Wren StrongEagle, an Indigenous artist with a thriving pottery business and a loving husband, lives in Qu’Apelle, Saskatchewan. She falls into depression after miscarrying her baby, also triggering her to truly process the past in which she was abused. Her twin sister, Raven, comes to visit her from Calgary, where she works as a lawyer. She speaks to Wren about an unsettling current case, a missing Blackfeet girl, which adds to the well-known situation of missing First Nation women and girls in Canada. They decide to distract themselves from the tragedy of the subject at a local pub, but by the end of the evening, Raven is gone.
Wren seeks help from the police, but she is quickly dismissed as most people think her twin sister simply left for a sexual affair. The plot unfolds as Wren loses her faith in the judicial system in Canada due to systemic racism, leading to frustration, anger, and sadness. In her quest for justice for her twin sister, she realises step by step that she is only one of the countless Indigenous family members experiencing the same grief and helplessness in the face of an ignorant system. The thriller takes its final turn to a haunting revenge story when Wren starts hunting down men who abused her and other Indigenous women and girls.
Bone Black has received a lot of very diverse critique. Especially mainstream reviewers criticise propagating self-justice and violence and thus putting Indigenous people in a negative light to the public. But in this specific case, we need to ask ourselves: isn’t there more to it?
Going back to the storyline, the very real and shameful Canadian history of abused, missing, and murdered women from First Nations is clearly the context used for the fiction. For three decades now, the Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, short MMIWG, is being recognised as an epidemic of social injustice and, since 2019, labelled as cultural genocide. Former governments refused to perceive the gravity of the situation and ignored protests and the cries for help of the grieving families. A leaked government report first drew attention to the issue at hand and a final report of the National Inquiry into MMIWG, also including 2SLGBTQQIA* people, proves that the starting point lies indeed in colonial ideologies and deeply rooted racism and sexism, a matter that still needs collective processing in Canada. Justin Trudeau and the Liberals have advocated for thorough state-commissioned research on the extent of the murders and disappearances in their campaign – a fundamental step to the beginning of the fight against these crimes – but due to the Covid crisis, action plans awaited in June this year have been postponed. Most importantly, the current news emphasise the fact that the MMIWG issue is only starting to become visible to the mainstream public; that it has not been given enough attention for a painfully long time. Statistics show that Indigenous women, girls and the 2SLGBTQQIA community are 12 times more likely to be kidnapped or killed than the rest of the female population, and still a remarkably large number of family members report authorities blaming all on the victims themselves being alcoholised or simply runaways.
Let’s conclude with a thought experiment and imagine ourselves grieving for a loved one, not knowing if they are alive, and being faced with authorities who respond with disbelief and no intention to take action instead of help. How else can we feel but desperate, frustrated and angry, especially knowing crimes like these have been happening for so long? This is the key to understanding Wren’s character and the dark turn the novel takes.
The author, a Cree woman herself, explains she was inspired to write about MMIWG when she learned about a 15-year girl found dead in the Winnipeg river in 2014. She realised it could have been her own daughter and created Wren on the basis of that feeling: the feeling of all being too much. Wren is an Indigenous woman who shares the dreadful fate of so many people and realises the scale of the femicidal crimes, a woman who has been repeatedly left behind by the system and, in her despair, decides to raise her voice by doing what she thinks is right by the people who have been preyed on for years.
Personally, I understand this dark perspective as a wake-up call. The story of MMIWG is being brought to the public with impressive power due to a thrilling narrative and the rough illustration of a reality many of the readers need to become aware of. Systemic racism is one of the biggest challenges of many governments at the moment, as the Black Lives Matter movement and numerous other protests around the globe prove. The first step towards racial and gender equality is to raise awareness of problems such as the MMIWG and truly listen to what victims of oppression have to say.
Wren holds up a mirror to the despair of many Indigenous women*; she is the personification of a psychological and emotional world rather than the illustration of a specific person. Her story does not advocate violence but symbolises the gravity of the issue and to what extent traumatic experiences torment human beings. At the same time, her character suggests empowerment, as she does not accept being silenced by authorities or her traumatic experiences. Bone Black, whose title by the way is also the term for a glazing technique in pottery, gives an important impulse to find a real, satisfactory solution to address justice for past and prevention of future crimes.
And, from a more pragmatic point of view, the exhilarating plot with a mythical Indigenous nuance does make a good read for thriller literature fans.
- 2SLGBTQQIA: two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual
Sources:
GOLDENEAGLE, C. R. (2019). BONE BLACK. Canada: NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS.
MARTIN, A. (2019, October 3). GoldenEagle’s new novel a vengeful twist on Missing and Murdered issue. Regina Leader-Post. URL: https://leaderpost.com/entertainment/local-arts/goldeneagles-new-novel-a-vengeful-twist-on-missing-and-murdered-issue (accessed on 02.10.2020)
NATIONAL INQUIRY into MMIWG (2019). RECLAIMING POWER AND PLACE: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Vol. 1a and 1b. Canada. URLs:
https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1a-1.pdf (accessed on 03.10.2010)
https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1b.pdf (accessed on 03.10.2020)
MORIN, B. (2020, September 7). Indigenous women are preyed on at horrifying rates. I was one of them. The Guardian. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/07/canada-indigenous-women-and-girls-missing (accessed 30.09.2020)
