The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

spoken in response to a safe and sympathetic
listener and perceptively written
within and in reaction to the conventions
of contemporary poetry.
Written/edited by Linda Shorten, a sensitive
journalist who is herself white, Without
Reserve comprises realistic, ethnographic
profiles of eleven Native people who live or
have lived in Edmonton. The personal stories
were taped and transcribed with a selfconscious
and, I believe, successful effort
not to appropriate voice but to represent it
fairly. The male and female speakers range
in age from fourteen years young to middle-age
to eighty-four years old. Shorten
explains in her brief introduction that she
did not seek horror stories; nor did she seek
a representative sample. She claims only to
have covered a range of experiences.
It is very difficult not to recoil from this
range of experience, from these testifying,
intensely personal voices which, with few
exceptions, chronicle desperate lives of
recurrent illness, alcohol and drug abuse,
attempted suicide; of profound poverty and
family instability; of personal irresponsibility
and betrayal of family members; of sexual
abuse by family members; of
undereducated children humiliated and
hungry in institutional settings and in a
seemingly endless progression from foster
home to foster home. The personal outcome
is a self that hates and is hated, a self
that is hopelessly improverished and
vaguely defined, a self that despises and
desires Aboriginal ties. Above all, most of
these profiles provide the microscopically
fine filaments of an unbearable lesson in
survival: stop being a victim of abuse by
becoming its perpetrator.
These individuals—Jimmy Mix
(Canadian), Grace, Lisa, Casey, Jokes,
Maggie, Kicker, Helen, Bicycle, Sky, Jane—
long for respect; very occasionally they
receive it. Jane Ash Poitras, for example,
escaped total ruin by having a very religious
white foster mother, called Grandma,
who, while feared ("...Grandma would
always tell me the social workers were going
to come take me away. So I was always
scared.") instilled in Jane a sense of gratitude—the
idea that "no one has it all". Jane
says that consequently she was never angry
about "what happened" to her:
When I was kid, I was always wondering,
who did I look like? ... I really wondered,
was I an alien? Was I a human
person? Because I had no family, no
physical family .... And I got this kind, little
elderly white lady looking after me,
but I knew I didn't belong to her.
You see, here is this brown mouse.
You're looking around and all the other
mice are white. You do see the odd
brown mouse, but they're on skid row,
and everyone is saying, 'Those mice over
there, they're drunks.' And you're thinking,
'Oh shit. I'm one of those mice.'
It was through academic achievement
that Jane gained self-respect and the
strength to learn about her Native roots,
about Native spirituality. Today she is an
acknowledged artist; she is regarded as a
holy woman; and she is used as a role
model, giving talks to Indian children on
how they should undertake their education.
"And not just Indian kids, other people
too."
The form of the second text is an expression
of individuality through a literary
form and of a tone that is very different
from the first. Written by Daniel David
Moses, The White Line, is a collection of
poems whose various points of view are
expressed by personae who evince no hint
of the bitter or the sere. In this poetry of
enactment, self-regarding statements are
few. And even these are distanced with wit
and conveyed through an exemplary technical
control over the expressive force of
diction. The externalized point of view,
while revealing a penetrating inner vision,
is directed outward from the self in celebration
of the subtleties and mysteries of the