Do we simply stand by and watch? How will we raise our own boys?

Melissa Johns - Vanished, A piece to honour the missing and murdered indigenous women of Canada

Cette oeuvre, inspirée du visage de Maisy Odjick, disparue en 2008, avec Shannon Alexander, a été lauréate du concours Aboriginal Arts and Stories 2016

My friend Tanya the artist and musician was sexually abused through much of her youth. She allows me to tell you this. She’s turned the pain into art. In October, the day after performing for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, a triumphant performance by all accounts, Tanya was followed, in broad daylight, down the street and verbally assaulted by a white man who made it clear to her that he wanted to fuck an Indian girl and she was the one. He went on, as she tried to walk quickly away, to describe all of the things he was going to do to her. Tanya says she can’t count how many times this has happened to her and to most of her friends. Tanya describes her daily experience of simply walking down the street as living in a horror movie, a movie you can’t escape from, one that doesn’t end. After her treatment by this man, Tanya got back onstage that night and performed triumphantly, once again, in front of a sold-out audience.
from Joseph Boyden - Hey, Boys (p. 8*)

Hey, boys, what are we to do? Hey, men, why don’t we question this sickness that beats inside too many of us? Shall we healthier ones spend our lives staring, not knowing what to do, just stand and look at our shoes or touch our faces and ask forgiveness for horrors we feel no part of? What are we men to do about this? Do we simply stand by and watch?
How will we raise our own boys?
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry, Amanda.
from Joseph Boyden - Hey, Boys (p. 9*)

After class, Faith McCabe, a second year Philosophy student, jogs on the woodchip trail near her parents’ home. It’s raining. Only three o’clock but almost nightfall. Earlier, she wrote her last exam before the Christmas break. On her final stretch three masked men—no, they’re boys—step out of the bushes in front of her. Down on your knees, bitch, says the one with the knife. A fist slams into her stomach. She buckles. Falls forward. Two boys take turns, first one, then the other, but the third says No. What the fuck? says the one with the knife. No, the third one says again, and turns and lopes away. But he doesn’t go alone. Faith McCabe leaps up after him. Even as she lies bruised and bloody on the ground, even as his feet pound the woodchip trail, she flies after him. No matter how fast he runs or how far he travels, Faith McCabe is right there, riding his heels, the stone in his shoe, stitch in his side, grit in his teeth. Large as a question and close as a lover, she follows the third one to the dark end of his days.
from Patricia Young - The Third One (p. 31*)

I think about my own position here today. I am a writer who tries to share stories of Northern Albertan women in my work, including Cree and Métis women, even though I am white. Last night I walked from Fort Garry through Winnipeg’s downtown core to my hotel named after Louis Riel, and while I was alert to my gender and sexuality, I did not think about my race. I am a Canadian who doesn’t know what to do about the epidemic of missing and murdered sisters except retweet links and write letters to politicians. I am spending Saturday in a museum rather than wondering about how I can provide for my kids or how I will survive the night if I end up on a “bad date.” I can see the Red River outside the window, the river that gave up two women’s bodies just before the surface froze and the snow fell in all its ambivalent whiteness. I am safe inside.
from Diana Davidson - November 2014 (pp. 55-56*)

Tonight, I watch the city of Ferguson ignite. It happens after a grand jury decides not to indict a police officer for the killing of Michael Brown, a black youth. I watch the live coverage of the riots and think of those vulnerable families ever more invisible, tonight, in this live-streamed spectacle of flames. For weeks before I had been listening to and reading about the despair of black youth in America over the everyday discrimination they face, over the lack of real security and opportunity in their lives. I don’t know what I was hoping for this evening. I know it wasn’t just a successful indictment.
from David Chariandy - November 24, 2014 (p.59)*

There’s an old joke in the Native community about a man walking down the beach carrying a bucket full of crabs. He meets another man who points out to him that he should be careful. “I notice you don’t have a lid on your bucket. Your crabs might escape.” The first man smiles and tells the other man not to worry. “They’re Indian crabs. When one manages to get to the top, the others will grab him and pull him back down.” Supposedly it’s a comment on the anarchy and backstabbing in our community.
from Drew Hayden Taylor - Chasing Painted Horses - A Novel in Progress (p.79*)

Sometimes change happens with gale force intensity. Sometimes it is subtler. A moment on a mountain, a rustling through the trees.
from Eve Joseph - Fire and Song (p.83*)

You were a young mother in Fort St. James before the road was paved through the Indian Reserve on the edge of town.
Two communities touching, one all paved and moneyed-up with cattle, clear-cutting, and mining. Ranchers in good trucks, diesel engines, front-end-loaders, and 18-wheelers rattling to life at 4:00 am in tidy driveways leading up to double-wides. Septic ponds out back, tethered dogs that don’t bark too much, a corral off to the side with horses and that clean scent of hay-fed shit that warms the ground in winter, almost breathing, the steam rising through settling snow, moist circles of brown earth.
When you first drove in, through the Nakazd’li Rez, your husband pulled over on the side of the road and said: like it? Our new town?
When you tell the story you say you felt a jagged ripping at the front of your throat, tears welling up, holding your three-month-old daughter against your breasts, warm, you stare out from the passenger seat at the cracked-and- duct-taped-over living room windows with faded wolf-face-embroidered synthetic blankets and bath-towels hung up for curtains. At the strange bent wood frames in front of everyone’s houses that you don’t yet know are for tanning moose hides. At the small smoke-stained shacks with doors flung open that you don’t yet know are where thousands of salmon will be dried next year, muscly pink meat casting shadows towards Stuart Lake.
You’ve never seen a town like this. You close your eyes.
from Sarah de Leeuw - 1CountryBoy (pp. 86-87*)

Flying home through London
from a Mediterranean island
lately split by Turks and Greeks,
though half the civilized ancients
made a claim to Cyprus
at their respective peaks,
signs of each occupation
so prominently displayed
the country seemed to belong
to no one in particular
and I carried that sorry sense
of unease, like a low-grade
fever, around the cobbled streets
and tacky tourist haunts,
slipped it into my suitcase
like a cheap souvenir.
Heathrow Departures dense
with lost souls repeating aimless
turns through the duty-free,
the faux pubs and restaurants
that somehow make the ennui
of jet-lag more intense,
and I leave the labyrinth
to stand outside awhile,
feeling naked without a cigarette
to justify my presence
among the smokers in exile.
Five purgatorial hours to kill,
dead time that seems infinite,
and I stuff that gaping hole
with visions of you fatally
maimed beneath a mangled car
or comatose after a simple fall
or bleeding out in intensive care
while I wait for my connecting flight.
It’s a morbid habit of mine—
idle in any airport I’ll light
up some lame catastrophe
and smoke it to the butt,
it’s just the tar and nicotine
of counterfeit emotion
I can’t dismiss completely,
lacking faith in the cosmos
or in myself, which amounts
to the same affliction—
the fear I belong to no one
in the end, the sorry sense
that belonging won’t keep.
Passengers wanting the entrance
forced to look away as they pass
the man undone by the urge to weep
outside the doors to Terminal Three.
from Michael Crummey - Grief at Heathrow (pp. 92-93*)

But that’s what happens when people mix up the product, the book, for the producer. They figure because I wrote a good book that I have good, intelligent things to say about a thousand and one things.
from Alice Kuipers & Yann Martel - Beginnings (p. 95*)

* sur ma liseuse

Joseph Boyden (edited by) - Kwe: Standing With Our Sisters (Penguin Random House, 2014)