Vera's book: Honouring the Strength of Indian Women

Honouring the Strength of Indian Women

Plays, Stories, Poetry

Vera Manuel (Author), Michelle Coupal (Editor), Deanna Reder (Editor), Joanne Arnott (Editor), Emalene A. Manuel (Editor)

This critical edition delivers a unique and comprehensive collection of the works of Ktunaxa-Secwepemc writer and educator Vera Manuel, daughter of prominent Indigenous leaders Marceline Paul and George Manuel. A vibrant force in the burgeoning Indigenous theatre scene, Vera was at the forefront of residential school writing and did groundbreaking work as a dramatherapist and healer. Long before mainstream Canada understood and discussed the impact and devastating legacy of Canada’s Indian residential schools, Vera Manuel wrote about it as part of her personal and community healing. She became a grassroots leader addressing the need to bring to light the stories of survivors, their journeys of healing, and the therapeutic value of writing and performing arts.

A collaboration by four Indigenous writers and scholars steeped in values of Indigenous ethics and editing practices, the volume features Manuel’s most famous play, Strength of Indian Women — first performed in 1992 and still one of the most important literary works to deal with the trauma of residential schools — along with an assemblage of plays, written between the late 1980s until Manuel’s untimely passing in 2010, that were performed but never before published. The volume also includes three previously unpublished short stories written in 1988, poetry written over three decades in a variety of venues, and a 1987 college essay that draws on family and community interviews on the effects of residential schools.

REVIEWS

“An invaluable contribution to our literature about residential school experiences and the effects of transgenerational trauma. With so many current projects focused on “reconciliation,” this republication of Vera Manuel’s works recalls the often forgotten side of the equation: the truth, unvarnished by politics or bureaucracy.”

– Jesse Archibald-Barber, Associate Professor of Indigenous Literatures and Performance, First Nations University of Canada

“Layered with intergenerational wisdom, replete with lived experience, this collection deftly presents both the devastating legacy of residential schools and the complex systems of care that sustain Indigenous women and fuel Indigenous resurgence.”

– Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Vera Manuel (1948-2010) was an Ktunaxa-Secwepemc writer at the forefront of Residential School writing who did tremendous work as a dramatherapist and healer.

Michelle Coupal (Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation) is Canada Research Chair in Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Literatures, and Associate Professor at the University of Regina.

Deanna Reder (Métis), Associate Professor in First Nations Studies and English at Simon Fraser University, leads The People and the Text.

Joanne Arnott (Métis/Mixed Blood), writer, editor, and arts activist, received the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Literary Arts.

Emalene A. Manuel (Ktunaxa-Secwepemc) worked with her sister, Vera, in Storyteller Theatre. In 2018 she completed her Masters of Education at the University of British Columbia.

BOOK DETAILS

• Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry
• Vera Manuel (Author), Michelle Coupal (Editor), Deanna Reder (Editor), Joanne Arnott (Editor), Emalene A. Manuel (Editor)
• Published April 2019, 296 pages
• Paper, ISBN: 978-0-88755-836-8 , 5.5 × 8.5, $24.95
• Topic(s): Indigenous Studies, Literature, Performing Arts
• Part of the U of M Press series: First Voices, First Texts

Source & to order: https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/honouring-the-strength-of-indian-women

Style Guide excerpt & 2 plays about residential school

Deanna Reder:

“In 2006, in my last year of grad school, I had the privilege to see a play by dramatherapist Vera Manuel, daughter of Secwepemc political leader George Manuel and Ktunaxa community worker Marceline Paul. The play was produced in Vancouver by the Helping Spirit Lodge Society and when I went to speak to its director, Geni Manuel, I discovered that she was Vera’s niece. It was in that conversation that Geni gave me several unpublished plays that her association had put together under Vera’s direction. I really wanted to do something with these plays for a long, long time, but was overwhelmed when I began my new job in 2007 and by my uncertainty about what to do with them. At the same time, I was working with Metis scholar Jo-Ann Episkenew and Algonquian scholar Michelle Coupal. At one point, Jo-Ann gave Michelle a photocopy of the only play Vera had ever published, in 1986, which had fallen out of print: Strength of Indian Women about residential school experiences. Jo-Ann insisted: “You’ve got to teach this.” In a later conversation, Michelle told me, “We’ve got to get this play back into publication,” and I realized that this was the chance to work together with her on the plays entrusted to me several years previously. This itself was an amazing chance to work together, but then, a few months later, we bumped into Joanne Arnott, a Metis poet I’ve known for years, only to discover that, in the last year of Vera’s life, Joanne had begun curating a collection of Vera’s poetry. At first it was a shock. Michelle and I immediately recognized that we as academics had a lot more access to publishing and power. What could we do to support a project directed by an independent poet? And then of course it just seemed obvious: we should work together. This snowballed when we connected with Vera’s sister, Emalene, who had saved Vera’s archive. Imagine our sense of wonder when we came across some of Vera’s stories that were written in 1988, stories that are drop-dead gorgeous, needing practically no editing. And suddenly what was going to be “The Plays and Poetry of VeraManuel” became “The Plays, Stories, and Poetry of Vera Manuel.” The title of the volume, due in 2018, is Honouring the Strength of Indian Women.”

Deanna Reder in conversation with Sophie McCall, Culturally Appropriate Publishing Practices, p. 35-6, in Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples

By Gregory Young-Ing © 2018 Brush Education Inc.

~

Two Plays About Residential School 20th Anniversary edition, paper ed

Two Plays About Residential School (Indigenous Education Press) honours the fearless voices of residential school survivor Larry Loyie (Cree, 1933-2016) and intergenerational survivor Vera Manuel (Secwepemc / Ktunaxa, 1949-2010).

Three poems by Vera Manuel

THE TRUTH ABOUT COLONIZATION

Brown-skinned people are enslaved

To add colour to white people’s lives

To create bureaucracies to administer

Poverty, grief, delinquency, and struggle,

To give white people a worthwhile cause

To carry forward in the next century

All those Indigenous, Aboriginal, natives

Who dared survive life inside

The boxed-cage created by grief.

Brown-skinned peoples’ true history erased,

Title and rights set aside

To make way for

Vivid, romanticized, more appealing

Convenient tales of the noble savage

Who fought and lost valiantly

To the great white founding forefathers

Of this stolen land;

“Indians” as backdrops to the grand exploits

of explorers, discoverers, colony-builders

of a history that only just begun in 1492

on this ancient land of our ancestors.

Brown-skinned children stolen, stripped,

Torn-down, ripped apart, emptied out

Fashioned into colonizing tools of self-hatred,

Taught to be ashamed to be brown

By a brown-skinned colonial education

That ensured the belief that white is right,

That brown-skinned people

Belong at the end of the line

To ensure privilege

To colonizers, settlers,

And future generations

A sense of entitlement

in their colonized world.

Brown-skinned people’s sacred ceremonial

Beliefs, objects, medicines, rituals

Stolen, filtered, processed, packaged, sold,

Swallowed up by a New Age Movement

Of lost souls searching for something better

Than Christianity to believe in;

Waya waya waya ho,

Twist and shift its spirit to fit

Waya ho, waya ho, waya ho,

With explicit instructions of how to,

For a high price, even if you’re white,

Become a medicine man, pipe-carrier, shaman,

They adorn mantle places and makeshift alters

For white people to comment on and play with.

Brown-skinned peoples’ lives

Bound to its’ history and the earth,

Thrive on resisting the evils of genocide,

Become more resilient, determined,

Refuse to die,

Makes supreme life sacrifices

In prisons across the land,

Birth activist babies

Who in turn

Raise up their fists in recognition, to the sky,

In unity give the warriors’ cry,

There is no end to resistance

And that is the truth about colonization.

JUSTICE

I am a product of colonization

In this land called Canada

I am the result of cultural oppression

By church and government

I am a survivor of forced assimilation

And genocide

I am First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous

Person of this land.

Yet, I do not speak the language

Of my ancestors

I know little about the customs and traditions

Of my people

I have never fasted up in the mountain

I have no song, nor dance

No Indian name to define me

And for most of my life

I could honestly say

I don’t know who I am.

When I look around my world

I see my people

In this land of riches

Confined to small spaces

Forced to fight every day to protect

Traditional territory

Living lives of poverty

Similar to third worlds

I find my rage stirring inside me

I feel robbed

A sense of injustice.

When I look around my world

I see the hearts and backs of my people

Breaking beneath burdens

Of unresolved grief

Nightmarish memories

Of childhood trauma

Residential school, foster

And adoptive homes, TB sanatoriums

Generation-to-generation

Physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual

Abuse and shame

I feel the rage stirring inside me.

When I allow my ears to listen

To voices of other people of this land

Who have no mercy

No love, no compassion, no understanding

Of its’ unjust history

Who come for freedom, opportunity,

Adventure, riches,

I feel my rage stirring inside me,

Who stand on the graves of my ancestors

And carelessly say:

“why can’t those Indians get it together?

They live off our tax money you know.”

I feel my rage stirring inside me

Camouflage for powerlessness and shame

Anaesthesia for grief

A sense of injustice.

I feel unsafe in the white world

To speak my views out loud

Or to share my culture

Uneasy, mistrustful,

Afraid those white people

Will steal the very words I speak, steal the

Ceremonies,

The sacred circle, sacred stories, songs and dances,

Wear our names

Copy our art and sell it

I get nervous when they write things down

So I tell them straight

“you can’t write it down.”

I fight hard inside myself

To see the human beings that they are.

I am a product of colonization

The result of cultural oppression

A survivor of genocide

I carry the burden

Of all the unresolved grief

Of my ancestors

In my heart, on my shoulders, in my gut.

In this lifetime

I have committed myself

To fight for Justice.

My brother tells me

“It is injustice that is our enemy, not white people,

remember we are fighting on the same side as

Geronimo, Mandela, Ghandi and King.”

We take responsibility for our rage

We fight on the same side

For justice.

When I See Injustice

When I see injustice

In this world

When I see child abuse

Women violated

Genocide

A fire rages inside

That wants to burn free

That wants a voice

Loud and

Aches to break through fear

Break through every fist

Every cruel word, vile look,

Every panting evil sin

That crawled inside my soul

To silence me

© Vera Manuel

Selected by Emalene Manuel &

shared with permission

WOMAN WITHOUT A TONGUE

Ah, the secrets are being swept ashore again
In great crashing waves they come
Pressing down upon me
Insinuating themselves
Into every corner of my being.
My body betrays me,
Remembering all those shameful places
Where my mind refuses to go.

I want to die, to drown in it
To be carried away
To a place where nobody
Knows my name
But that cruel ocean won’t claim me
Instead she spits me out naked
Gasping on shore
Gasping for breath
Gasping for life.

I know I cannot hide behind those secrets anymore
I can’t bear this life of loneliness
The isolation that separates me
Because I think I am different
And all those shameful secrets
Are all my doing
I’m ashamed to live
While they, dead or dying,
Carry the horrible secret to their grave
Trusting I will do the same
I am, after all, the dutiful daughter,
The loyal niece,
keeper of the secrets,
the family pride.

I know I must tell them or perish
If I don’t tell them I shall die
But I’d rather cut out my tongue.

A woman without a tongue has no safe place in this world
She is expected to be silent
Devoid of emotion
Obedient
Kneeling at the feet of men
A woman who knows her place
Is following behind
Lying beneath
Legs spread
Mouth opened
Ready to receive
That insidious embrace
That tongue down the throat
Without protest
Feigning pleasure
Not grief.

No one can crawl inside the heart of a woman without a tongue
A woman without a tongue has to pretend she has no heart.

What I know about life, about love, I could crush you with it.
(I know too much about life
And too little about love)
I have loved people without them ever knowing it
I have loved them from a distant place
On the periphery of their lives
Where I’ve always placed myself
A safe distance away
So I am not a burden
And love can’t get to me
Past that wall of secrets
That surrounds me
I have loved you.




Copyright Vera Manuel


My thanks to Doreen Manuel for permission to share this work.