64 pages • 2 hours read
Cherie DimalineHunting by Stars
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: The Marrow Thieves
The Marrow Thieves series is set in a near-future dystopia that has been ravaged by climate change. In the first novel of the series, which bears the same name, water sources have been poisoned by toxins and have dried up due to shifting weather patterns. Resources have become scarce, leading to a breakdown of law and order. A series of plagues has killed millions of people; the worst of the plagues causes people to lose their ability to dream. The loss of this ability profoundly alters survivors, who must grapple with the inexorable effects of physical and mental decay. Because Native peoples do not develop this symptom, a belief spreads that their marrow can heal the sick. The Canadian government reopens its shut-down residential schools and uses them as facilities to harvest the marrow of Native people. Bureaucrats designated as Agents and Recruiters capture Native people by force and bring them to the facilities. Native families are broken apart, and people are forced to hide in the woods to evade the Recruiters. In Hunting by Stars, it is revealed that the marrow extraction process often costs patients their lives, as bone marrow is essential for the body to heal. The sequel also reveals another debilitating symptom of the plague: an inability to procreate.
After French’s father leaves to urge the Canadian government to stop the atrocities against Native peoples, French’s mother is kidnapped by Recruiters. French and his brother Mitch hide in a treehouse. To save his brother from the Recruiters, Mitch sacrifices himself. French flees and nearly dies of starvation and cold before he is discovered by Miigwans, the Anishnaabe man who becomes the father figure of their group. French’s found family includes the Elder Minerva, Miigwans, Wab, and Chi Boy, along with the youngsters Rose, Tree, Zheegwon, Slopper, and Riri. As the family journeys across central Canada, they are constantly hunted by Recruiters. Minerva and seven-year-old Riri die in abduction attempts, plunging the group in despair. By the end of The Marrow Thieves, Rose and French are in love, Wab and Chi Boy are a couple, and Isaac, Miigwans’s husband, has escaped from the residential schools. This brief moment of hope is interrupted when Recruiters abduct French.
Hunting by Stars picks up after this event, with French waking up in a residential school. Characters recur across the two novels, and Hunting by Stars often references to the backstories of French, and of family members such as Riri and Minerva. Although beginning with the first novel aids a broader understanding of the storyline, Hunting by Stars has enough context clues to be read as a stand-alone novel. While The Marrow Thieves ends on a cliffhanger, Hunting by Stars concludes on a more positive note with the birth of Ishkode. However, certain questions persist across the series. For instance, the exact nature of the plague that strikes the settlers is unclear, and there is no practical explanation for why the inability to dream affects people so profoundly. In the metaphorical sense, the ability to dream can refer to the collective imagination of Native people, which honors their own community, and all peoples, as well as their ancestors, the land, and the environment. Because most Native people keep this imagination alive, they continue to dream. Thus, while the plague has very real effects within the world of the novel, it also operates as a metaphor of human greed and environmental degradation, implying that because humans have destroyed the earth, the earth is now reclaiming itself by destroying them.
Cultural Context: The Genocide and Persecution of Indigenous Peoples in Canada
Because the portrayal of the dystopian future in Hunting by Stars draws from history and real-world realities, it is designed to highlight the multitude of injustices that Indigenous communities have endured due to colonialist practices. To this end, Dimaline creates a post-apocalyptic future that is described from the perspective of historically wronged Indigenous communities. Not only do these communities suffer from the climate change that ravages everyone else, but they must also contend with the increased burden of racist and colonial violence. In Dimaline’s world-building, history repeats itself in a far bleaker fashion. For example, the residential school in which French is kept is echoes the residential boarding school system for Indigenous people in Canada. Beginning in the 1860s, the Canadian residential school program was designed to fully assimilate Indigenous populations into the society of European settlers. To this end, Indigenous children as young as four years old were taken from their families and kept in boarding schools, where they were banned from speaking their native languages or practicing their spiritual beliefs. Parents saw their children only rarely, and by the time the children grew up, they were thoroughly alienated from their families and culture. The abysmal conditions of the boarding schools forced the children to live in squalor and cold, and the children were often subjected to physical, and even sexual, abuses. Many died of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases and were buried on the school grounds, and their families were never informed. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the Canadian government concluded that the schools had carried out the equivalent of a cultural genocide. As recently as 2021, archaeologists have discovered unmarked mass graves in these former boarding schools.
While the residential school system was extremely pernicious, it was just one of the many anti-Indigenous initiatives that existed in Canada. Before European settlers arrived in Canada in the 16th century, the land had already been inhabited by many First Nations and Indigenous peoples with diverse languages and cultural traditions. As European settlers began to colonize Canada, they forced Indigenous peoples out of their land and began to forcibly convert them to Christianity. Settlers also brought European diseases for which the Indigenous populations has no immunity, leading to widespread sickness and deaths. As a result, the Indigenous population of Canada declined dramatically between the 16th and 19th centuries. Although their numbers began to rise again after 1950, Indigenous groups still comprise less than 5% of the national population. One of the greatest contemporary concerns among Indigenous people, anthropologists, and linguists is the loss of Indigenous languages. As English and French continue predominate and speakers of Indigenous languages die out, it is feared that many languages will be permanently lost, and with them, entire knowledge systems and spiritual traditions will vanish. Ongoing efforts are being made to conserve and revitalize these languages, both by the Canadian government and Indigenous people.
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By Cherie Dimaline
