I KNOW YOU DON’T KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT ME BECAUSE I COULD NEVER TELL YOU—YOU WEREN’T THERE TO TELL. OH, I UNDERSTAND YOU TRIED TO BE THERE, DADDY, BUT IT JUST COULDN’T HAPPEN. I KNOW IT WASN’T YOUR FAULT. STILL, I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT THIS LETTER TO HELP YOU SEE THE KIND OF GIRL I HAVE BEEN WITHOUT YOU. —LEE MARACLE, “DEAR DADDY”

17 March 2011

Conversation between Lee Maracle and Sam McKegney at First Nations House, University of Toronto.

LEE MARACLE (Wolf Clan, Stó:lo) is a novelist, poet, educator, storyteller and performing artist. First published in the early 1970s, she is an advocate for and teacher of Indigenous writers from around the world and a mentor to young people on personal and cultural reclamation and healing. She currently works as a professor in the Department of Aboriginal Studies at University of Toronto and as a counsellor to students at First Nations House. Among her many published works are the novels Ravensong (Press Gang Publishers, 1993), Daughters are Forever (Polestar, 2002), and Will’s Garden (Theytus Books, 2008), the poetry collection Bent Box (Theytus Books, 2000), and the non-fiction study I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (Press Gang Publishers, 1988).

SAM MCKEGNEY: In the opening section of Daughters Are Forever you write, “Tensions invade the men as they dig graves for the dead they were unable to protect. The return of the scent of murder becomes shame as the Earth fails to cleanse her of the magnitude of grief. In their tension, the men swallow her shame.” Can you explain the role of colonialism in this shaming process? How are both the shame of men and men’s complicity in oppression produced?

LEE MARACLE: I think there’s a number of sources. The first one is the epidemics. And I was talking to Khahtsahlano when I was a little girl, who was one of the people who organized the digs for the epidemics, and the first thing he said was, “Well, we didn’t have ceremony for them. Too many died at once.” So that’s the first thing. So those dead didn’t have ceremony, which means the living didn’t release tension. And secondly, the Earth herself, because she’s the mother of those children, didn’t release that tension either—because we received our instructions on how to grieve the dead from the land itself, originally. So neither the men who have to dig the graves—and you know, I guess some of the women probably helped—but the men who had to dig the graves were sure to swallow the tension of the earth, who is the mother, who had not had her tension released. Then it becomes toxic. And it’s toxic emotionality. We say the earth is sacred, but she is female and if she doesn’t get a chance to grieve the loss of her dead, then she’s gonna be toxic just like any other female. Female wolves go completely mad if they come upon their lair and their children are dead. They go completely nuts and so do we. And so, that is the tension that those men are swallowing.

SM: How does the swallowing of that tension affect the men’s sense of their role as protectors?

LM: The only example I get is Eddy [from Daughters are Forever]. He hears West Wind, he actually hears the ancestral voices, hears the voice of the Earth but doesn’t want to hear it, because he doesn’t know what to do about it. So he runs out in front of a truck and kills himself. Then the second voice that I use is Marilyn’s voice herself saying “wait” and the stepfather not waiting. Not attending to the young, not attending to the children, not listening to what they need and addressing those needs. So that’s the second voice. And the third voice is the stillness of the women, which then informs the men. Because the women are still, the men don’t have to move. They become paralyzed.

SM: And that paralysis then is self-defeating or locks them into those positions?

LM: I’m thinking it keeps them locked to a barstool. That’s one of the ways. Locks us in position.

SM: The short story, “Charlie,” from Sojourner’s Truth, contains a powerful depiction of a father recognizing his inability to keep the son out of residential school, and it mentions how he “confided none of his self-disgust to his wife. It made him surly but he said nothing.” I’m wondering how silence plays in …

LM: It’s not silence. Silence is not speaking. It’s a choice. But it’s part of the paralysis. Keeps us locked in—“in” being the operative word.

SM: So it’s then not a decision-making process at all, but rather the way in which one is contained.

LM: It’s just locked in. Yeah.

SM: Are there pathways to opening up that silence so that the “self-disgust” is not corrosive?

LM: Breaking the locks, you mean.

SM: Yes.

LM: It’s not silence. I just said it wasn’t silence, so don’t call mine silence. It might be silence from your direction, because you’re not in it, you’re looking from outside. But it’s not silence. So, it’s breaking the locks. And there’s a number of ceremonies that we have for undoing those locks, for pushing through the paralysis, and for giving voice to the unsaid. But I think that each nation has its own ceremonies and its own outcomes and each individual in those nations has to become through the world. [gets up to use blackboard]

THE WARRIOR IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING SURE THAT THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN. THE MALES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DIRECTION. AND IF PARALYSIS IS THE MODEL, THEN MADNESS ENSUES.

It goes like this: here’s the baby. And if it’s abused, it’s surrounded by family. But if this baby is traumatized by the parents and others in here, it’s bounced out of family and it has to go through the world to return. So it has to come through this doorway first, which right now doesn’t want them—so it’s double-locked. Colonization has to be addressed. And then dis-integration has to be addressed and then restoration of family has to be addressed. I should say restoration and healing of family. Then reintegration is possible.

SM: And because of how that child has been initially bounced out of this circle of family by those…

LM: That’s for anyone who’s ever been traumatized by their family—it fits the Irish, too. If you take a look around the world, Indigenous people as a whole are locked into this, outside their own worlds.

SM: And is an initial way of attacking the lock through, I guess, a decolonization process that attends to racism?

LM: That’s the keys to the lock. The initial way of attacking the lock is madness. And that’s what you see in most Indigenous communities throughout the world. Three-hundred-fifty million people locked into madness. You can really see it in southern Africa. So the madness begins. I think Fanon even talks a little bit about it. But this is how I’ve seen it. It’s like doorways to these rings lead to wholeness at the centre. Then you have a whole person and community. But all these things have to be happening. This fellow in my class today did his first feast and had his family and friends there and he was saying it was the first time he invited his entire family into a feast even though he’s been a pipe carrier for a long time. And it’s because this madness wasn’t being dealt with. And we realized that this had to come first before he could do that, and so then we were able to talk about that. Because the warrior is responsible for making sure that this doesn’t happen. The males are responsible for direction. And if paralysis is the model, then madness ensues. And in order to return to family, the child has to go through the world that bounced him out.

SM: How has this been informed by the ways in which colonial governments sought to reform Indigenous family structures—in terms of moving from clan-based kinship structures to imposed nuclear family structures?

LM: I think you’re thinking of the government as a little more absolute and powerful than they really are. The nuclear family came about as a result of many many epidemics. We chose it to survive. So it comes out of murder not the state. The state didn’t force us to burn our longhouses. But we did. So once they’re formed, the state can influence that formation. They can idealize the formation.

SM: We were talking earlier about there being a lot of in-depth work on Indigenous women’s issues—I’m thinking of I Am Woman, obviously, and Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop and Kim Anderson’s A Recognition of Being—but there not being a similar body of literature on men’s issues…

LM: I should say there’s not a book on it; that doesn’t mean there aren’t bodies of work. A body is a person. There’s lots of men who can speak to this issue. They just haven’t been published. [Laughter]

SM: I guess the question that I’m moving toward in relation to that is why do you think that there has been such a strong women’s voice among Indigenous writers and poets in what is now commonly called Canada? I think back to the Peterborough conference [Sounding Out: Indigenous Poetics in November 2010] and there was a lot of discussion among the poets there about the “foremothers” and a connection to really powerful women’s voices and ancestries, but there wasn’t a similar discussion of “forefathers.”

LM: I think it’s because the internal world that women have been writing about is female jurisdiction. So you have a lot of Two-Spirit writing and Native women’s writing, but the male world outside is this world and if you look around now, there’s about as many male writers as there is female, but they’re writing about history. You know, Peace, Power, and Righteousness…

SM: Taiaiake Alfred …

LM: So they’re writing about our relationship to this colonial world, but the internal world has to get straightened out in order for them to go back out and meet that world properly. It’s just the way our societies work.

SM: Yeah, yeah. I understand. Well—I don’t fully understand but I’m trying. That makes sense to me, is what I meant to say. [Laughter]

LM: [Laughter]

SM: One thing that I also wanted to ask about is the recognition in a lot of your work of the ways in which male characters have been adversely affected by history, but not in a way that robs them completely of agency. So it’s not like they’re free of any culpability by virtue of history. How do you balance recognition of the ways in which history has disempowered particular groups with a desire to hold individuals within those groups accountable for damage they may inflict on others?

LM: Yeah, I don’t see them as disempowered, and I hope you didn’t get that from my work. I don’t see them that way. We’re always moving. We’re either moving this way [refers to board] back to wholeness or we’re moving around in the hamster cage. We’re always moving, whatever it is we’re doing. And because we’re communitas, we’re always either looking at the madness or we’re walking to the sanity. And I think that’s what I’m trying to say in all my work. We’re always doing something—we’re engaging each other, either in sharing shit or sharing feasts. We’re sharing the sacred or we’re sharing abuse. But we never stopped sharing, we never stopped our communitas way of life. It’s particularly true of Daughters and Ravensong and some of the short stories. But we’re never not engaging the community.

WE’RE SHARING THE SACRED OR WE’RE SHARING ABUSE. BUT WE NEVER STOPPED SHARING, WE NEVER STOPPED OUR COMMUNITAS WAY OF LIFE.

Just because you take away the means of making sense of a culture doesn’t mean that the culture changes. They took away the things that would make us make sense and continuously reconcile ourselves to ourselves and to the outside world. But it doesn’t mean we stopped engaging each other in the same way we’ve always done it. We’re living in nuclear families but we have a communitas sensibility. We’re living in nuclear families but we still have joint raising of children. We’re living in nuclear families, and we’re sharing responsibilities, whether it’s in madness or it’s in wholeness. Whichever direction we’re going, it’s still the same way. And culture is about the way you do things. So we may not have the words for these things—which is the language—but we definitely do things the way we’ve always done them. We might be doing different things ’cause we’re running around in this hamster cage or we might be doing the same thing our ancestors always did because we’ve reached wholeness by some miracle. We’ve gone back to who we always are and who we always will be. That’s the saying: We always are and always will be. We cannot not be ourselves.

SM: This makes me think of Will’s Garden because although he’s seeking ways of negotiating the various circumstances he finds himself in, in high school or wherever, Will is always participating in that community.

LM: Even when he’s silent, he’s commentating in his mind. Even in his dreams, he’s watching his ancestors. And he does it in English. I remember my son reading it and saying, “I’m so glad you did this because it shows that we can have our culture in English or our language.” Because he always felt offended when people said, “You have to know your language or your culture. You can’t have culture without a language.” Because he always knew he did things differently than everybody else.

I belong to a family of twenty-two siblings, that are now all sober and together, functioning as a unit, building community. So we’re all here [points to the inside of the circle]—and we were all out here before [points to the outside of the circle, the realm of madness]. And you can tell how bad it was out here because my son was friends with my niece and didn’t know she was my niece, didn’t know it was my sister’s daughter. That’s how messed up we were thirty-four years ago. And I just made a decision when I was young not to hang out with people who were drunk. I don’t care if they were my relatives or not ’cause I’m raising my kids as a sober family. And so they didn’t get to know their aunts and uncles until everyone started to sober up, so we were all out here, my kids and I, in what I call a state of madness. Not that I was crazy, but the madness is that we didn’t have family here, and therefore you can’t actually be whole here. So we’re isolated from each other in little pockets of madness [draws on board]: There’s us quarantined. And that’s a very Euro tradition.

SM: Yes, I see. Quarantined!

LM: And there I have quarantined my children away and it took us a long time to make that journey back in. And it took quite a few books. My books have sparked so much re-entry to wholeness in my particular family.

IF WE DON’T HAVE POSITIVE RITUALS, WHICH ARE THE ONES THAT KEEP US GOING HERE IN THE FAMILY WITH A SENSE OF WHOLENESS, THEN WE’RE GOING TO HAVE MAD RITUALS, RITUALS THAT KEEP THE MADNESS RUNNING.

SM: In relation to re-entry and return, what is the role of ritual and initiation in these processes?

LM: Well, if you don’t have positive ceremonies, you’re going to have negative ceremonies—that’s just how humans are. If you watch people that are getting ready to go to the bar, it’s really ritualistic. Or go to bingo, it’s ritualistic. Or, you know, get into a fight—there’s a ritual before a fight. You know how men draw the line in the sand and do the dancing around. You can see it in boxing, you know? It’s a terrific ritual, and there has to be a ring. There has to be a public gathered around them. There has to be this, there has to be that… If we don’t have positive rituals, which are the ones that keep us going here in the family with a sense of wholeness [points to board], then we’re going to have mad rituals, rituals that keep the madness running.

SM: I wonder also about the love relationship between Will and Laylanee in Will’s Garden. Despite their youth, at the novel’s end they make a fairly profound commitment to one another…

LM: What’s the profound commitment?

SM: Well, I guess it’s that they sort of promise to be together when they return to the community after moving away to pursue school and things. I get the sense that they’re proclaiming a sort of mutual ownership or belonging.

LM: I don’t think that was what I was intending to show. I thought that she said that she wasn’t ready, but “when you’ve gone out in the world, call me.” [Laughter]

SM: I suppose I read a bit of machismo into Will’s framing of it… but that might be my misinterpretation of the novel.

LM: I don’t think she said, “I’ll be there. [Laughter] I’m not gonna wait for ya.” But they do make a commitment to contact each other. Nobody knows the end of that relationship, but he’s clearly smitten with her. And she clearly is aware of it. But I don’t believe I intended to have them commit to each other. He commits to his education and becoming an environmental scientist, which is his role out in the world. He picks up that bundle. And he commits to reading Aboriginal women writers. But the two things he can’t commit to right now is reading his mother’s diary and his girl. [Laughter] ’Cause he’s too young! He’s not ready, he’s not cooked up yet! He’s about here, on the edge of wholeness. So, yeah, anyway, that was what I was trying to get to. I’ll read it again to make sure I didn’t…

SM: I’m the one that needs to go back and read it again!

LM: I might’ve been mistaken, you know, pushing the envelope just a little bit too far. I did want to point in that direction because it’s always a possibility that young people can meet and fall in love. I had a sister who was sixteen, married her sweetheart at sixteen, and is still married to him and they’ve had a wonderful love together. She was, I think, fourteen when they started dating. But he was in love with her when she was a child and he was sixteen and he just waited for her to grow up enough for him to date her. And I remember him telling the family and I remember my brother saying, “Don’t even say that, she’s a child, I don’t want to hear it. What are you talking about? She’s my sister!” But anyway, they still have a very great relationship together. But you never know, you know?

SM: In relation to your criticism—and I’m thinking of Oratory: Coming to Theory specifically—you indicate…

LM: Sometimes I wish I hadn’t written that one. But go on…

SM: …you recognize, in the Western academy, that the desire for objectivity erroneously erases passion from the equation.

LM: Do I start with theory and evidence and all that sort of stuff?

SM: Yep, you were talking about John Stuart Mill…

LM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SM: And what I was interested in relation to that…

LM: I think the thing that I was never able to do in that little piece is say, we can’t get away with isolating a part of this text and asking questions because it’s a single text, it’s a single sentence, really. Think of it as a single sentence. The first part shows the emotionality of this confusion around what theory is.

SM: It also points to my reliance on a particular vantage point, right? My academic training is saying that I need to cut these ideas down to their smallest units of meaning so that I can evaluate and unpack them.

LM: Isolate and quarantine. It’s your medicine.1 It’s not your training; it’s your medicine. Isolate and quarantine. And I don’t know how that began but it’s probably got something to do with the plague and the unending fear of epidemic loss, because the only way the plague ended was to isolate and quarantine everybody.

SM: And then, at the same time, it provides an illusion of control when one doesn’t have control.

LM: Yeah, exactly. But it became a way of life. So it’s part of the way of life. So you look at something and I notice that—sorry, mostly in white men [Laughter]—not to belabour this, but white women can generally get a handle on the wholeness of something. Not all of them.

Right in the very centre of Euro-society, your very words cancel out your other words. On one hand, germs, or bacteria, can kill you and yet they’re the source of life, you see what I mean? Because you isolate and quarantine, you can’t come to understand bacteria from a holistic perspective as the first life. Breathe desire into it, and it keeps replicating, different but the same. And out of it comes all life. It’s just the Dene origin story.

So what I’m saying is that you first have to have this view clear in order to see the connection of the whole to the parts. It’s about seeing things in their concatenation and in their separation, once you’ve seen the whole picture. So you’re always looking for the whole picture. And we know when we’ve found it because it’s got a northern direction, it’s got an eastern direction, it’s got a southern direction, it’s got a western direction. West is the direction of transformation. North is the direction of organization and management—administration, if you will. East is the direction of wisdom, or life origins, if you will. And South is the direction of the emotion, the heart. The thing is born, it gains life, acquires wholeness, acquires good health, acquires light, is organized and is managed and administered, and transformed. Then we can know the whole. And now in the light of that, we can look at the centre, because that’s the centre of the whole, where all of this has reproduced—or, its culture, if you will—and then we can know the parts in relation to the culture.

SM: Is that the flaw, that people try to understand the parts first?

LM: Oratory: Coming to Theory was the whole. There is no way to isolate the parts.

SM: In an interview with Margery Fee and Sneja Ganew, you describe the Wolf Clan as “the backward and forward visionaries for [the] people,” who “help [the] people adjust to whatever change occurs.” What is the relationship between that role and working as an artist?

IT’S NOT A ROLE. WE ARE THAT. IT’S NOT A ROLE. I’M NOT A ROLE. I’M A WOLF CLAN, BACKWARD AND FORWARD VISIONARY. THAT IS MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE WHOLE.

LM: Okay, it’s not a role. We are that. It’s not a role. I’m not a role. I’m a Wolf Clan, backward and forward visionary. That is my relationship to the whole. I’m keeper of the backward and forward vision, so if somebody has a vision yesterday, I’m the keeper of it. This diagram is a vision [marks on board]. Now, whether it is my vision or my ancestor’s vision or a combination of all the visions, or I piece them all together from my experience, that doesn’t make any difference. That’s what’s going to take us from yesterday to tomorrow—this vision. And I keep it. It’s my bundle. I’m stuck with it. I mean, a whole lot of minds and wisdom and experience give birth to it. But we naturally are going in that direction. It’s not a goal. I think this is why a lot of the young people don’t want to be role models, because “role” is the isolated part. And then here’s the whole. And your relationship to the whole is distance. No, no, my relationship to the whole is the whole. And every other clan has that same relationship from a different angle, but still it’s about the whole. Then in Euro-society everything is about isolating and quarantining, and you get crazy poets like Yeats, who say “The centre cannot hold!” [Laughter] Who made you the centre?!

SM: [Laughter]

LM: The centre always holds. We might spin and fly off but the centre is gonna be the centre. We may not understand what’s going on, but we still have the same responsibility to see it. And whether or not we figure out something from it, it’s just a matter of rolling the dice. Things fell into my path when I was very young that contributed to me being able to make some sense of it. Not saying that this is the right way or the wrong way, but it is my vision of the way things are. Someone else might have a different vision and it’s equally viable, adequate, and correct. But in Euro-society, only one vision has a place in the universe. Like, how smart is that? We will only use the genius of one individual because the other six billion of you don’t count. No, we say everyone has a vision and we have to respect everyone’s vision. The saying is that there are an infinite number of pathways to the centre of the circle, so we’re always looking for other pathways to consider. And there’s six billion people. And gazillions of animals and rocks and ancestors and… it’s infinite.

So we’re always looking for another pathway to augment our vision but we personally need a vision. And we are always augmenting, clarifying, and substantiating our vision. Mine may never change. Or someone might convince me to isolate and quarantine. [Laughter]

SM: [Laughter] I don’t see that happening in the near future.

1.Maracle notes that Terry Spanish, a former student of hers who is a language teacher in Michigan, came up with the phrase “isolate and quarantine” to describe these tendencies.