Somewhere on a tiny island in the North Pacific, I row to the government dock from our lovely old 1946 wooden cruiser and hitch a ride into town, a town named after another old wooden ship from another era, HMS Ganges. It’s a small island, but now a very popular island, sadly infested with too many Tesco tractors or their like (Mercedes G-Wagons, e.g.,) on land and too many Tupperware boats (over-sized plastic yachts) by sea. We who have sailed in to one of the harbours belong to an eccentric class of old workboats, skippered by equally eccentric skippers who pour time, love, and probably too much money into keeping British Columbian mariner history alive. But I digress.

The trip into town is twofold: to get supplies and to pick up a vital piece of equipment, a small pump, for the boat (I did say it is an old wooden boat). The pump is being shipped from the mainland via seaplane to downtown Ganges and so I have a few hours to spend shopping and window shopping and maybe I’ll get something to eat. Over the past decade or so, the vibe here on the island has gone from quiet village and old-school shrub (think tie-dye and VWs) to high-end cars, linen, and cranky everyone. Gone is the beautiful gem of an island in the North Pacific that I first set eyes upon at age 17. Back then it was quiet and kind and humble. Now it’s in shock. The island is in shock.

There’s a great bakery here, one of those old hippy endeavours that used to serve huge, whole wheat cinnamon buns that basically took a week to digest but was oh so delicious. Well it’s still here, but the Tupperware boat crowd and the G-Wagon crowd now take up all the space and the lineups are out the door. The staff looks miserable so I decide to head over to the bookstore to pick up a weekend NYTs (ya, I know, but hey, there’s gotta be SOME upside to the linen crowd) before heading to the grocery store. I enter the bookstore, truly one of the best in the region, and failing to get a NYTs I grab a New York Times Book Review, which is always a thoughtful read.

There’s a lady in front of me, dressed in rather funky clothes wearing funky glasses. She gives off neither old shrub nor Tupperware/G-Wagon vibes. She’s picking up a book she’s ordered so is def. a ‘local’, albeit I can clearly see she is not really a local (the funky glasses) — I mean I’ve been coming to this island for decades and have watched the changes and can read the people pretty well. As the lady puts her book into her bag I put my mag on the counter and cheerily ask the woman at the till, ‘So, how about that Alice Munro?’

Well, dear reader, YOIKS is what I have to say when summarizing the convo in the little bookstore on the little island on the edge of the continent. We three women, of varying age and clearly of different backgrounds, albeit with an obvs love of literature, all agree at how disappointing and disgraceful the story is of how Andrea Skinner, daughter of Jim and Alice Munro, and stepdaughter of Carol Sabiston and the pedophile step-father, Gerald Fremlin who abused her, how utterly she was failed by ALL of them. And not just for a short while, but for decades. And she was failed by so many more, including many journalists she reached out to to no avail.

All three of us are appalled we say. I ask the women if they want to know how I REALLY feel about Munro and they say yes. I tell them that I for one am not ‘let down’ by Alice Munro the writer/artist because I gave up reading her a few decades ago. I tried and tried to read her short stories in The New Yorker and only got a third of the way in and gave up on them: she was just too damned cold for me. Icy cold, with that perfect, clever prose, I found the writing to be missing soul. And I found the stories cruel. So I quit, I just plain quit trying to read her just like I long ago quit trying to read Margaret Atwood. I suppose I wrote their work off as too Ontario for my liking, because, honestly, after living, working, and studying in Ont. for five years, I’d had enough of the type of people they write about and whom I found rather dull in their pursuit of things, stuff. (Though I really like the Anishinaabeg from Ont. with whom I’ve met and studied Ojibwe.) But again, I digress.

‘Me too’, says lady with funky glasses. ‘I quit reading her a long time ago too! And do you mind if I give you women MY two cents?’ ‘YES!’, we reply in unison. ‘Well Jim Munro should have protected his daughter. He sent her back AFTER she told her dad what happened? What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with the mother, the step-mother?’ We all shake our heads. I tell her I had always found, when living in Victoria, Jim to be rather preoccupied and aloof at his store, and even at a private party I once attended at his and Carol’s house. But I’d always supposed it was because I was a minor, minor, minor writer and he was attached, albeit in a divorcy way, with a truly GREAT writer and he had a serious business to run that shared her name!!

‘And Alice was a f*cking b*tch!!! I knew her in Toronto!’ the funky lady pronounced. ‘I had a bookstore and she’d come in for something or other and she would barely speak to me. She didn’t have the time of day for me even though we sold her goddamn books.’ And so our convo continued, all three of us sharing disgust at the hypocrisy of those adults, and us sharing the dirty secret that we didn’t like Alice Munro’s books, not for a long, long time (nor Atwood’s tbh). Nor Alice’s short stories in The New Yorker. I threw all of my Munro novels out before I moved to Scotland 20 years ago.

‘So what’s the plan with her books?’ I asked the bookstore person. ‘We just ordered in a bunch before all of this story broke. Nobel Prize winner and all that …’. ‘Oh dear’, we said. But she just shrugged.

Mid-afternoon, such a hot July, I crawl into my cool, dark bedroom, check messages, and one comes through, electronically: “My wife has died, I know this is late notice but there’s a memorial for her at the mess and I wanted you to know. How are you girl?”

Scramble describes best, finding my black linen dress — a permanent funeral dress it now seems, as I’ve worn it to the funerals of far too many young ones this past year. I splash water on my face, drag a brush through my tangle of post-chem0 hair, drive fast through busy Saturday lanes across the city to Regimental HQ in a city almost an hour away. Too late, too late, buzzed into the battalion lines by the duty clerk, candles still burn on a table set with linen outside the door, the door opening to the mess. Inside, familiar food and wine and whiskey, but no J. He left, overwhelmed, overcome, his comrades say. Grief on such a beautiful day in July, it feels extra unfair, extra wrong.

I sign the book of memory, of condolences, flip pages and pages of photographs of that young girl and J, so happy, so happy, on a beach, on a mountain top, all the places young ones should, no must, go to celebrate such aliveness. And now she’s gone. The RSM fetches a glass of port for me, urges me to grab some food (I have no appetite, I eat a single olive), we drink. And I weep. For them both, but especially for J, tall, lanky as I think of him, remember the first time I met him way back at Wainwright in the spring of 2009 before they went over. In the back of a LAV, with a medic, me saddled to DCoy, a rifle company, their mandate to show me what I needed to see, and above all, to keep me, the war artist, alive. Then again, tall in dress uniform at this and at that, him recovering from IED strike, the death of an officer, so much, so much and so young. And now this.

I weep in the mess. It’s one I am familiar with, as once I was a guest speaker for their annual dinner — and I swear I could read the minds of the 40 NCOs as I stood to speak, ‘What the hell is a poet doing here? Just why?‘ — warm polished wood, brass everywhere, framed history on the walls. An officers mess is a place where things are done as they are done, and they are done right. Last time I was in this mess, after speaking, the men jumped up from their seats, clapped loud, long, perhaps with relief that I’d done my homework, consulted the WWI war diaries (a pleasant surprise the Regimental historian later told me), knew more than a little about what it means to go to war, to get dirty, exhausted, to lose, or maybe it meant the dinner was soon over and they could go take a piss (it’s a thing, folks). They then bought me drinks. Too many, I’m afraid, I’m a light-weight. And the adjutant, a Captain, who later drove me home, had to pour me in through my apartment door.

Thinking about all of this, I suppose the poignancy of going to a memorial for a beloved wife, a young wife, lost so impossibly young, is that the officers mess is a place of preparing for/remembering war. War everywhere. It’s its raison d’être. And yet this soldier’s wife, well she had been through wars of her own, his as well as hers, ones she/they had been desperate to win.

The day before the memorial I had gone to Spanish Banks. I’d never seen the tide so far out that I could touch the marker as I did that day. And never had I felt so grateful as on that hot July day.

My mom grew up near there, a poor kid in Kitsilano. She’d had so little growing up, skirting poverty, but she did have the beach, the ocean, the mountains. And dad, a poor kid from Nova Scotia, well he was stationed with the RCAF at Jericho during the war, and always lamented never making it into theatre, so I wore his badge into the war zone, A’stan, back in 2009, fastened to my shirt with a safety pin, under my frag vest, and when landed in Kandahar, I said ‘You made it dad, you made it to war afterall’, tho he’d been long dead. And the day before the memorial for J’s wife, I felt both of my parents as I’ve never felt them anywhere else. And they are young, unencumbered. Theirs is a shimmering of a world of 1942, even in war. Knee deep in the ocean that day, I could feel them with me in the cool waves, and once they were happiness.

Three summers ago, the one I’ll call JA, and Frieda, our dog, well they used to bring me to Spanish Banks in the long hours before I took chem0, sort of like a last supper of wind and water. Every three weeks back then I prepared to be beaten, as with a chemical baseball bat, kneecapped with poisons so toxic the nurses in the c@ncer ward had to wear head-to-toe PPE, the compounds so toxic the nurses never left my side, no not for a second. For an hour, sometimes longer, they injected thick red chemicals into my veins, chemicals the colour of Merlot (but patently NOT Merlot). They would then watched me closely lest the chemicals drop onto my skin and burn me, or breach my veins and k*ll me, lest they caused my organs to cease. The ‘Red D*vil’ they call one of the five dr*gs they gave me. One of the five that k*lled the Stage IV bl00d c@ncer that tried to k*ll me that summer, and then, they were the five dr*gs that almost k*lled me, each round pushing me closer and closer to the edge, landing me in the hospital three times, taking out my lungs as they did (but miracle of miracle, my lungs slowly came back).

Some days that summer, the only summer of my life I did not swim (or was dandled as a baby) in the salt chuck, I was too weak to leave the car and could only watch, longingly, as JA and Frieda made their way across the wide grass to the beach, that black pup, our new dog, wild with excitement as she ran circles towards the surf. And some days I might slowly walk towards a bench, sit and watch dogs roar and biff and splash and nip. Then, later, that autumn and winter, after the torment of my final c@ncer treatment was done, my lungs crept back into me, and I could gather enough oxygen to walk again slowly to the water’s edge where knee deep I cupped my hands, tasted the salt water as I splashed my face and I knew I was going to live. What I didn’t know at the time was how long it would take for me to actually live again.

The day before the memorial for J’s wife, my dog and I walked a kilometre out to the water’s edge and back again. Out there on the edge I took off my clothes and swam while the dog, a mountain dog after all, waded halfway in.

The next day, for J and his beloved wife, I wept.

We were war crazy Lazarus,
the eve we slipped under your duvet & HBC blanket;

the long Winter Solstice night of angel choirs
who sang à l’Église de Saint Albert,

“Oh Holy Night” after

cornmeal snow swish-chh’ed swish-chh’ed

every click clack of our old-school snowshoes beside the frozen lake,

where we’d hiked, made tracks across Elk Island —

pregnant that first winter with something possible.

Under wolf-watch:
you’d brewed espresso, soldier capable (I remember pix

of your high Arctic trek with the Northern Rangers)

we ate fat green grapes, squares of dark chocolate, good bread, good cheese,
laid traps for joy in the icy wake we’d made all day.

Angels of the Snows, then looked up, look up, and up

saw Corbeau!

Circle black wings fresh winter’s sky, clear-eyed

blackbird crawked: “That k… k…. k… officer lost

in the desert last year, Andrew,

Lieutenant Nuttall, one year dead,

Well, k…k….k… he’s okay!”

and so we libated the snows with Jura Superstition,

“To Andrew!” and kissed.

Wolves blinked cool amber that Solstice,

Ancestors’ night-vision-green/sparkly fingertips

stretched the winter skies taught, aurora borealis

looked down upon us, “Love,” they said,

“Blessed be you who survive war”

then put us to bed.

In my arms you slept drugged deep,

I wrapped you so damned tight after war,

at midnight, opened your bedroom window just a crack

I heard them, all of them, especially the dead,

cry.

While 2020-21 was an enforced season of solitude for most of us, many of us carried on with our work despite all. During this time I had the great privilege of being the lead academic on a major Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project, Li Keur Indigenous Language Database. This partnership is with the Canadian Mennonite University, a small university in Winnipeg with a stated will towards reconciliation.

Drawing on my training as an information professional (MLIS), a scholar (PhD), and working closely with a tremendous team (see article) and generous, amazing translators and elders, we were able to explore aesthetic translation of Anishinaabemowin, French-Michif, and ‘Heritage’ (‘southern’) Michif, using the text from my new major work (with composers Neil Weisensel and Alex Kusturok), Li Keur, Riel’s Heart of the North, which premieres in Winnipeg in 2022 with the Winnipeg Symphony.

This research is just the tip of the iceberg. My goal is to develop a model transferable to other aesthetic translation projects of Indigenous languages. The translators we work with have told us that working on this project has stretched their translations skills even further. All I know is that the result of this collaboration is the gift of hearing the beautiful languages of the central continent brought to their rightful place at the heart of cultural institutions and performance venues where they rightfully belong!

At night, sometimes, from where we float

on False Creek in the cosy shell of our luxury

boat — gin palace, hardwood floors, plastic and pleasure

glass — I hear the sounds of rotors overhead.

 

Whirlybird, medivac, its race to Children’s or VGH

from Alert Bay, Rupert, Telqwa, Kitimat …

after medicine ran out: the flight to Vancouver 

 x-rays, MRIs, scalpels, last chance consults.

 

False Creek pounds black on stormy nights,

otters and seals now thump the dock.

From the bed that rocks with every wave

I heed the rotor-call-to-prayer, and beg for mercy.

 

Neil Weisensel and I are thrilled to be the recipients of a 2020 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Award — one that will enable me to work more closely with our Saulteaux and Michif(s) translators, and for Neil to found a Michif choir and to mentor Michif conductors. The work will be based on the text I’m writing for Li Keur, Riel’s Heart of the North, premiering in Winnipeg in October 2020 with the Winnipeg Symphony.

From the grant description:

“Dr. Steele will continue her work alongside the Indigenous translators to further develop protocols and methods of poetic translation (from English to Michif and Saulteaux) established in the initial phase of the project. Steele has a very strong connection to the Métis community and is highly respected by its members; the translators from the Metis and Saulteaux communities are Elders and traditional knowledge keepers and as such are highly qualified in their respective language and cultural traditions. In tandem with this, we will create a multimedia Michif/Saulteaux Pronunciation Database for the translated texts. This knowledge will be transmitted to the Metis Chorus, who will be involved in the October 2020 performance of Li Keur, through a series of workshops and seminars (see below).”

“The Michif/Saulteaux Pronunciation Database and translations will be made available to other interested parties, including but not limited to Indigenous language scholars, graduate students, the Indigenous communities to which our translators belong, singers and choirs in the extended Canadian musical community, and other interested groups. These resources will be valuable not just for additional future performances of Li Keur, but can serve as a model of methodology for other writers and creative artists wanting to create new works using Indigenous languages. It is important to note that the translations are intellectual property of the translators. We will be developing a proper strategy in concert with the translators, a Cultural Consultant, and other Elders to ensure this knowledge is appropriately mobilized.”

and this:

“The 80-person Metis Chorus will be created using connections established with, and outreach by, our community partners: Manitoba Metis Federation, l’Union Nationale Métisse de St. Joseph, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Manitoba Opera, our Indigenous translators, our Métis Chorus Director, and previous Metis Chorus members from 2018 workshop performances of Li Keur. In a series of further workshops and seminars, the Métis Chorus will integrate the results of our work with the Indigenous translators, making use of the Michif/Saulteaux Pronunciation Database. The Métis Chorus Director will be responsible for training the chorus and integrating it into the larger body of the piece, Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North, for performance in October 2020.”

Sometime ago, while I was living overseas for the majority of the past nine years, Canada embarked upon a consultation and conversation with the Indigenous nations. It was/is a huge and mightily ambitious project—to examine the impact of the past four centuries (or so) on the Indigenous peoples during the commencement of this nation of nations, Canada; the residential schools and how they harmed the Indigenous peoples in particular was the focus. A commission was established, thousands and thousands (millions?) of people participated, reports, summaries, and findings were made public.

Here is the commission’s stated goal: “There is an emerging and compelling desire to put the events of the past behind us so that we can work towards a stronger and healthier future. The truth telling and reconciliation process as part of an overall holistic and comprehensive response to the Indian Residential School legacy is a sincere indication and acknowledgement of the injustices and harms experienced by Aboriginal people and the need for continued healing. This is a profound commitment to establishing new relationships embedded in mutual recognition and respect that will forge a brighter future. The truth of our common experiences will help set our spirits free and pave the way to reconciliation.”

Besides the findings of the commission an accessible and beautifully written report was made available. One I highly recommend people read. In particular Vol. 3 on the Métis experience is of interest to us of Michif heritage as it describes the breadth of experiences of Michif peoples, many being quite different experiences than perhaps that of First Nations peoples or Inuit.

Another outcome of this laudable project was its Calls to Action (if you read this you’ll see that these calls are manageable). When I returned from the UK in 2016 I was intrigued and a bit overwhelmed by the ubiquitousness of these ‘calls to action.’ I saw them or heard of them almost everywhere I turned—from schools to churches to colleges and universities, media, sports orgs, and individuals. Almost all had drafted or articulated well-meaning sincere responses and programs to the calls for action. Meetings, visits and new partnerships with the local First Nations, self-examination became a modus vivendi. And that’s great. I began to notice, too, that there was a lot of wearing of hairshirts by some of the more well-meaning individuals. And so too, as the years rolled on and goals set out in 2015/16 failed to be attained, a lot of anger. (And it just occurred to me as I write this, that fuel for some of this might also be attributed to the rise of governance by tweet, the rise of the troll and the echo chamber etc. etc.)

Last night I spoke at a gathering at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre, an event hosted by Métis Night (a modest weekly gathering of Michifs far from home in the centre of the continent) and as part of the Heart of the City Festival. I was there with my co-collaborator, Neil Weisensel, soprano Leah Alfred of the Namgis, Kwagiulth Nation, the maestra of Michif dance Yvonne Chartrand, and Ella & the Other Fella (fiddler E. Speckeen and guitarist J. Hilberry) and the organisers of the festival, hosted by the stalwart Pat, who keeps the Michif peoples gathering. I spoke of the new major work I’m writing, a musical drama on Louis Riel that premieres in 2020 and introduced Leah and Neil who performed the ‘Mending of Violence’ aria, one I wrote the lyrics to and which we had translated into Saulteaux. Later we danced to Michif fiddle tunes and a fine time was had by all. But I also spoke of our project as a Truth & Reconciliation piece, one that has brought much joy and many challenges, and how my goal is to see our languages and narratives back where they belong, central to the cultures of the central continent.

Later in the evening, a well-known personage of the Nlaka’pamux First Nation took me aside and told me that my words had had an effect on him, and we arranged to meet to talk later about what I had to say. Last week too, I had the chance to speak to a primarily non-Indigenous university faculty on the TRC Calls to Action. They wanted to know what concrete things I could envision for their department. I do not doubt their sincerity, not one little bit, they are thinking, sensitive people who genuinely want to see change. Just as I do not doubt the sincerity of all the churches, arts org., educational institutes etc. who want to do the right thing. But I made some observations to them, as well as to the person from the Nlaka’pamux First Nation when he told me that ‘our youth are angry that nothing is happening’ that seemed to make sense.

We live in a reactive age. One engendered by spontaneous and somewhat anonymous communication. We live in a culture where we can cancel each other or ghost each other with no social penalty. We live in a culture that seems to have developed a Pavlovian response to likes and a whole host of icons that symbolise emotional responses. And these are responses we do not really have to be responsible for despite the harm they can bring others, and even ourselves. Given our digital responsive-ability we have also turned to wanting to solve problems immediately and this is what I see in all the ambitions and disappointments of the promises made in response to the TRC.

So my thoughts on the subject that I communicated to the Nlaka’pamux person and the university faculty are as follows:

We didn’t get here overnight folks, it took 400 years (at least) of cultural exposure/clash to get us to this place and we can’t resolve much, if anything, in four years, never mind 40. This is a generations-long project. But we’ve begun it and that counts for a lot. The starting place, I sincerely believe, is startlingly simple: to still ourselves, really still ourselves, and to develop our listening skills in preparation for speaking or responding.

To still ourselves. To listen. Prepares us to hear. This is the stuff of calm maturity, of peaceableness. Because we cannot hear anyone’s truths if we’re in high-response mode, nor can we make relationship (other than an enemy binary of them/us). Nor can others hear us if we are in response mode as we won’t be able to speak with eloquence or heart.

Yep, basic stuff. Don’t panic. And I sincerely hope, don’t give up. We can do this.

Here’s a nice article on my most recent doings! Thank you curator Paul Crawford, what an honour to share billing with Mary Riter Hamilton, one of my war artist heroes. She was neglected in her lifetime and I’m so glad Paul is bringing her home to us all.

How I love this article by Ocean Vuong for its insight into a different way of writing, especially handling narratives and literary techniques such as metaphor, and in the writing of On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous. I suppose I am grateful for Vuong’s voice at this moment because with the opera I am writing I feel pressured to write a classical dramatic arc with a main protagonist (Riel, of course), someone who DOES SOMETHING! In this much-anticipated work on Riel, I feel especially pressured to write something political/historical rather than the multi-layered work I have written to date, one with multiple persons, choruses, narrator, all working in an ensemble to create a whole. Thus it is fascinating to read Vuong’s literary provenance— that they are a poet does not surprise me.

In the article, Vuong (a McArthur Genius Award winner) writes: “In Western narratology, the plot is the dominant mode to which all characters are subordinate. But I wanted a novel to hold these characters thoroughly and, most importantly, on their own terms, free from a system of governance, even one of my own making. I could not employ the plot-heavy strategy because I needed these people to exist as they are, full of stories but not for a story.” Vuong cites

I love their commentary on the use of the metaphor from the point of view of non-Western literature. So often, it seems, we are warned not to write in clichés, nor to write in a style that is too metaphor-heavy. But Vuong comments that metaphor is ‘an alternate speech act’, and that ‘metaphor in the mouths of survivors became a way to innovate around pain’.” Oh how interesting, metaphor being a time-honoured building block of poetry empowers rather victimises the one who has experienced trauma; it is not a sidestep, nor a blocking.

What I am particularly intrigued with is how Vuong cites his use of Kishōtenketsu, a Chinese/Korean/Japanese literary form (Ki – Introduction; Shō – Development; Ten – Twist; and Ketsu – Conclusion). In this way they felt able to describe violence but not privilege it: ‘”It was important to me, at least in this book, that violence remain independent from any character’s self-worth, rendering it inert, terrible, and felt—but not a means of “development.” Through Kishōtenketsu, violence becomes fact and not a vehicle towards a climax.’

Now if I understand correctly, the Ten, or the twist, is a contrast rather than a climax in a ‘typical’ Western narrative arc. In some cases, the Ten is a cautionary tale within a tale (I’m just beginning research on the form so forgive me if I don’t have it correct!). Interestingly, Kishōtenketsu is used in gaming narratives (google the term in Google Scholar for a wide body of analyses), and given the relative youth of Vuong I could see how this might be a natural narrative ecology. The author offers this statement on why they used this form: ‘I could not employ the plot-heavy strategy because I needed these people to exist as they are, full of stories but not for a story.’ I like this very much in the context of my current work that focuses on the multi-cultural peoples—the composers and conductors may feel daunted as they juggle the forces on stage, but somehow, to me, it just feels right.

a quick note to say that two of my video installations have opened at the Penticton Art Gallery’s war artist show. I’m thrilled to know that I’m sharing the billing with Mary Riter Hamilton (1873-1954), my hero actually. Riter Hamilton spent three years painting the still-smouldering battlefields of the Western Front from 1919-1922, losing her health and partial eye-sight doing so and suffered greatly afterwards, financially and physically. Her work has been neglected for a century. I wish she could see it exhibited so beautifully by curator Paul Crawford. More photos from the exhibit coming soon!