A Short History of Indians in Canada (16 page)

From an interview conducted by Margaret Atwood for
Fine Print
in 2005

Margaret Atwood:
My first question is actually my fifth one.

Thomas King:
(laughing)
I’m in real trouble.

MA:
Which is: how far up people’s noses are you willing to get? In other words, how outrageous are you willing to be? Do you ever get attacked for going too far—such as in the couple of stories in this book—by making white people too stupid to live?

“There is a point past which satire will not protect you—a point past which humour will not allow you to be part of polite society. But I don’t know where that is yet.”

TK:
Is there a lawyer in the house?…It really is the society that I go after, but I must admit that individual people sometimes get in the way. That is a problem. I suppose there is a point past which satire will not protect you—a point past which humour will not allow you to be part of polite society. But I don’t know where that is yet. I haven’t gotten there yet. I worry about that, though.

MA:
Do you ever get letters about it?

TK:
Yes. Actually, most letters are about the
Dead Dog Café
. And I’ve gotten a number of letters that say, “This is the biggest piece of racist shit in the world. Why the CBC would put this on the air is beyond me. I never listen to your show.”

MA:
So, in one of your stories you have a little boy who gets in trouble at school, and the teacher makes him write on the board a hundred times “Racism hurts everybody.” And then he goes home and says, “The teacher made me write on the blackboard a hundred times “Racism hurts everybody,” he says to his mother. And his mother says, “Yes, it does hurt everybody, but it hurts some more than others.”

TK:
I suppose that’s what satire is. Satire hurts some people more than others. And the people that it hurts, well, I suppose that was my fault. I’m responsible for that.

“Satire hurts some people more than others.”

MA:
You didn’t mean to do that.

TK:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the nice thing about satire—the nice thing about humour—is that you can write about really sad things, really tragic things, and you can make them not just palpable, you can almost make them funny to where you can get people laughing, and they won’t attack you until long after you’ve caught the cab back to the hotel, and they sort of figure out that they’ve been had, or that it actually hurts a lot more than they thought it did.

MA:
Uh huh.

TK:
I’m really quick on my feet.

MA:
So my next question is: Do you really know or have you met a wily, charming old Indian man who says “Ho!”?

TK:
“Ho!”?

MA:
Says “Ho!” a lot. Ho, exclamation mark. Like the ones this character says in a number of your stories, in fact. This guy keeps turning up and saying “Ho!” and then telling stories. Have you actually ever met anybody like that?

TK:
(laughing)
You have to have a wise old Indian in any stories you have about Indians, for crying out loud.

MA:
Why does he say “Ho!”?

TK:
Haven’t you seen the movies? Actually, it’s not so much “Ho!” I couldn’t figure out how to represent that sound that many people in conversations make to let you know that they’re still paying attention. So you’ll be talking to someone and they’ll go “Ah, ah, ah.” But how do you write “Ah”? Spell it. Somebody spell it for me.

“You have to have a wise old Indian in any stories you have about Indians.”

MA:
I agree. So “Ho!” is better.

TK:
Well, now that you say it out loud, no, it’s not better. But I was happy with it until—

MA:
Well, I’m saying it in the wrong tone of voice. If I said
(deeper)
“Ho!”—that would be better, right?

TK:
I was perfectly happy with “Ah” until you said “Ho!”

MA:
Anyway, I was about to say that you do those kinds of stories particularly well, and I wondered whether you were ever going to put together a collection of just those stories.

TK:
Oh, the ones they do in that sort of storytelling voice.

MA:
The old guy says “Ho!” and tells stories.

TK:
Oh, the old guy. “Ho, Coyote!”

MA:
Yeah, that one.

TK:
“That one was pretty tricky that day.” That voice.

MA:
That voice.

TK:
No, probably not. I guess I would worry that that voice, if it wasn’t cut with other voices in a collection, for instance, might become overpowering. I tried to write a novel—actually,
Green Grass, Running Water
—I tried to write it in that voice and wasn’t able to do it in the end. It was just too much, too much. I had to back off and have other voices come in there and sort of create, dare I say, an opera.

“
Atwood:
Now I’m going to ask you a serious question. A serious question. All right. Here we go.”

MA:
Now I’m going to ask you a serious question. A serious question. All right. Here we go. My first encounters with your work go way back.

TK:
They do.

MA:
I reviewed two of your stories in the early nineties, and then I put “One Good Story, That One”—just one story—into one of those Oxford short story collections, and
around the same time, you edited
All My Relations
, which has got to be the first anthology of fiction and poetry by Canadian native writers. I believe it was the first one, because when I was looking, around 1971, when writing
Survival
, there was Pauline Johnson and Louis Riel and some life stories, and that was it.

TK:
Yeah, they’re still there, too.

MA:
Since that time, there’s been an explosion of native writing in Canada, and you were in at the beginning of it. So my question is, what was it like to be surfing the first wave? Was it scary? Was it fun? What was it like?

TK:
Well, you know, I had no idea what I was doing.

“People didn’t know what to make of some of the early works.”

MA:
Was that scary or fun?

TK:
It was kind of fun…I mean, picture it: you’re on the beach, and something you’ve never seen before, somebody in a log out on the water—and whether you think it’s great or not, it’s sort of interesting to look at, to see what they’re going to do, and so I—

MA:
So are you the person on the log, or are you the person on the beach?

TK:
Yeah, I’d rather have been on the beach, but I was on the log, as it turned out. There was a kind of excitement to that, because, in part, I suppose, people didn’t know what to make of some of the early works, and they were all so delighted to get them.

The reading public was very generous to many of us who were in that initial sort of surge, if you will. And so it didn’t have some of the dangers, possibly, that it has now, where people have seen some native writing in Canada and have, you know, maybe an inkling of what it might be about. You know, to be at that beginning—I was scared to death, actually.

MA:
Well, there was a scary part, and I know Tomson Highway had some of this because if you’re writing from inside a group that feels under siege, the other people in that group don’t always like it when you say things that aren’t totally positive all the time about that group.

“To be at that beginning of native writing in Canada—I was scared to death, actually.”

TK:
Yeah.

MA:
Not that I’ve had any personal experience of that.

TK:
No. I’ve never seen a bad review of your books.

MA:
Well, you’ve not been looking in the right places.

TK:
Actually, now that I think about it, really, Tomson and a number of the playwrights took the first—

MA:
Well, they got attacked by other native people for, I guess, opening the closet door, as it were.

TK:
Yeah, see, I didn’t do that.

MA:
Not quite, no.

TK:
Mine was more of a wide-angle shot. From above and out of range, as it were. And Tomson, Tomson was, you know, up close and personal.

MA:
On the other hand, some of your stories are not from a native point of view at all. So how does it feel to have a foot in both camps?

TK:
I like writing stories in both those areas, so if I sit down and I think to myself,
I don’t feel like writing a native story tonight, maybe I’ll write a non-native story tonight,
even when I do that there is a part of me that sort of says,
Well, how would a native storyteller tell this story, you know, what kind of slant can I put on it?
But, I mean, I write what I can imagine and not what I know. If I wrote what I know, I’d have been done two books ago. But I write what I can imagine, so anything I can imagine, I’ll try writing…And this particular book has a story in there where I take on a woman’s voice, as a matter of fact.

“I write what I can imagine and not what I know.”

MA:
I was about to mention that.

TK:
I thought you were. I wanted to race you to it. I win.

MA:
No, but I wasn’t going to beat you up for it. No, no. Not at all. You and James Joyce, I mean, heck.

TK:
Well, thank you.

MA:
Flaubert. Just to mention two or three.

TK:
That should make the paper. “Thomas King, the new Flaubert & James Joyce.”

MA:
Yes, um, sort of.

TK:
Did we get over that bump all right?

MA: So here’s another. This is a serious question. Do white people idealize and romanticize native people? I’m thinking about your story “Haida Gwaii.” Native woman; in her voice, the story is told. White man who doesn’t understand her. Is that because he’s a man, or because he’s white? You walk on a lot of hot coals.

“Non-natives romanticize natives; I don’t think there’s anything else you can do, given the kind of cultural material that’s out there.”

TK:
Well, I suppose the easy answer is both.

MA:
Both?

TK:
Both.

MA:
That’s an easy answer. So which would you say is worse?

TK:
Can we stay with the easy answer?

MA:
Which is worse: being a man or being white?

TK:
You know, I spent the first twenty minutes of this interview trying to avoid that question. I think, yes, non-natives romanticize natives; I don’t think there’s anything else
you can do, given the kind of cultural material that’s out there that we’re fed, you know, from childhood. I was raised on Cowboys and Indians—either the noble or the ignoble savage—one of the two. There wasn’t anything in between. There wasn’t the not-so-smart savage, or the entrepreneurial savage, who actually made a living for himself. You were either killing whites and bashing babies against trees or helping the white man chase down the bad Indians who’d just done all those nasty deeds—but nothing in between. So yes, there is certainly a sense of romanticism that’s attached itself to native people, and that, I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of that—at least not in my lifetime and not in my kids’ lifetime—because they keep making Cowboy-and-Indian movies.

“I was raised on Cowboys and Indians—either the noble or the ignoble savage…There wasn’t anything in between.”

It’s amazing. When Kevin Costner did
Dances with Wolves
, all my friends called me up and said, “You’ve got to see this movie. It’s a complete departure from the standard Cowboy-and-Indian film.” And so I went to see it, and I thought,
Okay, you know, I went to see it,
and I came back, and I said, “What is different about this movie than the rest of them?” They said, “Well, there’s a sense of humour. Indians have a sense of humour.” And I said, “They had a sense of humour in
Broken Arrow,
which was back in the fifties.” I said, “You know, this isn’t particularly new.” So, yes, there is that romanticizing that goes on.

I think there is more out there now in terms of art, some fiction, to complicate that. But I don’t think it’s easily complicated, particularly. Now is it worse to be
(long pause)…
No. No. Not particularly. But if you work in humour and satire,
as I do, you have to make—somebody has to come out on the short end of the stick. And, you know, ask yourself, given my choices, who do you think it’s going to be? It’s a real no-brainer. But, I try to make it so that readers understand that these are attitudes more than actual characters. There are attitudes that we have to deal with, and I try to write it in such a way that the reader is able to say, “Ah, but that’s not me. That’s somebody else.”

“If you work in humour and satire, as I do, somebody has to come out on the short end of the stick.”

MA:
Then you’re letting them off the hook.

TK:
Well, yeah, I suppose I do. But there’s a part of me that wants to be loved.
(laughs)

MA:
Or maybe you’re saying to them, “This could be you, but you can change your ways.”

TK:
That’s right, that’s right. If you, you know—the Ghost of Christmas—

MA:
Yes, you can give out turkeys to Tiny Tim.

TK: Yes, can you see all the non-natives opening up their windows on Christmas Day and saying, “Yes! I’ll buy that turkey. I’ll go down and see Tiny Timfeathers. You know, I’ll make sure he has a good education and clean housing and fresh water, and I won’t take his land anymore.

MA:
It’s better than the alternative.

TK:
Yeah, and we won’t turn it into a bombing range—we promise, we promise, we
promise. Yeah, I suppose humour has that potential for letting people off the hook, but I’m not looking to destroy people’s opinions of themselves. I’m looking really at the call of question, and how they handle that question is up to them.

MA:
Yes, well, of course you know the problem with satire is Swift’s
Modest Proposal
to solve the Irish problem. The people ought to sell and roast and eat Irish babies, which would provide a source of income and other things like that. And some people apparently took this seriously and thought it was quite a good idea. And I had that problem with
The Handmaid’s Tale
as well. I thought, “Uh oh, somebody’s going to take that as a recipe.”