People of the Whale

People of the Whale is a 2008 novel by Linda Hogan about a Native American man with a supernatural ability to breathe underwater named Thomas Just who is forced to come to terms with his experiences in Vietnam during the war.
The novel is separated into three parts. Its chapter titles are known to use a lot of colons, and chapters greatly vary in length from 2 to sometimes 30 pages.
Plot.
The novel begins with a brief prologue explaining the history of Dark River, the fictional reservation where the main character, Thomas Just, is born. The day of his birth, Thomas's mother holds him up to a giant octopus that can walk on land, asking for it to look after him, explaining that it knew his grandfather, Witka, a mystical man who used his ability to hold his breath underwater for long periods of time to act as the whale hunter for the tribe. As Thomas grows up, he loves the water like his grandfather and eventually marries a childhood friend named Ruth. They share an intimate marriage until one day at the drafts office, Thomas drunkenly signs up for the war with some of his friends, much to the sadness of Ruth. Ruth bears a child, Marco, named after the explorer Marco Polo, after Thomas leaves for Vietnam. Years pass as Ruth raises Marco; eventually the day comes when Thomas is supposed to return, but he does not. Instead, he disappears and is described as being “made up of lies.” Thomas has been changed by his experiences in Vietnam, and thoughts flow through his head, such as his cheating on his wife with a Vietnam woman named Ma, the sadness he experienced when the army took him away from Vietnam, and the faces of shot men from war scenes he was in.
The novel flash-forwards to the year 1988. There have been rumors around the tribe about a plot to kill a whale, and Ruth, attempting to expose that the whale killing is only for money, takes a stand against the council behind it, which consists mainly of Thomas's old war friends. The whale hunt attracts the media, and Thomas, seeing this, decides to return to the tribe in order to try to find himself. He returns to the reservation, but refuses to talk to Ruth or Marco. The local men, led by Dwight, persuade Thomas to join them on the hunt. Marco has the job of listening for the whale, and on the day of the hunt, he is able to feel a whale as it approaches and expresses this to his father. When the whale appears, Thomas, without thinking, shoots the whale with his gun, and is suddenly flooded with harrowing memories of his experiences in the war. Chaos ensues the other men open fire on the whale, the canoe is flipped over, and Marco disappears. After returning, the men, excluding Thomas, carelessly leave the whale on the beach and go inside to watch a football game, causing Thomas to realize the tribe has abandoned its traditional values. Milton, one of the men who is mentally slow, says that someone with a big ring drowned Marco, but little of the tribe believes him.
Thomas subsequently goes into mental withdrawal and builds a fence around Witka's home where he resides, further isolating himself from the rest of the tribe in the process. Dark River experiences a drought, with rain ceasing to fall and the ocean receding. Ruth decides to ask help from the Rain Priest, a mystical man said to be able to bring the rain back. She offers her boat, the "Marco Polo", as sacrifice, and the Rain Priest arrives in Dark River and causes water to pour down for days. In the tribe, the rain reveals the history of the tribe – seashell buildings built by ancestors in the distant past believed to have disappeared. It is revealed that Thomas has made a sacrifice, just like Ruth: he commits to traveling to Washington D.C. to return his medals and tell the army the truth and then to fly to Vietnam to find his daughter, Lin.
Narration shifts to Thomas's experiences in the Vietnam War many years ago. He is described as never fitting in with the other men, who disrespected the dead and didn’t mind the brutal violence of war. One day, Thomas's troop flies to a wrong location, a town containing only poor children and women instead of an enemy camp they had been looking for. One of the troops, named Murphy, begins to attack an innocent young girl. As the others begin to attack other residents, Thomas suddenly fires his gun. He goes on to kill almost his entire platoon with little conscious thought, paralleling his jerk reaction of shooting the whale in Dark River years later. Thomas leaves his dog tags for the American army to find, disappearing into Vietnam society. He marries a local woman, Ma, and actively works to hide from being found by the U.S. Army. They give birth to their daughter, Lin, who Thomas attaches to over time. One day, however, Ma is killed by a land mine, and at her funeral, Thomas is found by the Americans and is taken away from his daughter, throwing him into sadness as he is forced away from a life he loves.
As if to symbolize Thomas's removal from society, Hogan switches from the perspective of Thomas to the perspective of Lin. These chapters are some of the longest in the book and make up a lot of the second part.
Lin recalls her life as an orphan after the death of Ma and the taking away of Thomas back to America by U.S. Troops. She remembers how sad her father was as he rose in the helicopter back to the U.S. and how she waited for him to come back, always holding the red fish he had bought her years ago. Forced away from her village because of soldiers closing in, she is presented with gruesome scenes of violence and corpses. She is grabbed by one of the young soldiers; they stare at each briefly, but the soldier lets her go. Eventually, she travels to Ho Chi Minh City, where she makes a living sweeping the streets. There, she is able to win the favor of a man in a flower shop on the street; realizing that she is homeless, he takes her under his wing and provides her with food. His wife is initially reluctant to accept her, though soon she gains affection for Lin because of the hard work she does. As she grows up, her affinity for knowledge causes her to take secret classes and study different languages on her own. Lin also has a knack for connecting missing family members, a skill which eventually becomes her job. She meets her future husband at an English class, who turns out to be the young soldier that let her go when she was running away from her village years ago. With her life now in order, she now resolves to find her father in America.
Lin leaves her husband to visit Thomas in Dark River. It is here that she meets up with Ruth, of whom Lin's first impression is a strong, stubborn woman who stands up for what is right. Ruth is unusually enthusiastic to see her; she brings her to Thomas's home, where a shell-shocked Thomas is unable to speak or express his feelings. Lin brings him a red fish as memory of when Thomas bought one for her as a souvenir; however, it only reminds him of war and the loss of Marco. Lin leaves and Ruth is angered by Thomas's apparent dismissal of his own daughter.
In part 3, Thomas goes to Washington, D.C. with Dwight and some other men to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. At the memorial, Thomas solemnly reflects on his life in Vietnam. He is reminded of the barren landscapes bombed and defoliated, and the hostility of his unit. He sees his own name on the wall with a circled cross next to it, and suddenly begins to cry as he thinks about the people in his troop that he killed.
At the hotel, Thomas notices the ring Dwight is wearing, recalling Milton's statement about Marco being held down by a man with a ring. He turns against Dwight and accuses him of murdering his son, but Dwight denies the idea. Because of this encounter, Dwight decides later that he needs to “keep a watch” on Thomas. Meanwhile, Thomas tries to return the medals he earned for his service in Vietnam at The Pentagon; this does not go as he had wanted, as the truth Thomas reveals is ignored by the men, who tell him to let the past go.
Back in Dark River, Thomas reconciles with Ruth. He explains that he wants to be remembered as a man of tradition rather than a man of war, and vows to get Dwight back for what he had done to the whale and their son. When he tells Ruth about how he shot the whale during the hunt, she gets angry that he went against Marco and dismisses him, though is partly understanding of his situation.
Thomas and his men paddle on a canoe out into the water. He begins to sing ancient tribal songs, and Dwight, jealous of Thomas and possibly intimidated by the threat he poses, suddenly pulls out a pistol and shoots Thomas. Thomas falls into the water, apparently unaffected spiritually, and dies. However, his spirit is later seemingly reincarnated into his body by the Old Ones and he awakes a new, whole man. Dwight is arrested by his own friends and is put to justice. Months later, Thomas visits Ruth and her boyfriend Dick Russell, expressing his gratitude for all that she has done for him and that he intends to travel to Vietnam to see Lin.
Connection to Native American culture.
Throughout the novel, bits of Native American culture are embedded and intertwined with Thomas's story. Often, Hogan describes events from a perspective where readers must suspend their disbelief and look at the world from a different way (e.g. when Witka is able to seemingly communicate with his wife when he is underwater and his wife is on land, the fact Marco is able to see all life under the sea in visions, and Thomas's reincarnation), and in the story, Pacific Northwest Native American myths are true. The respect for whales and sea life stems from Inuit and Northwest Native American culture, where whales are believed to help people survive by offering themselves, therefore holding a position of reputation. This is apparent in Dark River, as whale hunting was a huge part of life for the Native Americans in the reservation, and they held whales in the highest regard. The A’atsika people sang many ancient songs that were passed down through many generations, which connects to the Native American tradition of expressing a tribe's history through music. The concept of spirits and the spirit world is a big part of Native American culture – Pueblo peoples had rituals for the spirits while wearing masks (masks are found in the novel since Thomas's father makes them), and Navajo beliefs included trying to maintain harmony with the spirit world. A lot of tribes believed in the concept of humans having one soul that perished with the body and another soul that lived on, which connects to Thomas's soul living on after he was killed by Dwight.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols.
"People of the Whale" contains many symbols and motifs and also subtly conveys messages about Native Americans and relationships.