Empire of Wild

The theme of Identity Through Community and Connection appears again in these chapters. The additional context around Victor’s disappearance reveals that his transformation and loss of identity are rooted in a moment when he betrayed Joan and also his own identity. Joan’s land symbolizes her connection to her lineage, community, and family traditions; she inherited it from her father, which reveals how other aspects of her identity also come from a history of traditions being handed down through generations.

The land also symbolizes how Joan finds peace when she is reminded of her connection to the natural world; as she reflects, “the place reminded her who she was” (72, emphasis added). This quotation reveals why Joan is so attached to the land and so horrified at Victor’s suggestion that they sell it. After he makes this suggestion, she laments to him, “[I]t’s like you don’t know me at all. That makes me feel really lonely” (73).

Victor’s proposal represents a betrayal of his commitment to being a partner who shares Joan’s values and hopes, foreshadowing the later revelation that he has become a rogarou. According to folklore, men become rogarou when they harm or betray women, often through acts of betrayal or sexual violence. Victor’s proposal to sell the land is not as outright harmful as those actions, but it reflects that he does have the capacity to be selfish and abandon deep-rooted values for more short-term gain.

It also raises the issue of Exploitation Versus Respect for Land. Victor’s willingness to consider selling the land has been foreshadowed by Junior’s willingness to consider working in the mines: In both cases, men consider pursuing personal gain are rebuked by women, suggesting that women carry a special responsibility for safeguarding cultural traditions in Indigenous communities. Tellingly, it is also revealed that Victor “didn’t grow up in community” (84), which hints that he might lack the sense of history and connection that Joan feels in her hometown and to the surrounding natural world.

The story of Joan’s encounter with the rogarou as a young girl reveals why she, unlike some of her family members, can readily believe that supernatural forces are influencing Victor and that Heiser might be a rogarou. Significantly, Joan’s encounter occurred when she was 13 and transitioning from being a child to becoming more mature. Puberty and her burgeoning sexuality expose her to potential risks, which the older generation of women recognize when they think that “these kinds of changes caused them new concerns, and they needed new ways to keep her safe” (75). Joan’s encounter with some sort of large wolf figure coincides with an encounter in which a man looks at her with “his lips curled into a cruel smile” (79), conflating the potentially predatory figure of the rogarou with the equally sinister threat of human men who might rape or kill her. While Joan always looks back on this encounter with terror, it actually serves to keep her safe since she “avoided that side road as much as she could. She feared men in unknown cars” (80).

While Joan’s body and sexuality can render her vulnerable, they also give her a form of power that she tries to harness in order to remind Victor of his true identity. Joan intuitively senses that reminding Victor of his desire for her will help to break the spell he is under. By doing so, she inverts the traditional Western archetype of the seductive female temptress because she is using sexuality to bring Victor back to himself, rather than lure him astray. When Joan recounts a story of a charged sexual encounter between herself and Victor, she “pu[lls] the memory out into the night like a siren song” (95). The sirens were figures in Greek mythology, who, embodied as beautiful women, lured men to their death, but Joan is actually striving to give Victor a rebirth.

The presentation of sexuality as a positive source of power also reflects a rejection of colonialist and repressive social norms: Before European contact, some Indigenous societies permitted women considerably more autonomy and sexual freedom than Christian norms permitted. When Victor lost his identity, he also lost contact with his sexuality. Joan’s attempts to seduce Victor also reveal that he can only find his way back to himself through connection and contact with others. Victor needs to remember who he is, which is a man who takes deep pleasure in living in communion with the woman he loves.

The episode in which Joan and Zeus watch Victor preach to an audience of primarily Indigenous people reveals how insidiously Victor is being manipulated, reflecting the Damaging Effects of Religious Indoctrination. Victor criticizes traditional Indigenous spiritual beliefs and implies that clinging to those beliefs is what has led to suffering and social oppression: “[W]hy are our youth dying, our men in prisons at such a high rate, our women being murdered and going missing? We are paying for the sins of our fathers” (120).

This argument is cruelly ironic because, in fact, Christian and Western systems of belief played a role in many of the social problems that have afflicted Indigenous communities under colonialism. Forced efforts at conversion, the separation of children from their families, and high rates of abuse (often at the hands of priests and nuns) within the residential school system have led to intergenerational trauma within many Indigenous communities. Victor effectively engages in victim blaming, and his critiques are insidious because he is an Indigenous man himself. Victor does something worse than abandoning his community and identity altogether: He turns to actively working against it by exploiting the trust that others place in him.