Paul Weiss's Reviews > Hunting by Stars

“I was in one of the new residential schools, …”

“… just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where they tried to kill the Indian in the child.”

HUNTING BY STARS, a sequel to THE MARROW THIEVES, posits a mid-21st century dystopian world, caused by the ravages of global climate warming, in which non-aboriginal white people have somehow lost the ability to dream. The scientific reasons for this devastating neurological deficit in white people and the fact that its cure rests in the bone marrow of aboriginal people are not explored. Nor are those explanations necessary for Dimaline’s story - aboriginal people are hunted down, their bone marrow is harvested, and the marrow donor is summarily killed. Aboriginal lives are meaningless and expendable in the drive to rescue whites from the plague and pandemic madness caused by the loss of dreaming. Even worse yet, with a terrifying program of indoctrination and brain-washing (in a manner much like Rick Yancey hypothesized for his extraterrestrial invasion in his young adult sci-fi novel, THE 5TH WAVE), some aboriginals, having been captured by the marauding whites, are absorbed and re-inserted into their communities as secret agents to assist with the “recruiting and harvesting” of healthy young aboriginals for their marrow.

The narrative stands, fully exposed in its naked reality, as an extended metaphor for the cultural and actual genocide of aboriginal people in Canada by the white non-native population, their government and its tools, the Roman Catholic and other Christian churches.

Highly recommended with the added hope that THE MARROW THIEVES and its sequel HUNTING BY STARS make it onto the curriculum for younger school readers. Perhaps if young readers, who are undoubtedly innocent of Canada’s past offenses, become shocked and angry, they will become adamant activists in the fight to ensure the problem is repaired and subsequently relegated to history. (Dare I say that we might hope to swell the ranks of the “woke”?) Like the first step in AA’s Twelve Step Program to recovery from alcoholism, the white community’s acknowledgement of the existence of this problem, as shameful and as embarrassing as it is (and note carefully that this is couched in the present tense), is the first necessary step to a meeting of the minds with aboriginal people, to the adoption of some of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to the elevation of aboriginal people to a recognized, important status in the future of a compassionate, tolerant, forward-thinking Canada.

Paul Weiss