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The Exile Book of
NATIVE CANADIAN FICTION AND DRAMA
edited by
Daniel David Moses
Publishers of singular Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Drama and Translation
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
The Exile book of Native Canadian fiction and drama / edited by Daniel David Moses.
ISBN
978-1-55096-145-4 (pbk)
978-1-55096-201-7 (ePub)
978-1-55096-202-4 (MOBI)
978-1-55096-203-1 (PDF)
1. Canadian drama (English)--Indian authors. 2. Canadian fiction (English)--Indian authors. 3. Canadian drama (English)--21st century. 4. Canadian fiction (English)--21st century. I. Moses, Daniel David, 1952- II. Title: Native Canadian fiction and drama.
PS8309.I53E95 2010 C812'.6080897 C2010-906454-2
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For All Our Relations
CONTENTS
Introduction by Daniel David Moses
TOMSON HIGHWAY
Hearts and Flowers
LAUREN B. DAVIS
Rat Medicine
NIIGONWEDOM JAMES SINCLAIR
Trickster Reflections
DANIEL DAVID MOSES
King of the Raft
JOSEPH BOYDEN
Born With A Tooth
JOSEPH A. DANDURAND
Please Do Not Touch the Indians
ALOOTOOK IPELLIE
After Brigitte Bardot
THOMAS KING
Coyote and the Enemy Aliens
YVETTE NOLAN
Scattering Jake
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Love Walked In
FLOYD FAVEL
Governor of the Dew
ROBERT ARTHUR ALEXIE
The Pale Indian
DANIEL DAVID MOSES
The Witch of Niagara
KATHARINA VERMETTE
what ndns do
EDEN ROBINSON
Queen of the North
Notes On the Authors
Permissions
Introduction
NOT-SO-COMMON PLACES FROM INDIAN COUNTRY
So today I’m imagining you finding yourself wondering on which shelf you might find a spot for this idiosyncratic selection of fiction and plays by writers from the First Peoples. Native Studies? Theatre? Canadian English?
Or maybe, in 2010, this one could simply go under Literature.
Are we there yet?
In 1992, many in the Americas and Europe, particularly those (I recall from television human interest news reports) of Italian descent, were celebrating the story (“In fourteen hundred and ninety two, / Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”) of a “discovery” made five hundred years earlier. That same summer, here in Canada – and in the U.S. too, a month or so later – some of us who had discovered ourselves awash in that story’s wake got together, as some might have it, to powwow. The story, do you recall, suggested Columbus had set foot on an island he took to be India? And wrongly, stuck us with the “Indian” label…
Well, we got together to confer, those of us from that swamped group who were still, or again, or were becoming, storytellers, the Americans among us then out front in fiction (Leslie Marmon Silko had just published her Almanac of the Dead), we Canadians taking the lead in the theatre (Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters having recently made its loud splash). We gathered to confer and tell and celebrate those tales and many others about our lives, all of which served as a literary antidote to the collective eye-rolling the Christopher Columbian spectacles had in us induced.
There were so many of us, old and young, a couple of hundred, probably, leaning into Saskatchewan’s wind, and up around five hundred finding shade from the Oklahoma sun; those numbers produced for me – lucky enough to attend both gatherings – a feeling of safety I had never felt before in a writers’ gathering. There’s a commonplace in the Canadian Writers’ Union that one of its founders, Margaret Laurence, dubbed the organization “a tribe,” but the experience of their AGM culture, a confusion of Robert’s Rules of Order, and a receding Sixties’ idealism, pales beside the experiences I had that signal year with, well, as some of the elders say, All My Relations.
I know, and probably felt even then, that I would like to achieve a more universal outlook, the family of humanity, but it seemed to me, in retrospect, later that year, that we “Indians” were, as you say, preaching to the choir, the proverbial voices crying in the wilderness. Nobody but us knew or really cared that we still existed out there, wherever it was we were out on the prairie, that Indian Country.
Yes, yes, this was all in the those short giddy days nearly twenty years back in Canada, just after the Oka Crisis, around the time Dances With Wolves made Graham Greene a star, when there was even a season (do you recall?) the Gap used Indian actors in their ads in the Toronto subway stations because the CBC, to show that they, too, were paying attention, had given us the series, North of 60. But politicians have at best four-year attention spans, even if they’ve had to call out the army, and Hollywood after all that dancing could only find supporting roles for Mr. Greene, and the only less-than-white faces the always beleaguered CBC can afford nowadays inhabit The Little Mosque on the Prairie. And as for that First Nations brown sort of face once seen on posters on those underground walls, they’re now still and again just outside the TTC turnstiles enquiring after change.
There’s a commonplace in Indian Country, heard most often in Canada’s First Nations arts community, that Louis Riel, in one of his prophetic moods, foretold that his people would sleep seven generations before being brought awake by their artists.
I know I’m not the only one who takes comfort in this idea of a collective wake-up call from a troubled sleep, the writer in me choosing to think it suggests that there is or will be some sort of literary movement or wave I might be a party to, or riding on, even as I spend my solitary hours intent on perfecting another sentence.
And I know I’m not talking anymore about a party just for those folks of mine who gathered that season in Indian Country, who have just kept on trying with patience since to take back the old stories, or tell with growing skill some new ones (the table of contents of t
his anthology lists some of their names and their various clear accomplishments). Meanwhile a few mainstream writers (I’m sure you heard something of the “appropriation of voice” controversy) took offence, it seemed, at being criticized for their own less-than-sterling approximations of aboriginal tales and, bizarrely, protested again censorship, as if First Nations critics were the government. Hey, Dief the Chief only let us in on this voting thing in 1960. We haven’t quite yet taken over Parliament!
About a decade after my visits with those folks in Saskatchewan and Oklahoma, I find that I am Writer in Residence at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, and one day on another visit to an English class, there I am giving a reading, poetry, a scene or two from a play; then I answer queries.
A grey-haired gent in the back row, a mature student, I assume, asks me, with good will for my success, I guess, when I’m going to write something more mainstream.
I hesitate a moment over what “mainstream” means, but then answer that I can’t not write about “what I know.” That place I grew up in, and see the rest of the world from, even if it is “a reserve” by the laws and regulations of Canada, is the complex world that concerns me. I also defend my stance by reminding him of the aesthetic commonplace that the particular can, when done well, evoke the universal.
But an eye-shadowed Goth girl at the far end of the front row, then a red-haired boy in sweats in front of me in the third row, and finally a black boy with a Québécois accent and Buddy Holly glasses in the back corner, chime in and are all openly and energetically discussing the question, saying among other comforting and encouraging things, that I don’t need to go mainstream, not for any of them, that they thought what I was writing was interesting and that they liked hearing it and wanted to read more, that they didn’t know before what they’d been missing, missing from their pictures of Quebec and the rest of Canada.
Missing?
After that class, I’m hopeful all our First Nations writing activity will no longer stay “on reserve,” especially if even that younger generation is aware that preaching from some old book of commonplaces isn’t good enough, that the absence of our stories from their awareness of the larger world, from their imaginings, limits their world and our literature.
The best of our First Nations stuff is certainly not commonplace, not yet, and does touch those emotions and experiences that we think of as universal, that we recognize as literature.
These stories and plays have no need of a special separate shelf space or categorization.
They succeed at telling stories that are whole stories.
Are we there yet?
Read on and we’ll all arrive much sooner.
Daniel David Moses
August 2010
Tomson Highway
Hearts and Flowers
Daniel Daylight sits inside Mr. Tipper’s traveling car. It is cold – not cold, though, like outside; of this fact Daniel Daylight is quite certain. He looks out through the window on his right and, as always, sees white forest rushing by; maybe rabbits will bound past on that snowbank in the trees, he sits thinking. He has seen them, after all, on past Thursdays just like this one. It is dark, too. Not pitch-black, though, for that half moon hangs unhidden, making snow – on the road, on the roadside, rocks, ground, trees (mostly spruce though some birch and some poplar) – glow, as with dust made of silver, Daniel Daylight sits there thinking. Daniel Daylight, at age eight, is on his way to his piano lesson in Prince William, Manitoba.
Twenty miles lie between the Watson Lake Indian Residential School, where resides Daniel Daylight, and Prince William, where he takes his weekly lesson. The Watson Lake Indian Residential School, after all, has no one to teach him how to play the piano, while Prince William has elderly and kind Mrs. Hay. So his teacher in grade three at the Watson Lake Indian Residential School, Mr. Tipper, drives him every Thursday, 6:00 p.m. on the nose, to his piano teacher’s house, Mrs. Hay’s, in Prince William.
Orange brick and cement from top to bottom, held in by a steel-mesh fence, then by forest (mostly spruce though some birch and some poplar), the Watson Lake Indian Residential School stands like a fort on the south shore of a lake called Watson Lake, 550 miles north of Winnipeg, Mr. Tipper’s place of birth. Prince William, quite by contrast, is a town that stands on the south bank of a river called the Moostoos River, just across from which sprawls a village called Waskeechoos (though “settlement” is a noun more accurate, Mr. Tipper has explained on previous Thursdays, for no “village” can be seen, only houses peeking out of the forest here and there). Waskeechoos, on the north bank of the muddy Moostoos River, is an Indian reserve, Mr. Tipper has informed Daniel Daylight, not unlike the one from which hails Daniel Daylight: Minstik Lake, Manitoba, 350 miles north of Waskeechoos, Prince William, and the Watson Lake Indian Residential School. It takes half an hour for Daniel Daylight to make the journey every week, in Mr. Tipper’s travelling car, from the Watson Lake Indian Residential School south through the heart of Waskeechoos and across the Moostoos River to Prince William, so he has time on his hands for reflection (so, at least, Mr. Tipper calls such thinking).
Daniel Daylight likes these trips. For one thing, he gets to practise what he knows of the language they call English with elderly and kind Mrs. Hay, with the waiters at the Nip House or at Wong’s (where he sometimes goes for snacks with Mr. Tipper once he’s finished with his lesson), and with friends of Mr. Tipper whom he meets at the Nip House or at Wong’s. He enjoys speaking English just as he enjoys speaking Cree with the students at the residential school (though, of course, mother tongues need no practise, not like English with its v’s that make one’s teeth come right out and bite one’s lower lip). Daniel Daylight, for another thing, likes to ride in “travelling cars” (as he calls them for the v in “travel”). Standing at the northern tip of a lake called Minstik Lake, the Minstik Lake Indian Reserve, after all, has no cars and no trucks, just dogsleds in the winter, canoes in the summer. A third reason why Daniel Daylight likes these trips is that he enjoys being dazzled by the lights of a city like Prince William (for, to him, the railway depot is a city of one million, not a town of five thousand) with its streets, its cafés, hotels, stores, and huge churches with tall steeples, whereas Minstik Lake, with its six hundred people, has no streets, no cafés, no hotels, just dirt paths, one small store, and one church. Daniel Daylight, for a fourth thing, likes these trips because Mr. Tipper’s travelling car has a radio that plays songs that he can learn in his head. When it stops playing music, furthermore, it plays spoken English words, which, of course, he can practise understanding. Tonight, for example, people living in the east of the country (Mr. Tipper has explained) are discussing voting patterns of the nation (Mr. Tipper has explained) even though Daniel Daylight knows the word “vote” for one reason: it begins with the sound that forces one to sink one’s teeth deep into one’s lower lips and then growl. Sound, that is to say, thrills Daniel Daylight. Which is why, best of all, Daniel Daylight likes these trips: because he gets to play the piano. He gets to play, for elderly and kind Mrs. Hay, “Sonatina” by Clementi, which he now knows well enough to play page one from the top to the bottom without stopping. He gets to play for the third time this winter “Pirates of the Pacific,” with the bass that sounds like a drumbeat. He gets to play, this week, for the first time, with Jenny Dean, the duet – for four hands – called “Hearts and Flowers.”
“Jenny Dean is a white girl,” he has overheard someone say at the Nip House, just a few days before Christmas, in fact, when he was there having fries and Coca-Cola with Mr. Tipper. “Daniel Daylight is an Indian. A Cree Indian. Indian boys do not play the piano with white girls,” he has overheard one white girl whisper loudly to another over Coca-Cola in a bottle, “not here in our Prince William, not anywhere on earth or in heaven.” Daniel Daylight let it pass. He, after all, was eight years old, not thirty-nine like Mr. Tipper; what could he have done to the girl who had made such a statement? Bop her on the head with her
bottle? Shove a french fry up her nose? Scratch her face? Besides, neither Jenny Dean’s parents, Mrs. Hay, nor Mr. Tipper seemed to mind the notion of Jenny Dean making music with a boy whose father was a Cree caribou hunter and a celebrated dogsled racer.
“There it is,” says Mr. Tipper. And so it is, for the travelling car has just rounded the bend in the road from which the lights of Prince William and the Indian reserve on this side of the river from the town can be seen for the first time. The first view of both town and reserve, to Daniel Daylight, always looks like a spaceship landed on planet Earth, not unlike the spaceship in the comic book that his older brother, John-Peter Daylight, gave him as a Christmas present twenty-one days ago and that Daniel Daylight keeps hidden under his pillow in the dormitory at the residential school. Daniel Daylight likes, in fact, to imagine all those lights in the distance as exactly that: a spaceship come to take him to a place where exist not Indian people, nor white people, just good people and good music. In fact, he can hear in his mind already “Sonatina” by Clementi, key of G, allegro moderato. He can hear “Pirates of the Pacific” with that drumbeat in the bass that goes boom. He can hear “Hearts and Flowers.” He has practised all three pieces to the point of exhaustion, after all, in the one room at the residential school that has a piano, what the nuns and the priests call the “library” but, in fact, is a storage room for pencils and erasers, papers, rulers, chalk, and some old spelling books. Feeling on the tips of his fingers all the keys of Mrs. Hay’s brown piano, Daniel Daylight sees the sign on the roadside that announces, “Waskeechoos Welcomes You.” Mr. Tipper’s travelling car speeds past the sign, thus bringing Daniel Daylight onto land that belongs “to the Indians,” Mr. Tipper, for some reason, likes proclaiming, as on a radio. “Speed Limit 30 MPH,” Daniel Daylight reads on the sign that then follows. The road now mud, dried, cracked, and frozen, pot-holed and iced, the travelling car first slows down to a crawl, then bumps, rattles, slides.
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