Tantoo Cardinal launches new history book

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The story of Louis Riel and the resistance he led in the 1880s against government encroachment on Metis lands and settlements is a well-known tale.

This turbulent time in Canadian history is taught in high schools across the country. But not much is said about what happened to those same Metis people in the 50 years after their defeat at Batoche, after Riel was hanged for his "treasonous" ways, after the European settlers flooded into the West.

It's the fallout from that glorious stand the Metis made to protect their interests on the prairies that storyteller Tantoo Cardinal was interested in. When the Dominion Institute asked her to contribute to a new book looking at Canadian history from an Aboriginal perspective, she knew which story she would tell.

The Dominion Institute is a non-profit organization founded by a group of young people who wanted to change the perception that Canadian history is boring. The institute put together a list of Aboriginal writers and invited each to contribute a fictionalized account of a moment in history that was personally important to them.

What results is Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past, a book of stories from nine Aboriginal writers, and a note from each explaining why the writer chose their particular topic.

Cardinal, the Dominion Institute and Enbridge-sponsor of the work-launched the book in Calgary on Oct. 20 with a visit to Forest Lawn high school. Cardinal, an actress famous for her work in major Hollywood motion pictures, including Dances With Wolves and Legends of the Fall, spoke to 200 students about her participation in the project. She talked about Aboriginal voice, the importance of looking at history from multiple perspectives, and her feeling through much of her life that history wasn't being told properly.

Cardinal's work in Our Story is called "There Is a Place," and it zeros in on what life had become for Metis during the period of 1915 to 1928, before the Metis Settlements Act of Alberta was negotiated.

The actress described it as a time of hopelessness. Metis industry was replaced with non-Native industry. The Metis lifestyle was usurped by the European way of life. Fish stocks were depleted; trap-line profits were taxed. There was no land the Metis could call their own, and disease was decimating their population.

"We were obsolete," Cardinal writes in her contributor's note.

The work in Our Story varies widely, from the creation story of the Iroquois by Brian Maracle, to Thomas King's story about the Japanese internment in Canada.

"Each [author] really specifically and quickly picked a story, which was interesting," said Alison Faulknor, managing director of the Dominion Institute. "These were stories at the back of their minds they felt were important to tell. I think each author felt very strongly and felt a commitment to making sure that Canadians learned about this moment in history. It might be a moment that we know about well, like Oka, but just looking at it from an Aboriginal perspective. Or it might be about a specific community or an individual that isn't necessarily a period in history that we learn about in history textbooks. So I think they each felt very personally committed to the story that they told and felt it was important that it reached a greater audience."

In the case of King, (Green Grass, Running Water; Dead Dog Cafe) the subject matter seemed curious. Why on earth would an Aboriginal author choose another people's history to wade in on?

In the contributor's note he explains:

"[W]henever I hear the story, I think about Indians, for the treatment the Canadian government afforded Japanese people during the Second World War is strikingly similar to the treatment that the Canadian government has always afforded Native people ..."

Lee Maracle writes about the land in Vancouver now known as False Creek, and a settlement negotiated for that land reluctantly accepted by her people.

Goodbye, Snauq" is about the emotional conflict of coming to terms with the past in order to fully participate in the future. As in the other stories, it is a fictionalized account about a very real, and in this case very recent, part of history that many of us might never be aware of except for her work in the book.

Maracle said she hopes the stories in the book will help people face themselves and the past.

"If you are Aboriginal you'll face what has happened to you and find some way to reconcile yourself to it, and if you are not Native you will face what was done to us and find some way to reconcile yourself to it personally. I think that's what story does anyway. That's what my hope is," she said.

Faulknor wants readers to stop and consider history from a new perspective and she quotes from the foreward of Our Story written by Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson.

"When we read a work of literary art, it should never be a purely didactic exercise, a moralizing lesson. It is something that pleases us and helps us to understand what we haven't experienced, what we might not have known that we didn't know." That's the impact Faulknor hopes the book will have.