AL: Did you ever find out firsthand what familial objections existed? Does that anxiety still exist with family members and community, that you must either address or continue to ignore?
That’s an important distinction, the 2020 awareness of Métis as opposed to the 1990s. What conversations and shifts have you seen happen, perhaps as a result of your work, and what conversations and shifts do you see as still needing to happen?
You describe very well what poets and poetry seeks to do – and how in keeping your own spirit alive, your words also spoke to others. What kind of responses have you received from other readers, particularly women, post-publication, and has it informed your work going forward?
MD: I never found more than one or two familial objections. The anxiety doesn’t exist as much anymore. For some people, being Métis is still a secret, families don’t recognise; however, it isn’t like it was in the 1950s and 60s when I grew up. Since the 1980’s things have shifted dramatically because finally the Métis were recognised in the Canadian Constitution, Section 35. We are now becoming slowly included when land acknowledgements are given, but the Métis need to be recognised by First Nations and Inuit and vice versa. If the Métis are Indigenous, then we must be acknowledged and treated as others are treated. Women really liked, men too, but particularly women liked the poem ‘Leather and Naughahyde’ because of how the poem addresses how casually someone’s identity is brushed aside
AL: It’s good to know that anxiety passes with time. Yes, many families are still generationally bound by the secrecy that came about after the 1885 Resistance where it was not safe to be seen as Métis, and the following generations really internalised that until the changes you speak of. Really it has been a government policy of ‘divide and conquer’ between Indigenous populations, that has become internalised to some extent as well. There are more conversations happening, but it is a slow change coming. Where do you see your place in that, as a poet and a teacher?
In ‘Leather and Naugahyde’, cited in full, you write:
So, I’m having coffee with this treaty guy from up north and we’re laughing at how crazy ‘the mooniyaw’ are in the city and the con- versation comes around to where I’m from, as it does in under- ground languages, in the oblique way it does to find out someone’s status without actually asking, and knowing this, I say I’m Metis like it’s an apology and he says, ‘mmh,’ like he forgives me, like he’s got a big heart and mine’s pumping diluted blood and his voice has sounded well-fed up till this point, but now it goes thin like he’s across the room taking another look and when he returns he’s got ‘this look,’ that says he’s leather and I’m naughahyde.
You point out that division, that way of looking at the Métis as if they are less-than, in a ten-line paragraph of poetry. A few pages later in ‘Fireflies’ you write about feeling lost in the playful banter of the old women ‘and the Cree syllables that summon me from long ago, syllables that know me but I don’t know them.’ Can you talk more about these divisions that exist, and the loss you express so powerfully in your collections, as well as the resilience and reclamation that takes place?
