“A General Has to See the Whole Field”: The Life-Giving Power of YA Fiction from Indigenous Canada

You can’t talk about Indigenous young adult literature in Canada without talking about residential schools: the abusive government- and church-supported institutions that, from the 1870s through the 1990s, tore more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their communities and subjected them to innumerable traumas. Until a few years ago, settler Canada largely ignored this history, but following the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the resulting 2008-2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), residential school narratives are everywhere. I am Not a Number, Fatty Legs, My Name is Seepeetza, Shin-chi’s Canoe, Sugar Falls, and When We Were Alone are just some of the Indigenous-authored (or co-authored) books about residential schools that target young readers and compliment the thousands of first-hand accounts recorded and archived by the TRC.

The ninety-four Calls to Action that conclude the TRC’s Final Report demand the inclusion of residential school history in the K-12 curriculum across Canada, but the calls also make it very clear that learning about this history will not, by itself, lead to reconciliation. The curriculum needs to include treaties, other aspects of Indigenous histories, and contemporary Indigenous experiences, too. And much more needs to happen not just in education but also in the realms of child welfare, governance, law, health, and the media before reconciliation between Indigenous peoples, the government of Canada, and settler Canadians can actually be realized.

Residential school narratives tell an important part of the story of Indigenous Canada, but not the whole story. What if we read these narratives alongside other important Indigenous stories: stories about other forms of genocide, stories about resistance, beautiful stories, ancient stories, stories of the present, and stories of the future? The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis community) and other Indigenous YA fiction titles can help us do just that.

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Young People’s Literature, Dimaline’s 2017 dystopian YA novel The Marrow Thieves is set in a not-so-distant future Canada where everyone is rattled by large scale environmental destruction, and non-Indigenous people despair over the mysterious loss of their ability to dream. Recruiters hunt down Indigenous people to harvest their bone marrow in repurposed residential schools, leaving the hunted dead and the harvesters with medicine that restores their dreaming. The novel opens with its young protagonist/narrator, Frenchie, losing his brother, the only relative he has left, to the Recruiters, who discover the boys in their hideout a few hours from what used to be Toronto. Frenchie runs north, out of town and into the woods, where he meets a small group of fellow runaways who, over the course of the novel, become his family.

Miig and Minerva, the only adults in the group of nine, are adept leaders; they often lead by telling stories. Shortly after Frenchie joins the group, Miig opens a time of Story by recalling that “Anishinaabe people, us, lived on these lands for a thousand years” before the “visitors” who “renamed” it Canada arrived (23). He goes on to describe war, sickness, residential schools, rebuilding of communities after residential school, wars over water, and displacement caused by climate change. Partway through Miig’s address, Frenchie reflects on Miig’s demeanor and his purpose in sharing this story and others:

Miig stood, pacing his Story pace, waving his arms like a slow-motion conductor to place emphasis and tone over us all. We needed to remember Story. It was his job to set the memory in perpetuity. He spoke to us every week. Sometimes Story was focused on one area, like the first residential schools: where they were, what happened there, when they closed. Other times he told a hundred years in one long narrative, blunt and without detail. Sometimes we gathered for an hour so he could explain treaties, and others it was ten minutes to list the earthquakes in the sequence that they occurred, peeling the edging off the continents back like diseased gums. But every week we spoke, because it was imperative that we know. He said it was the only way to make the kinds of changes that were necessary to really survive. “A general has to see the whole field to make good strategy,” he’d explain. “When you’re down there fighting, you can’t see much past the threat directly in front of you.” (25)

These characters cannot escape the imminent threat to their lives, but the stories Miig and Minerva tell help them to better understand both the threat and the means to fight it. The current campaign to cannibalize their existence is related to the campaigns before it. And their ancestors’ means of survival—including returning to treaty, language, old and new kinship relationships, and Story—can inform their own strategy.

The ability to see a story that is larger than the dark path directly in front of you can literally save your life. That idea, evident in The Marrow Thieves, is at the foundation of the We Matter initiative begun by Deniniu K’ue First Nation siblings Kelvin and Tunchai Redvers. Through We Matter’s website and workshops, Indigenous young people who may be contemplating suicide encounter the personal stories of those who have been in the same place but who have survived and found avenues for resilience and hope.

The more than 250 videos on We Matter’s website, all of which directly address Indigenous youth, ought to be included in a capacious definition of YA literature, as they, like first-hand residential school accounts, richly compliment novels like Dimaline’s.

In Dimaline’s own view, The Marrow Thieves, is, among other things, a suicide prevention project. When asked by Deborah Dundas for an interview with The Star about her message for readers of the novel, Dimaline responded, “We have a suicide epidemic in our communities. I’ve done a lot of work in the past with Indigenous youth and one of the things I realize is that they didn’t look forward, they didn’t see themselves in any kind of a viable future. And I thought, what if they read this book where they literally see themselves in the future, and not just surviving but being the heroes and being the answer, then that’s it.” Dimaline’s novel holds nothing back as it depicts incredibly dark realities faced by Indigenous people in the past and present, and as it realistically imagines those realities as continuing in the future. But, in imagining Indigenous youth into that future as resilient survivors and indispensable heroes, The Marrow Thieves offers lifelines to young Indigenous readers.

The Marrow Thieves is not the first work of Indigenous YA fiction to foreground the life-giving value of Indigenous stories. In fact, two of my favorites explicitly portray similar themes of stories as an alternative to suicide. In the 2007 novel The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel by Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway, Curve Lake First Nation), a 350-year-old Anishinaabe vampire pulls the young protagonist, Tiffany, back from the brink of suicide by storying the woods on her reserve. The 2012 four-part graphic novel 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga by David Alexander Robertson (Norway House Cree Nation), with illustrations by Scott B. Henderson, begins with a failed suicide attempt by Edwin, a Cree teenager, who then finds the strength to face the future by learning the stories of seven generations of his family.

As the protagonists of The Marrow Thieves, The Night Wanderer, and 7 Generations learn to connect stories from across different time periods, they also deepen connections with old and new Indigenous relations. They find resilience through these relationships as well as through the stories. The Vancouver-based Cherokee writer/scholar Daniel Heath Justice gives extensive attention to the concept of kinship in his 2018 book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. He argues in the book’s preface that “relationship is the driving impetus behind the vast majority of texts by Indigenous writers—relationship to the land, to human community, to self, to the other-than-human world, to the ancestors and our descendants, to our histories and our futures, as well as to colonizers and their literal and ideological heirs—and that these literary works offer us insight and sometimes helpful pathways for maintain, rebuilding, or even simply establishing these meaningful connections” (xix). Frenchie, Tiffany, and Edwin would all be dead were it not for their kinship ties to other Indigenous characters who take responsibility for these young people, a responsibility they enact primarily through storytelling.

Given the ubiquitous presence of benevolent white characters in multicultural children’s and young adult literature (including in books by writers of color and Indigenous writers in the United States who often are pressured by publishers to include such characters and only achieve a wide readership when they do), I find the absence of such characters in The Marrow Thieves, The Night Wanderer, and 7 Generations refreshing. That all three of these books are widely read and highly acclaimed in Canada shows the influence in that country of Indigenous presses, like Theytus Books. In 1985, Theytus published the first Indigenous YA novel in North America explicitly categorized as such: the Red Power-movement novel Slash, by Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan). Theytus, along with another Indigenous publisher, Kegedonce Press, also published Dimaline’s earlier fiction.

You might be wondering how these books can speak to the ongoing conversation about reconciliation or to non-Indigenous audiences given their focus on internal Indigenous storytelling, community-building, and empowerment. But I think these books are teaching us that this focus is exactly what reconciliation discourse and non-Indigenous readers need to hear. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg poet/storyteller/artist/scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Alderville First Nation) contends in her 2011 book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, “For reconciliation to be meaningful to Indigenous Peoples and for it to be a decolonizing force, it must be interpreted broadly. To me, reconciliation must be grounded in cultural generation and political resurgence. It must support Indigenous nations in regenerating our languages, our oral cultures, our traditions of governance and everything else residential schools attacked and attempted to obliterate” (22). If reconciliation is not pursued in this broad vein, Simpson contends, Canada remains like an abusive partner who apologizes but then doesn’t take any responsibility for his actions and doesn’t stop the abuse (21-22).

Simpson is by no means the first to define Indigenous sovereignty in terms of holistic internal empowerment rather than external recognition. That idea has been taken up by many Indigenous leaders, and it drove much of the narrative in Armstrong’s Slash more than thirty years ago. But Simpson’s recasting of this idea in terms of reconciliation is compelling. Indigenous communities themselves, Simpson suggests, need to reconcile with their experiences of colonialism by reconstituting themselves culturally, politically, and familialy. And if the Canadian government, settler Canadians, and potential non-Indigenous allies want to reconcile with Indigenous people, they need to respectfully and concretely support these efforts. One way they can begin to learn how to do this is by reading Indigenous literature.

In an interview with Editor’s Weekly, Dimaline says, “People often ask how they can be good allies, how they can work with our communities, and often feel left outside of the circle. Welcoming you into our stories is the best way we have to welcome you in, and to ensure that when you get there, you have a better understanding of who we are and what your role can be.” The stories found in Indigenous YA fiction can build relationships of responsibility with the readers of those books as well as among the characters in their pages. The Marrow Thieves provides a wake-up call to non-Indigenous readers about the ultimately doomed realities that result from exploiting, consuming, and destroying Indigenous lives. The novel suggests that we all should instead support Indigenous survival and resurgence, and that we ought to respectfully listen to and learn from Indigenous stories, knowledge, and, yes, dreams, if we want to survive into any kind of future worth inhabiting.

So, wherever you are coming from, Indigenous or not, Canadian or not, YA lit person or not, if you’re interested in listening, learning, and relating while also enjoying moving, gripping, beautiful prose, you should be reading Indigenous young adult literature. Next on my list is Fire Starters by Jen Storm (Ojibway, Couchiching First Nation). What’s next for you?

Wondering where to find more Indigenous YA literature?

There are, of course, many more Indigenous YA texts than those I chose as the focus for this short essay. Two great places to find addition Indigenous-authored children’s and YA texts are: 1) Dr. Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo)’s blog, American Indians in Children’s Literature (Reese regularly reviews texts published in Canada as well as in the United States, including many of the texts referenced in this post), and 2) Indigenous presses. Theytus Books and Kegedonce Press are major players, but there are also many others. The University of Toronto Libraries Research Guide on First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Publishers and Distributers lists many of these by region and includes links to their websites.

WORKS REFERENCED

Armstrong, Jeannette. Slash. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 2000. Print.

Campbell, Nicola I. Shin-chi’s Canoe. Illus. Kim LaFave. Groundwood Books: Toronto, 2008. Print.

Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Final Report. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015. http://nctr.ca/reports.php.

Dimaline, Cherie. Interview with Suzanne Purkis. Editor’s Weekly. 16 Mar. 2017, http://blog.editors.ca/?p=4332.

---. Interview with Deborah Dundas. “Cherie Dimaline: Hopes and Dreams in the Apocalypse.” The Star. 6 Nov. 2017, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2017/

11/06/cherie-dimaline-hopes-and-dreams-in-the-apocalypse.html.

---. The Marrow Thieves. Toronto: Dancing Cats Books, 2017. Print.

Dupuis, Jenny Kay, and Kathy Kacer. I Am Not a Number. Illus. Gillian Newland. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2016. Print.

Jordan-Fenton, Christy, and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton. Fatty Legs: A True Story. Art by Li Amini-Holmes. Toronto: Annick Press, 2010. Print.

Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier, 2018. Print.

Reese, Debbie. American Indians in Children’s Literature. Blog. Debbie Reese, 2018. https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com.

Robertson, David Alexander. 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga. Illus. Scott B. Henderson. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2012. Print.

---. Sugar Falls. Illus. Scott B. Henderson. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2012. Print.

---. When We Were Alone. Illus. Julie Flett. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2016. Print.

Simpson, Leanne. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2011. Print.

Sterling, Shirley. My Name is Seepeetza. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1992. Print.

Storm, Jen. Fire Starters. Illus. Scott B. Henderson. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2016. Print.

Taylor, Drew Hayden. The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel. Toronto: Annick Press, 2007. Print.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission Archives. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation University of Manitoba, 2018. http://nctr.ca/archives.php.

We Matter Campaign. We Matter, 2018. https://wemattercampaign.org.

“First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Publishers and Distributors.” University of Toronto Libraries, 2018. https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/Aboriginalpublishers

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mandy Suhr-Sytsma is the author of Self-Determined Stories: The Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature (Michigan State University Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Children’s Literature, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Wicazo Sa Review, and the Writing Center Journal. She also curated the Association for the Study of American Indian Literature’s publicly available “Resources for Engaging Indigenous Literatures in K-12 Classrooms” guide. Dr. Suhr-Sytsma teaches in the English Department and directs the Writing Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.