The Berry Pickers

The strength of Indigenous family bonds is another key theme within this text. This is especially important given the way that genocide, assimilationist governmental policy, and generational trauma have cut through Indigenous families since colonization, and it should be noted that Peters chooses not only to depict the enduring resilience of this particular family of characters, but also to end her narrative on a hopeful note. Part of Peters’s larger point within this text is that cultural knowledge can be regained and Indigenous families can heal from trauma, and both of those processes are possible only within the space of strong families.

One of the first scenes in which the tightly knit nature of Ruthie’s family is on display is the moment when Lewis pulls his children out of their residential school. He recognizes the damage that such places can do, and also understands that the best place for a child is with their family. Later, after Ruthie’s abduction, he threatens the “Indian agent” with a gun when the man informs Lewis that because he “lost” his daughter, he intends to remove the rest of the children from their home. Again, he is certain that the best place for his children is their home. The Indigenous family can thus be observed to be imperiled in multiple places within this narrative: residential schools, the kidnapping of Ruthie, and the intended removal of Ben, Charlie, Joe, and Mae from their home.

In part because she loses Ruthie and then Charlie, the mother, already a loving caregiver, becomes even more devoted to her husband and children as the narrative progresses. Readers never see her in any context other than as a parent, and her entire identity is thus tied to family and caregiving. Although her children do grow up and move out, at various points in time, they also return home, and readers learn that “Mom still treated the coming home of her children as a sacred thing, a holy event” (119-20). When Joe returns home, Mae also moves back in to care for him, and together with their mother and father (until his passing) they re-form the nuclear family of their childhood.

Ruthie, as Norma, grows up removed from her real family, and recalls how often she wished that she had siblings. When she finds out that she does, in fact, have siblings, she too returns home, and the novel ends with Norma/Ruthie seamlessly fitting back into her birth family. The bonds that she shares with them have proven to be unbreakable, for even after a lifetime apart, she finds that she feels more at home with her true family than she ever did with her other mother and father. The conclusion of this narrative focuses so intently on the reconstituted, healing Indigenous family, offering a profound statement of hope, and an argument that it is possible for such families to heal from generational trauma.

Moments of anti-Indigenous racism abound within this narrative, and the bulk of the prejudice depicted is verbal abuse. This is a form of casual, interpersonal racism that the Indigenous characters in The Berry Pickers deal with on a daily basis, and while none of the slurs lead to violence, the language is none the less dehumanizing, and the larger point behind the inclusion of so many moments of casual racism and stereotyping is that it becomes easier, on a societal level, to commit crimes against a particular group of people when they have been successfully dehumanized, and that dehumanization often happens through throwaway comments that the speaker does not put much thought into. The “Indian agent” who first objects to Lewis removing his children from the residential school and later comes to remove the children from their home after Ruthie is stolen writes that the purpose of placing Indigenous children into boarding schools is to turn them into “proper contributing citizens” (10). The implication here is that, on their own, Indigenous peoples are not contributing members of society, and they need to be immersed in white culture (and punished for their missteps) in order to become “real” citizens. Mr. Ellis, the owner of the berry fields, comments on the lightness of Ruthie’s skin in comparison with the rest of her family, and he sees this as a positive attribute, one that will make her life easier as she ages. When Mae gets older, she works at a taxi stand, “selling French-fried potatoes and hamburgers to men who called her ‘squaw’ [which is a deeply offensive word] and laughed” (118). The men in question were not looking to hurt Mae physically or even subject her to a lengthy stream of verbal abuse. Their slur was a comment made in an off-hand way, meant to show that they were on the entitled side of a power imbalance. Yet these small acts of everyday racism become part of a larger, societal project of dehumanization, and that it is so widely accepted to speak disparagingly about Indigenous peoples becomes the basis for a structural racism that, based on the idea of Indigenous inferiority, attempts to subjugate Indigenous populations and limit their access to high-quality healthcare, education, jobs, and housing.

The way that casual racism becomes systemic oppression is also evident in the way that Norma understands race and Indigenous identity. Norma “only knew Indians from middle school textbooks and appearances on television. In my narrow understanding, the entire history and existence of Indians comprised war-hungry savages, medicine men, and Pocahantas” (101). This statement is interesting in part because it models the way that true understanding is masked by racist preconceptions and stereotypes: For many white Canadians who do not personally know Indigenous individuals, their knowledge of Indigenous identity and culture is filtered through institutions like the media and through one another’s ideas about race and identity, many of which are markedly biased. Norma’s lack of knowledge about Indigenous culture is also a metaphor for the way that assimilation strips self-knowledge from Indigenous individuals, particularly stolen children like the myriad Indigenous young people sent to life in boarding schools, and like Ruthie herself.