MASCULINIDANS-21

13 October 2010

Conversation among Warren Cariou, Alison Calder, and Sam McKegney at the Wykham House Pub at Mount Royal University, where Warren, Alison, and Sam were all presenting as part of the Under Western Skies: Climate, Culture, and Change in Western North America conference.

WARREN CARIOU (Métis) and ALISON CALDER (English Canadian) are writers and professors of English at University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Warren was born and raised in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, which features prominently in his memoir Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging (Anchor Canada, 2003). He is also author of The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs: Two Novellas (Coteau Books, 1999) and writer/director of the film Land of Oil and Water (2009). He has written numerous articles on the study of Indigenous literatures and holds a Canada Research Chair in Narrative, Community, and Indigenous Cultures. Alison was born in England and grew up in Saskatoon. In collaboration with Jeanette Lynes, she published Ghost Works: Improvisation in Letters and Poems (Jackpine Press, 2007). Her poetry collection Wolf Tree (Coteau Books, 2008) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and won the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

SAM MCKEGNEY: In Lake of the Prairies you reflect on being a writer as a way of continuing your father’s stories in written form. Do you perceive there to have been a gendered element of that instruction process?

WARREN CARIOU: Yeah. Certainly, very early on, I pretended to write down his stories as if I was some scribe, even before I knew how to write. And so, I was always really conscious of the wonder, the power of stories, but also how evanescent they are, how transient they are, so that was my focus. I wanted to preserve these. Part of it was because I felt like I was not the same kind of personality as my dad. I wasn’t that larger-than-life, very social character. I always felt more withdrawn. And I still wanted to be like that, but I thought the only way I could manage being that gregarious was I could write, so it was like second-best, you know? At times I would think about it consciously as trying to carry on Dad’s legacy in some way. So I don’t know if I think about it as a gendered thing, per se, but as a very personal carrying on of what I learned from him. Not just the information I learned, but the ways of telling stories.

ALISON CALDER: But you are the oldest as well, so it may not necessarily be a gendered thing but just the fact that you were the first, and more sophisticated than your younger siblings, who also got the stories but didn’t become writers.

WC: Certainly some of my aunts were very good storytellers, but it was more of a male thing to do in the family. It was kind of a pastime with all the many brothers my dad had. Fourteen kids in the family, I think nine brothers, so their male bonding was actually storytelling. But the women would be there, at times, tossing in their versions, as well.

AC: But the bullshitting is really a male thing in your family.

SM: [Laughter] I love the scenes of the competitiveness, the good-natured ribbing that goes along with storytelling. Because storytelling isn’t always a way of ensuring the belonging of others, it’s also a way of potentially excluding others.

WC: Teasing was certainly a major part of my relationship with my aunts and uncles on that side of the family, as well—with them and with each other. There is a certain othering element to teasing, but I think it’s actually a performance of, not welcoming exactly, but sort of bringing a person in. I know when I’m in an Aboriginal community, if I’m not being teased, I think there’s a problem. Once you’re being teased, you’ve been welcomed in a certain way.

SM: Let’s talk about “The Shrine of Badger King”1 then for a second, which speaks to the desire for forms of male behaviour that can be acknowledged as legitimate by others. I think of Kenny and the Badger King as going in very different directions but each seeking validation of his manhood. Were those concerns you were intentionally exploring or did they just come out organically in the story?

WC: Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess one of the things that I was thinking about when I was writing that story was the sort of rough-and-tumble place I grew up. It was a violent place in a lot of ways. It was a place that you had to either—especially if you were visibly Aboriginal—you had to be tough to survive that. And so the story has this one character, the politician, Kenny, who is tough in a certain way, right? And he is also a big guy and can defend himself, but he can pass. He’s Métis, but he can pass as white. I wanted to explore that relationship to violence, and so Badger King becomes more a rebel, violent character but Kenny, there’s a violence about him that becomes more sublimated but in fact becomes more serious—in a way, it’s almost murderous. Whereas Badger, I think, he’s not been co-opted into that colonial system as Kenny has. And so, he’s a rebel, but he’s not murderous in the same way that Kenny is. That’s my take on it from a very great distance now. Anyway, so just to get back to your question, I was just thinking about the place of violence in a town like mine, if those guys grew up in a town like Meadow Lake, then they would have had to come to terms with a certain kind of masculine violence and sort of perform in order to survive.

SM: At one point in the story, Vince claims that perception creates reality: “Whatever the people think you are, that’s what you become” (18–19). How do outsider expectations of Indigenous men inform the spectrum of possibilities for self-identifying?

WC: Yeah, I think that statement was one of the germs of the story. When I actually worked in government for a couple years, the “perception is reality” thing was something that politicians talked about. But I started thinking about that in much more personal terms, as well. Certainly, self-perception is hugely important: how we think about how we interact with the world. But what that story is about is our perceptions about how other people perceive us. How we think other people perceive us. That has a huge impact on how we interact with the world. So Badger King, when he is talking to reporters, he thinks that they want a particular kind of guy, and he performs that and then he gets the benefits from it. Kenny performs a different kind of identity and gets benefits from that, too.

So I guess in terms of masculinity, very often I think the violent exchanges between men that I witnessed growing up are not about the two guys, but it’s about the people around them—it’s about performing for what people expect, “Hey, this is what I’m supposed to do.” So the sense that they are all sort of actors, that is certainly something that I saw growing up. It’s about the performance of expectations and playing out a kind of script because you don’t really know what else to do in the situation.

SM: And the question that arises, of course, becomes how does one change the script?

WC: That story, “The Shrine of Badger King,” it doesn’t really break out. The two remain enemies even beyond the grave. Kenny can never let go of that. And if he could, maybe he would be able to be a better person. So I think in a way the story really is an allegory of that inability to let go of the revenge fantasy that is part of his childhood, his initiation into manhood, in a way. But how to change the script? Well, I like to think there are ways of imaginatively reconstructing interactions so that the expectation that everyone has of young men—especially young Aboriginal men—is no longer that they’re supposed to beat the hell out of each other. I don’t know if some imaginative literature is going to do that, or whether people just being asked to examine the implications of what the script does in people’s lives, maybe that’s enough to start making change. I’m not entirely sure. I still see some of the same stuff back home when I go there, although it’s not as directly racialized now. It isn’t white kids against Native kids. But I think there’s still as sense of—whether it’s Indigenous or not—masculine need to prove oneself through violence. I definitely still see that there.

AC: Do you think these scripts of masculinity are very specific to particular places? You and Sam appear to be having a rational discussion here and not likely to break into fisticuffs. (You never know!) We were talking before about how when we go back to Meadow Lake and see guys that Warren went to high school with who stayed in Meadow Lake and never left, they look like they’re about twenty years older than Warren; just physiologically, they’re altered. And they’ve obviously been living very different lives and fulfilling very different trajectories that mark themselves on them. I guess what I was saying was, are scripts different in different places?

WC: Certainly in the world that I inhabit in the university, that’s different for sure. I think that there are definitely going to be places in Winnipeg, say, where that script is pretty much the same. Whether that’s class inflected or race inflected, it may well be. But yes, I think to a certain degree, it is place dependent, but the places are also marked by class and race in ways that affect the dynamic too.

SM: You note in your critical work that despite the complex and conflicted nature of most people’s histories, society pressures us to efface that complexity. What’s at stake in that erasure?

WC: No one likes to feel that they have been pigeonholed. We all want everyone else’s identity to be simple, and we want our own to be complex. A lot of the work that I’ve done is about examining—whether it’s my own ancestry in particular, or Métis ancestry in general—the ways in which it’s important to maintain a sense of the complexity of it. Not only because that’s important to the understanding of Métis identity, but it’s actually important to the understanding of all identities. The fact of Métis hybridity, in a sense, points to the constructedness of all racialized identities. We’re all hybrid in some ways, and we just have these labels attached to an identity that then start to take on validity and normalcy, or a normalizing quality. So I think acknowledging the complexity of my own ancestry, or of another Métis writer’s ancestry that I’m talking about, is important for thinking about what race actually is and how it’s constructed. So, something that I’m interested in is how your identity is not even fully present to you at any point in time, and is maybe never fully present to you. It’s something that could be contingent on discoveries you make in the future.

We take other people’s word for it, where we come from. We weren’t there! So all our identities are malleable in that way. We are a product of our ancestors obviously, but they’re a product of us too, because of how we think about them and accept stories about them, and what they are and what they are not. All racialized identities are a product of self-invention and contingency much more than we like to admit.

SM: Why can’t we stomach that fluidity in others that we desire for ourselves?

WC: I think that comes back to changing the script of the story of male masculinity, and masculinity and violence. When I went into a bar as a young guy, I expected all the other guys to be ready for a fight, and they all expected me and everybody else to be as well. We didn’t necessarily want to be the one doing the fighting, but we expected everyone else was going to be. It’s all so much about what other people are thinking: not what you think, but what you think other people think.

IT’S ALL SO MUCH ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE THINKING: NOT WHAT YOU THINK, BUT WHAT YOU THINK OTHER PEOPLE THINK.

SM: Do you consider identity to affected substantially by mobility? Moving from a small place like Meadow Lake to an urban centre, do you see yourself as belonging in Winnipeg in a way that is similar to the way you feel about Meadow Lake?

WC: No. It’s a bit strange for me now, because I’ve been away from Meadow Lake for so long that I don’t exactly feel like I belong there either. But I feel it a lot more there than I do in Winnipeg. I could never live in Meadow Lake, and I know that I never would. Socially I don’t think it would ever work. But somehow I still feel much more connected there than I do to Winnipeg, or to any place I’ve ever lived. Alison’s horrified.

AC: I’m not moving to Meadow Lake, I can tell you that much. But you’re probably more at home at the cabin than you are in town now.

WC: My mom has moved away from the farm. I had a very, very powerful connection to the farm. But now when we go back, she’s living in a condo in town. It’s fine, I don’t mind going there, but I don’t have the same connection to it, because it’s a place I didn’t know when I was growing up. But we still have our cabin. It’s about thirty or forty miles north of town. So that’s the place I connect to more now. But I go back, and it’s interesting. They teach Lake of the Prairies in the high school there now. So people know me, but I don’t know them. This younger generation knows me as a writer from Meadow Lake who now lives in the city. So, it’s not like I can go back there and fit in and fully belong there either. But, in my own imagination I guess, that is still the place I am most connected to.

SM: How does it feel to have your work read by high school students? Can a book like that actually encourage youth to think critically about the scripts they’ve inherited?

WC: I never thought that the book would ever be taught in a high school, because I thought there was too much violence and too much swearing, but I guess times have changed. On one hand, knowing how kids feel about books they’re required to read, there’s going to be a whole generation of kids in Meadow Lake who are going to hate me now. [Laughter] But thinking about changing the script, I’m hoping that maybe the book will help people to negotiate that really difficult divide that I saw in town when I was growing up. I think the divide is not as strong as it was when I was growing up, that sense of racial division. I think also maybe some of the things about masculinity, but there’s not a lot of that in the book. One scene where I talk about this is the stampede, and it’s sort of interesting for me to imagine the kids reading that. Not only was Meadow Lake a very racist community when I was growing up, but it was also a very homophobic community. And at that time—it would have been the late nineties—I was sort of an insider and an outsider at the same time. I went out to the stampede and I recognized everything and I knew a lot of people, but they didn’t know me. That was the first time that had happened. And as I was leaving I heard some kids laughing, and I didn’t know what it was all about. And then I heard one of them say, “Oh, he’s a fag anyways.” I didn’t even know if it was about me. But when I got to my car, I found out that they had sprayed BBQ sauce all over it. So they were stomping on packages of BBQ sauce, and then they had said “He’s a fag anyways.” That was their word for outsider.

AC: I’m sure it didn’t have anything to do with gayness, really.

WC: No, in a way it doesn’t. But that was their default term for a person who doesn’t fit in. So there was a deep homophobia embedded in that. It was so embedded that people didn’t even really think of it as a sexual term. It was just for somebody who’s an outsider. So for me, thinking about kids reading that, hopefully it will make them think about that.

AC: I’m thinking about masculinity and economics, or masculinity and money. Different practices of masculinity are permitted by the money you have. Like when Bron [Taylor]2 asked his question at the talk this evening about why aren’t there blockades up in Fort Chip [Fort Chipewyan]? Well, there’s nothing to blockade, there’s no main highway there. And people in Fort Chip can’t afford to do that. They would have to go somewhere else to put up a blockade.

WC: It costs like $400 to fly there, right?

AC: They would have to pay a huge amount of money to get out of the community and support themselves when they’re away to engage in that kind of warrior behaviour, and it’s just not possible for them to do that, so they can’t follow that model. I’m also thinking about means of production governing expressions of masculinity. So masculinity in traditional cultures is different than masculinity in post-capitalist culture. If you’re out on the land working a trapping line, you’re not getting into fights in bars; ideas of masculine power are different—power and expertise. So what’s of value is not your ability to beat people up or make money, but your ability to trap and fish and survive, and engage in a kind of subsistence.

WC: Some of the culture of violence in Indigenous masculinity has to do with a sense of powerlessness among the men. It’s certainly something Maria Campbell writes about in Halfbreed. The men get into fights because the people they really want to fight—the colonial powers—they can’t get at them. They’re not there.

THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE IN INDIGENOUS MASCULINITY HAS TO DO WITH A SENSE OF POWERLESSNESS AMONG THE MEN.... THE MEN GET INTO FIGHTS BECAUSE THE PEOPLE THEY REALLY WANT TO FIGHT—THE COLONIAL POWERS—THEY CAN’T GET AT THEM.

AC: And it also leads, of course, to violence against women and children.

WC: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a pretty clear part of the script. There’s a sense of powerlessness and a sense that your life is dictated in so many ways. And the only way to fight that is to fight against another guy who is equally trapped.

While you were getting drinks, Alison was saying that—in her version of psychoanalyzing me—that I was working through versions of Aboriginal masculinity, or Métis masculinity anyways, in “The Shrine of Badger King” story. Near the end, you get this figure of Kenny who is the so-called successful Métis man, but he’s a sellout. He’s become a suit. And there are so many representations of that that you see in Aboriginal communities. There are people, and they are mostly men, who are profitting from the system, and basically, in a sense, enacting a form of colonialism on their own people. And I think Kenny represents that in some ways in the story. Whereas Badger represents a more, sort of...

AC: Primal? For lack of a better word.

WC: Yeah. Uncontrollable anyway. An irrepressible version that is not necessarily that pretty, but for me, as a writer trying not to identify too much with one character or another, you still have to sort of cheer for him, because he represents something that is not that smooth or sort of colonized version of Aboriginal masculine identity.

AC: It’s interesting, in Warren’s family, his dad had thirteen brothers and sisters, and his dad was one of the younger ones. The men in the family, and possibly the women, seemed to have particular roles. It was the job of the older male siblings to be labourers, to get money to improve the lot of the younger ones. They worked at generally low-paying or very dangerous jobs.

WC: One of them was killed actually, working on a construction site.

AC: I didn’t know that.

WC: Jules.

AC: So they gave at least a part of their wages to support Warren’s dad going to university, and then when Warren’s dad became a lawyer, members of the family would often—this is my interpretation, anyways—come back asking for money or asking for support in various ways. Ray was always financing various things, and invariably losing his shirt in various ways. The interpretation of Widdowson and Howard3 would be that that’s a problem. The problem is that greedy relatives are coming for handouts all the time, rather than seeing it in terms of kinship structure, which is sort of a cooperative exercise where people contribute various amounts to the pool, and then that pool is redistributed as need be, I guess. Like, your uncle supporting your dad going to university is like an investment, which then pays back to him.

WC: Yeah, seeing it as a reciprocal generosity rather than a hapless idea of investment, would be more appropriate in a way. Certainly you see that in Aboriginal communities all the time, in families all the time. The Aboriginal scholars that I know, they are supporting huge families in a way that non-Native scholars definitely aren’t normally doing.

AC: Which also re-conceptualizes the idea of masculinity, at least in this case. As the provider: how do you provide for your family? Well, I provide for my family by supporting you to go to university, so that you will then provide for me in the future, as opposed to providing for your wife and kids in that narrow way, acquiring individual wealth. It’s more familial.

IF WE WENT OUT HUNTING GEESE AND GOT SIX GEESE, THOSE WERE DIVIDED AMONG EVERYONE, THEY WERE A COMMUNAL ACCOMPLISHMENT, EVEN IF ONE PERSON SHOT ALL SIX OF THOSE GEESE.

SM: And even the idea of accumulation as somehow part and parcel of what progress entails—that human societies are hard-wired to want to accumulate—I think we should interrogate that. And ultimately if you think of the reciprocal generosity that we’ve been talking about, that’s a way of facilitating the well-being of a large group, which in an evolutionary perspective makes the most sense. What doesn’t make sense in an evolutionary perspective is for me to carry as much as I can, so that everyone else is screwed.

WC: This reminds me—and I write about this a little bit in Lake of the Prairies—the sort of male bonding of going hunting when I was growing up. I was a terrible hunter, and my dad had great patience with me. I have very little desire to go hunting now, but there was something about that activity that was... it was a collective thing, even though each person has their own gun. But, especially when you’re hunting deer, you can’t pick up on your own very well. So there was this idea that this was something that we were all doing. If we went out hunting geese and got six geese, those were divided among everyone, they were a communal accomplishment, even if one person shot all six of those geese.

As I’ve said, my father was not a violent person, and I think he provided a good model of how you can be in the world. And he dealt with conflict all the time. Because he was a small-town lawyer, people hated him and people loved him. He had either sent someone to jail or saved someone from jail, so he evoked strong reactions all the time. He spoke his mind about things and would not back down, and he was not physically violent at all in any way that I ever saw. So I think he provided a very good example of how you could be in this place, which was at the time a violent community, and not partake of violence. He was threatened many times, and I didn’t know at that time, but I was also part of these threats sometimes. Someone mailed him a photo of me with a bullet hole through my head. Crazy things like that! As a result of his position in the community, those kinds of things happened. He was much more prone to using humour than violence, and I think that was something that I learned from him. Growing up I was always aware of the threat of violence, but I wasn’t thrilled about it, and there were ways to defuse it.

AC: Do you want to talk about religion in relation to masculinity? Your dad was originally supposed to be a priest, then he “fell” and became a lawyer instead. He went profane rather than sacred. [Laughter] But I was wondering how religion, whether it’s traditional Aboriginal religions, or Catholicism, or Buddhism, or whatever, might feature into ideas of what it is to be an Indian man.

WC: My dad was very Catholic, I would say, and as a young man, as Alison said. The reason that all the siblings devoted their energy and money to him going to university wasn’t because they thought he was going to become a lawyer, but because he was supposed to be a priest. Their mother was incredibly Catholic and that was something I think she felt: one of her children had to become a priest and that’s the way it was. Dad was sort of nominated, and I think he wanted to be as well. And obviously the role of a priest is a very different kind of masculinity as well, right? I don’t know what changed Dad’s mind exactly, because by the time he met Mum he was already in law school, so it wasn’t like she tempted him away from the priesthood or anything.

The Catholic religion is very strict and the roles are very rigidly assigned, and I think probably my uncles and aunts grew up with a sense, a very strong sense, that there was a destiny for them, that they were expected to do certain things. My grandmother, she was an amazing woman, but one of her shortcomings was that she judged her children very much, especially the females. I think some of my aunts had real problems coming to terms with that. One of my aunts, who has now passed away, was sort of nominated, I think by their mother, to be the one who would take care of my grandma when she got old. That was to be her destiny. My grandmother was an incredible matriarch, and she really did lay down the law. She raised fourteen kids by herself, so she had to be a strong personality. So on the one hand, she portrayed this role, this incredibly powerful feminine figure; at the same time, she was, I think, dictating roles in a lot of ways. I don’t think any of them really rebelled against that until after she was gone. Maybe I’m exaggerating that, but I think there was a sense that her word was law. I guess her role was, in a sense, a more traditionally masculine one in some ways.

SM: Intriguingly, in the way you’re representing it, it kept a very traditional notion of the masculine and feminine intact, and at the same it was portraying a very powerful feminine voice, an oversight that militated against the roles that were being delineated for others.

WC: Yeah. It was almost like Queen Elizabeth I. Sort of female, except in so far as she was ruling. In that way she was male. [Laughter]

1.One of two novellas in The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs.

2. Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (University of California Press, 2010), was among the keynote speakers at the conference we were attending. He had attended the film screening of Land of Oil and Water and had asked a series of questions of Warren during the Q & A that followed, including a question about what he saw as a lack of activist responses to invasive resource extraction in northern Indigenous communities.

3.In the paper I delivered earlier that day at the conference, entitled “‘below the poverty line but… above the Arctic Circle’: Carceral Composition, Inuit Critical Autobiography, and the Environmental Decimation of the North,” I had sought to deconstruct some of the arguments made in Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard’s Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).