“the rougarou kept the community in its circle”: Review of Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild
Is there joy—and can one find it—within a spatial and psychological circle, an enclosure separating one from their loved ones?
Can sex make things better—be transformative—when the dual colonial assault of resource extraction and Christian conversion threatens one’s connection to their family and land? Award-winning author Cherie Dimaline’s newest novel, Empire of Wild, answers a resounding “yes” to both questions.Empire of Wild grips readers in its mouth. I feel warm yet on edge in the novel’s enclosure, in a narrative that suspends readers in the shadows of the plot, only to shake us out of the dark’s comfort with surprises, twists, and unexpected revelations. This thriller ambiance feels like an encounter with the novel’s werewolf, the Rougarou, who haunts the town of Arcand. Dimaline revisits Métis stories of the Rougarou, a part-human and part-wolf being that has been variously represented as a woman-wolf roaming the forests at night (if you consult Marie Campbell’s transcriptions of traditional Michif oral stories) or, according to Empire of Wild, a vicious man-dog who marks the perimeter of Indigenous communities and attacks anyone who steps out of bounds. In the town of Arcand, which is based on Dimaline’s childhood in Georgian Bay, the “bounds” that the Rougarou stalks are the literal borders of the community—borders that women and girls stay within for fear of meeting the Rougarou (read as sexual assault, kidnapping, and murder), as well as the boundaries of consent one must respect to avoid becoming the Rougarou (read as a warning to those who sexually assault women and girls). Storytellers alert the boys: “You’ll wake up with blood in your teeth, not knowing and no way to know what you’ve done” (4). Mentioned in whispers and cautions, the Rougarou is both a protective spirit and a coercive, surveilling presence. The novel traces the journey of a woman, Joan, who has encountered a Rougarou in her childhood. She now confronts another one in her desperate quest to find her missing husband, Victor, who left home one night after the couple fought and never returned. Her name, and the opening chapter’s title, “Joan of Arcand,” foreshadows her Joan of Arc-like fight for love, community, and reunion.
One morning, “deathly hung over” (25), Joan discovers a tent revival in a Walmart parking lot. She enters it to discover Victor, almost a year after he first disappeared. Adorned in an unfamiliar “black suit and grey fedora” (28), he now calls himself Reverend Eugene Wolff. He does not recognize her, but she follows the band of travelling evangelists that have claimed him with hopes of reviving his memories. While a few of the evangelist staff try to obstruct Joan’s encounters with Victor, none are as adamant and dangerous as Thomas Heiser, a CEO and Resource Development Specialist using the missionary networks to push for Indigenous signatures on a natural gas pipeline. Heiser is a synecdoche for the twinned operations of Christian conversion and environmental colonialism. Turning individuals away from land-based understandings of spirituality and community, the evangelical movement works to disconnect Indigenous ties to the land and thereby leave the land vulnerable to capitalist-colonial projects of resource extraction. The idea for this narrative came from an article Dimaline read about the New Apostolic Reformation group, a movement from the United States that embraces local cultures and elects local peoples to the clergy to “heal” and “transform” the community from the inside out. The article highlights the movement’s impact in the Canadian context, noting its disavowal of traditional Indigenous beliefs and spiritual epistemologies. The Christian God replaces land as the centre of spiritual life, thus stripping land of its significance and leaving it bare as a commodity to manipulate and consume. Dimaline pulls this contemporary reality into her story to discuss the complicated everyday politics of Métis life, economic struggle, and love. The novel’s backdrop bears witness to a pernicious brand of Indigenous revivalism that ties the converts to a Christian universalism. The Métis community is led to believe that colonial projects like the pipeline are a grace from God, something that will rescue them from poverty and restore economic health. The individual conversions have the potential to weaken the community’s sovereign spirit and convert their agency into a managerial tool for corporate-controlled resource extraction. In the novel’s foreground, Joan fights for her husband to return to her. Victor disappeared the night he and Joan argued about the land she had inherited from her father. He wanted to sell it, a betrayal that the town of Arcand would feel more deeply as the community has struggled to maintain their precarious, non-treaty place on Georgian Bay since they were first forced to settle there in 1828. Her journey, therefore, anticipates how Victor’s return can renew their collective commitment to land and its stewardship. She needs to bring him back inside the community circle. This focus on return signals the novel’s thematic emphasis on circles and circular movements. The image appears as early as the prologue’s description of the Rougarou: “the stories of the rougarou kept the community in its circle” (4). Here, “circle” refers to the “bounds” mentioned above—the borders of the town and boundaries of the Self—but also to the ones the Rougarou creates through his vigilant and menacing patrol: the concentric circles of enclosure that separate different characters from one another, most significantly Joan from Victor.
But in Empire of Wild, the bone salt reappears to draw its own circles against the Rougarou and the Christian colonial project that hides behind his growl.The Elders in Joan’s town suggest the way to break through these boundaries is by creating one’s own circles of protection. They refer to their community’s history of laying down circles with bone salt that “came from the actual bones of one particular Red River family, who drew their own boundaries when the hand of God did not reach down to do it for them” (2)—a history that Joan did not know. The power of the bone salt slowly faded from intergenerational memory through the settler-colonial assault. The salt’s protective barrier was instead replaced by cautionary stories of the Rougarou. But in Empire of Wild, the bone salt reappears to draw its own circles against the Rougarou and the Christian colonial project that hides behind his growl. One Elder, Ajean, alludes to what Joan needs to do once her battle circles are drawn: have sex with Victor. The novel’s erotic framing of Joan’s quest differentiates it from other thriller and speculative fictions and disrupts stereotypical expectations of Indigenous literatures and of Indigenous women. About to meet Victor, who still believes himself to be Reverend Eugene Wolff, Joan spends time getting ready in a motel bathroom as she prepares to evoke his memories of their passion:
Getting dressed with the anticipation of sex is a different experience than just getting dressed. She smoothed the lace band on her underwear against her hips so it was without a fold or wrinkle. She snapped her bra on the last hook, then reached into each cup to jiggle her boobs upwards so they sat together, making that nice line under her clavicles. She turned in front of the mirror to admire herself and then applied her makeup. It was exciting, after a year of mourning and regret, to be beautiful in panties and red lipstick. (106)This third person attention to Joan’s body is not a detached or omniscient narrator who fetishizes her sexuality. When the narrative attends to Joan’s perspective, it enters her thoughts and gives itself to her completely. In this passage, as Joan admires herself—the way the clothes hug her, how lipstick enhances her sensuality—the reader is invited into an intimate moment between an Indigenous woman and herself without the harmful clichés of hypersexualized and objectified Indigenous femininity. Even irrespective of the reader, the novel preserves a moment of love, care, trust, and eroticism for Joan to experience alone. Dimaline demonstrates that Indigenous femininity can express itself with an unapologetic honesty and pride in its passion. Further, Joan’s moment of self-care is not corrupted or rendered inauthentic by the fact that she is readying herself to meet Victor. Joan can both love herself and love her body for how it moves and dresses for her lover. These moments—intertwining being-for-oneself and being-for-others—produce a beautiful contemplation and practice of Indigenous beauty that is fast becoming an important characteristic of Dimaline’s work. Dimaline’s formal experiments are also provocative. The novel’s thematic concern with circles is mimicked by the circular movement of the narrative that anticipates Victor’s return, but the form does not ignore the messy moments in favour of a celebratory and triumphant story. Circles, according to Marilyn Dumont’s famous poem, “Circle the Wagons,” have become an essentializing trope for Indigenous cultures and literatures, a trope Empire of Wild tacitly subverts. Circles and circular stories constitute decolonial forms of writing against colonial linear narratives that pit settler progress against Indigenous traditionalism. However, the same structure can also serve the settler-colonial narrative by reducing Indigenous writing and experience to certain stereotypes. Dumont suggests sarcastically that if she were to write a linear plot, it “proves that I’m a ghost and that native culture really has vanished.” As in Dumont’s poem, Dimaline’s novel leads one to wonder if circles can perform their decolonial function when they have become so attached to a narrow and static idea of Indigeneity.
It is her spiralling that resists the Rougarou’s trail, that enables her to evade capture as she moves within and beyond colonialism’s geographical and psychological boundaries for Indigeneity.Joan’s chaotic, thwarted, and painful journey resists the heartwarming and optimistic representations of Indigenous recovery that assuage settler readers’ guilt and render Indigenous healing apolitical. In fact, Joan’s circular trajectory is closer to the unpredictable motions of a spiral: a spatial and psychological movement that resists easy closure and direction. It is her spiralling that resists the Rougarou’s trail, that enables her to evade capture as she moves within and beyond colonialism’s geographical and psychological boundaries for Indigeneity. Spiralling, she returns to the same wounds and pains but moves with them towards her spiritual history, family medicine, and her lover. When Joan first sees Victor as the Reverend, she is spiralling downward in a hungover, emotional, and vulnerable state that leaves her susceptible to Thomas Heiser’s manipulations. Judging Joan to be ill and hallucinatory, Heiser calls the ambulance to take her away from Victor. In a later recollection of the moment, Heiser thinks: “Way to live a stereotype, lady” (46). But instead of fearing the stereotypes for Indigenous women and constructing their photo negatives, Dimaline plays with the possibilities of cliché and creates a strong and complicated female character who pursues her love despite others’ judgements and labels. As such, there is no coherent idea of Indigeneity in Empire of Wild, except as it is lived, experienced, and dreamed by the characters. The novel manages to balance a mimetic representation of Indigenous realities under settler-colonialism and an imaginative leap into interweaving spirals of Indigenous beauty, love, family, myths, and stories that exist beyond coloniality.
A four-book deal with Penguin Random House extends Dimaline’s literary spotlight into a mainstream future, but she had already written herself—prolifically—into a rich Indigenous storytelling tradition: Empire of Wild is her third novel, following The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy (2013) and the award-winning The Marrow Thieves (2017), a young adult “wonder work” (a name for the genre that Daniel Heath Justice prefers to “Indigenous speculative fiction”); Gentle Habit (2016) is a collection of short stories, while her first prose work, Red Rooms (2007) is a novel of short stories. In an interview with Quill & Quire, Dimaline describes Lee Maracle as her “adopted auntie” and Marie Campbell as her adopted grandmother, a family woven through storytelling and memory work that inscribes her prose. The foundations of her writing, furthermore, are conceptualized from her memories of a childhood with her grandmother, mère Edna Dusome, who died in 2006. Dimaline pays homage to her mère’s influence by framing Empire of Wild with her voice in the epigraph: “Just shut up, you; and listen.” One could say that Dimaline is a good storyteller because she listened to her mère and continues to be a good listener. Her writing captures the cosmic complexities of worlds and character psychologies, of body-memories and everyday experiences, which bespeaks her porous relation to her worlds and histories. Perhaps mère Edna Dusome’s words also address the reader. Her words reach across space-time, from an intimate and instructive moment between herself and Dimaline to the reader who picks up the book, to declare that her granddaughter has something to say and we need to listen.
