Cathy McCarthy

Cathleen McCaffrey has just watched her beloved grandmother die, surrounded by strangers chanting meaningless songs, burning sage and sweet grass. The Ojibway people of White Earth Minnesota with whom her grandmother chose to spend her final years claim she is their blood relation and ask her to take on the family mantle of Bear Clan Shaman Healer. How can a White woman raised in White society possess a hereditary responsibility to an Indian tribe, Cathleen asks them. They present her with a box of relics and a black notebook written in her grandmother's hand in answer to her question. Embittered by the abandonment of all who said they loved her and morally bankrupt from the life her father has forced her to live, Cathleen embarks on a journey of discovery, a journey toward self as she opens the notebook to read the story of the relics that she has laid out before her, the story of her grandmother's journey to a collective and personal reckoning of self.