Review: Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom

 

Set primarily in the 1870s and 1880s, Kathleen Grissom's novel Crow Mary is a fictionalized look at the very real Cypress Hills Massacre that occurred in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the spring of 1873. The ambush caught a small tribal group of Nakodas completely by surprise, and the ensuing slaughter of forty innocent men, women, and children forever changed the lives of Crow Mary and her white trading-post-owner husband who witnessed the whole thing. 

Once the drunken massacre is underway, it is impossible for anyone to stop it without being themselves killed. But after Mary witnesses five female survivors being taken inside the camp of the men who killed their families, she knows that she will either rescue them or die trying. After her husband forbids her to approach the camp, Mary knows that she - and her two pistols - will be doing it all alone. So she does. 

The novel begins with a short foreword written by Nedra Farwell Brown, a great-granddaughter of Crow Mary herself. Brown is understandably proud that her grandmother's story is finally being celebrated this way, and says this about Crow Mary: 

"My great-grandmother, Goes First, who became known as Crow Mary, was a beautiful, strong young woman who married a white man she did not know. That she faced this world with such bravery makes me proud to think that I carry her blood."

Crow Mary explores a period during which the native population on both sides of this country's northern border were being pushed into ever shrinking reservations and denied the ability to feed and clothe their families in the manner their ancestors had done the job for countless generations. They were told that they could no longer hunt outside the arbitrary boundaries of their new "reservations," and that  the government would supply them with the food they needed if it was not available to them within those boundaries. The politicians wanted to turn them all into subsistence farmers and cattle ranchers. But as it turns out, that would lead to the bloody fighting that marked the rest of the decade. 

Crow Mary and Abe Farwell tried to put things right after the Cypress Hills Massacre, testifying in trials on both sides of the border against the men who participated in the slaughter. Sadly, the chief result of their efforts was a lifetime of denunciation and hatred directed toward Farwell as being nothing but a traitor to his race; no convictions of the killers were handed down by either of the biased juries. Crow Mary is as much Abe's story as it is Mary's even though Abe suffered in a whole different way than his wife.

Readers interested in the history of this period will, I think, come away from Crow Mary with a clearer understanding of what a clash of cultures this all really was, and how tragically misguided and callus those in charge of policy were. Sadly, it all seems so inevitable, even in retrospect, that it triggers my general feeling of pessimism about the human race...are we any better today, really?