{ JANICE ACOOSE & NATASHA BEEDS }
For Blair, Blue, Nicole, Alijah, Angelina, Dakota and Rose:
So they’ll always remember the power of storied humour
And for the jazz-man Lee Kozak and the
word-mistress Susan Dawson: For their special gifts!
— IN THE BEGINNING —
TWO FINE specimens of mixed-Cree womanhood are jogging on the treadmills at Mecca Fitness Centre. Janice is training for her 5K race; she is, after all, the granddaughter of the famous runner Paul Acoose: Man Standing Above Ground. Right next to her, Tasha, her training partner, is just trying to keep up. Tasha is, on the other hand, the granddaughter of Man Who Smokes Too Much: John Beeds.
JANICE: Hey, Tasha, wanna write something funny with me about the Crees?
TASHA: Ho-leeee! Little mixed-blood me? Ahhh goooo onnnn, you. You really want me to write something with you?
JANICE: Well, our “Blue-Eyed Ojibway” buddy Drew asked me to write something funny about them Crees, so I thought I better bring along a Cree. You’re mixed-blood Cree, aren’t you?
TASHA: Yup, my mother is a mixed-blood Nehiyaw who fell in love with a woman-lovin’ Caribbean man my Granny called “Blue Beard.” When he broke my mother’s heart, she fled the ocean and mountains and came back to the bush toting me, her Cree-ibbean daughter. But I guess, like a whole buncha other indigenous folks, we’re a soup pot of status Cree, non-status Cree, Métis-Cree and just plain Indians. Are you Cree, Janice?
JANICE: W-e-l-l, hmm. I don’t really tell too many people, but I guess I’ll have to fess up sooner or later. You see, I think there was a Cree or two sneakin’ around w-a-y back when my down-Koochum’s family lived in St. Eustache, Red River.
TASHA: Chaaaa! Why is your Koochum down?
JANICE: No, no—she’s not down! We called her down-Koochum ’cause she lived down the hill from my Grandma’s house at the halfbreed colony in Marival.
TASHA: Ooooh! Hey, did your mom’s family really come from the Red River?
JANICE: Yeah.
TASHA: Ho-leee! You’re a real Métis then, eh?
JANICE: Well, that’s a bit confusing.
TASHA: Why?
JANICE: See, Ni’mosom—that’s my dad’s dad—told us stories about our Anishinabe side of the family for as long as I can remember. So I’m pretty certain about that part of me, but my so-called Métisness, well, that’s kinda a contentious issue right now, what with all the bullshit Métis politics goin’ on. And gee, if Grandma—that’s my mom’s mom—ever heard that I was spilling the beans about our Cree connection… well, ho-leeee, she’d be rolling over in her grave. Though, come to think of it, I always wondered why her and my mom’s French was peppered with Cree-sounding words, eh? Oh well, guess she didn’t nickname me La’Bishon for nothing!
TASHA: Chaaaa… La Ba what?
JANICE: La’Bishon—I think it’s some kind of Mitchef-French for “The Big Mouth.”
— CREE-ATIVE CONNECTIONS —
TASHA (in between puffs): Cree humour, eh? (Puff, puff.) So, where are we (puff, puff, puff) gonna start?
JANICE (not one single puff): Well, the Cree-ator of the world is Wesakaychuk.
TASHA: Eeeee… Don’t you know, you can’t say His name. It’s past springtime!
JANICE: Whaddya mean, you can’t say His name?
TASHA: You can only say His name in the winter. If you say it any other time… JANICE: Ah, go on, don’t be silly. Nothin’ will happen.
TASHA: Yes, those old people say snakes will come. Don’t you remember last year when we were walking and talking about Him and right there, in the middle of that westside road, I saw a snake?
JANICE (chuckling): Yeah, Tasha, I remember. It was a stick, not a snake, but you sure did scream. I bet those hoity-toity folks probably heard you all the way over on the eastside.
TASHA: Okay, okay, maybe it was just a stick, but don’t say His name now.
JANICE: Pa-leez. I don’t believe in all that old Cree superstitiousness. Wesakaychuk, Wesakaychuk, Wesakaychuk, Wesakaychuk, Wesakaychuk, Wesakaychuk, Wesakaychuk. See, nothing happened to me.
Aghast at Janice’s courage, Tasha covers her ears. In seconds, her body is somersaulting through the air. Sounds of terrifying screams are cut short by a t-h-u-m-p! As she lands ass over treadmill, Tasha’s mixed-blood Cree derrière dangles over the treadmill’s rubber. Janice peers mischievously at her with a Trickster-like ear-to-ear smile.
TASHA (groaning and moaning over the treadmill’s lightning-fast humming): Owwwwww! Owwwww! Owww! See, I tolddd you.
JANICE (laughing uncontrollably): Oh god, I’m gonna pee myself.
TASHA: Help me up, you spoon! See, you gotta call Him Kistasinow or Chakapas or Ti Jean… just not the W-word.
JANICE (still laughing): I think maybe you saw stars, not snakes. Anyway, I think you’ll be okay if we just write about Him.
TASHA: Yeah, okay, but there’s no way I’m gonna read his name out loud!
Along with the stories told around kitchen tables and evening fires, the Trickster was brought onto the cultureless white pages of books in the early 1900s. He is just as powerful on the written page as she is in the oral stories. (Remember, the Trickster is a shape-shifter and has no fixed gender.) Makes sense that she would follow us onto the written page, since wherever we Nehiyaw go, the Trickster follows. Yup, her powerful energy illuminates the Cree-ative tales that live between the pages of contemporary written stories. Kicking ass, the Trickster’s spirit empowers today’s Nehiyaw writers to Cree-atively transform the old stories into lily-white words with picket-fence sentences and manicured paragraphs that back-talk the Great White Way of writing, as writer Marilyn Dumont says. With the spirit of the Trickster guiding them, Cree-ative writers bring the humour of the people back from the bush and into the cities. Just wait until those hoity-toity eastsiders see who their next-door neighbour is.
JANICE: Oh! I’m so excited by all this Cree-ativity!
TASHA: Me too, Janice. Cree-ative humour is spilling off the pages of written stories so fast it’s drenching “Indian” myths and making mud puddles out of the mastery of English.
Don’t ya just love playin’ in the mud? The Trickster does.
Just as he reconstructed the world after the great flood, the Trickster reconstructs the world of written English with Cree-ative humour that calls up ancestral spirits and powerful mythological beings. The Trickster uses Cree-ative humour to mirror collective memory, dissolve into digestible laughter centuries-old constipated pain, anoint salve over unhealed wounds and turn the stresses of contemporary living and fast-moving city life into: NEHIYAW TIME!
Hey, Janice, do you Nehiyaw-Métis know what time and space that is?
JANICE: Hey, are you trying to Cree-centricize me?
TASHA: Who, little Cree-ibbean me? Never.
I got an idea. Let me show you what I mean by telling you about this short piece I just finished reading. Paul Seesequasis, the guy who wrote it, definitely moves through Nehiyaw time. In “The Republic of Tricksterism” (nope, not Plato’s Republic), Seesequasis Cree-ates a contemporary Trickster story that resurrects our Nehiyaw humour, taunts the Cree-centric voice of storytelling, collapses myths into each other and tickles the funny out of seemingly unfunny situations.*
JANICE: Hey, I read it too, Tash. What struck me about that powerful piece is the way that it lies so quiet and unassuming in Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie’s Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. It stimulated and frustrated me so much that I phoned up Seesequasis and told him so. I told him that I like the way he teases the funny right out of the cultural dis-ease so many of us find ourselves drowning in. And the way he un-dams Cree-ative Trickster humour and uses it to wash over the pages.
But mostly I like the way his humour tickles all those ridiculous ideas of Cree cultural purity and pokes fun at our fancy academic writing. Look what happens when he calls up Wesakaychuk, Pakakos, Hairy Hearts, Wetigoes and the Little People. Those figures of Cree oral mythology nonchalantly saunter onto the book’s pages and create pandemonium by destabilizing the tightly structured written English. Really, he’s very much like the Trickster because he ruptures any potentially fixed interpretations of culture and story. Seesequasis even Tricksterizes our expectations of the Trickster. Remember how he invites the mixed-blood Uncle Morris onto the pages? Morris shape-shifts into the mythical rigoureau of Métis oral stories in places where we expect Wesakaychuk to appear. And look at the way Seesequasis uses Cree-ative humour to rip open the seams of the written story. With Trickster energy, the oral storytelling voices break free.
TASHA: Oo! Oo! I just love being teased and tickled. And hey, Janice, did you notice that when Seesequasis assembles his motley crew of characters he whirls his Trickster voice, blowing wind and creating havoc in both the English written form and Cree storytelling? Take the Cree urban mixed-blood orphans, for example. When they make their appearance in his story, they’ve been de-Cree-d and banished from the so-called Reserve-d Place of Indian culture and storytelling. Fallen between the cracks of mainstream and Cree culture, the urban mixed-bloods become prisoners tangled in the red tape of bureaucracy.
Seesequasis reminds us that both the Reserve-d Place and the Indian have been colonially manufactured by that same government bureaucracy. And his Republic of Tricksterism alludes to the massive government marketing of both these ideas, constructs that have been bought into by many Cree people ourselves. ’Course I’m talking about the ones Seesequasis says get paid the big bucks, who become Indian clones ready to defend their tribalism and prevent Nehiyaw who are not willing to turn Tricks to set foot on the sacredly served lands.
Getting back to the Republic’s mixed-bloods, as orphans of the Cree oral storytelling traditions and de-Cree-d outcasts without status in the English written stories, they exist in a storytelling limbo, where both written and oral forms become Tricksterized.
JANICE: What are you talking about, Tricksterized? Do you mean like when you tripped over your mouth and ended up with your mixed-blood Cree derrière up in the air?
TASHA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, La’Bishon. Just never mind about that. You should see my cheeks. I got big blue bruises from that one.
Anyway—hey! Are you listenin’? As a contemporary writer, Seesequasis uses the English written form, but he re-Cree-ates oral storytelling techniques within his text. Let me show you what I mean. You know that when us Nehiyaw tell tahp-acimowina (a true/family story), we introduce ourselves, tell where we come from and who we come from. But when Seesequasis re-Cree-ates this storytelling technique, he uses the Master’s tools to dismantle the Master’s rules. Appearing to adhere to biographical form, he places the life story of his mother onto the page. According to those written conventions, he writes that she was born on Beardy’s Reserve on January 20, 1934, and that her parents are Sam Seesequasis of Beardy’s and Mary Rose Nahtowenhow of the Sturgeon Lake band.
Then he Tricksterizes our expectations of form. Using Cree-ative humour he jump-starts these silent written facts into storytelling images: Sam becomes Nimosom and starts dancing through the pages with gentleness and humour, and Mary Rose becomes Nohkom who shifts into a bear, hunts rabbits, cuts the heads off chickens and farts in the direction of bureaucrats and posers. As literal relatives of the Creeative storyteller, Nohkom and Nimosom disrupt the neatly organized structure of the written word and awaken the senses to the possibilities of cultural differences.
When Tobe, the “grand-chief-to-be,” appears on the page alongside figurative beings such as the Trickster and Pakakos, his presence signals the shift from storytelling to the written narrative. Usually, the Trickster and Pakakos signal an oral form, but again we have been Tricksterized. In Seesequasis’s text, Tobe’s life sits silently factual. He is a mixed-blood, spawned by a Cree father and a white mother, but he grows up as if he is a mixed-race pure blood. Exaggerating his half a cup of tribal blood, he thinks himself purer Cree than Mary Seesequasis. Unlike Mary, Tobe has no relations on the written page. His identity flows from the Indian Act. Yup. He is a puffed-up Indian-Act(ing) Indian. On the other hand, the Trickster, Pakakos, Wetigoes and Hairy Hearts are spirited beings relative to Cree acimowina. Although they lie quietly on the page as names of remembered stories, they tantalize us with the prospect of things to come.
Teasing and tickling our expectations, the voice of Cree acimowina seems tamed by the inherent patriarchal conventions of written English. But when Seesequasis’s mother Mary becomes Dennis Ogresko’s hisqueau, Creeative humour puns the English word “his” with the Creesounding word “queau” for woman. Think you been Tricksterized again?
JANICE: Maybe a little confused.
TASHA: And when the mixed-blood Uncle Morris shows up as a rigoureau, both the forms of oral storytelling and the written tradition evaporate faster than a tin of canned milk. Out of nowhere, spirit rodents and scavengers scamper across the page, escaping the oral realm of Wesakaychuk, Hairy Hearts, the Little People and Wetigoes. In between time, in the meantime, as the storytelling and written narrative voices shape-shift, the story’s seams bust ass-wide open. Truth turns into fiction, biblical myths spill into Cree oral telling and Trickster humour rules!
Yeah! I hope that phrase catches on. Oh, baby, Tricksterize me. You’ve been Tricksterized. Let’s Tricksterize. Kinda has an aerobic sound to it, or maybe it’s anaerobic. Knowing the Trickster, it’s probably both. But Tricksterizing sure makes us work out hard, eh?
JANICE: Hey, you know it, Tasha. At first I was confused, trying to make sense of Seesequasis’s Trickster trickle. It’s a good thing I have a bit of Cree-text. Cree-text allows us to appreciate how his mom, Mary, comes to stand in for the oral tradition while the chief functions as a symbol of the written tradition. When Seesequasis plays the two forms of storytelling off against each other, the results are hilarious. How many Cree chiefs do you think would like to be placed in stories between references to Nohkom’s smelly farts? Or to materialize in the text smelly with the noxious gas emanating from Nohkom’s bowels? But then Tobe is merely a symbolic figure of the de-Cree-ing authority of written narrative. He becomes a colonial clone, selling himself for paper money and papering himself in white, worded definitions and power.
TASHA: Talk about turning Tricks.
JANICE: Yeah, eventually he becomes Grand Chief Tobe in the Fermentation of the Saskatchewan Indian Nations. A rotten chief in a fermenting organization amidst the cultural confusion and ever-increasing number of mixed-bloods moving to the city. Then he becomes the disfigured part-legend part-lie, Honourable Heap Big Chief, after the pronouncement of Bill C-31, the government de-Cree that restored “Indian” status.
Like a lot of contemporary skins, the chief imagines himself into being and covers himself with “status.” He forgets the oral stories that can speak to him of culture and identity. From the boy who played with the storyteller’s mother, Mary, he morphs into the main cannibal spirit who feeds off the flesh of mixed-bloods and urban orphans.
TASHA: Wow, this stuff is really deep. To Cree-textualize his work, Seesequasis embeds it with wahkotowin—the strength of relations. Like you said, he places his mother, Mary, in his text as the symbolic figure of Cree cultural traditions of storytelling. Her presence resists the de-Cree-ing authority of the written narrative’s masterful conventions. A full-blood Nehiyaw woman, Mary is the daughter of Nimosom and Nohkom. As such, she presides over the story as a familial Cree presence that threatens to rupture the textual surface of written English. And when Mary becomes a hisqueau by marrying a white man, she refuses the de-Cree-ing authoritative papers that tell her she is a person without status. Instead of hanging her head in shame when she is exiled from the rez, she re-Cree-ates her own status by becoming a “registered” healer who nurses the ever-increasing community of mixed-bloods and urban orphans. As she shifts her home from Prince Albert to Saskatoon, she shapes the traditional role of healer into an urban “medicine woman” who nurses the whores, dykes, queers and street people at the 20th Street Community Clinic.
JANICE: Tasha, don’t you just love Seesequasis’s irreverence? He debunks mythic ideas of the sacred. He pokes fun at notions of cultural purity by characterizing the mixed-bloods as urban orphans who have been exiled from the sacred-mythical place of culture: the reserve.
TASHA: And I like the representation of mixed-bloods as resourceful and resilient—like us.
JANICE: Hmm, I wonder if we can call them postmodern non-status urban mixed-bloods? They do, after all, shift the Reserve-d Place of culture by transplanting it into an un-Edenic plot. Shopping malls and beer parlours become their sacred grounds, and Clashing–Sex Pistols their tribal drums. Then again, they are outcasts of the constructed written world and orphans of the oral tribal culture, too. Hey, I got it: they’re like another shape-shifter between worlds: Wesakaychuk. They show their irreverence by pissing on city streets to mark shifting traditional territory. As the Trickster’s children, they transform ideas of tradition, culture and identity, and they poke fun at clonish Indians. While Indian-Act(ing) Indians roar with anger and smash their fists against their palms, these Trickster upstarts gnaw away at layers of the de-Creeing authority.
TASHA: But it’s Uncle Morris, the mixed-blood rigoureau, who really turns everything upside down. He doesn’t pull any punches as he disrespects, even disregards, the boundaries of the de-Cree-d authority. He rambles across the white pages, shape-shifting into the Métis rigoureau who then shifts shape into a fictional character named Uncle Morris and then into the legendary Métis activist Malcolm Norris! Blending Métis and Cree acimowina, the rigoureau Uncle Morris wants to unite all “urban skins” and envisions urban reserves liberated from the Wetigoes and Hairy Hearts. “Free All Urban Skins!” Can’t you just hear the rallying cries?
As he shifts the shape of the story form, Uncle Morris parodies the sacred texts of Western civilization. I love how he parodies the Christ stories when he shape-shifts from a squirrel into a Christ-like figure. Of course, he is persecuted and condemned to death for blasphemous challenges to the so-called noble and sacred institutions.
Poor ol’ Uncle Morris is nailed to a cross, though in the Cree-text his cross is a metal medicine wheel and his arms and legs are spread in the four directions. Stories are literally turned upside down and around again. In Seesequasis’s re-Creeated text, Uncle Morris appears as a martyr and saviour dragged before a “regional” council, not the mythic Big Cree Grand Council. Unlike the suffering Christ-martyr, the mixed-blood rigoureau doesn’t carry his own wooden cross up a rural mountain. No way. This Cree-textualized Christ rolls his cedar-wood wheelchair up the Prince Albert hill.
JANICE: Some of those die-hard Christians are going to take offence at this!
TASHA: Cree-ative humour encourages us to laugh at everything. Nothing is exempt; the more sacred the idea, the better it is to poke fun at. Look at the way Seesequasis pokes fun at both ceremony and ritual. When he writes about Uncle Morris’s death, he calls on an urban scavenger crow rather than a majestic eagle to caw his name to the clouds, while memory fires burn in street-corner garbage cans. Uncle Morris rises resurrected, with his Cree-Trickster energy pulsing, not as a holy spirit but as a pesky termite! As that termite, he chews up the pages of the master narratives, spits them out and re-Creeates the stories in true Trickster fashion.
JANICE: Even meaning falls apart as the pesky termite chews away at ideas of importance. Yippee! I can’t wait to read more re-Creeated stories.
— IN THE END —
Walking towards the change rooms, the two fine specimens of mixed-blood Cree womanhood are glowing and glistening.Heads are turnin’ this-a-way and that-a-way.
TASHA: Wow! I feel awash in that warm fuzzy feeling that comes after a good… JANICE: Shit!
TASHA: Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of… JANICE: No, I mean shit, I forgot… I gotta go.
TASHA: Let me guess: that jazz-man is going to soothe you with his smooth-sweet songs.
JANICE: Ohhhh-Lee! I mean Ho-leeee. Okay, I really gotta go.
TASHA: Okay, buddy, nice chattin’ with ya.
JANICE: You, too, my friend. Tomorrow? Same place, same time?
* Paul Seesequasis, “The Republic of Tricksterism.” In An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 2nd ed., eds. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998. Quotations from the story appear throughout this conversational essay.