A Really Good Brown Girl

by Marilyn Dumont

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