I reread Tomson Highway’s first hit play, The Rez Sisters, this morning. I needed to refresh my memory before teaching it this week. I’ve read it many times, mostly because I’ve taught it many times, although I’ve never seen a production; I did see the National Arts Centre’s production of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing 35 years ago, and I’ve always been curious about what The Rez Sisters is like onstage.
Every time I reread something, I find something new in it. I don’t suppose that’s unusual. This time, I was focused on moments where Nanabush appears, and where Christianity is mentioned, mostly because Highway was interviewed in The Globe an Mail recently (here’s a link, but it’s paywalled), on the occasion of the NAC production of Rose, the final play in the Wasaychigan Hill trilogy, and during that conversation he talked a lot about the differences between Cree or Ojibway mythology (since Nanabush is also known, in Cree, as wîsahkîcahk, and the sacred stories about the two figures are similar), on one hand, and the Christian mythology, which he encountered first in residential school, on the other. Highway has been talking about those differences since The Rez Sisters opened in Toronto. They’re important in his recent book, Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions, and they’re mentioned in every interview with him I’ve read. In TheGlobe and Mail interview, he says,
In non-Native culture, God is male. . . . Gender is the fulcrum on which rests the structure of patriarchal religion. In Christianity, God created man and forgot to create woman – woman was an afterthought. It’s her fault she ate the apple and submitted to temptation; it’s her fault we’re cursed as a species, that we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
By contrast, Cree and Ojibway mythology, and their culture hero, emphasizes the pleasure of eating: “You’re supposed to enjoy the fruit. One system of thinking treats the fruit as a curse; the other talks about a gift of pleasure, a gift of beauty.” The Christian God has no sense of humour, either, unlike Nanabush. “I have yet to hear him laugh,” Highway stated. “His principal weapon is this spiritual terrorism, where everything you do is forbidden.” Instead of that spiritual terrorism–a term which echoes Jo-Ann Episkenew’s description of colonialism, “psychological terrorism”–the mythology with Nanabush as its culture hero is centred on laughter. “God put us on this planet to laugh,” Highway told The Globeand Mail‘s interviewer, Aisling Murphy. “We’re here to have a good time, to laugh until we cry.”
The contrast between the two belief systems helps me understand, once again, the horrific damage residential schools did by forcing children to reject the one they already knew, to feel terrible shame about it, and to adopt one that is so alien and, from Highway’s perspective, repellent. In the play, Nanabush is silly, mocking, and goofy; he’s (in this play, he takes a male form; in Dry Lips, she’s a woman) also serious, a link to the spirit world and a catalyst in the play’s cathartic resistance to The Biggest Bingo in the World, to which the characters travel and which they discover is a cheat. That game, Jesse Archibald-Barber argues, is a closed system without transcendence that offers economic or consumerist freedom while also being a trap. At the end of the play, Pelajia, who seems to be the most important member of the play’s ensemble, recognizes Nanabush’s importance instead of mourning his absence, and Nanabush himself, in the guise of a seagull, lands behind her, dancing “merrily and triumphantly,” according to the stage directions.
That’s pretty much the lecture I’m giving tomorrow. This is likely the last time I teach The Rez Sisters, and to be honest, I think I’ve finally figured it out. Better late than never.
I finished rereading Métis writer Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 novel The Marrow Thieves yesterday–good thing, since I’m teaching it next week. I taught it seven or eight years ago, and at some point during that semester I met Dimaline, who was here giving a talk. I’d forgotten about that, or that I got my copy signed, but when I saw the inscription, I remembered telling her I was teaching the book and that her bank account was $35 richer as a result. On the book’s title page, she wrote, “For Ken–the light in my bank account.” Without that inscription, I might not have remembered that conversation. Why I forgot about it I don’t know. I remember liking her quite a bit–her confident energy and her friendliness were appealing.
Such recollections might be all I’m capable of today. I feel drained of insight, but I started this post, so I need to say something halfway intelligent, if that’s possible. The Marrow Thieves seamlessly brings together post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and young-adult fiction. It’s set in the 2050s, after war, the ongoing climate catastrophe, and other forms of pollution have rendered large parts of Ontario almost uninhabitable. Since the polar ice caps have melted, it rains constantly, but there’s little to drink, because much surface water has become toxic sludge. As a result of this apocalypse, the majority of the population–descendants of settlers–have lost the ability to dream. Literally dream, that is, not imagine the future or fantasize. First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, though, have retained that capability, and it’s somehow connected to their bone marrow. Without dreams, people are going crazy. The government’s response: to recreate something like the Indian Residential School system, except this time, instead of trying to eliminate Indigenous languages, cultures, and ceremonies, it is harvesting their bone marrow so that settlers can regain the ability to dream. The government’s Recruiters are everywhere, rounding up likely looking suspects. They’re dressed like gym teachers, with running shoes, shorts, and whistles, except that they also carry pistols. Like the people responsible for residential schools in our past, they’re remorseless.
The narrator of almost all of the book is Frenchie, a 16-year-old Anishinaabe boy with the usual problems a 16-year-old boy has, along with new ones that go along with the way settler colonialism has metastasized in his lifetime. He’s become separated from his family and is on the run in northern Ontario with a small group of Indigenous people, mostly children and teenagers, shepherded by Miigwans, who teaches the kids how to survive, and Minerva, who has other essential abilities. They constantly watch for the Recruiters and snitches that seem to be everywhere in the forest. In two chapters, the narration shifts to two other characters, Wab and Miigwans, who tell their stories about how they found themselves part of the group. That’s an interesting writing decision, and I wonder why more of the characters don’t also get to tell their “coming-out” stories, and why the focus is on those two. If I had to speculate, Miigwans is included because he’s central to the story, and Wab’s experience is perhaps the most difficult of the group, although nobody has had an easy time. It’s hard to say, though, because we don’t get a lot of detailed information about the rest.
The Marrow Thieves was a big success, winning a Governor General’s Literary Award and being made into a feature film. I like the book better than the movie (of course), mostly because the movie stays close to Toronto, as I recall, while the book shows the characters on the run far from the big city. Given the omnipresent danger of the Recruiters, heading for the woods is more believable and frankly more sensible than going underground in the south.
The adolescent narrator makes this a young-adult book, but it works for older folks, too, particularly the ending, which is quite moving. I like the touches of the fantastic: the way that First Nations languages become weapons against the colonizers in a literal fashion, which echoes their essential role in what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls resurgence and resistance, and the way the ability to dream is rooted deep in the body. The dystopian framework feels all-too-possible, sadly. In interviews, Dimaline talks about the easy fit between Indigenous experience and the notion of an apocalypse. “We have survived our apocalypse. I thought of the worst thing I could write about and it was stuff that had already happened,” she told The Globe and Mail in 2017. True enough. If the world were to come to an end, as more and more it seems to be doing, given the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, I’d want to hang out with people who had some experience with such catastrophes. For Dimaline, our current world is already post-apocalyptic. The notion that some limited form of collective survival is possible is oddly cheering. So too is The Marrow Thieves. I’d like to read more of Dimaline’s work. Maybe when this semester is finally in the rearview mirror.
It’s March. At this time in the semester, I can’t read (or reread) anything unless it’s something I’m teaching. This week, my students and I begin talking about Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream, so I got to reread this wonderful book.
Wonderful, yes, but also horrifying. These poems are scalding, a mosaic of the direct and intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools. They are personal, even confessional, although they don’t only reflect Halfe’s own experience at Blue Quills IRS in St. Paul, Alberta, not far from Saddle River Cree Nation, where she grew up; they also speak of the poisonous effects Blue Quills had on her parents and grandparents.
The volume is divided into sections which are marked by family photographs. The mostly carefree smiles in them act as a counterpoint to the description of family relationships in the poems. Not all of those relationships are damaged by residential school and colonialism, but many are, which is a sign of what Jo-Ann Episkenew describes as the “psychological terrorism” that creates the post-colonial traumatic stress response we see in these poems.
These poems are hard to read, but if they were easy to read, if they didn’t provoke anger and deep sadness, they wouldn’t be much good. What other emotions should a genocide, especially one practiced on children, generate in us?
And these poems are good. Better than good. Marvellous. Filled with pain, but free from self pity, as in the second stanza of the opening poem, “Dedication to the Seventh Generation”:
Sit by the kotawân–the fire place. Drink muskeg and mint tea. Hold your soul but do not weep. Not for me, not for you. Weep for those who haven’t yet sung. Weep for those who will never sing.
Silence is a recurring theme in these poems, almost a motif, which makes so much sense, since those institutions were intended to silence the children incarcerated in them. Halfe, thankfully, sings in these poems, in English and in Plains Cree, which is usually translated (where it isn’t, you can use the itwêwina online dictionary if you need to). Let’s be grateful for these poems, and for their author, who has taken such risks by publishing this book.
You might decide to take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Louise Halfe is a friend, and I’m a huge fan of her poetry, so yes, I might be biased. I’ll tell you what: find a copy of Burning in This Midnight Dream in the library, either the first edition, published by the late, great Coteau Books, or the new edition, republished by Brick Books, and try it out. My guess is that you’ll agree with my evaluation.
I’ve been teaching Bevann Fox’s Genocidal Love: A Life After Residential School this week. Fox describes this book as both “a fictionalized telling of my own story” and a novel; as Michelle Coupal, one of my colleagues and an expert on the literatures of residential schools, points out in the foreword, in Cree culture the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not as clearcut as it is, or pretends to be, in settler culture. Writers who discuss memoir note that it always involves selection, compression, exclusion, even (in some cases) fictionalization; after all, who can remember conversations from decades ago word for word? The main distinction between different kinds of stories, I’ve learned through Cree language classes, is between âcimowina, or secular stories (journalism, history, memoir, novels) and âtayôhkêwina, or sacred stories (such as the ones about kistêsinaw, the Elder Brother, the Cree culture hero, which I taught in a different course last week). Coupal suggests (through another scholar, Deanna Reder) that the best word to use in describing Fox’s book is âcimowisin: “a story about oneself.” That works for me. Whatever is fictionalized here, the truth of Fox’s experience comes through clearly. That’s true of other novels about residential schools that are rooted in their authors’ experiences, like Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls or Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen.
This book is not an easy read. The protagonist, Myrtle, is raised by her grandparents before being sent to a residential school at the age of seven. That life isn’t perfect, but Myrtle is learning her culture, language, and ceremonies, and she is part of a network of loving familial relationships. The residential school, in contrast, is a place of horrific physical, emotional, cultural, and sexual abuse. You have to wonder what would cause the nun and priest who torment Myrtle to behave that way. Maybe they’d been treated like that when they were children and repeat that trauma on others; maybe they’re licensed to be that cruel by the racism that accompanies colonialism in this country; maybe compulsory celibacy plays a role; maybe it’s something else. Certainly when children are put into institutions where they are considered less valuable than others, particularly when those institutions are run by Christian churches, the result is this kind of abuse. There are many examples in our recent history, including the Mount Cashel Orphanage in Newfoundland, which Coupal mentions in her foreword. In residential schools, the children were considered disposable because they were Indigenous, and the violence was part of the way those institutions attempted to destroy their languages, ceremonies, and cultures in an effort to eliminate their claim to the land. Once those Indigenous children had been assimilated, any argument they might make that the land belonged to them, rather than to settlers, would be nullified. “You’re just like us,” the response would go. “You don’t have any more rights than we do.”
The chapter that details Myrtle’s experience in the school is brief, and as Coupal notes, it is “harrowing.” That abuse, that trauma, leaves terrible scars, particularly in Myrtle’s intimate relationships. As Coupal notes, this book is unique in its exploration of the way that the “psychological terrorism” (the late Jo-Ann Episkenew’s term) of residential schools affects romantic and sexual relationships. Myrtle’s abuse teaches her that she has little value, and she unconsciously seeks out partners who do not value her. Perhaps those men experienced abuse as children themselves and are incapable of behaving differently; we don’t know. But the core of this book is the way Myrtle recovers from all of those experiences through therapy, ceremony, and writing. She is always writing–journals, notes on scraps of paper, letters–and she uses that material to write her story. Sometimes we’re given examples of things she has written about her experiences. I wonder if that fictional source material comes directly from Fox’s own notebooks; it seems likely. Myrtle’s writing is precisely what psychologist James W. Pennebaker calls “expressive writing,” and his research over the last 40 years shows how it helps people heal from psychological and emotional injuries.
The point of the book, then, is Myrtle’s resilience and resurgence. In the final paragraph, she describes herself as “absolutely sane.” In her preface, Fox is a little less absolute. “I’m still forced to live with the fact that the effects of genocide will never be over, that the trauma I experienced will never completely go away,” she writes. Maybe that’s one difference between Fox and her fictional narrator.
I wondered about Myrtle’s name. Myrtle, I discovered, is an evergreen plant, but not one that grows in North America. One source I found suggests that the word comes from myrrh, which is a soothing balm. Both the notion of being an evergreen and of something that makes injuries feel better suggest something about resilience. What seemed like an odd, old-fashioned choice of name immediately made sense.
One question I had was why Myrtle’s grandparents allow her to go to residential school. They’re the right age to be survivors of those places, and even if by some miracle they avoided them, surely they’ve heard about what happens to children there. There’s a day school on Myrtle’s reserve, but those institutions weren’t much better than residential schools, and if her grandparents had attended that day school, I thought, maybe they figure the residential school would be better. I was at a loss until one of my students, Brayden Benjoe, clued me in: the family doesn’t have much money (the grandfather, Nimôsom, collects scrap metal at rural dumps and takes it to a recycler in the city to earn a living, and that can’t be lucrative), and sending Myrtle to the school means there’s one less mouth to feed. I felt silly at missing such an important point. The poverty on reserves is, of course, another aspect of colonialism. When settlers took all of the land, they also took its resources, leaving little behind for First Nations.
Genocidal Love situates Myrtle’s trauma within the ongoing genocide of colonialism and, in particular, residential schools in Canada, partly through its prologue, a fable (it begins with “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after”) about a wicked queen who sends a representative to lie to the Red People with a treaty. She’s the one who lives happily ever after, not the people she tricks into giving up their land. One man, though, named Yellow Dog Breast, resists the crooked treaty. When it’s his turn to sign the document, he refuses, angrily:
Everyone stopped to look at him. Yellow Dog Breast was strikingly beautiful. He stood tall as he held his robe around him. Finally, he threw off his robe and stood completely naked! Yellow Dog Breast gave out a cry to the heavens. He threw up his arms and jumped in the air and then fell to his knees. He leaned forward and kissed the ground and said, “This is my land!“
Myrtle’s grandfather tells her that story, and it stays with her; she passes it on to her grandson, who at the end of the book retells it in a speech he gives to Governor-General David Johnston at his school. At one point, she even makes a list of the qualities she wants to find in a potential romantic partner, and “Must be like Yellow Dog Breast” is at the top of it. That story frames Myrtle’s narrative as part of a broader resistance to colonialism and, in her grandson’s words, resurgence. Part of the resurgence in Genocidal Love is physical: the book ends with a naming ceremony for one granddaughter and the birth of another. It’s an excellent place to bring Myrtle’s story to a close, with a sense of hope for the future. Read this book, then, not as trauma porn, but as an example of resistence, resilience, and resurgence.
