The occupation of Heather Rose

the long version

"Young, naive, and inadequately trained, urban health care/social worker Heather Rose flirts with the pilot as she wings her way north in a bush plane, to land in an isolated and remote northern/Native community, carrying her Canada Food Guide, plans for fitness classes and community social activities with her. Nine months later Heather Rose is "bushed"--utterly disillusioned by the growing horror of her new-found realization that what her culture has to offer this community: the alcohol bootlegged in by the charming bush pilot; the unsuitable clothing sold by the thoughtless proprietor of the general store; the gasoline used as much by the youth of the community to get high as to afford them access to what has become the tractless wilderness they inhabit; she finally understands is less than nothing--total dependency. She returns, compelled , like Marlowe in Heart of Darkness to tell her story to others--like her missing supervisor, whose empty office she "occupies" on her return, illustrating her monologue of despair on a blackboard to an absent colonial authority for which the audience stands in as its silent and complicit witness"--P.[4] of cover.