My life in books

I’ve been waiting excitedly for the publication of Rebecca Roanhorse’s novel Trail of Lightning ever since I heard she was writing it. Because based just on the one short story of hers that I’ve read - the one that won this year’s Hugo Award - I knew that I was going to be totally swept up in anything she wanted to write.

And I was totally correct in that.

Trail of Lightning is truly kickass fantasy - think urban fantasy but not in a city, with a troubled female monsterhunter and a serious monster to hunt - that takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where the Navajo Nation, or Dinétah, is now an autonomous region, separated from what remains of a North America ravaged by rising waters and ecological disasters by a wall raised by traditional powers. It’s no paradise - life is hard, technology is rundown and cobbled together, the economic system has reverted to barter, and there are ancient creatures of evil lurking in the hinterlands, and not all power workers have good intentions.

Maggie Hoskie was once almost killed by a monster. She was saved by Neizghání, a legendary, immortal monsterslayer, who took her on as his apprentice, in part because with the wounds she took from the monster, darkness entered her spirit, and only training and discipline could keep her from becoming a monster herself. But he came to mistrust her ability to resist, and stopped teaching her, leaving her alone, mostly trained, with clan powers that enhance her strength and speed, and doubting herself.

Part of her wants to stay away from monsterhunting, without the support of her mentor, but when a family calls for her to find, and save if she can, their daughter, taken by monsters, she does what she can.

The creature is unlike anything she’s encountered before, but with the help of Tah, a medicine man who is like a father to her, and his grandson Kai, she discovers that it’s a magical construct, which means there’s a witch operating in Dinétah, and she sets out with Kai to hunt them down.

The story is complex, with many twists, and unreliable characters who are telling layers on layers of untruths - after sll, Coyote is one of the characters, and you can never trust Coyote. It is steeped in Diné traditions, and - content notice here - brutal in many places. Maggie and Kai and the other humans in this story live in a brutal time, after the end of the world, when all the monsters that were kept in dreamtime have come to life. It’s a very different vision from most post-apocalyptic fantasies I’ve read, and it is absolutely enthralling. Fast-paced, action-filled. And Maggie Hoskie is as real as anyone I’ve ever read about.

I am certain of one thing - the next book is going to be a blast.

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.

Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization, edited by Peter McFarlane and Nicole Schabus, is exactly what the title says. A collection of essays on the mechanisms of colonisation, resistance, land claims, and true reconciliation by noted Indigenous thinkers and activists including Glen Coulthard, Taiaiake Alfred, Arthur Manuel, Pamela Palmeter, Bev Sellars and others, this volume was produced by The Federation of Post Secondary Educators of BC and is available for download at http://fpse.ca/sites/default/files/news_files/Decolonization%20Handbook.pdf

It’s an important collection of voices that need to be widely heard and understood, because these issues speak to the essence and survival of Canada as a nation. We settlers live on stolen land.Indigenous people’s land, taken through conquest and deceit and the arrogance of such legal fictions as the Doctrine of Discovery. If we are to work through this history that poisons our relationships with Indigenous people, with the land, with more recent arrivals on these lands, with our notions of what Canada ought to be, then the first thing we need to do is decolonise our relationships, and to remake the theft into a true partnership.

This book provides insights into what has gone before, and what must come after, in order to make this a reality. It’s not easy for settler peoples to acknowledge that what was done, was wrong. But that’s the first step. The essays collected here show first how it was done, and how government policy continues to support colonisation, land theft, and genocide under the goal of extinction of land title and special status, and second, how Indigenous peoples are resisting these goals.

These essays speak to everyone living within the nation called Canada. Much of the work is by Indigenous people, addressing Indigenous people. But the teachings are important for those of us from settler backgrounds, and those who have come as immigrants to the Canada built on colonialism. We all need to understand where we have come from, in order to see where we can go to, as Indigenous people and allies, as partners in defending the land and water, in a truly postcolonial world.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s book “All the Real Indians Died Off” is a methodical deconstruction of 21 common myths about Indigenous people in America. While it is informed by US culture and history, there’s certainly some overlap, some myths that I’ve encountered as part of the white settler view of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Both authors are Indigenous women, who have lived the experience of being characterised by these myths and are thus best suited to expose and explode them.

“...knowing and being able to articulate clearly what all the most prevalent myths and stereotypes about Native Americans are comes at least as much from the lived experience of being Native, in its infinite manifestations. As we discuss throughout these pages, this knowledge inevitably includes processes of inclusion and exclusion and personal histories of profound cultural loss, things neither of us are strangers to. To know personally the myths and stereotypes about Indians is to grow up hearing the narratives behind those myths, knowing that they were lies being told about you and your family and that you were expected to explain yourself at the demands of others.”

As Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker point out, many of these myths about Indigenous Americans arise from the American master narratives of exceptionalism, of settling a new and empty land through the exercise of rugged individualism, of being “a place of exceptional righteousness, democracy, and divine guidance (manifest destiny).”

The first myth they examine is that of the “vanishing Indian” which says “all the real Indians died off.” This myth has been used to justify both the seizure of land and policies of assimilation. Other myths they unpack and examine include the beliefs that Columbus discovered America, that Indians were savage and warlike, that Europeans civilized the backward natives, that the US government did not have a policy of genocide, that Indigenous culture belongs to all Americans, that most Indians are on welfare, that they are predisposed to alcoholism, and other perceptions that ignore the truths about Indigenous life within a racist settler society.

Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker offer important lessons in the history of white treatment of Indigenous peoples, from the exploitation and extermination of the Arawak by Columbus, to the enslavement and cultural genocide practised in the California missions under the now canonised Junipiero, to the tragedy of the Trail of Tears enforced under Andrew Jackson, to the widespread and commercialised appropriation of Indigenous art, dress, spiritual symbols and ceremonies, and other cultural elements.

It’s not a long book, but it is packed with detail about how Indigenous peoples and their cultures and histories have been perceived, and misperceived, by white American society. The book ends with a brief timeline of key events in the colonisation of the North American continent and the oppression of its original inhabitants. A solid introduction to Indigenous issues.

Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales and Oral History, edited by American/Ojibwe scholar Anton Treuer, is a collection of cultural narratives, tales and remembrances recorded by Treuer in conversation with Ojibwe elders. The collected narratives of the elders he spoke with are presented in both Ojibwe and in English translation. Treuer's intent in publishing these narratives is not just to preserve the legacy of the elders, but to offer material that will serve the vital project of preserving the language itself. As he says in the Introduction to the volume,

" 'We’re not losing our language, our language is losing us,' says White Earth elder Joe Auginaush. I have been both haunted and driven by that thought for many years now. The current peril faced by the Ojibwe (Chippewa) language is a matter of a declining number of speakers and a people who have lost their way, rather than a language that is lost or dying. The Ojibwe language, spoken by as many as 60,000 Anishinaabe people in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, is alive. The grammar, syntax, and structure of the language are complete. The oral tradition and history of the Ojibwe are still with us. Yet in many areas fluency rates have plummeted to unprecedented and unsustainable levels. Especially in the United States, most speakers are more than forty-five years of age. In some places, the fluency rate is as low as one percent. As the population of fluent speakers ages and eventually leaves, there is no doubt that the Ojibwe language will lose its carriers. We are not losing our language. Our language is losing us."

Preserved in the collected oral histories of the elders interviewed by Treuer are the memories of traditional ways of life, seasonal activities, and aspects of those ceremonies which may be written down or shared with those not Ojibwe (Treuer makes it clear that he has published nothing that can only be transmitted orally, or only within the Ojibwe people). The personal histories also speak of transitions to other ways of living and their consequences.

Some elders directly address their concerns about the lost of their language and of their traditional spiritual knowledge and traditions. Among the elders Treuer interviewed are those who are Drum keepers, entitled to teach about and conduct Drum ceremony, which is central to Ojibwe religious practice. Although direct information about the ceremonies is part of the knowledge that may not be written, only transmitted orally, those who are Drum keepers, who 'carry a drum' or who 'carry a pipe' talk about the importance of preserving Indigenous religion as another vital aspect of their culture and way of life.

A valuable contribution to the attempt tp preserve Indigenous languages and to record the memories of a people to whom the memories of elders are a vital element of cultural transmission, an element that has been severely undermined by colonialism and forced assimilation.

Me Funny, edited by Ojibway playwright and humorist Drew Hayden Taylor, is a collection of meditations and ruminations on the subject of Indigenous humour. Many of the contributors are Indigenous Canadians, writers and playwrights engaged in the creation of the very art which is the subject of the collection.

I found this collection among the Toronto Public Library's online ebook offerings. I was browsing their Indigenous section and somehow it seemed that after reading two books in quick succession that focused on the oppression of Indigenous peoples, I wanted to read something from the other side, something that looked at Indigenous survival - and what speaks more to the survival of a people and their culture than their laughter.

I was not completely unfamiliar with the territory when I chose this book - I've read some of the work of Drew Hayden Taylor, and Tomson Highway, and Thomas King before now, enough to have gotten a glimpse of what indigenous comedic writing can be like, and know that it makes me laugh, and makes me think. As did many of the contributions to this volume.

Among the working comics, writers and playwrights who share their perspectives are Ojibway stand-up comic Don Kelly, who offers thoughts on the nature of Indigenous comedy within the context of the Canadian comedy circuit, interspersed with excepts from his routines, and playwright Ian Ferguson, who talks about the differences between Indigenous humour intended for mixed audiences, and "our jokes" - humour by and for Indigenous peoples.

In "Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone," Taylor provides some of his own perspectives on the nature of Indigenous humour, with particular focus on what has been one of the recurring themes of his own work, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

In "Ruby Lips," Louise Profeit-LeBlanc, a Northern Tutchone storyteller, offers a poignant story, sour and sweet, about her characters Johnny Silverfox and Mary Malcolm, who embody both the tragedy and the drive for survival that are so often interwoven in Indigenous life and literature.

Janice Acoosta (Cree/Métis) and Natasha Beeds (Cree/Afro-Caribbean) discuss "Cree-ative" comedy - with notable emphasis on the Trickster figure - in the form of a two-handed play/dialogue that veers wildly between interpersonal humour, satire, and detailed analysis of the comic writing of Cree writer Paul Seesequasis.

Cherokee writer and scholar Thomas King interleaves a discussion of the difficulties of defining Indigenous humour with passages from his popular CBC radio comedy show, The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour.

In "Why Cree Is the Funniest of All Languages," an elegiac meditation on language and mythology, Tomson Highway talks about the soul - and the gut-level presence - of Indigenous humour.

Mohawk academic and parent Karen Froman, in "Buffalo Tales and Academic Trails" talks about her own uses of humour in teaching, both at the university level, and as a volunteer resource person on Indigenous issues at her children's school.

In one of the few pieces to address visual comedy, Alan J. Ryan's "One Big Indian," analyses both the creative process in Bill Powless' satirical paintings of Indigenous people, and the nature of public reaction to the paintings and the questions they raise about Indigenous representation for the white gaze.

Métis scholar Kristina Fagan's essay "Teasing, Tolerating, Teaching - Laughter and Community in Canadian Literature" examines the ways in which Indigenous writers have portrayed and used humour to strengthen community and cohesiveness - both by ambiguous example, and by teasing, even humiliation, as a form of coersion. She illustrates this through a discussion of the prevalence of the joker or jester figure - often an elder, but hardly a serious and sage advisor - who simultaneously defuses tension, transmutes fear or tragedy to laughter, and provides multiple lessons, sometimes contradictory or self-subversive, to be teased out of his or her words and actions.

As Mirjam Hirch notes in "Subversive Humour - Canadian Native Playwrights' Winning Weapon of Resistance," it has only been in recent decades that white observers were aware of the existence of Indigenous humour. Early writers on the subject depicted the indigenous peoples of North America as serious, placid or warlike by turns, but never funny. This view, however, has been thoroughly discredited with the emergence of a body of Indigenous humour, much of it expressed through theatre as the literary form closest to traditional storytelling forms. Hirch traces the roots of Indigenous humour from pre-colonial sacred rituals involving reversals and 'tricksters' and notes, as other contributors have, the importance of teasing in Indigenous cultures as a means of social control. She also talks, as others have, about how Indigenous people have used humour as a way to cope with and heal from trauma, and as a way of 'retaliating' against their oppressors without incurring punitive reaction.

Sprinkled throughout the volume are a series of jokes that the editor has written/collected/curated under the collective title "Astutely Selected Ethno-Based Examples of Cultural Jocularity and Racial Comicalness."

I don't know if I could do any better defining Indigenous humour now than I could before reading this, but I certainly enjoyed it, and more than one passage left me smiling, even laughing. Maybe that's the best reason for reading it.

Reading about the history and ideology of racism, colonialism, and other global projects of oppression seems to be my thing these days. I think it has something to do with the frightening rise of right-wing, white supremacist, and fascist politicians and movements around the so-called developed world, and watching the slow erosion of democracy, compassion, justice, even humanity itself, as I define it. I've always been a left-wing, social justice sort of person, but now I find myself compelled to learn more about my enemies and the ideologies, institutions and actions they have, and still do, espouse, propagate and defend.

One of the books that's been a part of this reading project is An Indigenous People's History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. In this volume, Dunbar-Ortiz seeks to decentre the white settler narratives of the establishment and growth of the United States, and present instead a narrative that centres the indigenous perspective.

In her Introduction, Dunbar-Ortiz states:

"Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America - "from California... To the Gulf Stream waters" - are interred the bones, villages fields and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today. It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the western hemisphere, the very evidence of the western hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set up on a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged the path of that destruction of life itself - the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, overheated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties."

She goes on to describe the ways in which land - the idea, the metaphor, the physical reality of the soil and water we live on and the resources it holds - is a key concept in understanding American history: "everything in US history is about the land - who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity ("real estate") broken in pieces to be bought and sold on the market."

Dunbar notes that the connection of white invaders/colonists/settlers and indigenous dwellers with/to the land means that the relationship of white and indigenous peoples is not one of racism - or not exclusively so - but also of colonialism and imperialism, and, as a consequence of the outright theft of land, genocide. Recognising this means "rethinking the consensual national narrative." She goes on to say:

"Awareness of the settler colonist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The form of colonialism that the Indigenous Peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both offensive and defensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what is now called terrorism. In every instance they have fought for survival as peoples. The objective of US colonial authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples - not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a sociopolitical and economic entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples."

Dunbar-Ortiz begins her history of the United States with a discussion of the conditions that prevailed among indigenous peoples prior to the arrival of European colonists. She describes the major groups of nations in North and Central America, and the variety of agricultural and land management practices, trade patterns, governmental structures, and other key aspects of the many civilised nations that covered all the habitable Iand of the continent.

She goes on to examine the European roots of colonialism, from the appropriation of land and exploitation of labour that formed the basis of the feudal system, to the colonisation of states such as Scotland, Wales, Catalonia and the Basque Nation, to the Crusades, which married Christian zeal to conquest for profit. As she notes: "The rise of the modern state in Western Europe was based on the accumulation of wealth by means of exploiting human labour and displacing millions of subsistence producers from their lands."

Having perfected the techniques of colonialism with Europe itself and the lands closest to them, these states set out to increase their wealth, expanding "... overseas to obtain even more resources, land and labour" through the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, Africa, the Pacific, and much of
Asia. The increased need for labour - both at home to convert stolen resources into wealth, and in the colonies as support for the military and developing capitalist classes, and then as settlers to develop the land taken from indigenous peoples - was supplied through the appropriation of the commons and the enshrinement of private property which forced small subsistence farmers off their land.

Dunbar-Ortiz also locates the beginnings of white supremacy in the "colonizing ventures of the Christian Crusades in Muslim-controlled territories and to the Protestant colonization of Ireland" as well as suspicion of Conversos and Moriscos - Iberian Jews and Muslims who has converted to Christianity. As she observes, "The Crusades gave birth to the papal law of 'limpieza de sangre' - cleanliness of blood - for which the Inquisition was established by the Church to investigate and determine." Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to describe the result of this - the imagined alliance of 'old Christians' regardless of class against the potential contamination of the body spiritual by new Christians of questionable devoutness and 'purity' as "the first instance class leveling based on imagined racial sameness - the origin of white supremacy, the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa." A brief discussion of the colonisation of Northern Ireland and the racislisation of the indigenous Irish as lesser products of creation, descended, like people of colour, from 'apes' rather than men demonstrates the ways in which this imperial project - combining land seizure, 'white' settlement, resource exploitation, racialisation of native peoples and religious ideology - is a precursor to the British colonisation of North America.

In discussing the subjugation of the Americas, Dunbar-Ortiz delivers a critique of the 'disease theory' of the massive depopulation of the continents. While agreeing that the introduction of new diseases into the microbiological ecosystem of the Americas played a part in the genocide which literally decimated the population of the Western Hemisphere, Dunbar-Ortiz notes the almost constant state of war, and the multiple conditions of colonialist practice that increased susceptibility to disease in a previously healthy population.

"US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians "accept uncritically a fatalistic 'epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity' explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors ... which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections." Other scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another, or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement."

As Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates, a close examination of the kind of warfare waged by the settler colonists against the Indigenous nations reveals its genocidal nature from the very beginning - violence against women, children and the elderly, and destruction of farms and other sites of food production in order to depopulate the land in preparation for white settlers. Bounty hunting was introduced, with the taking of scalps (originally practiced during the colonisation of Ireland) accepted as proof of kills. Indigenous women and children not killed outright were taken as slaves, their forced labour contributing to resource extraction in Caribbean as well as continental American colonies.

After securing the northern coastal area of what is now the United States, Anglo colonists moved west, warring directly with the Indigenous nations, and to the north and south, attacking French and Spanish colonies and their Indigenous allies. Following the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years' War), which ended in 1763 with the transfer of French colonies in what is now Canada and the Spanish territory of Florida to Britain, the British government attempted to halt the colonisation of the Ohio valley. Anglo settlers, however, refused to be constrained in their westward push, creating tensions which helped to trigger the War of Independence. Wars against Indigenous nations in the Ohio Valley - marked by extreme violence from military forces whose officers were ordered to "most effectually chastise and terrify the savages" - continued throughout the revolution, with the consequence of an expanded land base for the new colonial nation. The litany of total, genocidal wars against Indigenous nations continued over the next century, as the new colonial republic and its militant settlers moved south and west into territories ceded by other European countries (as in the Louisiana Purchase), or still under Indigenous control, and initiated a long imperialist conflict with Mexico. Dunbar-Ortiz describes in heartbreaking detail the resistance of the Indigenous people to the inexorable progress of the colonial project.

At the same time that the new republic was devoting its military resources to exterminating the original inhabitants of the land, the myth of American origins was bring crafted to deny the real processes of colonisation. In The Last of the Mohicans, Fennimore Cooper created the image of the vanishing Indian passing stewardship of the land on to his white adopted son. The idea of Manifest Destiny romanticised those who led settler-colonists into new lands, defeating the unworthy and barbarous savages who dared to oppose the advance of Christian civilisation. Novelist Wallace Stegner wrote: "Ever since Daniel Boone took his first excursion over Cumberland Gap, Americans have been wanderers... With a continent to take over and Manifest Destiny to goad us, we could not have avoided being footloose." An article in a contemporary publication compared European and American imperialism by arguing that European nations "conquer only to enslave" but the United States "conquers only to bestow freedom." As Dunbar-Ortiz notes, the erasure of colonial genocide has been so effective that President Barack Obama was able to declare, in an interview given to the Dubai press shortly after his inauguration in 2009: "We sometimes make mistakes. We are not perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power."

The December 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of over 300 Lakota who had surrendered to American military forces essentially marked the end of armed Indigenous resistance to US colonisation. The shift to cultural genocide had already begun, with the establishment of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and the cultural repression of the California missions. At the same time, lands that had been allotted to various surrendered Indigenous nations in "Indian Country" were being systematically diminished to provide land for white settlers, railroads, and exploitation of natural resources including gold and oil. The iconography of the 'vanishing Indian' - most graphically portrayed in James Earle Fraser's 1915 sculpture "The End of the Trail" - came to represent the public image of Indigenous peoples.

Dunbar-Ortiz draws a connection between the 'domestic' colonialism of the United States in its dealings with Indigenous peoples and its history of military imperialism abroad. "... it's important to realize that the same methods and strategies that were employed with the Indigenous peoples on the continent were mirrored abroad. While the Indigenous Americans were being brutally colonized, eliminated, relocated and killed, the United States from its beginning was also pursuing overseas dominance. Between 1798 and 1827 the United States intervened militarily twenty-three times from Cuba to Tripoli (Libya) to Greece. There were seventy-one overseas interventions between 1832 and 1896, on all continents, and the United States dominated Latin America economically, sone countries militarily. The forty interventions and occupations between 1898 and 1919 were conducted with even more military heft but using the same methods and sometimes the same personnel."

Dunbar-Ortiz continues with an account of consistent mismanagement of Indigenous peoples' lives and livelihoods in the 20th century under the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, with decisions taken without reference to the actual needs of the people, and often made to facilitate corporate interests at the expense of the people. She discusses the 'narrative of dysfunction' used to characterise Indigenous peoples and justify continued paternalistic colonial intervention, a narrative that conveniently ignores the conditions which led to the current situation in which Indigenous communities display a high incidence of poverty and social dysfunction. These conditions include the loss of land and sovereignty, generations of brutal violence and oppression, denial of access to sacred lands, destruction of traditional economies and ways of life, and the legacy of forced assimilation, abuse and alienation from culture, language and history - all part of the genocidal war waged on Indigenous peoples by settler colonists. She quotes Mohawk historian and activist Taiaiake Alfred: "What is the legacy of colonialism? Dispossession, disempowerment and disease inflicted by the white man to be sure.... Yet the enemy is in plain view: residential schools, racism, expropriation, extinguishment, warship, welfare."

Moving forward to the 1960s - the era of multiple civil rights movements - Dunbar-Ortiz discusses the new resistance movements among Indigenous peoples and their goals, from return of sacred lands to recognition of treaty rights. She notes the increase of high-profile resistance actions among young Indigenous people, including the occupation of Alcatraz, the AIM protests at Wounded Knee, identifying these as the 'beginning of Indigenous decolonization in North America.' More recently, Indigenous nations have begun to establish systems of governance to replace the colonialist oversight of the past. In her conclusion, Dunbar-Ortiz restates the premise that the United States' undeniable history of imperialist violence abroad and domestic violence at all levels of society is inextricably linked to its genesis in colonialism and genocide; at the same time, she speculates that the process if decoloniation may offer new ways of imagining the American polity leading to a more humane culture.

This is a profoundly important book. The importance of understanding the processes of colonisation which resulted in the modern white settler states of the United States and Canada (which shares much with its neighbour in terms of the colonisation of Indigenous peoples) is vital if we are to move toward a more just society - and knowledge is the first step to understanding.

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

Sherman Alexie's young adult novel, The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-time Indian is by turns hilarious and heart-breaking. And while it may be fiction (though based at least in part on Alexie's own early life), it rings absolutely true.

The narrator is Arnold Spirit Jr., a young boy growing up on a Spokane reserve. He is charmingly geekish, isolated by his intelligence, his fondness for drawing cartoons, and the physical consequences of being hydrocephalic - seizures, an ungainly appearance with an overly large head. As narrator, Arnold speaks directly to the reader, sharing his sometimes funny, sometimes angry, often poignant observations about his life and the lives of his relatives and neighbours on the reserve. There is no sugar coating here; Arnold sees the ways in which his people are trapped in destructive patterns and second-class lives:

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.

Early in the book, Arnold thinks about what his parents might have been like under different circumstances:

Seriously, I know my mother and father had their dreams when they were kids. They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams. Given the chance, my mother would have gone to college. She still reads books like crazy. She buys them by the pound. And she remembers everything she reads. ... Given the chance, my father would have been a musician. When he gets drunk, he sings old country songs. And blues, too. And he sounds good. ... But we reservation Indians don't get to realize our dreams. We don't get those chances. Or choices. We're just poor. That's all we are.

But Arnold does get a chance, and a choice, when he is suspended from the reserve school for throwing a book at his (white) teacher. (He has reason for his anger - he has just realised that he is studying from the same textbook his mother used in school, that no attempt has been made to give the Indian students an up-to-date education.) His teacher, despite his own anger at having his nose broken, sees in Arnold's anger a deeper emotion - hope. And the urges Arnold to "take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope." For Arnold, that means the white school, 20 miles away, and there he determines to go, even though he must walk to school and back each day because his parents cannot afford the gas to drive him there.

Attending an off-reserve school brings with it many additional problems; to the white kids at school, he is an outsider - at least, until he displays an unexpected talent for basketball - while to his former friends on the reserve, he is a traitor - especially when he plays basketball against them. But he perseveres, takes this rare gift of a chance that has been denied to so many others, and makes his choice.

The non-fiction I read in 2011 was a small and somewhat mixed assortment.


William H. Patterson, Jr., Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, The Authorized Biography, Volume I: Learning Curve

This was somewhat interesting but essentially unsatisfying. Patterson does not appear to have the detachment or the analytical bent (at least when discussing this subject) to provide more than a highly detailed but ultimately superficial look at Heinlein as man or as writer, and both his accuracy and his treatment of sources is open to question. A biography must be more than a collection of everything one could find about the subject, set down without comment even when the various sources are contradictory.


Sarah Schulman, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences

Schulman makes an interesting but not completely convincing argument that lack of full acceptance and support of queer people by their families is the basic cause, not only of social intolerance of queer people, but also of all the ills that can be found within the queer community. I think she has a point - that being that if families would fight for the rights of their queer members, both within the family and within the greater society, then much positive change would occur - but I think her argument simplifies the situation somewhat. But still, she poses some very interesting ideas and points out how easily gay men, lesbians other members of the queer community settle for the most modest shows of acceptance from their families of origin, and how much more many parents, siblings and other family members need to go in supporting, encouraging and defending the queer people in their lives just to provide the same kind of support that is automatically given to the straight people in their lives.


Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire

Roy is one of the most eloquent critics of the global imperialist project. These essays are from the periods of the Bush administration in the US and address issues having to do with the Iraq war as well as challenging imperialism and its effects around the world and in her own country.


Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

Maracle's book is part personal narrative, part history of the development of the movements of resistance and change among First Nations peoples, and part sociological analysis of the situation of First Nations peoples, and First Nations women, in their own communities and within north American mainstream society.


Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life

A fascinating examination of the ways that women's lives are chronicled, and how the ways that biographers and women writing personal narratives structure and organise their work differs from traditional approaches taken toward the writing of the lives of men.


Jennifer K. Stoller, Ink-stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors

Stoller offers the reader an interesting and lively survey of many of the fictional heroines that have become part of popular culture over the past 70-odd years, from Wonder Woman to Buffy and Xena.


Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

Ehrenreich looks at the history, the current manifestations and the effects of the positive thinking and self-help movements in American culture, and demonstrates how what appeared to be a beneficial response to the restrictive culture of Calvinist thought in the 19th century has become a dangerous mass delusion in the 21st.


Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Woman at the Dawn of the 1960s

Coontz does three things in this book, all of which are quite interesting - perhaps especially to someone like myself who remember when The Feminine Mystique was first published. First, she looks at the book itself. Second, she presents narratives of women who read the book and have described how it affected them. Third, she looks at the social history of women and the the women's movement in the US using the book as a touchstone.


And finally, a book that is not really classifiable, but which I am including here because taken in whole, it is an example of writing about a woman's life, and is hence no more a fiction than are the lives of any of us.

Karen Joy Fowler & Debbie Notkin (eds.), 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin

To celebrate the occasion of Ursula Le Guin's 80th birthday, editors Fowler and Notkin invited contributions of many kinds from a variety of writers. Here are reminiscences of Le Guin, personal accounts of what her books have meant to various writers, poems and short stories presented in her honour, pieces of critical analysis, a brief biographical sketch by Julie Phillips (who wrote the definitive biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr.) and a few other kinds of things that one might produce in order to celebrate a most extraordinary woman.