First published 1999
A Native American woman watches from a missionary boat as San Nicolás Island grows smaller behind her. Her people have been captured and removed from their ancestral home off the Southern California coast. But her child is missing, left behind on the island. She makes a desperate choice and jumps overboard, swimming back through the cold Pacific waters to search for what she has lost. Alone on the windswept island in the early 1800s, she struggles to survive while Catholic missionaries continue their systematic removal of indigenous peoples from the region. Her solitary existence cannot last forever. When she is eventually captured and taken from her island sanctuary, her fate becomes intertwined with a white family whose lives will be forever changed by their encounter with her. The collision between these two worlds brings consequences that ripple through both the woman's life and the family that takes her in. Her story becomes one of survival, loss, and the price paid when cultures clash with devastating force.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 19th-century, native-american
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, survival
Setting: San Nicolás Island, Southern California
Period: Early 1800s
302 pages · Paperback · University of California Press
Content warnings: colonialism