An extraordinary literary fiction debut from an award-winning writer
and activist, set in the remote Labrador Innu community of Utshimassits,
exploring grief, trauma, unlearning, and healing.
One cold February morning in 1992, Anna receives a phone call, a request
to work with the Utshimassiu Innu in Labrador to organize a people's
inquiry, a self-examination into a house fire that killed six children.
Eager to escape a complicated relationship and afraid to face the grief
of losing her father, Anna accepts the invitation. She catches a plane,
painfully aware that she doesn't have a clue what a people's inquiry
might look like, and heads for Nitassinan.
This world, with its own language and spirits, is where she's told
children die because people do not care for the caribou bones. It is a
world where an inquiry becomes a gathering of voices. As the community
tells its story -- elders, men, women, and children -- Anna learns to
listen deeply to their words, to the land, to the past and the present.
Memories knit together to find meaning in a pain that cannot be named.
She immerses herself and leans into her own grief. As she bears witness
to the fiercely close community and the unexpected, tender, and
courageous way they look after each other and carry on, she learns
something about our collective need to imagine a future together, no
matter how fragile and imperfect.
Inspired by true events, and the Gathering Voices report, of which
Fouillard served as editor, Precious Little is a unique enmeshing of
the imagination with memories and experiences spanning decades of
working and living with the Innu. At its core, it is a journey toward
unlearning and unknowing. By turns harrowing and empowering, provocative
and enlightening, this novel is a powerful act of reconciliation and
resistance in the face of trauma, infused with love, humility, humour
and joy.
