A Dream Like Mine: (Exile Classics Series Number 16)

Formatting note:

In the electronic versions of this book blank pages that appear in the paperback have been removed.

A DREAM LIKE MINE

M.T. Kelly

Publishers of singular Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Drama, Translation and Graphic Books

2009

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Kelly, M. T. (Milton Terrence), 1947-

A dream like mine / M.T. Kelly ; introduction by Daniel David Moses

(Exile classics series ; no. 16)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN

978-1-55096-132-4 (pbk)

978-1-55096-272-7 (ePUB)

978-1-55096-273-4 (MOBI)

978-1-55096-274-1 (PDF)

1. Ojibwa Indians--Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Exile classics ; no. 16

PS8571.E4477D73 2009 C813'.54 C2009-906486-3

All rights reserved; copyright © M.T. Kelly 1987, 2009

Design and Composition by Digital ReproSet

Cover Photograph by permission of Winhorse / iStockphoto

Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2009. All rights reserved

We gratefully acknowledge, for their support toward our publishing activities, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights –or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: info@exileeditions.com

You cannot harm me,

you cannot harm

one who has dreamed a dream like mine

Ojibway

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Related Reading / Questions / Bibliography

Introduction

A Long Dreaming

A white man from Toronto, an Indian from northern Ontario, and someone who seems to be a Métis from out west go into the northern wilderness together to fish, and it’s not the set-up for a joke. The white man is fishing for images of the pristine, the Indian for some sort of understanding of the remains of his traditional ways, and the Métis? Well . . .

I’m turning the pages of M.T. Kelly’s 1987 novel A Dream Like Mine over again after twenty some years and find that it’s still a fierce, surprising, exhilarating read, even though a lot of the landscape and characters it evokes – the landscape and characters of Canada’s near liminal Indian reserves, their historical poverty and cultural collapse – have since become more a part of the Canadian cultural consciousness.

When Kelly wrote his story, Canada’s native peoples seemed to have only small parts on Canada’s stage and those parts mostly historical or monumentally decorative. It seemed to most Canadians – when they took a moment to reflect, their noses lifted from the urban grindstone – that their Victorian predecessors were indeed correct, that the Indians had all but vanished. A Dream Like Mine seemed odd and obsessive, compelling but out of sync. Those drunks begging for spare change were sad remnants and Buffy Sainte-Marie, despite her Quebecish name, must be an American. (A few of us, the jury for the Governor General’s Award, for example, thought differently.)

But then the Nineties came and history continued to happen. The landscape and characters visible to Canadians changed, with news like the standoff at Oka, with government responses like the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, with rulings like the Supreme Court’s requirement that governments negotiate with the First Nations in good faith, with organizations like the Aboriginal Television Network, with artists like Tomson Highway, the late Norval Morrisseau and the actor Graham Greene (who astounded in Clearcut, a film adapted from A Dream Like Mine), with, mostly recently, the Prime Minister’s Apology for Residential Schools, and John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country.

So was Kelly, the student of Canada’s past (the unnamed narrator of A Dream Like Mine refers, as part of his quotidian consciousness, to Champlain’s description of the Ojibwa shaking tent, to the Indian paintings of George Catlin and Paul Kane, to the Jesuit Relations, and even has nightmares that hallucinate historical horrors), made sensitive by his studies to Canada’s then present unconscious or prescient enough about the future currents of its politics? Or maybe did he just feel something blowing in the wind? Out of his own historical landscape and character, the story he imagined dramatized the troubling human emotions and needs behind a specific, perhaps exemplary real world conflict between native and apparent mainstream interests – the mercury polluting of an aboriginal food source by a pulp and paper mill. The whining and frustrations, the guilt and hesitations of Kelly’s characters, their knowledge or ignorance of the injustices Canada’s Indians suffered when they were considered less than human, less than adult, wards of the state, all informs what on the surface seems a straightforward story of – as we most readily identify such actions nowadays – a terrorist kidnapping, but has, rising through the narrative, an undeniable return of the repressed energy, a nearly surreal result.

The monster who rises out of Canada’s cultural murk in A Dream Like Mine claims to be a Métis, a representative of that mix of white and Indian cultures, that hybrid political force that, merci à Louis Riel, had so much to do with the burgeoning dilemmas of power in the history of Canada’s west in the 19th century. This Métis, Arthur, however, doesn’t confirm any roots of his origins, doesn’t give anything away, much to the narrator’s continuing chagrin. Arthur seems at one moment like a mind reader, at another like a bully and a tease, a moody vengeful spirit who, at one particular moment looks, to our knowledgeable but uncomprehending narrator, like an Iroquois False Face medicine mask. On the whole he’s more than a little mysterious, almost supernatural in his sudden appearances and disappearances. All of which works well for the reader, since he is this boys’ adventure story’s antagonist, a darker sort of trickster (the anthropological idea of the trickster migrating into the literary context of stories about First Nations people and/or culture – and the words First Nations too, come to think of it – are also part of Canada’s broadened knowledge of her own landscape and characters).

The character of Wilf Redwing, the story’s front and centre Indian, the Ojibwa cultural elder and fisherman who goes or gets dragged along with the story’s kidnapping action, isn’t much help with the narrator’s effort to suss Arthur out. Is it an expression of the powerless place First Nations people have been pushed into in the real world of politics or rather some sort of spiritual or mystical stance that sees the events of this life, including mercury poisoning and avenging Métis like Arthur, as inevitable? The narrator, after hearing Wilf repeat about the story’s mounting violence that It had to happen, derides the elder as being a fatalistic mystic. Wilf’s reference to the spider who wasn’t a joke . . . The spirit was huge, the size of the sky. People died; people went into the water and didn’t come out seems to even more position unfathomable Arthur and his crimes as some sort of force of the natural world beyond human control, even though all of Arthur’s actions are presented in the context of failed or absent social policy.

All of which adds to the discomfort of our edgy, reliably unreliable narrator, the information-saturated journalist. The voice through which A Dream Like Mine is narrated is an embodiment of the changes the landscape and characters of this novel go through. The emotional turmoil of the narrator who garrulously can deride another person as garrulous but then immediately admit to himself the fellow’s good intentions, who can at another moment describe the Aurora Borealis as almost overdoing it and the next himself lapse into song-lyric lyricism (God, how deep the night, how high the stars!), who can accuse himself of sentimentality when he decides, that simple human gesture, to take his son along to visit Wilf, creates a neurotic, chatty, self-contradictory monologue.

At first it made it harder to see the action of the story as the voice alternated between being irritating and amusing. But then I realized it was a most cunning way to present a portrait of a man who seems without a morally certain centre but is nevertheless human and passionate – a man almost at home in words, searching the vocabularies of the worlds of power, politics, religion and class for somewhere to stand and see the Canadian landscape and characters that and who matter so much to him. This astonishing ventriloquism is done with an energy that left me giddy and almost breathless.

How does one live morally amidst the harsh, sharp-edged ruins of the romance of the west? How do we see the reality of our situation, the landscape and characters of Canada?

A Dream Like Mine shows us the ruinous dream we all need, characters in the Canadian landscape, to wake up from.

Daniel David Moses

October 2009

ONE

The spider is the darkness in the night sky where there are no stars. Wilf Redwing sat hunched in an aluminum-tube chair that had no back. His legs looked frail, long-boned as he crossed them, so lost in the folds of his sweatpants as to seem non-existent. He went on. The spider comes from the West; it’s not an Ojibway spirit.

I was listening to the lonely, defiant voice of an old Indian at the Heron Portage Reserve, twenty miles outside Kenora in northwestern Ontario. What Wilf Redwing told me reminded me of legends I’d read and it took me back to a trip I’d made to Ireland years before. In County Sligo I’d been told in a shout that the current political troubles would be resolved in the Valley of the Black Pig. That two-thousand-year-old prediction was made as an old man swirled Guinness at me; here in Canada, another old man was speaking living myth, but under a night sky so clear and without humidity it would be utterly foreign to any European. The air was so pure and cold, the rocky landspace so alive and blue. I forgot the temperature.

I had come to this place to attend a sweat ceremony. I’m a reporter, and I’d had an idea for a story on traditional native healers. These shamen had apparently had success in treating alcoholics in Kenora, a town blighted with the effects of Indian drinking. A story about drunken Indians and a new treatment was familiar enough not to challenge anyone and I easily got two days to fly to Kenora and interview some of the medicine men. It’s a heavy enough subject, I was told. Make it a mini-feature; serious, but light, tight and bright.

The medicine men, it turned out, were funded by the Ontario Government, Ministry of Health. An ex-girlfriend who worked in the ministry put me on to the funding. Maybe there’d be a story in that, I’d thought. Yet, when I met the elders whose names I’d been given I found them sympathetic and legitimate. No story about them would ever be light, tight and bright. They were also astonishingly political. Wilf said he could see the headlines: Government Funds Witchdoctors. It doesn’t get out the right way, he said, and asked me not to write about them and their religion.

Maybe I have a soft spot for old men because my dad died when I was a kid and he would have been around Wilf’s age if he’d lived; or maybe I was tired and just didn’t want to interview a bunch of Indians, balance them by quoting a bunch of experts, and do another chronicle about drunks and child abuse and suicide and jails that explained nothing and led nowhere. What I did want was to find out more about traditional beliefs and Wilf promised me this sweat ceremony for my cooperation. I also think he liked me.

Do you know about the spider? Wilf asked.

No. Yes, I think I’ve heard . . .

The spider is sacred to the Sioux, enemies of our people from away back, from the West. The ‘Mighty Sioux.’ He shrugged with good-natured contempt. You can still see the rivalry when we play hockey.

The word hockey was familiar enough that I tuned out for a moment, staring at the fire, feeling again where I was, not listening, enjoying my nervousness, and the fire did make me nervous. The rocks in it were white-hot. Split slabs of wood burned, bark out, around this white-hot core. The burning wood came up in a cone like a tipi, and there was something touching about the fire’s neatness amongst the, well, squalor was too strong a word, but amongst the mess I could see around me: the house off to my left lit with bare light bulbs, the broken chairs, the barren ground. Above the aurora suddenly began, and Wilf stopped talking. At first I thought spotlights in town were sweeping up to announce the opening of a new car dealership. But the town didn’t throw up the lights of a city, and town was far away. A huge moon, an hysterical shaman moon, framed by spruce trees, seemed too big. The night again felt cold.

There’s blood on it tonight, Wilf said. Blood and the moon. Don’t worry, he laughed.

I worried, and Wilf didn’t make things any better when he said, You know, two people recently drowned in the Lake of the Woods. Wilf used the full name deliberately. At night. Maybe the spider took them. Then he spoke lightly.