radiant fracture

Coast of Many Faces (1979) seems to have a startlingly modest origin story.

This is the remarkable collection of photographs and brief interviews / oral histories I quite randomly took down from the shelf one sleepy afternoon in the library of Royal Roads University, which campus resides in the northern part of lək̓ʷəŋən territory, currently known as Colwood.

I have two copies now, a paperback purchased from Russell Books, and a hardcover just arrived from a seller in California.

( Material culture notes on the two copies )

Photographer: Ulli Steltzer

Before I opened this book to a black and white photograph of octogenarians flirting in the tiny ferry terminal at Alert Bay, I had never heard of Ulli Steltzer, yet she worked all over the world for forty years as a photographer-activist. Not quite a journalist -- a photo documentarian, maybe? Is that a thing?

The jacket copy tells me that Steltzer's "powerful photographs have been commented on by reviewers around the world for their 'remarkable quality of direct engagement' and 'poignant discernment,'" which I think also reflects my own response.

The jacket also notes that Steltzer "perceptively photographed ... Adlai Stevenson, Robert Oppenheimer and Martin Buber" (!).²

Steltzer died only in 2018. She has a brief Wikipedia page, just longer than a stub. From this and some useful sources like the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative at Concordia, I have begun to get a rough sense of her life.

( Stelzer's biography will need a longer post of its own -- here is a sketch. )

Co-Interviewer: Catherine Kerr

It is more difficult to find information on Kerr, and the most I've learned about her so far comes from her eulogy for Steltzer. Kerr recalls meeting Steltzer:

My friendship with Ulli started in 1975 when I was a fledgling editor with Douglas & McIntyre and she a distinguished photographer whose project, Indian Artists at Work, the company was understandably excited to publish. While the book designer was crafting the graphic layout, my happy assignment was to review the text with a copy editor’s eye.

So at that point in their collaboration, Stelzer was the sole interviewer (unless she worked with someone else on the first book).

The arrival of my hardcover cleared up Kerr's role on Coast: she was a co-interviewer and editor, who "selected from the transcript a vital mixture of narrative, explanation and personal commentary."

I wonder if there are extant transcripts or recordings of the longer interviews in an archive somewhere. That would be amazing.

There's not much more in the book that frames its purpose; the introduction talks about their process but not the thinking behind it. Steltzer and Kerr must have taken for granted that the reader/viewer would recognize the value of these images and words on first encounter -- and also that they would share the collaborators' own readings. A book like this, created now, would do a lot of work situating the project and its intentions. I feel a little adrift without that context.

There's an odd justification for the interviews:

[E]ach of her portraits capture circumstance as well as expression, each landscape speak[s] eloquently of its people. But since people must sometimes speak of history, of fact, and of the future to explain what can be seen in a photograph, the words of today's coast people have been recorded in this book.

-- which makes the voices sound supplemental and almost unwished-for. Perhaps it is my bias towards language, but it seems to me that the voices are what elevate this book beyond a beautiful collection of photographs to -- well, to an oral and visual history, though I'd like a grander word.

Let's finish with an image, though.

Here is my very bad copy of Stelzer's photograph of oolichans at Fishery Bay (p.10):



-- what I notice is the way Steltzer has noticed that the diagonal lines of the oolichan heap and the tarp on top echo the forms of the mountains; to me, it also looks like a cutaway geological illustration, so that the oolichans become both the landscape and its underlying strata, the foundations of the world.

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Notes

1. In full, the inscription reads as follows: "for Ken – I know you appreciate the rugged coast of BC and are fascinated by the many different people who each lend their own special charm to each magical place. I hope you enjoy the stories and truly magnificent photographs. Love, Marilyn & Ken".

2. A rabbit hole opened up under my feet concerning the Oppenheimer photography: you can follow it here at this post from 2012 on Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog if you wish.

3. Steltzer also created a book about this experience, A Haida Potlatch (1985), which earned a brief review in the Atlantic. It also sounds like an extraordinary record.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulli_Steltzer

https://cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists/displayArtist.php?ID_artist=5651

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1985/05/a-haida-potlatch/667235/

https://celebratingullisteltzer.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/catherine-kerr/

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/obituary-ulli-steltzer-photographer-with-a-social-conscience

https://blogs.princeton.edu/manuscripts/2018/08/03/ulli-steltzer-1923-2018-photographer/

Steltzer, Ulli, and Catherine Kerr. Coast of Many Faces. U of Washington P, 1979.

I've just finished Maria Campbell's collection Stories of the Road Allowance People,¹ which I both ordered online in the 1995 edition and put on hold at the library in the 2010 edition, because impatient. The 2010 edition includes one more story and a CD with fiddle music, which I alas cannot play on my computer -- I'll have to make a rare journey in to the office.

The transcription of these stories is interestingly complicated. Most were, if I understand properly, first told to Campbell in Michif². Then they were translated into Village English, the dialect of English used in Campbell's community. So the stories are translated into English with a Michif accent.

Two interesting linguistic features of Campbell's transcription of Village English:

1. Campbell writes can when the person says can't. I think this is because the final T of can't is dropped. That's similar to the BC Interior accent I have, where can is usually said more like kn and can't is kaʔ with a nasalized vowel. I cn do it. I ca' do it.

As a reader, you just have to figure out from context that this is can' rather than can.

2. Campbell's Village English doesn't have gendered pronouns, so everyone is "he" in these stories. I enjoy that a lot.

Campbell learned the stories from old men in Métis communities (4). She doesn't name the individual storytellers, so a reader can't tell how many voices are here, though I think you can hear different ways of telling come through.

What I find most captivating about these stories is the way that big history is so familiar and so recent in them. So there are some great tall tales, and a story about shapechangers, but also there are stories about Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel and the North-West Resistance. Often these are all the same story. The storytellers weave these elements so fluidly that it's possible to miss how masterful that movement often is.

There's a version of the story of Almighty Voice, which could make a really beautiful lesson combined with Daniel David Moses' play Almighty Voice and His Wife, one of the first Indigenous-authored plays to see mainstream production (in 1992, six years after The Rez Sisters), and, say, an encyclopedia-style version of the story for contrast.

My favorite story, which I would love to research further, is "Joseph's Justice."

The story is about a Métis man who doesn't fight in the Resistance -- he just wants to live his life.

Then Joseph runs into the English general who is taking Louis Riel to Regina:


The intimacy with Riel and Dumont and Dumas is so moving.

Joseph is walking home with his gun and beaver pelts (95) and the soldiers decide to arrest him, even though he's had nothing to do with the war. He is dragged into court, but the judge believes him and he's released. Then Joseph asks for his gun and his furs back:
But Joseph is not taking any more shit, so he files charges against the general. An Irish lawyer helps him out, and, after a long struggle, he wins! But he still doesn't get his stuff back.

And then the storyteller says this:


And I stop, and I count.

It's 1995 when this book is published, probably a little earlier when Campbell writes down the story. Say the storyteller is 70 in 1995; then he's born in 1925. The North-West Resistance was in 1885. Say his uncle was 70 in 1935 to tell him this story at age 10. That would put his uncle's birth in 1865 -- 20 at the time of the Resistance. This guy, hanging out in his kitchen telling Maria Campbell this story -- his uncle was there.

That kind of intimacy between 1995 and 1885 isn't something I have experienced or even really imagined. I can see why it would be so for the storyteller, for Campbell, but I have nothing like that in my sense of community, of time, of history.

Anyway, I'd love to teach that story, too, for its beautiful braiding of personal and national history, of satire and comedy and tragedy. It's like a Victor Hugo novel in miniature.

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The book is one of many mentioned in Jo-Ann Archibald's Indigenous Storywork. From the list I made of her suggestions, I ordered this, and George Clutesi's books, and Keeping Slug Woman Alive, an earlier book about teaching storywork.

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Notes

1. Campbell on the title: "You will have to do your own research .... however, I can tell you that the name Road Allowance People was coined by white government officials and land owners to describe the dispossessed Métis people who, having nowhere to go after the Resistance of 1885, built their homes on unoccupied crown lands, more often land that had been set aside for highways or roads" (4).

2. Michif is the Metis language, grown out of Cree and French, with some English and Anishinaabe elements (The Canadian Encyclopedia).

In searching for more information about Michif I found some very exciting statistics like "94% of Michif nouns come from French and 99% of the verbs come from Cree" (The Polyglot Files). That kind of information makes me all dreamy.

(Imperfect Offering is a series for Indigenous History Month about Indigenous authors and storytellers who have meant a lot to me and to the students I teach.)




(Photo Credit Doug Griffin; Picture from Toronto Star Archives, Toronto Public Library)

Kahentinetha Horn
Kanien’ke:haka Bear Clan, Kahnawake
1940-
Activist, civil servant, fashion model, storyteller

Listen, do you know about Kahentinetha Horn? Because if you don’t, you need to.

In all the informational entries about her scattered across the Internet, she’s listed as an “activist, model, and civil servant” in some order. “Advocate, troublemaker, revolutionary” might work, too.

Here, this is from an article by Lisa Gregoire at the Carleton Newsroom: “Horn was a successful fashion model in the 1960s, but it wasn’t enough. She used her fame and political clout to overturn just about every well-set colonial table of oppression she came across.”

My favourite way to get to know more about her is to listen to the podcast she made with her daughter, actor and broadcaster Kaniehtiio Horn — Coffee with My Ma.

There's this one episode, "Ma Steals Larry the Cree Baby, Surviving the 60s Scoop." I assign this story in Indigenous Literatures and Oratures because it is a perfect story — it’s about the resourcefulness of and mutual care between Indigenous women, the love of community, and triumphant resistance to horrifying tyranny — and Horn also manages to be hilarious, which is some feat under the circumstances.

Horn does that thing Daniel Heath Justice asks for — she tells stories that (unavoidably) involve oppression without making them stories of lack. In her story, Horn is young and she’s broke, but she’s not helpless — she’s incredibly resourceful, and she creates community wherever she goes.

I'm following a thread here. Basil Johnston cites Horn as a cultural force at the beginning of “Is That All There Is?” And “her career in fashion involved daily modelling at the Canada Pavilion during the Expo 67 World’s Fair in Montréal,” according to Library and Archives Canada. And all this ties into the next profile...

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Note: Horn’s name is also spelled Kahn-tineta on some sites, but I’m using the spelling she and her daughter use on the Coffee with My Ma site.

(A series for Indigenous History Month about Indigenous authors who have meant a lot to me as an instructor and to the students I teach.)

* * * * * *


(Photo Credit: Ted Whitecalf)

Maria Campbell

I know this seems like another obvious choice -- Maria Campbell (b. 1940) is a household name and a beloved Métis author, broadcaster, and Elder (CBC.ca). Her 1973 autobiographical book, Halfbreed, is one of the best-known books from that late-60's / early-70s wave of Indigenous publishing in the mainstream. If that was all she'd done, it would be important, but she's done a lot of other things.

The Book of Jessica

It might be less well-known that Campbell is also a playwright. Flight, her first play, was the first all-Indigenous public production in what we currently call Canada. Her play Jessica is also important in the story of Indigenous theatre here.

The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation tells, in dialogue, a fascinating (and very frustrating) story about the play's creation, as Campbell collaborates with the settler actor/playwright, Linda Griffiths, who performed the play. I mean, if you want to hear colonialism talk (and talk and talk), this is your book -- but also Campbell's voice is here, honest and brilliant.

I'd love to teach from this book sometime, if I could figure out how to do it.

Censorship of Halfbreed

If you follow Canadian publishing and academic writing, you may also know that Halfbreed was censored by the publishers, McClelland and Stewart. It was, first, edited down from 2000 pages to 200. (The longer manuscript, so far as I know, is lost, though we can always hope.)

However, after editing, the book was then censored again at the last minute, without Campbell's consent.
( CW: sexual violence )

Jack McClelland himself said that "the RCMP would issue an injunction and stop the book from ever seeing the light of day." I don't know how he felt he knew that. I think, though, about what this act of silencing and his reasoning around it did to delay bringing the truth of Campbell's life and of colonialism's violence to the larger conversation -- and what that act and that thinking expose about how this nation really works, if he was right, or even thought he was.

In 2018, the missing two pages were re-discovered in an archive by Alix Shield, research assistant of Cree-Métis scholar Deanna Reder. Halfbreed has since been re-issued with the pages restored.

Here's Shield's timeline of the Halfbreed publication history.

Reder is a co-editor of Learn, Teach, Challenge, a brilliant collection of critical works on studying and teaching Indigenous literatures. According to Shield, she and Reder are developing "the People and the Text, building a digital database of Indigenous authors in Northern North America." Obviously this sounds amazing.

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A colleaguefriend and I watched Campbell's 2020 keynote at the Gabriel Dumont Institute on Saturday -- we meant to watch a more recent talk, but it wasn't available online yet. It's very quiet and personal and I liked it a lot.

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Okay, here’s my imperfect offering. I was posting these to my personal Instagram and then it occurred to me that someone over here might like to see them too.

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It’s Indigenous History Month, and I thought I might do a little series on some of the Indigenous authors I teach about in my classes and the role of these folks in cultural resurgence.

Mine is a pretty limited and flawed settler perspective, but I hope the awesomeness of these folks will shine through anyway.

First off is an obvious one:

Basil H. Johnston (1929 - 2015) -- Anishinaabe language revitalizer, author, scholar, storyteller, and teacher

Johnston is one of the breakthrough authors who, in the 1960s and 1970s, began to create space for Indigenous voices in Canadian publishing. Using his position at the Royal Ontario Museum, Johnston did incredible work in Anishinaabe language revitalization, gathering and saving traditional stories and creating language curricula.

Johnston’s two essential essays from Canadian Literature issues 124 (1990) and 128 (1991), “One Generation from Extinction” and “Is That All There Is?” are available for free online. In these essays, Johnston identifies and critiques the way settler scholarship fetishized physical objects while ignoring and/or belittling the profound knowledge and philosophy of the peoples who created them.

His clarity about the power and philosophy embedded in his language has been transformative for me as a reader and student of Indigenous literatures. Anishinaabe scholars and writers like Leanne Simpson and Louise Erdrich develop on his discussions of language and philosophy, and he was an influence on myriad Indigenous authors in the generation following him (Thomas King, Drew Hayden Taylor, etc.).

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When I posted this to Instagram, I found out that a friend of mine knew Johnston during the 1980s and had family connections to him (he used to babysit her brother). I wouldn't have known that unless I posted this little profile, so that was a fantastic outcome in itself.

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