“We Were Always More than Things”: Intergenerational Trauma, Indigenous Relationality, and Decolonial Storytelling in Mona Susan Power’s A Council of Dolls

A Council of Dolls (2023), the latest novel by Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe), is an important contribution to the third wave of Indigenous writing that attests to its vitality and diversity. This article aims to refine and expand the characterization of this recent creative movement through an analysis of Power’s novel from the perspective of Indigenous trauma theory and Dakota history and onto-epistemology. It examines how, through reverse chronology and layered narrative, the novel articulates the transmission of trauma across generations; it delves into relationality and more-than-human ontologies through an analysis of the dolls that accompany the protagonist girls in and beyond boarding school; and it underscores how the novel vindicates open wounds to resist the silencing effects of narrative resolution, offering ethical witnessing in place of therapeutic closure. All in all, Power’s novel is a relevant decolonial intervention insofar as it offers a narrative model of healing grounded in Indigenous relational accountability and cultural continuity.