Essay Example: The Impact Colonizers in the Back of the Turtle by Thomas King

In The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King, Mara shows how colonizers have negatively impacted Indigenous communities. Mara is a young woman who lived on the reserve with her grandmother and mother in Samaritan Bay. The Ruin was a nuclear disaster that resulted in a spill and killed and displaced many people on the reserve. On the day of The Ruin, Mara lost a lot of friends and family members, and this insurmountable loss caused Mara’s mental health to deteriorate.

The first representation of the impact colonizers have had on Indigenous communities, is the death of Mara’s friends and family, which has caused her depression. Mara talks about her mother, grandmother, and her friend, Lilly in the past tense and tells loving stories about them. The first instance is when it's said that, “In the aftermath of The Ruin, she had stopped dreaming altogether” (King 48). Mara says her dreams had been “pleasant collages of sound and sexuality” before the day of the spill, but afterwards, she had nothing to dream of. Her mother and grandmother talked of their dreams a lot, and were a big piece of Mara’s life, and she lost that piece when her mother and grandmother died. After Mara’s first talk with Gabriel, she realizes her mental health is deteriorating, “Depression, of course. So why was she so enguine with such a diagnosis? Because there was no one left who cared. That was it. Not even her.” (King 73). Mara realizes that she has been struggling with depression ever since The Ruin, and she seems unbothered by the diagnosis, since there’s nobody left who loved her. They all died on That One Bad Day. Mara had been eating very little and not doing very much, and after realizing the disease in Gabriel, she realizes she suffers from it too. Mara lost her mother, grandmother, and best friend, Lilly the day of The Ruin, and those were the only people that really cared for her, and so there is no one left to care for her and make sure that she is happy. Lastly, when Mara finishes the painting of her mother and grandmother, it is said that, “When her mother and grandmother were alive, Mara had flourished. Now that they were dead, she was diminished.” (King 189). This represents how the death of her mother and grandmother has impacted Mara’s well-being. When her mother and grandmother were alive, Mara was bright, cheery, and full of life, but their deaths have caused her to be more reserved and quiet. Mara feels that she lost their support and love when they died, and she feels no desire to do anything exciting with her life, which is why she feels “diminished” since their deaths. The colonizers have impacted Mara’s life, as there weren’t ample resources available to help save them and the spill was mostly contained to the reservation and Samaritan Bay, which had a direct correlation to the deaths on the reservation. She also shows how the deaths of her friends and family have caused her depression and that she has no one else that cares for her.

The colonizers and the spill have caused the disarray in Mara’s life and have negatively impacted her mental well-being. Mara shows the mental and physical repercussions of colonizers on Indigenous communities, much like the repercussions that have been happening in real life, for centuries.