The Back of the Turtle.

 

King, Thomas. The Back of the Turtle. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2014

Did ye know that a fortune may be read on a face and a fate found in a query?[i]

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.[ii]

             Imagine you have a job as a technician in a large corporation employing thousands. Imagine further that your job is to develop and produce a certain combination of chemicals in order to facilitate other aspects of whatever else the corporation produces. Suppose that you discover one day that the corporation has been found responsible for the deaths of many people in an accident resulting from the faulty use of a product that contains the component you developed. Would you feel guilt at having contributed to such a disaster? Would you feel that you ought to have had a handle on the potential risks and foreseen the tragedy?

      
            Are individuals responsible for the actions of the collective entities of which they are parts? Does the plea, “I was only following orders,” pass the moral smell test?

            King has created a marvellous novel in The Back of the Turtle, a story that contains the questions above without ready answers. Rich with unforgettable characters, it chronicles the aftermath of a horrifying mistake made by the Domidion Corporation in accidentally destroying a BC reserve and tourist town, poisoning people and destroying flora and fauna alike in a fatal effort to defoliate an area for the construction of a pipeline. What's different from typical diatribes against ruthless resource exploitation is that The Back of the Turtle tells the story through individuals experiencing the events. Corporate groups, institutions, reserves, towns are in the end not so much cohesive, active entities  as collectives that serve to limit accountability, excuse the culpability of the individuals involved, bury the lives of people under the rubric of “the common good.”

            What a fabulous cast of characters King has imagined here. Sonny and Crisp, eccentric characters who have outlived the disaster and continue to inhabit the ghost town that is Smoke River. Mara who comes back to the reserve where she grew up to find that her childhood friend hasn't survived the disaster . . . and then can't leave. Gabriel who turns up in the ruined community with a secret deeper than he can tell.

            And then there's Dorian Asher, the CEO of Domidian, a man swimming in money but drowning for lack of the things money can't buy: a fulfilling marriage, health, peace of mind, self respect.

            King's narrative takes us back and forth between the BC coast and corporate Toronto; the contrasts between the high-end shops of TO and the ruined houses, abandoned convenience stores and motels of Smoke River characterize the gulf between the haves and the have nots: First Nations and white corporate culture in this case. Most Canadians will have sensed the depth of that division by now as it plays out between the Canadian government/petroleum business and the people who are directly affected by the collateral damage of oil extraction, the laying out of pipelines and other infrastructure. What King achieves in his novel is the removal of this tension from the political sphere and the placing of it in the realm of the personal.

            Readers may be left with a question: how ironical is it that people can be trampled by massive projects whose justification is “the welfare of the people?”

            It's difficult for us to be certain about what happens behind corporate board room doors and in the offices of Suncor, Shell or Exxon, and so King's retailing of possible conversations between corporate executives on possible ways of handling disasters like spills and bird deaths has to be speculative. If King is accurate when he fictionalizes their conversations, his boardroom dialogue (including plans to spread suggestions that sabotage, extreme environmentalism, terrorism are behind such “accidents”) has to be read judiciously: companies are run by people, individuals who have homes and lives and families and worries about their health. They are all are people who fear for their jobs, their incomes, the caché and power they possess and a lifestyle that most only dream about. That they are willing to behave ruthlessly, lie if necessary, treat consumers as commodities is hardly surprising. In fact, it should be absolutely predictable. Furthermore, corporations carry the "Ltd" affix after their names; individuals who control them must see their liability as limited and therein lies the dilemma that faces ordinary citizens: you are valued as a compliant consumer, the quality of your life often hangs from a lopsided negotiation.

            But to stop here would be to do The Back of the Turtle an injustice. Smoke River, the reserve, the people who remain and those who wander back are best characterized by their resilience. It's their stories that will stay with readers after the indignation at corporate injustice has faded. The creation myths surrounding turtles and the woman falling from the sky thread through the novel and serve as foundations for the hope that King's characters possess: the turtles, the whales, the people will come back. They will fall from the sky, they will emerge from the sea and the place will flourish once more.

            I've long been impressed with the generosity of spirit in Thomas King's writing. Even in his non-fictional The Inconvenient Indian, the tone is refreshingly conciliatory when considered in the catalogue of literature chronicling indigenous/settler conflicts and injustices. For me as a privileged, white settler who recognizes the need for justice and reconciliation, a real danger exists that I will make the same mistake that governments and corporations have long made at the aboriginal/settler interface, namely the homogenization of “the opposition” into a blob such that the persons involved are rendered faceless and nameless . . . and insignificant.

       
            I began this review with a question: what responsibility does a minor functionary in a corporate entity bear for the actions of the conglomerate for which he works? I might have added: what responsibility do we all share for destructive behaviours that can ensue when we act corporately? I was surprised at the degree to which King practically answers this question for us in a near-essay in Chapter 82 where one of these “functionaries” recognizes his own role in an unbelievable disaster:

How had he come to such a fantasy, that there was a benign purity in scientific inquiry? He had mistaken the enterprise completely, had seen only the questions and had ignored the obvious answers.

  What was the proper goal of research?

  Profit.

  What was the proper use of knowledge?

  Power.

He could see his errors now, could see all his illusions in stark relief. Too late, of course. Very much too late.[iii]

I generally prefer that I be allowed to come to such a conclusion through the actions and words of the characters, but I'm willing to forgive King for superfluous guidance here, particularly as  The Back of the Turtle gave me probably the best read of the year.     

 Really.        

           

           

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[i]Page 1

[ii] Invictus, William Ernest Henley

[iii]Page 466

The Inconvenient Indian - Thomas King

King, Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Doubleday Canada, 2012

If I had to select one quote that best summarizes the fork in the rode for indigenous peoples in North America in 2013, it would be most of paragraph 2 on page 265 of Thomas King's Curious Account:

 " . . . there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America.

With the rest of the bones."

Everything before the penultimate page 265 is King's accounting of reasons for coming to this conclusion.

In fairness to the other ethnic communities in Canada, the question of assimilating or “sinking into the stewpot of North America” can't be considered exclusively an Aboriginal choice. Something similar could be said about the many Chinatown cultures in our metropolitan areas, the Hutterian Brethren colonies, the Amish of Southern Ontario, the Kurds of Northern Iraq to name just a few minorities struggling to survive while gradually "sinking into the stewpot."

Where the cases differ is in the history that brought us all to these shores. The Inconvenient Indian is a story of a culture over-run by Western civilization, it's a history that can help us understand why "I started with nothing and made it, why can't they?" is an absurd question.

King begins in 1492, where we normally begin our history of the Aboriginal people of North America as if they didn't exist as anything more than the deer and the beaver before then. The memorable stories that followed Columbus' discovery of the New World—Custer's last stand, the Riel Rebellion, the role of the fur trade and its missionary partners—all are clothed in our history books with the patina of a conquerors' viewpoint. Like the cold winters and the vast, formidable distances, the presence of Indians has historically been one more obstacle to overcome as we forged nations after the European fashion. Hence, the inconvenient Indian.

At the least, the story of our interactions with North America's Aboriginal people is highly ambiguous. King traces some of this ambiguity through the portrayal of Indians in movies where the "Cowboys and Indians" mentality had its birth. The relationship between the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto, (remember kemo sabay?) exemplifies one movie stereotype. Tonto is the Indian image that lives on in minds around the world: the noble savage, the living Indian. But there are other images that we carry around with us at the same time: the bloodthirsty savage (the scary one), the "dying" Indian (the disappearing one), the indolent Indian (languishing on reserves), the hungry Indian (poverty is highest on reserves), and you could probably add others. King draws our attention to the multitude of First Nations citizens who have become household names, not because they were Indians but because they were talented: Buffy Sainte-Marie, Kenoujuak, Clint Walker, Jay Silverheels and Will Rogers to name a few. (A joke of Will Rogers: "There's no trick to being a humourist when you have the whole government working for you," underlines another sensibility, namely that every government since confederation has bungled the Aboriginal file - page 39.)

Added to the stereotypes above is the reality of Indians categorized more objectively: the legal Indian or treaty Indian vs. the non-treaty Indian, the Inuit, the Metis and others who may or may not have fallen under any particular treaty. This is all very tricky ground and the moment one starts to define who is a genetic, an ethnic or traditional member of a group, the ambiguities begin to burgeon. There exist certain treaty rights to which only legal Indians are entitled and before 1968, treaty Indians who voted, who served in the military, graduated college, married a non-treaty person were automatically or voluntarily enfranchised, ie. given Canadian citizenship in exchange for treaty status. King quotes a Blackfoot friend: " . . . enfranchised is French for 'screwed'" (page 71). Suffice it to say that King portrays with a concise and ironic wit the ambiguities adding to the inconvenience of Aboriginal populations and the legacy with which early settlement saddled both us and them.

Not every phase of the story from Columbus onward lends itself to witty retelling. The assimilation through education chapter most certainly belongs in the "too tragic for jokes" category. In the "We are Sorry" chapter, King deals with the residential schools period under the general principle that for whites, two options only were considered for resolving the Native inconvenience: extermination or assimilation (page 101). In the endeavour to "kill the Indian to save the man," children of Aboriginal families were forced into residential schools where Indian culture, language and spirituality were drummed out and English or French, European culture and Christianity were beaten in. At least that was the plan, its execution entrusted to various mission-minded churches, a decidedly unholy alliance of state, commerce and Christianity. ( " . . . you might wish to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism" – page 103) The cruelty of the plan and its ineffectiveness in reaching its goals is currently being clarified by the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Canada. It's still unclear how much benefit Aboriginal people will experience as a result of apologies heard, received and accepted for the Residential Schools debacle.

In 1991, a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples began work that would conclude with a 4,000 page report and 440 recommendations to government in numerous areas including replacement of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development with something more in line with current realities. "The expectation was that the government would see the report as an opportunity to renew, amend, and restructure its relationship with Canada's First Nations . . . Almost as soon as the report was released, it was placed on the shelf with all the rest of the reports from Royal Commissions." (page 171) It seems that governments still lack either the will or the means—or both—to effect the changes that are necessary but then, the history of the relationship between the Canadian nation and the First Nations has—according to King—always been about land (see page 216), and to this end, the periodic confiscation of reserved land, the delays in settling land claims and the toying with reducing the numbers of status Indians through measures like Bill C-31 would be evidence enough to conclude that the end game is to extinguish the sovereignty of First Nations over their territories and their right to self-determination.

Even so, The Inconvenient Indian is not a diatribe against the evil white man. King is remarkably even-handed in his assessment of where things have gone wrong and where they've gone right. He may be too generous. The mess that characterizes the majority of reserves in Canada was made by the system that has made me well-off, secure and able to make choices. What role should First Nations expect me to fulfil in the cleaning up of that mess? Whatever that role is, it's not about handouts, admonishment or even education; been there, done that--nobody liked it much. For us children of settlers, the first obligation is to get to know the past, to educate ourselves about the present and to grasp finally that we are treaty people as much as the Aboriginal bands, tribes and individuals are.

To this end, a thoughtful reading of The Inconvenient Indian certainly makes a good start.