But at the same time, while my baby’s whiteness gave them a shield, it also erected a barricade between them and their people. They didn’t look like kin; they looked like an enemy. If they were on the rez, would they be seen as Tuscarora? Or would they be treated as just another white person on a poverty tour? Holding my baby for the first time surrounded by loving, Indigenous midwives, I remembered the pain of passing. The way you deny parts of yourself to appease others, as though identity were so easily partitioned. This day with these people you’re Native, while this day with these people you’re white. Everything will be fine. You will be fine, ducking in and out of labels with a smile pasted on. All the guilt any white person feels for centuries of racial genocide and injustice welled up in me. But it was more complicated than that: I was both the winner and the loser, the victim and the abuser. Two strains married in me, impossibly. Any time I felt outrage at something a white person said or did to my people, I felt like a fraud, as if I, too, were culpable. Yet if a Native person made a sweeping statement about white people, I couldn’t help but question my belonging. After all, I didn’t have enough knowledge of my culture to mitigate my skin colour. Defences were always up. The tear always widening.
When my father talked about the issues our people faced, he uttered a three-word mantra as the solution: decolonizing the mind. He was referring to a process of retraining one’s brain to reject the values of Western culture. Or, in his words, “to stop living in the boat, and come back to the canoe.” That solution fell flat for me. Born from both the boat and the canoe, I’d always felt I didn’t belong in either, so I was left drowning in between.
Maybe being mixed-race doesn’t have to mean shaming myself out of my Indigeneity just because I wasn’t raised in the culture: silently, safely watching from my whiteness as Native people around me suffered. Maybe it doesn’t have to feel like forcing a smile for the same white people who continually gut my community and myself with dull blades.
This is how I can decolonize my mind: by refusing the colonial narratives that try to keep me alienated from my own community. I can raise my kid to love being Haudenosaunee in a way my parents couldn’t, in a way my grandparents couldn’t. This is my responsibility as a Haudenosaunee woman.
But my white-passing privilege gives me another, more complex responsibility. I have to use my white privilege like an undercover agent would use a good disguise, leveraging my lightness to drop the guard of non-Indigenous people around me, then slowly, methodically picking at their inherited colonialism, forcing them to re-evaluate their own complicity in a way they may not have if they could easily identify me as Indigenous. More importantly, I need to lift up the voices of those in my community who, like my uncle, like my grandfather, like my father, are treated as less than human, unworthy of attention or time, because their skin is too dark for certain people’s liking. I need to make sure that their experiences are centred, that their concerns are heard, that their needs are met.
Being both Haudenosaunee and white wasn’t a curse meant to tear me in two; it was a call to uphold the different responsibilities that came with each part of me. Turns out my dad was wrong. I didn’t need to worry about whether to get in the boat or the canoe, and I certainly didn’t need to drown in between. Understanding and honouring my unique responsibilities was always the way to keep myself afloat.
ON SEEING AND BEING SEEN
’ve heard that when you see someone you love your pupils get bigger, as if your eyes themselves want to swallow them up and trap them inside. I don’t know if that same physiology applies to seeing objects, but I like to imagine my pupils were huge, hungry black orbs when I first read Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, activist and teacher Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love. Every sentence felt like a fingertip strumming a neglected chord in my life, creating the most gorgeous music I’d ever heard.
It was the first time I, an Indigenous woman, had read the work of another Indigenous woman. It was such an intimate and personally revelatory moment—as if she had reached out from the pages, lifted my face and smiled. She can see me, I thought. She can see me. I was twenty-five years old.
I’d known I wanted to write since I was twelve, but back then I’d never seen a girl like myself in the books I loved so much. I saw white girls—often upper middle class, often pining after unremarkable white boys. So that’s what I wrote. I wrote my way out of used clothes and food banks and parents who screamed in the night. None of my characters ever worried about money. None of them were concerned what their friends would think if they met their Haudenosaunee dad or their white bipolar mother. None of them even had a Haudenosaunee dad or white bipolar mother. Things were simple; things were normal. Rich boys and brand names were normal.
My taste in literature changed as I got older. What didn’t change was my suspicion that publishers felt Indigenous girls like me were unworthy of book covers or book deals. Even in university the writers we studied were white: Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Jane Austen. I admired the work of these women, but they weren’t writing what I needed to read, and this made it hard to believe there was space for what I needed to write.
So imagine my surprise when a fellow writer—a white woman—told me during post-workshop beers that I was going to get published right away because I was Native. My fiction at that time included one short story about a white woman with a mixed-race child and the beginning of a novel about three generations of Indigenous women. I was particularly excited about the novel, about the possibility of writing Native women like the ones I knew, and the workshop feedback was enthusiastic. Still, this white woman—who wrote effusive comments on all my work—had determined that my talent was not enough to get me published. Only my ethnicity could do that. The funny thing was, I could count the Native writers I knew of with half a hand—none of whom were women, and none of whom were writing about Native women in a way I recognized.
The idea that the colonialism, racism and sexism that had systematically kept Indigenous women out of the literary community could somehow be leveraged to benefit me as an Indigenous woman through some half-assed literary affirmative action was absurd. And yet this white woman believed it with her whole heart. This white woman, who got into an MFA program while I was rejected from every one I applied for. Perhaps I hadn’t made it clear enough on the application that I was Native. Perhaps I had made it too clear on the application I was Native. It was hard to say.
I stopped writing for years after those rejections. When I did write—between being a mother and shifts at my minimum-wage job—I scraped all Indigeneity out of my work. At least if my fiction read as “white” I’d be sure that any rejections were based on the work itself. I wouldn’t have to field questions about why my characters were Native, or deal with criticisms that they somehow weren’t “Indian enough”—issues that, as far as I could tell, never came up for white writers, for white work.
Then came Islands of Decolonial Love. Everything changed. Reading stories of Indigenous women who had good sex and bad boyfriends, who dealt with both underhanded and overt racism, who spoke their language and loved their families, gave me hope. Here—in these pages—was what I’d been searching for my whole life. Finally, after twenty-five years, I felt there was space for me to breathe inside the claustrophobic world of Canadian literature. Reading Simpson’s stories ultimately gave me permission to write my own.
Of course, this didn’t change the realities of the publishing industry. I once entered a short-story contest with a piece about a complicated relationship between two Indigenous women and lost to a story written by a white American man that not only appropriated but outright misrepresented Indigenous ceremonies. His story featured stereotypical drunken, dysfunctional Indians, one of whom offered his white girlfriend—the story’s protagonist, naturally—to his brother during potlatch. His brother accepted, and the two went off and had sex in the woods, the rest of the Natives vomiting and partying around them.
Potlatch c
eremonies had to be held in secret from 1885 until 1951 because they were banned by the Canadian government. There was a raid on the B.C. village of Memkumlis in 1921, and forty-five people performing potlatch were arrested. Twenty of those arrested were sent to prison. I shudder to think of how their grandchildren would react if they read this story and saw how the powerful ceremony their ancestors fought for was turned into racist, colonial poverty porn. The old questions emerged: Was this, a story written by a white man in another country, more “Indian” than my own writing as an Indigenous woman? Did this racist portrayal and cultural appropriation of Indigenous people matter if the story was otherwise “good”?
That is the crucial problem with the push for “diversity” in publishing—something I’ve known my whole life but have only recently been able to articulate. “Diversity” is not about letting those who aren’t white make whatever art matters to them and their communities. If that were the case, it would not havetaken me twenty-five years to find a book that represented Indigenous women in a meaningful way.
No, “diversity,” as Tania Canas so succinctly puts it in her essay “Diversity is a White Word,” is about making sense of difference “through the white lens…by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness.” It’s the literary equivalent of “ethnic” restaurants: they please white people because they provide them with “exotic” new flavours, but if they don’t appease white people’s sensitive taste buds they’re not worth a damn.
White authors writing from other racial perspectives is hardly new. As early as 1893, Mohawk writer Pauline Johnson criticized how white writers portrayed Native women. Back then, countless white authors—particularly men—wrote the “Indian maiden” trope: Native women so hopelessly in love with white men that they were willing to betray their nation to help the men achieve their goals. When this did not win the love of these dashing white men, as it almost never did—for what white man in his right mind would love a Native woman when white women were available?—the heartbroken Indian maidens would commit suicide. In her Toronto Sunday Globe editorial “A Strong Race Opinion,” Johnson called out these writers for their ignorance:
Perhaps, sometimes an Indian romance may be written by someone who will be clever enough to portray national character without ever coming in contact with it….But such things are rare, half of our authors who write up Indian stuff have never been on an Indian reserve in their lives, have never met a “real live” Redman…; what wonder that their conception of a people that they are ignorant of, save by hearsay, is dwarfed, erroneous and delusive.
Johnson could very well have been describing the white man who, a hundred and twenty years later, wrote that contest-winning story about potlatch. Research into Indigenous life is not necessary because these writers are not writing real Indigenous people; they are writing Indigenous stereotypes that their white readers recognize and falsely consider authentic.
Perhaps these white writers believe, as my classmate did, that Black writers, Indigenous writers and other writers of colour have an edge in the current publishing climate, and as a result, white writers must now make their texts more “diverse” to compete. Johnson made a similar argument back in 1893: “Do [non-Native] authors who write Indian romances love the nation they endeavour successfully or unsuccessfully to describe?…or is the Indian introduced into literature but to lend a dash of vivid colouring to an otherwise tame and sombre picture of colonial life?” These questions remain pertinent for white writers to answer. Yet it would seem those are exactly the questions they want to avoid.
I will not say that these authors cannot write from an experience they’ve never had. To an extent, all fiction writers write from experiences they’ve never had, since the characters they’re writing aren’t real. However, there is a marked difference between the way the man who wrote the potlatch story wrote Indigenous people and the way Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes Indigenous people. What is that difference? Well, there is this oft-cited notion that you can write from any perspective as long as you write with empathy. I don’t know whether the white man who wrote about the potlatch felt he was writing with empathy. He may have. He might have no idea why his words were offensive to me. He could even read this essay and liken my criticism of his work to censorship.
That was British author Lionel Shriver’s reaction to the Washington Post review of her novel The Mandibles, in which (white) writer Ken Kalfus said Shriver’s Black and Latinx characters were “racist characterizations.” The Black woman in her book has dementia and is either restrained or led around on a leash by her white husband. The Latinx character is a pudgy, lisping Mexican-born man who uses lax immigration laws and constitutional amendments to become America’s “criminally incompetent” president. Instead of asking herself questions similar to those Johnson posed, or considering Kalfus’s criticism, Shriver wrote a speech complaining about “fiction and identity politics” and delivered it at the Brisbane Writers Festival. In it, she claimed people concerned about inaccurate representations and cultural appropriation in fiction were stifling free speech. Of course, that’s the knee-jerk reaction many white people have when marginalized communities criticize them: criticism magically becomes censorship. Who knows? Maybe Shriver thought she was writing with empathy, too.
But writing with empathy is not enough. It never has been. Depictions like these—reactions like these—are proof that white people are willing to extend only so much empathy to those who aren’t white. Empathy has its limits—and, contrary to what some may think, it is possible to both have empathy for a person and still hold inherited, unacknowledged racist views about them. How else do you explain the Canadian government’s apology for residential schools and pleas for reconciliation coexisting with its continued, purposeful underfunding of Indigenous children? How do you explain the national outrage over the murder of fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine existing at the same time as the national silence over the child welfare system that targeted her as an Indigenous youth and made her so vulnerable in the first place?
To truly write from another experience in an authentic way, you need more than empathy. You need to write with love. That is what I felt when I read Simpson’s stories. That’s what I feel when I read the work of Gwen Benaway, Waubgeshig Rice, Tracey Lindberg, Eden Robinson, Katherena Vermette, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Joshua Whitehead, Lindsay Nixon, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Cherie Dimaline. That’s what I hope Indigenous people feel when they read my work. Love.
If you can’t write about us with a love for who we are as a people, what we’ve survived, what we’ve accomplished despite all attempts to keep us from doing so; if you can’t look at us as we are and feel your pupils go wide, rendering all stereotypes a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace—then why are you writing about us at all?
WEIGHT
ou know as soon as it happens, feel it like a tiny pebble settling in your uterus. This directly contradicts your grade ten health class, which claimed it takes days, not seconds, for implantation, but the Catholic paranoia you’ve inherited from your mother is far stronger than logic.
Another thing you were supposed to have learned in grade ten health class: strategic ways to say no to men you imagined as mustachioed villains from silent films, tying women to railroad tracks between exaggerated title cards. You never imagined having to say no to real boys. Your femininity was safely bundled beneath cheap, ill-fitting sweaters and baggy jeans, a veritable Do Not Enter sign you hoped would keep out the unworthy. You certainly didn’t expect to have to say no to the boy, the one you’d been pining after since grade ten, inspiring you to obsessively scribble “MIKE + ALICIA” on the wooden slats that held up your sister’s top bunk. Yet here you were: in a lukewarm, year-long relationship frequently punctuated by your sighs and his silence.
You wanted to say no to him that night, but despite your Ontario curriculum training, you weren’t really sure how, so you reluctantly a
greed. It was quick, awkward and silent, surrounded by sleeping boys you barely knew who were there for Mike’s birthday party. Even though there was no Hallelujah choir or moment of transcendence, there was still a minor thrill in finally doing something your Catholic mother disapproved of. That was sort of an achievement.
Your high school is called PJ, which stands for Pauline Johnson, the local Mohawk poet good enough to name a school after but apparently not good enough to have her work taught within it. Students at rival high schools use the initials quite differently, though, referring to you and your classmates as “Pregnant Juveniles.” The nickname’s an unfortunate, if predictable, side effect of being the only high school sensible enough to offer a daycare in the teen-pregnancy capital of Canada. All the knocked-up teens in Brantford get shuttled here, stretch marks peeking out of their low-rise jeans, strollers stowed away in their lockers. You used to look down on those girls. Now you’re sure you can feel your organs shifting inside as you walk down the halls. You wonder if that’s how those girls felt, too, as their lower abdomens pushed into that telltale pear shape and whispers grew to a hum.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 3