Taiaiake Alfred: Peace, Power. Righteousness

Canada is a nation built on stolen land. Further, throughout its history, the people who decide things in my country have tried to keep the Aboriginal people it was stolen from in a state of poverty and powerlessness - disenfranchised, dispossessed, and as much as possible, disappeared.

However, people who are marginalised often fight back. In recent years, much of the resistance to oppression has come in the form of demands for self-determination. In his book Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, Taiaiake Alfred - speaking largely to other Indigenous people - addresses issues related to Aboriginal self-determination in Canada, with the aim of clarifying the meaning of Aboriginal self-determination and identifying what Aboriginal people must do to in order to achieve it. In so doing, he names and expands on three key principles - peace, power and righteousness - that must shape and inform any action directed toward the creation of a true Aboriginal self-determination.

As reviewer Peter Jull comments in the Indigenous Law Bulletin,

Alfred calls for a clear re-centring of indigenous self-determination politics away from expedient policies devolving western-style governance and political structures from dominant governments to indigenous communities by returning to cultural values and outlooks. Angered and ashamed by fringe status and dependency among indigenous peoples, he shows how most current ‘reforms’ offer little more than a perpetuation of that situation. It is contended that the white man can no longer pretend that ‘the natives aren’t ready’, while ‘the natives’ can demand and expect better results than an often cynical or weary national politico-administrative apparatus usually offers. (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ILB/2000/69.html)

For a more detailed review of Alfred's manifesto, check out Scott Neigh's blog, A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land: http://scottneigh.blogspot.ca/2005/11/review-peace-power-righteousness.html

Kathherine Kurtz: The King's Deryni

I remember when Katherine Kurtz' debut fantasy novel, Deryni Rising, was published as part of the famous Ballantine Adult Fantasy imprint in 1970. Kurtz was one of a very few contemporary fantasy authors to have novels published as part of that series (along with Joy Chant, L. Sprague De Camp, Poul Anderson and Sanders Anne Laubenthal, and was the only contemporary fantasist to have more than one volume of work published in that series.

I fell in love with Kurtz's world of Gwynedd, and with her magical, endangered Deryni with that first book, and have followed her writing ever since, waiting patiently for each new volume in the Deryni series.

And it has been such a long wait for this, The King's Deryni, the last volume of Kurtz' Childe Morgan trilogy - eight years, in fact. With this volume, Alaric Morgan, the half-Deryni Duke and loyal servant of the Kings of Gwynedd finally comes into his own, and Kurtz' work comes full circle. In her first novel, we met Alaric as a full-grown man, protector of the young King Kelson Haldane. Six more books took the story of Kelson, Alaric and his cousin the half-Deryni priest Duncan forward. Then, Kurtz wrote six more books set well in the past, about the restoration of the Haldane line following a bloody and tyrannical interregnum.

This most recent trilogy has brought the story almost back to where it started, with all the key characters of Kelson's reign in place and Kelson's birth one of the last events of the novel.

While I truly enjoyed The King's Deryni because it brought me back to a beloved world, I must acknowledge that it may not suit everyone's taste. While there are definitely some dramatic moments and key events, highs and lows, it is a slow-moving book, full of everyday details and family life. Kurtz devotes considerable time to the minutiae of Alaric's progress as a page and then a squire, to his training both for knighthood and for his coming adult responsibilities as Duke of Corwyn and Earl of Lendour. We see him in the midst of his family - father, aunts, uncle, sisters and half-sisters, cousins, the most important if all being the young Duncan - and we meet both the friends and enemies of his youth. We follow him on travels around Gwynedd, to his own lands (which come to him through his mother's lineage), his father's family seat, his ducal uncle's holdings, and on various journeys both within Gwynedd and to foreign kingdoms as part of King Brion's entourage - and in so doing, we see elements of the political and religious situation both at home and abroad that he and the kings he will serve must navigate. It's a book rich in worldbuilding, scene-setting, and character development rather than action and complex plotting.

I'd love to see more of Gwynedd. There's still much to be explored about Gwynedd during Alaric's time - the shadowy Council of Deryni who watch Alaric closely, the mysterious knight of the Anvil who serves as Alaric's teacher, the events that lie between the birth of Kelson and the death of his father King Brion - and the future of Gwynedd still to come. And there is still a gap between the early post-interregnum books and the beginning of Alaric's story. I have heard that Kurtz has plans to write more about her Deryni - time will tell what comes next.