As I was getting ready for school that night, Mom asked me what I did and I told her about everything except Ma-ma-oo and the Octopus Beds. I was uncomfortable sharing it with her. It felt like it was something private.
This quote demonstrates the gap between the two worlds in which Lisamarie is living. With her grandmother, she is becoming familiarized with Haisla tradition and contacting the dead, which they do in the fire ceremony at the Octopus Beds. This is something outside of her mother's paradigm, and thus Lisa feels unable to share it with her. The moments with her Ma-ma-oo feel like something special that must be guarded from the judgement of her mother, who will only look down upon Lisa for participating in any sort of spiritual practices.
No neat row of crosses, no meticulous lawn, no carefully tended flowers will guide you. Too sterile, antiseptic. Headstones carved into eagles, blackfish, ravens, beavers appear seemingly at random.
Here, Lisa is describing the cemetery at Kemano. Her poetic language here depicts a place that is not overly-manicured like how we typically imagine graveyards. It speaks to the way the Haisla people live: more connected to the earth and its wilderness. The different animal-shaped headstones also reflect a culture with shamanic origins, with each animal having its own special meaning and medicine.
Time passed, I don't know how much, everything blurred and slid together, and I shook and felt like I was going to throw up.
This sentence comes after Lisamarie witnesses a strange, flirtatious interaction between her mother and Uncle Mick. As a child, Lisa feels powerless to do anything in the moment. A loss of time is a common response to experiencing a trauma, however small. The flow of the language here evokes her sense of anxiety and heightened emotion that Lisa feels upon seeing something so unexpected.
Childhood ends and you grow up and all your imaginary friends disappear.
This statement by Lisamarie underscores her difficult transition between being a child and adult, not knowing exactly how to view her extrasensory experiences. Usually when children get older, they leave their imaginary friends behind. But Lisa continues to have visits from the little man, and so she can't quite brush him off. She does not understand her "friends" and so she attributes his appearances to eating too much before sleeping.
"I have feelings! Unlike the rest of you bastards!"
This is something Trudy exclaims during the funeral of Mick. She is the only one who shows any emotion and is frustrated by the way Kate has told her to "take it easy." There is a tendency in Lisamarie's family to cover up feelings, especially through addiction. We can see here how Trudy feels things quite deeply and thus can get a better sense of why she struggles so much with alcoholism.
Her smile came back. She chuckled, deep in her throat. "Pot calls me black."
Lisamarie has just bumped into Screwy Ruby, a village oddball and rumored witch. Lisa, who is angry that Ruby hasn't answered her questions about supernatural powers, calls Ruby an "evil witch." Screwy Ruby's phrase "pot calls me black" refers to the irony of Lisa accusing her of being a witch when she has these dangerous powers herself. Lisa's rage stems from seeing this reflection of herself in the old woman. She also feels rejected by someone who she thought would understand her predicament.
"Honey," she said, "if you were some little white girl, that would be true. But you're a mouthy Indian, and everyone thinks we're born sluts. Those guys would have said you were asking for it and got off scot-free."
Here, Lisa's Aunt Trudy points out the riskiness of Lisa's confrontation with the white boys in Terrace. Trudy is intending to give Lisa a dose of reality pertaining to the racial situation and the unfortunate history of Haisla girls being treated as less than human. The warrior-like Lisa, on the other hand, cannot understand the warnings of all the adults; she knows she was doing the right, just thing to fight back against potential assaulters, and can't fathom why she is receiving the blame rather than them.
"You have a dangerous gift," she says. "It's like oxasuli. Unless you know how to use it, it will kill you."
When Lisa enters the land of the dead in the last chapter, she finds her grandmother, who warns her that Lisa is misusing her supernatural abilities. Earlier in the novel, Ma-ma-oo explained the power of the oxasuli plant to describe the general principle of the spiritual world: that it can be both a help or a dangerous hindrance, depending on how it is approached. Ma-ma-oo serves as Lisa's guide throughout the book and is concerned even from the other side that Lisa will end up dead if she continues to do foolish things like offer her own blood to the unreliable spirits. Whether Lisa heeds her grandmother's warning is left ambiguous.
As I drove away, I felt deeply comforted knowing that magical things were still living in the world.
Lisamarie is driving back up from Vancouver with Frank. She has just gone through a period of chaos after abandoning her family for a life of drugs and drinking. In the car ride, she spots a sasquatch on the side of the road. She had seen sasquatches when she was younger, and seeing one again reminds her of the mystical side of life that she has negated because of her depression. This point marks when Lisa embraces her roots again, beginning to heal from years of grief and trauma.
Something bad was going to happen to Jimmy. If I stayed with him, I might be able to stop it.
Lisamarie has just had a strong vision involving the little man and Jimmy holding a crow with a broken wing. She understands that the little man usually appears as a harbinger of a negative event and she panics, thinking something bad will happen to Jimmy. Though she receives these warnings, she has never been able to stop anything from happening in the past. Thus, she now feels that it is her responsibility to protect her brother at all costs. Nothing happens to Jimmy then, but Lisa does not anticipate that he would go missing years later. Throughout the book, there is a recurrent message about how certain events and tragedies are truly beyond anyone's control.
