This is based on a short story I've written that I would like to maybe expand. In this book, we braid together two stories. On a rainy June morning, two babies were born in Nunavut. Rebecca Kamookak and a caribou. The caribou face the wild getting less and less wild and Rebekah faces generational poverty. She also grows up hearing stories from her grandfather, stories of gods, monsters, and heroes, but intermixed with these, are horror stories of his own life. He tells her about the residential school that he survived and an orphaned caribou that he raised and the wolves that k*lled him. He tells her that even though he'd known he'd hated the residential school, there was something about that caribou dying that let him realize how much it had destroyed him. It was the first death he was properly allowed to mourn. And he fought to remember his ways, remember his language. But it still affects him to this day and as he gets older it gets worse, he remembers his trauma a little better and he takes it out on his family a little more. Rebecca becomes determined to escape generational poverty and fight for human rights for the Inuit. The first bit of the story follows her through difficult jobs, her journey through university, and the racism she faces. In the same herd mentioned before a caribou loses calf after calf as the wild is destroyed. The story follows Rebecca as she fights for the wild and the deer realize just how dependent on humans they are. The story is full of rage and bitterness and a campaign is made to "save Santa's reindeer" all while this is woven in with Rebecca's grandfathers memories of residential school and the people who did not fight to save him and all the other children. In the future, children in a more sustainable Canada are at a museum learning about the time when the caribou population was nearly extinct, a situation that seems unimaginable and how humans fought to save them. There's some pointed commentary from the narrator speaking as a mother caribou about how they shouldn't have had to rely on humans, but since they did it was good that they matched their aesthetic and were worthy of saving. There's a list of all the animals that ended up going extinct. Although the Santa metaphor serves to show just how random some people are about who is worthy of helping, but Rebecca and her colleagues really have to fight against logging companies and oil companies. A friend of Rebecca's tracks the caribou migration and the illegal things being done by the oil companies, which totally isn't related to his very suspicious accidental death. Periodically the story goes back to those children of the future, reminding them of their duty not to become soft. To always know that it is their job to fight for the planet and for everyone who lives there. I guess I don't fully know a lot about this story and who the characters are exactly. A lot of it is an allegory for the ignored atrocities of the world. But still it's also the stories of these particular characters. It's based on the recent history of residential schools, but it's also imaginative of an awful future but a future that we can fight and the outcome we might get if that fight goes well. The caribou will never truly win, and there are hints of a loss of autonomy and the pain of never being able to be independent, but healthy calves are being born..and they are thriving.
