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.
Themes
Processing Grief and Loss to Overcome Isolation
Content Warning This section includes depictions of anti-Indigenous racism and substance misuse.
The impact of grief and loss on individuals and families is one of this novel’s most overt themes. Johns initially introduces Mackenzie, the narrator and protagonist, through the framework of grief and loss. Very early in the narrative, the author reveals that Mackenzie has lost both her beloved grandmother and her sister Sabrina. Mackenzie’s unwillingness to confront her melancholy has caused a rift in her family, and she is isolating herself in Vancouver, far from the small hamlet in which she was raised. Mackenzie’s self-imposed separation from her family renders her, in her eyes, a “bad Cree,” and her self-reflective, healing journey will ultimately come due to a focus on reconnection with family and community.
Mackenzie’s family is large, and many of the novel’s characters are her family members. Although plot-driven and not particularly invested in in-depth character development, characterization is nonetheless important in Bad Cree for the way that it speaks to Indigenous family structure in Mackenzie’s community: Her Cree settlement is close-knit. Many of her family’s neighbors are also their relatives, and everyone looks out for one another. When Mackenzie’s mother and aunties want more information on local wheetigo sightings, they make a round of visits to extended family members to gather data. Against the backdrop of a society in which the Cree (and other First Nations communities) are marginalized, exploited, and even preyed upon, they maintain strong family support networks.
The importance of such networks is evident in Mackenzie’s relationship with her grandmother (often referred to by the Cree word for grandmother, “kokum”). Much of this novel unfolds in flashbacks, both in the form of dreams and memories, and Mackenzie spends countless hours remembering her grandmother. She played a key role in the lives of not only her children but also her grandchildren, and they all took care of her, especially during the last year of her life. She lived with Mackenzie’s family, and Mackenzie was as closely bonded to her grandmother as she was to her mother.
Her grandmother’s death, even after a long illness during which everyone had prepared to lose her, shook the family. Mackenzie struggled with the sadness that seemed to permeate the household and struggled even more with the gradual loss of detailed memories of her grandmother. She reflects at one point that “[w]hen someone dies, you stop remembering them completely” (21). This process was as devastating to her as her grandmother’s death, and it eventually drove her from her home. She moved to Vancouver hoping to distract herself.
Mackenzie’s grief intensifies after the sudden, unexpected death of her sister, Sabrina. Sabrina died after Mackenzie moved to Vancouver and, fearing a repeat of the difficulty she faced at home in the wake of her grandmother’s death, Mackenzie did not go home for the funeral. At this point, her already strained family relationships begin to fracture: Both her mother and her surviving sister, Tracey, are deeply hurt and confused at Sabrina’s choice to remain in the city rather than grieve with her family. Because familial relationships and family networks play such an important part in Cree cultural identity, Mackenzie feels the additional weight of guilt on top of her sadness: She has become a “Bad Cree.”
Mackenzie’s melancholy lessons only when she returns to her family and can process her feelings with her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties. The women spend time together, support one another, and work together to vanquish the wheetigo and put an end to Mackenzie’s nightmares. Their shared ability to dream prophetically further unites them, and Mackenzie learns that family relationships are too important to be cast aside in the manner that she did after her grandmother’s death. The way to heal from grief is through family unity, and Mackenzie learns to reconnect with and lean on the strong women in her family.
The Affirming Power of Family and Community
The importance of family and community is another of the novel’s key themes, closely tied to its exploration of processing and healing from grief and loss. Family relationships are important in Mackenzie’s community. In addition to the close bond that she shares with her grandmother, Mackenzie has strong relationships with her sisters, cousins, and aunties. Her aunties are surrogate mothers for her, especially as her relationship with her mother becomes strained in the wake of Sabrina’s death. Verna and Doreen care deeply for Mackenzie, her sisters, and her cousins, and they play an active role in the lives of Mackenzie’s generation of the family. From Verna and Doreen, the girls learn about important cultural traditions like beading and better understand what it means to be part of the Cree First Nation. Johns shows that the girls’ identity development happens as a result not only of parental instruction on both familial and cultural values but also due to input from extended family as well.
Prophetic dreams and visions are one of the ways the author illustrates the strong ties in Mackenzie’s family. The shared experience of meaningful dreams and visions unites all of the women in the family. Additionally, the interpretation of these dreams is communal: Mackenzie is not able to analyze her dreams on her own. She only determines their meaning after speaking with her aunties, her mother, her sister, and her cousin. The communal nature of interpretation also speaks to the importance of family and community in the novel. Mackenzie and her family members must work together toward common goals, and their cooperation strengthens them. Mackenzie experiences family belonging both through shared traits and working together.
Mackenzie does struggle during this process. Her dreams are upsetting, and their intensity destabilizes her. She notes, “That’s the best and worst thing about being connected to everything, you are a part of it all, but you can’t choose what gets sent out into the world or what can find you” (34). What “finds her” is the wheetigo, but she can kill it with the help of her family. The wheetigo isolates its victims, and Mackenzie, Kassidy, and Tracey learn from their mothers and aunties that when fighting the wheetigo, it is important to stay together. The wheetigo is a creature that appears in many different Indigenous traditions both in Canada and the United States, typically interpreted as a cautionary tale. The wheetigo’s story encourages individuals to avoid greed and remain connected to friends and family in a meaningful way. In Bad Cree, the wheetigo becomes part of the novel’s emphasis on the importance of togetherness and belonging: It cannot be killed by a person alone.
In addition to blood family, Bad Cree also focuses on broader kinship structures and belonging to chosen family. In Vancouver, although isolated from her mother, aunties, and other relatives, Mackenzie forms close relationships with her mother’s friend, Dianne, and Dianne’s child, Joli. These two characters become Mackenzie’s support system away from home, and they are no less devoted to her than her mother, aunties, sisters, or cousins. This is especially important for Mackenzie in a city like Vancouver where many of the people she encounters are white and have deeply ingrained racism and anti-Indigenous bias. Like its depiction of the importance of large family networks in First Nations communities, this novel’s illustration of a chosen family also highlights additional important forms of togetherness and belonging across different Indigenous cultures.
The Impact of Extractive Industry on First Nations Communities
Johns ultimately reveals that Mackenzie’s dreams are connected to the impact of extractive industry (much more so than grief and loss). Additionally, this theme connects Bad Cree to other works of Indigenous literature, particularly works produced during the last several decades as outside industries (like the petrochemical companies depicted in Bad Cree) have gained an increasing foothold across Indigenous lands.
Mackenzie grows up in High Prairie, a small, remote Cree hamlet that saw little outside involvement for centuries. The oil boom changed that, and after oil was discovered in the area, companies descended upon the town. They promised jobs and prosperity, but Mackenzie and her family observe that jobs given to Indigenous workers are often temporary and less lucrative, and prosperity is limited. Although new businesses opened during the years the oil company was active in the area, they quickly closed when the oil dried up, and High Prairie was left much as it had been before the boom, although more dilapidated. Additionally, the oil companies caused indiscriminate environmental damage, the impact of which is not yet fully understood. Mackenzie observes, “We don’t know all the damage that was done to the land when we started extracting from it” (214), and other characters in the novel echo this sentiment.
Another dangerous effect of outside industry is the uptick in missing persons and murder cases in the area. Both Canada and the United States are amid an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and industries like oil are notorious for the dangers that they pose to women who live in and around the towns where plants, pipelines, and other infrastructure are put in place. This epidemic is the result of a complex constellation of factors including racism, the unwillingness of authorities to investigate crimes in which Indigenous women are victims, and endemic violence amongst communities of oil workers. Mackenzie and her family note that the oil industry “changes men into worse men” (214), and they all know several women who went missing after the oil boom came to High Prairie. There are many texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that explore this epidemic, and Bad Cree’s interrogation of violence against Indigenous women places it in dialogue with other works of Indigenous literature.
The wheetigo also becomes a key point of engagement with the impact of the extractive industry, for it is a creature that is “made by greed” (214). The wheetigo’s relationship to greed is a characteristic that is common across all the Indigenous traditions in which it appears. The decision to connect the oil boom with the figure of the wheetigo is a key way the author brings Indigenous myth and oral tradition into dialogue with a contemporary issue an increasing number of Indigenous and First Nations communities face. Mackenzie’s mother and aunties date the first appearances of wheetigos in their community to the early days of the oil boom, and none are surprised at this outcome. As Johns shows through the narrative, the oil industry is largely motivated by greed, and this causes it to indiscriminately harm Indigenous people, communities, and their land. Killing the wheetigo becomes a metaphor for Indigenous resistance, resilience, and reclamation. In defeating it, Mackenzie frees not only herself but also her family and community.
