Tears in the Grass

At ninety years of age, Elinor, a Saskatchewan Cree artist, inveterate roll-your-own smoker, and talker to rivers and stuffed bison, sets out to find something that was stolen from her almost a lifetime ago. It is 1968, and in what little time she has left, she is determined to find the child taken from her after she, when only a child herself, survived a rape at a residential school.But a harsh winter and harsher attitudes await Elinor, her daughter Louise, and her granddaughter Alice as they set out on an odyssey to find the missing child, enduring a present that tests their spirits and chips away at their aboriginal heritage. Confronting a history of trauma, racism, love, and cultural survival, Tears in the Grass is the story of one woman’s quest for the courage to open her heart to a world that tried to tear it out.