive in an overly hostile environment. As his figure is gradually superimposed on that of James Nathan,12 as the old wolf becomes James’s totem animal13, it becomes obvious that his fate is a reminder that the Blue People have been left in a state of nothingness, lost in a cultural and emotional desert amidst the Blue Mountains, where the spirits of their ancestors dwell, but with which the connection has been almost completely severed. Not only have these people lost their references and landmarks, but they have also been deprived of their agency. Disempowered by a century of forced schooling and culturally repressive policies, they no longer have control over their lives nor over the course of their destinies.

• 14 The term “ward” is used deliberately to attract the reader’s attention to the fact that Status-Indi (...)

8If consolation is a connection between people (Julliand 10), and if consolation may occur through physical contact—touch mainly—when pain cannot be addressed through language (Fœssel 267), then there is clearly no room for it in the dormitory. Crying and suffering must be silent for fear of harsh punishment. As the short sentences and the clipped rhythm of this passage suggest, the children are kept separate, muted and isolated in their own state of desolation. Additionally, the use of impersonal forms such as “someone” or “they,” as well as the shift of focus from the children to their cries (“it”) reveal how dehumanised the young Indians—or “wards,” in the paternalistic, imperial perception of the Canadian government of the time14—are at the hostel, denying them any possibility to be consoled.

• 15 An intended reference to the notion of “band” widely used in Canadian Indian legislation. “Disbandi (...)
• 16 Ignatieff means that it is future-oriented, that it is the opposite of resignation.

9Coercive measures and tough discipline only taught the children and their relatives to repress their emotions (PCD 13). Pain, however, might become utterly destructive when it cannot be expressed through tears or language; when, to quote Julliand, it reverberates endlessly in the labyrinth of shame and trauma (113). For instance, in the chapters describing the parents leaving their children at the hostel, we are told that, from that day on, the adults’ hearts stopped beating (PCD 23-26). This heartlessness of sorts, which is the only way for most of the characters to survive the trauma left by residential schooling, explains the dysfunctional relationships that bind—or rather disband15—the residents of Aberdeen. The scenes taking place in the reservation saloon offer a prime example of their destructive behaviours and epitomise the feeling of isolation prevailing within the small Indigenous community. If then consolation is enduring and propositional16 (Ignatieff 6), the wounded young Gwich’in come to the bar to seek a fleeting moment of relief, a physical and transitory gratification amounting to what Ignatieff calls comfort (6). They drink themselves into oblivion to try to forget how much it hurts and how scary it is to be left with no future but recurrent memories of past humiliations. They numb the pain, at least for a while, in all sorts of addictive behaviours:

• 17 Stasis is part of the IRS legacy. Many IRS survivors who testified at TRC events insisted on the fe (...)

11The characters seem to be trapped in a dead-end life that offers little space for consolation. In fact, the brutal IRS system has only generated more violence and rage. As a result of these debilitating processes, most of the characters are emotionally impaired. In the prologue, James’s emotions are clearly identified: hate, rage, anger, sorrow (PCD 2). The violence of these emotions, however, is not directed at those responsible for the demise of the Blue People, but rather at other members of the community, who have also been the victims of abuses, or at himself. This is also true with most of the other characters. As we are given access to their inner thoughts, we become aware of their yearning for revenge, their desire to murder those who hurt them so badly at the hostel (PCD 12-13), as well as their frantic quest for casual sex in which others are no longer seen as humans but as mere objects to achieve temporary relief (PCD 55). The time-gap in which the characters find themselves when they spend the night at the saloon also mirrors the paralysis affecting the residents of Aberdeen (PCD 51)17. When James keeps repeating the phrase “Same ol’,” he points out the routinised and tedious side of reservation life, where nothing new ever happens, where bar fights and murders are daily routine, and where new generations only repeat the same dysfunctional behaviours as the previous ones (PCD 53).

• 18 Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe defines settler colonialism as an ongoing system of power perpetua (...)
• 19 In his teenage years, George abused his younger sister. Later, he beat up his wife, Myra, whom Jame (...)

13Thoughts of vanishing into oblivion, suicidal impulses meant to achieve forgetfulness and nothingness are other strategies James imagines to escape the repressed memory his nightmares slowly bring up to the surface (PCD 87-88). However, as David James remarks in Discrepant Solace, consolation is not about escapism (7). In this respect, James’s repeated failed suicide attempts inform us that there is no easy way out (PCD 112). What Alexie seems to offer in his novel is what Theodor Adorno calls art as a voice and a consolation for suffering that does not betray it (88); yet art, as David James highlights, does not divert the reader’s gaze from the festering wound but rather exposes the desolation it seeks to address (1). The beautifying sorrow, against which David James warns us (30), is nowhere to be found in Porcupines and China Dolls. The style is deliberately terse, and the vocabulary voluntarily graphic and offensive to express the brutality of the lives shattered after two centuries of settler colonialism.18 As James ironically stresses in a conversation with Mary, “The truth is not nice” (PCD 54), and every time he himself tries to escape it, he is reminded that there is no hiding from the events that destroyed his life and that of his friends at the hostel. To a certain extent, the consoling effect of bleak truths (James 19) operates in the novel and Alexie thus validates Fœssel’s contention that there can be no consolation without desolation. As a consequence, consoling is not a matter of denying the bleakness of a present condition, but of making sure that this bleakness does not cloud the future (Fœssel 25). In the novel, the grimness of the Blue People’s lives is never sugar-coated and bleak truth even serves as a weapon, a means to right past wrongs, as when James tells George Standing that he knows about him molesting his younger sister when he was an adolescent. As a result, George commits suicide shortly after, and James feels that the death of George’s wife Myra19 is thereby avenged (PCD 264).

• 20 The word “truth” is used not to imply that there exists a one and only truth, but bearing in mind t (...)

14Forgetfulness, on the other hand, does not bring solace. Each time James tries to escape reality by pretending he is dreaming, something forces him to confront the truth (PCD 62, 10). The novel’s structure also suggests a constant back-and-forth movement between dream and reality, a journey from “The Dream World” to “The Real World,” an “Awakening” suggesting that the truth20 must be faced, however hard and painful it might be.

• 21 Nehiyaw poet and scholar Neal McLeod insists on the fact that in many North American Indigenous cul (...)

16In this passage, the grammar mirrors repressed memories as they chaotically surface in James’s mind.21 The fragmented rhythm, the dissolution of fully-formed sentences into nominal ones, everything suggests that only shards, or flashes of the traumatic events come back to the surface in the nightmares (PCD 162, 213). This process, which, according to French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, is characteristic of the way traumatic memory operates (45-48), takes on form and substance in Alexie’s style. Concurrently, the many references to visceral and sensorial elements show how embodied this memory is. In this passage, Alexie offers a prime example of what neuroscientists call embodied cognition, that is to say the idea that cognition depends upon experiences linked to sensorimotor capacities (Varela et al. 172-173). As images of sexual abuse start invading James’s mind, so do sensorial experiences linked to the traumatic events, a phenomenon American anthropologist Roberta Culbertson calls body memories and which, as she underscores, is characteristic of trauma narratives (170-178).

• 22 This idea is shared by many survivor groups who encourage other survivors of traumatic events to te (...)

17Halfway through the novel, the full picture starts to materialise as Jake Noland recognises a familiar figure in a show he is watching on television. The man is Tom Kinney, the supervisor at the hostel who raped most of the boys he was supposed to look after, including Jake, James, and David (PCD 95-97). The reader can now make sense of James’s nightmares as the three men share their stories for the first time. Consolation might be expected to start occurring at this stage for, as trauma theoreticians often argue, telling is healing, or at least engaging on the road to healing.22 In short, there is a widespread belief that breaking the silence amounts to breaking the cycle of pain (Thompson 662). Alexie, however, challenges this assumption as telling does not suffice to soothe the pain. The resurfacing image of a young gwich’in boy scrubbing himself so hard he removes his skin and makes himself bleed (PCD 47-48) serves as a potent reminder that memories and their articulation through language are not just what makes up for what has been lost, as Plato contended (Fœssel 16-17), but that they may also be what keeps the wound permanently open and therefore delays or limits consolation.

• 23 At a conference he gave at the University of British Columbia in 2013 (see works cited), Wagamese d (...)

21The function of the “gremlins” metaphor, yet another reference to pop culture, is twofold. On the one hand, it is a means of insisting on James’s addiction and often delusional behaviour. When he realises that his glass is empty, he imagines that a flock of Indian gremlins sucked it dry while he was not paying attention. On the other hand, the metaphor brings comic relief in an otherwise tense and depressing context, which, as French writer Anne-Dauphine Julliand argues, prevents darkness from obscuring hope in times of desolation (105). More importantly, it validates Vine Deloria Jr’s contention that humour permeates every area of Indian life; that it is an essential component of all North American Indigenous narratives (147). Just like many other metaphors and similes, the “gremlins” reference prevents the novel from sliding into what Richard Wagamese describes as the never-ending story of Indigenous suffering23. Another prime example of this is to be found in the many instances where James wakes up with a hangover, takes a quick shower and no longer sees himself as “shit,” but as “a well-washed shit” (PCD 51). The creative potential of language surfaces in these comparisons and metaphors which abound and perform a vital function in the narrative. It is bitter and harsh humour, but one that allows the characters to survive when the pain is unbearable. In these instances, form, as David James reminds us, serves to stage solace when words are unable to bring consolation (7). As Fœssel would contend, such a use of metaphors and similes is not so much a way to reveal hidden truths, but more importantly a means of reasserting the generative and regenerative power of language, which is a source of consolation in its own right (73-75).

• 24 According to Gwich’in cosmogonic narratives, the Gwich’in and the caribou exchanged a piece of thei (...)

22In this respect, Fœssel argues that myths, legends and parables might perform similar functions. In Porcupines and China Dolls, the story of the old wolf is illustrative of the potential of myth when it comes to coping with persistent pain and destructive rage. In his quest for food, the wolf manages to bring the caribou24 back to the Blue Mountains (PCD 123-124). By doing so, he restores what the intrusion of white people on Gwich’in land had removed—the possibility to hold on to hopes, the possibility of a future without which consolation cannot occur (Ignatieff 9). Paradoxically, the wolf, whose story seems to distract the reader from the “main” plot at the beginning of each of the eighteen chapters of the second part, is the cement that holds the novel together. His journey across the tundra secures continuity in an otherwise disrupted narrative that mirrors the characters’ inability to cope with traumatic memories. In a community which has been dismembered, the ancient legend of the old wolf and the caribou herd is a means to achieve re-membering, which, to quote David James, is a factor of solace (2). It also qualifies Alexie’s novel as what Shawna Thorp identifies as “enactment narratives,” that is to say stories challenging the narrative rules set by the settler culture and reasserting the potential of myth as a way to amplify lived experience (147-152).

• 25 Michael was also sexually abused at the hostel and committed suicide. His father, Martin, acts as a (...)
• 26 Stressed syllables are in bold letters (scanning our emphasis).

24The primeval scream echoing across the vast hills is absorbed by the old forest, as is part of James’s pain. During his hunting trip on the land, James is able to quit drinking for the first time. What would have been impossible on the reservation can be achieved in this place where Gwich’in identities are rooted and can be partially reclaimed (PCD 173). Healing can only start when the connection with the land has been restored. This connection is epitomised by the reburial of Michael Lazarus25 in the Blue Mountains. By bringing Michael’s remains back to the grounds in which the identity of the Blue People is rooted, an essential step towards collective recovery has been taken (PCD 221-228). As the title of the chapter suggests—“Old Ways and New Beginnings”—the resurgence of traditional rituals and practices performs regenerative functions. In the meantime, reconnecting with the land collectively, as Salish writer and educator Jeanette Armstrong remarks, constitutes “a fundamentally healing process” (110). Armstrong’s comment implies that alienation from the very places where tribal identities stem from impedes recovery. In the novel, the return of the drum, which had disappeared from the Blue People’s lives for so many years, is also instrumental in encouraging them to venture out of the reservation, back into the mountains (PCD 202). Its beating, which is both the beating of the earth and of the heart (Carleton), reverberates through the text as Alexie uses anaphora, repetitions and cadences (pentameters and hexameters26) to recount the drumming ceremony:

• 27 Alexie seems to mock the cathartic truth-telling approach adopted by many Truth and Reconciliation (...)

29As a matter of fact, the positive effects of disclosure are questioned as soon as they are felt (PCD 198). The idea that telling, testifying, has a liberating effect27 is persistently undermined in the novel. The equation “telling is healing” is once more challenged as Alexie debunks the widespread idea that, as Riki Thompson asserts, sharing one’s trauma will generate understanding and initiate recovery; that speaking from a place of power (the stage in this particular case) will shame the tormentor while freeing the victim (669-671). As it happens, after the workshop, James has moved one step forward, but he has not recovered (PCD 224). The nightmares subside for a while, but then return. And so do suicidal thoughts. Yet, if full recovery is out of reach, consolation, as a process making up for what cannot be healed (Fœssel 10), might still have a role to play in Alexie’s narrative. The truth-telling experience might be part of a consolatory process if we consider, as Ignatieff does, that consolation reveals the limits of language to articulate and share trauma, that it unveils the extent of our solitudes (2). In the face of this loneliness, the restoration of a sense of belonging, a sense of proximity putting an end to isolation and alleviating pain might be what qualifies as a step towards consolation (Julliand 137). In the novel, consolation may be found in the resurfacing of a tribal identity colonisation had obliterated. Once the characters start sharing stories about similar abuses suffered at the mission school, once they reconnect with the land, they manage to recreate a tribal structure which was precisely what the Canadian government tried to destroy.

• 28 According to Fœssel, consolation and clear-sightedness are perfectly compatible (36).

30The compassion and the collective feeling of care expressed by members of the Aberdeen community offer some degree of consolation when permanent healing is not possible. Thus, when Chief David tells his wife about how he was repeatedly raped at the hostel, she does not try to divert him from the violence of the truth he is sharing,28 nor does she try to numb his pain. Words of consolation would be useless, and even obscene considering the trauma experienced by her husband. She simply tells him that she will be there for him, that he will never be alone with his pain (PCD 152, 181). Similarly, when Jake and James reveal that they too were raped by Kinney in the dormitory, David does not dwell on his own suffering but tells them that they too are not alone (PCD 159). The feeling of extreme loneliness and isolation, which is what brings James on the verge of committing suicide so many times, is appeased by the restoration of a “feeling of togetherness,” a “feeling of family,” a “feeling of tradition” (PCD 200)—the resurgence of a culture and a social order which had been fragmented. By providing a space for the drum to pound out its ancient cadences, for the old rituals to resurface, and by affirming the collective solidarity of his broken community, Alexie engages in what American scholar Deena Rymhs identifies as renewal narratives (327).

• 29 Court action will lead to Kinney’s suicide.
• 30 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada operated from 2008 to 2015. It had a mandate to i (...)
• 31 Other Indigenous writers, however, such as Richard Wagamese, believe in the transformative and refo (...)

31What stops James from shooting himself in the closing chapter is Louise’s voice, “the voice of reason and of hope […] the voice of love and compassion” (PCD 286), what Julliand calls the compassionate gesture allaying pain (137). Porcupines and China Dolls makes us realise that healing does not have to be permanent, that, as Alexie writes in the final lines, one brief instant is what it takes to make sense, what it takes to hold on (PCD 286). This sense of togetherness, understanding, and caring, often provides temporary solace when consolation proper does not apply. For instance, when Jake tells Mary about the rapes, she cannot find appropriate words to react (PCD 98). She does not remain powerless though, and she decides to call Jake’s aunt, Bertha. Bertha does not try to console Jake either. She rather makes him feel responsible for what he will decide to do with his story and his pain (PCD 100). In the end, she encourages him, David and James to take legal action against Kinney.29 Bertha does not weaken Jake by assuaging his pain but rather empowers him by making him understand that facing the past will help him decide what one’s future should be like (PCD 186-187). As for reconciliation, which has become a key word in Canada since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings30 took place, it is clearly not what Alexie had in mind in his novel. As a matter of fact, a number of Indigenous thinkers reject the idea of reconciliation as a strategy used by the settler state to favour amnesia and absolve non-Indigenous people from the wrongs done to Indigenous communities (McCall 57). Some of them point out that this concept does not even exist in Indigenous epistemologies (Corntassel & al. 145).31 Additionally, Fœssel highlights a significant difference between consolation and reconciliation. To him, reconciliation implies renouncing, forgetting that something has been lost in the course of reconciliation—aiming for closure (258). The opposite attitude, according to Fœssel, is melancholy, which entails brooding persistently over what has been lost. Consolation, he says, might be a middle way between the two (27, 230-235, 258).

• 32 Alexie’s life seems to reflect the frailty of consolation. Although Porcupines and China Dolls is a (...)

32In the light of these considerations, I would contend that Alexie’s main character, James Nathan, is not fully consoled, however. The seemingly happy conclusion is undermined by the final words: “James’s journey had come full circle, and the future had unfolded as it should” (PCD 286). The feeling of completeness, of the circle being restored, is upset by a sentence already used by Alexie to describe the devastating effects of colonisation (Hazlett 63-64). By unsettling the expectations of non-Indigenous readers for/of a clear and unambiguous ending, the author further underlines the volatility of consolation.32 Alexie’s novel reaches a conclusion that deflects gratifying repair, as David James puts it (13). It alerts the reader to the fact that painful memories of IRS traumas will persist and that Indigenous communities will have to live with them (Covello 85-86). Additionally, acknowledging the loss and allowing the grief to persist while moving forward might be a means to admit the power of grief as a form of opposition, the idea that grief might be subversive, and that trying to mute it is a way to silence those who suffer (Fœssel 10, 21). But above all, by avoiding a pacifying discourse that seeks to reconcile Indigenous people with colonial systems, Robert Arthur Alexie makes sure that, as Canadian scholar Martin Keavy once wrote, “historical wounds continue to seep” (63), that they remain generative.

• 33 Fœssel suggests that being reconciled with the past may be the only means to have a future (24).
• 34 About consolation and agency, see Fœssel 13 and James 18.
• 35 This shortcoming of reconciliation is highlighted by Deena Ryhms in a chapter on guilt and reconcil (...)
• 36 Wagamese’s own word.

33In the end, it should be underlined that what James is offered through Louise’s intervention is the prospect of a future (PCD 227).33 He is not inconsolable, insofar as he does not refuse consolation, but rather “unconsoled,” which, to paraphrase Fœssel, means that he is aware that consolation cannot compensate the loss (21). As the young protagonist argues, the past cannot be fixed, but it is still possible to plan the future (PCD 174). The past is here to stay, and so are its many scars. To be consoled, though, Ignatieff contends, is to live here and now (4), to catch a glimpse of a hope despite the persistent grief (9, 257), which is exactly what James Nathan sets out to do in the final lines (PCD 227). The novel’s ending is also congruent with Fœssel’s idea that consolation cannot be equated with the recovery of what has been lost (40). In a context where, as Daniel Heath Justice argues, Indigenous stories of hope and possibility have been displaced by stories of Indigenous deficiency (4), Robert Arthur Alexie proposes to identify the root causes of the trials Indigenous peoples must endure. Additionally, his narrative asserts the existence of a whole culture “today, in days past, and in days to come” to quote D. H. Justice’s words (2). As for what has been recovered, it can be argued that James and the other characters have regained their agency.34 They no longer see themselves as the victims of colonial systems, nor do they accept the pre-eminence of these systems anymore. In this respect, Porcupines and China Dolls qualifies as a narrative of survivance as Gerald Vizenor defines them, one that rejects victimry, dominance, and tragedy (vii). It is a story that refuses the dissolution of the agency of those who have been wronged by the dominant group in a narrative of absolution.35 In Taking Back Our Spirits, Jo-Ann Episkenew insists on the healing power of stories for communities dealing with the trauma of settler occupation. She contends that by writing stories that “articulate Indigenous truths in the form of alternate collective myths, Indigenous writers not only fill the gaps in the collective myth of the dominant colonial society, but also correct many of its falsehoods” (72-73). Porcupines and China Dolls provides some degree of healing to Indigenous communities. In a context where remedial stories have become intolerable for the harrowed, Porcupines and China Dolls is a harrowing story that serves as a remedy; it is “hard but strong medicine” as Tłı̨chǫ Dene writer Richard Van Camp wrote (2002). It is a narrative of resistance, insofar as it encourages readers and scholars alike to confront the responsibilities of their involvement in the political and social context in which it emerges (Harlow 78). It is a story of both recovery and redress, of an unconsoled people regaining agency after a long history of oppression and humiliation. It is the story of a people resisting annihilation and fostering the resurgence of their culture, a people restoring, at least partly, a disrupted harmony, which, as fellow writer Richard Wagamese once said, might be the true Indian36 way of achieving reconciliation (“Returning to Harmony” 165).