Julie, a lonely fourteen year old girl, moves to Manzanita, an Oregon seaside town, from Los Angeles after her writer father, Robert, loses his job. Her family, including mother Kathryn and older sister Susan, has trouble adjusting to life in a small town. Julie parents struggle with her father's unemployment and her sister, Susan, finds solace in a summer fling with Tom.

A young boy witnesses his parents' murder. Later, as he grows up, he befriends a bear in the wilderness and the chief of a local Indian tribe, and he stays with the Indians, but makes an enemy of the chief's son. As he enters adulthood he sets out to find the men responsible for his parents' deaths.

A white lawyer finds his values shaken when he is paired with an angry Indigenous activist who insists on kidnapping the head of a logging company to teach him the price of his destruction.