A Quality of Light

The novel opens with Joshua Kane, an Ojibway man adopted at birth by white Protestant farmers Ezra and Martha Kane, reflecting on the friendship that shaped his life. Joshua grows up on his grandfather's farm outside the small southwestern Ontario town of Mildmay, raised in a devout Protestant tradition. His parents never hide the truth of his adoption: His birth mother was a young Indigenous woman unable to raise a child. They teach him reverence for the land and for scripture, but the "Indian" in Joshua remains dormant, "an anonymous subtext in the book of [his] life" (5).

In the summer of 1990, Joshua, now 35 and a nondenominational pastor in Paisley, Ontario, receives a pre-dawn phone call from Inspector David Nettles of the Calgary police. Joshua's childhood friend, Johnny Gebhardt, has seized the Indian Affairs office in Calgary. Dressed in braids, war paint, and beaded buckskin, Johnny holds 12 hostages and signs his faxed demands "Laughing Dog." He demands a special parliamentary sitting over the Oka crisis, an armed standoff between Mohawk Warriors and the Canadian army over the expansion of a golf course onto sacred Indigenous land in Quebec, as well as a United Nations tribunal on Indigenous conditions in Canada. He refuses to negotiate with anyone except Joshua. Joshua's wife, Shirley, whom he met at Bible College in Red Deer, Alberta, hands him a cigar box of Johnny's old letters and urges him to go.

The narrative flashes back to the spring of 1965, when 10-year-old Joshua meets 10-year-old Johnny at a community welcoming. Johnny is pale, thin, and withdrawn. His father, Ben Gebhardt, is a violent person with an alcohol addiction who fabricated a military record; his mother is emotionally compliant. Johnny developed an obsessive fascination with Indigenous peoples from books, and meeting Joshua, an actual Indian who knows nothing about being Indian, both excites and confuses him.

Both boys prove hopeless at baseball and are mocked as "the Spazzes" by their classmates. Johnny discovers instructional books at the library, and the two begin a secret campaign to master the game behind Joshua's equipment shed. They perform a blood brother ritual, giving each other warrior names: Joshua becomes "Thunder Sky" because Johnny believes people will one day listen to him; Johnny becomes "Laughing Dog" after a neighbor's deceptively fierce collie. With Joshua's parents joining the practice sessions, the boys transform into skilled players. At the inter-school tournament, Joshua hits a game-winning home run after Johnny tells him to think "warrior." Joshua reflects that the answer to baseball is love.

At 14, the boys enter Walkerton Secondary School, where Joshua becomes the target of relentless racism. Johnny urges Joshua to fight back, but Joshua, grounded in Christian nonviolence, refuses. When Mary Ellen Reid, a popular classmate, invites Joshua to the Freshman Welcoming Dance, the invitation proves to be a setup. Behind the bleachers, a group forces whiskey down Joshua's throat and beats him while hurling racist slurs. Johnny and their classmate Ralphie Wendt arrive and fight back. Johnny is arrested and sent to the Galt School for Boys, a juvenile detention facility. Hospitalized, Joshua erupts at his parents for the first time, accusing them of never teaching him what it means to be Indian. They acknowledge their failure and promise to help him learn his Indigenous identity. At Johnny's hearing, multiple witnesses come forward to testify about the setup, and the charges are dismissed.

At Galt, Johnny befriends Staatz, a militant young Indigenous man who educates him about broken treaties, residential schools, and the American Indian Movement. This encounter plants the seed of Johnny's political radicalism. Meanwhile, Reverend Charles Hendrickson, known as Pastor Chuck, Joshua's unconventional minister, connects Joshua with Jacqueline Kakeeway, an Ojibway elder and medicine woman at the Cape Croker Reserve on Georgian Bay. Over regular weekend visits, Jacqueline teaches Joshua Ojibway traditions: burning sweetgrass, praying with a hand drum, hearing stories of the trickster Nanabush, and learning the Medicine Wheel, a teaching framework centered on the balanced development of heart, mind, body, and soul. She tells him that being Indian is "an inside truth" (208), about what one carries within rather than what one shows the world.

The boys' paths increasingly diverge. Johnny grows furious at Joshua's spiritual approach, calling him an "apple," red on the outside and white on the inside, and arguing that the church was an instrument of colonization. Joshua counters that the most fundamental human right is the right to know who you are, and that faith transcends institutional affiliation. After graduation in 1974, Johnny urges Joshua to join the Ojibway Warriors Society, an Indigenous activist group planning an occupation in Kenora; Joshua reaffirms his calling to the ministry. Johnny denounces him as a sell-out and drives away. They meet once more in 1978, when Johnny summons Joshua to British Columbia for a trial following a logging protest arrest. Learning that Joshua has married a white woman and has a son on the way, Johnny erupts again, accusing him of assimilation, and walks away.

In Calgary, Nettles theorizes that Johnny always needed Joshua to need him, and that Joshua's growing independence felt like abandonment. Joshua insists on entering the occupied building face-to-face rather than negotiating by phone. Inside, he discovers the central secret: There are no real explosives. The dynamite is genuine but the wiring is fake; the grenades and detonators are props. The entire occupation is a performance piece, a modern act of "counting coup," an ancient warrior tradition in which the greatest courage was to touch one's enemy rather than kill him. Johnny explains that the hostages, confined to one room and stripped of political voice, mirror the condition of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Johnny reveals his transformation. After years of wandering and grief over Staatz's suicide, the result of unhealed trauma from residential school sexual abuse, he spent six years at Tall Bear's Camp, a traditional Cree settlement in the Rocky Mountain foothills where he learned to drum, sing, pray, and listen. He confronted his hardest truth: He is a whiteman who can no longer deny his identity. He gives Joshua his personal pipe, bow, and parfleche, a rawhide case, of arrows, saying Joshua always carried the warrior way within him. Joshua reveals that his son is named Jonathan, "Johnny to his friends." They plan the surrender: Hostages will exit carrying Johnny's handmade arrows, and Johnny has written a statement to be broadcast on live television reframing 13 arrows as healing properties, including respect, honor, faith, humility, forgiveness, and love, and calling for a "new lodge" where all can sit as equals.

The hostages are released safely. As Johnny steps through the front doors, he bends to retrieve prop derringers from his moccasins to hand to Joshua. The snipers, seeing him reach for what appear to be concealed weapons, open fire. Johnny is shot multiple times. Joshua cradles him as he dies. Johnny's last words are: "Go home, Josh. Tell them" that "it's all about light" (315).

Joshua insists on honoring the agreement. He reads Johnny's statement on live television and tells the cameras his friend's story. Afterward, Joshua retreats to the Hockley Valley to grieve, sitting on the cliff where their warrior names are carved. He realizes that "Go home" means home is not a destination but a state of belonging. Joshua leaves the institutional church. He and Shirley move to Cape Croker, where Joshua works alongside Jacqueline counseling others through the inward journey to self-knowledge, using both sweat lodge ceremonies and Gospel teachings. A camp for men, modeled on Tall Bear's Camp, is established nearby and named Johnny's Camp. Their son Jonathan grows up learning both Ojibway traditions and Christian practices, carrying the best of two worlds. Joshua dedicates his life to talking about light.