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His mother's neck broke while he vaguely watched . . .
The ocean that was once a blanket for the village, smothered the village and killed her sister . . .
And both wind up in a school that seemingly has the motto "From savage to civilized."
Hotah
Often getting pneumonias and being conceived by rape, Hotah lived in a Hopi village with his great-grandmother deep in her nineties but said, "The hell with a walking stick." His whole life, he had seen war sprout, such as witnessing his grandmother's brutal death and severed body parts thrown to the railroad. But most of that had not given him troubled thoughts. It was mostly his mother's hanging, perhaps, because he had to help carry her dead body back home. As an eighty-one-year-old man, Hotah recaptures his time at both home and the St. Mary's Indian Mission School he was sent to shortly after his mother's dismiss. Traumatized at the school, his memories play to him over and over again while meeting his first crush and someone he shares an unlikely bond with.
Kai
Kai was the only Hawaiian at the Indian Mission School, as there were no records of Hawaiian children being sent to these schools. Kai was taken with a few other villagers to a refugee camp after the tsunami but very faintly remembered how she arrived at the school. Orphaned at birth, Kai was raised by her much-older sister Haunani but lost Haunani to the storm. As a woman, she speaks of her memories at home and the mission school, which involved meeting a person whose face she never forgot.
