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Meanwhile Lone Danger Solo Performance Outwits Tricky Tontomatic Tribulations: A Review of Thomas King, A Short History of Indians in Canada (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2005)

By Marie Annharte Baker
The Rain 4:1 (Winter 2006): 2


Described as a “comic tour de force”, these twenty short stories do give a quickie tour of forced comic speculations about First Nation and North American interactions. Thomas King has been praised for his use of satiric humour to reverse effects of a racist or colonial discourse. A newbie to Indigenous literatures would find the text to be a safe threshold for maintaining simplistic beliefs about race, gender, culture and diversity. The more informed reader, though, might have to endure a scarescape. Just try to avoid notice of the dominating presence of the Indian as a one-size-fits-all monstrosity. Go figure the mixed up machinations. Drew Hayden Taylor’s recent Me Funny publication adds to this suspense of what makes multicult chuckles so de rigueur or dernier mot.

In the first story, Indians are equated to migratory birds flying into Toronto skyscrapers. A Twilight Zone scenario, perhaps? Monty Python? Thankfully they don’t fall into the gutter but fall on the sidewalks to be rescued or buried if dead on impact. A do-gooder might determine how indeed useless are efforts to save the pathetic urban Indians. As the author is “hybridized” and it follows the writing, how does the dark humour balance with the white hate hee haw guffaw? Here ambivalence is mediated by an educated Indian swiping at the White Liberal still-racist racist honky forces. He sneaks into the master’s house by the back door to use his tools. Not sure if the LHGBIRDH (Laugh holding guts because it really does hurt, eh) is an appropriate response. In a creepy comic way all is believable on every subliminal level possible because it is supposed to be tricksteresque. Buttock backwards coyote brilliance should overshadow. Heh heh. Notwith-standing this approach to genocide is a cool slant.

Moving right along, the real scary mood continues when the reader (matters not what multicultural you are) is co-opted party to Indians discussed as antiquated objects. In the typical western frontier manifest manner, Hudson Gold in “Tidings of Comfort and Joy” checks on his Indian possessions by toting a gun. His worry is that a pregnant Indian might be the dreaded Madonna of a mutant race. Help! Turn off the nazi bubble machine already! Dag Nab It! Gabby Hayes might even ponder on that one! What a struggle to laugh at potential genocide although many people have become jaded participants of shoot’em whoop’em up cinematic comedy. Easy to get chided as being too politically correct if you gag at the gag. The feelings of the mother who has lost children is a convenient nevermind “get over it” moment as when in “The Baby in the Airmail Box” the convoluted caricatures of both Indians and their White counterparts ponder the destiny of an abandoned baby. Any quick appraisal of child welfare programs in Canada would certainly reveal the ambiguity of each “Other” wanting to raise an “Other” child because there is a money exchange.

The grisly comedic undercurrent of the stories that follow is juxtaposed by inane insane sameness of characters that possess an Indian name or a status card. Indian names have nothing to do with heritage and history but serve aesthetically on a toe tag or in Native short fiction. Get real. While not every family name is equivalent to Smith or Jones, people do at times have a reverence for ancestors. People are gifted with Indigenous names or family names and then proceed to act like one dimensional Canadians. All behave “ass”inine because everyone is “ass”imilated! No tribal differences or linguistic ones happen on the horizon either. Occasionally, Crees do have a diversity within the ranks. Even Kinsella’s Cree characters were stupid! Conversational tidbits or jokes may not always be weaved into a settler flat line narrative structure. Native stories are not supposed to be flat and boring but instead do have unexpected twists or surprise beginnings, middles and ends. The inclusion of native jokes does assuage the Native listener and is a clever device. Again, a Native audience would be polite because of the presentation of yet another benign bland attempt to misinform but include them. We have endured the captive audience spectacle too often.

If a careful reader chooses not to over-react to the fantastical element, in “The Closer You Get to Canada, the More Things Will Eat Your Horses”, will show respectfully how seniors in a dangerous futuristic neverland might just have to bite the bullet. Japanese of Canadian descent would find “Coyote and the Enemy Aliens” super hilarious because it is an allegorical story about the Japanese internment situation in WWII. The feminist funny bone would be ticklish about “Little Bombs”. A woman terrorizes her husband in an nonchalant way. “Garden Court Motel” is a screwed up screw ball creation story where a sky woman misses turtle’s back to fall into a swimming pool. She might have given Amelia Earhart a few navigation lessons. In “States to Avoid” and “Fire and Rain” relationships end without melodrama. Star Trekkers will be cajoled by “Where the Borgs Are”. In “Bad Men Who Love Jesus”, the Christ figure has to exit stage right. His intended escape is probably not the venue of “Domestic Furies” where a not-so-desperate ex-housewife practices the “Bitch” heroine role. “Not Enough Horses” shows how pragmatic bride price and courtship is a contemporary low key phenomenon compared to the more romantic Plains Indian traditional expectations. “Rendezvous” is a great story for animal lovers. “The Dog I Wish I Had, I Would Call It Helen” is the sad tale of the modern “kid-driven” family. Hybridized stories take place in the suburbs as well as on the rez and definitely require an Indian guide to announce whenever Indian territoriality is approximate. Jean Chrétien should be nominated to do this service or else donate to a special White Paper Literary award.

Thomas King definitely lives in a camp of his own choosing. He is perhaps one of the more unusual writers in Canada who has appropriated Kinsella and Grey Owl formulaic writing as a vehicle to avoid authenticity and substitute elitism for “excellence”. His devotees claim he is a celebrated and well-known writer in Canada who also positions a moccasin foot across the border and will soon extend tracks globally. Instant bonding instead of cultural misunderstanding is made possible because of the familiar “settler speak” dialectics. It is a pervasive voice pattern that distances and overrides Native or First Nations “orality” in storytelling. The problem is not the difficulty of transferring oral stories into a written piece. Just forego any collaborative communal possibilities. As a potentially weak and helpless elder as eminent future, the foreboding end of trail scenario might be a Native home care worker pushing a stalled scooter to join a group of Native intelligentsia who are retelling Thomas King stories. I sure hope the medicine chest clause of the treaties does not allow for this. In the meantime, if this latest Tom King book purports to be a “window on the Aboriginal world”, then it is hoped that someone would raise the blind.