Set in the mid-1880s, Red Wolf is the story of an Anishnaabe boy who is taken to a residential school at the age of five and endures the evils of that system. His story runs parallel to, and occasionally intersects with, that of an orphaned young wolf named Crooked Ear. The tale is mostly told from the perspectives of these two main characters, though it occasionally strays into a minor participant’s point of view.

Red Wolf’s experiences at the school, where he is forced to give up his own culture for one that will never accept him, are a good composite of the many horrors and abuses that tens of thousands of native children suffered. The portrayal of Crooked Ear, on the other hand, is overly anthropomorphized, and the descriptions of animal behaviour are flawed – for example, the idea of a dominant alpha male wolf has long been discredited, and red-tailed hawks don’t hunt at night.

By her own admission, author Jennifer Dance wrote Red Wolf in hopes that her book might “restore relationships and increase peace, understanding, and compassion among our nation’s youth.” Unfortunately, lofty goals are not always enough. The main difficulty is that Dance’s fervently held beliefs and understandable disgust with residential schools overwhelm the story. The characters are either very good or very bad, and this oversimplification tends to make them clichéd ciphers who stand in for the wrongs of the school system or the doomed spirituality of the native way of life. It is hard to get past the feeling that the reader is continually being told how to feel.

Red Wolf depicts an unquestionably shameful part of our history, about which today’s children should be informed. The novel serves that purpose while reinforcing our feelings of outrage and disgust. It’s too bad it’s done in such an uninspiring way.