Tommy Orange, whose novel “ There There” was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, said the growing prominence of Native authors in genre fiction is long overdue. Dillon, a professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program at Portland State University, who edited “Walking the Clouds,” an anthology of Indigenous science fiction published in 2012. “There’s so much variety and so much experimentation,” said Grace L. That flash of inspiration turned into “ Empire of Wild,” a genre-bending novel whose modern Indigenous characters confront environmental degradation, discrimination and the threat of cultural erasure, all while battling a devious monster. She needed a charismatic villain, and when the rogarou - a wily trickster figure in Métis oral traditions - popped into her head, she realized the creature had never been given its due in popular culture. “They would say, ‘The rogarou’s out, and he’s really hungry.’”ĭecades later, Dimaline, a member of the Métis Nation in Canada, was working on a novel about a woman whose missing husband reappears with no memory of her, seemingly under a spell. “This wasn’t like, here’s a metaphor,” she said. It wasn’t spoken of as a mythical creature but as an actual threat, the embodiment of danger in a place where Indigenous women face heightened risk of violence. When Cherie Dimaline was growing up near Penetanguishene, a small town on the Georgian Bay in Ontario, her grandmother and great-aunts told her stories about a werewolf-like monster called the rogarou.

The marrow thieves pages