FICTION: LEE MARACLE

“When I teach Aboriginal thought, I’m really teaching from our matriarchal beginning, our medicine tradition, our handling of social relations, and, of course, the recent feminism. So it’s largely the women’s knowledge that gets passed on.” So says Lee Maracle, novelist, poet, dramatist, academic, feminist, and leading authority on native issues in Canada. Born in North Vancouver, with combined Salish and Cree heritage, Maracle is a member of the Stó:Loh nation (her grandfather was Chief Dan George). Her fiction and poetry have received accolades both in Canada and abroad. But somehow Maracle has yet to break CanLit’s glass ceiling. There remains, undoubtedly, an unforgivable ghettoization of both native writers and, to a lesser extent, women writers in Canada, a situation that is slowly changing, but that has resulted in some working writers not receiving the full attention they deserve. Cormorant Books hopes to redress this situation, at least in part, with the October publication of Maracle’s latest novel. Celia’s Song ($24 pa.) is set among the natives of the Nu:Chahlnuth territory on what today is Vancouver Island. The novel tells the multigenerational story of one family’s struggles against the violence and cultural appropriation that results in the wake of European interference.