The Berry Pickers

Content Warning: The source text contains descriptions of violence, domestic violence, racism, substance use disorder, miscarriage, and outdated terminology for Indigenous and First Nations peoples.

Norma has dreams in which she can smell a campfire and cooking potatoes, and she sees shadowy figures, including a woman whom she is sure is her mother, but who does not resemble her own mother, Lenore. The sights, sounds, and smells in these dreams are profoundly evocative, but as a child she struggles to understand their meaning. She wakes from them sobbing, and her grief is so immense that her mother and Aunt June arrange for her to speak with a therapist. She draws images from these dreams in the journals provided to her by the therapist, and there too she finds herself drawn to shapes, forms, and pictures that seem so familiar, but yet so strange. Although the dreams fade as Norma ages, they return at various points in her life, and there are times when she thinks, even during waking moments, that she can smell smoke from a campfire and potatoes cooking.

When she finally meets her mother, she realizes that these were not dreams, but memories. Stunned, she tells her mother: “I thought I’d made it all up, that you were a dream” (286). Her mother explains that this must have been the only way that her youthful brain could hold onto memories of her real family.

These dreams are a motif within the text, because, although they appear more frequently during her childhood, she returns to them periodically, and they, along with the unhappiness in her parents’ home and the physical dissimilarities between Norma and her parents, become part of what leads her to believe that something is not quite right about her family. These dreams finally allow her to understand the depth of the connection to the family from whom she was stolen by Lenore. They speak to the importance of Indigenous Family Bonds within the narrative. They are really memories, pieces of self-knowledge which remain just beyond her grasp, and they also represent this text’s interest in the loss of First Nationals cultural knowledge that happens as a result of assimilation. Norma being kidnapped as a child and raised in a white family where she does not have access to traditional cultural knowledge or identification is a metaphor for the way that First Nations peoples have lost pieces of culture and language during the years since colonization, and particularly as a result of the assimilationist policies of the Canadian government.