The Break

Métis writer katherena vermette was born in 1977 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her poetry and prose writing have earned numerous awards. vermette attended the University of British Colombia, where she earned an MFA in creative writing. vermette is best known for her poetry. She published her first book, North End Love Songs, in 2013. The book earned vermette the Governer General’s Literary Award for Poetry. The Break, vermette’s debut novel, was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. The novel was shortlisted for that year’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and it won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2017. The Strangers, a sequel to The Break, won the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her most recent novel, Real Ones, was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. vermette’s work frequently draws on her own experiences as a Métis woman and the experiences of Canada’s Indigenous people as a whole. The neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where vermette grew up, had a relatively high Indigenous population, and this exposed her to the prejudice that Canada’s marginalized populations face. When vermette was just 14, her older brother was found dead after he had been missing for several months. According to vermette, the media failed to give her brother’s disappearance and death adequate coverage because he was Cree. In addition to her work as a writer, vermette is also involved in activism and has held writing workshops for young people from marginalized backgrounds. She lives with her children in a house on the Red River.

The Break focuses on the traumas that generations of women in a Métis family have faced, as well as their struggle to find justice for the crimes perpetrated against themselves and their female relatives. Though a work of fiction, vermette’s The Break sadly draws from the very real disproportionate violence that Canada’s Indigenous women face, as well as their struggle for justice. vermette’s novel begins with an epigraph taken from Cree/Métis poet Marily Dumont’s poem “Helen Betty Osborne.” Helen Betty Osborne was a young Cree woman who was living in The Pas, Manitoba, in 1971, when she was kidnapped, raped, and violently assaulted by four white men. It would be 16 years later, in 1987, before any of the men were convicted of the crime. Only one of Osborne’s attackers, Dwayne Archie Johnston, was convicted. One was never charged, a second received immunity, and a third was acquitted. Osborne’s murder received considerable attention after it was adapted as a CBC miniseries in 1991. However, such public awareness surrounding a case is unusual among Canada’s many cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women—despite the reality that from 2001 to 2015, the homicide rate for Canada’s Indigenous women was roughly six times as high as that for women of other ethnic groups. A national inquiry conducted from 2016 to 2019 (The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) found “state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies”  to be contributing factors to the high rates of violence that Indigenous women in Canada experience relative to the broader population.

katherena vermette has followed The Break with numerous sequels. The Strangers (2021) focuses on The Break’s Phoenix Strange, picking up after her release from a youth detention center. The novel follows Phoenix, her sister Cedar-Sage, and their mother Elsie as they navigate the myriad challenges of their lives. The Circle (2023) also takes place following Phoenix’s release from prison, focusing on the process of restorative justice that she and those affected by her crime undertake in an effort to make peace with and move forward from Phoenix’s assault of Emily. Cherie Dimaline is another notable Métis author. Her 2017 young adult dystopian novel The Marrow Thieves examines the impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples in Canada. Bad Cree (2023) by Cree writer Jessica Johns is a supernatural horror novel that follows a young Cree woman whose horrifying dreams force her to reckon with trauma in her family’s past and send her on a journey of self-discovery. Heart Berries (2018) by First Nation Canadian writer Terese Marie Mailhot is a memoir that focuses on the author’s troubled childhood, her struggles with mental health, and her identity as an Indigenous woman.