The Cliffs

Content Warning: This section of the source text and the guide refers to alcohol use disorder, abduction, and anti-Indigenous racism and violence.

The Cliffs explores the possibilities and limits of history, considering how stories become history and how perspective often affects historical “fact.” The novel highlights this theme through Jane’s developing understanding of the issue as it manifests in the erasure of the Indigenous history of her hometown, Awadapquit.

From the time she’s in high school, Jane sees how the local history fails to incorporate Indigenous history and culture. Most of the locals believe that the town’s name, Awadapquit, is its exact name in the Abenaki language and accept a highly embellished translation: “where the beautiful cliffs meet the sea” (41). However, as Jane finds out through Naomi, the name is a twist on the true Abenaki name for the area, Sawadapskw’i, which means “of the jutting-out rock” (231). This shift in name and meaning, and the way “Awadapquit” and a tourist-friendly interpretation are considered historically accurate, illustrates how what people take as fact is often a misrepresentation, even if inadvertent. In addition, area residents proudly reference Indigenous figures and culture, as Allison’s parents did by naming their inn Saint Aspinquid Inn, after “a seventeenth-century chief of the Pawtucket tribe, and a local folk hero, to whom they had no particular connection, and whose very existence many people doubted” (67).