‘The Berry Pickers’ by Amanda Peters

Fiction – paperback; Fig Tree; 304 pages; 2023.

In Australia, state-sponsored programs forcibly removed generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities in what we now call the Stolen Generations.

This shameful separation of children severed significant cultural, spiritual and familial bonds, and caused long-lasting intergenerational trauma, which First Nations people are still dealing with today.

I was reminded of this when I read Amanda Peters’ debut novel The Berry Pickers. Even though the book is Canadian, it explores what happens when Indigenous families are torn apart and disconnected from their culture.

Missing girl

The story begins in 1962 and is framed around a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia who cross the border and decamp to Maine every summer to pick blueberries for the season.

One hot day, four-year-old Ruthie, the youngest child of five, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, was the last person to see her. He left her sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields while he went off to skip stones on a nearby lake, but when he returned, his beloved sister was nowhere to be seen.

A frantic search yields no clue as to where she might have gone. The police, when informed, are disinterested, telling Ruthie’s distraught parents: “If you were so concerned about the girl, you’d have taken better notice.”

Ruthie is never found. Instead, she’s raised by a privileged white family as one of their own under a new name — “Norma” — and knows nothing of her earlier life.

Two perspectives

The book is divided into two separate narrative threads, told in alternate chapters from Joe’s and Norma’s points of view.

Joe’s storyline is told retrospectively, as he looks back on the formative experiences of his life: the loss of his sister; the brutal bashing of his older brother, who dies from his wounds; a serious accident that leaves him disabled; and the love of a good wife, whom he eventually commits an unforgivable act of violence on.

For much of his adult life, he has drifted from place to place and cut himself off from everyone he knows, including his daughter, and is beset by all-consuming rage and grief and guilt. He’s now dying of cancer and is being cared for by his two elder siblings, Mae and Ben, with whom he’s recently been reunited.

Norma’s storyline is told in chronological order as she grapples with an overbearing, overprotective mother and an emotionally distant father. She’s a bright child, with an enquiring mind, but something isn’t quite right.

In the early days, she’s plagued by “dreams” of another mother and a sibling — which are clearly, unbeknownst to her, memories of her Mi’kmaq family — and as she gets older she’s puzzled as to why her skin is darker than her parents. This anomaly is spirited away with explanations that she’s a “throwback” to her Italian grandfather. But even when she grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher and gets married, there’s always a niggling feeling in the back of her mind that her past doesn’t add up.

Poignant tale

Right from the start, it’s obvious these two storylines are going to converge in some way, so this isn’t a novel that offers up a mystery in need of being solved (although exactly how Ruthie came to live with her white family **is** intriguing). Instead, the author is focused on showing us two sides of the one coin: what happens to the family left behind when a beloved child goes missing, and what happens to the missing child if they are raised with no knowledge of their biological family?

By adopting this approach, Peters, who is of Mi’kmaq heritage, is able to explore the repercussions on a First Nations family when the police fail to treat the disappearance of an Indigenous child with the seriousness it deserves, and she’s also able to show how a young person’s identity is impacted when they are uprooted from their culture.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s well-plotted, fast-paced and suspenseful. The characters are wonderfully realised (Norma’s Aunt June is a standout) and the individual voices of the two protagonists are distinct so there’s never any doubt whose perspective is being told. Peters also writes beautiful descriptions of landscapes, people and places.

This is a poignant and heartfelt story about racism, grief, guilt, betrayal, hope, curiosity, love — and the pull of family.

I read this book for my #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which focuses on literature by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but may occasionally include First Nations writers from other parts of the world. In this instance, the First Nations writer is from Nova Scotia, Canada. Amanda Peters is of mixed European and Mi’kmaq heritage and belongs to the Glooscap First Nation.

You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page.