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Short Stories Meditations, Medicine, and Stories
Difficulty with the Weather
A murder of crows flies overhead. I am thinking of Monkey Beach, Lisamarie, circular narratives and medicine; white symbols and mythology. Outside it is raining in the grey drizzly way which marks autumn, and as I sit looking up at the sky, I feel nauseous because I can’t reconcile these narratives to what I’ve been taught about literature. The last three hours I’ve spent looking at the rain, rereading the rants, poems, words, phrases, and disconnected sentences that have be borne of me since I started this course, and I just don’t know what to do with any of it. What is this journal supposed to look like? Why don’t I like anything I’ve written?
Floyd Smith was my great-grandfather. I have lots of questions. Where did he keep his stories? In my mind’s eye, I see these stories as wispy entities of light, entwined through my grandfather’s hair, hidden in his breast pocket, or held fast within a shoe. Who heard them? Did he tell them to his wife, a fair Irish woman, or did he wait for when his twin daughters would be old enough to remember his stories; to take, to shelter and preserve them simply in their retelling?
Until recently, I kept my stories in the hard drive of my computer. The hard drive of my computer is infected with viruses.
Thomas King is “not the Indian I had in mind” (King, 48). Indians from my childhood were tall, smooth, and muscular; rarely female. They usually wore a loin cloth and carried some kind of crude hatchet to murder pioneers with. I don’t remember how my schema of Indians developed, but I do remember standing in the bed of Lyall Creek: me, spreading thick lines of clay over my cheekbones, my bellybutton and arms; me, tying my hair back into the prerequisite braids, and tucking a long eagle feather behind my ear. Some of the other children had guns. Guns; plastic reminders of our societies’ fascination with violence:
‘Give your child a gun. Teach them that violence is an acceptable
method a methodic solution to human pollution.
Destroying the other isn’t killing,
it’s heroic. Preventative measures really.’
I want to know my Grandma’s stories. But I cannot ask her; Alzheimers. Even on her best days, she believes my mother to be her long deceased twin Arlene. She moves between homes and facilities, medicated; underrated. Grandma is alive because we keep her alive. It reminds me of what Betonie says in Ceremony: “In that hospital they don’t bury the dead, they keep them in rooms and talk to them” (123).
Where do I look if the stories of my mother’s family are lost? I want to take King’s advice. I don’t want to “say in the years to come that I would have lived my life differently if only I had heard the story” (King 151). .
Is my curiosity and persistence in ‘knowing’ my families’ stories a benchmark of my whiteness? Do I just want to ‘know’ because I can’t bear the thought of not knowing?
Home
Where is my home? I feel like a lost kitten, a puppy, any small helpless animal will do, really. I don’t think that I will ever identify Ireland or England or Wales as my home. I don’t really have the right to claim North America as my homeland; having one First Nations great-grandparent doesn’t make me any less foreign. Are white people allowed to have an identity crisis?
I’ve always considered Saturna Island, British Columbia my home. It never occurred to me to think otherwise. I was born there, I grew up there. In Dwellings, Linda Hogan suggests that ‘home’ is a place of medicine: “She was sick and had lost her faith in the medicine ways, she says, and has come back to the healing waters of the earth” (35). In my life I have found no place that offers me the medicine Saturna does. It is my refuge, my place of contemplation. When I strip off my clothes and wade into the ocean, walk along the sandy bottom; see flounders dart between my feet; feel the cold water creep up my body and around my throat, I know, I know where I stand in relation to the earth. I know that I am vulnerable, and I’ve been fed too many lies about my greatness. I feel as though I could duck and bob in that water forever; become cleaner and wholer. But this medicine, what I call my medicine, came at a heavy price.
In his essay The Spirit Weeps¹, Stephen Hume discusses how Canadian museums continue to display the stolen artwork of Native peoples. Saturna Island too was stolen by white people, put on display, used to turn a profit; it’s cultural and spiritual importance picked clean by the hands which sifted through midden and grave. Hume says: “It is the
constant bleat of Canadian society with respect to native peoples. It was somebody else’s fault. It is somebody else’s responsibility.” I look at my home; it is one of the most pristine, ecologically sound areas left in the world. The nature of Saturna heals me, but I cannot stop thinking of how I came to enjoy this beauty. Can I take responsibility and still keep ‘my’ medicine?
¹ Stephen Hume, “The Spirit Weeps”, in Landmarks: A Process Reader, 2004, Toronto, Ontario, Pearson Education Canada Inc., pg. 84.
Science Class
I am one-eighth Huron. I think back to first year biology where I dissected female quails full of unlaid life. One-eighth: Pie charts and fractions, ventricle cuts and eggs popping one by one from fallopian tubes. When one destroys life, one also destroys the life which would’ve been born of that life: families, lineages, histories, and stories. One-eighth: A dead term; a vague description. How might you cut me up?
Naturally you will discover that it is my left-hand which is Huron. When I was a child, learning to write, my teacher would pull the pencil from my left hand and force it into my right, shaping my fingers around a rubber mold. This taught me the proper way of things.
Ruminations on “White Medicine”
“We make whole our broken-off pieces of self and world. Within ourselves, we bring together the fragments of our lives in a sacred act of renewal” (40). Linda Hogan, Dwellings.
In Leslie Marmon Silko’s narrative Ceremony, and Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach, the authors critically examine the role white medicine has played in Native society. The authors define white medicine as the medicine of the Western world, which aims to heal the body of one who is sick, but in contrast, Indian medicine provides healing of the whole- body, mind, and spirit. The novels’ protagonists Tayo and Lisamarie must face, in their respective narratives, the devastation of white medicine and the ways in which this white medicine has shaped their peoples’ histories. In hearing their peoples’ stories, and by traveling through forgotten landscapes, these characters learn of the old medicine ways and are able to start a journey of healing.
In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, the character of Tayo, a man of both indigenous Mexican and Laguna Indian descent, finds himself in the “white smoke” of a war veteran hospital. In this hospital, Tayo feels invisible; an outline. And when Tayo is finally sent home to his family, a white doctor has the insensibility to tell him to cry. Tayo’s experience in the white hospital exemplifies how destructive white medicine is in its ability to make Tayo “hollow inside” (15), and Tayo’s treatment by the white doctor exposes the absolute power which white people feel they have over Indians. To ask Tayo to cry is to ask Tayo to forget the hundreds of years of unspeakable abuse, degradation and eradication of a culture that white people inflicted upon Indians. To ask Tayo to cry is to ask Tayo for his gratitude- for all that white people have done for him and his people.
In Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, we meet the character Lisamarie, who like Tayo, has lost much at the hands of white medicine. In a series of narrative flashbacks, Lisamarie introduces us to her grandmother Ma-ma-moo, who first teaches Lisamarie about the dichotomy of medicine: “There’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s like oxasuli. Tricky stuff” (154).
Here, Ma-ma-moo teaches Lisamarie that while a plant such as oxasuli can be a powerful medicine when respected; in the wrong hands this same medicine can be deadly.
When Tayo returns home to the Laguna reserve, he finds himself surrounded by a tribe no less sick than he, but adept at coping. Tayo’s Grandma realizes that Tayo’s sickness is deeper than its physical manifestations and that despite Auntie’s protestations and the Army doctor’s warning, it is necessary to send for a healer trained in the ways of Indian medicine: “He’s my grandson. If I send for old Ku’oosh, he’ll come” (33). In this novel, Grandma is the one person on the Laguna reserve who recognizes Tayo’s need for healing, and his potentiality to bring healing to the long divided Laguna and Mexican peoples.
In Monkey Beach, white medicine shapes Lisamarie’s experiences with the white shrink, who is shown by Robinson to be the very embodiment of western medicine- one who tries to cleanse Lisamarie of her ‘false’ visions and ghosts. Most important in the novel, however, is the way in which white medicine has historically affected the Haisla people as a whole: In the creation of the residential school system. In Monkey Beach, the characters of Mick and Aunt Trudy both experienced, and continue to experience the nightmare of this white institution, whose goal was to essentially ‘treat’ and ‘heal’ Native people by stripping them of their heathen culture. The after-effect of this “white medicine” manifests itself in Aunt Trudy’s alcoholism, and Mick’s inability to settle down, as well as his nightmares. The residential schools also have a lasting effect on the Haisla people in their legacy of sexual abuse; the abuse becomes a cycle which the character Josh perpetuates upon his niece Karaoke. At the end of the novel, the reader learns that it is Josh’s actions against his niece which incite Jimmy’s need for revenge. Yet Jimmy does not simply seek retribution for what Josh has done, but for what residential schools and white men have done to First Nations people.
In Ceremony, Tayo’s journey of healing culminates in his experience in the desert; in his resistance to the ‘witchery’ which tries to make him one more victim in a “deadly ritual” (253). Yet Tayo does not fall victim to the witchery or fulfill the Army doctor’s prophecy of victimization. He instead allows the principles of Indian medicine to guide him away from violence, for he realizes that vengeance will not heal the pain of his heart, nor assuage the devastation which white people brought upon the Laguna and Mexican peoples. Tayo’s completion of his own ceremony, the antithesis of witchery’s “deadly ritual” (253), gives him hope for the regeneration and renewal of his culture.
Analogous to Tayo’s defeat over the witchery, in Monkey Beach, Lisamarie returns from the land of the dead, having fought off the powers which seek to destroy her. Monkey Beach too ends on a note of hope, as Lisamarie has managed to free herself from the constraints of white medicine which ended Ma-ma-moo, Mick and Jimmy’s lives, and she now can honor Ma-ma-moo’s wishes by learning to respect her own “dangerous gift” (371). In conclusion, both the narrative of Monkey Beach and the story of Tayo in Ceremony examine the ways in which white medicine has affected Indian peoples, and in both novels the protagonists complete curative journeys to healing, and gain new awareness of their histories.
(This essay feels strangely inadequate. How unsettling.)
A Thought about Earth
In The Truth About Stories, Thomas King wonders “what kind of world might we have created” (28) had the Genesis creation story been told differently. What if the story for white Christians was one of cooperation, tolerance and forgiveness as we see in the Charm creation story, as opposed to “egotism and self-interest” (26) which we find in the biblical rendering?
What I found most interesting about the Charm and Genesis creation stories and the Mayan creation story from Dwellings is that in all of these narratives, humans are created from earth, dust, or mud. Not from fire, wind or water- earth. So why does the Genesis story end differently? With humans fighting, as opposed to revering, the very earth they came from?
Yesterday
Floyd Smith died. His daughters were four and too young to have heard his stories. Those stories, particular to my great-grandfather, ended with him, just as my grandma Avis’ stories ended with her. The history of one whole family, a lineage, disappears into earth and time.
Today
I have already begun to tell stories.
