Tag: Jenna Butler

39. Duncan McCue, The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir

You might recall the name Duncan McCue. In fact, if you listen to Radio One, you’ll remember him as the host of Cross-Country Checkup, among other shows. He teaches journalism at Carleton University now, but occasionally he fills in for someone on the CBC. The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir is his first book; he’s since published a textbook on decolonizing journalism. It’s a book about how, when McCue was 17 years old, he spent several months on a trapline in northern Quebec with a Cree family. He didn’t speak their language, and he had few skills as a hunter, and the experience was both difficult and life-changing. At the beginning of the book, McCue tells us that it’s been 20 years since that experience, more than half of his life, and “I’m still trying to unpack what I learned there.”

I’ve taught The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir three or four times now in an English course that considers Canadian examples of writing about place, and every time I get something new from it. This time, partly because the course focused on braided forms of creative nonfiction, I paid close attention to the book’s structure, particularly to the way that McCue shifts between his experience on the trapline, and more broadly as a young, urban Anishinaabe man, separated from his community and unable to speak his grandparents’ language, and the context of Cree history, particularly the James Bay Hydroelectric Project and its aftermath. I asked my students to read Nicole Walker’s article on braided essays, as well as Jenna Butler’s more recent expansion of Walker’s argument in an essay published in the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild’s magazine, Freelance, and I was particularly interested in the way that, as Walker and Butler argue, braided memoir structures tend to affect our understanding of the writer’s experience and of the context in which that experience is situated. In The Shoe Boy, we read McCue’s identity confusion–he writes, “I always felt, somehow, I wasn’t Native enough”–against the history of colonialism in northern Québec, and in the process we learn about cultural resistance and resurgence. Resilience, too, although some people hate that word, because both McCue and the people of Chisasibi, including the family he lives with in the bush, adapt to the things they can’t avoid without abandoning what is essential to them.

As an aside, I want to recognize the work of Margaret Orr, an artist from Chisasibi whom I met while I was working on my MFA here. Her work at that time examined the drowning of more than 10,000 caribou in 1984, when Hydro Québec released water from a reservoir into the Koksoak and Caniapiscau rivers during the animals’ annual migration. McCue mentions that event in passing, but Orr’s work taught me how deeply traumatic that mass killing was for her community. Hydro Québec, perhaps not surprisingly, refused to accept any responsibility.

The Shoe Boy is deceptively complex, though, because it’s framed by McCue’s career as a journalist, and implies that through the writing process, he comes to understand what is important to him about those months on the trapline. I’m not going to spoil the conclusion he reaches, because I hope you read this short but important book, except to say that I think that his conclusion is legitimate, and that it suggests something about the multiplicity of ways to understand what it means to be an Indigenous person–the same way that there’s more than one way to be a middle-aged môniyâw like me.

35. Jenna Butler, Revery: A Year of Bees

I read Jenna Butler’s 2020 book Revery: A Year of Bees several years ago, and I was impressed by it—so much, in fact, that when I decided to teach a course on place writing this summer, I decided to include it on the reading list. It’s a sort of sequel to her earlier book of essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail—the same farm, more or less, but this time, the focus is on those tiny domesticated creatures, honeybees, and the wonders they give us: sweet honey and wax for candles and balms. The book, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Readscompetition, goes beyond honeybees, though; it thinks about the way we might connect with place through what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a “taskscape”—through labour, care, and attention—and the challenges inherent in attempts to make that kind of connection.

Revery: A Year of Bees has two structuring principles. As its subtitle suggests, it follows Butler through the annual cycle of work involved in stewarding a small organic farm and bee yard on the edge of the boreal forest in northern Alberta. At the same time, though, it’s also an excellent example of what writers call a “braided essay”—or, perhaps, more accurately, it’s a braided book of braided essays. The text moves back and forth between personal writing about Butler’s experience and informative writing about beekeeping. As Nicole Walker explains in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that continual shift in perspective sets up a “tension between two unlike things working against each other” which, through repetition, presses out meaning. Revery: A Year of Bees does exactly that by moving between Butler’s experience and its broader context. As Butler herself has argued in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that kind of writing allows writers “to tell stories at length that may be crushingly hard, balancing that sustained, clear, and factual telling with moments of beauty or humour.” In fact, towards the end of the book, when Butler explains how working with bees has helped her with the lasting effects of violence and trauma, readers come to see the value in the braided structure she has constructed; it allows us to understand the ways in which personal experience, past and present, affects our work and our relationships, and the ways in which that labour and connection change us. Her description of that trauma, by the way, is both bluntly honest and tactful, something many of us who want to write about our difficult experiences might want to learn from. I certainly could.

Before my students read Revery: A Year of Bees, I asked them to read Robert Macfarlane’s essay “A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook,” published in a collection of poems and essays, Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, edited by Gareth Evans and Di Robson. There, Macfarlane argues, among other things, that having a specific language of place allows us to see what is valuable and important in the world around us, as well as our connections or relationships to that world, things that modernity, according to Max Weber and Martin Heidegger, has taught us to ignore. Instead of seeing a forest as something special, even enchanted, an ecosystem or a place we might get to know but never fully understand, for instance, Heidegger contends that we now see that forest as a “standing-reserve,” as so many board feet of lumber or tons of fibre for paper or disposable diapers. The forest becomes fungible: we think we translate it from one thing, a living place, to something else, economic activity and profit, without losing anything worth saving. Seeing places in a different way—as something rather than nothing—might help us to avoid destroying or “desecrating” them (note the overtones of the sacred in Macfarlane’s use of that word). Writing like Butler’s encourages us to think the way Macfarlane advocates: to consider our relationships to place and land, to wonder at the ways they exceed our knowledge and understanding, to approach them with respect and awe. That’s part of what makes her writing worth paying attention to.

But that’s not the only reason I admire Revery: A Year of Bees. Butler’s account of how the bees she works with pick up on her emotions, how they respond to her when she’s overwhelmed by her nearly unspeakable emotional and physical traumas, is fascinating. Like horses and dogs, bees sense the moods of the people around them. On her bad days, she can’t approach the bees, which feel threatened by her “cloud of energy.” It’s yet more evidence of our deep connections to the world and its inhabitants, and a sign of the way that forming relationships with the land can heal us. We need to learn those lessons, and Revery: A Year of Bees is a kind and gentle teacher.

Jenna Butler, Revery: A Year of Bees

My PhD research tried to use walking as a way to come into relationship with the land—a watered-down, môniyâw-inflected version of the Cree ethical principle of wâhkôhtowin, or kinship. I walked in places that were not all that conducive to building that kind of relationship: the edges of a small prairie city, highways, grid roads. I’m sure I would’ve found it easier if I had walked on native grassland, or in the boreal forest, but both of those options would’ve meant making long drives, and I wanted to see what walking in this place, dominated by industrialized agriculture, might bring me. I tried my best, and on some walks I was able to feel something changing in the way I connected to the land. Walking was slowly taking me where I wanted to be.

But my experiments pale beside those of Jenna Butler, who has been living in an off-grid cabin in northern Alberta for more than a decade, raising bees and vegetables and developing a deep knowledge of her small corner of the world: its native flora and fauna, including its wild bees; the plants she grows for beauty and sustenance; and the bees living in her bee yard. She writes of her partnership with those bees, both the wild ones and the domesticated. “Our goal has always been to provide and sustain the best life possible for them out here in the forest and among the plants in our garden, under the vast expanse of northern sky,” she writes. But the learning that’s necessary to achieve that goal is unending. “The old adage once again proves true: The more I know, the more I don’t know,” Butler tells us. “That’s the paradox of working with the land in a sustainable way, learning its cycles and seasons, the length of time it takes to build up soil, ecosystems and resilient pollinator populations. The Earth is a constant teacher” (19). Its students can learn through humility or hardship—or they can ignore the Earth’s lessons and be part of the ecocidal course most of us have chosen to follow. 

The bees, in particular, are one of her teachers. Butler considers what it means for them to thrive, rather than just survive. “By keeping questions like these at the forefront of our minds and practices, we consciously and intentionally support the health of the surrounding ecosystems, and we promote the health and dignity of the bees themselves,” she states. “And by extending these ideas outward to the many millions of other beings with whom we share the planet, we practise a deep kind of lived humility for our space within a much larger, infinitely complicated collective” (33). She doesn’t use the word “relationship” to talk about her connection with the land, perhaps because it makes a grand claim that would contradict the principle of humility that is central to her life and work on the land, but I think that word would fit. Even so, her concern about the land and its inhabitants constitutes, I’m certain, a form of relationship with them. After all, she describes her climate grief as a form of love (109). Doesn’t love presuppose a relationship with the beloved?

I learned a lot about beekeeping and living on a small farm while reading this book, about what beekeepers do and who they are, but the biggest surprise for me was the discovery that bees, like other creatures, are sensitive to our emotional states. “I came to beekeeping as a way of learning how to handle my fear of pain, of learning how to survive with it,” she writes. “I still have bad days when something from the past is dredged up, and then I can’t go into the bee yard because I can’t control the spiral of pain and fear that those memories spur in me” (95). The guard bees will chase her from the bee yard on those days. The bees are completely honest, she tells us, and their honesty is a gift to her: they let her know that she has more work to do as a survivor (95). Even if Butler might argue with my description of her connection to the land as a relationship, I’m sure she would agree that she has a relationship to the bees. “I’ll never be able to see the bees as simply another sort of creature at the farm, or their honey as simply another product,” she states. “In the long journey of coming home to myself, I’ve come to need these bees as much as they need me” (96). That recognition of interdependence, of interconnection, is a form of healing (96).

Butler describes her life with the bees in lucid, straightforward prose. My beekeeping friends would enjoy this book, as would anyone seeking to walk with a lighter tread on the earth. And it makes me think about what I accomplished during my PhD work. What does my relationship with the land look like, compared to Butler’s? That’s a question I’ll be coming back to. I have an idea of what the answer will look like.

Works Cited

Butler, Jenna. Revery: A Year of Bees. Wolsak & Wynn, 2020.