After a long walk to the east end of the city to get the screen on my phone replaced (it wasn’t the screen—it was the screen protector! a Christmas miracle!), and before a well-deserved nap (with the tabby cuddled up against my shoulder), I read Simon Armitage’s Dwell. Like Blossomise, it’s a chapbook more than a book, a collection of a dozen or so poems about the nests animals make (dreys, dens, lodges) and other places they call home (ponds, nest boxes, hives). Armitage was invited to write these poems by The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Europe’s largest garden restoration project, which, along with hosting horticultural research projects, also provides habitat, deliberately and accidentally, for birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. It sounds like a place to visit on a European junket.
The poems (of course, since they’re written by Simon Armitage) sing, especially one that imagines how a variety of creatures might review an insect hotel, which made me laugh. But I hate to single one out for praise; they’re all wonderful.
One nice recognition: Armitage often writes in free verse tercets or quatrains, as I do. I’ve always seen that as a kind of timidity in my work, a structure that keeps the maelstrom of formlessness at bay, but because it works in Armitage’s poems so well, maybe it’s a valid choice and not a pair of metaphorical training wheels. I dunno. The idea makes me happy, and it’s Christmas Eve, so I’m going with it.
I’ve submitted a proposal to a conference in Leeds, where Armitage is a professor, and if I get in, maybe I can get my copies of Dwell and Blossomise signed. They’re small enough that they wouldn’t take up much space in my carry-on. Of course, I could just as easily be told to take my proposal and play on it somewhere else, as Humphrey Bogart says in The Big Sleep.
I hope you enjoy the holidays, no matter how or what you celebrate, or whether you do or not. They’re a deep breath before the long bleak cold that lasts, here in southern Saskatchewan, until Easter. First the wassailing, then the wailing. It’s not that bad, really, but it can seem endless.
In September 1874, during the negotiations that led to Treaty 4, the treaty between First Nations and the Crown that covers southern Saskatchewan and parts of southeastern Alberta and southwestern Manitoba, kamooses, one of the Plains Cree or nêhiyaw Chiefs who was speaking on behalf of his people, asked the federal treaty commissioners this haunting question: “Is it true that my child will not be troubled for what you are bringing him?”
I thought about that question, and the promises in the treaties that schools would be provided so that, in the words of Treaty Commissioner Alexander Morris, First Nations might “learn the cunning of the white man,” as I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City. It’s not a new book–it was published in 2018–and yet it remains important. It won or was shortlisted for a slew of awards, and it deserved to; it presents an account of how Canada has consistently refused to take seriously its obligations to provide First Nations children with an education comparable to the one settler children receive. Instead, we have engaged in active genocide, through residential schools, or malign neglect, as Talaga describes in this book.
Why malign neglect? The young people Talaga writes about, students as Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, Ontario, would rather have studied at schools in their communities. The federal government, however, will not fund high schools in First Nations communities in northern Ontario. That’s not surprising; it won’t fund clean drinking water or proper sewage disposal, either. So young people who want to go to school beyond Grade 8 move hundreds of kilometres from their families to board with people who are often strangers and attend a First Nations-run high school in a converted office building in a big city. Some of those young people have never been south before, have never seen traffic lights, don’t know what to do when they get onto a city bus. The school, which is supposed to look after them, is under-resourced. Many of the young people aren’t fluent in English; instead, they speak Oji-Cree or Anishinabemowin. Many carry the burden of intergenerational residential-school trauma with them.
And, like young people anywhere, they like to party. A little alcohol, or a lot, makes them feel less awkward, more social. Hands up if your experience at parties in high school was like that. They gather to party in parks along the rivers that flow through Thunder Bay into Lake Superior. Sometimes–too often–they disappear into the cold, fast waters of the Kaministiquia or McIntyre. Their bodies are found, eventually. Talaga’s book considers seven lives, seven deaths, but it’s clear they represent only a partial sample.
The malign neglect isn’t just in our refusal to fund First Nations education adequately. It goes beyond the federal government into the Thunder Bay Police Services, which decides no foul play has taken place when yet another First Nations youth is pulled out of a river without bothering to conduct an investigation, and into the Province of Ontario’s coroners, who can’t be bothered to contact families when their children die, which they are required to do by law, or show up on the scene of an unattended death. If white kids were drowning like this, something would be done. But since the bodies are Indigenous, only First Nations people seem to care.
Talaga suggests, at the end of the book, that these deaths aren’t examples of drunken misadventure–that some First Nations teens have survived being assaulted, beaten, and thrown into the water by gangs of white men uttering racist taunts. But she can’t go beyond suggestion, because there’s no evidence, and there’s no evidence because the police don’t take seriously their responsibility to investigate these deaths. The malevolent racism behind their collective shrug is astonishing. They just don’t care.
Talaga’s prose is spare. She talks to people in communities across northwestern Ontario. She connects these deaths to residential schools, to the 60s Scoop, to other assaults on First Nations children and families committed by Canada. Her anger (as you can probably tell) is infectious. We settlers need to do a lot better, collectively, all of us. And our federal government needs to take its responsibilities seriously, to stop fighting Indigenous Peoples in court, to realize that the word “reconciliation” will only take shape in actions, to fund schools, to stop jamming resource development down the throats of communities where you can’t drink the water that comes out of the tap. The treaties we made? They bring obligations with them, responsibilities we settlers need to acknowledge and live up to.
Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road has been reviewed in The Literary Review of Canada. So many excellent books published in this country get little attention; Walking the Bypass has received two reviews, this one and the earlier discussion in Harper’s Magazine. I am beyond grateful.
Check out the new review, which appears in the January-February issue, here.
Yes, my copy of Danielle Janess’s The Milk of Amnesia looks a little scuffed. It’s been bumping around in my backpack for weeks as I tried to find time to read it during the busiest December of my career, which is unfortunate, really, since a) it’s a wonderful book, and b) it came from the publisher’s warehouse bearing the author’s signature, which was unexpected. I finally finished it this afternoon in one of the gymnasiums, pacing between rows of tiny desks as my students wrote their final examination. Here is my brief report.
The Milk of Amnesia is a book of lyric poems that inhabits the form of a five-act play, the way a hermit-crab essay inhabits whatever form its author has chosen. I wouldn’t call it a closet drama, although the third act, “The Wound Carnival,” gets close to being something you could imaging being performed but not quite. Janess’s use of drama as a shell in which to carry this play isn’t a surprise, since she has a theatre background.
As the title suggests, this is a book about trying to remember and inevitably forgetting–not only one’s own stories and experiences, but those of one’s ancestors. That forgetting, as the title’s pun also indicates, can be necessary: both medicine and poison, perhaps. In Janess’s case, she’s thinking about stories from her mother’s family: Polish refugees who came to Canada after the war after enduring the Nazis and the Soviets. Some of the poems track the process of attempting to find documentary evidence of what happened to her forebears; others tell their improbable but true stories. But the book also recounts Janess’s travels through Germany and Poland as well as her memories of her family in Canada. The language is rich and precise, and in a way it’s good that I was forced by circumstances to read it slowly. Like some decadent mittel-European dessert, it might’ve been too much had I tried to read it in one sitting. I had to pause, think, double-check vocabulary I didn’t know. Janess is a linguist and translator as well as a performer and poet, and the glossary she provides her readers is welcome to folks like me who struggle to get by in just one language, never mind four or five.
My favourite poem here is the title poem, which is the second-to-last in the book. It brings together all of the book’s themes in a dizzying seven-page series of prose poems. I was happy it came so close to the end, because by then I was ready for it; I understood the territory the book had staked out for itself.
I highly recommend The Milk of Amnesia. I am looking forward to Janess’s next book.
