Northern Lights
This is a love story set at the end of an era. Mitiahwe, a young Blackfoot woman, loves Dingan, a white man, in the last days before the railroad brings sweeping change to her people's world. Her mother, Swift Wing, sees catastrophe approaching; she knows what comes when "civilization" arrives. But Mitiahwe sees only hope, only the man she loves. Then Breaking Rock arrives with news that shatters her peace: Dingan is planning to leave. Now the only certainty is that everything will change. Gilbert Parker writes with novelist's intuition about what is lost when worlds collide, and Northern Lights captures that last moment before transformation becomes erasure. It is a novel about love across the lines culture draws, about what mothers see that their daughters cannot, and about the particular cruelty of hoping for a future that the surrounding history renders impossible.
