ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT – BOOKS-CANADA: Grim Realism of Indigenous Life

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

OTTAWA, Jun 15 1999 (IPS) - Leading Canadian playwright, Tomson Highway has produced an exuberant autobiographical novel, “Kiss of the Fur Queen”, which fully captures the grim realities of aboriginal life earlier this century.

The novel is set in the early 1950’s and recounts the story of Abraham Okimasis, the first Canadian aboriginal to win the Trapper’s Festival Dog Sled Race in snowy northern Maniotoba..

Part of the awards ceremony involves being kissed by a beautiful woman, known as the “Fur Queen” and, in the book, Abraham’s wife Marisis gives birth nine months later to a son, Champion. Three years later another son, Ooneemeetoo, also comes into the world.

The two boys play, hunt, fish and trap with their father in a kind of a isolated Eden, where there is very little contact with white Canadian European culture. They live in a small community of several hundred souls where the Cree language is largely spoken and English is never heard.

Champion begins to play the family accordion, communing with the music of nature around him. Of course, this is before land and resource development comes to their region of northwestern Manitoba where the sole contact with the outside world consists of the Roman Catholic Church.

At the age of six, Champion is suddenly taken away from this bucolic existence and forced to travel south away, from his family, to attend a school run by the church and receive compulsory primary education.

This was, in fact, the fate of hundreds of thousands of aboriginal children in rural and northern communities across Canada from the turn of the century until the 1950s. It was a policy instigated jointly by the Canadian government and the Christian churches.

It also was a deliberate attempt to block generations of aboriginal people from their heritage and culture and turn them into supposedly acceptable Canadians, based exclusively on the white European model.

Champion – renamed Jeremiah in this setting and his young brother, who is renamed Gabiriel when he arrives later at the school – must speak English and are forbidden to speak Cree among themselves. They also are sexually abused at the hands of priests.

One aspect of their Christian education involves the depiction of Heaven as a white world of angelic pale and blond winged creatures versus the more aboriginal-like underworld or Hell – where the devils are darker in complexion, dance around fires but generally seem to have a good time.

Later, as young men living in the city of Winnipeg, they grapple with alienation from their aboriginal identity. They encounter racism and watch other native people sink into alcoholism and prostitution on the street because of the difficulty of making the transition to a European-dominated society.

What keeps body and soul together for Jeremiah and Gabriel is the attention given to them by the “Fur Queen”, who in the tradition of aboriginal legend protectively watches over them.

She appears in different forms, a woman in the theatre, a pregnant mother and a rape victim. It is this contact that turns them into artists – Jeremiah studies classical piano; while Gabriel turns to dance and ballet.

These pursuits do not end the challenges that these two main characters face in the urban setting, leading to some sibling conflict and divergent paths taken.

Recently, in an interview, author Highway explains the mythic aspects of their origins. Jeremiah is born out of the sky and becomes a thinker who has few bodily concerns beyond practicing on his piano.

He represses both the memories of the residential school abuse and his own Cree heritage. Brother Gabriel on the other hand is born of the Earth and its physicality, celebrating the body and the heart with passion and emotion.

The latter discovers his homosexuality and revels in it, but at an unfortunate cost.

Kiss of the Fur Queen fuses the story telling tradition of aboriginal culture with the linear European narrative.

Highway himself lived on a remote Manitoba reserve and was born the son of a trapper in a tent in the woods, where his father did receive a trophy from a real Fur Queen after a gruelling dog-sled competition. He also studied the classical piano and literature, before abandoning music for jobs in support work within the urban native community.

Eventually Highway turned to theatre. His two plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapukasing made him a national celebrity, the recipient of the Order of Canada and the producer of new plays by other emerging native playwrights.

A gay man himself, he demonstrates great sympathy for the plight of native women in a male macho community through the characters that he has depicted in his theatre. The tragic death of his brother and dancer Rene from AIDs may have helped inspired him to write this novel.