Another white woman who wrote about settler culture

[morgan_dhu]

I want to talk about what is possibly my favourite book, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners. It's the story of Morag Gunn, who grows up in a small Canadian prairies town in the period between WWI and WWII, and eventually becomes a respected middle-aged author dealing with her own daughter.

Morag is orphaned at an early age, and is adopted by the town garbage collector, who served with her father in WWI. She grows up poor and socially stigmatised, and all her adoptive father Christie has to give her for pride is his legacy of settler culture - the stoy of the Scots who left the British Isles under some duress and hardship, and established new homes and hopes for the future in the new territories, a trek made by both his and Morag's ancestors. He tells her stories of Piper Gunn, a heroic (albeit mythical) leader of the Scottish settlers in the Red river region of Manitoba. These tales not only help to sustain her pride, but eventually lead her toward her ultimately successful career as a creative artist.

But there's more to this book than an unquestioned revelling in the adventure of the colonial project. Becasue early on in her life, Morag meets her Aboriginal counterpart. Skinner (Jules) Tonnerre is Métis, and he too is poor and socially stigmatised and at the same time bright and creative with gifts too large for a sleepy prairie town to hold, but as a Métis, his options are very different. Yet he too has a mythic family legacy that gives him pride - the legends of his ancestor Rider Tonnerre, who fought in the Riel Rebellion at the side of Gabriel Dumont.

This is a book that tries to look at the settler culture of Canada from the perspective of both indigene and immigrant. And that doesn't shy away from rubbing the painful truths of Aboriginal experience in the face of the poor and socially outcast, yet at the same time privileged because of her whiteness, protagonist. Skinner and Morag are lovers at certain points in their long yet sporadic relationship, and for every step up the social ladder that Morag makes, there is some counterpoint in Skinner's life that kicks Morag - and the reader - in the gut, becasue no matter how hard it's been for her, she never has to face what Skinner and his sisters face.

And it's important that she try to learn, even though she never really does, because she and Skinner have a child, and no matter how hard Morag tries to pretend otherwise, her daughter is always going to be on the other side of the racial barrier, as her father was.

It's a subtle and complex book, one that explores a great many things at once - the power of story and myth, the struggles women face in being themselves (it's an intensely feminist book), the writing life among others - but this unrelenting juxtaposition of settler romance and Aboriginal realities is one of the things that lies at the heart of the novel.

As a white woman (and one of settler Scot background myself, and therefore having a personal inclination to be carried away by the tales of the heroic Piper Gunn) I don't know and haven't the experience to make a definitive assessment of how well Laurence did at this - but it's clear that she wanted to tell this story as a part of her creation, and that she tried very hard to do it right. And it's certainly had a powerful effect on me. (I have more to say about the book from a less directed perspective here.)

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Among my positive memories of the last few iterations of RaceFail was the opportunity to find many wonderful recommendations of books by people of colour.

Reading about a book that has erased Aboriginal peoples makes me only more eager to read books that don't erase the indigenous peoples of entire continents like North and South America or Australia and New Zealand, and that deal openly with settler/colonialist issues instead of handwaving them aside.

I'd love to hear about what you have read and enjoyed/appreciated/learned from about the settler invasions that isn't about an Empty Continent.

Comments

[issenllo]

...Louise Erdrich? She's one of my favourite authors.

I remember reading The Diviners in university, though I can't remember much about it now. Hm.

[morgan_dhu]

I haven't read any of Erdrich's work, although I do have her on my list of authors to investigate. Is there any particular book of hers you would recommend to someone who is primarily a reader of fantasy/science fiction/magic realism/speculative fiction and/or historical fiction and prefers to read books with a feminist perspective, about female protagonists?

[issenllo]

I see from comments that Erdrich's Birchbark House series has been recced, so I shall simply second it. ^_^

If you like magical stuff, then it definitely has to be Tracks. It is narrated by Nanapush, an elder of the Ojibwe tribe, and by another woman, Pauline, but it's focused on Fleur, who is rumoured to have magical powers and is feared by the tribe. Parts of it is painful to read, especially about how they lost their land, and other parts are wonderful because there's so much richness about their lives.

Another one of Erdrich's that I read recently is The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which I thought fantastic. It's in the same timeline as Tracks and works through some of the same events, but it's from the viewpoint of a white woman (I guess this isn't a spoiler?...) who crossdresses as a missionary priest and goes to work with/on the Ojibwe. Quite a bit of magical realism in this one.

Oh, and if you'd prefer to dip your feet into Erdrich's books first, Love Medicine is composed mostly of (linked) short stories, also mostly about the Ojibwe.

Erdrich writes a lot from a female perspective and tends to have a lot of female protagonists, and she works First Nations myths into her narratives. Not to turn them into fantasies, per se, but to show the worldview of her characters.

[morgan_dhu]

Thank you for giving me some recommendations on where to begin. Both Tracks and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse sound very interesting - the latter in particular as I also have an interest in reading about passing women.

[sanguinity]

Joseph M. Marshall, The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn. Marshall goes through the full history of contact between the Lakota and Europeans, extending from first contact with French trappers through at least the 1930s, all told from a Lakota perspective.

I also enjoyed his Winter of the Holy Iron, which is a novel about an early encounter between Lakota and Frenchmen. Nowhere near the same scope, obviously, but one of the things I liked about it was its subversion of the Western genre. Holy Iron is a straight-up lawman vs. outlaw story, but the lawman and the society he protects are Lakota, and the outlaw is a Frenchman.

For settler-invasion stories, I'd also recommend Erdrich's Birchbark House series which is sometimes referred to as "an Ojibwe Little House on the Prairie." The settler-invasion is a background thread throughout the books, and the series does an excellent job of communicating that people had had ongoing lives.

Oh! And Thomas King's Coyote Columbus Story, which is irreverent, highly subversive, and eighty million kinds of awesome.

And if you're not familiar with it, have a browse-through Oyate's catalog -- there's a lot of good stuff in there. And-and-and! A Broken Flute, which is a compilation of reviews, mostly written by Native authors, of published children's and YA books "about" American Indians. You'll learn a lot about how twisted white-told stories about Indian/white conflict tend to be, and what those conflicts look like from Native perspectives. The volume is a wonderful feat of documentation and correction.

I'd also suggest reading books that are about what was happening here before the settler invasions: part of North America not having been an empty continent is that history/interestingness didn't begin with the European arrivals/contact/conflicts. Unfortunately, those books are a lot harder to find, because the mainstream perception is that the only interesting thing about Indians is the Conquest. The only rec I've got at the moment is Joseph Bruchac's Children of the Longhouse, but I'm hoping to find more.

[morgan_dhu]

I am totally in awe of Thomas King's writing. I've only read a couple of his books so far - both fiction and non-fiction - but he does most brilliantly but gently eviceration of white/settler perception/stereotyping/treatment of First Nations peoples I've read just about anywhere, and he wields his blade with great skill.

In terms of pre-Columbian non-fiction, I have read 1491, but I'm also looking for indigneous voices on that theme. I recently learned about Bruchac's trilogy Dawn Land, Long River and The Waters Between, and I'm hoping to locate used copies of those.

I read your comments on A Broken Flute and am heartily in agreement that I must read it.

Thank you for the recs.

[sanguinity]

King's text was brilliant, but the illustrations on Coyote Columbus Story absolutely made it for me. I should have explicitly credited Monkman, too, because he added a lot.

Thanks for the additional Bruchac titles. Bruchac also did Wabi, which is a pre-Columbian YA quest fantasy about a were-owl. I'm not sure why I slipped it, except maybe I had put it in the "fantasy" mental box, and not the "pre-Columbian" mental box.

And yay! Someone who's taking the Broken Flute rec!