The Traveller

Robert is a successful dealer of Northwest Pacific First Nations masks but pain lurks behind his pale blue eyes. Although its nature is initially amorphous, this pain will adopt more defined forms once Robert’s business brings him to the autumnal shores of the West Coast.

There, not far from where he was raised in an Indigenous community on an island, Robert’s past will come rushing at him with the force of an offshore squall.

Confronted by the troubling discrepancy between what he’s become and what he was (once married to an Indigenous woman, he spent his university years as an activist for Native rights), Robert finds himself vertiginously suspended between vastly distinct cultural spheres. Yet, try as he does to divest himself of the trappings and priorities of the dominant culture, Robert finds his old life resistant to instant reclamation — it can’t be picked up like an old jacket.