Knowing

In the passage Robert Arthur Alexie read from his novel, Porcupines and China Dolls, he puts us into a missionary ship in the far north. The ship is carrying away young Aboriginal children to residential school. Looking back to shore, a child sees the tiny black outlines of his parents, standing motionless, like statues. When the children arrive at the school, priests and nuns brusquely strip, wash, and shear them, as well as cover them with white delousing powder. The children's clothing and personal effects, the one comforting link with home, they burn. "Porcupines" are the spiky-headed boys after their hair has been shorn. "China dolls" are the girls, their hair left only slightly longer, faces dusted with the white powder. With these stark and evocative details, the haunting image of the parents on the shore, Alexie, in a short space, conveys more about the residential school experience than any number of more generic accounts in the mainstream media. As one member of the audience commented toward the end of the event, "White Canadians know with a small ‘k' about the residential school system, but they don't Know about it with a capital ‘K'." The key to Knowing is when we feel something in the guts. The specificity and intimacy of Alexie's written words, and the forthrightness and openness of his spoken ones, achieved that feeling for me, and probably for many in the audience.

Alexie is a former chief of the Teetl'it Gwich'in, the First Nations people living in and around Fort McPherson, NT, and he himself spent four years in a residential school. He now lives in Inuvik, which in the vast spaces of Canada's north, is just up the road from Fort McPherson. Appearing with Alexie at True North, the event hosted by Joseph Boyden, was Cathleen With. For two years, With, who grew up in Richmond, BC, worked as a teacher in Inuvik, and as she discovered just prior to the event, a nephew of Alexie's was one of her students. With read a passage from her novel Having Faith in the Polar Girls' Prison. To my ear, With succeeds in creating a credible voice for her teenaged narrator, Trista, of mixed Inuit and white heritage, who is in a youth facility, charged with a violent crime. The use of a local vernacular helps build that credibility ("Snow Nanuks" are village matriarchs Trista and her friends can go to for solace; "parkies" are parkas), but perhaps more important are the cadences of Trista's speech, the spaces for what isn't said, investing the interaction between Trista and her friends with an energy and authenticity. I can hear those girls.

An audience member did ask the non-native With the obvious question about cultural appropriation, to which With responded that she felt she was "bearing witness," that the story needed to be told. Crossing racial boundaries is delicate territory for any writer, especially if the writer moves deep into the psyches of his or her characters, and With's first-person narration, and access to Trista's private thoughts and emotions, is pretty deep in. I think one response to the question of appropriation is ‘getting it right'. If a writer feels a story justifies imaginatively inhabiting a character of a different race, the writer must do so with respect, which means at a minimum getting the details, the voice, and the milieu right. And that implies a depth of knowledge, a familiarity, on the part of the writer. I have the sense that With is a careful listener and that she can still hear those teenaged girls' voices in her classroom in Inuvik.

Both Alexie and With spoke candidly about the autobiographical underpinnings to their work. Alexie was abused during his time in residential school, spent years struggling with alcohol—a struggle that had a setback when he saw his former abuser on a Winnipeg television station—and he contemplated suicide on more than one occasion. With "had hard times when [she]  was a kid"—sexual assault, depression, alcohol, detox. Both are acquainted with "dark places"—Boyden's phrase. But Alexie and With are not people consumed by darkness. Throughout the event, With's vivaciousness and empathy, and Alexie's humorous asides, allowed plenty of light into the discussion.

Boyden did a good job of hosting the event, guiding the discussion at appropriate moments, and contributing elements from his own experience of a mixed Irish/Ojibwa background. For the most part he allowed Alexie and With the space to convey how they became who they are, and where they are going with their reclaimed lives.

Joseph Boyden