Sunday, November 1, 2020

Skeletons of Poetic Genocide in the Closet of Canada's Literary Elite



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.

No comments:

Post a Comment