Jennifer Manuel on a nurse's struggle to belong to a First Nations community

Jennifer Manuel spent a number of years as a treaty archivist and teacher for First Nations communities in British Columbia, and she drew on that experience when she wrote The Heaviness of Things That Float. The novel is about a nurse, Bernadette, who has spent her 40-year career living on the edge of a West Coast reserve, working for the community. She sees herself as part of that world, but when a young man goes missing, she must re-examine her own position of privilege — and in doing so, she realizes that even after 40 years, she's still an outsider.

Shelagh Rogers and Jennifer Manuel spoke at an event at the Gabriola Island Public Library in B.C.

A matter of perspective

"Contact" refers to what First Nations people experience. The contact with people who have come onto their lands. "Arrival" is that thing that non-Indigenous people do. Arrival is all I've known as I went up and taught in the corners of our province — I know nothing of what it feels like to have that contact as the person whose home, whose traditional territory, it is. 

Bias and belonging

The main character, Bernadette, mistakenly overestimates her belonging. What she fails to see, and what she wrestles with as she comes to see it, is that she thinks she's rid of those biases that come from the colonial legacy that we're socialized into in our country. That she's somehow expelled that by being there for 40 years. I think that she thinks, subconsciously, that this enables her belonging. What she comes to see, slowly, is that not only does she still hold some very deeply embedded biases, but that the community sees that she has biases that she didn't know they saw.

Jennifer Manuel's comments have been edited and condensed.