Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach- a lecture

Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

Terms:

Haisla

Sasquatch (b’gwus- “man of the woods” in Haisla)

Highway of Tears (highway 16)

Robert Pickton

Ds’onoqua

Eden Robinson

The Haisla:

• I want to start by first by talking about the Haisla people, then giving a brief biography of Eden Robinson, then a short description of her book’s plot
• Eden Robinson grew up in Haisla territory on the central BC coast
• I have to say a few words about the Haisla, because they are central both to Robinson’s life and this novel
• She lived near to Kitimaat, where about 700 Haisla live
• The Haisla are a relatively small people
• The band has 1,500 members, and even in pre-contact times it was one of the smaller bands to live along the coast
• This one town has almost half of the band’s members
• So Robinson was very much growing up in the heart of the Haisla world
• The Haisla are undergoing a process of reculturation, as they try to make sure that grandchildren learn the language that their parents forgot
• they are known for their great art: wooden boxes, carving and totem poles
• they recently had a famous totem pole returned from Sweden
• they are also undergoing an economic boom
• land that is important for the transport of energy from Alberta to the coast
• a people who were poor and impoverished –including in the time period in which the novel is set- are becoming relatively wealthy today
• very different from Robinson’s experience growing up

Eden Robinson

• Strangely, when she was growing up her greatest influence was Steven King, best known as an author of horror novels
• She later studied creative writing at the University of Victoria
• She became more interested in indigenous authors as she grew older, and wanted to describe the native reality in an honest manner, and with black humor
• After she earned her BA, she moved to Vancouver
• She took a lot of low-level jobs to finance her writing
• She wound up getting a master’s degree at UBC, a very strong school
• She then wrote her first book, Traplines, which was a collection of stories with dark –even brutal- stories
• She wrote Monkey Beach while holed up in an apartment in Vancouver
• This book is the first English language novel to be published by a Haisla writer

Plot Summary:

• The story is set on the northwest coast of British Columbia, in a poor coastal indigenous community called Klitimaat
• The main character, Lisa, belongs to a small band of coastal Indians
• She is growing up in the 1980s
• One day in 1989, he wakes up to join her parents, who are leaving to try and find her brother, Jimmy, who has disappeared at sea
• Lisa decides to join her parents, but there are no convenient flights
• So she instead decides to travel by a small boat, which is very dangerous in the difficult waters of the coast
• As she prepares to travel, she thinks about the past, and the stories that brought her to this moment
• She begins to reflect on all of the other loved ones that she has lost in her life
• This is a coming of age story told through a series of flashbacks that cover ten years
• It’s also an incredibly dark story, which is haunted by a series of losses
• Family is at the heart of the narrative, from the very start to completion
• The reader is drawn deeper into the past, to try to understand why so many members of her family are damaged
• The story also traces Lisa’s life as she enters high school
• For a time it seems that she will follow in the path of two many indigenous people
• They leave the reservations –where there are few jobs- and wind up in East Vancouver, a poor section of a wealthy city, which is characterized by drug use and crime
• Lisa drifts into this world, where she drinks heavily, and is part of a native party scene
• But Lisa seems to be remaking her life just as her brother disappears
• And this proves not to be a random event
• Instead, like everything else in this story, the key to understand the family’s experience is the past, and the trauma inflicted upon it by colonialism and racism
• I won’t give away the climax of the book, in case someone here chooses to read it later
• Not an easy book to read, or one to pick up when you are feeling depressed.
• Grief, and multi-generational trauma, is a central theme
• The legacy of sexual assault –dating back to the residential schools- haunts the novel
• Residential schools were church run but government financed boarding schools, to which over 150,000 Native American children were sent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
• The goal of these schools was to change native culture, and assimilate them into Euro-Canadian tradition.
• There were later many accusations of sexual and physical abuse
• This legacy underpins much that happens in the novel.
• There are ghosts in this book, but only Lisa can see them
• yet all the characters are haunted
• At times this loss is graphic, even traumatic
• At one point Lisa finds a relative’s dead body in the ocean, and it has been partially eaten by seals
• This violence, and the many secrets from the past, haunt the book

Folklore:

• Folklore is central to the novel
• These characters are a recurring theme throughout th work
• Her connection to the spirits is both a source of great strength, and a weakness, as her grandmother warns her 
• The book begins with the calls of the raven
• The Raven is the trickster figure in Northwest culture
• An ambivalent figure, perhaps a little reminiscent of Loki in Norse myth
• Neither good nor evil, but amoral
• Only interested in himself
• In Northwest myth, Raven created the world because he was bored
• Perhaps symbolic that the novel begins with the ravens calling the Lisa
• We soon realize that Lisa has spiritual powers
• She has perhaps inherited them from her grandmother, to whom she is very close
• We are soon introduced two other characters out of folklore
• Both are truly spirits.
• The first is a strange red-haired man who appears early in the novel, and manifests himself to Lisa whenever something bad its about to happen to someone she loves
• As you can expect, she finds the appearance of this man truly traumatic
• He is reminiscent of an Irish character, the banshee, that would warn families when someone was about to die
• But in a conversation with her grandmother Lisa learns that her people have a belief in red-haired men who are tree spirits
• His appearance remains a motif throughout the book
• A strange figure, at one point when he appears to Lisa he puts his hand on her, almost as if he was comforting her
• His trauma, however, is balanced by another folklore being the Sasquatch, which in the United States is known as the bigfoot
• This is an eight foot tall creature that is found in the native traditions of many Northwest peoples
• In popular culture, these stories date back to the nineteenth century, when Euro-Canadians first began to arrive in this region
• I want to say a few words about the Euro-Canadian understanding of the Sasquatch or Bigfoot.

Sasquatch in Popular Culture

• For Euro-Canadians, this being entered popular culture in the 1920s, when a newspaper editor began to collect and publish native tales about this being
• The creature became truly popular in the 1950s and 60s, at a time when people were becoming truly interested in a folkloric being in the Himalaya called the Yeti
• If such creatures could live in Asia, perhaps they existed in North America too
• The Northwest of the U.S. is heavily wooded and marked by vast mountain ranges
• It’s an easy environment to imagine such a being hiding in
• A prankster named Ray Wallace, from Centralia Washington, helped to feed popular interest by carving giant feet and strapping them to his shoes, to leave tracks in areas where he knew that people would find them
• Allegedly the editor of a local paper was in on the joke with Wallace
• If true, one can imagine the fun that they had at the serious outsiders who came in fascinated by the tracks that Wallace had left in the forest
• Began doing this back in the 1960s.
• This being has two names
• In Canada, it is called Sasquatch, a word that comes from an indigenous people in the Northwest
• In the United States, it is known as Bigfoot
• In 1967 Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin filmed footage of what they claimed was a Bigfoot in Northern California
• In the image, a large creature strides through a clearing
• People have argued over that piece of film for decades since
• One of the men’s friends later came forward and claimed that he had worn an ape suit, and that the men had filmed him
• Patterson had also told people that he was going out for the express purpose of filming Bigfoot
• He ultimately made a lot of money off of that footage
• What are the odds that he would find it?
• Whatever was caught on that film, it served to raise the Bigfoot or Sasquatch to iconic status
• A being that was an element of Northwest indigenous culture had become appropriated by Euro-Canadians and Americans, who used it in everything from beer commercials to novels
• The scientific world would argue that there are no large ape-size creatures in the Pacific Northwest
• Their bones have never been found
• Strange that an animal known for its tracks has never been tracked successfully by hunters
• We now live in the age of the i-phone, but no good footage has emerged since Patterson’s
• No Sasquatch has been ever been hit by a truck
• No solid scientific evidence in all these years
• There are plenty of track casts, blurry pictures, audio recordings
• But nothing convincing or solid
• So for the scientific world, the Sasquatch is a fable
• But I would also note that the Sasquatch is very powerful in popular culture

The Strange Cries on the Umatilla Reservation

• In the winter of 2013 there was a front page article in the Oregonian, my local newspaper
• It said that people on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Eastern Oregon were hearing strange cries in the night
• A number of these strange cries were uploaded to Youtube
• You can find some of these recordings on Youtube yourself if you are curious
• The reservation has about 1,500 people who live on 178,000 acres on the edge of Oregon’s Blue Mountains
• The cries were heard coming from a vast swamp on the reservation
• People heard the cries and started to call the housing authority to complain
• People were nervous to go out at night, and one man reported that his dogs were afraid
• These were people who were used to living much of their lives outdoors, but they said that they couldn’t identify the animal making the sounds
• Wildlife biologists said that the sound was probably made by cougars
• But native elders said that they had seen bigfoot tracks in the region before
• The point is, that the Bigfoot is living folklore
• Not only something in history books

Gothic Sasquatch

• The book gets its title from this being.
• As you have read, in the opening there is a terrifying story of violent Sasquatches.
• And yet, in this book the Sasquatch represent something positive
• To discuss their meaning, I have to talk about gothic traditions in Canadian literature, something that we will be examining in much more depth later in the course
• Canadian literature has a long tradition of gothic writing
• Certainly the case with French Canada, which is haunted by the memory of the past
• The Gothic is characterized by the exaggeratedly strange or fantastic
• Also characterized by the sense that the past is determining the present
• In most Canadian literature, the wilderness is associated with gothic themes
• The forest is almost a character in many Canadian novels, a dark and threatening figure
• The Sasquatch is a forbidding figure, that builds upon older European traditions of the Wildman
• There is a duality between the civilization of urban areas, and the barbarism of the forests, which gives a sense of menace to many Canadian novels
• The Sasquatch represents a primitive and dangerous vision of the wilderness
• A being not bound by the inhibitions and rules of civilization
• In fact, the the Sasquatch is depicted in a way not unlike the manner in which native peoples were portrayed in early Canadian literature- a menace from this forest
• Perhaps the fears of urban Canadians who live in cities separated from each other by long stretches of wilderness
• Nature is seen as a force that is overwhelming and dangerous
• I should say that this is a viewpoint that is quite English Canadian
• The French Canadian view was much less fearful of the wilderness
• Still, a common motif
• I would argue that this image is a very Gothic one

Robinson’s Depiction of Sasquatch

• this Euro-Canadian view is not what Eden Robinson draws on in her novel
• Instead, the Sasquatch represents the past, and the wilderness represents a past before the encounter with Europeans
• People go back to the forest to escape the social ills that plague the community
• The B’gwus does not invoke terror but rather redemption
• The indigenous conception of Sasquatch is very different from that whites
• The Haisla refer the Sasquatch by their own name, b’gwas
• At one point, Lisa’s mother tells her that the stories of the Sasquatch were much different in the past, in that they were more explicitly sexual
• The b’gwas was also very different from European ideas of the wild man
• Early in the book Lisa hears a story about a woman whose husband is turned into a b’gwas as a result of her sin
• In this concept of the b’gwas, there is a mythical meaning to the sasquatch, which is very different from its conception in Western culture
• As Lisa hears different versions of the story of the b’gwas, she realizes that different people can have different perspectives on the same event
• She also realizes through time that the wilderness is not frightening, but rather a place of refuge
• At one point, she kidnaps her brother –who is spiraling into disaster- and takes him to a remote island
• The wilderness helps him to heal
• And the b’gwas is no longer something that her brother hears about from supermarket tabloids
• Instead, she feels a connection to these beings
• Unlike the strange red-headed man, the connection to these beings brings peace
• It is not the wilderness itself that is dangerous
• Rather it is the legacy of colonialism, and the painful encounters with the dominant culture
• The b’gwus is a recurring theme in the work
• After decides to leave Vancouver, she was driving north in a friends car, in which a couple of other people were sleeping
• She saw a b’gwus on the side of the road
• She didn’t tell the others
• When they ask her why she had pulled over to the side of the road, she said that she had seen a moose
• In the very final scene of the book, Lisa hears a b’gwus.
• The B’gwus and the wilderness are more marvelous than terrifying
• It is what happens in the city that is truly terrifying

Highway of Tears:

• The book also has explicit references to Euro-Canadian racism
• In one scene Lisa and her friend are threatened by a car-load of drunken white men
• The men shout insults at the women that are sexist and racist
• In the end, she is saved by the intervention of a white store owner, who is a bystander
• But people are all too aware of the real history in which indigenous women have disappeared in Northern Canada
• Highway 16 runs from Prince Rupert to Prince George in northern British Columbia
• Officially 18 women have disappeared along this stretch of road
• Other people have placed the number at 43
• Some of the murders were likely associated with an American Bobby Jack Fowler
• But the killings have been taking place for decades, and have not stopped with this death
• He was only one part of the story
• Many observors believe that part of the reason so many women disappeared was institutional racism
• They point to the large number of women who have disappeared in Vancouver, perhaps as many as sixty, of whom 20 were aboriginal
• They also point to the Robert Pickton murders in that city
• Pickton operated a pig farm
• He would pick up prostitutes –many of whom were indigenous- murder them, and feed them to his pigs
• In this case, people also believe that people just didn’t care to investigate the disappearance of these women
• There is a very powerful documentary film on this topic by a Metis film-maker, called Finding Dawn
• It’s available for free on-line
• One point that you frequently hear is that people did not begin to take the disappearances along the highway of tears seriously until two white women disappeared
• When people think of femicide, of the mass murder of women, they think of Cuidad Juarez in Mexico, from which hundreds of women have disappeared
• The number of women who have disappeared on the Highway of Tears is much lower
• But perhaps the central problem is still the same: the official indifference that has permitted this to happen
• The racist and sexist ideals that make women vulnerable
• This sense of violence is in the background of Robinson’s work
• She does not avoid the experience of indigenous women in East Vancouver
• In this world, the real threat is not deep in the wilderness, it’s when you’re hitch-hiking on the highway, or in the city
• After her experience, Lisa was talking to her friend Trudy about what had happened
• Trudy told her to be careful: the priests at the residential schools weren’t punished for abusing little kids, and the white men would not be punished for raping her because society expects native women to be “born sluts”
• Perhaps this is the reality that the b’gwus speaks to
• This section of her novel returns to her work on Traplines, which also dealt with drunks, drug dealers and sadists
• Robinson describes the violent world that indigenous women are forced to inhabit

Folkore and Ds’onoqua

• Folklore is a central theme of the work
• But there is an ironic tone to her discussion of it at times
• At one point, Lisa talks about D’sonoqua, a troll-like character in many Northwest indigenous oral traditions
• This giant woman would wander the forest capturing children, and putting them in a basket
• She would cover their eyes in sticky tree sap
• Some Canadians aware of her, because the famous painter Emily Carr discussed her in one of her books
• But outside of western Canada, it’s unlikely that anyone would recognize this name
• Why, Lisa wonders, don’t people ever think about her?
• Why is Sasquatch so powerful in popular culture
• In interviews, Robinson has talked about how her publishers initially wanted to expand her discussion of Sasquatch 
• Probably viewed it as a means to attract more readers, given the popular interest in this figure
• Robinson chose not to do this
• These supernatural beings are not superfluous to the story
• Rather they are integral to the narrative
• The one representing trauma, the other the healing power of the natural world
• They aren’t gimmicks, or included to attract curious readers

Ghosts:

• The book is named after Sasquatch
• But I am not sure that the Sasquatch is truly the most important folkloric being in the book
• Instead, I might say that the most powerful image in the book is that of ghosts, for this narrative is haunted by the past
• At one point early in the book, she remembers traveling to a fishing camp with her uncle Mick, and sees ghosts on the way
• Towards the end of the book, Lisa’s supernatural powers begin to fade and this is a good thing

• She decides to leave Vancouver and go back to her community after an encounter with the ghost of a cousin, Tab
• Tab told her to pull herself together and go home
• She soon learns, however, that her cousin is not dead
• Her powers are playing tricks on her
• This echoes an early conversation that she had with her grandmother, in which she had told her about the little red man
• At that time the grandmother had told Lisa that the maternal side of her family had the ability to sometimes to see the future
• She had also warned her grand-daughter not to trust this spirit, because he could trick her: “Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different than the living.”
• At this moment, Lisa realizes that her powers are not infallible
• Lisa inhabits a world in which the line between the living and the dead has rubbed thin, and it is easy to get lost

The tension between the native world and the dominant society

• At the same time, she also has learned that the non-native world has very little to offer her to solve her problems
• Her parents worry about Lisa’s mood at one point, and take her to a psychiatrist
• The result is a fiasco, as the spirit world appears to her insistently, even while she is in the doctor’s office
• The point is that these powers are both problematic and inescapable
• They cannot be simply reasoned away or ignored
• In a sense, Lisa is a shaman, a person who mediates between the world of the living and that of the spirits
• It is a painful position
• But it is central to who she is
• And as a coming of age novel, identity is a central motif in the work
• Lisa Marie must also balance between the world of her community and the outside world
• That is a much more difficult balancing act