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  • Intimate EnemiesWeetigo, Weesageechak, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road
  • Sophie McCall (bio)

The ongoing Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc Canada), struck in 2008, is part of the current global proliferation of discourses of reconciliation.1 Recent commissions in places such as South Africa, Chile, and Sierra Leone are suggestive of what Pauline Wakeham calls the “increasing co-optation of discourses of reconciliation by a hegemonic network of institutions and agents” (par. 1). In spite of a high level of scholarly and public interest, there is little agreement about what the term reconciliation means and how to initiate a transformative politics of reconciliation. Paulette Regan suggests that a “deep divide exists between Indigenous peoples and Canadians about what reconciliation is and how best to achieve it” (“Apology” 47): while Canada wants to “achieve legal certainty,” First Nations’ advocates highlight the need for reparations in the form of land, resources, and other forms of restitution (48). In Indigenous literary studies, the fissures in approaches to reconciliation stem from and echo other, overlapping tensions between those critics who argue for Indigenous nationalist positions, emphasizing the need for deeper engagement with tribal traditions of storytelling, governance, and cultural practice versus those who draw on postcolonial theories that focus on issues such as cultural hybridity, liminality, and white-settler complexes of guilt and complicity. For Indigenous nationalists, such as Taiaiake Alfred (Kanien’kehaka), Glen Coulthard (Dene), Roland Chrisjohn (Onyota’a:ka) and Sherri Young, and many others, reconciliation often functions hand-in-hand with the nation-state’s drive toward amnesia; furthermore, since there never was a historical moment of “conciliation,” reconciliation is beside the point. For scholars who critically engage with reconciliation as a way to talk about settler colonialisms, on the other hand, the key words of postcolonial theory—ambivalence, [End Page 57] negotiation, complicity, resistance, and so on—offer some useful conceptual tools to build an interpretive framework.2

This essay fleshes out the differences and overlaps between postcolonial and Indigenous nationalist critical approaches through an analysis of Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road. I argue that bringing into dialogue these two approaches can create productive openings for thinking through the multiple and competing senses of what a politics of reconciliation entails. The two novels explore residential schools as part of a larger policy of assimilation and genocide through the interaction of two figures from Cree storytelling traditions, the Weetigo/windigo (a cannibal spirit) and Weesageechak (a ‘trickster’).3 Both Boyden (of Irish, Scottish, and Métis ancestry) and Highway (a Cree writer) associate the Weetigo with the invasive and spirit-devouring effects of residential school and other colonial institutions; Weesageechak’s role in “healing” from that inheritance, on the other hand, takes on a different form in each novel. The final scenes of Boyden’s novel suggest that a recovery of Cree traditions, through storytelling, ceremony, and connection to land, is necessary for healing; Highway’s novel, while also invested in such a recovery, further suggests that healing comes from artistically transforming those Cree traditions within a dynamic, intercultural context. I argue that the representation of the intimate enemies of Weetigo and Weesageechak in Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Boyden’s Three Day Road illuminates both the ruptures and the unexpected common ground between postcolonial and Indigenous nationalist approaches to reconciliation. I further suggest that a combination of both postcolonial and Indigenous nationalist perspectives may best do justice to the complexities of these novels and the conceptualizations of healing and reconciliation that these texts offer.

Reconciliation: More Than One Approach

Before engaging with Highway’s and Boyden’s novels, I want to establish the key historical and cultural contexts for the debates on healing and reconciliation. In this section I argue that the rifts in conceptions of reconciliation may offer useful critical leverage by which to engage with the different roles and responsibilities in initiating a program of social justice. Many critics have drawn attention to the problems with a state-imposed discourse of reconciliation that, with its implicit drive [End...

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