Martha Wells: Books of the Raksura

Martha Wells’ fantasy The Cloud Roads, the first volume of the Books of the Raksura series, introduces a complex, long-lived species with multiple forms, some of whom can fly, all of whom have certain shapeshifting abilities. Through the protagonist, Moon, a youngish male Raksura orphaned young and left to survive among “groundlings” - non aerial humanoid species - who is reunited with other members of his species after years of knowing nothing of who and what he is, Wells is able to explain her creations without needless exposition. And the Raksura are a fascinating creation indeed. The worldbuilding here is deep and satisfying, both in the nature of the Raksura, and in the richness and sometimes strangeness of the world they live in.

Learning about the Raksura, their society and way of life, and their enemies, the vicious Fell, is probably the best part of the first volume. The rest of it is a not unfamiliar story about the outsider that virtually no one trusts until he saves the people who weren’t sure they wanted them, at which point he ends up respected and granted some high status. In this particular story, the people who don’t trust him are part of a “court,” as Raksura communities are called, that has been dwindling for years, through a combination of ill-luck, illness, and attack from outside, that has left many wondering if there’s a curse on the place they settled in, or some other evil stalking their community. But Moon is a fertile winged male, or consort, and few such are born in any community of Raksura, and this community, Indigo Cloud Court, has lost all but one of its consorts to illness or injury, and the remaining consort, Stone, is old. Moon may be an outsider, of unknown history and bloodlines, but he is a consort. And it is his past, his experiences with other peoples, that hold the key to survival when the ancient enemy of the Raksura attack the court and take many of its members prisoner.

It’s very well told, suspenseful, with lots of action, touches of humour, and great characterisation. A well-crafted story, fun to read, and thoroughly engaging.

After finishing The Cloud Roads, I was curious enough to discover what would happen next to Moon, Jade - his mate and the secondary queen of Indigo Cloud Court - and their community, driven from their home by the attack of the Fell. So I started reading The Serpent Sea on the same day I finished The Cloud Roads.

Stone, the old consort and line-grandfather of Indigo Cloud Court, leads the survivors to the Reach, a vast forested land, home to a species of gigantic mountain-trees, each one large enough to shelter a community several times the size of the remnants of Indigo Cloud Court. Here they find the empty mountain-tree where their ancestors had lived when Stone was still a child, a home that, by Raksura custom, they still held claim to. But once they arrive, they make a terrible discovery - the magical heartseed which allows the giant trees to be shaped into a vast, living habitation has been stolen, and without it, the tree that was their ancestral home is dying.

Once more faced with a fight for survival, Moon, Jade and Stone lead a party of Raksura on the trail of the thieves, hoping to find and reclaim the heartseed and heal the mountain-tree so they may begin the slow process of rebuilding their court in a safe home.

Again, the twin delights of the story are its fast-moving plot, and its formidable worldbuilding. We learn more about the Raksura, their history, and how different courts interact, the politics and rituals of greater Raksura society. And we see more of this fantastic and complex world that Wells has created.

The third volume of the Books of the Raksura, The Siren Depths, begins shortly after the conclusion of The Serpent Sea. With their home tree healing, and the community settling into their new life in the Reaches, Moon and Jade decide it’s time for her to being their first clutch - but before they can conceive, news that may imperil their future together arrives. The story of Moon’s early life has spread among the other courts of the Reach, and a formal embassy arrives to deliver a message on behalf of distant Onyx Night Court. Moon, it seems, is the survivor of a Fell attack on a small court that had fissioned off from Onyx Night - and there are other survivors, including one of the queens, who claims Moon as a member of her court, and refuses to acknowledge the union between Moon and Jade. Without the consent of his home court’s queen, Moon cannot, by Raksuran custom, contract a union, and must return to Onyx Night Court.

Jade is unwilling to give up her relationship with Moon, and, with Stone and a few other members of Indigo Cloud Court, follows Moon to Onyx Night to claim her mate from his queen - who, he learns, is also his birthmother. As Moon begins to piece together the story of his childhood, and Jade struggles to convince his mother, Malachite, that Moon belongs to her, an old enemy resurfaces. Both Onyx Night Court and Indigo Cloud Court have suffered deep wounds at the hands of the Fell, and their reappearance brings about an uneasy truce as members of both courts unite to foil the long-laid plans of the Fell.

Again the story Wells tells is tightly plotted, full of action and suspense, reversals and revelations. We learn more about the linked history of Raksura and Fell, but at the end of the novel, we are left still in the dark about much that has gone before. Fortunately, there are more Raksura novels to read.

James Daschuk: Clearing the Plains

In Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, James Daschuk sets out to tell the history of the European colonisation of the the Canadian Great Plains as it affected, and continues to affect, the health of Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. As he states in his introduction: “Racism among policy makers and members of mainstream society was the key factor in creating the gap in health outcomes as well as maintaining a double standard for acceptable living conditions for the majority of the population and the indigenous minority.” This book shows how that double standard was created and maintained.

“Canada consistently places among the top nations in the world according to the UN Human Development Index. In its report for 2007–08, only Iceland, Norway, and Australia ranked higher than Canada in the criteria considered by the United Nations. Yet also a regular story is the dismal condition of Canada’s indigenous people in comparison with its mainstream population. The gap between these populations is so wide that official communications of the Assembly of First Nations, the largest aboriginal organization in the country, state that Canada’s indigenous population would rank sixty-third on the same index, the equivalent of Panama, Malaysia, or Belarus. On average, indigenous Canadians can expect to die between five and eight years earlier than other Canadians. Canadians have come to expect the highest-quality medical care as their national right, but indigenous people routinely suffer from poverty, violence, sickness, and premature death. Substandard health conditions are so entrenched that a recent text on the social determinants of health listed aboriginal status as a key predictive variable in the analysis of the country’s overall health outcomes. The chasm between the health conditions of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians has existed for as long as anyone can remember; it too has become part of who we are as a nation. The primary goal of this study is to identify the roots of the current health disparity between the indigenous and mainstream populations in western Canada. Health as a measure of human experience cannot be considered in isolation from the social and economic forces that shape it. In Canada, the marginalization of First Nations people has been the primary factor impeding improved health outcomes for all of its citizens.”

I don’t think I could present a better summary of Daschuk’s work than the one published in the Literary Review of Canada, written by Anishnaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair, department head of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, from which I quote below:

“In the book, Daschuk presents an intricate examination of how Canada cleared the plains coldly and opportunistically, taking advantage of a famine caused by the loss of bison populations, due to the flooding of Nakota, Dakota, Nehiyawak, Niitsitapi and Anishinaabe territories by settlers. Methodically, using draconian legislation regarding Indians and starvation, Canadian leaders coerced indigenous leaders into signing treaties and acquiescing to federal control—all in an attempt to exterminate indigenous peoples from the national consciousness. In other words, Indians were forcibly and willfully manipulated, removed, and murdered for the sake of “progress.” None of this is an overstatement: it’s all there in the evidence Daschuk unearths in deft research and prose.

The most remarkable aspect of Clearing the Plains is the narrative arc of the book. He draws a direct line connecting 19th century Canadian Indian policy, Sir John A. Macdonald’s railroad, western settlement, Canada’s economic foundation and territorial theft of indigenous communities, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The conclusion of this story is that indigenous peoples now experience, a century and a half later, dire circumstances due to these events: the lowest life expectancy, the greatest amount of poverty and ostracization, and the highest amount of racism and violence. Simply put, the situation indigenous communities face today is the result of an elaborate and extensive plan in which every Canadian is culpable. Throughout the 19th century, Canada pursued a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities,” Daschuk states, that continues to “haunt us as a nation still.”

In 340 pages Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains does more to tell the true story of Canada’s history than the entirety of Eurocentric pioneer narratives, “award-winning” textbooks, and self-congratulatory encyclopedias that flood bookstores, libraries and classrooms across this country. Daschuk announces the secret that indigenous peoples have been telling all along but Canadians weren’t ready to hear (frankly, until one of their own said it): Canada’s settlement, growth and economy was not a simple, earned and positivistic set of events but a cold, methodical and exploitative plan built on sacrifices by and theft from indigenous peoples.”
(http://reviewcanada.ca/the-lrc-25/clearing-the-plains/)

This is the story of a genocide, in which all settler Canadians are complicit. Daschuk begins with a picture of life before the influence of English and French fur traders began to affect the Indigenous Great Plains peoples, a semi-nomadic life that hunted bison in a sustainable manner, and prohibited hunting of beaver to ensure the water supply, dependent on the dam-building behaviours of beavers, remained stable. The coming of white settlers and traders was felt on the Plains long before whites actually reached the area. The growth of European colonies in the east pushed the Indigenous peoples of Central Canada westward, destabilising conditions across the continent. Trade in horses along the north-south trade routes with Mesoamerica brought changes to long-established hunting methods. And with both these movements came smallpox, which would irrevocably affect both the demographics and the population levels of the Plains peoples. Other diseases - tularaemia, tuberculosis, whooping cough, venereal disease, measles - followed as contacts with Europeans increased and the fur trade encroached on the Plains economy and ecology. The fur trade, with its insatiable demand for beaver pelts, its introduction of highly distilled alcohol products, and its creation of competition for hunting grounds among the peoples who took part, further impacted the Indigenous Plains nations’ stability and way of life. Food shortages became a serious threat to the Plains peoples. Violence between Indigenous peoples, between whites and the Indigenous hunters they exploited, and between rival trade companies Hudson’s Bay Co. and North West Co. was endemic. “By 1821, the Canadian northwest was in social, demographic, and environmental crisis. Harsh climatic conditions compounded by the eruption of Mount Tambora, along with catastrophic disease episodes, created severe conditions for the physical environment and people of the northwest.”

Throughout the 19th century, as the fur trade, followed by the beginning of white agricultural settlement, followed by successive gold rushes, and an increased military presence, brought more and more movement of white people into and through the plains in both Canadian and American territories, waves of infections swept through indigenous communities, decimating populations already weakened by malnutrition due to the hunting out of fur-bearing species and the buffalo and bison. With the end of the traditional bison economy and the more recent fur-trade economy, the only option for many Indigenous communities was to negotiate treaties and convert their economies yet again, this time to an agricultural economy under the reserve system. Many treaties included, at the insistence of the Indigenous parties, the provision by the government of a “medicine chest” to combat the frequent epidemics, and rations during times of famine - provisions rarely honored by the government once its goal of isolating Indigenous peoples on reserves was achieved.

The deadly conditions continued, exacerbated by Government policies and lack of concern at the highest levels for the suffering of Indigenous peoples, bereft of their traditional ways of life, hemmed in by restrictive laws, weakened by famine and disease, subjected to multiple forms of abuse by Department of Indian Affairs employees and agents.

Daschuk’s account concludes with the following comments:

“This study has shown that the decline of First Nations health was the direct result of economic and cultural suppression. The effects of the state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities that began in the 1880s haunt us as a nation still. The Cree negotiators at Treaty 6 recognized the need for their people to adapt to the new economic paradigm taking shape in the west. They acknowledged that the conversion would be difficult. What they failed to plan for was the active intervention of the Canadian government in preventing them from doing so. Tuberculosis and pathologies that have emerged in aboriginal communities in recent decades are the physical manifestations of their poverty and marginalization from mainstream Canadian life.

The gap between the health, living conditions, and other social determinants of health of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians continues as it has since the end of the nineteenth century. While Canadians see themselves as world leaders in social welfare, health care, and economic development, most reserves in Canada are economic backwaters with little prospect of material advancement and more in common with the third world than the rest of Canada. Even basics such as clean drinking water remain elusive for some communities. Identification of the forces that have held indigenous communities back might provide insights into what is required to bridge the gap between First Nations communities and the rest of Canada today.”

Canada’s genocidal war on Indigenous peoples continues.