Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts

Friday, October 29, 2021

Highly Recommended! A Girl Called Echo, Volume 4: Road Allowance Era

 



A Girl Called Echo, Vol.4: Road Allowance Era
Written by Katherena Vermette (Red River Metis)
Illustrated by Scott B. Henderson; Colors by Donovan Yaciuk
Published in 2021
Publisher: Highwater Press
Reviewer: Jean Mendoza
Review Status: Highly Recommended


This will be a "Short and Sweet"* recommendation of the fourth book in the "A Girl Called Echo" graphic novel series. Katherena Vermette, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk have teamed up again for another chapter in the story of Echo, a time-traveling contemporary Metis teen. 

Here are four of the many reasons to recommend it:

First: Katherena Vermette is Red River Metis, and her story is about Red River Metis people -- historical and contemporary -- in what is currently called Canada. Pivotal, and often traumatic, moments (such as the execution of Louis Riel, and government-sanctioned destruction of Metis communities) are given an Indigenous focus they don't receive in typical history classrooms. As with the previous Echo books, Vermette includes a timeline and other Metis-specific resources to deepen the reader's understanding of Echo's experiences when she travels to the past, and to help create a through-line to her current distresses. 

Second: Meeting one's forebears while time-traveling is a prospect that intrigues writers and consumers of speculative fiction. It may be presented as comedy (e.g., the Back to the Future films), or as drama (as in Octavia Butler's devastating Kindred). Road Allowance is primarily dramatic, though it has some very sweet, tender moments. I appreciate that Vermette keeps Echo from interacting directly with the major historical figures. That would have been a mess. Instead, what's foregrounded is the Metis: how they lived, what they hoped for, what they endured, and how the past may be present in a Metis child and her family, today. 

Third: One of my favorite things about this fourth volume is that it shows Echo and her contemporary family healing from whatever trauma led to Echo's mother being in an institution. Mother hugs daughter. Echo smiles big.  An ancestor tells her she is beautiful. A school friend listens to her expressions of anger and pain, and offers a helpful perspective. And Echo finds that she can decide when she will go to the past, and when she will go home.

Fourth: The story is thought-provoking even though Echo's far from the only fictional character ever to be what Vonnegut called "unstuck in time." For me, an especially lovely bit for thought lies in ways to think about the protagonist's name. Intergenerational trauma reverberates in Echo, at school and at home. She embodies the idea of "echoes of the past." But, when she interacts with her ancestors during their times, she also embodies what I think of as echoes of support or hope from future generations to the forebears who needed reasons to carry on in the face of racism, dispossession, betrayal, and genocide. 

We hope you'll share the whole series, including Volume 4: The Road Allowance Era, with middle schoolers and teens you know. Though it's set in what's currently called Canada, the Indigenous people didn't make the border, and the experiences on either side of it run parallel, when they don't directly intersect.

*A Short and Sweet Rec is not an in-depth analysis. It is our strategy to tell you that we recommend a book we have read. We will definitely refer to it in book chapters and articles we write, and in presentations we do. Our Short and Sweet Recs include four reasons why we recommend the book.

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Recommended: Inconvenient Skin by Shane L. Koyczan


Inconvenient Skin/nayehtawan wasakay
Written by Shane L. Koyczan 
Cree translation by Solomon Ratt
Illustrations by Nadya Kwandibens, Jim Logan, Kent Monkman, Joseph Sanchez
Published in 2019
Publisher: Theytus Books
Reviewer: Jean Mendoza
Review Status: Recommended

"The cure will take as long as the sickness, and the sickness isn't yet over." (Shane Koyczan)

Inconvenient Skin is a message, in the form of art works and poetry in English and Cree, to the people and government of what is currently known as Canada. It's a message about a shameful part of the Canadian past that continues to infect the present: its residential schools for First Nations children. Although Skin is "about" Canada, its main message is relevant in what is currently called the United States. It speaks back fiercely against the notion that Native people, or settler-colonizer descendants,  should "get over the past," forget historical horror and injustice, and move forward while still in denial.

The book was inspired, if that's the right word, by the discouraging net result of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The commission was convened in 2008 to study the history and legacy of the residential schools. Its work included gathering (often traumatic) testimony from survivors. The final report and "calls to action" were published in 2015.

From the outset, Indigenous people in Canada had expressed doubts about the project. There has been profound disappointment that the commission's work resulted in few, if any, of the positive changes it seemed to call for.

The book's title is taken from the passage:
we are not free to shed our history
like an inconvenient skin
Inconvenient Skin holds a mirror of truth to Canada's beliefs about its goodness: "[O]ur nation is built above the bones of a genocide."

Canadians, Koyczan says, aspire to certain traits as a nation (e.g., kind, honest, strong, free), but he warns:
if we ever become
who we hope we are
it will be because we see how far there is still to go
and we know that if we are not these things to everyone
then we are none of these things
And Canada has not been, and is not "these things to everyone." The same can be said of the United States.

As narrator, Koyczan uses the pronouns "we" and "us" to speak directly to anyone who identifies as Canadian. Having a same-page Cree translation of his words signals that Indigenous peoples are not silent in the discourse about Canada's identity. They've never been silent, though they have been ignored, and certainly the residential schools had the mission of destroying Indigenous languages.

Koyczan doesn't identify as Indigenous, but says his father "had first-hand experience with residential school". He is learning about "missing chapters" of his origins, he says, by beginning to reconnect with his father.

Biographical material about translator Solomon Ratt states that he is also a residential school survivor.  He is an educator, focusing on teaching the Cree language. You can see some of his teaching videos and other work on the Cree Literacy Network Web site, including a collection called "Stay home: Learn Cree!" inspired by COVID-19 regulations.

You could say that the "work" of Inconvenient Skin happens on 3 levels: Koyczan's call for reflection and change, Solomon Ratt's Cree translation, and the powerful Indigenous perspectives presented by the contributing artists.

Kent Monkman's (Cree) emotionally charged cover painting, titled "The Scream," depicts priests, nuns, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dragging children away from their families. The same image appears later in the book. One of Monkman's satirical paintings is also featured. The paintings by Joseph Sanchez (Taos Pueblo) consist of spare patches of color and indistinct figures that suggest trauma and the closeness of death. Several of the mixed media works by Jim Logan (Metis), incorporate text to depict a variety of residential school experiences; their overall effect is devastating. Nadya Kwandibens' (Anishinaabe) photographs highlight the "Idle No More" movement that began in Canada in 2012, signaling contemporary Indigenous sovereignty, and resistance to Canada's ongoing failures relative to First Nations.

Be forewarned that this was not meant to be a gentle book. The words are an admonition, an accusation, a call to action; the pictures depict the reasons behind the words.

Koyczan recorded a spoken-word performance of Inconvenient Skin in 2017 that's definitely powerful. The video incorporates vocals by Inuk throat-singer Tanya Tagak and Kym Gouchie (Lheidli T'enneh Nation). Before viewing or sharing the video, be aware that it uses some images of childhood trauma that are not used in the book.

Inconvenient Skin assumes that readers already know something about the residential/boarding schools. That may be true for Canadian teens. But teens in the US will probably need background information. They need to know, also, that the US and Canada have held (and hold) similar settler-colonial attitudes about Indigenous peoples, and that the goals, policies, and practices of the schools were very similar on either side of the border. It might help to first read the section about boarding schools in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People. 

I doubt the US will have a truth and reconciliation commission in my lifetime. Awareness of the boarding schools may be increasing among non-Native people, but there remains a nearly bottomless pit of ignorance and denial about the aftermath of the schools for Native families and communities.

Inconvenient Skin can be a powerful catalyst for conversations about what the legacy of the boarding schools means for a country (be it Canada or the US), and those who identify as its citizens. We can predict that these conversations about ugly, painful stuff will be hard for descendants of settler-colonizers who allow themselves to engage in that work, be they adults or high school students. But they are necessary, because as Koyczan says,
this nation is not so sturdy
that it can sustain the weight of this blind spot in our memory
As the mother of Native kids, though, I'd ask that in high schools, Inconvenient Skin be recommended rather than required reading. Some of the art in particular depicts traumatic situations that may well be part of Indigenous families' experiences, and still "with them" in ways that can make discussion re-traumatizing. I'd insist that Native students be allowed to structure and direct discussions themselves on a purely voluntary basis, and that they could opt-in to those discussions. They should never be put on the spot or asked randomly to speak for their families, or for Native people in general.

That said, I think the foregrounding of Indigenous experience, and an Indigenous language, in Inconvenient Skin can serve as encouragement and empowerment for Native kids. If any readers of AICL have taught with this book, we'd like to hear how you went about it, and how it went.

This is one of the most compelling illustrated books I've seen about settler/Indigenous relations. No one should expect it to be something they can take lightly.

Edited 4/29/2020: You can buy a copy from Theytus Books, the oldest Indigenous publishing house in Canada. It's good to support Indigenous businesses!