Hunting by Stars Study Guide

Cherie Dimaline was raised in the Georgian Bay Métis Community of Ontario, where her family has strong genealogical connections to Indigenous people and European settlers. Dimaline’s maternal grandmother played a significant role in her upbringing, sharing stories that traced back to their Indigenous lineage and inspiring her granddaughter to become a writer. Dimaline has spent her adult life working in and for the Indigenous community, serving in various roles including director of a women’s center and museum curator. Dimaline’s first novel, Red Rooms (2007), won the award for Fiction Book of the Year at the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival. Since then, she has written several novels including her popular young-adult dystopian novel The Marrow Thieves (2017), which won the Kirkus Award for young adult literature, and its sequel Hunting by Stars (2021). Dimaline has also contributed to various anthologies including Mitêwâcimowina: Indigenous Science Fiction and Speculative Storytelling (2016) and An Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Our Anxiety (2023). She is the founding editor of Muskrat Magazine, an online publication centering Indigenous voices. In 2014, Dimaline was named Ontario’s Emerging Artist of the Year, and in 2015 she became the Toronto Library’s first Indigenous writer-in-residence. Though her Indigenous identity and community are central to her work, Dimaline is adamant that she cannot and does not speak for all Indigenous people. She lives in Toronto and is a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Council.

Dimaline’s imagined schools for harvesting Indigenous bone marrow draw heavily on the historical Canadian Indian residential school system of the 19th and 20th centuries. These government-funded and often church-run boarding schools sought to isolate Indigenous children from their families and culture of origin, thereby forcing them to assimilate into colonial Euro-Canadian culture. Although assimilation efforts of this nature date back to the 17th century when French missionaries established the colony of New France in North America, the school system gained momentum after the Indian Act of 1876, which redefined how the colonial Canadian government interacted with Indigenous people. In 1894, school attendance became compulsory, resulting in an estimated 150,000 children being taken from their families and forced to live in residential schools nationally. These students were often physically and sexually abused by teachers and administrators and suffered greatly from malnourishment. It is unknown how many children died in residential schools because records were destroyed, and their bodies were buried in unmarked graves. The last federally-funded school closed in 1997. In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada was established to uncover truths about the schools in an attempt to bring closure to countless families. In 2015, the TRC released a report concluding the residential school system was a cultural genocide.

As a sequel, Hunting by Stars (2021) continues the story Cherie Dimaline began telling in 2017’s The Marrow Thieves, which provides more context for Frenchie’s world and what his family has been through. Catherine Knutsson’s Shadows Cast by Stars (2012) imagines a similar dystopia in which the government hunts down aboriginal people to harvest their blood, which makes people immune to the Plague. For readers who enjoyed Dimaline’s incorporation of Indigenous culture in a futuristic world, Joseph Bruchac’s Killer of Enemies (2013) tells the story of a teenage Apache hunter doing what is necessary to survive in a world of augmented humans and genetically engineered monsters. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) by Ambelin Kwaymullina follows a character who, like Frenchie, is captured and coerced to betray her people, who are being systematically hunted by institutional forces. For a young adult novel featuring an Indigenous protagonist, Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter (2021) investigates similar themes of identity and community. The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir (2017), details the author’s life as a child sent to a government-funded school whose aim was the “aggressive assimilation” of Indigenous children into White society. In a similar vein, Bev Sellars’ memoir They Called Me Number One (2012) recounts her experiences in a church-run Canadian residential school and reflects on the lasting impact trauma inflicts on entire generations of people.