Pop 89: More gold

I realize, in my offering up brief descriptions and gushings over the gold nuggets of prairie prose and poetry, I could easily be outlining a year’s worth of columns. But instead, I will sprinkle my book ravings through the year. In fact, I can’t help but do so; books guide my experience through life. Some serve as mirrors, reflecting back to me what I think and feel, the clever and well-crafted ones doing so before I even realize I’ve been busted. That’s what a good mirror should do - tell the truth, not flatter.

But the books I love more and more as I grow older are the books that open windows to me, that lay out maps to foreign places and characters and times. I am particularly fond of engaging histories. I have a hard time arranging the facts of geo-political happenings and events. I rely on road trips with my friend Ervin to understand how wars got started, and borders shifted over time. I can throw out a question like: “The Austro-Hungarian Empire, how did that come about?” then just lean back into my car seat and listen to him unpack history.

I do believe we would become more involved in our historical education if someone earlier in our lives made history pertinent and interesting for us. Memorizing dates is a recipe for a life-long dread of history books. I understand how dates pin an important moment onto a page so that we can, from there, colour in the surrounding unfolding cultural responses, like a starburst, and make relevant connections. But in my childhood, no one taught history that way.

The date that will remain forever in my soul is the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated: April 4, 1968. I even know the time and place: 6:01 pm on the balcony of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN. I know this because it was my tenth birthday. And even though I didn’t know who he was until his face came up on our tv screen that night, the event sent my life on a clear trajectory, one that would take me to live a while in Memphis and later to return to spend my 50th birthday in front of the Lorraine, holding candles amidst a crowd of a hundred or so others.

And I would make human rights and civil rights a holy calling. I would have to stick my neck out for others less fortunate than myself, I told myself that night in ’68.

I read every sermon, lecture, and interview MLK ever gave. I watched Videos. I still carry a tattered copy of a collection of his writings with me in my knapsack, my favourite among them Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool. In it, he is reduced to tears at a kitchen table over a cup of coffee after receiving a death threat phone call in the middle of the night.

What does all this have to do with Prairie writing, you might ask? King was a preacher first and foremost, he insisted, but he was also a storyteller and a historian of the people. And the prairies have a history of great writing by preachers and champions and prophets of the people. I like Joan Chittister’s definition of a pophet: “one who calls us to become the fullest, not basest, of what it means to be human.”

Besides the obvious orators of fiery rhetoric and reasoning, Tommy Douglas and Nellie McClung, the former giving us universal health care, the latter forcing pay equity for women, the Prairies breed pragmatic, bullshit-detecting observers. They live among the people they fight for and write about, and so they get the details right.

It is a gift for detail that pull us into the work of journalists and historians Barry Broadfoot, James Gray and Grant McEwan. And that same gift pulls onto the saddles of the horses of cowboy artists, and writers Will James and R. D. Symons, whose Where the Wagons Led is a classic depiction of the first cattle drives.

But even more illustratively grounded in place are the works of Indigenous writers, who write about their shared existence with plants and animals of the territory the way we might write about our siblings because, for them, they are. A predominantly oral culture, we are now benefitting from authors willing to write down their stories in English, so we can come to a full, not base, life.

I remember the paradigm shift that occurred when I read Marie Campbell’s Halfbreed, now considered a classic. Her depiction of life for a Metis woman coming age in the 60s and 70s revealed a world of crushing poverty, cruelty and prejudice that should have destroyed her. But she kept her strong ties to her grandmother Cheechum, and her sense of humour and, above all, a value system that did not revolve around climbing the success ladder but was endeared to the circular nature of life.

Then came Warren Cariou’s Lake of the Prairies. It raised similar questions about belonging. I asked myself: How does one group become so absorbed by empire they never question the belief they have the right to usurp any territory and then, to add horror to hubris, erase the language(s) of the local inhabitants and enforce their own?

These are all challenging and guilt-provoking questions only engaging storytellers will lure us into listening. Thankfully a whole bounty of Indigenous writers from the prairie are getting the attention they deserve for their gripping and engaging works of nonfiction and fiction, winning our hearts, as well as long-deserved winning accolades and admiration, to name just a few: Five Little Indians by Michele Good, Katherena Vermette’s The Break and anything by Richard Wagamese, who passed away far too soon. In each of these books, if we are open, we will be brought to tears and come to terms with the common humanity, often mediated by this immense geographic territory we share with others and The Other. And we will, no doubt, be carrying their books in our knapsacks for years to come.