Lee MaracleRezensionen

It’s called Conversations with Canadians, but it is time for Canadians to listen, to learn and to act. To listen to the voices of Indigenous authors like Maracle, to learn the unvarnished colonial history of our country, and to act on that knowledge by being an ally and advocate for decolonization.

Bobbie Lee Indian Rebel is a memoir of Lee Maracle’s first twenty years in Vancouver and Toronto. Twenty years filled with racism, poverty, violence, drug and alcohol use, and family dysfunction. “Colonialism stole everything”. Maracle courageously shares the darkest and most difficult times of her early years. It is easy to understand her shutting down emotionally and her acknowledged lack of self worth amidst the trauma of living in a racist society. “The umbilical cord of terror we inherited from our imprisoned parents.”

Right from the start though, Maracle had a hunger for meaning and this is likely what kept her going through her darkest times in Toronto and back home in BC. Maracle details her interest in Marxism and leftist politics and outlines her involvement in the Indigenous resistance movement Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) modeled after the Black Panther Party. In a 1990 update at the end of the book (the original story was recorded in 1975) Maracle brings us forward another 15 years in her life including the birth of her children.

The first hundred pages of this book are amazing.

The story follows a shape-shifting witness called mink who observes Celia and her family deal with the horrific effects of colonialism. Meanwhile, a two headed spirit-serpent grows restless from the community's rejection of the old way of loving. The serpent tries to feed upon and tear apart the community while the community tries to learn to live with their trauma and the changes in their lives. The beginning of the book of filled with interesting characters, thoughtful meditations, and a unique form of magic realism grounded in indigenous mythology. Towards the end of the story, the framing device of the witness falls away much to the detriment of the quality of the book. The end of the book feels quite hurried and doesn't seem to quite fit with the rest of the book.

I still really loved reading this, and I think it's an important book in spite of the writing toward the end.½

In the spirit of Lorde and Fanon. Fantastic.

Really enjoyed this collection - "Erotica" was a particular favourite.

Salish- Métis author Lee Maracle’s 1993 novel Ravensong doesn’t centre around queerness or lesbian sexuality in the way that you might expect in a book reviewed here. It’s a beautiful and powerful novel about settler and Indigenous relations regardless, but its main character Stacey, a young Salish woman living on a reserve in the 1950s, isn’t explicitly or implicity queer (although she is potentially queer, I would say, given Maracle’s take on sexuality). There is, however, a lesbian couple who feature as secondary characters in Ravensong, and I think their inclusion is really significant, for a few reasons. Mostly, I find the way that the novel deals with queer sexuality in relation to its politics of decolonization fascinating. In fact, I think honing in on how the novel deals with queerness is a great way to understand what it’s trying to do in terms of decolonizing. The absence in Ravensong of an explicit assertion of queerness, the fact that it doesn’t “come out,” as it were, as a queer text, is no failure at all but rather indicates an entirely different method of interrogating issues of queer sexuality...

See the rest of the review on my website: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/a-review-of-lee-marac...

This was a beautiful and powerful read. I appreciated the analysis, the sharing of personal stories and poetry, and the insight offered.

The place of deep thoughts... I loved this book.

Nice collection of poems. The shorter ones, fortunately making up the bigger part of the book, speak a poetic, clear, intense language and position. Most of the longer ones (except 'solitude') are very polemically political and while I see some of the points she is not differentiating enough to be authentic.½

This book shook me to my socks when I was a young runaway. It's stayed with me many years.

Will is 15, and is getting ready for his Becoming Man Ceremony. He is a Sto:lo Canadian Indian and lives with his extended family in a big house on a reserve north of Vancouver. All the family is excited about the ceremony and participates in the preparations. The family is preparing handmade presents to give out to the guests. Will is making “gardens” out of glass bead flowers to give to important people in his life. As the ceremony is coming closer, Will confers with long gone spirits, his ancestors and ponders traditions. He also asserts himself at school, and gets respect from others who haven’t been treating him all that well. As part of becoming a man he has also decided on his way of life: he chooses a girl for his wife and he wants to be an environmental scientist when he grows up. He wants to study native knowledge of the environment and then study at the university. He wants to fix the problems: “Everything has changed. We just haven’t figured out how to catch up with the change.” But this is the problem with the book. Despite these proclamations, the family in the book has no problems. The problems are in the past only. This is the happiest and most idyllic family I have encountered in my reading history. The characters possess integrity, courage, an unbelievable insight, and create a group anyone would like to be a part of. They all live as a big, happy family, possess no vices, in fact, nobody on the reserve does. They all support each other endlessly. To me the picture is simply not realistic. On the whole, though, a nice book with a nice message, really nice narration and a symbolic ending. I guess, its aim is to be inspirational.