I think the arts has great potential to create citizens. Citizenship is about the direction your imagination travels. We can’t plan or calculate or examine citizenship: it’s an imagined thing. Community is an imagined thing. And if your imagination isn’t working—and, of course, in oppressed people that’s the first thing that goes—you can’t imagine anything better. Once you can imagine something different, something better, then you’re on your way.
Lee Maracle
Harold Ashkewe, an Elder with the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation, recently inspired us with his words at the inaugural Celebrating Indigenous Culture evening at Trent University in Oshawa, arranged by Trent Cultural Advisor and Counsellor Jill Thompson from First People’s House of Learning and Professor Sara Humphreys. Ashkewe shared some key Indigenous teachings with a very interested and keen audience, composed of the All My Relations drum group and the Debwawin singers, along with members of the Trent community and the public. He also stressed the importance of story and said, “A lot of time, Indigenous people will not complete a story when telling it. As the person hearing the story, it is up to you to finish it yourself so you can learn something” (Talk Nov 20, 2013). What better way to learn? By making a story or lesson personal, there is a much better chance that a person will take the lesson inward, make it hers, and remember it.
Through his CBC Massey Lectures, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King creatively demonstrates through the introduction of each of five lectures the varying nature of story: “[E]ach time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it’s the dialogue or the response of the audience” (1). I believe stories are important as teaching tools, as aids to vision, and as inspiration.
Storyteller Lee Maracle is a visionary author. She writes to inspire people, to offer an alternative way of being: “Her work re-imagines centuries-old myth and tradition for future generations, and reflects her antipathy toward sexism, racism, and white cultural domination” (University of Windsor). She believes that “reclaiming” identity is a key mission for Indigenous Peoples (University of Windsor). In an interview with Margery Fee and Sneja Gunew, Maracle explains that she takes a “traditional story or a ceremony that’s a traditional ceremony . . . and creat[es] story from it, like a mythmaker, creat[ing] new myths out of the old myths” (218). She further confides, “So my whole journey is to master this language and turn it to account to make it work for us” (218). As other Indigenous authors have joined Maracle, I hear their voices growing louder and simultaneously quieting the old, tired, and inaccurate voices of western historians, missionaries, and anthropologists. Instead of being written about, I believe that Indigenous authors are re-righting history and writing to offer an alternative vision to those seeking inspiration.
“‘I’ll die if I don’t keep pecking and believing'” (50)
When Lee Maracle tells the story “Laundry Basket,” she envisions another world. Budding author Marla not only writes stories, she tells herself stories to allay her fears, to reimagine herself as someone who will not be oppressed, to picture herself as someone who can succeed at her craft, and to create a positive future for herself. She looks into the past and reviews old memories; and these past memories give her new vision and perspective on her present situation (Humphreys Lecture Sept 23). She hears Chief Khatsahlano, an inspirational voice from her childhood, which pushes negative memories into the background. However, both good and bad memories fuel her fire. “On the trail to recovering language” (50), she falls in love with words. She puts buying a typewriter ahead of buying a washing machine. She writes instead of maintaining a tidy house, keeping up with mundane household chores, or doing laundry. She writes because she must. Although her husband tries to extinguish her dreams, she pursues her craft and, in the process, re-creates and re-imagines herself. Author Lee Maracle shows that Marla is relevant. In writing of everyday contemporary issues and offering her readers another perspective, Maracle “counters the vanishing Indian myth” (Humphreys Lecture Sept 23).
Books such as Cogewea; The Half-Blood, Three Day Road, First Wives Club: Coast Salish Style, and The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative help to “break down the stereotype of Indigenous Peoples as soundless people who do not have a voice” (Beeds Lecture Feb 23). From a colonized past in residential schools where children were not allowed to speak their language, we now hear the voices of Indigenous authors, who are well acquainted with words and their value. King asserts that these authors “use the Native present as a way to resurrect a Native past and to imagine a Native future. To create, in words, as it were, a Native universe” (106).
In this new universe, Robbie Robertson further dispels the myth of the “vanishing Indian.” Listen as he sings his anthem, “Ghost Dance,” which alludes to the power of the past to give vision to the future:
You don’t stand a chance
against my prayers
You don’t stand a chance
against my love
They outlawed the Ghost Dance
but we shall live again,
we shall live again.
Write.Right.Rite. 