Jenny Ferguson Reviews Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild
Cherie Dimaline. Empire of Wild. Random House Canada. $29.95, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7352-7718-2
Empire of Wild starts with history, the history of the Métis town of Arcand, and the history of a thing living on the land, a thing that the people should fear as it is there, amongst them, always, already at the hunt. In this community, this thing is called Rogarou.
When once-wayward thirty-something Joan returns home with Victor, it takes time for Joan’s family to accept him. When Victor goes missing—he walks out the door one day after a fight about selling Joan’s land and never comes back—the town searches for him. After a while, the town stops. Joan never does.
Two things happen simultaneously, shocking Joan out of her grief and into a new kind of action: the appearance of an old-time revival tent, featuring the Reverend Eugene Wolff—a man Joan is convinced is her husband, Victor—and the death of Joan’s grandmother, reportedly caused by “dogs, maybe wolves.”
This is the set-up for Dimaline’s highly anticipated new novel, after her YA project, The Marrow Thieves, wowed readers of all ages. As in The Marrow Thieves, Dimaline offers multiple characters whose perspectives we inhabit through her third-person omniscient point of view. This provides multi-faceted insight into the novel’s players—including the enigmatic, missing Victor. Readers experience rounded and fully human Métis characters whose lives are tied to the land, to family, to traditions, and who live their lives inside the borders of colonial Canada. This will never get old for those of us who haven’t widely seen our cultures and our ways written by those of us who live these cultures and ways in literature. Like in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow—another excellent, recent Indigenous novel featuring a cousin of the Rogarou (Windigo)—the antagonist is a white man, and this white man stands in for other white settlers as an active harm on Indigenous communities and families. Finally, although both Dimaline’s recent novels are speculative, The Marrow Thieves engages with dystopia while Empire of Wild simply engages the dystopia Indigenous peoples live in. While categorized as “Fantasy” because of the Rogarou, for Indigenous readers, this novel is also part of the genre of Indigenous Realism(s).
Empire of Wild unwinds slowly. Unnumbered inter-chapters focus on Victor—lost somewhere both real and unreal. These inter-chapters work to increase anxiety; Victor is being hunted by something. The narrator says, “Joan better find him soon. Before the something else did.” The narrative’s gentle unwinding mirrors the deep experience of grief, a feeling of moving more slowly than real time—the Victor inter-chapters, certainly, but Joan’s too. When Joan begins to actively stalk the Reverend, in order to save Victor, time speeds up. Zeus, Joan’s twelve-year old cousin, also injects added energy into the narrative with his casual “yup” and his way of showing us what Joan’s too-deeply-sunken perspective can’t. When Zeus walks into the revival tent with his auntie the first time, he says, “This place is insane.”
The hunt, and the ritual of the hunt, does the same, grounding the narrative and breaking the pace and pallor of Joan’s grief by both making it communal and explicating the hunt’s ties to culture and to generational-memory:
They needed to kill the thing that took the old woman—to put down the animal that had tasted human flesh. It was solemn work dictated by the black-and-white laws of grief and peace. And they were glad for the chance to be tested, to play out the role handed down to them through blood memory. Even with their GPSs and their Bass Pro Shop Gore-Tex vests they felt a connection to this old work, and they were grateful for it.
As hard as it is to read the sermon where the Reverend desecrates Indigenous ways of knowing, passages describing the hunt, or aunties playing cards, or knowledge-keeper Ajean’s bawdy jokes, are a kind of medicine. In these moments, Dimaline skillfully reminds readers how beautiful her sentences are—yes—but also, how in her plots and characters, she weaves together past and now into a present—a way of living and a way to live. This is the work of Empire of Wild.
Jenny Ferguson is Métis, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice with a PhD. She believes writing and teaching are political acts. BORDER MARKERS, her collection of linked flash fiction narratives, is available from NeWest Press. She teaches at Loyola Marymount University and in the Opt-Res MFA Program at the University of British Columbia.