A Really Good Brown Girl Read online

  “Each poem . . . looks us straight in the eyes and confronts us . . . mocks attitudes that lie deep within our culture.”

  — SUSAN MUSGRAVE, The Vancouver Sun

  “Dumont undercuts the rhetoric of Canadian intervention and reminds readers that the desire to join both coasts of the country came at a heavy price . . . . Dumont employs her own discursive strategies to ensure that the irony of the Métis population’s survival is communicated . . . [A Really Good Brown Girl] cultivates its own space of in-between-ness.”

  — JENNIFER ANDREWS, Canadian Poetry

  “Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl is an impressive first book of poems, not only for its firm grasp of poetic measure, but also for its playful ways of thrusting and parrying with tradition”

  — GARY GEDDES, BC Bookworld

  “The collection as a whole is a spirited dance in words, fully engaged with physical sensation, shifting from the linearity of forthright statement to cadenced, lyrical turns.”

  — BARBARA CAREY, The Malahat Review

  “Dumont forces the reader to look through her eyes at what is really there. It is not always easy to read her words, and the imagery she conveys packs a wallop to the senses . . . Marilyn Dumont has proven to be a writer to be reckoned with.”

  — NANCY COOPER, Arc Poetry Magazine

  “A Really Good Brown Girl offers students not only well-written poems to study, but an analysis of Canadian society that must be addressed.”

  — HARRIETT ZAIDMAN, Canadian Materials

  BOOKS BY MARILYN DUMONT

  * * *

  POETRY & PROSE

  • A Really Good Brown Girl · 1996

  green girl dreams Mountains · 2001

  that tongued belonging · 2007

  The Pemmican Eaters · 2015

  ANTHOLOGY

  Initiations: a Selection of Young Native Writings · 2007

  A REALLY GOOD BROWN GIRL

  The author with her mother, Calgary. c. 1962

  Marilyn Dumont

  A Really Good

  Brown Girl

  with a new afterword by the author

  and a new introduction by

  Lee Maracle

  BRICK BOOKS

  Copyright © Marilyn Dumont 1996, 2015

  Brick Books Classics first edition, 2015

  ISBN 978-1-77131-385-8

  We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

  BRICK BOOKS

  431 Boler Road, Box 20081

  London, Ontario N6K 4G6

  www.brickbooks.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Dumont, Marilyn, author

  A really good brown girl / Marilyn Dumont ; with a new afterword by the author and a new introduction by Lee Maracle.

  (Brick Books classics ; 4)

  Poems.

  Originally published: London, Ont. : Brick Books, ©1996.

  ISBN 978-1-77131-385-8 (epub)

  I. Métis — Poetry. I. Maracle, Lee, 1950–, writer of introduction II. Title. II. Series: Brick Books classics ; 4

  PS8557.U53633R42 2015 C811’.54 C2015-900185-4

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the following writers, who gave so much of their valuable writing time as editors of this manuscript: Rhea Tregebov, Don Coles, Tom Pow, John Donlan, George McWhirter, and the MFA students in the Advanced Poetry Workshop 1994/95, Creative Writing Department, University of British Columbia.

  I would also like to acknowledge the work of Jeanne Perrault and Sylvia Vance as being instrumental to my writing career.

  I am especially grateful to Cheryl Malmo for: her vision, her practice, her support.

  I gratefully acknowledge the former Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

  Many of these poems have appeared in the following periodicals and anthologies: Writing the Circle (NeWest Press 1990), The Road Home (Reidmore Books, 1992), Miscegenation Blues (Sister Vision Press, 1994), CV2, Room of One’s Own, Orbis, Matriart, Other Voices, NeWest Review, Gatherings, dANDelion, Grain, West Coast Line and absinthe.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: And They Waited to Judge,

  by Lee Maracle

  SQUAW POEMS

  The White Judges

  Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl

  The Halfbreed Parade

  The Red & White

  Squaw Poems

  Helen Betty Osborne

  Blue Ribbon Children

  old fool and a five-year moon

  let the ponies out

  the pay wickets

  WHAT MORE THAN DANCE

  what more than dance

  beyond recognition

  as if I were their sun

  horsefly blue

  spineless

  blue sky pokes

  when you walk through my door

  wild berries

  a hard bed to lie in

  talking on stone

  recovery

  spring breathing

  breakfast of the spirit

  a bowl of smooth brown wood

  you only know after

  my mother’s arms

  guilt is an erosion

  not just a platform for my dance

  one day in May

  WHITE NOISE

  half human/half devil (halfbreed) muse

  Letter to Sir John A. Macdonald

  Still Unsaved Soul

  The Devil’s Language

  For Bruce, the Night We Sat Studying Cree

  Circle the Wagons

  Leather and Naughahyde

  It Crossed My Mind

  the sound of one hand drumming

  MADE OF WATER

  Liquid Prairie

  the geese are not welcome

  Installation Piece

  Fireflies

  âcimowina

  Instructions to My Mother

  Who Knew the Moons Would Remember

  He Taught Me

  yellow sun days of leaving

  The Sky is Promising

  we are made of water

  AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

  Biographical Note

  INTRODUCTION: AND THEY WAITED TO JUDGE

  ■ I came across Marilyn Dumont’s work in Writing the Circle, edited by Jeanne Perrault and Sylvia Vance, when they asked if I would write a blurb for the back cover. After that I looked for her work. My next taste of her poetry was in Connie Fife’s Colour of Resistance. Finally A Really Good Brown Girl was published. I have kept a copy next to my bed for many years, careful not to damage it in any way. The publishers sent me a new copy, which I promptly lost along with a small suitcase of clothes. I rely on the old one. I read it like it was made of ancient birchbark scrolls, careful not to drink anything near it, spill anything on it. I even wash my hands for thirty seconds before picking it up. I read it every now and then, and it revives me like an old friend. Many times over the years I have used it in my classes.

  This book calls native people up; it presents us inside our homes “while outside the white judges [sit] encircling our house. And they [wait] to judge us.” This circle of judges was as familiar to my younger self as an old shoe, so familiar that it felt normal, so normal that I rarely even wondered if it mattered to me until I read about it in Dumont’s poem, where it was carefully placed after a description of the “old schoolhouse” the Dumont family lived in, the “nine kids,” the “plank staircase,” the “single window,” the “gas stove,” the walls “bare except for family photos,” the “pot of moose stew” to which all eleven family members sat down. Like Emile Zola’s J’ac
cuse, this work presented the poverty tenderly, in images that sent me spiralling into a sweet reverie about years that were often difficult for me to recall through the haze in which the white judges had obscured my memories. This haze always stood in front of my old family house: a boat shed converted into a three-bedroom house with a grand living room. Ten of us kids, siblings and cousins, stared at our fish just as Dumont’s family stared down the pot of moose stew. The haze lifted for me the moment I read “while outside the white judges sat encircling our house. And they waited to judge.” When the haze lifted, I could see us again, my siblings, my cousins, feet dangling off the bench not far from the pot-bellied stove. The soup steaming from our bowls as Momma pulled the bannock out of the oven, we would let go the most sumptuous gaggle of giggles. For the first time, that memory fed my soul. We had food that night. We ate so much fish in those days that I thought it was poor people’s food. What stands out for me now is how evil the circle of judges are and how impotent Dumont has made them in retrospect.

  No other book so exonerates us, elevates us and at the same time indicts Canada in language so eloquent it almost hurts to hear it. For the Métis of the prairies the food of shame was tripe; on the West Coast it was fish-head soup (the heads were free at the cannery my dad fished for). When the head soup came out, we knew we had run out of the rest of the fish – literally. Hunger was now the main item on the menu. The charity “cardboard boxes” “anonymously dropped” at Dumont’s door also arrived at ours. Once the box turned out a giant pair of pyjamas that my momma showed us how to transform into an amazingly entertaining toy by dropping the twins into one leg and me into the other. I charged around the room, the younger girls giggling wildly as they stumbled about, never falling right down because I was holding them up. Most of the time I was afraid to wear any of the donated clothes until Momma’s magic hands had transformed them into something the original owners would not recognize.

  Finally, in our house as in Dumont’s, “the guitars came out” and the dancing started up. I weep at the heroics, the warmth, the wonderment of our lives as our family struggled through neglect, shame and shunning by the millions of others who had removed us from our lands, confined us to poverty, forbidden us to sing our songs, then condemned us for how we lived. The white judges were always waiting in the poem until finally:

  a fight broke out

  and the night would settle in our bones

  and we’d ache with shame

  for having heard or spoken

  that which sits at the edge of our light side

  that which comes but we wished it hadn’t . . .

  Magically, in the re-presentation of the judges as the demons, the shame melted, dissipated and was discarded. The internalized mantra, You are not good enough, not good enough, obviously not good enough (“Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl”) lost its power, became some weak neurotic chorus Canada can’t stop chanting. The chorus is never loud or conspicuous. It is just there. The judges’ power to whip me into submission was gutted by Dumont’s poem.

  But the poem’s power didn’t only come from the representation of our lives in a way that liberated us, excising the judges from our view so that we could see ourselves with fresh and fairer eyes; it also came from the accomplishments of the poem as a work of art. Poetry is not new for Salish people. When I was starting out as a writer it seemed every second one of us wrote poetry – women particularly. We gathered on weekends and read poems to one another, listening and scribbling “springboard poems” in response to every reader. “We played with words in long chains,” says Jeanette Armstrong in her novel Slash. But we did not study poetry. We seldom read the poems of others; rather, we wrote poetry as others might play a board game or charades. It was a chance to cut through the veil separating us from one another, push through the haze created by the judges, and just be.

  A Really Good Brown Girl plays with everything, even the Dumont house, a “[f ]loating prairie structure” (“The Halfbreed Parade”). In so doing, Dumont removes all of us from the shacks them Indians live in and gives us entry into a magical space where authentic life begins and each of us becomes truly human. Simple, elegant, lyrical, whirling about on the page like butterflies, flying heroically through some insane storm conjured by Sir John A’s colonial dream, these words flipped the proverbial bird in the face of all that history of oppression. Dumont showed us that a really good brown girl could shrink colonialism, making it so small that it was surmountable.

  Every felt response to the colonial text reserved for us is in this book. A third-person Dumont hears the taunt, “hey squaw!” Then, “[f]or a moment, her spirit [drains] like water from a basin.” Just for a moment, then “she [breathes] and [draws] inside her fierce face and [screams] till his image [disappears] like vapour.” (“Squaw Poems”) The caveat is “for a moment.” In it is the simple truth that in order for the shame to last, we have to hold on to the vicious words and consider them true, self-evident. A Really Good Brown Girl invites us to let go of them and at the same time reminds us that we have used those very words to condemn others of ourselves: “I first heard it [squaw] from my mother. . . . I held the image of that woman in my mind and she became the measure of what I should never be.” That single line committed me to be forever vigilant against my own lateral violence. It changed the lives of my children, their children and those my children work and play with.

  “Betty,” says Dumont in “Helen Betty Osborne,” addressing the now well-known tragic murder victim, “if I write this poem about you, it might turn out to be about me”:

  it might even turn out to be

  about our grandmothers,

  beasts of burden in the fur trade

  skinning, scraping, pounding, packing,

  . . .

  it might turn out to be

  about hunting season instead,

  about ‘open season’ on native women . . .

  Or, if I had written the poem, it might be about little girls on a dock, endlessly cutting the heads off fish, drinking a hot rum toddy every four hours to warm the blood; about standing on a stool before a hot stove, stirring mush, stirring soup, while my mother works endlessly, pounding crabs down below in the crab shack with my young aunts. It might be about. . . . Dumont connects Betty Osborne’s murder to the murderous existence that robbed us of childhood, of food, of land, of freedom.

  Feminist, rebellious, outside the fold of what we were supposed to be, the exposé of “Blue Ribbon Children” was written too late for me. I have been the mother in the poem, with babies on my hip, pulling them in and out of tubs, hand washing their clothes, drying them on lines, cooking slabs of brown bannock, baking bread and apple sticky buns. I did draw the line at patching clothes. Instead I designed and sewed brand new clothes from second-hand cloth. If I couldn’t give my children a blue ribbon life, I would give them a blue ribbon look. My kids are in their forties and I still sew for them. Not even Dumont’s book could stop me from being a blue ribbon mom. I am now a blue ribbon grandmother of grown grandchildren and will likely live long enough to be a blue ribbon great grandma. The book did, however, stop my daughters from becoming blue ribbon moms. I imagine a host of other young Indigenous women also began to imagine living independent and fulfilled lives because of this book.

  “Squaw Poems,” the first section of A Really Good Brown Girl, ends with two poems in memory of Dumont’s papa. My papa is still alive. I am awed by the privilege of being sixty-four and still having a living father. When I first read these poems I could only think of my momma, sick and then consumed by cancer years earlier. Generally speaking, most Indigenous people my age do not have living parents. Most of my friends are dead. I have dead sisters, a dead brother, dead cousins, dead in-laws, all gone before they were sixty, so the notion in “let the ponies out” of letting go of life was difficult for me. But the excitement, the beauty of letting go, of breathing one last breath that takes us into “the teal plate of sky soaking foothills,” into ancestry
, into origin, into wind and unbridled ponies, is so painfully beautiful that it helped me finally to accept my mother’s death, the death of my cousins, my sisters and my brother. I so needed this poem. Magic: “let the ponies out” allowed me to stop hating their early departure and made it possible to stop feeling guilty about continuing on, turning fifty, turning sixty, and to imagine being seventy, eighty and ninety like my father.

  Once I was riding with Maria Campbell and made the comment that Salish people are inveterate gamblers. “We are the worst gamblers in Indian Country,” I said. “Wanna bet,” she answered. “How much?” I asked. She laughed and said, “Okay, you might be worse than Métis for gambling,” and we both laughed. “The pay wickets,” the second poem about Dumont’s father and his betting on horses, is also about my brother and brings me to understand him in a different way. Salish bone games are about community, but horses, that’s a Métis thing, and my older brother spent a lot of time in Alberta with my mother’s family. The pay wickets are a part of his life too.

  A Really Good Brown Girl affected men as well as women. Young people who read it began to go to school to study writing, to study poetry and begin seriously not just to play with words, but to struggle with them. This book elevated the writing of works to follow. It laid the foundation for young writers’ words to be “fierce, direct, true” (back cover) and magical.

  Beth Brant thinks Dumont is breaking through stereotypes. I think so too. But she does more than that. She struggles fiercely for full freedom of expression: as Indigenous person, as woman, as thinker and poet. Her poetry inspires us to be freethinking poets looking at our lives from an exalted place. It inspires us to raise the low standards that this country imposed on us.