- Thomas King Reads - the mighty quill
Thomas King, child of a Cherokee father and a Greek-German mother is Canadian. He grew up in California, returning back across the border only in 1980, to teach at the University of Lethbridge. One of Canada's best-known native writers, KIng is appreciated for his incisive intellect as well as his zany humour, showcased in his long-running CBC radio drama The Dead Dog Cafe.
An early novel Green Grass, Running Water (Houghton Mifflin, 1993, Bantam 1994 ISBN 0553373684), was short-listed for the Governor General's Award. King gives a unique and oblique view of Canadian history, and pokes unrestrained fun at the Queen's omnipresent blue-sashed portrait, the RCMP, and other revered Canadian institutions. The native trickster Coyote is only one of many weird and wonderful characters who show up in this marvelous book.
Thomas King Gives 2003 Massey Lectures
In 2003, Thomas King was the first person of aboriginal descent to give the Massey Lectures. Entitled The Truth about Stories, a Native Narrative, these talks are packed with the powers of a story teller and intellectual at the top of his game.
Beginning each of the five talks with the same tale, King emulates the oral traditions of his ancestors by varying the details ever so slightly at each retelling. Through the five lectures, he moves sure-footed from light stories to dark ones, from comedy to tragedy, from satire to the historical vicissitudes of native-unfriendly government policy. He comes at last to the profoundly sad and puzzling question asked by the native in our less than inclusive midst: "Why do you dislike us so much?" The listener is pierced to the heart with the pathos of this question.
Drew Hayden Taylor is twenty years younger than Thomas King. Born in 1962 in Curve Lake, Ontario, he has been active in native theatre groups, written a television series and been writer in residence at the University of Michigan and the University of Western Ontario.
Taylor Writes a Vampire Story for Teens
Self-described as "Pretty Like a White Boy," the blue-eyed Taylor jokes about his dual Ojibway and Caucasian ancestry, combining the two terms to coin a word for a new race that he can fit into, the Occasions, in which he then claims the status of a Special Occasion. His novel The Night Wanderer, (Annick Press, 2007, ISBN 9781554511006) is sheer genius, a humorous and adventurous combination of teenage angst, contemporary life on the reserve, and plain old-fashioned vampirism. It is an easy read, designed for kids in Grades 8 through 11. A well as being a novelist, playwright and essayist, Taylor is also a very entertaining speaker.
Four years younger than Taylor, Joseph Boyden is another towering talent, a citizen as well as an artist. Upon winning the 2008 Scotia Bank Giller Prize, Boyden says in a National Post interview that he plans to set up a scholarship for aboriginal teens. In the same interview, he speaks of bridging divides by overcoming unrealistic and romanticized views and showing native people for what they were, with both positive and negative qualities.
Joseph Boyden Portrays Contemporary Aboriginal Culture in his Prize-Winning Novels
His first novel, Three Day Road, (Penguin, 2005) won the Rogers Writers' Trust fiction prize. It deals with the ancestors of the protagonist of his recent book, Through Black Spruce.(Viking, 2008 ISBN 978-0-670-06363-5) Inspired by the story of a real aboriginal World War I sniper, the prequel describes the harrowing experience and the dangerous return from war of a drug-addicted wreck of a veteran.
A person of mixed native and Caucasian ancestry, Boyden too has a foot in two worlds. Quite literally, in fact; he divides his time between New Orleans, where he teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature, and a reserve in remote Northern Ontario.
This hard subject matter in both books is treated with humanity, warmth and hope, and Boyden's readers look forward to the historical novel he is planning to complete the trilogy. In 2009, he was awarded an honourary doctorate by Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. His work has been widely translated.
In his novels, at least, Boyden is not primarily a funny writer. Yet the protagonists of Through Black Spruce show occasional glimmerings of gentle humour. Will Bird, the has-been drunken bush pilot, sees himself and his contracting life with a certain wry humour, and so, at moments, does the former high fashion model Annie, who goes to the city in search of her lost sister, only to be caught in the same toils of glitz, booze, drugs and treachery of the fashion runways.
Drama Still Spiced With a Little Humour
However, humor is a less prominent factor in Boyden's work than in the work of Thomas King and Drew Hayden Taylor. In Through Black Spruce, the reader is plunged at first into the harshly surreal present of the reserve, with the tragedy of glue-sniffing kids and the motorcycle gangsters who bring in the crack cocaine. However, the novel progressed from these harsh beginning toward an increasing sense of hope.
Reading on into the novel brings relief with the gradual discoveries that the dead are perhaps not dead, and the murderer perhaps not a murderer after all. The proagonist, though initially he considers himself a dead man, gradually comes to understand that in spite of his profound suffering, he still has the capacity to live. Thus, like Boyden's first novel, this book offers readers moral solace.
All three of these writers are major contemporary talents, and none is easy to categorize. However, there are some interesting parallels. All have both native and Caucasian ancestry; all write about native experience and identity, all are anchored in dual histories and dual cultures. From King, the eldest, to Boyden, the youngest, all deserve recognition and respect for their brilliant storytelling powers..
In short, the literary flowering that Canada has been experiencing over the past thirty years is experiencing an infusion of new talent from within. Along with the many naturalized Canadians who have enriched the nation's literary heritage by their stories of elsewhere, the descendents of the storytellers who have occupied this land the longest are at last taking their honoured places.
Carol Tulpar - Carol Tulpar is a teacher, writer and editor from Surrey, BC. After taking her undergraduate degree in English Literature in 1973, she ...
