The hard truth of indigenous literature,
Robert Arthur Alexie’s books portray the shameful reality of residential schools
Ten years ago now, travelling the country for a book of mine, I met the Gwich’in author Robert Arthur Alexie, and we quickly became comfortable with each other. I hesitate to say that we became friends, because I’m not sure how capable a man with such terrifying private demons was of “friendship,” but we had a love of Canada and books in common.
We met in his band office in Inuvik. It was the week of the summer solstice — also Aboriginal Day in Canada — and “1876” was scrawled across the Saturday of his office calendar pinned to the wall. June 25 was “General Custer Day” and Alexie, grinning, said, “After work a bunch of us are going to get together and beat up a few white people. Wanna join us?” I knew then that we’d get along. Alexie, who died a year ago this week, was the author of a couple of works of fiction, the names needing little explanation in light of this last week’s Truth and Reconciliation news.
Porcupines and China Dolls, originally published in 2002, was the first of them and the reason I was in Inuvik. The title referred to the look-alike brush haircuts and powdered faces of native children taken from their families and put into residential schools and made uniform, as happened to Robert.
The second, issued in 2005, was The Pale Indian, which told the story of a native child adopted into a white Calgary family.
Porcupines and China Dolls is a classic of Canadian literature. It is a novel of often dizzying intensity, whether describing the wrecked living quarters of disorientated residential school survivors barely managing to get by, or utterly unforgettable scenes of drum dancing and purgative spiritual healing that approach, to my mind, Jack Kerouac’s ability to evoke music and tempo with words, as in the wonderful nightclub jazz scene of On the Road.
Alexie had been the chief negotiator for the Gwich’in in their land claim, settled in 1992, with the Canadian government. He also spent time in rehab in Scarborough. Whatever the ups and downs of his life, his dark humour never left him.
One of my favourite of his stories involves a Gwich’in man picked up by the RCMP and made to chop the winter’s wood for the station.
The incident ranks among the slightest of the pandemic settler-Canadian abuses of natives that the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has turned into written, archival fact, but upsetting enough.
In Alexie’s story, the Gwich’in man is let go when the task is done, after which the RCMP discovers that their suspect has cut every single log two inches too long for their stove. A Trickster, perfectly.
In this week so momentous and important not just for the native peoples of Canada, but for all of us, I find myself thinking back to Robert, and to other First Nations writers with whom I have been privileged to work in small ways over the years. To Tomson Highway, whose own Trickster’s stance is to argue that residential school was the best thing to happen him, as he would not otherwise have learned to write or to become a classical pianist — a view that will not be popular now (though one only has to read his brilliant novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen, to learn just how ambiguous and nefarious the experience was).
Or to Louise Halfe, her Plains Cree name Sky Dancer, whose poetry has addressed brutality towards aboriginal girls and women unforgettably — as in her poem “Maintain the Right,” in which a policeman who has picked up a 16-year-old native girl “drove/ down a country road/ Stopped and pushed her out. Ordered a blowjob. She didn’t understand./ He pushed her head/ between his legs/ Said a girl dressed like her/ gave head/ to cops like him.” (The upset you may feel reading these lines is the least homage to be paid). To Thomas King and Joseph Boyden, whose literary triumphs have thrust each into the spokesperson’s roles they have taken on so ably, but also Lisa Charleyboy, Zacharias Kunuk, Patti LaBoucane-Benson, Lee Maracle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and a host of others. First Nations and Inuit artists are a vital part of the Canadian fabric and ours would be an infinitely lesser culture without their integral, nation-defining contribution.
Literature is not a frivolous pursuit but one that points the way. Anyone who reads Canadian stories with any alacrity has long understood the distress of the country’s aboriginal population, the effect of the residential schools, and the shame of the country’s de facto racism that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has brought to the fore.
The “truth” in TRC is not a surprise to readers of Canadian and First Nations stories because writers inhabit what I have previously described as the “middle space” between the world as it is and as it is eventually described. From this place, writers intuit what is on our minds but not yet clearly articulated, and they use words and language to do so. (Aboriginals believe much the same thing, but put it more poetically. “We believe,” said the Stó:lo Nation writer Lee Maracle, “that stories — the sacred stories, for want of a better word — are born in the space where the river meets the bank. There’s a little silver eddy there, where the sun hits, and that’s where the story creators live.”)
This is why making knowledge of the residential schools a component of the core curriculum is — while a necessary gesture that should be implemented immediately — not in itself enough. It is also of the essence that the teaching of some sort of course in aboriginal language be a mandatory requirement for students matriculating from high school because language is the vessel to understanding a community’s culture, history, specificity and world view.
What with our long experience of French- and English-speaking difference, we of all peoples of the world should understand this. And making courses of this kind compulsory would have three immediate social benefits: it would hasten “reconciliation,” but also create thousands of meaningful jobs contributing to aboriginals’ senses of value and participation in Canadian society, and, through more confident discussion, drive us along a better road in which less comfortable truths replace politically correct ones convenient in different ways to different parties.
Canada, remarkably, is still a place where reconciliation is eminently possible — where the rebuke and anger, for instance, that Acadians might also have felt, did not come to pass. Recently I have wondered, despairingly, if that Canada still exists. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that it does when Bernard Valcourt, the aboriginal affairs minister, is able to deflect the issue of teen suicides on reserves as “first and foremost the responsibility of their parents,” or when the prime minister himself insists that 1,200 missing and murdered aboriginal women “is not a sociological problem.” This callousness is criminal.
In Porcupines and China Dolls, Alexie’s character James looks to the Blue Hills and contemplates shooting himself, the effects of his residential school experience too painful to bear.
“It’s like Jake is making an effort to get back to the old ways and join the old people,” Alexie told me. “He’s trying to get back home, wherever home is — it’s a crazy way of thinking, but better to kill yourself out on the land than on some dirty back street somewhere. Out on the land it would almost be like a ritual, but it would be a tragedy in the community.” In truth, a tragedy either way. Robert died June 10, 2014 on the Dempster Highway, of “wounds to the head.” That’s all his friends and family would say but there is little doubt why, and how, his demons won.
Anyone who reads Canadian stories with any alacrity has long understood the distress of the country’s aboriginal population