The Berry Pickers

The focus in this final section is ultimately on Ruthie’s reunion with her family, and the novel ends with a depiction of the strength of Indigenous Family Bonds. However, in the initial chapters, Joe’s backstory comes to its completion, and readers witness more of his preoccupation with Grief and Guilt. Joe remains mired in unhappiness until the very end of his life, but ultimately finds peace with his family and through reconnecting with the newly discovered Ruthie.

Unbeknownst to him, Joe fathered a child with Cora. Although he intends to go home to help raise his young daughter Leah, he backs out at the last minute, sends her money instead, and drives to the berry fields in Maine that had been such a formative part of his youth. Joe is drawn to the very source of his trauma, and because he travels to the scene of Ruthie’s disappearance and Charlie’s murder as a way to avoid responsibility, the trip can be read as another coping mechanism. Joe is unable to fully heal, which speaks to the probable experience of generations of Indigenous peoples who were wounded so deeply that they too could not heal. So, while Joe admits to holding onto the past, the circumstances he faced are also unimaginable, with one missing sister and a brother whom he watched die. This, when combined with The Impact of Anti-Indigenous Racism, offers insight into Joe’s tormented character: Joe is the heart of the narrative, and he carries the wounds of his whole family to the point that they break him. Further, that he happens upon one of the men involved in his brother’s killing and punches him speaks to the persistence of his anger and grief: It has been many years since Charlie’s death, but he fills with rage when he recognizes the man who’d held Charlie down as his own brother hit him. Yet his time in Maine is not all bad. He returns to the cabin in which he and his mother stayed with young Ruthie, and over time, makes it not only livable but also beautiful. Here, in a remote cabin, like his sister, he is able to find a kind of peace, and it becomes a space of quiet, if not complete healing. This also furthers the twin stories of Ruthie and Joe, as neither can find peace without each other, and each wanders a lonely path until they reunite.

Interspersed with Joe’s story is that of Norma/Ruthie, who has found out that Lenore stole her. She is deeply angry with June, to whom she points out that she could have had a completely different life. She could have had siblings, and happiness, and freedom. She could have known her family and her culture. Here, the text returns to its initial descriptions of the residential school system: Although this is a story of strong, Indigenous Family Bonds and the Grief and Guilt that consume families as the result of tragedy, it is also a novel in dialogue with contemporary public discourse in Canada, and Ruthie’s kidnapping also becomes an allegorical representation of the thousands of children stolen from their families, raised in assimilationist settings, and taught to value white culture over their own Indigenous traditions. As dialogue around the issue of residential schools has progressed, there has been a linguistic shift, and where it used to be common to read about children having been placed in such institutions, they are now understood to have been stolen from their families, and the word is often used by survivors, writers, journalists, and Indigenous community members when describing the trauma of the residential school systems. Ruthie was a stolen child who lost her family and her culture, and although her situation is different, her story is meant to spark conversation about the residential school system and other Assimilationist Policies and the Loss of Culture. Further, in offering Ruthie an alternative narrative to other stolen children, Peters offers a painful irony in that Ruthie’s circumstances were far better than other stolen Indigenous children. She wasn’t overtly harmed; she was robbed of time, and she reunites with her family. In this sense, Ruthie’s ending is a happier one than many others, but it is also deeply tragic; this juxtaposition demonstrates that being kidnapped and raised by a white family would have been better than the fate that befell many real Indigenous children versus the fictional Ruthie. This reality is sobering, but the reunion of the family can also be read as an ode to the stolen children who were not given the same chance.

The novel’s final set of chapters tells the story of Ruthie’s reunion with her true family. Her deep bonds with both her mother and Joe are apparent, and she and her mother discuss the dreams, which she now understands to have been memories. She has been to the cabin that she stayed in as a girl, seen the care that Joe put into it during his renovations, and the space triggered a series of memories for her. She feels a closeness with her family that decades and cultures could not damage, and the ease with which she fits back into her real family structure speaks not only to the strength of Indigenous Family Bonds, but also to the possibility for Indigenous families and communities to heal from generations of assimilation, separations, and trauma. Indeed, that Peters chooses to end her novel on such a hopeful, bittersweet note clarifies the tone of the narrative, conveying a wish to approach Indigenous people and their stories with humanism, compassion, but also a recognition that they are characterized by strength and resilience.