The Barren Grounds

Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Middle Grade | Published in 2020

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

Remembering Who You Are

One of the main themes that runs through The Barren Grounds is the importance of remembering who you are. Morgan’s initial anger stems partly from the fact that she does not know who she is, having spent most of her life in the foster system. When Katie and James gift her moccasins because they don’t want her to feel disconnected from her culture, they unwittingly touch this sore spot. Morgan doesn’t identify as Cree—not because she rejects her culture, but because she has never had the chance to experience it. She says, “I don’t even know my culture [...] Being a kid with no real home? With no real parents? Accepting the fact that there probably won’t be a three- or four-month anniversary with a cake and moccasins? That’s my culture” (52). At Morgan’s outburst, Eli disagrees, telling Morgan, “Who you are is still inside you” (52). Nevertheless, Morgan later tells Katie that, unlike Eli, she isn’t truly Indigenous: “He’s got himself figured out. […] Probably goes to ceremonies and all that. I don’t think I even want to be Indigenous. I grew up white, in all these white homes. I’m not Indigenous anymore” (75). To Morgan, Indigenous identity is at this point a matter of looking and acting like it.

In Misewa, Morgan dreams of a woman who is rocking a toddler and saying, “Kiskisitotaso”—a Cree word that Morgan doesn’t know. Morgan asks Eli what the word means, and Eli says, “In English, it means something like ‘Don’t forget about who you are’ or ‘Don’t forget yourself’” (92). This memory upsets Morgan, who feels her mother denied her this self-knowledge by giving her up. However, through her adventures, Morgan rediscovers a connection to her heritage through the land: “For the first time, she felt she knew something about herself that she’d long forgotten: she belonged in a place like this. She belonged on the land. She’d never felt more at home than during the days she’d spent on Askí” (191). Morgan hears her mother’s voice in this same passage, underscoring the connection between her Cree identity and having a respectful and protective relationship to the land. In the last dream of her mother, Morgan can talk to her and says, “I haven’t forgotten myself [...] I did, maybe, but I’ve found myself again” (240). Morgan had to journey through Misewa and the dreams of her mother to remember who she was. When she returns to Earth, she wears the moccasins her foster parents gave her, symbolizing her acceptance of her heritage.

Caring for the Earth

One of the other major themes of The Barren Grounds is the need to take care of the land. The importance of this emerges especially in Mason’s story, which illustrates what happens when humans do not respect nature and take more from it than they need to survive. Mason, the antagonist, believes he deserves to own the land and sees it as something that exists to serve him. This has harmful effects on both nature and Mason himself. Ochek explains that Mason not only drained the village’s resources in his desire to have more for himself but that he was also never satisfied once he started taking greedily from the land. The lesson is that the more people take from the earth, the more they will find themselves needing (or at least wanting); they will therefore never be content. Conversely, those who respect the land and only take what they need will find that the land will provide for them.

Ochek again illustrates the havoc humans have wreaked on nature when he sees that Mason has hunted so much that all the game is gone even from the Green Time: “[W]e don’t really have anything the land wants, [so] we honor it for what it gives us [...] When you take more than the land can provide, it stops giving. It can’t give. That’s what’s happened here. That’s what happens with humans” (190). Ochek here laments the harm humans have done to the land but also implicitly draws attention to the foolishness of such destruction; while humans might see nature as something merely to use, humans actually depend on nature for their own existence and thus hurt themselves when they exploit the land.

In the final confrontation with Mason, Morgan tries to figure out why he is so angry and why he took the summer birds away from everyone else. Morgan says Mason doesn’t deserve to have 12 months of warmth and that he should be content with five. Mason simply responds, “Who are you to say what I deserve?” (217). Mason’s belief that he deserves whatever he can take and his anger that anyone would dare to set limits on him is a dangerous and selfish attitude that has led him to wreak havoc on the ecosystem of Misewa.

Ochek gives a last reminder to take care of the land when he is turned into a constellation: “He will be in the sky forever, to remind all of the beings living on Askí of what lay in the past, the gift they have been given now, and what could happen again if the land, and all it has to lend, is not respected” (212). Because Ochek has sacrificed himself for the land, it is fitting that his story should serve as a warning to others of the havoc and destruction that follows when people don’t respect their environment.

Consequences of the White Savior Complex

As a story focusing on Cree experience, The Barren Grounds is critical of the damage wrought by “white saviors,” especially within the foster care system. Morgan doesn’t know her cultural identity because she has grown up in a system that doesn’t take her heritage into account. In Canada, there is a long history of First Nations children being taken from their parents to “civilize” them (i.e., assimilate them into white society); one dream Morgan has of leaving her mother implies that her own adoption was coercive. This attitude toward Indigenous culture has shaped Morgan’s experiences with white foster families, whom she describes as wanting to “be saviors for the poor Native kids” (45). Morgan understands that she has been trapped in a system that doesn’t seek to foster her culture or identity but rather to mold her to fit the dominant culture.

The longer Morgan stays with Katie and James, the more she recognizes that they aren’t exactly like other foster parents she has lived with. When they bring home takeout from an Indigenous restaurant, Morgan rethinks her opinion of them:

Mostly, they’d seemed to want to help, even if their attempts had been misguided. As Morgan had told Eli, Katie and James were trying to be saviors for the poor Native kids. […] But maybe she was wrong about them. Then again, maybe she wasn’t (45).

Morgan wants to change her opinion of Katie and James, but her experiences have made her cynical. Furthermore, as Morgan notes, Katie and James’s efforts are awkward and perhaps reflect a different kind of white saviorism—one that seeks to shoehorn Morgan into a particular vision of Indigenous identity, regardless of who she is as an individual. Their intentions are good, however, as Katie’s words make clear: “We’ve read that, as foster parents, we should try to expose you to your culture. […] We don’t want to make the same mistakes that have been made in the past” (52).

After the argument about the moccasins, Katie further explains that she respects Morgan as a “strong young woman” and says that she herself is “just one of those good-intentioned settlers” (74). The self-deprecation of the latter phrase demonstrates Katie’s recognition of her own privilege and how it might come across. Morgan in turn says she appreciates the efforts but doesn’t want to be treated differently: “Just treat me like I’m any other human girl, that’s it” (75). The conversation suggests that self-reflection and open dialogue can help people like Katie and James avoid falling into white saviorism when interacting with people of color.