Hunting by Stars

Written by Cherie Dimaline in 2021, Hunting By Stars is the second installment in the young adult Marrow Thieves series, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world where Indigenous people are being hunted for their bone marrow. With climate change and a devastating plague robbing settlers of their ability to dream, the settlers have decided that the cure lies in the marrow of Indigenous people. In Hunting by Stars, 17-year-old French is stolen from his found family by greedy government agents and taken to a place where his marrow will be harvested. As the resourceful survivalist French, his brave girlfriend Rose, and the rest of his family struggle to survive, the novel traces the group’s increasingly dangerous journey to find each other while fighting a system that treats even the babies of Indigenous families as mere fuel. Part dystopian thriller and part critique of colonial violence against Indigenous people, the novel cuts across genres to paint a future that requires young people to take drastic action to save the earth.

Dimaline is a Métis writer from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation in Ontario, Canada, a community that is linked with the earliest First Nations Indigenous peoples and with European settlers. Dimaline draws on traditional Métis stories and the spiritual traditions and lore of First Nations and Indigenous communities to enrich the world of Hunting by Stars. In addition to the award-winning Marrow Thieves series, she is also the author of Red Rooms (2007) and the short-story collection Seven Gifts for Cedar (2010. The Marrow Thieves (2017) won the Kirkus Prize and the Governor-General’s Award for English language children’s literature. Dimaline did not originally intend to write a sequel to The Marrow Thieves, but she changed her mind when young fans in reservations and schools demanded to know more about the characters. On its release in 2021, Hunting by Stars was met with popular and critical acclaim and became a 2022 American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book.

This guide refers to the Jacaranda Books Great Britain 2022 Kindle edition.

A Note on Wording: On some occasions, Indigenous characters refer to themselves or their companions as “Indians”; when necessary, this guide addresses and analyzes direct quotations that feature this term. At times, the novel refers to Indigenous peoples as “Natives.”

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide include depictions of imprisonment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, violence, torture, racism, murder, and attempted infanticide.

Plot Summary

In the novel’s post-apocalyptic universe, the world has been ravaged by climate change and a terrible plague, one of the permanent symptoms of which is the loss of the ability to dream. Unable to dream, plague-sufferers lapse into physical and mental decay. Because Native people are largely immune to the plague, a belief spreads that their bone marrow has curative properties, leading to widespread hunts against them. Native people are forced to leave their homes and reservations and live in hiding in the wild, constantly on the watch for government recruiters who want to capture them and extract their marrow. At the start of the novel, 17-year-old French is traveling with his found family, which includes Miigwans, Rose, Wab, Chi Boy, Tree and Zheegwon. Suddenly, he is stolen by recruiters and taken to a former residential school that has been converted into a marrow extraction facility. Once there, French encounters Mitch, his long-lost biological brother. To his horror, French discovers that Mitch, who gave himself up to save French from recruiters when they were children, has since been converted to a government agent. When Mitch suggests that French could be saved from marrow extraction if he joins the agent training program, French pretends to acquiesce in order to gain an opportunity to escape. French’s pretense requires him to oversee patients scheduled for extraction and forces him into impossible choices, such as handing a rebellious resident over to the guards. French’s success in the program leads to his next mission, and he and Mitch are ordered to infiltrate French’s family and facilitate their capture. Based on intelligence, the Recruiters drop French and Mitch close to where French’s family is supposedly located.

The narrative shifts to the perspective of French’s family after French is stolen. At the family’s camp, the members await intel about French so that they can rescue him. Rose, who is in love with French, is impatient with the waiting, so she secretly leaves to find him. She is accompanied by Derrick, a new member of the family, who is infatuated with her. The family intends to follow Rose as soon as they learn the name of the facility where French has been taken. However, when two sympathetic nurses bring the news that Recruiters are now targeting pregnant women and newborns, the family decides to move south to the United States to protect Wab, who is due to give birth soon. They leave instructions for Rose with another family in their camp and begin their migration. On the way, they discover French and Mitch. French tells the family that he has been looking for them for days. When he learns that Rose is missing, French wants to look for her, but Mitch contends that this would jeopardize their mission. As the family heads closer to their destination, a train station near the United States border, Mitch turns on his tracker so that he can reveal the group’s location to the Recruiters. To save his family, French makes another impossible choice and kills Mitch in the forest.

Meanwhile, Rose and Derrick close in on the school where they believe that French is being held, but they meet two nurses in the woods who ask them to turn back. The nurses are part of a network of sympathetic non-Indigenous people who help Indigenous people to escape Recruiters. When the nurses tell Rose that French has become an agent, Rose is shattered. Derrick asks Rose to stay with him, but she chooses to search for French and the family instead.

Meanwhile, French’s family members reach their destination and hide in cargo boxes in the train, which will take them to Albany, New York. Their journey is rudely interrupted when the Mothers of Meaningful Slumber (MOMS), a group of mothers-turned-vigilantes, stops the train and abducts them. Because the United States has banned marrow harvesting, the women have taken the law into their own hands to kidnap Native people and extract their serum to help their plague-struck children. The MOMS take the family to a shed and cruelly chain them in crates and boxes. The MOMS then make contact with the Canadian government so that the government will offer them asylum and free access to marrow in return for the prisoners. Agent Mellin heads to Albany to collect the prisoners. In the shed, Wab goes into labor and delivers a baby whom she names Ishkode. Tree and Zheegwon figure out a way to break out of their chains. As the MOMS enter the shed, a fight breaks out between the captives and the women. One of the MOMS is about to shoot French when a mysterious figure in black shoots her instead. The figure is revealed to be Rose. She helps to free the group, and they escape, but Tre, Zheegwon, and a nurse are lost in the fight. As the novel ends, French and Rose reunite, and the family makes their way to the American plains. Although dangers still abound, Rose has hope for a renewed future in the form of Ishkode, a girl she predicts will make herself heard.