Cherie Dimaline never fails to enchant and VenCo is the start of something spicy, warm, and wicked. At least, I hope so. The prologue features three bad-ass hipsters collectively known as the Oracle—the Maiden (a Tender), Mother (a Watcher), and Crone (a Booker)—who reveal the stakes and premise. A sixth witch must be found and once she is, she’ll have seventeen days to find the seventh witch and complete the circle. In case you missed it, VenCo is a play on Coven. “She better be some kind of living-at-Hogwarts, spell-work-in-her-sleep legacy witch,” says the Maiden.
What sets Dimaline’s work apart is her original and impeccable writing style, which is both literary and lyrical, casual and raw, as befits the characters and situation. Vivid descriptions of urban grit pepper the pages, along with references to pop culture, and symbols such as little yellow witchy birds. In this magic carpet ride of a romp, we fly to various locations: Toronto, Salem, the California desert, and New Orleans. Chapter headings are casual, detailed, and comic. For example: “A Complete F* 180 over General Tso Chicken and Shitty Rice.”
I feel like the first half of this book offers a crucial backstory to a series and world-building as Dimaline introduces the members of VenCo, and we hear their individual tales. Circles within circles, stories within a story. We begin with protagonist Lucky St. James and her charming, dementia-prone grandmother, Stella Sampson. After her Métis mother dies a drunk, they are about to be evicted from their grotty home in East End Toronto when Lucky finds a key to a hidden basement room in her wet laundry. When she unlocks the door, she discovers a dirty, rocky, tunnel, and inside it, a tiny silver spoon engraved with a Halloween witch and the word SALEM. Lucky is the sixth witch. The other five: Meena Good and her Anishinabe partner Wendy; blond, gender-queer Freya; artist and rare-book collector Morticia from New York; and Louisiana Creole woman Letitia and her son, also joined the coven via enchanted spoons. Freya offers Lucky a writing job at VenCo and with nothing to lose, Lucky and Stella drive to Salem where they join the others whose personal tales are embedded within the larger narrative.
Jay Christos (obvious play there) is the smarmy antagonist taxed with stopping the coven from forming and keeping the Patriarchy in place. This immortal, bisexual, misogynist, Benandanti (witch hunter/killer) hunts at night through streets and dreams, and has mesmerizing skills of his own. Once he starts to move on Lucky, things heat up. This is a feminist kind of book; at least the job of VenCo is to “Hex the Patriarchy” of whom JC is the kingpin. This matriarchal coven has much work to do, enough to fill several more novels. With shades of Thomas King and Eden Robinson, this book will delight and enchant with its quirky, irresistible characters.
A member of the Georgian Bay Historic Métis Community, Dimaline is an Indigenous Canadian writer. Her YA book, The Marrow Thieves, won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2017, was named Book of the Year by CBC, Quill & Quire, the NY Public Library, and was selected by Time magazine as one of the top 100 YA reads of all time. She followed it with the disturbing sequel, Hunting by Stars. Her stand-alone novel Empire of Wild was Indigo’s #1 Best Book of the Year and was featured in the New Yorker and the New York Times. Without giving too much away, “f* you” is the last phrase in VenCo. That takes courage and a certain amount of bravado.
Fans of Thomas King and his serene, sensible, and sly, alter-ego, Thumps DreadfulWater, will be delighted to know his latest DreadfulWater Mystery is out, and it’s one of the best yet—a mischievous, slow-paced, cozy, infused with King’s trademark comedic wittiness, characters who are old friends, and a cup of sugar. Both down-to-earth and defying gravity as an eco-mystery, Deep House follows closely on Obsidian.
The “perhaps” love of his life, Claire, has adopted a young child named Ivory, and Thumps is embracing the idea of fatherhood; the only problem is, Claire doesn’t seem to be embracing Thumps with the same vigor she once did. In fact, she finds his presence “disconcerting.” Oh oh. Add to this, his trepidation around changing his photographic mode from film to digital during a waning pandemic, and Thumps is left facing a true “Thelma and Louise moment.”
King’s always told us his version of the truth, so doesn’t shy away from that “dreadful” subject Covid. As the pandemic “normalizes” people are beginning to gather outside again as they are now. The locals convene at Al’s café for the usual hijinks and witty political philosophizing. King invites us into discussions involving everything from photography to paint shades to prostate problems. And with surprising literary agility, he describes the passing of gas from Pops, the neighbour’s Komondor (big shaggy dog) without ever mentioning the word—“which is when the air on the porch went black … Thumps stumbled backwards, momentarily blinded by the smell that had exploded out of the dog … tried to get his eyes to focus” (100).This takes skill.
Many crime novels are plot driven. This one is not. Yes, Thumps inadvertently photographs a body in the boulders at the bottom of Deep House—a treacherous canyon on the local reserve near Chinook—and unravels a mystery. But what makes this story are the characters. Cooley Small Elk, big-hearted and anything but small, and his grandfather, Moses Blood; Archie Kousoulas, book store owner, who invites everyone to the pre-opening of Pappou’s, his new Greek restaurant; the laconic sheriff Duke Hockney; and the charming “ninja assassin” Cisco Cruz.
But more’s been tossed over the canyon wall into the crater than ancient appliances and a body. Folks have been using it to get rid of their junk for years, and the discovery of several painted panels pushes this eco-mystery into the landscape of corporate conspiracy.
Now the sugar. Fans will remember the disappearance of Thumps’s cat, Freeway. In this story, the cat comes back with a passel of surprises that draw out the man’s sensitive nature, making book six the sweetest installment of the series.
If you’ve never waded into the dry waters of Chinook, this is a great place to start to feel the true genius of the man and his imperturbable crime-fighting personality, Thumps DreadfulWater.
It’s been some time since I read an installment of the DreadfulWater Mysteries. Too long. The Red Power Murders (2017) was my first. With the latest Thomas King mystery about to launch, I decided to catch up with Obsidian, released 2020. Plus, I love the shiny black volcanic rock, so was enticed by the title. While reading Thumps DreadfulWater’s adventures, I could hear King’s voice narrating, and that got me thinking about his mocking comedy style, and where I first heard it.
Way back in 1997, King created CBC Radio’s Dead Dog Café, where he played straight man to Jasper Friendly Bear and Gracie Heavy Hand at the fictional town of Blossom, Alberta. I used to listen and laugh along with the fifteen-minute CBC episodes on the car radio while driving my daughter to taekwondo. If you’ve never heard Indigenous satire at its finest, you can catch episodes on youtube. I’d previously read Medicine River and Green Grass, Running Water while attending Trent University’s Indigenous Studies program. The latter is a 1993 Trickster novel, nominated for the Governor General’s Award. I add this preamble because the DreadfulWater Mysteries echo the same wry, ironic tone that characterizes King’s writing while offering a classic who-done-it mystery that will appeal to all those who love crime novels.
Obsidian takes Thumps back six years to a tragic time when he was a deputy sheriff and his girlfriend, Anna, and her daughter, Callie, were killed by a serial killer on the Northern California Coast. It doesn’t get much worse than that. They never caught the guy, who killed eight other people during his killing spree. Perhaps that’s why Thumps has given up law enforcement to become a photographer—something that Thomas King does exceptionally well. Check out his photos here. DreadfulWater’s ancestry is Cherokee, as is King’s. I feel an alter-ego lurking here.
Thumps returns to Chinook, only to discover that the producer of a true-crime reality TV show who’s investigating “The Obsidian Murders” had come there to talk to him but been murdered. Moreover, Maslowe’s found with a piece of obsidian in her mouth—the trademark of the original serial killer. Is he now in Chinook or is this a copycat killer? Either way, the news leaves Thumps feeling both troubled and curious.
Naturally, there’s a café in Chinook populated by funny friends. The banter between Thumps, Cooley Small Elk, and Moses Blood is reminiscent of the characters at Dead Dog Café. The story is largely plot-driven and heavy in dialogue—humorous dialogue—which is no surprise since King is also a screenwriter. I’m surprised the Thumps DreadfulWater Mysteries haven’t been purchased for screen yet. With their Canadian/Indigenous humour they’d make a splash—think Schitt’s Creek merged with Blackstone.
Maslowe has left Thumps a name—Raymond Oaks—who, it turns out, was Anna’s husband before he was sent to prison for life (robbery-homicide) and released on a technicality just around the time of the killings. Thumps is enlisted by Sheriff Duke Hockney to help investigate the murder and joined by his slick deputy-friend, Leon Ranger.
Not long after, Thumps is approached by a strange trio of film producers—Mercer, Gerson, and Shipman—who’ve come to Chinook to make a cable movie based on the Obsidian murders. “People, it seemed, liked to be disgusted, liked to be terrified, and broadcasters without borders had quickly learned to mine this deep and disturbing vein in the American psyche” (89). King is a masterful storyteller who writes ironically about his own work, and peppers his stories with political opinion, satire, sage wisdom, and the occasional belly laugh. If you’ve never read him, this is a great way in.
There are several characters embedded in this edition who I want to know more about. That means going back to the beginning with DreadfulWater, originally published in 2002. Obsidian can be read as a standalone mystery but would definitely be richer with more background and description. These characters can quickly become old friends worth knowing. Check out The DreadfulWater Mysteries for a seductive and respectfully irreverent read you can’t put down.
Cherie Dimaline never intended to write a sequel to her dystopian novel, The Marrow Thieves, but after earning the Governor General’s Award and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature, she went into schools to talk with teens about writing the book. When the kids asked if there would be a sequel and were told “no”, they booed her. They wanted to know more about seventeen-year-old Frenchie, his girlfriend Rose, and their road family. They wanted more “coming to” stories, more knowledge of this past/future apocalyptic world, and how these characters would survive this Indigenous holocaust by living as a tight, loving, bush community.
A bone-chilling tale of what could happen, Hunting by Stars is set in the not-too-distant future; perhaps 2050, certainly within the lifetime of teens reading today. When humans have all but destroyed the planet and been sickened by plague, the non-Indigenous people stop dreaming and go insane. Settler scientists experiment and find a cure. Woven within the DNA of Indigenous peoples is the ability to dream. Once it becomes apparent that this precious fluid can be extracted from bone and turned into a dream-enhancing serum, Indigenous people become a commodity to be hunted and harvested. Medical centres, termed “schools,” are constructed like space-age hospitals, and “recruiters” enlisted to track down and detain anyone who might hold the cure. Worse still, some of their own kind are “turned” and sent into communities to bring in their own people. Indigenous people should be proud to do their part in healing the world, shouldn’t they? This situation puts Frenchie’s small family on the run in northern Ontario, heading north into the wilderness, or what’s left of it.
This tale is, in some ways, prophetic; in other ways, a horror story. If you’re squeamish to tales of imprisonment and torture, this story may not be for you. If you’re anxious and afraid of the coming climate change—which is already revealing itself in floods, droughts, fires, hurricanes, and extreme temperatures—this story might not be for you. I actually had to put it down and stop reading during our recent B.C. floods. It became suddenly too real.
But know this: within the evil perpetrated by one race upon another, despite the genocide so graphically portrayed, and the ferocity of Mother Earth’s reaction to humanity’s ignorance, this is also an inspiring story of survival and hope. Case in point—though Canada is still intent on producing the serum organically, the President of the United States has put a halt to the genocide and scientists there are working on a synthetic cure. For Frenchie’s family, the underground railroad south might hold more promise than the sketchy north.
The intensity of love shown between the members of Frenchie’s family, the heart-wrenching loss, deep betrayal and depravity shown by the other, and the gritty reality of living a bush-life on the run, sink deep into our souls.
This is a political book, told in the language of reconciliation—settler versus Indigenous—and from the point-of-view of the hunted. It’s the settlers who created the problem, yet the Indigenous people are being mined as the solution. The schools, forced imprisonment, government-sanctioned hunting of Indigenous people of all ages, and the medical testing and torture that goes on within them, are all based on the Indian residential school model of the none-too-distant past. As such, past is future, and now a thin weave between.
Cherie Dimaline is from the Georgian Bay Metis Community and this story is her voice. She is both a dreamer and singer; her cinematic, poetic prose transports us where “bees swarmed broken streets, made hives out of green-clotted houses, the wallpaper shot through with moss” (389); while her fertile imagination warns us of our own ghoulish capabilities.
Hunting by Stars pulses with a rhetoric of resilience and reclamation. As Nature reclaims the Earth, so Frenchie’s family works to reclaim its culture and language, cherished word by word, action by action, dream by dream. Both books should be read and discussed in schools, for we’ve left this generation with a massive task, and books such as this and The Marrow Thieves are roadmaps to reclamation and hope.
The subtitle of Elements of Indigenous Style is A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. I read this book to learn what is appropriate and what is not, as the two fiction books I’m now writing include references to Indigenous Peoples and are set on Indigenous territory. After reading, I made revisions to my manuscript. Younging wrote this edition in 2018, so it may already need updating as, in Canada especially, much is changing rapidly with regard to how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people work together. I highly recommend this book to writers, editors, students, and anyone interested in reconciliation; in fact, we all should read it because we are in relationship with Indigenous People and need to be much more aware. I’m not re-writing the book here, just providing a sampling and speaking to a few key points.
Naming
Merging the name of his Cree mother (Young) and his Chinese father (Ing), Younging forged his own identity. I appreciate this, as I created my own name, Hawkin. It means “kin of hawks” and expressed my need for freedom following my divorce. I was neither my father’s daughter nor my ex-husband’s wife, but was searching for self. I identified strongly with the hawks who lived nearby in Ontario and still identify with birds of prey.
About Gregory Younging
Younging died in May 2019 at the age of fifty-eight, and was posthumously awarded the Association of Canadian Publishers President’s Award. You can read more about his achievements here. He was a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, and managing editor/publisher of Theytus Books in Penticton, British Columbia, for many years. Theytus Books was the first Indigenous-owned publishing house in Canada and continues to publish Indigenous authors. Gregory Younging also taught at UBC Okanagan and served as assistant director of research to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
As I said, I learned much from this book. He includes appendixes, case studies, and twenty-two principles of style. Here are a few key points to consider that struck me.
Characteristics of Contemporary Indigenous Literature
Contemporary Indigenous Literature gives authority to all voices rather than one; as well as the voices of animals, and messages given by spirits and natural phenomenon; and it crosses circular time—ancient past, present, future. These characteristics come from the work of Anishinaabe author, Kim Blaeser (13).
Protocols for working in Collaboration
Non-Indigenous authors, or, Indigenous authors writing about a nation that is not their own, should enter into a relationship with that source nation, get permission, and negotiate mutually agreeable terms. Younging stresses collaboration and the need to always ask in an appropriate way. For example, when I studied at Trent University, the Protocol was to respectfully offer tobacco to an Elder or Teacher if you wanted to ask a question. If the person accepted it, they could help, and you had permission to engage. Younging writes that the Protocol is still to ask respectfully and offer a gift, but tobacco might not be the right gift. You need to find out what’s appropriate by asking around the community or asking the Elder. Then listen. Finally, give them the right to read your text before publication.
Awareness of Sources
I appreciate the chapter on terminology because much of this has changed since I studied in the nineties. Also, in some classes, we used texts written by archaeologists or anthropologists who viewed Indigenous Peoples as static cultures of a distant past. That is not the case. Indigenous Cultures are resilient, adaptive, dynamic, and distinct. If you use content published by anthropologists or historians be aware that the author likely did not follow Protocols, and translations often use stereotypical language and concepts. For example, the anthropological theory that Indigenous Peoples migrated across the Bering Strait to North America is not part of The Oral Traditions of The People.
Terminology to use and not to use
A few words to be wary of using are artifact, band (use the People), clan (unless it’s a particular Clan System, pagan/heathen, land claim (use Indigenous title), legends/myths/tales (use Oral Traditions), self-government (use self-determination). Aboriginal is an adjective only and is being replaced by Indigenous.
Many words in our everyday vocabulary are of Indigenous origin, though we assume they’re English. Here’s a partial list: canoe, hammock, igloo, kayak, potato, raccoon, skunk, squash, tomato. Also many place names have Indigenous origin including the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Alternatively, explorers and settlers renamed places after themselves or their foreign sovereign (investor) in many cases as a means of claiming territory for the colonizing country.
First Nations, Inuit, and Métis
In Canada, the government recognizes “First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.” First Nations is a political term that refers to someone from a First Nation. Inuit means “The People” and refers to The People who live in the Arctic. Métis is both a noun (she is Métis) and adjective (Métis heritage). The term Métis is complex as it has three possible meanings.
1) Métis means “mixed race” in French and refers to those who were involved in the Red River Resistance and their descendents. They may speak French, English, and/or Michif. Note it’s termed the Red River Resistance, not rebellion.
2) Someone may identify as Metis (without accent) if they are English-speaking people of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous ancestry. For example, my great grandfather’s father was Dutch and his mother was Tuscarora (a nation who moved north and were adopted into the Haudenosaunee).
3) Métis (with accent) can also be used by those who do not descend from Red River.
Use of Traditional Names
Use Traditional Names that The People use to refer to their distinct nation—Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Nuu’chah’nulth, Mi’Kmaq, Gitxsan, and so on. Younging writes: “Names are part of the way we render identity” (91). Be particular and precise. Many of us acknowledge the name of the Traditional Territory on which we’ve settled and use it in our email signature: Settled on unceded Stó:lō territory—Ts’elxwéyeqw (Chilliwack) and Se:máth (Sumas) tribes
Capitalization
Indigenous style uses capital letters where non-Indigenous writers/editors may not—Survivor, Chief, Clan, Elder, Indigenous Voice, the Longhouse as an institution, Midewiwin, Oral Tradition, Seven Fires, Sundance, Sweat Lodge, Vision Quest, Warrior Society, Wampum Belt, Traditional Knowledge. I see this as a positive way of showing honour and respect.
Possession
The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada by Geoffrey York was one of the first books I read, and it’s always stuck with me. York was a journalist with the Globe and Mail in Toronto. He wrote about the legacy of abuses from land grabs, to diseases, to residential schools, to reserve land that afforded The People little to nothing. They were dispossessed of their land and culture. They are now reclaiming, so when you’re writing, it’s important not to imply Indigenous Peoples are “owned” or “possessed” by Euro-colonial states. They are not Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. Also, use present tense rather than past. The Nuu’chah’nulth potlatch or hold potlatches, not the Nuu’chah’nulth held potlatches.
Younging’s guide is political. It’s complex and much to absorb. As a former high school English teacher, I suggest this book be used in humanities classes. Younging has titled this book with an obvious poke at Elements of Style, an American English writing style guide written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, that’s still used by high school and university students. It’s time to change it up and expand our awareness of how language informs thought and thought informs language, as both inform culture and cultural prejudices. Even those of a subtle kind.
Chi’miigwech to my friend Tamara at Western Sky Books for putting this book in my hands last Sunday and to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for writing this cure. Easy now, white ladies, the cure is a response to one Susanna Moodie, whose Roughing It In the Bush (1852) is a racist, colonial, settler account of her arrival in her New World. I read the aforementioned text in 1997 and wrote in my journal: “Moodie is a classist and racist—not my idea of Canadian classic literature.” (Yes, I have journals that date back to the early 90s.). I downloaded Moodie’s text for free on Kindle (cause why pay for something like that) and tried to read it again just to compare this to that, but I couldn’t get beyond the first chapter of Moodie’s vehement verbosity. She starts out by slamming the Irish immigrants and moves on from there. Nothing but perfect white homes and sun rippling on water suits Mrs. Pastoral Moodie.
While Moodie uses far too many words to describe her dissatisfaction with “the bush,” Simpson sprinkles her text with enough Ojibwe words to make we want to enrol in an Anishinaabemowin language course. (And forgive me if I use these terms in the wrong way. I’m trying, and hate being only a zhaaganaash.) I knew a few Anishinaabe words before I read this text and I know a few more now. I finished the paperback last night and then, this morning, I went through the whole text using the online Ojibwe People’s Dictionary Simpson recommends in her Author’s Notes, while eating pancakes and maple syrup and thinking of home and Niinatig, the Maple Tree. I penciled in the translations where needed. I apologize, Tara. I know you hate my margin notes. But I’m an academic at heart and need to know. Still, I refuse to look stuff up online when I’m settling into dreamland with a good book; hence the need for a breakfast session.
Anishinaabemowin is a beautiful language that interweaves people, land, weather, culture, and feelings in a soft, gentle, musical rhythm. For example, Makwa Giiziis is the Moon When Bears Wake Up — much better than February, don’t you think? Minomiin Giizis is the Moon of Wild Rice — August or September depending where you live. That connection to what’s happening on the land makes me feel soft and warm inside. That’s how I feel as I read this book, actually. There’s quiet gentle healing here and a good dose of sarcastic “haha” humour (which as we know is healing in itself.)
I’m reading the sign and letting the 4:45 a.m. departure time sink in, sipping the lemon water in the shitty plastic cup, when he approaches me with all the confidence the trifecta of obliviousness and delusion and patriarchy can provide.
We talk about things, but not really, because I can’t remember who he is.
He tells me he’s the director general of Indian Affairs and sometimes I have a poker face and sometimes I just have a face.
He is so clean and shiny. I’m in flannel plaid pyjama pants with a not-matching plaid flannel shirt because who gives a fuck. He has a bureaucratic overcoat and adult shoes that require regular neoliberal maintenance. I’m in bare feet. He looks like he’s lived in Ottawa for too long. I look like I’ve lived in Peterborough for too long (179).
I grew up on Anishinaabe territory (along the north shore of Lake Ontario) later lived near Lake Scugog, and then went to Trent University near the aforementioned city of Peterborough, where I learned from traditional teachers and Elders. If I were ever to move back to Ontario that is where I would settle. I don’t know how authentic this map is, but it will give you some idea of the land of which I speak. And, of course, the Anishinaabe people and their neighbours were here long before maps were drawn. Since forever.
At any rate, this is a book review and all I can say is, “read this book.” Now that I’ve penciled in the meaning of all the words I guessed at (and got most right from the context by the way) I’m going to read it again because it just makes me feel good — not numb, not guilty, not sad, just good. I’m not sure if it was Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s intention to make white ladies feel good, but it worked for this one. Perhaps this is the cure of which she speaks.
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