Jas M. Morgan signs, with nîtisânaka hard-hitting debut novel about family in the broad sense: blood family, adoptive family, and especially chosen queer family. An indigenous story that is as fresh as it is uncompromising, with a scathing frankness. Not to mention… “sexy”!
Let’s say it straight away: it’s a text that stands out, when we think a priori of the indigenous genre. Forgive the stereotype, but it’s written as is in the text: “I’ve had enough of works centered on visual and cultural symbols that deal with the disappearance of Aboriginal people – a feather here, a chief’s headdress here -there […]. Why can’t Native people be young, wild, brown, free, untamed and fucking?
One thing is certain, they are here, in this demanding first novel that is also much more than that, of course. Namely: committed, feminist, anticolonialist, it goes without saying. To this end, Canada is in these pages the KKKanada, the reserves are rez (“fuck the rez!”), and the narration is in the name of the “proletarian and combative mixed-race bitches”. That gives you an idea of the tone.
Yes ! I think the book is fun, the text is sexy! But there is also this reality: we, Indigenous people, also have trauma. And we mix it all together in our writing, and it can be really cathartic!
Jas M. Morgan
Think: racism, toxic masculinity, rape culture, downright pedophilia culture. Not to mention the subjectivity surrounding the notion of truth. Because “on the Prairies, Truth is a white man”…
Jas M. Morgan teaches in the Department of Communications at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His novel, which has just been translated into French by Éditions du Marchand de feuilles, has been very well received, winning two prestigious awards for emerging authors (the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia First Book Prize).
“I was really surprised by the reception, I think it’s maybe just exciting to hear stories that we haven’t heard yet from an Indigenous perspective. […] And then there is a lack, in terms of feminist titles, to address indigenous themes. »
A gap that is slowly beginning to be filled: “I think, without a doubt, that I am part of a movement of new indigenous authors. We grew up reading books on difficult subjects, like residential schools. Now, it seems that we want to write about more fun subjects, like desire, sex and love!”
Beyond the Clichés
A word here about the title, which literally means “my relatives” in Cree. Jas M. Morgan, who is of Cree, Métis, and Saulteaux descent, sees it as an allusion to “cousins, siblings, relationships.” But be careful, not the ones you think. In the text, a series of short chapters, which read like so many reflections on queer youth in the Prairies, it is mainly the adoptive family that is discussed. Again, to draw a line under these over-exploited representations of the past, we understand.
“I didn’t want to exploit my Indigenous family in the same way that the stories of our ancestors have already been exploited.” Basically: forget about the clichés of Edward Curtis, the photographer who made a career out of his famous portraits of the First Nations of the American West, “as sad and dying people.” “I didn’t want to perpetuate those images…”
And then nîtisânak obviously concerns, as we have said, the chosen family, or rather the “found” family, namely the queer family.
Jas M. Morgan, who considers herself “culturally trans” (or “non-binary according to the colonial model”), explains that among Indigenous people, there is a “discussion on gender sovereignty”. Exit medicalization, “by sovereignty, we mean the freedom to live one’s gender as one feels it, without medical intervention”.
Didactic, you say? The novel actually reads like an essay at times. Again, it shakes things up, and that’s intentional. “I hope to confuse readers! To confuse their cards, in terms of indigenous stereotypes! We’re not just a romantic people in museums. We exist, in the world around you!”
nîtisânak
Leaf seller
242 pages