Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
CBC Books | Posted: January 9, 2023 7:15 PM | Last Updated: July 8
A novel about an Indigenous character's attempt to reconnect with their land and culture
When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.
Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too — a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina — Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams — and make them more dangerous.
What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina's death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?
(From HarperCollins Canada)
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Jessica Johns is a Edmonton-based writer, visual artist and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 Territory in northern Alberta. Johns won the 2020 Writers' Trust Journey Prize for the short story Bad Cree, which evolved into the novel of the same name.
Jessica Johns on the inspiration behind Bad Cree
"I really wanted to represent, in this novel, the important relationships that aunties have had in my life."
I really wanted to represent, in this novel, the important relationships that aunties have had in my life. - Jessica Johns
"And the aunties in the novel are a mishmash of all of my aunties in small ways and one of the things that I wanted to do was also kind of subvert this idea of the 'all-knowing' native person. That's kind of funny to me because all of the brilliant people in my life, all of the Indigenous people who are so, so brilliant are also very human and flawed and complex."