A Short History of Indians in Canada
MY UNCLE, who is an Elder and a Healer, is fond of the phrase, “In darkness there is light, and in light there is darkness.” He usually pulls this out with a smile just before he leads sweat lodge. On one level, it is meant to explain part of the mystery and beauty of the sweat lodge, where those who are trained can see the spirits who cross over to visit the living as points of light. It is also meant to indicate that relying only on what we can see in daylight may obscure the deeper relationships that lie under the surface.
The night I began reading Thomas King's short-story collection A Short History of Indians in Canada, I had a detailed and bizarre dream. It began as a day at a fair, with games of chance and target throwing. However, all the targets were people, who gradually transformed as the games progressed: some becoming part animal, some part machine, some part of a strange new terrain. Eventually, the transformations spread until my dream friend and I were the last two people in the world struggling against an apocalyptic vision of humanity twisting into animals, machines and cubist landscapes. When I awoke, my uncle's words came back to me, and I remembered how he spoke of the visions one sees in the dream world and how they are instructive.
Thomas King's book is like thisâe"a series of stories that are part dream, part satire. The first story, from which the book takes its title, sets the tone suddenly, with the kind of shock that you feel when a dream that starts out set in an average day abruptly becomes surreal. Disorienting, but somehow understood as having a certain logic, as if you always knew there were rules that would have made sense of all the weirdness blooming all around you if you had only paid attention when they were explained to you.
The story presents us with a typical business tourist in Toronto looking for some excitement in the big smoke; he is directed to Bay Street. However, once he gets there, admiring the skyscrapers, he is astonished to see a “flock of Indians fly into the side of the building. Smack. Smack.” As the bodies of Indians rain around him like jumpers from a doomed tower, he meets city workers who arrive to bag the dead and tag the living to be nursed back to health and released into the wild. They show him how to tell Cree from Mohawk and Navajo with the help of a guidebook, and cheerfully assert, “Most of them are stunned.”
Thomas King
Most of the stories in the collection keep this tone, with that dry, deadpan voice that doesnâe(TM)t want you to know right away that there is a joke being played on you. Sometimes you get the feeling that the joke is a little bit cruel, a little bitter. One tale of a rich white man who collects Indians as decorative items on his estate names the character “Hudson,” and he peers at his collection through his “bay” window. In another, a Native boy gets a poor grade in school for analyzing the Indian Act as a plot by time-travelling Borg from the Star Trek series. His grandfather, who joins the debate by suggesting that the logical Vulcans or greedy Ferengi are perhaps to blame, comforts him.
Children are central to many of the stories, and loss of parents or partners figures strongly as well. It is as if childhood dream and fantasy states are being used to help interpret the larger painful issues of racism, loss and loneliness.
When I began reading these stories, I found them felt truncated, hard to warm up to. I thought there was too much irony, some kind of humour I could not get. It felt as though the stories didnâe(TM)t like me, as though they had invited me into a place where I didn't understand the rules. But when I went back to the stories again, I had a better feeling about it. Somehow the rules of this surreal space, where Indians and whites confront the pain and loss of racism in stories that sound like trickster tales, felt like they made sense.
I think the dream helped me to understand. I felt comforted and finally amused and a little wicked, as when a mischievous and beloved uncle tells you tales that you know mean more than they say, and you know you will understand them better when you are older.âe"Steven James Stunell
