Debut novel a funny, moving tale
Cree author uses TV show Beachcombers as touchstone for native protagonist’s quest
Being timely is generally a good thing for a novelist.
But it’s hard to feel very celebratory about the circumstances that made Alberta CreeMetis author Tracey Lindberg’s debut novel, Birdie, so topical when it was released just a few weeks ago.
At roughly the same time, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a damning 381-page report after a six-year study that outlined the shameful history of residential schools. It concluded that Canada’s removal of aboriginal children from their families and forcing them into abusive, Christian-run schools resulted in “cultural genocide.”
The impact of colonization — or as Lindberg calls it, “the colonization bomb” — hovers over Birdie, a funny, sad and occasionally harrowing tale of Cree woman Bernice Meetoos’ journey from northern Alberta to Gibsons. She is in search of Pat John, the First Nations actor who played Jesse in the long-running CBC series The Beachcombers.
While Birdie has been described as part travelogue and part dream quest, the history of colonization haunts Bernice on her journey. Lindberg says she hopes her novel, which delves into colonization’s legacy of sexual violence and economic deprivation, adds to whatever conversation and soul-searching the commission’s report creates in Canada.
“Conversation is the operative word here,” says Lindberg, who was born in Kelly Lake Cree Nation and is a citizen of As’in’i’wa’chi Ni’yaw National Rocky Mountain Cree. “I keep thinking about the dialogue and the questions we don’t ask. I think often we are afraid to have a conversation because everybody is worried they are going to give offence. That whole notion of reconciliation itself really has to do with taking responsibility for your own stuff and owning it and then being able to sit down and have a broader, more intensive dialogue about what that means. I hope something like this (novel) takes another different entry point. Maybe narrative gives people a different place to be able to springboard their ideas about how it is we can most nicely and compatibly get along together in Canada.”
If that sounds a little academic, it’s because Lindberg has spent much of her career in that field. The first aboriginal woman in Canada to complete her graduate law degree at Harvard University, Lindberg was an awardwinning academic writer and
I think often we are afraid to have a conversation because everybody is worried they are going to give offence.
TRACEY LINDBERG
AUTHOR
activist before she turned her hand to fiction. She teaches indigenous studies and indigenous laws at Athabasca University and the University of Ottawa and is a sought-after speaker with expertise in indigenous traditional law and aboriginal women’s issues.
But Birdie is anything but stuffy. It’s funny, albeit often darkly so, and packed full of memorable characters. Bernice, or Birdie, is an intriguing protagonist who refuses to be defeated by a dark secret from her past. Using the Beachcombers, a TV series that ran from 1972 to 1990, also gives the tale a nostalgic hue.
“There were so few places in popular culture where we could see indigenous peoples at all,” Lindberg says. “I remember seeing (Pat John). In the novel, Bernice thinks of him and the list of things she wants: an Indian man who is healthy and working. That’s him. For me, as a young girl to be watching TV and to see that native people could be a part of the arts, that native people could come into your home through television, was really empowering.”
While Birdie may examine the long-term repercussions of abuse and inequality, Lindberg says it offers a reassuring, uplifting message.
“What I want people to understand is that things that happen to you are not you,” Lindberg says.
“Everybody has beauty in them and the potentiality for beauty. We have to be looking toward each other and the things that are beautiful within us as cultures to start our conversations with, even if we are going to be talking about hard things.”