Lake of the Prairies (review)

Place, family, history, belonging, home. Drawing on such ordinary words, Warren Cariou begins his memoir of growing up in northern Saskatchewan. The stories he recounts seem familiar: fishing, digging for arrowheads, moving to an old farm, learning about one's family. But there are also deeper truths in these stories, rooted in hidden secrets, lost for generations. In Lake of the Prairies, such stories are wakan, 'mysterious' in Lakota - and they take time to be told so their truths may be revealed.

One such story - Cariou's discovery of his own Metís heritage - is central to the constellation of questions the author raises about identity and knowledge. But there is no thunderclap, no single moment of transition. Cariou's heritage slowly emerges from his recounting of the stories others tell - his father, his uncles, his aunt, and others in his family. There is little remarkable about his initial self-description; at an early age, he is supposedly from 'Norwayfrancenglandgermany.' By itself, such a polyglot self-description would be unremarkable; the history of immigration from Europe to North America is replete with descriptions of 'mixed' marriages across lines of nationality and religion. But as Cariou shares his own history and self-discovery, issues of race and belonging begin to destabilize his original comfortable sense of himself as a white Canadian. To be Metís meant accepting an uncertain and negative position in society, one without clear boundaries or sense of belonging - yet making sense of it anyway, rather than accepting 'the canyon of forgetting.'

Interwoven with larger considerations of race and place is the author's own story of growing up and leaving home. Beginning with his relationship with his parents and uncles, Cariou gradually reveals his own life growing up in Meadow Lake as a youth and then going to university and becoming a writer as an adult. Common life events - his romance with his partner, Allison, or the deaths of his grandmother and father - help reveal hidden complications of the seemingly easiest questions. Who am I? Where am I from?

But the power of this memoir does not come from a relatively bloodless sense of self-discovery. Risk and uncertainty underscore the elegiac quality of the stories being told. Sometimes the risk comes from outside - the flight of fighter jets overhead, bombs ready to be released in an otherwise peaceful prairie landscape of woods and muskeg. Sometimes the risk comes from inside - as a child, his fear of Native people, and also knowing that it must be kept hidden. Avoiding any immediate conclusions, Cariou deftly interweaves his own childhood observations of others and their impressions of him, revealing the mundane vulgarity of small-town racism and the deeper causes of prejudice.

Loss, too, plays a role. The loss of connection to others, whether it is from moving away to go to university, or as elders pass away, leaving only the ordinary products of their own handiwork as a bittersweet reminder of their departure. The changes wrought by time and place and personal choice have unforeseen consequences. For Cariou, there is no going back to fix the past; we can only learn from what we have, now, and from where we have been.

Throughout Lake of the Prairies it is this sense of gradual revelation that shapes and reveals the landscape of identity, not only of what you know, but also of what you don't know about yourself. In that, Lake of the Praries is itself a story being told about our own identities and how we relate to one another - and we would be wise to listen carefully.