“No, it was a girl. A woman”: A Study of Indigenous Resilience and Girlhood in Katherena Vermette’s The Break

Métis author Katherena Vermette’s The Break (2016) portrays with striking clarity the reality and lived experiences of Indigenous girls within the settler colonial landscape of Canada. The novel centers around a horrifying violent act of sexual assault against Emily Traverse, a thirteen-year-old Métis girl, and the police investigation working to solve the crime. As the novel attempts to reckon with many acts of violence that occur in the wake of this attack, the narrative weaves together the multigenerational voices of Emily’s kinship relations as they attempt to care for her and process what has happened. This framing allows the novel’s female characters, who are of various ages, to reflect on the persistent modes of intergenerational trauma and systemic violence they individually and collectively experience. As these stories come together, readers learn how the women and girls have either grown through or endured their experienced trauma. Strikingly, given the focalizing event of the novel, Emily’s perspective is given little space within the narrative, and the book jacket doesn’t mention her name or character. Still, her perspective and that of two other girls, Phoenix (Métis) and Zegwan (Anishinaabe), are pivotal to the overall structure of The Break . These young