Reading Canada Reads: A Two Spirit Journey

Welcome back to my Reading Canada Reads series, where I take you all along as I attempt to read as much of the Canada Reads longlist as I can. This year’s theme: one book to change the narrative.

My fourth longlist (and first shortlist) read is A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer.

“From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community, Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social and economic legacies of colonialism.

As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual violence, and in her teen years became an alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby took her children and, fleeing an abusive marriage, moved to Thunder Bay. Despite the abuse, racism, and indifference she often found there, Chacaby marshalled the strength and supports to help herself and others.

Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety, trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor, raised her children and fostered many others, learned to live with visual impairment, and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay.

Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, and humour. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.”

In my review of When The Pine Needles Fall, I talked about how I felt I may have had a better time with it if I had listened to the audiobook. For A Two-Spirit Journey, I listened to the audiobook, and I feel that it was the right choice for this book. While the audiobook was read by Marsha Knight rather than by the authors, I think hearing Ma-Nee Chacaby’s story spoken aloud still had a certain impact to it that might not have been the same in a text format. For memoirs like this, especially ones that cover such a large span of time, I think an audiobook format makes it feel even more like someone recounting their memories to you. It feels like sitting around and listening to older relatives and friends tell you stories from their lives, which I think works well when the book is just that: an elder recounting her life.

The book also includes a lot of information on how it was created and the process of turning Chacaby’s oral recollections into a memoir, including the process of translating between English, French, and the indigenous languages that Chacaby speaks and formatting her stories into the narrative format that a book needs while still maintaining her voice and being true to the story as she told it. This can be a tricky balance to strike, especially when dealing with the stories of people who have had much of their history warped in the retellings of it by colonialism. I think this book managed to strike that balance well, and I like the transparency and discussion it had when addressing this topic.

Chacaby’s story has intersectionality at its core in many ways. As a disabled, two-spirit, and indigenous woman, she has a lifetime of experience of marginalization we can learn from. You can see throughout the book how all these identities combine and overlap as well as how colonialism has and continues to impact all of them. It also shows us that people like Chacaby have always existed, and we have the advances in acceptance and understanding that we have today because of them. Changing the narrative can sometimes mean reminding ourselves of the truth of the past, and we need to look to the stories of the elders in our communities for that, especially while they’re still around to pass that knowledge on themselves.

A Two-Spirit Journey will be featured in the Canada Reads debates from March 17-20th on CBC. It is being defended by podcaster, wellness activist, and founder of The Matriarch Movement: Shayla Stonechild.

Rating: 4.5/5