Little White Squaw. Kenneth J. Harvey

I was only six when I suspected my skin might be the wrong colour… Born female on the wrong side of the tracks, Eve Mills Nash, with the help of co-author Kenneth J. Harvey, tells a hard-hitting tale of a lifelong fascination with men of a darker hue. From early childhood, Nash knew it was «something to do with what was inside the bottles» that encouraged the groping male fingers that casually abused her during her parents’ drunken parties. She soon discovered that the wine remnants in the revellers’ discarded cups would numb her pain. Nash’s fortuneteller grandmother predicted a future of violence for her, starting as a teenager with her marriage to first husband Stan, an Ontario Mohawk. What Nash’s grandmother didn’t prophesize was the drunken binges and revolving door of unstable partners that traumatized her children, left her suicidal, and convinced her she was a failure as a mother after her eldest daughter became a cocaine addict. Harrowing yet life-affirming, this blistering account of life on the cusp of New Brunswick’s Native community sees the Little White Squaw and her children balance precariously between two seemingly irreconcilable cultures and colours.