49 pages • 1 hour read
Jessica JohnsBad Cree
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Mackenzie tries to distract herself from the eerie, unexplainable text messages by doing laundry. She thinks back over her time in Vancouver, remembering that she’d already been in the city for two years when Sabrina died. The grief from losing her grandmother was fresh, and so she had declined to travel back home for her sister’s funeral. Mackenzie remains in the laundry room while her clothes are in the washer and then the dryer; she does not want to return to her apartment. When she finally does have to go upstairs, she calls her aunt, Verna, and tells her everything. Verna suggests Mackenzie come home: She is worried by the dreams, the crow’s head, and the text messages and thinks that Mackenzie is being sent a message of some kind. After hanging up, Mackenzie smudges her apartment with sage, reflecting on how few times she performed the ritual before. Unlike her Indigenous friends and family members, she has had little use for the bundles of sage she was gifted over the years. She even learned how to smudge from a white yoga instructor’s video on YouTube.
The next day, Mackenzie returns to work. She gets a few tight-lipped smiles and strange looks, and she wonders what rumors have been circulating about her in her absence. She tells Joli that her family is pressuring her to visit home, and Joli responds that they also think that Mackenzie could use some time with her parents and aunties. Mackenzie asks their manager, Brandon, for a few weeks of unpaid leave. Brandon, who is fond of white feminist authors and Marxist work jargon about cooperation and unity, sighs audibly when she asks and does not want to give her the time off. She reminds him that when her sister died, she did not take a single day of leave, and he reluctantly relents. Mackenzie’s aunt, Doreen, buys her a plane ticket, and she prepares to return home for the first time in three years.
Chapter 7 Summary
Mackenzie arrives in Edmonton. She recalls her grandmother’s final months and the funeral that followed. She and her sisters hoped their grandmother would make it through winter, but the elderly woman seemed to know that her time was up. After she died, the sisters were grief-stricken, but their mother was resigned. She, too, knew that her mother’s time had come. Mackenzie, Tracey, and Sabrina felt like they were sleepwalking. Mackenzie remembers an incident, not long after the funeral when a group of oil workers accosted them in a store. The men were intimidating but pretended they were just joking. Tracey, usually quick to anger and ready with a scathing comeback, remained silent. She is shaken from her memory by an airport employee and heads toward the baggage claim to meet her auntie, Doreen. The two make the long drive out of the city to High Prairie, talking as they go. The familiarity of the landscape strikes Mackenzie, and she is happy she made the trip home.
At her parents’ house, various family members have gathered. The space seems full, familiar, and homey. Mackenzie thinks that she should have returned much sooner, but she is grateful to at least be back now. After a night of restful sleep, she talks with her mother and aunties. She is hopeful that the dreams are over, but no one else seems ready to believe that she is out of the woods. She finds out that various other family members, including her aunt, Verna, have prophetic dreams and visions. Verna’s have even predicted disasters, disappearances, and illnesses. The consensus is that Mackenzie’s dreams are a message of some kind, and Mackenzie realizes that she does not yet understand its message.
Chapter 8 Summary
Mackenzie finds these new revelations about dreams unsettling and locks herself in the bathroom to check her phone and calm down. When she comes out, Tracey challenges her to a game of mortal combat. It is the unofficial video game of Mackenzie’s family, and she recalls many hours spent playing it with her sisters and cousins as a young girl. As the two sisters play, they talk about Sabrina. Mackenzie wants to know if Tracey is mad at her for skipping Sabrina’s funeral. Tracey explains that she was never angry, but she thought it was odd that Mackenzie hadn’t “shown up” for their sister.
Sabrina’s death was a shock to everyone. She died in her car: A blood vessel burst in her brain, but luckily the tragedy happened just as she was starting the vehicle. She wasn’t on the road and hadn’t put anyone else in danger. Mackenzie thinks how much easier it is to lose someone to sudden death than illness. They lost their grandmother bit by bit, and the sadness of it remained with Mackenzie but also, she thought, in the house. It was why she’d left. She and Tracey continue to talk, and it becomes apparent that Tracey is deeply angry with Mackenzie for leaving. Sabrina had been “the glue” that held Mackenzie and Tracey together, and without her, Mackenzie worries that their bond is forever altered.
Mackenzie tried to assure everyone that her dreams had stopped, but that night, she has another disturbingly vivid nightmare. She is in the woods at the lake, out by the bonfire in the gravel pit where teens would gather after their parents fell asleep. She remembers this night: Tracey and Sabrina disappeared into the woods alone, and for 45 minutes she was sure that something happened to them. As children, they were taught never to go anywhere alone, and she knew when the girls ran into the woods, she should have followed. In the dream version of this event, she does find Sabrina. Sabrina looks like a corpse and admonishes Mackenzie for not following her. Mackenzie begs to know what happened to Sabrina that night, but Sabrina says nothing.
Chapter 9 Summary
Mackenzie wonders if her actions that night at the gravel pit caused her dream. She wonders if Sabrina was haunting Mackenzie because she hadn’t followed her that night and not because she’d stayed in Vancouver for her sister’s funeral. She calls Joli to run this idea by them, and Joli tells Mackenzie that they and their mother had been talking and thought they had figured something out. Just as Joli is about to share this new perspective with Mackenzie, the phone cuts out. Mackenzie tries to call back, but no one picks up.
She spends the rest of the day in a daze, scared to fall asleep. She does eventually drift off but her mom wakes her before dawn the next day. Her mother planned an impromptu road trip, and the two set off together in the car. She remembers another such trip, years ago. They were out scavenging and ran into an angry white man who claimed that they were on his land. (They were not, her mother later explained.) It was evident from her mother’s demeanor and body language that she was nervous around this man, and Mackenzie and her sisters watched as her mother diffused the situation and kept the girls safe. Today, they find another old barn to scavenge in, and her mother looks for anything that might be useful for craft projects. The two talk and Mackenzie tells her mother how hurtful she found her mother’s behavior when she left home. She’d just wanted a fresh start, but her mother didn’t seem to understand. The two talk things over, and Mackenzie realizes that her mother both loves and understands her. She is grateful for their relationship.
Chapters 6-9 Analysis
Mackenzie’s characterization is an important focal point within this set of chapters. Much of what the author reveals about Mackenzie happens during one of her many moments of reflection and remembrance. Although she has struggled to process her grandmother’s and sister’s deaths, Mackenzie is a markedly self-reflective character. At this point in the narrative, she is actively trying to identify the source of her nightmares, and she does that in part by sifting through various memories of her childhood and adolescence. The Affirming Power of Family and Community is important to Mackenzie, even as she has chosen to live apart from her mother, sister, aunties, and cousins. After reflecting on the importance of these relationships, Mackenzie eventually decides to reach out to someone in her family. She calls her aunt, Verna, and the strength of their bond is evident during the phone call. Mackenzie is close not only with her immediate nuclear family but also with the wide sense of kinship that makes up their community in High Prairie.
Mackenzie’s reflection also reveals the role that Processing Grief and Loss to Overcome Isolation plays in her decision to leave High Prairie. She recalls her grandmother’s last year, noting, “We lost kokum one bit at a time as she got sicker and sicker” (105). She recounts how difficult it was for Mackenzie and her sisters to lose their grandmother even as they were grateful to have her in their home for her final days. It is during this section of the novel that Mackenzie clarifies that it was not only loss that prompted her to move to the city but also the atmosphere in the family home after her grandmother died. Mackenzie felt the house suffused with grief, not only her own, but everyone’s. It was this communal sense of loss that Mackenzie was so overwhelmed by, even as she knew that shared grieving was an important part of both familial and cultural norms. This causes her to opt for isolation in an attempt to process her grief; however, she now realizes that this left critical wounds unresolved.
The sense that Mackenzie is a “bad Cree” for refusing to take part in communal patterns of grieving with her family intensifies when she returns home after speaking with aunts, Verna and Doreen. However, this section of the narrative also evidences the beginning of Mackenzie’s healing journey. Although she previously ran away from communal healing, she begins to embrace it at this point in the story, further cementing the role of Processing Grief and Loss to Overcome Isolation. She processes her feelings first with her sister, Tracey, and then with her mother. While each family member was hurt by Mackenzie’s abandonment of the family, they begin to forgive her. Both women are worried about Mackenzie’s dreams, and they feel a strong commitment to working together to address the root cause of Mackenzie’s recurring nightmares and eerie visions.
Racism also underpins Mackenzie’s interactions with white people—both while living in Vancouver and in her rural community. In one scene, she smudges her apartment with sage after a nightmare and a conversation with her aunt. She notes that she learned how to smudge (a ritual smoke cleansing in Cree culture) not from her family but from the video that a white yoga instructor posted on YouTube. Mackenzie’s wry language here both provides commentary on cultural appropriation and contributes to her feelings of being a “Bad Cree”—evidenced by learning about a ritual practice from a non-Indigenous voice.
While back at home, she recalls an encounter with a white man during which it was obvious that her mother was fearful for their safety and actively trying to diffuse the situation and appease the man’s anger. Mackenzie realizes that interactions like this are common and reflects on how many of the women in her family have learned appeasement as a kind of “soft” survival skill out of necessity. Mackenzie also recalls oil workers taunting her while she was out with her sister, Tracey. Tracey, like her mother, grew up with this kind of racist abuse and devised ways of dealing with it. This incident is the novel’s first moment of engagement with the theme of The Impact of Extractive Industry on First Nations Communities. Its focus is not yet on the environmental or economic impacts of the extractive industry. Rather, it focuses on the harmful effects the oil industry has on women in High Prairie, many of whom became fearful of their safety due to the presence of hostile, predominantly white male outsiders. Here, Johns establishes a connection between her characters’ experience with the negative impact of the extractive industry and the real violence and uptick in missing persons and murder cases of Indigenous women due to outside industries’ increasing presence on Indigenous land.
