R.I.P. Lee Maracle.
One of my favorite things is discovering new writers – not necessarily ‘new’ as in ‘emerging’ but new as in I haven’t heard of them before, and they’re a writer I’d really like to read. The only exception to this is when I learn about them reading their obituary. Pleasure then curdles into dismay and a sense of loss.
This happened just last month when a NY Times headline caught my eye: “Lee Maracle, Combative Indigenous Author, Dies at 71.”
Combative Indigenous author!!
Click bait to an avid reader like me…
After clicking I was shocked that I’d never before heard of Maracle, a Canadian member of the Sto꞉lo nation who, during her 40-plus years writing career published about a dozen books, (novels, poetry, nonfiction and criticism) that shined a revelatory light on the harrowing history of Canada’s First Nations people. She was even whispered about as a potential recipient of the Nobel prize in literature.
In her home country, Maracle was a pathfinder, lighting the way for other native writers and women of color. Strange that her work remains essentially unknown in the United States. What was the big secret? I wondered this as I read and reread Alex Traub’s concise and skillful rendering of Maracle’s remarkable life story.
The answer is, of course, commercial: Her books were unlikely to become bestsellers in the United States. Hence, they were easy to ignore.
Maracle (think miracle or maybe oracle) was born in 1950 in West Vancouver. She was the granddaughter of the Oscar nominated actor Chief Dan George though her father didn’t acknowledge his paternity until Lee (a nickname for Aline) was an adult. She was brought up by her mother who, she wrote in I Am Woman, her 1988 book essays, raised her with a sense of pride in her indigenous roots, a social conscience, and a ‘tenacious’ will.
In the mid-1970s, when Maracle was in her 20s, she tried to publish her first book – an autobiographical novel titled Bobby Lee: Indian Rebel. By her own account, the manuscript was rejected by many publishers because “Indians don’t read!” So Maracle went out and gathered the signatures of 3500 native people who declared they’d buy and read her book. An independent publisher agreed to publish it, and apparently they did. The book is still in print, the paperback now selling for $42 on Amazon.
Years later, when the Vancouver Book Festival turned down her request to launch I Am Woman, Maracle not only attended the festival but hopped up onto the stage and began to read from it anyway.
“The festival officials were horrified,” Maracle said of her escapade, in a 2019 profile in Canada’s Globe and Mail.
In more recent years, Maracle hasn’t had to be so brazen in her effort to be heard. In 2018 she was named an officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor, and one about which she expressed ambivalence. She told an interviewer that accepting such an award from the Canadian government “for the work that I do with decolonization struck me as a bit odd.”
On the other hand, she’d recently published a new novel, "Celia's Song,” which was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize. The honor, she speculated, “are probably going to help my book sales.”
In the years since she began publishing a sea change has occurred across Canada with regard to First Nations people. Maracle’s writing accounts for some part of it.
Among the changes are the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate and offer reparations to the families of at least 150,000 native children who were seized from their families and placed in residential schools geared toward the erasure of native culture and language. This continued into the ‘90s when the last of these ‘schools’ was finally closed. As if family separation and cultural genocide weren’t enough, the bodies of about 1,800 native children were found this year buried on the grounds of several shuttered schools.
In addition, the Canadian government, in response to demands from newly mobilized First Nations people, has launched an investigation into the disappearances of many thousands of native women, most of them feared to have been trafficked and/or murdered.
“For us,” Maracle wrote in ‘I Am Woman,’ “racism is not an ideology in the abstract but a very real…part of our lives…The pain, the effect, the shame, are tangible, measureable and murderous.”
I plan start my Maracle reading journey with Bobby Lee: Indian Rebel and then I’ll move on to Celia’s Song. It’s the only way I can make up for having missed out on her writing while she was still at work.
