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Reading Wednesday
Jul. 28th, 2021 08:02 amJust finished: Indigenous Toronto: Stories that Carry This Place, edited by Denise Bolduc, Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, Brian Wright-McLeod and John Lorinc. This was excellent and I'll likely buy at least one reference copy for my classroom. The essays were variable in quality, but it's such an important, fascinating, seldom-heard history.
The Breathing Hole by Colleen Murphy and Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy, translated by Janet Tamalik McGrath. This one is about a 500-year-old polar bear, rescued by an Inuit woman as a cub and raised as her son. It follows the bear through the pre-colonization era, the Franklin Expedition, and a climate change ravaged future. It's exactly as depressing as you might imagine. It's also translated into Nattilingmiutut, which is super cool, and an interesting collaboration between a settler playwright and an Inuit writer and translator.
Paying the Land by Joe Sacco. I love everything Sacco does, and this is no exception. This is about the Dene people in the Northwest Territories as they adapt to, and resist in turns the encroachment of settler society and resource extraction. It's a fascinating story of colonization, complicity, and survivance. Sacco is a thoughtful writer, at times questioning his own participation in the process. Is he different than the oil companies, given that he too has come to extract something from the people? It's also a story that is very much aided by the art, as he captures the sweeping landscapes and the sheer difficulty of survival on the land.
I did notice things that I might not have before I read so many books by Indigenous authors. Sacco, as he is in all of his work, comes at the story as an outsider and a journalist, and as always depicts himself differently than he does his subjects, with scathing caricature instead of realism. It seems odd to say that such a brutal story is in some ways not brutal enough, but that was the overall impression I got. As in this is a story where compromise and reconciliation exist as possibilities, whereas I'm not sure that they do. He also uses phrases like "Canada's indigenous people," and it's a credit to the circles I exist in that I stumble upon that rarely enough that it jumps out at me.
Overall, though, I think it's a very effective, powerful book, and it portrays the diversity and nuance in the ways different Dene communities and individuals survive in a very sensitive way.
The Breathing Hole by Colleen Murphy and Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy, translated by Janet Tamalik McGrath. This one is about a 500-year-old polar bear, rescued by an Inuit woman as a cub and raised as her son. It follows the bear through the pre-colonization era, the Franklin Expedition, and a climate change ravaged future. It's exactly as depressing as you might imagine. It's also translated into Nattilingmiutut, which is super cool, and an interesting collaboration between a settler playwright and an Inuit writer and translator.
Paying the Land by Joe Sacco. I love everything Sacco does, and this is no exception. This is about the Dene people in the Northwest Territories as they adapt to, and resist in turns the encroachment of settler society and resource extraction. It's a fascinating story of colonization, complicity, and survivance. Sacco is a thoughtful writer, at times questioning his own participation in the process. Is he different than the oil companies, given that he too has come to extract something from the people? It's also a story that is very much aided by the art, as he captures the sweeping landscapes and the sheer difficulty of survival on the land.
I did notice things that I might not have before I read so many books by Indigenous authors. Sacco, as he is in all of his work, comes at the story as an outsider and a journalist, and as always depicts himself differently than he does his subjects, with scathing caricature instead of realism. It seems odd to say that such a brutal story is in some ways not brutal enough, but that was the overall impression I got. As in this is a story where compromise and reconciliation exist as possibilities, whereas I'm not sure that they do. He also uses phrases like "Canada's indigenous people," and it's a credit to the circles I exist in that I stumble upon that rarely enough that it jumps out at me.
Overall, though, I think it's a very effective, powerful book, and it portrays the diversity and nuance in the ways different Dene communities and individuals survive in a very sensitive way.
