May 2017
The Leacock Medal
and Other Living Things
The Leacock Medal
and Other Living Things
“Imagine if we all looked at the water, at the earth - as living things,” he said. “Maybe, just
maybe, it would be different, better.”
Mohawk Elder Ka'nahsohon Deer opened the 2017 meeting of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO with a song, a solo on a water drum, and those words about climate change, toxins in the environment, and the perspective of Indigenous people. His comments stuck in my head that week, in part, because they were echoed by my Kindle at night when I laid in the hotel bed reading Drew Hayden Taylor’s book Take Us to Your Chief.
In his first pages, Taylor, a resident of Ontario’s Curve Lake Reserve, says he wants this book to move the boundaries of aboriginal literature and to invite more of us to see life in all things. Take Us to your Chief opens this door by presenting science fiction with a twist. Lots of aliens, space travel, and the like. But always with a substantive First Nations reference, angle, or association.
Mohawk Elder Ka'nahsohon Deer opened the 2017 meeting of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO with a song, a solo on a water drum, and those words about climate change, toxins in the environment, and the perspective of Indigenous people. His comments stuck in my head that week, in part, because they were echoed by my Kindle at night when I laid in the hotel bed reading Drew Hayden Taylor’s book Take Us to Your Chief.
In his first pages, Taylor, a resident of Ontario’s Curve Lake Reserve, says he wants this book to move the boundaries of aboriginal literature and to invite more of us to see life in all things. Take Us to your Chief opens this door by presenting science fiction with a twist. Lots of aliens, space travel, and the like. But always with a substantive First Nations reference, angle, or association.
A 2001: Space Odyssey-style artificial
intelligence realizes it is an aboriginal consciousness, and this has
consequences. Orwellian Big Brother is linked to the ubiquity of dream
catchers, time travel is facilitated by petroglyphs, and aboriginal radio
broadcasts lead to fights over roasted raccoon drumsticks. In the process of
applying skill, a smart sense of humour, and the Indigenous bent to the space
and robots subjects, I think Taylor moved the boundaries of science fiction as
much as those of aboriginal works.
For me, the
transcendence of the Take Us to Your Chief stories comes from the
humour, the poignancy, and the craft. I will buy hard copies of the book and
push them into the hands of people I like not because of the cultural
references or even the different point of view, but because it is fun to read -
even when passing through the reality of
teen suicide and the perils of alcohol.
This is important because the book is short-listed for the 2017 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and while the award has other criteria, influences, and agendas, being fun to read is a persistent one and the one I think is most important.
This is important because the book is short-listed for the 2017 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and while the award has other criteria, influences, and agendas, being fun to read is a persistent one and the one I think is most important.
Nevertheless, I would
bet that Take Us to your Chief might
grab a few extra points in this year’s Leacockian competition because of its
Indigenous associations and purpose.
Not that you could
brand the Leacock Medal as an excessively First Nations friendly institution. The
award carries the image of another era when homogenized small town Canada, the
Mariposa of Stephen Leacock’s works, was celebrated as something distinct from
the country’s aboriginal societies. Even though the inaugural Leacock
Medal winner Ojibway Melody speaks with admiration of the Indigenous
people around Georgian Bay, the book does so with the posture of something
separate and observing. W.P. Kinsella’s Leacock Medal book The
Fencepost Chronicles celebrated aboriginal humour and experience, but did
so through the pen of an outsider censured for cultural appropriation, and
passages in at least one early medal winner carried more than a little
prejudice and offense.
But one element, besides the
fun-to-read bias, of the Leacock Medal history bodes well for Take me to
your Chief and may have helped it get onto the 2017 short list.
A love of community.
It runs through most of the past
winners of the medal and is glaring in the backdrop of Mariposa and Stephen Leacock’s
Sunshine Sketches.
Leacock put
an appreciation of community at the core of effective humour writing.
In defining humour as
“the kindly contemplation of the
incongruities of life and artistic expression thereof,” Leacock did not
demand, as some feared, that all humour be “kind,” but rather that we
understand that all humour is peculiar to a community of shared experience and
belief – our own kind, our kin. For a long
stretch, the accepted notion of “our kind” as reflected in the winners of the
Leacock Medal, like many other Canadian institutions, did not shout recognition
of many of the communities that form both modern and ancient Canada.
Take Us to your Chief invites us into the affection and humour of the broad aboriginal
community and, in doing so, to stretch the boundaries of our own.
Slowly, iteratively,
over the years, the Leacock Medal has added a bit to its definition of “our
kind” and, each time, added to its own credibility and that’s why I would give
a few extra points in grading this book’s potential for success in this year’s competition.
Like water and the
earth, I think the Leacock Medal might be a living thing – one that must
evolve and adapt to survive and to be different, better.
Writing Exercise
Tell how your life changed when you learned that your aboriginal parents had adopted you as a baby and that you were in fact an alien.
Writing Exercise
Tell how your life changed when you learned that your aboriginal parents had adopted you as a baby and that you were in fact an alien.