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Author Reading & Discussion with Jessica Johns: Bad Cree
Author: Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. She is an interdisciplinary artist and award-winning writer whose debut novel, Bad Cree, was released in January 2023.
Bad Cree - Book Summary: When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.
Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too — a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams—and make them more dangerous.
What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina's death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?
Physical Location Details
- Building:
- *Irving K. Barber Learning Centre*
- Room:
- *301 Peña*
- Date:
- Friday, March 24, 2023
- Time:
- 12:00pm - 1:00pm
- Location:
- Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
- Audience:
- All
- Categories:
- Presentations Special Events
- Presenter(s):
- Jessica Johns
In December 2015 Daniel Heath Justice began a Twitter campaign to share the names of Indigenous writers. The reason for his efforts was to: “…push back against the frequent assumptions that our literary history is any less complex, robust, or diverse than that of other peoples (Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter?)
In solidarity with his efforts, in 2018 a group of interested individuals from the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program, UBC Library, and the Centre for Teaching and Learning Technology at the University of British Columbia came together to develop the first Honouring Indigenous Writers Wikipedia event. The purpose of the event was to increase awareness of Indigenous literature and improve the coverage of Indigenous writers on Wikipedia. Since then, the event has evolved to include author readings, panel discussions, and workshops with many partnerships from Canadian academic institutions and organizations.
To learn more: https://hiw.open.ubc.ca/