When looking at Aboriginal life and culture, through the lens of fiction, there is often a heavy emphasis of the supernatural, many times portrayed through the images and stories of mythical creatures. These spiritual beings, such as the Weetigo, a cannibalistic creature of Cree mythology, can be seen as a representative of a society in which trauma plays an influential role in origin stories and in life; thus such stories often have a strong 'traumatic' base to them. Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen and Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach, both utilize mythology and the spiritual world to describe the battle of dealing with various traumas. Through these novels the role of mythology and storytelling within Aboriginal trauma, and how to …show more content…
Highway shows how the brothers mature past the sexual abuse inflicted upon them by Father Lafleur at the school, and how Jeremiah and Gabriel cope by developing their passions in music and dance. Tomson Highway applies traditional Cree mythology to portray the impact of residential schools upon Aboriginal life and culture, and the resulting dramatization of Aboriginal. Kristina Fagan says in “Weesageechak Meets the Weetigo” that Highway uses the tool of storytelling in Kiss of the Fur Queen “to explore connections between the traumatic past and troubles in the present and to self-reflexively examine the potential and limits of such indirect... communication” (Fagan, 1). The idea of indirect communication, is instead of saying something or expressing themselves directly, a person acts something out, or gets their point across in a round-about way. It's a subtle way of communicating harsh issues. Kiss of the Fur Queen, for example, has many instances of “indirect communication”, one of them being Chachagathoo's island, where the Catholic priests had hunted down Chachagathoo, an Aboriginal Shaman/medicine