Indigenous influence on contemporary Canadian poetry
This is an example of contemporary Canadian poetry of a very special type. It is a type still strongly informed by ancient oral literature but rendered in post-modernist style in terms of verse form while fortified by an old story-telling narrative and a consciousness borrowed from folktale and myth.
It represents the literature of the Indigenous People, which today makes up a part of Canadian literature in its corpus of both oral literature and modern literary poetry and fiction. In Canadian literature there are samples of preserved creation myths recorded as far back as 1878 and modern stories written by members of the nations of
First People which retain elements of their traditional ethos.
It is interesting to revisit some of the poetry of these types that are not so often heard of or given wide critical attention. But they have been published in anthologies and exist as part of the unfathomable and extraordinary store of world literature. It is very instructive to discover these unsung corners of writing in English which, nevertheless, reveal some of its treasures.
“Coyote Goes to Toronto,” first published in 1995, was written by Thomas King, a lecturer in English at the University of Guelph in Canada. King is from the Cherokee nation; he is a Canadian-American writer and sometime activist who is regarded as the most influential Indigenous writer and scholar of his generation. He is primarily a novelist, still outstanding in his field, and has won a number of prizes and awards. His most recent novel, Indians On Vacation, won the 2021 Stephen Leacock Medal of Honour and was shortlisted for Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, including the 2020 Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award 2020.
King is further distinguished as the first Indigenous person to deliver the CBC Massey Lecture in 2003. His most successful books include Green Grass, Running Water (1993), The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (2012), and The Back of the Turtle (2014).
The fictional character, Coyote, is ubiquitous among his works, sometimes appearing in humorous fashion. The animal character is a factor in oral and folk literature, particularly in Amerindian folk tales, some of which belong to the trickster tradition, often with an animal character hero as a trickster of the ilk of the well-known Anansi of West Africa and the Caribbean.
Coyote thus appears in this poem in a familiar guise. She seizes the opportunity presented by the moment and
ends up getting all the food and attention that she wanted. She plays a role which wins sympathy and eventually benefits her. “The women brought her food”, “the men brushed her coat”, and “the children played with their friend”. Through her wits, she does indeed “become famous” which was her aim in going to Toronto.
Additionally, the poem has a narrator who is the traditional voice of the folk story-telling performance. Note the language, the conversational speaking to the audience in direct familiar tones and pretending to tell a story that was, in fact, true. (“It’s TRUE /that’s what she said”). The story progresses with the incremental repetition of “so”.
One of the achievements of the poet is the way this traditional folk feature is integrated into the postmodernist qualities of the poem. The stanzaic structure is irregular and dictated by the rhythm of the speaker as performer – the narrator/story teller’s pauses and there are interruptions and strategies to arrest the audience’s attention. These include “So that RAIN came along. /So that WIND came along. /So that SNOW came along. . . ”. all the way to the rhetorical “pretty soon the people came along . . . . ”
This also includes punctuation along with a sparse lineation and structure. In another rhetorical feature, successive stanzas begin with “so” in common letters. Yet occasional words are printed in all capitals, like “TRUE’. “FAMOUS”, and “FOOD”. This Spartan style is even further in keeping with the colloquial nature of the language “I been to Toronto” and “she went back to the rez”. Note also the many one-word stanzas.
A quite peculiar poem is created in this way. Most of the literary works representing the Indigenous Peoples are works of prose. This is a rare example of poetry with the power of the oral tradition providing a backdrop for modern verse that represents contemporary Canadian poetry.