Read an excerpt: Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut novel “A Minor Chorus” and the legacy of residential schools: ‘We are still haunted by it’

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer for all mediums. His memoir “A History of My Brief Body” was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award; his debut book of poetry “This Wound Is a World” won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. Now, the author from the Driftpile Cree Nation is out with his first book of fiction “A Minor Chorus,” a novel that asks questions about family, love and happiness. This powerful excerpt explores ideas of property, remembering and mourning.

An almost animalistic instinct compelled me to turn off the highway and into a predominantly white hamlet named after a French Catholic priest from the early twentieth century. I wanted, for the first time as an adult, to return to the site of the Indian residential school my relatives were forced to attend as children. It was one of dozens in Alberta intended to brutalize rather than educate. This was an era of horror so prolonged and systematic that it continued to permeate the larger Indigenous consciousness. We are still haunted by it.

I stood in front of what was left of the school: a white entryway (chipped paint), the year 1947 etched into the entryway, a dark and empty room (to the extent I could know it was empty). Throughout adolescence I heard stories of supernatural disturbances spun from these remains: twirling figures, inexplicable sounds. Usually these were seen or heard during teenaged parties thrown in the hidden valley in which the abandoned school is situated, a graveyard just steps away. I never attended one, but almost everyone I knew had; it was somewhat of a rite of passage to do so, to barrel down the hill from a car or quad parked on the public side of a farmer’s NO TRESPASSING sign. On this day, I was alone. The sky was vast and the grass was long and wild, and in it my boots disappeared. Inside me: nausea, the bitterness of the past. Also, a sense of how what I saw agitated representation. I wanted to take a photo and call it “The Unwritability of Grief.” I felt that I too could be photographed and labelled this way.

As a child, I knew little about the site; it was where I was brought to toboggan during winters. No one told me about the sick experiment that unfolded there, though later I would be told in few words that a number of relatives had been forced to go there as children. It was this unspeakable fact that compelled me to return, though I now felt rebuked by it. The forest, the ground — these both seemed tinged with a sorrow older than I would ever be. The landscape was something I felt hurled at even as I was standing still.

What wasn’t included in the public memory of a place was of deep ethical significance. The small community existed in a state of unremembering. Whenever I visited I felt like a ghost. An integral part of my personhood was unrecognizable. I was like wind: only visible when I made something else rustle.

As I stood sunlight crashed against me. I thought about what it would look like to practise a way of life that didn’t amount to something like a Ministry of Historical Ignorance or a squad of memory police. At the very least, I wanted to erect a plaque that said

HERE UNFOLDED CRIMES AGAINST

INDIGENOUS CHILDREN

IN THE NAME OF THE NATION.

HERE IS THE UNSTABLE GROUND OF

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY HAPPINESS

AND MISERY.

I was reaching for a wildflower when from atop the hill a middle-aged white woman addressed me in an accusatory register: Excuse me, what are you doing?

I was caught off guard and couldn’t respond with haste.

This isn’t public property, she said. A lot of us pay a lot of money to camp here, so if you aren’t here to visit someone, I think you should leave.

I pointed at the old school: You mean to say this is private property? Do you even know what it was?

She was metres away, but from where I stood I could see her face redden.

Some abandoned shed, I don’t know, she said. That’s besides the point. She inched backward. It seemed she was afraid of me.

I’m not trying to start anything, I said, knowing fully that I was plotted inside a semiotics of racism I wouldn’t easily escape from. This was a residential school, I said. I came here to mourn.

She paused, looked at the doorway. Then, as if refusing to solidify any sense of mutual understanding, she said: How do I know you’re telling the truth?

I haven’t given you a reason to distrust me, I responded. If you don’t believe me, well …

Okay, she barked back, it sounds like you’re trying to make this about something it’s not. She reached for her phone from her back pocket, as if with it she could defend herself. She went on: I’ve never seen you before. You know what people are like. Where are you even from?

Her body, I supposed, betrayed her wish to not be seen as hostile or emotional. I saw her hands shaking, heard her voice break. She gestured in a circle, at the lake in the distance, at the forest even. All this is campground, she said. The houses are back there, nowhere near here. You shouldn’t have even driven onto the grass. She pointed at her feet. That’s disrespectful, you know? There are already dirty ruts. I don’t drive onto your backyard with my vehicle, she added.

I was astonished by her resolve to implicate me in affronts I hadn’t made, to put blame, however ambiguous, onto me so as to absolve herself of any kind of wrongdoing. It was becoming clear she wanted to pull me into a battle I could only lose because the world, this small pocket of it, at the end of the day, was hers to claim against political reason. What was also clear was that this kind of defence of property, even that which didn’t legally belong to anyone, was bound up with the larger culture of amnesia that made it so a white woman could come upon a Cree man standing in front of what’s left of a residential school and think she was in danger.

I’m not sure what to say, ma’am, I said. My relatives suffered here. My ancestors have lived on this lake for centuries. It is entirely within my right to be here. I was looking directly at her. I said this even though I knew it would sound to her like another dialect, if not an entirely different language.

I’m sorry but I’m going to have to report you for trespassing. I’m done talking, she said. She put her phone to her ear. I knew she was calling the police. I also knew I couldn’t reach my vehicle without walking within arm’s reach, something neither of us wanted. So I walked into the forest, away from her, until her voice was drowned out by the density of trees. Was I evading the law? No, because I hadn’t committed a crime. Yes, because the law in this country has always functioned as a suppressor of Indigenous life. To be Cree and alive, one had, in both minor and major ways, to evade the law, to stay out of its crosshairs. This woman wanted to make me into a moving target. The same history that obscured the terror of the abandoned school was the same history that deputized her, that imbued her with a degree of legal power I didn’t have nor could I ever attain. I didn’t want to live like a weapon.

I would come back for my vehicle in an hour or so. I would come back to the site as well; in the fall, when the campers would have returned to their ends of the country. In the meantime, I decided, I would continue to live believing the story of Indigenous revolution has no ending, believing there will be nowhere that isn’t already ours into which someone might think I was trespassing.

Eventually I arrived at the water. I walked past the marina, crowded with boats and tourists, to reach a more secluded stretch of shoreline. The problem of private property arose once more; I wasn’t sure who owned the patch of land upon which I was walking. I knew that no one could truly own the land, and this thought emboldened me to stay put. The water was crashing gently at my feet. I was surprised at how opaque the lake was, how overtaken it was by algae, the kind that kept swimmers at bay. From where I stood, I could see the northwest edge of the lake, near which was another small community, this one named after a Catholic bishop. A residential school had also been located there, and I’d heard stories of Indigenous kids from further south than Edmonton being transported like prisoners to this part of the province.

I seldom cared to think about the concept of a soul, but I found myself thinking about it as I stared at the horizon, water extending in every direction. Could a place have a soul? If so, what kind of damage would all those decades of child abductions have done to the soul of these communities, to those who benefited from these acts of genocide? It pained me to think about it.

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