The Cliffs

Content Warning: This section of the source text and the guide refers to alcohol use disorder, abduction, and anti-Indigenous racism and violence.

The Cliffs explores the possibilities and limits of history, considering how stories become history and how perspective often affects historical “fact.” The novel highlights this theme through Jane’s developing understanding of the issue as it manifests in the erasure of the Indigenous history of her hometown, Awadapquit.

From the time she’s in high school, Jane sees how the local history fails to incorporate Indigenous history and culture. Most of the locals believe that the town’s name, Awadapquit, is its exact name in the Abenaki language and accept a highly embellished translation: “where the beautiful cliffs meet the sea” (41). However, as Jane finds out through Naomi, the name is a twist on the true Abenaki name for the area, Sawadapskw’i, which means “of the jutting-out rock” (231). This shift in name and meaning, and the way “Awadapquit” and a tourist-friendly interpretation are considered historically accurate, illustrates how what people take as fact is often a misrepresentation, even if inadvertent. In addition, area residents proudly reference Indigenous figures and culture, as Allison’s parents did by naming their inn Saint Aspinquid Inn, after “a seventeenth-century chief of the Pawtucket tribe, and a local folk hero, to whom they had no particular connection, and whose very existence many people doubted” (67). Although on the surface these names may seem like admiring and respectful tributes, to Jane “[i]t seemed […] that whenever New Englanders attempted to honor the legacy of Indigenous people, the story was told in the past tense” (67). She sees how, by placing Indigenous people and culture in a historical context only, the white community controls the narrative, appropriating Indigenous cultural references when it suits them while simultaneously disregarding the perspective of the Indigenous people and the importance of their voice in telling their stories.

In addition, Jane knows from her work that controlling the narrative is often a matter of documentation, which determines which version of history becomes the established one. When Lydia gives her Ethel Troy’s local history book, Jane reads the English settlers’ version of local history, which has become the only accepted narrative but has a decidedly narrow perspective. She specifically notes Troy’s version of two famous local events: when the Abenaki people sold their land to settlers and left, and when the Abenaki people burned the English village. Jane knows that Troy’s version reflects a limited perspective: “One told a story of murderous violence unleashed upon innocent colonists in their beds. Another, of a peaceful and willing handing over of land. Jane assumed neither was accurate” (153). Later, when she finds out about the four Abenaki men whom Pembroke abducted, she reflects, “How many times had [she] mentioned Pembroke’s name on one of Abe’s tours? And yet she had never heard about any captives” (153). She notes the unevenness of the perspective in the established historical record: “Four men, their names unknown to her until now, stolen from their home by a man whose name she had spoken hundreds of times” (229). Thus, Jane realizes that even as a historian, she had unconsciously accepted the dominant white narrative of events.

In the end, however, the novel is optimistic about the changing nature of historical narrative: Jane “didn’t believe in ghosts or heaven, but she believed in the power of stories, written, told, and handed down in the form of objects left behind” (136). She builds her new career at the Awadapquit museum resolving to tell the diverse stories of local history. When Naomi receives Kanti’s story, she learns about Awadapquit’s historical events from the Abenaki perspective. Jane’s receiving a call from Naomi at the novel’s end implicitly foreshadows Naomi relaying Kanti’s story to Jane. Jane’s interest in representing diverse voices leads her to dismantle the dominant historical narrative (which is skewed to cover up disgraceful actions by white colonists) and incorporate the Abenaki perspective into Awadapquit history.