From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing

6. “It is the law”: Disturbing the Authoritative Word in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen

101 In an evocative moment early in Highway’s novel, Abraham and Mariesis Okimasis acknowledge their ineffable sadness at their son’s encroaching departure for the residential school in the south. “‘Soonieye -gimow’s orders,’” Abraham repeats to himself, a phrase uttered by the local priest, Father Bouchard. Rather than soothe the grief of the two parents , the words reflect their helplessness (40). “Sooni-eye-gimow,” we learn from the text’s gloss, translates literally as “Indian Agent.” In a reiteration of this statement’s meaning, one that further confirms the finality of the situation , Abraham declares in deference: “‘It is the law’” (40). The addition, “It is the law,” creates a distance—here, linguistic, but also ideological—between the speaker and the system enforcing this undesired change. The “semantic finiteness” (Bakhtin 344) of this statement calls to mind Bakhtin’s notion of “the authoritative word,” a type of discourse fused “with political power, an institution” (343). “Located in a distanced zone,” the authoritative word is “the word of the fathers,” Bakhtin writes, “a prior discourse” (342). Though authoritative discourse precludes any intervention or play in its transmission, there is potential for its transformation in certain generic contexts. Bakhtin posits the novel as the privileged site where struggle is waged against authoritative discourse. Quite within Bakhtin’s formulation of this genre, Highway’s novel is a SIX “It is the law” Disturbing the Authoritative Word in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen “contact zone” whose “mixing of linguistic forms” signifies a “collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms” (360). Stan Dragland, reviewing Highway’s novel, highlights its discursive and aesthetic hybridity, a hybridity that takes after Jeremiah’s own “mongrelized life” (Dragland 44). “Page by page,” he describes, “it sears through the tragedy of deracination and the casualty-strewn but ultimately triumphant process of cultural revival. But as a whole it holds the competing cultures in suspension and is therefore an assimilating text, an exercise of the power to welcome the imperializing culture’s art and to ridicule its politics” (44; emphasis in original). In her review of Kiss of the Fur Queen, Margery Fee similarly notes Highway’s mixing of cultural forms. The innovative work that Highway performs in this discursive and aesthetic blending , Fee claims, “takes Canadian literature in a new direction” (156). Publishing considerations may further reinforce Fee’s claim: published by Doubleday Canada, Highway’s novel has benefited from wide circulation and a broadly based readership. Like Fee and Dragland, I am interested in the interaction between Cree and non-indigenous expressive forms and frames of meaning in this text. While Fee observes that, in Highway’s novel, “salvation comes through the transformative power of music, dance and theatre” (157), I will emphasize the transformations and interventions that take place on the levels of language and narrative. This examination of Kiss of the Fur Queen draws on Bakhtin’s theories of the novel to explore Champion and Dancer Okimasis’s introduction to the residential school, a place that is, quite literally, a “distanced zone,” a realm of the fathers. I will consider the aesthetic dimensions of this traumatic interruption in these two characters’ lives. My discussion will then turn to Champion’s and Dancer’s—or rather, Jeremiah’s and Gabriel’s— gradual process of “ideological becoming” (Bakhtin 341) and theorize how this process is enacted narratologically. The collision of discrete worlds changes into a multilayered consciousness in Highway’s text, a mingling of languages and cultural forms. In the context of contemporary Aboriginal writing, the dissolving of semiotic boundaries can involve, as Catherine Rainwater points out, a subversive entry into the dominant discourse that “exposes the ways in which both Native and non-Native frames of reference constantly undergo revision” (xiv). Champion and Dancer Okimasis experience a rupture in their worlds when they are hauled away on a plane and taken to Birch Lake Indian Residential School three hundred miles south of their home community of Eemanapiteepitat. This is a place where an alien language is spoken, where their superiors dress in strange vestments, and where both boys are victims of sexual acts difficult to name. Like the narrator in Jane Willis’s 102 • Genre in the Institutional Setting of the Residential School residential school account Geniesh, Champion and Dancer initially build up an excitement about the plane ride that will take them...