Bad Cree

Here’s the story we’re going to walk through together. Mackenzie, a Cree woman living alone in Vancouver, keeps waking from brutal winter dreams with proof still on her palms—pine needles, the scent of frozen air, and once, the bloody head of a crow. Crows begin to follow her in daylight. In those dreams she sees her older sister Sabrina, already dead in waking life, surrounded by crows in a snow-laced clearing, a wound carved near her heart. The dreams don’t feel like symbols anymore. They feel like messages.

Mack wants to tough it out. But her friend Joli, her cousin Kassidy, and her Auntie Doreen all say the same thing: go home. Go to High Prairie. And when Mack does, the house holds everything—love, noise, auntie laughter, and the ache of who’s missing. Mack and her twin sister Tracey aren’t on steady ground. Neither is their mom, Loretta. Beneath the joking and the card games is a tight, honest truth: their grief never found a place to rest.

So we sit with Mack while she stumbles back through memory, back to the lake where their kokum taught them plants and time and how to count distance in “High Prairie minutes.” And we learn with her that the dreams are not only memories, but warnings—of a wheetigo shapeshifter that feeds on the wounded and hides in plain sight. The crows know it. Their medicine is to gather and tear at the monster’s frozen heart.

This is a story about sisters, aunties, and the kind of love that won’t stop showing up even when it’s scared. It’s about a city apartment that won’t quiet down, a bar called the Stardust, and a kitchen where grief meets bannock dough. But mostly, it’s about a young woman deciding she won’t let the bad devour what’s still alive in her family. She gathers her people, follows the crows, and walks straight into the woods.

• Listeners who love literary fiction threaded with Indigenous horror and family warmth
• Anyone navigating grief who wants a story about community-led healing
• Fans of grounded supernatural tales where land and kinship drive the plot

Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw (Cree), English, and Irish writer and interdisciplinary artist from Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory, Northern Alberta. An award-winning author and proud auntie, she brings Cree worldview, humor, and fierce love of family and land to every page.