A Short History of Indians in Canada (17 page)

TK:
This is a good idea, they say. We could take women and—

“Humour has that potential for letting people off the hook, but I’m not looking to destroy people’s opinions of themselves.”

MA:
Well, alas.

TK:
Did you get letters about that?

MA:
No, but it seems to be playing out…

Some of your stories are not funny. They instead are pointed and touching. Or, did I miss something? In other words, do you suffer from Jack Point’s problem in the
Yeomen of the Guard
—that everyone expects you to be funny all the time and it depresses you?

TK: That’s a good question. I was going to tell you about a skit for
Dead Dog
that was like Swift’s
Modest Proposal
. One of Jasper’s schemes—and this is playing off of
The Handmaid’s Tale
—is to have Cryo[genic] babies. The idea is that, you know, the
problem that women seem to have in this modern age is that they want to have children, but they don’t want to have children when they’re young. They’d like to have them when they’re older.

MA:
This is like frozen babies.

TK:
Frozen babies, rather than frozen embryos. You see, what you do is you have the baby when your body is really able to have it, but you don’t have to raise it; you just freeze it.

MA:
That’s a very good idea.

TK:
And then, when you’re thirty-five or forty, and you’ve got nothing better to do—you’re retired—then you defrost the baby, and you raise it.

MA:
You know, Tom, that’s got legs.

TK:
And arms. And a head.

MA:
And on that—although you didn’t answer the question.

TK:
No, we’ll get back to the question. I just wanted to throw that out, because you’d brought up the other thing. So what was the question again?

MA:
Some of your stories are not satire. They’re actually sad and touching. So do you suffer that problem of “everyone wants me to be funny all the time, and I’m not allowed to be other things,” and is that depressing?

TK:
Yeah, what’s depressing is that in most of the stories that I write there’s an underlying problem—that if you looked at the problem all by itself, then these would be very sad stories. But I can tell these stories without the satire and without the humour and they would be, you know, positively depressing. And so, yeah, I get depressed when people don’t see the other layer. But it’s my own fault. I mean, do you cover it over? It’s like burying a bone—and sometimes I bury the bone too deep, and people say, “That was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” And I’m going, “What do you mean? This is terrible. Look what happens. Little Tiny Timfeathers dies at the end of the piece.”

“I write stuff that will make people laugh, that’s serious. It’s a razor’s edge. And, you know, writers who work with satire sit on that razor. The trick is not to move.”

So, yeah, if you’re a native person at this particular period of time, there is a general depression that you have to live with. And that, you know, I do live with. And one of my ways of dealing with that is to try and write this stuff that will make people laugh, that’s serious. It’s a razor’s edge. And, you know, writers who work with satire sit on that razor. The trick is not to move. Once you’re there, don’t move. You’re okay.

MA:
And you’re okay.

TK:
I’m okay.

MA:
Yes, and on that note, you’re more than okay. Thank you so much.

To listen to CBC’s interview with Thomas King about his Massey lecture:
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey/massey2003.html

For an interview with Thomas King about the
Dead Dog Café
radio series:
http://www.ubyssey.bc.ca/article.shtml?/19980925/king.htmlf

To learn more about the Assembly of First Nations:
http://www.afn.ca/

For interviews with Thomas King about other books:
webcontent.harpercollins.com/text/guides/pdf/0006481965.pdf

For an article about King and his writing:
www.firstnationsdrum.com/Fall2002/CovKing.htm

To receive updates on author events and new books by Thomas King, sign up today at
www.authortracker.ca.

A Short History of Indians in Canada

©
2005 by Dead Dog Café Productions Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40317-7

P.S. section © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2006

Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

Originally published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2005

Interview with Thomas King conducted by Margaret Atwood courtesy of
Fine Print Media Services Inc.
, 2005

www.harpercollins.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

King, Thomas, 1943-

A short history of Indians in Canada /Thomas King.-1st trade pbk ed.

1. Indians of North America-Canada-Fiction. I. Title.

PS8571.15298S46 2006 c813’.54 C2006-902432-4

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