Dreamspeaker
Dreamspeaker is a Vancouver Island yarn about Peter, an emotionally disturbed orphan, who escapes his juvenile “facility” to spend a northwoods idyl with a native elder and his twenty-something adopted son, a friendly mute muscle man. This mentor pair is an idealized alternative to all-male family that also has creative leanings, not as a brass band, but as a dancer/storyteller and woodcarver team who feed and clothe the boy, pump up his self-worth, teach him native lore, and take him skinny-dipping. Of course it can’t last, the trio are denounced by an urban handicraft dealer, and the Mounties burst in to puncture their rhapsody. While the justice system may well recognize the men as Peter’s “natural parent” equivalents for visiting privileges in the “facility,” everyone dies anyway, the elder peacefully of a broken heart after the boy is taken away, the two younger ones violently by their own hands.(R of T, 126-127)