HOW CAN YOU FORGET EVERYTHING AND BE A MAN?

—DANIEL DAVID MOSES, ALMIGHTY VOICE AND HIS WIFE

3 November 2010

Conversation between Daniel David Moses and Sam McKegney in Sam’s car on Highway 401 en route to the “Sounding Out: Indigenous Poetics” Symposium at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

DANIEL DAVID MOSES (Delaware) grew up on a farm on Six Nations land along the Grand River near Brantford, Ontario. He created “The Committee to Re-Establish the Trickster” with Tomson Highway and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, he has served on the boards of the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts and the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and he has been involved with Native Earth Performing Arts since the 1980s. He currently teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His plays include Kyotopolis: A Play in Two Acts (Exile Editions, 2008), The Indian Medicine Shows: Two One-Act Plays (Exile Editions, 1995), and Almighty Voice and His Wife (Williams-Wallace Publishing, 1992). His books of poetry include Delicate Bodies (Nightwood Editions, 1992) and A Small Essay on the Largeness of Light and Other Poems (Exile Editions, 2012). He is co-editor with Terry Goldie of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford University Press, 1992).

SAM MCKEGNEY: What was it like growing up on the family farm at Six Nations? What kinds of responsibilities were involved in that type of youth?

DANIEL DAVID MOSES: Well, as soon as I was capable, I helped with the chores. I got up early for years for the morning milking, always aware that my father was up even earlier to get the cows from the field—he was working way harder than I was. It never occurred to me to complain. My perception now is that I contributed to the household as much as I could. And it taught me responsibility.

In contrast I remember being at a friend’s house for a meeting. He had kids who were just becoming teenagers, and when they came home for lunch, we had to stop so he could make them sandwiches. I was flabbergasted, thinking (but saying nothing), “These kids are old enough to be doing it themselves. Why are we breaking up our meeting?” I was surprised by how childish they were. I always wanted to grow up as soon as possible.

SM: With the family farm, I’m—what would I be? Three generations removed from the family farm… And it exists for me as almost a mythological space, right? And there seems to come with that image in my head a certain ruggedness that might fall into a category of masculinity. Was there ever a sense for you of the work involved in the farm being decidedly masculine labour?

DDM: I’m not aware of it in that way. It was hard work. We all did the hard work that we were capable of, so there were only a few women who would actually climb onto the backs of the wagons to help with the shovelling. Mostly the men did the stuff requiring physical strength. But the women would be driving the tractors or the trucks or supplying the food. Largely the gender roles were established as you might expect, but it was really just the practicality. The men who had done this work before were stronger and more skilled in doing it. But some of my aunts, when I was younger, before I myself was old enough, they would be up there throwing hay bales onto elevators and shovelling grain. Just caring for livestock, though, anyone can do that. That’s how I started out.

The word “matrilineal” still makes sense to me. That’s how the family was centred, traditionally, through the women’s line. It seems to me that idea is still a functioning thing socially if not legally. My grandfathers passed away and the extended family still gathered for family occasions. It wasn’t until the grandmothers went that that family focus disappeared and dispersed, moved to the next generation.

What I was concerned with, in the sense of the word “matriarchal,” was that it seemed imprecise as a word to describe that traditional culture. It seemed an effort to contrast the Iroquois with settler assumptions—patriarchy evokes an image of vertical hierarchy—rather than seeing that culture as something more horizontal and balanced between both sexes.

SM: I noticed in one of your author profiles that you mention your distrust of the illusions of prose. Do you still feel that prose obscures by presenting a façade of coherence?

DDM: “A façade of coherence”! I like that phrase. I do think that that’s a continuing dilemma, trying to make everything fit into a certain cultural or class set of assumptions about what makes for beauty or clarity or truth. The reality of chaos theory was also supposed to make for a broader understanding of other cultural realities, in my humble opinion. I’m still trying to construct façades of incoherence.

My experience: Simon Ortiz was putting together an anthology1 and I was contributing an essay about my process. He had some other editor at the press itself doing the final editing of the text, so I sent my piece to this person, this piece I’d written with my habitual, consciously oral sensibility—lots of air around the words—and suddenly this guy was wanting to collapse all of my small breathy paragraphs into larger block paragraphs. And to top it off, I was writing about my play, Almighty Voice and His Wife, and I had used the phrase “bluff of poplars” which is the actual language from that story, that place, that history—I’d done my research. And this editor wanted to change it to “the grove of poplars.” So that just broke it for me—Saskatchewan doesn’t have “groves”—and I immediately contacted Simon and said something along the lines of, “If these are the sorts of changes you need to make to my piece, I’m going to have to withdraw it because it’s preposterous. It’s changing what I perceive as the truth I’m telling into clearly something else entirely. I mean, it may be within the conventions of that particular university press, but it’s not right as far as I’m concerned and I won’t have my name attached to it.”

MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE LANGUAGE, BECAUSE I CAME TO CANADA FROM SIX NATIONS, MIGHT BE IN PART LIKE THAT OF AN IMMIGRANT, IF YOU CAN IMMIGRATE OUT TO A COUNTRY THAT’S COME UP AROUND YOU.

SM: And were you always drawn to poetry? Was that a natural progression for you?

DDM: I only started to be interested in the middle of high school. The paper I’ve written for the symposium is mostly a memoir—although, I won’t be presenting this part of the story of how I came to poetry, because we don’t have time. The little moment I’m remembering has me in grade eleven, studying some highly structured poem and my best friend at the time being impressed by it. Whether I was being perverse or actually felt that way, I just said, “That’s not amazing, it’s just a trick, anybody can do that with a little effort.” And he challenged me to do it and put some money on it. So I went home and over the weekend wrote a little poem that was highly structured the way that we’d agreed—and I won the bet. I’m imagining five dollars. It proved my point that that sort of surface characteristic that we’re taught to look for as a measure for poetry really could be just a trick, but in the process I had begun to feel there was something else that was going on in poetry that was intriguing to me and I did start paying more attention to it.

SM: So from your very first poem, you were a paid poet.

DDM: I guess so. [Laughter]

SM: There’s always a collaborative element to writing, in terms of the editing process, as you suggested with Simon’s collection, but it’s so much more pronounced in theatre. Is there vulnerability in having your work interpreted by actors and directors and set designers and others? Is that always exciting for you or do you have trepidation about it?

DDM: No, it’s never been a problem for me. I’ve always been aware of language as this negotiation. Even though I speak and write in English, I’ve realized lately that perhaps my relationship to the language, because I came to Canada from Six Nations, might be in part like that of an immigrant, if you can immigrate out to a country that’s come up around you. I have warned friends who are basically poets or basically fiction writers that you can’t be precious about stuff if you work in the theatre. You’re writing for the actors. The actors need something they can work with. You can’t leave them dangling too long in the air. They can take a moment or two where you want to use your latest poetic bit, or your nice prose description, but that doesn’t work too long on the contemporary stage, so you’ve always got to come back to your characters, to the actors. It’s the reason behind those theatre jokes (“But what’s my motivation?”). The actors need their motivation, and they need to be in their emotion, to make the play work. That part of it is a convention and it’s a very conservative part of theatre, but that’s why people will sit down with it for a couple hours. You need to feel.

Back at the beginning I had rehearsals where actors having difficulties would ask for line changes and revisions. In first productions, I still will listen, and if what they’re saying seems reasonable, I’ll do it. But by the time I get a play to rehearsal, I’m usually so confident in the piece that, nine times out of ten, I won’t change a thing. But what I will do, I’ve learned from one of my directors, is say, “I’ll think about it, let me come back to you.” Most of the actors forget about it, they find the sense of the line. Revision isn’t necessarily necessary.

SM: And it’s acknowledging their desire or their investment in the character… The collaborative element of producing, how does that filter through to the audience? I mean, in theatre you have different audiences every night. It’s a totally different dynamic than a movie theatre, or something like that, when you go to a play. Do you think about audience as you’re writing or does that come after?

DDM: That comes after, for me. I assume that if I find this interesting and can write about it in a way that is clear and has some beauty, that should be enough to bring the audience along. I think that is the difference, wanting to create art as an expression of an individual’s point of view in a particular culture. I find the questions about writing for an audience seem to be based in the capitalist concern for selling a commodity. I’m always trying to not be prepackaged. So I’ll never write for Disney.

SM: What year would the idea for the Oxford anthology have been originally floated, approximately, and what was the context for that project?

DDM: I guess, almost twenty years ago, now. Early nineties. Oka had happened; Tomson [Highway] had happened, an event. I’m not sure whether North of 60 had started on television at that point. But I remember, there was a point where it felt like suddenly we Indians were part of what had to be talked about. You could count on one article about Native people being on Morningside every week. That lasted for about three or four years, until we fell below the radar again. I mean, The Gap even had one winter where they used Native actors in subway ads. I can remember thinking it was so neat, there was Tantoo [Cardinal]’s picture, there was Tom Jackson and Graham Greene. But it didn’t last and you can’t go forcing the government to call out the army every five years to keep people’s attention.

SM: I’ve been thinking a lot about The Indian Medicine Shows and Jonathan Jones as this hypermasculine violent response to anxiety around effeminacy. I’m interested in your perceptions of that character and what issues you sought to bring forth in his portrayal.

DDM: The play just happened. I had back in my university days written a clown play about Billy the Kid. An interesting experiment, I guess. I put it into a contest, got an honourable mention out of it, but mostly, I wasn’t impressed by it, except for one scene, the scene where Billy passes a moment of the day after he’s committed his first murder with Jon and his crazy mother. I just thought there was something intriguing about that trio and I would keep that scene in mind. I wanted to explore it at some point. Years later, I was doing a writer-in-residence gig as a poet for the Nakai Theatre in Whitehorse. I was up there for a week—it was winter—just doing a lot of one-on-ones with local writers. But part of the deal was that all the guest writers were supposed to take part in the twenty-four-hour playwriting contest being held at the end of the week.

SM: So you were actually up there mentoring and trying to draft a play?

DDM: We were all much younger then. I’d gone up there intending to work on another idea but that morning, when they came to pick me up and drive me over to the college where the contest was taking place, I saw the moon setting over the snowy mountainscape there and I suddenly remembered this scene. I’ll work on that, I thought. And it was ready to happen and it really did come out and appear in maybe twelve hours—The Moon and Dead Indians. Everything that’s in the play now was there. A bit underwritten but a good draft. But it was also scary to me, so I was thinking of it as a skeleton of a play, as if there was something spooky, uncanny about it, even though it was, I know now, that hypermasculine violence you mentioned that was scaring me. “Where the hell is this coming from?” So I put it away in a drawer for a couple of years because I didn’t know what to think of it. I didn’t know how to take responsibility for it.

AS IF THERE WAS SOMETHING SPOOKY, UNCANNY ABOUT IT, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS, I KNOW NOW, THAT HYPERMASCULINE VIOLENCE YOU MENTIONED THAT WAS SCARING ME. “WHERE THE HELL IS THIS COMING FROM?”

I was still connected with Cahoots Theatre Projects at the time (they’d produced my play Big Buck City) and they were doing a development program they wanted me to take part in because I had a bit of a name by then and my participation would ensure them a bit of an audience. And the only thing that I felt I had that might be ready to work on at that moment was that skeleton of a play, so I showed it to Colin [Taylor] and he said, “We have to do this.” With his focus I was able to face the material. I found myself reading a psychology book to get the definition of psychopath so I could figure out who the Billy character was. Once I was able to do more historical research—there had been a new book about Billy the Kid—I was able to get more detail into the play and it felt better that way. And then, Lenore [Keeshig-Tobias] around this time also put me onto Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop, which seemed to me to talk about part of the process of the colonization of Native America being the destruction of female spiritual power. I knew I had to answer the question the skeleton play asked and that’s where Angel of the Medicine Show came from. The two plays gelled and came together into The Indian Medicine Shows in a way that I’m really proud of. It’s just a really neat piece of theatre.

SM: It seems like in my reading of that play—and other elements of your work—there’s sort of a cliff where one drops off into violent response and the person is often pushed that way through fear or anxiety about personal inadequacy or ideas about appropriate behaviour. How do you think that fear is engendered or promoted in contemporary society? The fear that young men can be subject to, which leads them to respond in violent ways. That’s just my reading. Where does that fear come from, that anxiety?

DDM: I suspect it’s there in the conservative mindset. I’m imagining all these Tea Party people are very sure about just what makes proper behaviour. I could understand, then, that it’s kind of scary to see that society has actually been finding ways of commodifying behaviours that they found outrageous and unmentionable, even only ten, twenty years ago. I think things are becoming mainstreamed that were formerly very scary and those Tea Partiers are desperate to go back to this idea they have of what is real, Real Women, et al. But is it really real? Isn’t it an image created after the Second World War to get the women to go home and keep house so the men could have the work outside the home? Meanwhile, from what I understand, World War II had already been breaking down gender roles.

SM: Yeah, there’s a way in which the nuclear family has been so naturalized through repeated viewings in film and television as the normative social unit that it becomes somewhat unquestioned or something.

DDM: Yeah, people are blind to their own families in front of them and don’t realize that so-and-so never had kids and so-and-so are divorced. They see the persistent mirage of the nuclear family. I mean, aren’t the recent statistics that the single-parent household is the norm now?

SM: Yeah, exactly. And of course there are other models of social formation and different ways of understanding what kinship means.

DDM: I got mine from my lucky childhood. I lived with my parents and my sister on the farm, but we could, on the way to school—we walked or rode our bikes on the dirt road—we would pass both sets of grandparents’ houses and there were also aunts and uncles very close by. My grandmother used to tease me, “You know, you used to run away?” But it was like nobody was worried because I was just running away to Aunt Leona’s house.

SM: That’s so different, actually, that story, from what we’re talking about in terms of fear. Like, there’s such anxiety around so many things in contemporary urban society that we don’t even allow children to run off and play. To be able to do so in a way that isn’t overseen but is connected to the broader idea of the family, it seems so healthy.

DDM: I found it so strange over the last decade how so much of television is about criminal masterminds. I mean most criminals are losers, and on television we turn them into these really scary monsters. I mean, even the reporting of Colonel Williams.2 He did kill, but it’s like all the other details about him are grotesque and pathetic and laughable. I find it strange how people keep talking about him as this incomprehensible monster because I don’t think he deserves that amount of respect. There’s something very sad about this upstanding life that has fallen into this sad, weird loop in his head.

SM: But then there’s also the creation of that figure in the media as something larger-than-life, grandiose almost. By turning it into the monster, it becomes somehow other than us.

DDM: I glanced at a column some woman had written about feeling like the media was using him to put her in her place, to remind her that she was a woman and she was vulnerable. This is one man among millions of people and the actual number of these individuals is so minor. This is such a big complex society and we’re actually using these few glitches to define it. The exception makes the rule? How many crime shows are there on in just one evening? How bored are we by our comfort that we need such fantasy? It’s one thing for teenagers testing themselves as they grow into adults to feel the need to face horror, but for the society at large? Something’s going on...

HOW BORED ARE WE BY OUR COMFORT THAT WE NEED SUCH FANTASY? IT’S ONE THING FOR TEENAGERS TESTING THEMSELVES AS THEY GROW INTO ADULTS TO FEEL THE NEED TO FACE HORROR, BUT FOR THE SOCIETY AT LARGE? SOMETHING’S GOING ON...

SM: There’s one quotation from Almighty Voice that could very well be the title of the project I’m working on right now, and that’s “How can you forget everything and be a man?” (Almighty Voice 21). I interpret that line as speaking to the difficulty of imagining endorsable Indigenous male identities after hundreds of years of colonization. And not only the ways in which traditional gender roles have been obscured through the violence of dispossession and the Indian Act, but also how simulations of what constitutes Indigenous masculinity emerging in popular culture and the media have muddied the waters. What does that line mean to you, and why is it important for Almighty Voice to articulate that concern in the play?

DDM: I guess the image is in the title of your larger project [Carrying the Burden of Peace: Imagining Indigenous Masculinities through Story]. I have that idea in my head that the word from an Iroquois language—which Iroquois language, I’m not sure—that is commonly translated as “warrior” actually evokes the image of someone “carrying the burden of peace,” so it has a different emphasis, a different set of values behind it. It’s really about someone who is maintaining the good rather than participating in war, something that by its nature is problematic. It seems to me I was reading somewhere, I guess maybe it was some Cree word that is commonly translated as “warrior” and it also had other implications in the Cree culture that just are lost in the translation to “warrior.”3 So, I guess I’m wondering if that is a way of looking at the traditional languages and seeing what values or wisdoms lurk behind the different translations of them that have more implications for the maintenance of a social fabric.

Just in that moment in the play, the character is questioning his usefulness. He has an image of himself as someone who should be able to take care of his wife, and what is he doing? He’s hiding. His mother and his wife are helping him hide. Meanwhile, his father’s in prison. He feels he’s not doing his job.

THE PAST CAN BE JUST OFF TO THE SIDE, PERIPHERAL INSTEAD OF FAR BEHIND. IT’S EASIER THEN TO KEEP ITS LESSONS IN MIND.

SM: To me as reader and audience member, the play juxtaposes in a powerful way those questions from the first act—which point toward somewhat of a tragic trajectory—with the surrealistic second act, which forces the audience to consider the role of representation and semiotics in forcing Indigenous peoples to “forget” what it means and has meant to be a man. How much of writing that play for you was speaking to 1890 and how much was speaking to 1990, you know, in the sense that you were dealing with an historical incident [the pursuit of Almighty Voice—Kisse-Manitou-Wayou—by the Northwest Mounted Police in 1895] but also reflecting on how memory and performance and representation affect our ability to understand that history?

DDM: I think I’m always writing from now, from where I am, trying to understand the dilemmas of this life. If investigating how something in the past might have made the present seems useful, I do it. I fell in love with that image of time as a circle or spiral rather than an arrow. It seemed true to my experience. The past can be just off to the side, peripheral instead of far behind. It’s easier then to keep its lessons in mind. A student suggested to me, about Brébeuf’s Ghost, that he thought the play was “Just like Swords and Sorcery, but with Indians!” and I realized that on a certain level, what I’ve been doing so far is a kind of science fiction imagining, even if it is about the past.

SM: There’s a section in Pursued by a Bear where you talk about your initial anxiety about the otherworldy or the ghostly or the spiritual—about not truly trusting what you can’t feel in your own hands. And I was thinking about that in relation to Craig Womack’s recent argument in Reasoning Together that “the inability to deal with spiritual reality” limits critical work on Indigenous literatures (364), which implies that attentiveness to the spiritual is a crucial part of ethical Indigenous criticism. And I guess I’m wondering is there a place for secular Indigenous literature? Does it cease to fit that category of literary expression if there’s not a spiritual component somewhere embedded within? Does that question even make sense?

DDM: I’m thinking that there isn’t such a thing as a secular literature, period. I mean, any literature worth reading has some spirituality, whether it’s some conventional idea of God or some idea of spirits or just the metaphors. You need these metaphors to embody, in an active way, moral values. I just finally read Crime and Punishment and I thought it was so neat how it ends up in this spiritual place after dragging us back and forth through the streets of really ugly-looking, very material St. Petersburg.

I feel like it’s a responsibility to activate ideals even if you don’t have a spiritual experience. I live very much a secular life, I live in the scientifically measurable world. But that scientifically measurable world, while a lot of it can be experienced, a lot of it might as well be magic or spirits. I mean I used the word “X-ray” in a poem, and I worried, would it work, that seems so contemporary. So I looked it up and it’s over a hundred years old. We really should be realizing a lot of this knowledge is a mysterious thing. We can’t see or feel or smell X-rays. We have to take them for granted. So I think the definition of spiritual needs an adjustment. Certainly, I can see putting the emphasis on Native spirituality just to help maintain a sense of what the cultures and their values are, because we’re protecting something, those values that gave them social coherence. In the final analysis, the spiritual is just part of the culture, part of the texture of lived experience.

1. Daniel David Moses, “How My Ghosts Got Pale Faces,” in Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, ed. Simon Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).

2. Colonel Russell Williams, commander of the Canadian Forces Base Trenton, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, sexual assault, breaking and entering, and forcible confinement in October 2010.

3. In the introduction to Gabriel’s Beach, Cree poet Neal McLeod refers to the okihcitâwak or “worthy men” as “hunters, providers, and soldiers” (11).