Candid answers to Canadians’ questions
Maracle’s Toronto Book Award-nominated collection delves into questions she’s been asked about segregation, citizenship
Five books have been nominated for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards, given each year to books that best represent the city. Leading up to the awards ceremony on Wednesday at the Toronto Reference Library, the Star is running an excerpt from each book. Today: My Conversations With Cana
dians, in which Lee Maracle answers the many questions she’s been asked about citizenship, labour, segregation and other issues over the years.
At the end of my reading of Bobbi Lee, the audience was invited to ask questions. “Who wrote it for you?” was a common question, asked of me as though I could not possibly have written my book myself. I half wondered how they knew very few of us could write. Or was it based on some racial dumbing down of the possibility of writing developing among us? Those kinds of questions annoy Canadians when I tell them that they were asked of me in the early days of my writing, but actually I liked them; they are so easy to answer. “No one — I wrote it myself, but I did not edit it.”
About halfway through the questionand-answer period, an older man got up and bellowed out his question: “What are you going to do with us white guys — drive us into the sea?” He shook his fist. I stared at him for a while, thinking. On the one hand, there is this business of his fear, which affects so many white people here in North America. In so many movies, the line “We are in Indian country now” pops up when the heroes enter enemy territory, no matter what country the enemy is from. This is particularly true for Westerns and Vietnam War movies, but it is also true for cop shows and other war movies as well. “Indian country” is dangerous country, full of ambushes, secrecy, guerrilla fighters, traps, and maybe even some torture. I am not sure if any of this fear is grounded in reality, but I do know that a few of us gave both Canada and America a very hard time in their pursuit of sub- duing us and establishing the two aforementioned countries on this continent.
Hence the treaties. But that is not all. Although we gave the British and the French a hard time, we did not have genocide as a goal. Canada and the U. S. did have genocide as a goal. “Nits breed lice” was General Armstrong Custer’s famous line when the American army killed everyone at Wounded Knee. During the beginning period of residential school, when Dr. Bryce complained to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs that the children were all dying of disease, the superintendent’s response was “If they are dying, isn’t that the point?” Does the man asking me what we’re going to do about white guys know about General Custer? Does he believe we are angry enough about the first forty years of residential-school child killing that we want to drive him into the sea?
Finally, after looking thoughtfully at him for a while, I said, “Thank you that you think I could,” and I smiled, flashing all of my teeth. The answer shocked him as much as the question had taken me by surprise, but it made most of the men of colour in the audience chuckle. After the reading, my moderator pointed out that no white folks had laughed at my joke. Not sure why this was her first comment coming out of the reading, I responded as honestly as I could: “That’s probably because they knew I was not joking,” at which she laughed heartily.
About halfway through the question-and-answer period, an older man got up and bellowed out his question: “What are you going to do with us white guys — drive us into the sea?”