The Barren Grounds
The Barren Grounds
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David Alexander Robertson on The Barren Grounds
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The gap he grew up insideRobertson grew up in Winnipeg as the son of a Swampy Cree father, a member of Norway House Cree Nation, without the language, the community connections, or the classroom materials that might have told him who he was. That absence became the engine of his writing life, and he has named it plainly when asked why he turned to books for young Indigenous readers.
I grew up not really having much connection to ways to learn about myself, so whether it was storytelling or family connections in that way, or stuff in school, I didn’t really have any of those things, so when I started writing professionally, I really thought about wanting to give people things that I didn’t get to have.
That same biographical gap is the premise Robertson built into his protagonist. Morgan, the 13-year-old Cree girl at the center of the novel, has been in foster care since she was three, does not speak Cree, and cannot recognize the word her mother whispers to her in dreams. The novel’s study materials describe how Robertson chose a structural model familiar from his own childhood reading and remade it around that experience.
Robertson set out to write a portal story like C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, which Robertson loved as a child, while making this sort of narrative more inclusive of Indigenous experiences. [paraphrased from SuperSummary study guide; single source]
Where Lewis built his other world from Christian allegory, Robertson built his from Cree language and Cree knowledge of the land. The portal leads not to Narnia but to Misewa, a community in crisis, and what the children must learn to save it is rooted in Cree relationships with the natural world.
Robertson has three Cree and Métis daughters, and the statistical vulnerability of Indigenous girls in Canada is not an abstraction for him. His concern for the world his daughters are growing up in has sharpened the social purpose behind everything he writes, including the portrait of foster care and identity loss that drives the Misewa Saga.
I have three Cree/Métis daughters, and I am concerned about the world they are growing up in because statistically, they are less safe than non-Indigenous girls. I want people to think about why that is, and consider their part in making this country a safe place for everybody.
How he wrote it
A familiar door, an unfamiliar worldThe structural choice to write a portal fantasy was deliberate and specific. The Narnia template gave Robertson a well-worn door that young readers would recognize, but the world on the other side required that the book do something Lewis never attempted: ground its other-world in an actual living culture, with its own language and its own principles about the relationship between people and the land.
Robertson set out to write a portal story like C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, which Robertson loved as a child, while making this sort of narrative more inclusive of Indigenous experiences. [paraphrased from SuperSummary study guide; single source]
The novel’s characters each carry a specific cultural weight that Robertson designed into their function in the story. Morgan, who does not know her language or her community, and her foster brother Eli, who is half Cree and half Ojibwe and equally disconnected, are not generic fantasy protagonists dropped into an adventure. Their disconnection from Indigenous life is the wound the plot is built around, and the study materials document how Robertson made that disconnection visible at every level of the narrative.
Morgan’s journey can be seen as a coming-of-age story and a quest narrative in which the inner journey—her reconnection with her Cree identity and her healing from trauma—mirrors the outer quest to restore warmth and balance to Misewa. [paraphrased from SuperSummary study guide; single source]
Robertson placed the Cree principle of reciprocity, the understanding that people and the natural world exist in a relationship of mutual responsibility, at the structural center of the plot. The crisis in Misewa, a world locked in perpetual winter because that balance has been broken, is not just a fantasy problem to be solved. It is the book’s argument about what the foster care system costs when it severs Indigenous children from the land-based knowledge their communities hold.
The Barren Grounds, the first installment of Robertson’s Misewa Saga series, draws heavily on Cree mythology and features themes of Indigenous identity, the effects of the child welfare system on Indigenous families, and the importance of connection to land and community. [paraphrased from SuperSummary study guide; single source]
The personal thread
His family inside the storyRobertson’s connection to Norway House Cree Nation runs through his father, and the reserve his father grew up on is also the birthplace of Betty Osborne, a distant relative whose murder Robertson later wrote about in a graphic novel. That proximity to violence against Indigenous women is not separate from his reasons for writing about Indigenous children in foster care; both subjects come from the same geography and the same family history.
Betty Osborne is also a distant relative to the Robertson family and grew up in the same reserve my father grew up in, and of which I am a band member. So, this story is close to me and has been for two decades.
When Robertson received an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University in 2026, more than thirty-five books into his career, he described how he had measured success from the beginning. The answer was not about recognition. It was about whether the work had reached the children who needed it, particularly those growing up the way he did.
I had a pretty good vision of what I wanted to accomplish, and it wasn’t awards; it was really just building stronger communities and thinking of ways that we can maybe work towards some sort of meaningful social change, and I wanted to contribute to that.
That standard, community over accolade, explains why the Misewa Saga is aimed squarely at young Indigenous readers who may see their own disconnection from culture reflected in Morgan and Eli, rather than at readers who encounter that disconnection from the outside.
What he wants us to sit with
What children lose when they are takenThe novel does not treat the child welfare system as a background condition. It treats it as the source of the wound that both children carry into Misewa, and the source of what they must recover before they can help anyone else. Robertson built the plot so that cultural reconnection and the restoration of the natural world are the same act.
The Barren Grounds invites readers to consider the long-term effects of the Sixties Scoop and the ongoing overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the Canadian foster care system, and how separation from family, community, and land affects Indigenous children’s sense of identity and belonging. [paraphrased from SuperSummary study guide; single source]
Robertson’s larger aim, the one he had set before writing the first page, is not satisfaction at completing a book but movement in the world outside the book. He has made that distinction between recognition and impact repeatedly, and his account of what he hoped to build across his career applies as directly to the Misewa Saga as to any single title.
I was surprised, I’m always surprised, you don’t really do any of this work expecting any sort of recognition.
Morgan does not resolve her disconnection from Cree identity by the end of the first book. She begins to. Robertson wrote a series rather than a standalone novel because the work of cultural reconnection takes time and cannot be wrapped up in a single quest. The question he leaves readers with is less about whether the world of Misewa is saved than about what it means to belong to a place and a people you were never taught to know.
I want people to think about why that is, and consider their part in making this country a safe place for everybody.
That call to consider one’s part is addressed to every reader, not only to Indigenous ones. Robertson wrote a book that centers Indigenous children’s experience, but the question of who is responsible for the conditions those children inherit is one he leaves open for everyone sitting with the story.