Conflicts that aren’t stranger than fiction
Novel tells how a group of native veterans retakes land
Istarted to read Doug Bland’s novel Uprising in 2009, shortly after it was first published. didn’t finish, only because I was then embroiled in my own non-fiction account of the native occupation in Caledonia, Ont., three years earlier. As always for me, this is a time of great writer-ly insecurity, and I was afraid both of distraction and of being intimidated unto paralysis by the excellence of someone else’s book.
I still haven’t quite made my way through Uprising’s almost 500 pages, despite an all-day effort, but reading it now is considerably creepy-crawlier than it was before, amid the widespread protests, hunger strikes, flash mobs and assorted other actions of the aboriginal Idle No More movement.
Lt.-Col. (retired) Bland, until 2011 the chair of Defence Management Studies at Queen’s in Kingston, was already a respected author when Uprising was released, but not of fiction.
In fact, he says, he wrote the first draft “as a typical academic book,” realized afterwards that the only people who would read it were other academics, and did it again as fiction.
It is fiction too, but barely reads or feels like it. What it feels like is possible.
The story is one of armed revolution, or insurrection, by aboriginal young people trained and led by a disciplined core of native veterans of the Canadian Army, all of them brought together by a charismatic aboriginal leader named Molly Grace.
Almost equally fed up with and disdainful of the “white settlers” and the “white Indian” chiefs who have played footsie with Canadian governments for decades, Grace harnesses all the disaffection that has been simmering for so long, both on reserves and within the lonely hearts of many of those who leave them and succeed.
As one of the book’s characters, ex-warrant officer Will Boucanier, once says, “The white man’s economy took away the reasons, the rhythms of the old ways, turning tradition into inertia, ignorance and stale custom. But it didn’t bring (native) people into its rhythms either; it left them wandering like vagrants between a world that no longer existed and one they couldn’t enter.”
Grace’s solution — her “third way,” neither to remain on reserves, in too many instances scratching out an existence, nor assimilation into the Canadian mainstream — is to take back the land by force.
Lt.-Col. Bland’s three decades in the Canadian Forces — his intimate knowledge of how the army establishment works and how the political one often doesn’t — render this scenario plausible.
What really makes it so is that the fictional conditions underlying the uprising in the book so mirror the reality of modern Canada.
First, it is fact not fiction that the real target of the uprising, Canada’s energy transportation system — the oil and gas pipelines, oilfields and storage and production facilities in the west, the James Bay hydro facilities in northern Quebec — is not merely vulnerable to attack, but also virtually impossible to defend even if a government was so inclined.
Second, also fact not fiction, the Canadian Forces, and its all-native Ranger program in the North, provide a natural home for young aboriginal Canadians who have few jobs or other opportunities. It is also fact that some of the country’s most able, even distinguished, soldiers are natives.
Third, again fact not fiction, some reserves — famously Akwesasne, the huge Mohawk reserve near Cornwall, Ont., which straddles three borders (Ontario, Quebec and New York State) and is a jurisdictional nightmare — are already islands unto themselves.
And fourth, on the rare occasions where natives have risen up — most recently in Caledonia but also in Oka and Ipperwash — authorities have bungled matters, either overreacting or, as in the case of the OPP in Caledonia, barely reacting at all. Consider even the recent blockade of a CN Rail line in Sarnia, part of Idle No More, which ended early Thursday, but persisted for almost two weeks despite court orders.
As Andy Bishop, the book’s chief of defence staff, tells the waffling defence minister as he dithers about what to do about the increasingly real signs that the country is under threat, “My worry is that very few national leaders, or opinion makers, or members of the courts, seem willing to accept the central notion that as a first principle a liberal democracy has the right to defend itself against anti-democratic elements in its midst.” That’s, ah, fiction. Of course it is. The book is available still — from Dundurn Books in hard copy and on Amazon and Kobo — so I won’t give so many details as to spoil it for new readers.
But the story ends with running gun battles in Winnipeg streets, a bomb in Montreal, violent takeovers of army bases and power facilities, casualties and death on both sides — and in the coming apart of Canada.
As the fictional U.S. president remarked, still bewildered, in an address to her nation, “How could anyone understand quarrels about land in a country overwhelmed by its space; arguments about language between people who rarely spoke to each other; solemn quibbling about which group was or was not a distinct society in a nation that had officially declared itself multicultural?”
That last bit, about ridiculous quarrels in a sprawling and empty land? That, methinks, is both fact and fiction.