Interlude

Reflective Interlude (because sometimes your stomach twists in a knot when you look at the daunting stack of articles on your desk, and you have to take a deep breath and dig down to find the roots of your interest and passion).

Throughout my childhood, I spent a lot of time with an amazing man by the name of Ed (“Pops”) Martin. Pops was a community icon, well known for his incredible ability as a master storyteller.

When my father migrated to Bella Bella thirty-five years ago from his home in Ontario, Pops was one of his first friends in this small indigenous community. In fact, Pops took him in and adopted him, under Heiltsuk law, as his son.

In our culture and under our law, the family links you forge through traditional adoption are strong as blood ties, and weave you into a whole family. So, Pops took in my brother and I, when we came along, as his grandchildren. I grew up listening to his stories.

Pops had a rough go under the residential school system, and when he returned to Bella Bella to pick up the pieces of his life, he put away our culture and our language in a place far from his daily life. Throughout most of his adulthood, he repressed them. It wasn’t until late in his life that he let them back in, and to everyone’s amazement (and joy), his powerful grasp of our traditional language and the First Generation stories that tell our history as a people remained intact.

Woven together with his own life’s story – his experience on the land as a trapper and in the variety of occupations he adopted in his life – his recollections of family moments and the history of our community – the traditional narratives and oral historical methods that helped him to preserve a piece of our culture we nearly lost – the greater story that Ed told, piece by piece, throughout his life, was compelling and beautiful to say the very least.

I remember him admonishing me, when I asked him why he was telling me the same traditional story he’d told me the day before, that we learn by repetition and reinvention. He never told stories the exact same way, though he told them dozens and hundreds of times in his old age. Sometimes an image or a phrase or an event would migrate from one story to another. Sometimes the sequence of events would change. Sometimes the raven would transform into a loon or a deer or a wolf. Sometimes the moral would be located in a different moment, a different sentiment, a different sentence.

And sometimes, it was hard to discern where Pops’ life left off and the storytelling began. Sometimes, in his stories, he was the trickster raven. Sometimes his fishing buddies in a fond recollection of the cannery days seemed pretty similar to the figures of myth and legend. But what it taught me was that our identity as indigenous people is inextricably linked to place, and the stories associated with those places. I am the places my people come from, and I am the raven and the wolf and the deer and the First Woman. And in the end, what I amount to is just a story (I hope it’s a good one).

Maybe what appeals to me most about Mandeville is the space he creates to wear him like a garment. “He” is a fabrication. There is no Mandeville, and everyone is Mandeville. He is not rooted to just one place, one origin – he uproots, and transplants himself in a diverse range of wild and beautiful places. And in doing so – through inventing an identity that is inextricably linked with a rambling concept of nature and place – by inventing a self that is reflects a compelling impression of the exotic – by inventing a story that is many narratives, all of them invented and true even if they are not real – in doing all these things, if you read them just the right way, he teaches you how to invent yourself through storytelling.

It’s the same thing, really, that Pops used to do. In their way, they were both trickster-figures. They both blurred the boundaries between invention and recollection, roots and imagination, culture and perception. It’s not about fact or truth. It’s about how you receive the story, how you adopt it, and how you pass it on. That’s why I don’t care, frankly, who the “real” author of the Travels might be. That’s why I don’t mind that people have proven (Heavens, no!) that the narrative contains invention and plagiarism. At the end of the day, don’t you fall asleep imagining yourself traversing those incredible landscapes? Don’t you wish you could sit down across the table from Mandeville-the-imagined-figure, put down a bottle of bourbon, and start swapping stories like a couple of old soldiers – like a pair of old friends?

I miss Pops. He’s one of those people whose loss can never be reconciled. It’s been years since he passed away, but when I close my eyes, I can still see every wrinkle with perfect clarity. I can still see his twisted, arthritic hands gesturing wildly to punctuate an enthusiastic story. I can still hear every nuance of his cracking voice. I think he would have liked Mandeville. I think, next summer, that I’ll take a copy of the Travels to his mortuary pole with a bottle of bourbon and share some Mandeville stories with him. I’m not very good at compartmentalizing – I’ll probably end up weaving in some threads of Heiltsuk lore, and even some fond recollections of special moments I shared with my Pops. But that’s fitting, isn’t it?

The truth about stories, huh.