Summary
Miig shares his coming-to story with French. In the early days, when the Recruiters were just beginning to hunt Indigenous people, Miig and his husband, Isaac, went to live in their semi-remote, off the grid cottage. Isaac was half-Cree and a respected poet. One night, they heard noise in the bush and found three apparently Native people there: a man, a woman and another younger woman. The man says he’s sprained his ankle and the woman says she is pregnant. Miig is suspicious, but Isaac invites them in.
One night, the younger woman sneaks out of her room to show Miig her blinking ankle monitor. She tells them they must run. But it is too late: government vans have already pulled up outside and men are knocking at the door. Miig tries to convince Isaac to escape through the yard. But Isaac refuses to believe the rumors and has faith that he will be able to reason with the agents. The guards kick the front door open.
Miig finishes his story there and tells French the moral: that sometimes one must trust that people are making decisions for the good of the community based on things they know but that you don’t know. He tells French that what he saw up in the trees was a new school the Recruiters are building nearby. However, it isn’t necessary for the whole group to know that now. As a steady snow falls, Miig directs the group eastward to avoid the new school.
On their way, the group finds evidence that other people are camping nearby. Frenchie climbs a tree and spots two men, one wearing camouflage and another in a red hat. The group decides they will catch up with the men, since they cannot avoid them and feel an obligation to see if they need help. But from the outset the strangers are suspicious. Wab insists they are the same people she saw in the woods, including the man who turned her over to the Toronto gang. They show few signs of trying to hide: they have built an open, visible fire in the early evening. They leave a conspicuous trail of trash along their way. And when the group approaches their campsite after three days of walking, the men fearlessly call out to ask who’s there.
The pair turn out to be Travis, who speaks in the Anishnaabe language with Miig, and Lincoln, from the Hobemma Nation. The men invite the group to eat, saying they’ve had a good hunt and stocked up supplies in the surviving city of Espanola. Miig is hesitant. But the men may have valuable information, and in the end they decide to stay. Smoking tobacco around a fire, Miig and Travis discuss the armed Indigenous resistance in Espanola. Lincoln says the resistance is stupid; “you either run or you find other ways to fit it.” Later, Travis justifies his actions toward Wab, saying he never meant to get anyone hurt and that he is a changed man.
The men invite the group to stay for the night. The group feels uneasy around the men but it is too late to move. So they set up camp between the men and the cliff and establish hour-long watch shifts. At night French hears a squeal and feels a body crash into his tent. He leaves his tent to take in a terrifying scene: Tree and Zheegwon are back to back, arms intertwined, at the end of a gun held by Travis. Miig is on the ground with his gun thrown nearby. Chi-Boy is also on the ground with his knife in his arm. And Lincoln, appearing woozy and drugged, has his arm locked tightly around RiRi’s throat. Travis tries to convince Lincoln to put the girl down, saying the Recruiters should be there any minute and she’s worth nothing dead. French and the others realize the men are traitors.
Eventually, Chi-Boy manages to stab Travis in the leg and Lincoln runs toward the cliff with RiRi over his shoulder. Miig, Wab and French chase after them while the twins tie Travis up. But by the time they arrive they realize they are too late. Lincoln has jumped off the cliff with Ri in tow and all that is left behind of her is one pink boot. French returns and in an intense moment he shoots and kills Travis.
The group is devastated. They run, taking turns carrying Minerva. For days they keep moving, and French feels terrible and numb. On the fourth day, Miig calls him up to the front of their line to finish sharing the rest of his story. He explains that when he escaped the school he ran barefoot for two days and two nights until he found a Cree family that gave him food, clothing, and information. Back then there were still small Indigenous communities, and it was one such settlement near Huron that Miigwans met French’s father. Miig began bartering, with the aim of obtaining camp gear—and above all, a gun—so he could make his way back to the school to rescue Isaac. It was French’s father who gave him the gun in exchange for showing him and the other Council members the way to the capital, since they still had faith in the possibility for dialogue.
Gun in hand, Miig made his way back to the school over the course of eleven days. But upon reaching the windowless building he didn’t know what else to do other than sit and watch. After two days, a pickup truck passed and he hopped in the back. After a couple of hours, when the driver stopped to relieve himself, Miig pointed his gun and asked the driver to help him get into the school. The driver explained that there was no one left at the school, since harvesting Native bone marrow is a process that ultimately kills its victims. Miig, furious and incredulous, kicked the driver, who instructed him to check the crates in the back of the truck. When Miig did so, he found test tubes containing thick, viscous liquid. Each tube was labeled with a number, age, and Indigenous Nation.
Without thinking, Miig shot the driver and left him to die. He took the truck and went to the last lake known to have fish in it. There he camped for four days and released the bone marrow liquid into the water, singing to each one of them with the intention of sending them back home. Finishing up his story, Miig tells French that given the times they live in, sometimes you do things you wouldn’t have otherwise done. But as long as the intention is good, nothing else matters.
Analysis
In this block of chapters, author Cherie Dimaline continues to develop the characters’ coming-to stories. The coming-to stories that French, Wab and Miigwans share are narratives about how each escaped persecutors and came to live in the bush with the rest of the group. They are also decisive stories about loss, trauma, and survival, in which each character loses what is most important to them.
French lost his brother Mitch, who was “all I had left.” Wab lost her autonomy and her ability to support herself, along with her eye and her dignity. And Miig lost Isaac and the life they built together. This loss and the experience of violence mark each character forever. Yet through great struggle and persistence, they survive, forming a new, found family and coming to be who they are today. It is important to note Miig’s insistence that each person chooses when to tell their coming-to story, since “[e]veryone’s creation story is their own.”
After hearing Miig’s coming-to story, French reflects that loss is the most difficult aspect of the inhospitable world they live in. “I realized there was something worse than running, worse even than the schools. There was loss.” Dimaline demonstrates that the devastating power of loss not only affects characters psychologically but also has an impact on a physical level. After losing RiRi and killing Travis, French experiences loss “as physical pain at the bottom of my stomach and under each kneecap. That’s where the loss lived….”
Diverse Indigenous characters respond to this loss, and to the trauma and violence of the Recruiters’ persecution, in very different ways. Dimaline uses characterization to explore these varied responses to persecution and violence. The “other Indians,” Travis and Lincoln, are characterized as lazy, untrustworthy traitors who are only looking out for their own interests, even at the expense of their own community. From the first moment that French spots their fire, Dimaline foreshadows that the encounter with Travis and Lincoln will end badly.
In one particularly heated moment, Lincoln says that the resistance in Espanola is “stupid,” since “[y]ou either run or you find other ways to fit in and get by.” Miig interrogates the pair about what they mean by finding other ways to fit it. In the end, it is clear that rather than go on the run, Travis and Lincoln turn in their fellow members of the Anishnaabe and Cree Nations to the Recruiters in exchange for whatever small comforts they may offer them.
In passing, Dimaline establishes the resistance movement in Espanola as another way of responding to persecution by the Recruiters. The group is camped out by the town and they are armed in an effort to defend themselves. On the other end of this spectrum are French’s father and the Council, along with Isaac, who still have faith in the possibility of dialogue with the government. In Miig’s words, the Council still held on to “this crazy notion that there was goodness left, that someone, somewhere, would see just how insane this whole school thing was.” In the end, all of these characters end up dead.
Finally, Miig, French, and their group represent a third way of responding to persecution and violence. They choose to run, with the aim of making it north to Native communities that are said to be doing okay. They train to use weapons—mostly to hunt, but also to defend themselves if need be. They approach fellow Native people with a healthy dose of caution—always willing to help out those in need, but also looking out for the safety of their own found family first and foremost. Through the characterization of these different groups, Dimaline explores the diverse ways that humans respond to crisis.
Against this violent backdrop, French has learned to use a rifle and has had two major opportunities to put his new skills to use. Dimaline uses the same language and tone to draw a parallel between these two critical moments. In the first instance, French encounters a moose. He feels time slow down such that he’s able to take aim. But in the end, he chooses not to kill the animal, so as not to take its life wastefully. In the second instance, French—devastated beyond reasoning due to the death of RiRi—ponders whether or not to kill Travis. Again he feels time slow down as he takes aim with his gun. This time he does pull the trigger, killing this person who handed Wab over to a gang, killed his adopted little sister, and who is likely to keep turning over Native people to Recruiters.
