But A Really Good Brown Girl does even more. With her Dear John letter, Dumont shreds the myth of Canadian nationhood and Sir John A. I cannot read this poem without laughing hysterically. When I finally recover from the comedy, I feel like counting words. In one short poem the poet dismisses Canada, dismisses Sir John A. and reduces both to an old Métis joke – lotta Raven in that poem.
But this book was not written for us, or about us; rather it is the unravelling and the storying of Dumont, her family, her history, her spirit and her heart. She cuts through the crap like a surgeon, reconstructs truth with reverence and without inviting any guilt. She is a free agent, and the agency in this work is almost scary because in Canada we are not often bold. We are polite, reserved and cautious. This really good brown girl runs across the prairie, unmindful of the tracks of Sir John A’s trains.
“[Y]ou’re dead, funny thing,” she says in “Letter to Sir John A. Macdonald,” “and it’s funny we’re still here and callin ourselves halfbreed.” We are all called to cut our own paths, to lay down our own breath-tracks, to throw off all the harnesses this country tries to confine us with and to re-word our lives, to conjure our world anew. That makes A Really Good Brown Girl worth reading over and over – forever.
LEE MARACLE · Toronto, 2014
A REALLY GOOD BROWN GIRL
this book is for tisa
SQUAW POEMS
* * *
THE WHITE JUDGES
We lived in an old schoolhouse, one large room that my father converted into two storeys with a plank staircase leading to the second floor. A single window on the south wall created a space that was dimly lit even at midday. All nine kids and the occasional friend slept upstairs like cadets in rows of shared double beds, ate downstairs in the kitchen near the gas stove and watched TV near the airtight heater in the adjacent room. Our floors were worn linoleum and scatter rugs, our walls high and bare except for the family photos whose frames were crowded with siblings waiting to come of age, marry or leave. At supper eleven of us would stare down a pot of moose stew, bannock and tea, while outside the white judges sat encircling our house.
And they waited to judge
waited till we ate tripe
watched us inhale its wild vapour
sliced and steaming on our plates,
watched us welcome it into our being,
sink our teeth into its rubbery texture
chew and roll each wet and tentacled piece
swallow its gamey juices
until we had become it and it had become us.
Or waited till the cardboard boxes
were anonymously dropped at our door, spilling with clothes
waited till we ran swiftly away from the windows and doors
to the farthest room for fear of being seen
and dared one another to
“open it”
“no you open it”
“no you”
someone would open it
cautiously pulling out a shirt
that would be tried on
then passed around till somebody claimed it by fit
then sixteen or eighteen hands would be pulling out
skirts, pants, jackets, dresses from a box transformed now
into the Sears catalogue.
Or the white judges would wait till twilight
and my father and older brothers
would drag a bloodstained canvas
heavy with meat from the truck onto our lawn, and
my mother would lift and lay it in place
like a dead relative,
praying, coaxing and thanking it
then she’d cut the thick hair and skin back
till it lay in folds beside it like carpet
carving off firm chunks
until the marble bone shone out of the red-blue flesh
long into the truck-headlight-night she’d carve
talking in Cree to my father and in English to my brothers
long into the dark their voices talking us to sleep
while our bellies rested in the meat days ahead.
Or wait till the guitars came out
and the furniture was pushed up against the walls
and we’d polish the linoleum with our dancing
till our socks had holes.
Or wait till a fight broke out
and the night would settle in our bones
and we’d ache with shame
for having heard or spoken
that which sits at the edge of our light side
that which comes but we wished it hadn’t
like ‘settlement relatives’ who would arrive at Christmas and
leave at Easter.
MEMOIRS OF A REALLY GOOD BROWN GIRL
You are not good enough, not good enough, obviously not good enough.
The chorus is never loud or conspicuous,
just there.
Carefully dressed, hair combed like I am going to the doctor, I follow my older sister, we take the shortcut by the creek, through the poplar and cottonwood trees, along sidewalks, past the pool hall, hotel, variety store, the United Church, over the bridge, along streets until we reach the school pavement. It is at this point that I sense my sister’s uneasiness; no obvious signs, just her silence, she is holding my hand like she holds her breath, she has changed subtly since we left home. We enter a set of doors which resemble more a piece of machinery than a doorway, with metal handles, long glass windows and iron grates on the floor, the halls are long and white, our feet echo as we walk. I feel as though I’ve been wrapped in a box, a shoebox where the walls are long and manila gloss, it smells of paper and glue, there are shuffling noises I’ve never heard before and kids in the rooms we pass by. We enter a room from what seems like the back door, rows of small tables lined up like variety cereal boxes, other small faces look back vacant and scared next to the teacher’s swelling smile. (I have learned that when whites smile that fathomless smile it’s best to be wary). I am handed over to the teacher. Later I will reflect upon this exchange between my older sister and the teacher as the changing of the guard, from big sister to teacher, and before that, when I was even younger, from mother to big sister.
This is my first day of school and I stand alone; I look on. Most of the kids know what to do, like they’ve all been here before, like the teacher is a friend of the family. I am a foreigner, I stay in my seat, frozen, afraid to move, afraid to make a mistake, afraid to speak, they talk differently than I do, I don’t sound the way they do, but I don’t know how to sound any different, so I don’t talk, don’t volunteer answers to questions the teacher asks. I become invisible.
I don’t glisten with presence, confidence, glisten with the holiness of Ste. Anne whose statue I see every year at the pilgrimage, her skin translucent, as if the Holy Ghost is a light and it shines out through her fluorescent skin, as if a sinless life makes your skin a receptacle of light.
The other kids have porcelain skin like Ste. Anne too, but unlike her, they have little blond hairs growing out of small freckles on their arms, like the kind of freckles that are perfectly placed on the noses of the dolls I got each Christmas. In fact, the girls in my class look like my dolls: bumpy curls, geometric faces, crepe-paper dresses, white legs and patent shoes.
•
My knees are scarred, have dirt ground in them from crawling under fences, climbing trees, riding skid horses and jumping from sawdust piles. I remember once, when I was a flower girl for my brother’s wedding, I was taken home to the city by my brother’s white fiancée and she “scrubbed the hell out of me.” All other events that took place on that visit are diminished by the bathtub staging, no other event was given as much time or attention by her. I was fed and watered like a lamb for slaughter. I was lathered, scrubbed, shampooed, exfoliated, medicated, pedicured, manicured, rubbed down and moisturized. When it was over, I felt that every part of my body had been hounded of dirt and sin and that now I, like Ste. Anne, had become a receptacle of ligh
t.
•
My skin always gave me away. In grade one, I had started to forget where I was when a group of us stood around the sink at the back of the class washing up after painting and a little white girl stared at the colour of my arms and exclaimed, “Are you ever brown!” I wanted to pull my short sleeves down to my wrists and pretend that I hadn’t heard her, but she persisted, “Are you Indian?” I wondered why she had chosen this ripe time to ask me and if this was the first she’d noticed.
How could I respond? If I said yes, she’d reject me: worse, she might tell the other kids my secret and then they’d laugh and shun me. If I said no, I’d be lying, and when they found out I was lying, they’d shun me.
I said “No,” and walked away.
•
I just watched and followed; I was good at that, good at watching and following. It was what I did best, I learned quickly by watching. (Some learning theories say that native kids learn best by watching, because they’re more visual. I always knew that I learned by watching to survive in two worlds and in a white classroom.) I only needed to be shown something once and I remembered it, I remembered it in my fibre.
•
I lived a dual life; I had white friends and I had Indian friends and the two never mixed and that was normal. I lived on a street with white kids, so they were my friends after school. During school I played with the Indian kids. These were kids from the other Indian families who were close friends with my parents. At school my Indian friends and I would play quite comfortably in our own group, like the white kids did in theirs.
•
I am looking at a school picture, grade five, I am smiling easily. My hair is shoulder length, curled, a pageboy, I am wearing a royal blue dress. I look poised, settled, like I belong. I won an award that year for most improved student. I learned to follow really well.
•
I am in a university classroom, an English professor corrects my spoken English in front of the class. I say, “really good.” He says, “You mean, really well, don’t you?” I glare at him and say emphatically, “No, I mean really good.”
THE HALFBREED PARADE
The mystery of the white judges
who sat encircling our two-storey schoolhouse,
the one my father ‘skid’ into town with, a team of horses and a
parade of snotty-nosed, home-haircut, patched halfbreeds
trailing behind it.
Floating prairie structure.
The only thing missing was a mariachi band
and a crowd of pilgrims stretching
miles down the gravel road
that offered passage to our grand mansion
of clapboard. So magnificent,
we all slept upstairs
sharing one long sleeping quarter,
while downstairs our sentinel, Grandpa Dan, stirred
the oatmeal that bubbled at dawn on the airtight heater
and poured himself another cup of heavy coffee.
THE RED & WHITE
god only knows, Mary tried to say these things but
her lips cracked and
words fell out like
mad woman’s change
god only knows she tried but
we all thought she was crazy
a little twisted, Mary was
in one of her spins again
who knows who she would twist into it,
like hair in a French braid
god knows Mary tried
to keep us clean and fed, respectable but
all the bleach and soup bones
in the Red & White couldn’t keep our
halfbreed hides from showing through
SQUAW POEMS
• peyak
“hey squaw!”
Her ears stung and she shook, fearful of the other words like fists that would follow. For a moment, her spirit drained like water from a basin. But she breathed and drew inside her fierce face and screamed till his image disappeared like vapour.
• niso
Indian women know all too well the power of the word squaw. I first heard it from my mother, who used it in anger against another Indian woman. “That black squaw,” she rasped. As a young girl, I held the image of that woman in my mind and she became the measure of what I should never be.
• nisto
I learned I should never be seen drunk in public, nor should I dress provocatively, because these would be irrefutable signs. So as a teenager I avoided red lipstick, never wore my skirts too short or too tight, never chose shoes that looked ‘hooker-like.’ I never moved in ways that might be interpreted as loose. Instead, I became what Jean Rhys phrased, ‘aggressively respectable.’ I’d be so goddamned respectable that white people would feel slovenly in my presence.
• newo
squaw is to whore
as
Indian maiden is to virgin
squaw is to whore
as
Indian princess is to lady
• niyanan
I would become the Indian princess, not the squaw dragging her soul after laundry, meals, needy kids and abusive husbands. These were my choices. I could react naturally, spontaneously to my puberty, my newly discovered sexuality or I could be mindful of the squaw whose presence hounded my every choice.
• nikotwasik
squawman:
a man who is seen with lives with laughs with a squaw.
‘squawman’
a man is a man is a whiteman until
he is a squaw he is a squaw he is a squawman
HELEN BETTY OSBORNE
Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you
it might turn out instead
to be about me
or any one of
my female relatives
it might turn out to be
about this young native girl
growing up in rural Alberta
in a town with fewer Indians
than ideas about Indians,
in a town just south of the ‘Aryan Nations’
it might turn out to be
about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall or Richard Cardinal,
it might even turn out to be
about our grandmothers,
beasts of burden in the fur trade
skinning, scraping, pounding, packing,
left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,’
left for white-melting-skinned women,
not bits-of-brown women
left here in this wilderness, this colony.
Betty, if I start to write a poem about you
it might turn out to be
about hunting season instead,
about ‘open season’ on native women
it might turn out to be
about your face young and hopeful
staring back at me hollow now
from a black and white page
it might be about the ‘townsfolk’ (gentle word)
townsfolk who ‘believed native girls were easy’
and ‘less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence.’
Betty, if I write this poem.
BLUE RIBBON CHILDREN
I was supposed
to be married, a wife
who cooked
large pots of potatoes,
chunks of steaming meat and
slabs of brown crusty bannock. I was supposed
to prepare meals
for a man who returned
every night like
a homing pigeon
to hot meals and a warm bed, slept
up against my flannel back and generous hips. I was
supposed to balance children like
bags of flour on my hip,
lift them in and out of
bathtubs, lather them
like butterballs, pack them safely
away in bed, then stuff them
into patched clothes for morning, and
feed
them porridge as though
they were being fattened up
for prizes at a fair, blue ribbon
children, like the Red Rose
tea he expected hot and strong
in front of him as we sat down for supper.
OLD FOOL AND A FIVE-YEAR MOON
it was in a five-year moon
that you held my hand
for the first time
I remember
clinging to life
between you and my sister
in a pickup truck
fixed to the moon
you called it
that five-year moon
you an old man
whose unschooled life
to you made more sense
than my learned life
would ever make to me
was it in that moon I changed?
old fool you were then
my mother said
you who could barely write your name
you cradled my shaking hand
my thirty-five-year-old shaking hand
you twice my age
and content not knowing
all that school had taught me
you an old fool
who stepped cautiously
as a two-year-old now
that you were finally
tenderly
an old fool
to my mother
LET THE PONIES OUT
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky-soaking foothills, papa,
to have your breath leave, escape you, escape the
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