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.

Up Ghost River: a chief’s journey through the turbulent waters of Native history, Edmund Metatawabin’s memoir, is at once a survivor’s recollection of violence and oppression, and an activist’s declaration of Indigenous resistance and power.

Chief Metatawabin writes with courage and brutal honesty about his life, about the abuse he experienced as a student at a residential school, about the cultural genocide experienced by the Indigenous peoples, about the ways these things affected him, and came close to destroying him and his family. He offers his earliest recollections, before going away to school, about the damage done by oppressive laws that made the exercise of traditional ways a crime, the divisions created by Christian priests and ministers persuading Indigenous people that their culture was sinful and evil, abut the ways that Indigenous people were kept poor, hungry and in debt.

He writes about the almost unthinkable tortures, humiliations, abuses forced on him and others at residential schools, and the psychological damage from years of mistreatment and trauma, the way that pain led him to addiction.

He writes about his struggles to overcome alcoholism, to hel from trauma, finally learning that white men’s treatments in white institutions only perpetuated the damage. He became part of the indigenous healing movement, and began to rediscover self knowledge, and Indigenous pride.

As a chief and activist, he spearheaded court cases against residential schools, began to demand more autonomy for his nation, and supported the recovery of the almost lost traditions of indigenous people, working closely with the Idle No More movement.

These courageous personal accounts are important, both in exposing the history of white abuse, oppression and genocide, and in restoring the hope and the power of indigenous people, through making the truth known. I thank Chief Metatawabin for sharing his story with the world, and I honor him.

“What was accomplished by Idle No More? With Stephen Harper’s parliamentary majority, it was hard for us to stop the Acts from becoming law. And yet, it soon became apparent that the movement was bigger than the original legislation that sparked it. We organized and demonstrated politically and spiritually, championing those aspects of our culture that the residential schools had tried to destroy. At the protests worldwide, we raised our voices and sang to the four directions to show that we are still here. We banged the moosehide drum because it symbolizes the union between the heartbeat of Mother Earth and our people, still beating strong after centuries of oppression. We rose up, strong and united, to return to the Red Road. We took to the streets and retraced the ancient trails. We found our spirits and our voices, and told our stories of renewed pride and strength in powerful traditions. We took a healing journey, as I have been doing ever since I left St. Anne’s. We honoured the memories of our living ghosts.”

Memory Serves is a collection of lectures and speeches by Sto: lo/Salish activist and author Lee Maracle. In her Preface, Maracle says of her work as a communicator:

"Indigenous people have historically hesitated to create books such as this because they express the views of the individuals presenting thoughts on the whole. The individual cannot represent the whole in that way in our communities. We don't assign anyone that kind of authority. I derive my understanding of social theory, of our logic, our processes for thought, discovery, consultation and learning from the stories I have heard and from having witnessed thousands of oral discussions with youth, elders, middle-aged people, even children. As a witness I pay attention to how these discussions unfold, how each individual engages the whole, the subject in question, and how they play with it. I have been witnessing for as far back as my memory serves, but this does not make me an expert on our people.

What makes my words valuable is the thousands of Indigenous people who have said to me: You just articulated everything I was thinking."

Maracle's writing - actually, speaking, for these are the written forms of oratories, spoken word performances - is poetic, evocative, drawing on the shape and style and images of the Indigenous storytelling genre. She uses events, examples, images, and linking all, rhythm and sound, to lead the listener to an understanding. It must be listened to in the heart and the gut as well as the head to be comprehended. In the oratory that gives a title to the volume, "Memory Serves," her re/membering connects pasts and futures, moving from ancient myth/stories of the relationships of men and women, peace and war, life and death, to a speakers panel of Indigenous women to the birth of her daughter. It guides the reader/listener toward the path that leads to 'the good life' - and reconnects them with their hidden selves and their community history.

Her re-membering is a force for wholeness, for understanding, for action, for justice.

"I re-member courage in the face of awesome fear and haul up the courage from every cell, transform it into desire and push it with a will toward freedom. I re-member rage and dig beneath its hoary cap in search if the justice moving me to rage and then I determine to stretch this rage into some kind of energized force and transform it into justice. When I am successful this will become a moment that will live for all time because others will choose to remember. I re-member dark, its seriousness, its sobriety, its sacred ability to hold my life still and call me to alter my conduct, change my direction and commit to participating more fully in my life. I come to the table full feast. I offer the host, the multitudes, the dead, the living, and the unborn this food.

I remember the body is made to move, that life is always worth engaging, that fear is a beautiful friend cautioning me to take care, and that courage is there to mediate this fear and is ever willing to be summoned that this old friend will not capitulate and become some beast that no longer serves me. I move as though sure. I fear no decision as belief in my memory grows; it has always served my spiritual path."

In the oratory "Salmon Is the Hub of Salish Memory," Maracle compares the divisive and reductive European worldview, which ignores connection and sets artificial hierarchies of importance, to the Indigenous worldview which recognises the community of all things. She builds this comparison around two events from 2001 - the suicide of an entire salmon run, and the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center which led to the invasion of Afghanistan.

"At the time that the salmon were committing social suicide, Afghanistan was the object of international invasion. Salish people know that the homelands of the salmon have been the object of chronic invasion by fisheries, pulp and paper mills, the forestry industry and all manner of toxic dumping. Are these events connected? Is there a connection between Western society's devaluation of the lives of Afghanis and and the devaluation of salmon, the degradation of their life conditions such that suicide seems their only option? Are the Afghani people and the sockeye of equal value? Is there a connection between suicidal salmon and suicidal warriors?"

"Who Gets to Draw the Maps - In and Out of Place in British Columbia" questions the authority of those who make not just the geographical representations of land that we think of as maps - complete with boundaries that divide this from that and assign ownership to segments only of the whole - but the maps of reality formed by the accepted language and story we are surrounded by. Who decides the sociological hierarchies, the categories we put humans and other living things into? Who defines the terms that shape our realities, and to what ends?

In these as well as other oratories collected in this volume, Maracle addresses the conditions of colonialism from a variety of perspectives: the absence of a well-developed post-colonial literature in Canada that results from our holding on to colonial power relations; the system of colonialist laws that limit the autonomy of Indigenous people; the impact of colonialism on Indigenous women and on Indigenous traditions of relationship between me and women in families and in society; the devaluing and loss of Indigenous knowledge and the methods of developing and transmitting it.

At the same time, Maracle presents Indigenous alternatives to the Western colonial way of being - ways of relation to the earth and to each other, ways of seeing, learning, studying, developing knowledge bases, thinking, remembering, communicating and teaching. She places particular emphasis on exploring/explaining the oral nature of Indigenous culture - its literature, its teaching methods, are based not on written text as both repository and communication, but on memory and the spoken word, on the real-time communicator of accumulated knowledge and ongoing creativity.

In "Oratory on Oratory" Maracle explicitly addresses the Salish methodologies of knowledge development, a topic which is woven through all of the other oratories collected here:

"Study is tempered by humans studying the space between the beings in the relationships humans engage. From the snow flea on a glacier to barra- cudas and sharks, the small beings and the invisible beings, all beings have a perfect right to be. We respect the barracuda, but we recognize that the charming smile of this predator is dangerous, and so we maintain a good distance from his territory, and we don’t swim with sharks. Principles of fair exchange govern all of our relationships. We pick berries in such a way that the berries are assured of continued renewal, and we are cautious to leave some for the bears. We study from the perspective that, as the variable beings on earth, it is humans that need to transform and alter their conduct to engage in relationship with other beings and phenomena. Relationship engagement is disciplined by conjuring the least intrusive and invasive con- duct possible, respecting the distance and reproductive rights of other beings, and ensuring the greatest freedom of beings to be as they are and always will be. This requires that we study the life of beings and phenomena in our world from their perspective, and not from the perspective of our needs."

This is a volume to be read slowly, to be read with the ears and eyes, heart and mind. It unfolds a way if thinking, seeing, remembering and teaching that is very different from European tradition, in the very act of remembering and teaching about the impacts of colonialist history of the European presence on the people who thought, and saw, and remembered and taught, and who still, in spite of all, think and see and remember and teach in this way.

Saanaq, by Inuk author Mitiarjuk ​Nappaaluk, has been called the first 'Canadian Inuit novel.' Written over a period of two decades, first in Inuktitut syllabics (published in transliteration in 1984) and later translated into French (published in 2002) and English (2014), it was commissioned by Catholic missionaries working in Nunavut, who wanted to improve their ability to communicate with the indigenous peoples living in the region. What they asked for was a simple phrasebook. What Nappaluk began writing was an episodic novel that, in telling stories about the Inuit people and their lives, served not only as a reading primer but a record of indigenous life in Nunavut and the arrival of Europeans in the area, from the rarely-heard perspective of an indigenous woman.

it is written very simply, in prose that reminds me very much of the storytelling style I've encountered in some other works by indigenous people (some of the short stories of Thomas King cone to mind), and it's a series of short pieces detailing bith the daiky activities and special events of a small, interconnected community of Inuit. The connecting thread is the relationships of all the characters to Saanaq, a young widow who, at the beginning of the novel, lives with her younger unmarried sister and daughter. The time period is somewhere in the middle of the 20th century - the community knows of Europeans, but they have not yet been significantly affected by their arrival in the North, and still live as their ancestors did.

The story behind the novel's creation took many twists and turns. As anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure - then a post-graduate student working with Claude Levi-Strauss - says in his Introduction,

"... the novel took almost twenty years to write, for several reasons. The first part covered a little over half of the final manuscript. It stopped at the beginning of episode 24 (The Legend of Lumaajuq) because the author had to leave for a long stay at a hospital in the South and then because Father Lechat [the priest who had originally asked Napaaluk to write the phrasebook - bibliogramma] had been transferred to Kuujjuaq (Fort Chimo). Father Joseph Méeus, O.M.I., took over supervision of her work and about forty new pages were written, i.e., episodes 25 to 37. The novel continued to remain unfinished with her return to hospital and the transfer of Father Méeus to another village. Mitiarjuk stopped writing for several years.

I met Father Lechat in January 1956 during my first stay in Arctic Quebec. He welcomed me to Kuujjuaq, offering the hospitality of his mission, and told me about the novel Sanaaq. In his hands was the first part, written in pencil with almost nothing crossed out or added. It had been transliterated into Roman letters, with the author’s help, before he had left Kangirsujuaq, and had also been partially translated. But the spelling of the Inuit language had not yet been standardized and the imprecision of syllabic writing, the lack of punctuation, and the distance from the author made the job impossible for him to pursue. He read me some of the translation and my interest was aroused right away. It was not until 1961 that I finally met Mitiarjuk, during anthropological fieldwork at Kangirsujuaq. I convinced her to start writing again. The next year Father Lechat gave me his manuscript of Sanaaq so that I could work on it with Mitiarjuk."

It was through d'Anglure's ongoing assistance and contacts (and access to academic funding) that the book saw publication. (He used the experience of working with Napaaluk as the basis for his Ph.D dissertation.)

I was struck, in reading this, by the strong sense of community among the families whose stories are included in the novel. They support each other, feed each other, join in hunting and gathering firewood and other resources for each other. Napaaluk describes a life that is semi-nomadic - the community changes their camp's location several times - and focused on subsistence. Food is not just for nourishment, it plays an important social function - when people come to visit each other, they are offered 'arrival meals' as welcome to the new community, and 'going-away meals' when leaving, as recognition of the effort and use of energy in travelling in a difficult landscape. And when someone has been successful in hunting or fishing, it's often the signal for a community feast, with everyone invited to share in the meat from the kill. There are several occasions where hunters and fishers give part of their catch to the elders of the community, because they are not always able to find food for themselves.

In one chapter, in which several elders share legends, there is an exchange which I found unintentionally ironic, and deeply saddening. One if the young hunters, whose parents are dead, is instructed by an elder on how to identify animals that are healthy and thus safe to kill and eat. The young hunter and the elder talk about the role of elders in preserving the knowledge of the people:

"Thank you! I won’t forget any of what you’ve told me and which I didn’t know before. I need to be taught. Those who aren’t elders are less knowledgeable than those who are. Without elders the Inuit are nothing, for there is much knowledge that the elders alone possess!"

"My knowledge comes not from me but from my ancestors. It seems to be mine but, in fact, it comes to me from people who preceded me. I pass it on to all of you, to all of your descendants and all of your kinfolk!"

In the earlier parts of the story, there is little indication of the existence of white Europeans, beyond the use by hunters of guns. As the novel progresses, contacts with Europeans (called the Qallunaat by Sanaaq's people, literally meaning 'big eyebrows) become more frequently mentioned, until finally, the story records the arrival of Catholic missionaries and the first conversions among Sanaaq's community. In reading these passages, it's impossible to forget that Nappaaluk was herself a convert, who wrote the majority of her novel at the request of, and in consultation with, the Catholic priests who had cone to live in her community.

Later in the story, white 'Inuit agents' arrive, and establish an outpost near the area where Sanaaq's community makes their camp. Sanaaq's second husband accepts a contract job of several month's duration working for the Qallunaat at another place. The Inuit agents establish a system of cash payments to the elderly and to families with children, and later there are regular visits to the outpost from a community health nurse. There is now a store where Sanaaq and her relatives can purchase food, cloth, and other goods. Anglican missionaries arrive and there is a suggestion of some competition between the two religious groups for conversions.

The intervention of the Qallunaat - specifically the availability of Western medicine - is of direct significance to the story when first Sanaaq's young son almost drowns, and later, when Sanaaq experiences a violent battering from her husband which leaves her severely injured. The Qallunaat offer to fly her son out to a hospital if he does not recover - which he does - and then does fly Sanaaq to a hospital for treatment of her injuries. Her husband, meanwhile, is cautioned not to beat her again or he will go to jail.

Personal interactions - even sexual relationships - between Inuit and Qallunaat become part of the story of Sanaaq's community. In the later chapters - those written after Nappaaluk had begun to work with d'Anglure rather than the Catholic priests for whom she had begun her work - there are indications of the beginnings of patterns of abuse of the Inuit by Qallunaat sent into the north, although it's uncertain what Nappaaluk felt about the incidents she included.

In Sannaq, Nappaaluk has given us the gift of an account of traditional Inuit life, and of the beginnings of the relationship between Inuit and white settler-colonists in the North, from the viewpoint of an Inuk woman who witnessed the changes herself. It's a rare and precious gift, and I'm richer for having ben able to read it.

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.

As Constant Reader has probably noticed, I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction, but I do read some. The remaining books in this category to be recorded in my reads for 2009 are:



Tracks, Louise Erdrich - I enjoyed this thoroughly. Erdrich tells a most engaging story and writes compellingly of the circumstances of First Nations people forced to live under the oversight of white settler law and authorities.


Feminist Fables, Suniti Namjoshi - A collection of short - often very short - narrative pieces that are a combination of keen observation informed by feminist vision, and adry and delightful sense of humour.


Bird in the House, Margaret Laurence - another collection of shorter, linked narratives, set in the fictional town of Manwaka which serves as the nexus from many of the characters in Laurence's fiction.


One Good Story, That One, Thomas King - collection of short stories that explore the relationships between First Nations and settler peoples and their perceptions of each other, told with King's trademark piercing humour and truth.

Green Grass, Running Water, by Thomas King

Imagine magical realism with all the satire and bite and planned absurdity of Monty Python’s Flying Circus at its very best. Add in the best of aboriginal storytelling tradition, from some highly unusual and unlikely narrators, and a skillful examination – no, make that evisceration – of the images that white settler culture has created of, about and around aboriginal peoples in North America. And a wealth of literary, mythological, religious and historical allusions and references. Oh, and don’t forget to braid all of this together with a perfectly realistic novel about four people from the same reserve in western Canada who are each, in their own way, on the brink of major changes in their lives, and how their individual pasts, their First Nations heritage and the assumptions and actions of the white people and institutions around them have brought them to this point.

Or, as another reviewer put it:

Imagine four Indian storytellers in the best oral tradition, only with frequent interruptions (“Who, me?” says that Coyote). If I tell you that their names are the Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye, you will begin to get the joke. Their stories are mashups of Native American and Western culture: Changing Woman, meet Noah. They rewrite the classics, rewrite Hollywood Westerns, rewrite Creation itself in the attempt to get it right this time. And while the novel works as a story complete in itself, the literary references, punning names, and recurring motifs are an English major’s Easter egg hunt.

Short chapters, some of them no more than a barrage of dialogue, keep the plot moving quickly. The novel does jump about: between history, myth, Hollywood, Melville, the Bible, and an actual plot, King is keeping a lot of balls in the air. Enjoy the juggling act and the wickedly dry sense of humor. You’ve never read a book about cultural (and patriarchal) oppression that’s this funny. Williamsburg Regional Library review

Then you’ll have some idea of what you’ll find in King’s Green Grass, Running Water (the very title makes reference to the terms in many treaties and agreements made between settlers and aboriginal peoples – “as long as grass grows and water runs” – that were in fact broken as quickly as ink dries).

It’s a book with the rare gift of making people of privilege see their unexamined racism, laugh at themselves – and thank the author for the pleasure of the lesson.

I’ve raved about Thomas King’s writing before, and I have every intention of doing it again, because I heartily anticipate reading everything he’s written. He’s just that good.

Kynship, Daniel Justice Heath.

Once, the whole of the Eld Green was the home of the Folk – the tree-born Kyn, the earth-dwelling Gvaerg, the Tetawi, descended from ancient animal spirits, the clever builders of the Ubbetek, the reclusive, spider-like Wyrnack, the Beast-folk and the Ferals. Then there was an opening of the walls between the worlds, and the Eld Green experienced the coming of the Humans, who have pushed the Folk out of the great plains and forests that were once their home, driving them into a small stretch of forest and mountain; yet even so, the Humans are not satisfied. They want all the land, all the resources, all the power.

It’s easy to see parallels between the setting and backstory of this novel – the first in a trilogy – and the European conquest of the Americas, and it is hardly surprising to see them, as Health is a member of the Cherokee Nation and scholar of Indigenous literary traditions, with an interest in telling stories rooted in the Aboriginal experience. As one reviewer comments, "...Justice helps decolonize the genre and brings us a story that is vital to Indigenous survival and resistance." (Qwo-Li Driskill, Walking with Ghosts: Poems)

One of the things that has struck me most about Kynship is that the story is told from the point-of-view of non-humans, who are confronted with humans as alien oppressors. While I’m sure there are other fantasy and science fiction works that give us this perspective – requiring us to identify with the oppressed Other, rather than observing the oppressed Other through the mediation of a human ally – it’s certainly not a common perspective. In Kynship, the humans are the invading aliens, and the story is experienced through the eyes and minds of non-human protagonists. Most other conquest stories I can think of are about non-humans oppressing other non-humans, non-humans oppressing humans, or, more common in recent years, humans siding with oppressed non-humans against other humans.

Of course, Heath is too good a writer to make the racial divisions in his world quite so cleanly defined. There are members of the Folk who have left the old ways and want to assimilate into Human culture; there are Folk who want to give way, keep retreating until they find some place the Humans won’t follow; there are Humans who live and work among the Folk, intermarrying with those of the Folk who are more humanoid than not; and so on. But the simple fact that, as humans reading this book, our point of view is made explicitly non-human, and in opposition to humans, adds layers of meaning to the work.

And non-human they may be in appearance, but the protagonists of Kynship, Tarsa, the she-Kyn warrior and apprentice wyrwielder, or sorcerer/shaman, and Tobhi, the Tetawi scout and guide, are engaging and sympathetic characters, and the society they live in is a complex one, on the verge of decisions that could mean survival or extinction.

I was impressed, and plan to read the remaining volumes as promptly as I can. One can hope that the Kyn fare better against those who would steal all their land than the Indigenous peoples of Earth have done.