Bad Cree

“You can always tell the time of day in Vancouver by the crows. In the winter, they fly to roost in Burnaby at 5 pm, at 8 pm in the summer. They move through the sky like a thunder crowd, collecting more kin as they fly home.”

Crows are one of this novel’s key symbols. They represent unresolved grief and the pain of losing a family member. As the narrative unfolds, Mackenzie learns more about crows and begins to understand why they seem to haunt her, following her everywhere she goes.

“The dreams I’m having now are different. I can move and speak. But both types feel like a warning, a deep siren of something to come.”

Dreams are one of the novel’s most important motifs. Like crows, they speak to the narrative’s interest in unresolved grief and healing. Dreams are messages, but they also signal to Mackenzie and everyone in her family that she has not yet processed Sabrina’s death.

“Kokum was my parent, just as much as my mom and dad. She was part of my life, like waking up and going to sleep at night.”

The Affirming Power of Family and Community is an important thematic focal point within the novel. Although many of the characters struggle with grief, loss, and other issues, they find strength and support in the friends and family who understand and love them.

“That might be the worst thing about death: It doesn’t stop anything. The world keeps moving, even though the pain is just as real as the day it settled in.”

Mackenzie’s unresolved grief over the loss of her sister is at the core of the novel. This passage reflects Mackenzie’s experience of grief at the beginning of the narrative. She has yet to process her loss, and this absence of self-reflection mires her in unhappiness and melancholy. Because she has not truly moved on, she feels just as anguished as she did on the day that her sister died.

“This place wasn’t built to believe us, and white people will stamp out anything they don’t understand.”

Racism and anti-Indigenous prejudice are evident in many of the interactions between Indigenous and white people in the novel. The Indigenous characters learn to deal with microaggressions and threats of violence but dealing with these kinds of stressors takes its toll on the Indigenous characters.

“I thought if I stayed away after Sabrina’s death, the ugly would pass me by like a car that has some better place to go. I didn’t know how wrong I would be.”

Processing Grief and Loss to Overcome Isolation is a theme that permeates the novel, underpinning all of Mackenzie’s thoughts and actions. She is resistant to the idea that her dreams and visions are rooted in unresolved sadness over the loss of her sister and grandmother, but she cannot deny that she has not yet processed their deaths.

“As soon as the doctors had moved kokum from our house into hospice, we know that whatever hope we’d had that she’d make it was gone. For the whole last month she was there, a family member was with her every hour of the day and night.”

In this passage, Mackenzie recalls how the family rallied around her grandmother during the final months of her life. The Affirming Power of Family and Community is one of Mackenzie’s primary values, and part of her uneasiness in Vancouver is due to the nagging sense that she should have gone home to visit her parents, sisters, and aunties at some point during the past three years.

“One thing Cree people are supposed to do when we’re grieving is stop. Stop work, stop the everyday of our lives. We’re supposed to rest.”

This quote, spoken by Mackenzie during a moment of reflection on her grandmother’s death, speaks to the novel’s title. “Bad Cree” is an epithet of which Mackenzie worries she is deserving. She feels this way due to her refusal to see her family during her time in Vancouver and not participating in the grieving rituals she was supposed to attend after her sister died.

“A month after Sabrina died, I saw her on the bus. It wasn’t her, of course. But in one moment of forgetting, a moment in another life where I didn’t lose her, I saw her.”

Memories of her sister haunt Mackenzie, so much so that she sees her face on the street, on buses, and in crowds. This novel uses elements of the supernatural to explore Processing Grief and Loss to Overcome Isolation. Moments like this support the idea that Mackenzie’s dreams and visions are manifestations of unprocessed grief.

“When I left, I thought the result would be two-fold: I wouldn’t worry about anyone anymore, and no one would have to worry about me. But now I see that’s not how it works.”

Part of what makes Mackenzie a “Bad Cree” in her mind is the fractured relationship she has with her family and community after she moves to Vancouver. Togetherness, belonging, and mutual support are important values within both her family unit and her hometown. Through ignoring these teachings, Mackenzie loses important familial and community connections. Her healing journey begins when she realizes the importance of community and belonging, and this passage illustrates one of the key realizations she has during that process.

“Sometimes the bad isn’t a hole, a lack, a place where something is missing. Sometimes feeling bad is a true warning, something that could save you.”

Mackenzie makes this observation after she and her mother have a tense exchange with a white man whom she can see means to harm them by her mother’s body language. There are multiple such exchanges with predatory white men in the novel, and part of what Mackenzie learns growing up is how to trust her instincts and keep herself safe during potentially dangerous encounters.

“Mom, Auntie Verna, Kassidy, and now me have all had strange things happen in our dreams. This has to be coming from somewhere in our blood, something that started long before us.”

The importance of family and community ties is one of the novel’s key themes. Mackenzie shares with her mother, aunties, sisters, and cousins the ability to see the future or receive warnings through dreams. Realizing that she has this trait in common with her family is part of Mackenzie’s journey back to her family after her self-imposed isolation in Vancouver in the wake of her grandmother’s death.

“It’s only then that I look down and realize my hands are balled into fists. Clutched in one of them is the piece of bloody flannel from Sabrina. When I blink, it doesn’t vanish.”

This moment is illustrative of how the novel uses horror tropes and imagery to discuss themes related to Indigenous lives and experiences. Here, the cloth is revealed to be saturated with blood from a wheetigo, a mythical creature who feeds on greed and victimizes the High Prairie Cree community after predatory oil companies summoned it into existence.

“I wonder if this is our family tradition, tamping down dreams before they have a chance to take shape, cutting off a part of ourselves once the fear sets in.”

Mackenzie’s desire to stop her dreams represents her unwillingness to come to terms with grief and loss. Just as she shares the ability to dream prophetically with her family members, she also shares the habit of trying to hide from unpleasant experiences that nonetheless help individuals to process loss and find resilience amid grief.

“Not all hurt is visible.”

The impact of grief and loss on both Mackenzie and her family is one of this novel’s key thematic focal points. Although Mackenzie appears “normal” to many of the people she encounters in Vancouver, she nurses a deep inner melancholy that she initially struggles to process and move past.

“There’s more than one way to eat someone up. They feed off greed, and our world creates enough of that to keep them nice and full.”

The wheetigo is a legendary creature in Indigenous myth. It is an undead beast said to feed off greed and to kill its kind. People associate it with winter, often using it as a cautionary tale told to children to prevent them from running off alone. Here, the girls speculate that this creature had something to do with Sabrina’s disappearance from the gravel pit.

“The wheetigo didn’t appear here by accident. Greed lured them here, like bears to spawning fish. Or maybe they were turned here, created and set loose. Just like those damn pipelines, built underneath our feet and then abandoned.”

Wheetigos appear in many different Indigenous traditions. Here, the author uses the mythical creature to explore the adverse impact that outside, extractive, non-Indigenous industry and its overwhelmingly white oil workers have on Indigenous communities’ safety.

“The wheetigo said it’s already been in our home. It said it watches Tracey as she sleeps. I didn’t bring it back home from the dream tonight. It was already here.”

This passage is a metaphor for how the oil boom harmed Indigenous communities. With the promise of jobs and economic development, it made its way into reserve life. However, rather than deliver prosperity, it brought pain and destruction.

“I think about the toxic environment in the oil patch, the high rate of depression among people based in camps for weeks and months on end, working every day. The way the industry changes men into worse men. The spike in missing Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people with the rise in industry.”

Mackenzie’s family and community feel the impact of the oil boom is felt in various ways. The extractive nature of outside industry in rural, First Nations communities is one of the novel’s key themes and allows Johns to engage with lived experience in Indigenous communities in the Americas. Here, Mackenzie reflects on the damage that the oil boom brought to High Prairie and feels a deep sense of sadness and loss on behalf of her community.

“This thing feeds off the helpless and the needy, and we are none of those things.”

The author shows that solidarity and cohesion are key to defeating creatures like the wheetigo, or the greed of an oil company. Mackenzie’s mother decides that because they are united, they are strong and capable of fighting back against the wheetigo. They are successful in their quest to vanquish the wheetigo because they remain united, and their experience with the mythic creature teaches them the value of togetherness.

“I’ve always had trouble with that. The letting go part. I’m a bad Cree sometimes.”

Both Mackenzie and her mother describe themselves as “Bad Crees.” What they mean in each case is that they struggle with togetherness and connectivity to their community. Because both familial and community unity are important Cree cultural values, each woman views herself as having failed to live up to the values with which she was raised. Mackenzie’s journey of self-discovery and self-healing is rooted in the idea of returning to community, and it is only through reconnecting with her family that she can heal.

“I think about the crows that have been following me since the dreams started, both in real life and in dreams, the protectors I now understand have been on my side since the beginning.”

Crows are an important symbol in the novel. They speak to the unknowability of grief in its early stages and how Mackenzie can understand her feelings better once she takes the time to process them. Although she thinks them an ominous sign at first, she realizes after some thorough analysis that they are, in fact, helpers. The crows, like her grief, changed form upon further reflection and understanding.

“‘All of this pain can end.’ Sabrina’s voice pulls me back to her. ‘Just come to me.’”

The wheetigo is a figure found in many different Indigenous myths and traditions. Part of its power lies in its ability to shape-shift and mimic other forms. Here, it is alluring because it has taken the form of Sabrina and promises to absolve Mackenzie of her guilt for having left Sabrina in the woods. In reality, Mackenzie herself must come to terms with her actions. The wheetigo cannot “forgive” her.