Indigenous activist and leader, Ailton Krenak (Aimoré/Krenak), has published three of his short essays in Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Translated from the Portuguese by Anthony Doyle in 2020). With clarity and passion, he illustrates how the indigenous perspective acknowledges and nurtures relationships with parts of the Earth (like rivers and mountains).
His tone is matter-of-fact and simultaneously declarative and questioning: “No community that is in debt to the land can call itself sustainable, because we take out more than we can put back in. Our deficit to Gaia is half an earth per year.”
You could read this short volume with a cup of tea, but you’ll be thinking about his ideas for long after.
Toni Jensen’s Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land (2020) also considers questions of sustainability, particularly in regards to fracking, and it was her photojournalism work on the sex trade and violence which proliferates alongside this resource extraction that landed this book on my stack.
Like Krenak, she reasserts herself in the landscape: “One thing the myth of the vanishing Indian continues to get wrong is that we’re disappearing.” But, she embraces contradictions: “What does it mean to try to pass? What does it mean to pass without trying?”
Her style is precise and some chapters are so delicately pleated with observations about the natural world that I wanted to run my fingers across each line of text, just to feel it again.
In Toni Jensen’s memoir, her complicated relationship with her Métis father, who taught her “about football, about the trapline” and “about violence and destruction and despair” is at the heart of the story.
True, too, of Jesse Thistle’s memoir, From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way (2019).
What I loved about Thistle’s story is the focus on boyhood. In time, he would collect fines like other boys collected hockey cards, but early on there are arcade games and movies, and a bizarre but relatable respect for French fries and gravy (I had my favourites too). His short chapters and vivid scenes pull in readers hard and fast; his boyhood perspective is consistent and credible, so that a relative’s increasing consumption of “brown pop” allows readers to recognize Jesse’s later “chemical haze” as part of a legacy. There is laughter with his young brothers, alongside the struggle (the air vent!); this, and knowing that he survives to write this memoir, balances the black-outs and vulnerability. Occasionally a poem introduces a touch of artistry—one about the Windigo in relationship to his personal experience of self-cannibalization is particularly powerful—embellishments not interruptions.
NOTE: Jesse Thistle’s memoir was one of the five contenders for CBC Canada Reads 2020. Another memoir, Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here, was written in a very different style; Thistle invites and immerses readers in emotional scenes that are sometimes hilarious and often painful, Habib analyses and presents her reflections on past selves. Two other indigenous novels were also contenders that year, Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club and Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster. And Cory Doctorow’s set of four speculative-fiction novellas, Radicalized, which are political in their own way. If you want to watch the debates, they’re online.
You don’t have to be Indigenous to hate fracking. Why would we even consider allowing irresponsible companies to pump random chemicals into the ground to deliberately destroy our groundwater. But we do!
Passing is something I’ve only thought about recently. The easy assumption is that it makes life easier, but of course if you’re in a Black leadership position you’ll be criticised by conservatives for your blue eyes.
It’s true: too often these issues are triumphed/dismissed when they are politicized, and the universal realities get shoved aside.
I’ve been listening to the Riverhead books podcast with Marlon James and they recently discussed short novels and stories (probably the LAST episode in their series that you would choose yourself LOL) and they discussed Nella Larsen’s Passing, which occasioned James to talk about the concept in Jamaica and the nuance was fascinating (I think, previously, I’d only heard commentary from people who’ve grown up in the U.S. and Canada).
Ohhhh, if you don’t have Nella Larsen on your list… ooops, sorry! #notsorry 😀
I have been reading up on Nella Larsen, a fascinating, difficult life and one in which it seems ‘passing’ was the last thing she managed to do. Happy to add to my list all through this year, especially ‘important modernists’.
I loved Thistle’s book too-I totally forgot it had poems in it! Very talented man. Question for you-you mention Megan Gail Cole’s novel as Indigenous? She’s from Nova Scotia but I don’t think she has any Indigenous roots…
It’s a long book; I can see where you might forget the poems. Part of Cole’s ethnicity is Mi’Kmaq, I think, but IIRC the jacket copy was vague, because I wasn’t aware of that when I read her novel. Not sure where I picked up this bit of information actually…it might have been something that Naomi mentioned after she attended an event about Indigenous writers out east? Maybe she’ll remember if she sees this.
Not sure if it was from me, but I believe you’re right about Cole!
Thanks, Naomi…I figured you’d get around to reading this eventually!
Haha! 🙂
I loved Krenak’s book! Small but powerful. I recently read Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta and it was really good. He is Australian aboriginal. Ii am currently just a fe pages away from finishing As Long as the Grass Grows: the indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. It is very U.S. centric, but in terms of what environmental justice means to indigenous peoples, it probably applies in most cases.
Ohhh, thank you: I definitely want to read Sand Talk and it’s available. I did enjoy As Long as the Grass Grows; I felt like it was written with a classroom in mind, but not to the point where the style was inaccessible, just that I wanted to read it sitting at a desk not on a porch! And I agree, the locations felt specific but not exclusionary. Not What-Happens-at-Standing-Rock-Stays-at-Standing-Rock…but It’s-Happening-at-Standing-Rock-and-Around-the-World. The Winona LaDuke collection I discovered after ALATGG and I thought they were perfect companions. Oh! Also Carole Lindstrom’s We Are Water Protectors…which is illustrated, for children, and a beautiful tale. Okay, I’ll stop now… grins
From the Ashes broke my heart. The only thing holding it together was the knowledge that Jesse was writing his own book, so there must be a good ending! Just coming out of all he went through is amazing enough, let alone all he has accomplished since then!
But wasn’t that early scene from the boys’ perspective (which was actually a sad situation viewed from the adult’s-knowing perspective) told SO well? I was so engaged, and so quickly, that he kept me interested all through. And, yes, knowing that he made his way to a publication deal was a massive hint!
Yes, absolutely! My comment kind of makes it sound like the only thing holding the book together, but I meant the only thing holding the pieces of my heart together! 🙂
These really do sound good. I am particularly drawn to Carry and From the Ashes.
You would enjoy them both, I think, but I suspect you’d love Jensen’s because of the way that she connects ideas across pieces, in a simmering-beneath-the-surface kinda way, so that you don’t need to tug on that thread but, if you do, there’s an additional layer of “discovery” to marvel at.
These all sound excellent and ambitious in their themes. I’m really tempted by Toni Jensen in particular. The way you describe her style is beautiful.
Her prose is beautiful. And a couple of sentences don’t capture it fully. I had a duedate on my library book, but I would have loved to have allowed this one to spool out, over a series of Sunday afternoons.
Great mini-reviews, Buried, making me want to read them all. Of course, as an Aussie I can relate to Toni Jensen’s “One thing the myth of the vanishing Indian continues to get wrong is that we’re disappearing.” This has been often said about Australia’s First Nations people too.
And, I like essays, so Krenak appeals in particular.
You would love the Krenak essays, WG! Partly because they are so short! LOL You know, when they say you could put a book in your pocket? This one, you actually can! (Well, not those useless pockets they sew into women’s pants, but a jacket pocket!)