“8” in “Indigiqueerness”
I want to talk about the writing you did when you were young. You said you started writing when you were five. Do you go back and read those poems and stories? What were they about?
They’re quite embarrassing! They’re retellings of fairy tales and fables. I created hyper-femme women who were the most bad-ass characters I could imagine at the time.
As a teenager, I had a good connection with my high school English teacher, Annika Nussbaum. People taking classes with her still tell me that she expresses fondness for me as a student, writer, and person, which is so heart-warming.
I was never good at shop or subjects like that in school. I excelled in home-economics (I liked cooking and sewing).
To fill my other classes, I stacked up on English and creative writing electives. Brevity was never my forte, so when teachers asked for a short story, I handed in a novella! One novella was this post-apocalyptic world with a nuclear war brought about through the cloning of Jesus Christ through his DNA cells and people wanting to claim this clone, which started a world war. In the novella, there were post-post-apocalyptic characters who were queer and Black and Indigenous. All trying to thrive in this world, already knowing how to live in an apocalypse because they’d already been through one. Some of us have been through multiple already. That’s the premise of what I wrote in my mid to late teens. That’s not the plot line that I’ll use in my new novel, but some of those characters—like Jonny (the protagonist of Jonny Appleseed) who’s been with me for a decade—will return to me in a more mature sense now that I understand them better.
Recently, I was back at home, with COVID and isolation and having been so emotionally and mentally exhausted from the memory excavations I had to do for Making Love with the Land, my memoir about mental health. I was burned out on writing, and I was reading those characters I wrote as a teen, and I remembered that I loved them and still think about them. That revisiting turned into this new work.
It’s funny that characters can live within us for so long, not like a parasite but like a host. They fatten and become emboldened and return to us when we need them down the line. That’s what Jonny did for me in Jonny Appleseed, and these characters are doing that again.
Out on the reserve there isn’t much to look at. The occasional gas station, run-down shacks that pass for houses and burnt-yellow prairie fields as far as the eye can see. It has a distinct smell that I could never quite comprehend—maybe it smelled like grass and smoke. My dad always said that the land used to be rich and beautiful, rich with game and culture, beautiful with greenery and tanned men—though whenever I came here I saw anything but. I rarely visited the reserve and when I did it was only to see my grandmother.
I always found it embarrassing, admitting that my family lived on a reserve—and that I was from the reserve. I found it embarrassing that the stereotypes everyone jokes about were mostly true. I had an alcoholic uncle, a pregnant teenage cousin and every Indian I knew loved bingo. Not me; I thought if I looked white, I was white.
I thought this shoddy, decimated area of land nothing but a cesspool of welfare and gangs. To the reserve, I was an outsider—one of “them.” I remember once going to the mall—which was made up of a dollar store, a discount grocery store, a bank, and the band office where one could always find a line of people waiting for their cheques—and being looked down on by the adults and bullied by the teenagers in their do-rags and baggy clothes.
Whenever I went I’d usually confine myself to my grandmother’s. Her home was warm and always smelled like bannock and tea. Together we’d stay up and talk into the early hours of the morning. We’d sit side by side on her couch blanketed beneath her knitted couch spread and sip overly sweet tea while we listened to the songs of the crickets. She’d crack off a piece of bannock with her strong, aged hands, slather it with rhubarb jam and pass it to me. There we’d sit for hours watching reruns of wrestling, one of us occasionally rearranging the bunny ears on her television whenever Bret the Hitman Hart was about to deliver his finishing blow.
She’d tell me about her life as she reminisced on the photographs in her living room.
“That one there, that’s your mother—boy, was she a handful. And that one there, that’s your Uncle Jay—lemme tell ya, that boy loved his ketchup. And over here, that’s your grandpa, best hunter on the reserve.”
My grandmother died when I was twelve. It was the last time I’d visit Peguis for a long time. I went to her funeral, buried her and went to the reception. I filled myself with bannock and rhubarb jam until my stomach hurt—I had to remember its texture, its taste, its memories—and drank tea until my stomach was bloated.
When we were driving back to Selkirk my dad handed me a wooden box.
“M’boy, Grandma wanted you to have this.”
It was a small, homemade wooden box with the prairie’s seasons painted on each side. A turtle was painted on top of the box with little yellow and red circles in its shell. I opened the box and found dozens of recipes. The recipe for her bannock sat in front alongside a little handwritten note that read: To my boy I leave my most precious—my recipes. Make all the Bannock and rabbit stew your little stomach can handle, and one day make it for your children. When you’re old give this box to them so they can make it for their children and their children’s children. Be proud m’boy, never forget who you are.
As we neared the sign that read, Welcome to Peguis, I saw the most magnificent prairie fire that I’d ever seen; a fire that roared through the fields during that brisk autumn evening, with flames that flickered and danced like parading devils atop the gold brown grass. A grey haze of smoke billowed into the fire-laden sky and filled the air with the rich, sweet smell of smoke.
Excerpt from “My Grandmother’s Bannock,” a short piece written from the perspective of David Barnes, an early character.
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