Mink is a witness, a shape shifter, compelled to follow the story that has ensnared Celia and her village, on the West coast of Vancouver Island in Nuu’Chahlnuth territory. Celia is a seer who — despite being convinced she’s a little “off” — must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews. While mink is visiting, a double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the village decades earlier, has left his terrible influence on Amos, a residential school survivor. The occurrence signals the unfolding of an ordeal that pulls Celia out of her reveries and into the tragedy of her cousin’s granddaughter. Each one of Celia’s family becomes involved in creating a greater solution than merely attending to her cousin’s granddaughter. Celia’s Song relates one Nuu’Chahlnuth family’s harrowing experiences over several generations, after the brutality, interference, and neglect resulting from contact with Europeans.

Harkening back to her first book tour at the age of 26 (for the autobiographical novel Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel), and touching down upon a multitude of experiences she's had as a Canadian, a First Nations leader, a woman and mother and grandmother over the course of her life, Lee Maracle's My Conversations with Canadians presents a tour de force exploration into the writer's own history and a re-imagining of the future of our nation. In this latest addition to BookThug's Essais Series (edited by poet Julie Joosten), Maracle's writing works to engage readers in thinking about the threads that keep Canadians tied together as a nation--and also, at times, threaten to pull us apart--so that the sense of sovereignty and nationhood that she feels may be understood and even embraced by Canadians.