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.

RECOMMENDED: Red River Resistance: A Girl Called Echo, V.2

Red River Resistance: A Girl Called Echo, Volume 2 

Written by Katherena Vermette (Metis)

Illus. by Scott B. Henderson. Colors by Donovan Yaciuk 

Published in 2019

Publisher: Highwater Press

Reviewed by Jean Mendoza 

Status: Recommended

Red River Resistance is the second graphic novel in Katherena Vermette's A Girl Called Echo series. The Metis teen protagonist of Volume 1 (Pemmican Wars) is still quiet, still spends a lot of time with earbuds in, listening to her music, but she's becoming less isolated. She is befriended by a classmate named Micah. She gets involved with the school's Indigenous Student Leadership group, under the guidance of teachers Mr. Bee and Mx Francois. She plays in the snow with her foster family. And she smiles a bit. But powerful dreams and daydreams still take her into the Metis history of what is currently called Canada. This time, her dream episodes are set in 1869-70, when political machinations in Canada focused on pushing Indigenous and Metis people further and further west. Metis leader Louis Riel is a central figure in the dream events Echo experiences. 

The first Echo book established that Echo is in foster care because her mother is in some sort of facility (mental health care? halfway house?). We can guess that historical or intergenerational trauma may be affecting the family. Echo's dreaming translates facts she learns in class into stories of her Metis ancestors. More than once, Echo wakes with tears streaming down her face. She feels the impact of historical events viscerally, (re)living hopeful and joyous moments as well as the pain of betrayal and shattered hopes, displacements, departures, and violence witnessed.  

Though it's not the story's only "message," teachers and others who work with young people need to be mindful that children and their family members may be affected in the present by what happened during earlier stages of settler-colonization. Intergenerational trauma may not be easily recognizable, but it's real. It can be a factor in depression, loneliness, child neglect, and other problems that are generally considered mental health issues, and the effects of those are communicated from generation to generation through actions and beliefs.

The more time I spend with this book, the more I appreciate the author's and the illustrator's & colorist's craft:

• Character development. Echo's teachers, Mr. Bee and Mx Francois, are believable and rounded-out, though Mx Francois (pronouns they, them, their/s) hasn't yet had as much to say as Mr. Bee has. Mr. Bee, for example, stands in front of a classroom of benignly disengaged students and talks about what he loves: history. Notice how he seems to just assume his dozing, note-passing students are getting what they need from the information he's sharing. 
• Detail in the graphics. Take time to read the screen on Echo's mp3 player. Notice the subtly pleased looks on the faces of the two teachers as they watch Echo and the other students talking together after the Indigenous Leadership bake sale. And spend a moment with the panel that shows the exhilaration Echo and her friend feel when they believe, briefly, that Louis Riel's efforts have succeeded -- wow!    
• Things that pique interest: Such as -- Echo's foster mom -- what's her story? She has a houseful, including a child with special physical needs (seen in Pemmican Wars). Yet she treats Echo with great concern and respect, and when Echo seeks her out after a very bad dream, she seems surprised but her from-the-heart response is perfect. 
• The back matter. A detailed Red River Resistance timeline and the Metis List of Rights from 1870 helped me better understand Mr. Bee's lectures and Echo's dreams. Both were essential, in fact.

A particular strength of the Echo books is that so far, Katherena Vermette has not had Echo interact directly with real historical figures in her dreams. Her relationships of the past are with people about her age, who seem to be her guides (Marie in Pemmican Wars, Benjamin in Red River Resistance.) I hope that trend continues. It's much more effective, in my opinion, to have her be primarily an observer, than to imagine fake dialogue between a 21st century middle schooler and someone such as Louis Riel.

Something to watch for: Volume 3 of A Girl Called Echo is due out in February 2020!

Apple, Echo, and the Importance of “More Than One Book"

Two Native high school girls, two unique stories about not fitting in, and about trying to make sense of Indigenous heritage/ancestry when something has disrupted their place in a Native community....

Most regular readers of this blog won’t need to be convinced that it takes more than one story about a group of people to adequately portray that group’s experience. Still, we know that in classrooms and in library collections across North America, the pickings are usually slim when it comes to books by and about Native people. So “the danger of a single story” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns about is very real.

Right now I’m revisiting that point -- yet again -- via two recently published books with contemporary Native teen girl protagonists. Dawn Quigley’s (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) debut novel Apple in the Middle (2018) is set in Minnesota and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. The protagonist, Apple, meets her Native family members for the first time, the summer after her sophomore year in high school.

Katherena Vermette’s A Girl Called Echo: Pemmican Wars (2017) is a graphic novel. Echo, the main character, is 13 years old. She is Metis, as is Vermette. The story is set in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Apple’s mother, who was Turtle Mountain Chippewa, died after giving birth to her. Apple grew up with her dad and stepmother (both white), in their upper middle class suburban world, where she feels like she never quite fits. She carries a sense of guilt for her mother’s death. She’s a bit prickly, and more than a bit socially awkward. Since an incident of open racism during grade school, she has tried to look as white as possible. Her father’s reluctance to tell her about her Native family hasn’t helped. As a narrator, Apple has a lot to say. She can be rude, impulsive, and loud, with a biting sense of humor, but she begins to dial it all down somewhat as she gets to know her Turtle Mountain relatives.

Of her sense of not fitting in, Apple says, “I call it the Ping-Pong effect because you’re the ball, and nobody ever wants you in their space. Have you ever felt like that? Never really belonging anywhere, but trying your darndest to run between two lives only to find you’re always stuck in the middle.”

Apple may feel that she's constantly running, but Echo’s days in Pemmican Wars seem to involve just putting one foot in front of the other, with tremendous effort.

Unlike Apple, Echo is nearly silent. She’s emotionally isolated at school and in her foster placement, and moves as if something is draining all her energy. She spends most of her time with her earbuds in: Guns n Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers. The only time we see anything like a smile on her face is when she finds some graphic novels about Metis history on a library shelf. She’s in a new school and knows nobody, though her history teacher seems to “see” her. When she falls asleep, she dreams herself into events from First Nations history, and it’s in those dreams that she seems to feel most alive -- and where she has a friend.

Her mother stays in some kind of institution – rehab or mental health facility, maybe – which hints at why Echo is in foster care. Echo opens up slightly when she visits her mom. She speaks, asks questions about their family's Metis background, tells her mom what she is learning. The history class, the dreaming, and her relationship with her mom may be what eventually help her find her place. (That's "eventually" because Echo doesn’t find resolution in Pemmican Wars. Vermette’s second Echo book is due out in December, and we can hope that things will be looking up for her protagonist.)

The changes Apple and Echo go through in their respective stories are very different from each other, though both characters move toward a stronger sense of who they are, and what being Indigenous means (or can mean) to them, as they deal with racism, school, family issues, and so on. Young people deserve to get to know both of them.  Their stories belong on the same shelves (and in the same gift bag!) with Cynthia Leitich Smith’s 2018 release, Hearts Unbroken, whose protagonist Louise faces the effects of personal-level and community-wide racism while navigating peer relationships and romance during senior year. 

Three brand-new, strong Indigenous female teen main characters -- now there's a gift for your students, your teen patrons, your children, and your grandchildren!

(Recognition is due Katherena Vermette’s collaborators on Echo – illustrator Scott B. Henderson and color artist Donovan Yaciuk. Because Echo speaks so seldom, it’s on the illustrations to convey key details about her life. And they do so with subtlety and grace! For example, the letters WPG on the front of a bus Echo rides signal that she's in Winnipeg. Or so I'm told.)

--Jean Mendoza

UPDATE 10/29/19: Last week, @debraj1121 commented on Twitter that although she liked Apple in the Middle, she was concerned about negative mentions of "voodoo." One of Apple's distorted ideas about Native people is that they practice what she thinks of as voodoo, which evidently both intrigues and frightens her. Apple's grandmother pushes back on that mistake, calling voodoo "nonsense" and enlightening Apple about their family's actual beliefs.

Reading the Twitter conversation that followed, I realized 1) how much I need to learn, and 2) it's important to make a statement here about how voodoo appears in Apple in the Middle.

Voodoo is widely misunderstood in mainstream Western culture, and is portrayed in horror films and the like, as a kind of magic that can be used to hurt someone or cause chaos. It's often racialized (practitioners shown as African, Afro-Caribbean, or African-American, and scary). Popular (mis) representations reveal little if anything about the actual cosmology, a complex belief system with origins in Africa. It probably had a powerful role in sustaining many people who were enslaved and brought to the continents currently called the Americas. It has many believers in Haiti and elsewhere, and is more correctly called Vodou or Voudon.

I was dismayed to realize that, focused as I was on Apple's ignorance about Native people, I had scarcely noticed the mention of voodoo in the book.  @debraj1121's tweet got me started looking into what "voodoo" really is. Beyond the very general statements above,  I can't be a reliable source of information; still building a sense of what's trustworthy. One scholarly exploration that I'm finding helpful is "Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture" by Adam M. McGee, which focuses not on the actual religion but on how it has been sensationalized in the mainly-White popular imagination.

Anyway, part of Apple's growth as a character involves putting aside misunderstandings about Native people. Authors often do that by having events or other characters interfere with the character's ignorance or mistaken ideas. Apple's grandmother's contradiction (voodoo is "nonsense") falls short.
Author Dawn Quigley has said on Twitter that she honors and values @debraj1121's insights,  and has contacted the publisher of Apple in the Middle about the problem. 

If you've read or shared Apple in the Middle, recognize that voodoo is a real religion and that in the Western imagination it has been heavily colonized by powerful and persistent misrepresentations in films, stories, etc. 

Also on 10/29/19 -- A large and growing number of previously-White-identified people in eastern Canada have begun coopting First Nations identity by being spuriously designated "Eastern Metis." (For more information, see Darryl Leroux's book Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity,  and his Web site Raceshifting.) We want to note that A Girl Called Echo author Katherena Vermette and her character Echo are of the Metis nation in Manitoba, not the pretender group. 

Recommended: FIRE STARTERS, by Jen Storm; illustrations by Scott B. Henderson, colours by Donovan Yaciuk

Check out the cover for Jen Storm's Fire Starters: 

Who are those two boys on bikes, riding away from that burning building? Are they the fire starters who set that building ablaze?

**** 

Jen Storm's Fire Starters is a graphic novel published by Highwater Press in 2017. Its gorgeous illustrations are by Scott B. Henderson; Donovan Yaciuk did the colours. Here's the description:

Looking for a little mischief after discovering an old flare gun, Ron and Ben find themselves in trouble when the local gas bar on Agamiing Reserve goes up in flames, and they are wrongly accused of arson by the sheriff’s son. As the investigation goes forward, community attitudes are revealed, and the truth slowly comes to light.

In an interview at CBC Books, Storm said that she wanted to:  

..."explore how all the people in a town — the bully, the bystander, the underdog, law enforcement — would react and what their role can be in reconciliation because I think a lot of people hear that word and think really big grand picture and don't see how they can fit into it."

Reconciliation? Some readers of AICL know about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada. For those who don't, here's the introduction, from the commissions's website:

There is an emerging and compelling desire to put the events of the past behind us so that we can work towards a stronger and healthier future. The truth telling and reconciliation process as part of an overall holistic and comprehensive response to the Indian Residential School legacy is a sincere indication and acknowledgement of the injustices and harms experienced by Aboriginal people and the need for continued healing. This is a profound commitment to establishing new relationships embedded in mutual recognition and respect that will forge a brighter future. The truth of our common experiences will help set our spirits free and pave the way to reconciliation.

Storm is Ojibway from the Couchiching First Nation in Northwestern Ontario. With her story, she moves reconciliation from a concept to an on-the-ground example of what reconciliation could mean, in action, in a small community that is predominantly White.

Within a few pages, we know that the building is owned by a Native man. We also know that Ron and Ben, the Native teens, did not set that building on fire. We know that it was done by Michael, the sheriff's son, and we know why he did it. Ron and Ben are being held at the jail. People think they're the ones responsible for the fire. When they're let go, they are taunted on the school bus and at school, they're surrounded by kids who call them fire starters. A fight breaks out. There's more of this kind of thing later, at a hockey game.

Finally, the sheriff figures out that it is his son, Michael, who set the fire. After that, the story shifts to a circle justice gathering. It is a Native system of justice. In the next scenes, we see Michael helping to clean up the inside of the burned building.

Storm's story is a very thoughtful look at the two systems of justice. The Native boys are in the White system, being interrogated and intimidated. It is a stark contrast to what the White boy experiences in the Native system of justice. It points to the path Storm is looking for: how a community can heal, rather than how it could punish and inflict more harm on people.

There are two especially poignant aspects to the story. First is the poster on the wall of the building that was set on fire. It is of a Native woman. She's missing, and the poster is asking for help, to find her. For information about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, I suggest you read the news stories archived at Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). The second is Michael's friend. His name is Jason. Though he keeps it quiet, he is Native, too. He's torn between his friendship with Michael and his own strong sense of doing what is right, especially because he--like the Native boys being mistreated by the justice system and the townspeople--is Native.

I recommend Jen Storm's Fire Starter. There's a lot to study, think about, and of course, talk about.

Richard Van Camp's A BLANKET OF BUTTERFLIES

Check out the cover for Richard Van Camp's A Blanket of Butterflies:

Gorgeous, isn't it? A Blanket of Butterflies, illustrated by Scott B. Henderson, is new this year (2015) from Highwater Press, an imprint of Portage & Main Press in Canada. That sword? It is a key piece of this story.

When you open the cover, here's the first page:

As the story opens, Sonny is at the Northern Life Museum in Fort Smith, Northwest Territory. He's looking at a samurai suit of armor when he notices a man who is also looking at it. The man's name is Shinobu. See the paper he's pulling from his coat? He's at the museum with a specific purpose: to pick up that suit. It belongs to his family. The museum staff worked to identify who it belongs to, and then got in touch with Shinobu's family.

I gotta say--I love how Van Camp's story gets going--and here's why. So many things in museums are there due to theft and exploitation. Grave robbing of Native graves is rampant. Native protests led Congress to take action. In 1990, Congress wrote the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help tribal peoples reclaim remains and artifacts (see the FAQ). That law, and A Blanket of Butterflies, is all about dignity and humanity, for all peoples.

Back to the story...

There's something missing from the display. A sword. Shinobu learns where it is and sets out to get it, but Sonny knows where it is, too, and he also knows that it is risky for Shinobu to go there alone. Sonny follows him, and strikes up a conversation, noting that Shinobu has a butterfly tattoo on his hand. Things don't go well. Shinobu gets hurt...

Yesterday (Friday, November 14) I listened to Acimowin on CJSR, an independent radio station in Edmondton, Canada. The guest? Richard Van Camp. I listened to him talk about A Blanket of Butterflies and wish you could have heard him, too. There's a grandma in this story. She's the hero. Hearing him talk about her... awesome.

Get a copy of A Blanket of Butterflies for your library or classroom, or for your own young readers. I really like it and highly recommend it.

And--check out that weekly radio show, Acimowin, too, on Friday mornings. You can listen online. One of the best things people who write, review, edit, or publish children's and young adult literature can do, is listen to Native voices. Learn who we are, and what we care about. It'll help you do a better job at writing, or reviewing, or editing, or selecting, or... deselecting! Acimowin is hosted by Jojo, who tweets from @acimowin. I laughed out loud more than once, listening to the banter between these First Nations people... (Note: the radio show is not for young kids.) Love the graphics for the show!