"Mike wants to head up north to the Beaufort Sea, he's got himself a good job there with an oil rig. There's no place for you, and I think you better stay in one place.... Don't look so panicky! Abandoning you? I'm not abandoning you!"

With those words Lucy Haley is forced from her Chicago home into an unfamiliar world. She is placed with a grandmother she has never met in a place she has never been. Despite this alien setting, she learns over time to love both her grandmother and her new home on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.

Talking to her grandmother and old friends of her mother's, she also comes closer to finding out the identity of her biological father. But when she attempts to contact him, she is met only with coldness; he is an internationally renowned Haida artist with a new family, and has no time for his daughter.

When Lucy becomes pregnant and her grandmother becomes ill, she has no one to turn to. What follows is a story of one girl's journey from the innocence of childhood to the experience of motherhood. Along the way she is met with racism and other difficult barriers, but ultimately the love and respect taught by her Native culture brings her fractured world together.