A Chippewa woman
With her sick baby,
Crouched in the last hours
Of a great storm.
The Forsaken – Duncan Campbell Scott
Deputy Superintendent Indian Affairs 1913-1932
I picked it up in London, Ontario at that Goodwill bookstore
on Wellington near the 402 with an eclectic selection and cheap prices. It is the bookstore you love to wander into when you have a handful of minutes to spare and a
couple of toonies in your pocket.
Among other scores, I purchased a scuffed but well preserved
47-year old paperback copy of Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970 for
50 cents, a two-dollar saving from its 1972 price. The poets listed on the
cover included Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Michaeal Ondaatje and the
legendary Al Purdy.
It was just what I was looking for, I was returning to
northern Manitoba and a vintage paperback is the perfect travel companion,
lightweight, well-made and small enough to fit into any bag and most pockets. New Canadian
Library books have a nostalgic vibe that long time Canadian readers or readers
of Canadiana will know. The iconic covers often featured inscrutable artwork with experimental color combinations.
This one is metallic blue and army green with artwork that
is mostly black with the metallic blue highlighting a woman and who I thought
was some kind of mountain scene until about 5 minutes ago.
I know the imprint from hours scouring bookshelves in Sally
Annes, VV’s and Goodie shops. The nostalgia is real here, the look and feel of
the NCL title in my hand connects me to my final year of high school. I am reading
Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town late at night on my
bunk in residence of the Frontier Collegiate Institute, Cranberry Portage, Manitoba in the winter of 1980.
I skipped immediately to the contributions of Cohen, the only poet that had
been included in earlier collections of The New Poetry series. It is of course,
magnificent and heard in that unforgettable baritone especially on works widely known as songs such as “Suzanne Takes You Down” and “I Believe You Heard
your Master Sing”.
In my perusal of the book I soon came across Al
Purdy’s “Beothuk skeleton behind Glass Case” and was disturbed by poem and poet. It led me to examine all the work and reveal the skeletons of Genocide in the closet
of Canada’s most revered poets.
The collection begins with the late Purdy a touchstone of
contemporary Canadian poetry and who in this slim selection has written some of the
most well known poetic acknowledgements of Genocide.
In “INNUIT” Purdy describes witnessing the ancient that once
existed. Purdy sees the Indigenous spirit in an Inuit carver and declares that
the person is a ghost of his greater self.
An old man carving soapstone
With the race-soul of the people
THE PEOPLE
Moving somewhere
Behind his eyes
He returns to similar territory in “Lament for the
Dorsets” but it is “Beothuk Indian Behind a Glass Case” that speaks Canada's truth. It is the cold-blooded detachment which he expresses towards a trophy of real and grotesque Genocide that reveals the hidden story within.
I ought to feel sadness here
But I can’t
Only a slight amazement
At the gawking tourists
That these specimens survived
And this man behind the glass
case did not
The Purdy contribution ends fittingly with “Remains of an
Indian Village” published in 1961, one year after First Nations received the
right to vote.
Milton Acorn follows and his contribution “Poem for the
Astronauts” is complimentary but the positive perspective is given to one who
no longer exists. The sexualization of the exotic other is another trope
favoured by poets on both sides of the border.
An Indian running the desert
Kept a stone under his tongue
To drink the saliva, and
His skin remembered a thousand
light touches
-the
fingers of his beloved.
George Bowering’s Indian Summer includes lines that should
be widely considered among the most offensive in Canadian Literature.
The
Indians I think
Are dead, you cant
Immortalize them, a
Leaf presst between
Pages becomes a
Page
John Newlove places Indigenous Peoples in some Manifest
Destiny Circle of Hell in his ode to another First White Man to See tale, “Samuel
Hearne in Wintertime”.
Hell smeared with manure,
Hell half-full of raw hides,
Hell of sweat, Indians, stale
fat,
Meat-hell, fear-hell, hell of
cold.
The poem ends in a brutal stanza that speaks to the inbred Canadian scourge of Murder and Missing Indigenous women and girls. Newlove describes the
agonizing death of an Indigenous girl like some creature commonly hunted.
There was that Eskimo girl
At Bloody Falls at your feet
Samuel Hearne, with two spears in
her
You helpless before your helpers
And she twisted about them like
an eel, dying, never to know
Newlove’s lengthy “Pride” tries to capture the romantic past
of Indigenous Peoples and concludes with the spirit of Indigenous people
being eaten alive. The parasitic desire to swallow another culture is lovingly expressed.
In our mouths,
In our bodies entire, until at
last
We become them
Margaret Atwood follows in the footsteps of Purdy in “A
Night in the Royal Ontario Museum”.
And further confronting me
With a skeleton child, preserved
In the desert air, curled
beside a clay pot and some beads
The younger version of the Grande Dame of Canadian
Literature is suitably disturbed although one would be hard pressed to find a
reflection of Canada’s true history in her work unless "A Handmaiden’s Tale" was
inspired by the Indian Residential Schools System. (The schools were in full operation when the book was published.)
Gwendolyn MacEwen is the discovery of the collection for me I
can well imagine that small joy that would fill me to one day come across a collection
of her works in a second-hand store. Her reference to Indigenous peoples is
again complimentary but the reference is to a distant past and lingers with the sexual exotic stereotype in “The Last Breakfast”.
You think of dark men running
through the earth
On their naked, splendid feet.
“Reports in These Killed” from Michael Ondaatje award
winning The Collected Works of Billy the Kid again treat Indigenous men
as less than other humans.
Joe Bernstain, 3 Indians
A blacksmith when I was twelve,
with a knife.
5 Indians in self-defence (behind
a very safe rock)
That very safe rock has always been the vantage point for
many Canadians when viewing their history and the responsibility of their ancestors
and governments for the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples.
It takes work to maintain the illusion of Canada versus the
reality. For years Canadians have looked down their noses at their American
cousins and the horrific history of Native Americans. As the true history of
Canada becomes unveiled can they look at themselves with an equally critical
eye. The schools, the churches and the government have been held accountable to
some degree; but a hidden Genocide requires more than perpetrators perhaps it
needs poets.
