Highway brings humour, positivity in lectures

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This article was published 22/10/2022 (1144 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tomson Highway’s latest book is a series of five lectures from the CBC Massey Lectures, intended to spread the ideas of groundbreaking Canadians. They will be broadcast on CBC’s Ideas in November.

Highway is best-known for his award-winning plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Ought to Move to Kapuskasing. More recently, Permanent Astonishment, his memoir of growing up Cree in northern Manitoba and attending residential school near The Pas, won the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction.

Highway’s determinedly positive view of his early life, evident in Permanent Astonishment, carries over to this series of lectures, particularly the first of the five, On Language. He is thankful to be one of approximately 90,000 people who still speak Cree, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Canada.

Born in 1951, Highway missed the devastating results of television, which didn’t reach Lac Brochet for another 20 years. English, he maintains, is a great language for scientific and other intellectual pursuits, but “its value stops at the neck.” When it comes to humour or describing sexual pleasure, Cree takes the prize, he says.

Although residential school failed to quash Highway’s connection to his language, the Catholic Church had already done its work of suppressing Indigenous spirituality, even in the remote community where he grew up. He describes himself as one of the first generation armed with university degrees “who started picking up the pieces of a shattered culture.”

In the next four lectures, entitled On Creation, On Humour, On Sex and Gender and On Death, he illustrates various aspects of Indigenous mythology compared to Christianity and Greek mythology. Sometimes this can be heavy-going, particularly if you’ve forgotten all the Greek mythology you ever learned, and if you’re inclined believe Christianity has at least a few redeeming features.

In these lectures Highway focuses on the sober, patriarchal nature of Christianity versus the egalitarian pantheism of Indigenous beliefs where “a leaf on tree, a blade of grass, a fish in the river… all are divine energies, divine beings with a living, breathing soul.” Christians believe “the garden of Eden — the planet called Earth — was given to us and then taken away” by a male god, whereas Indigenous people believe they continue to live in that garden, as they have from the beginning of time.

If you are not an anthropologist, this comparison and its implications may take a while to ponder and digest, but that task is an important one. We call ourselves multicultural today, but our world has been shaped by colonizers who had no respect for Indigenous beliefs and very little concern for the environment.

Tomson Highway is not an academic. He is a storyteller who has gathered many stories and lived many lives himself. These lectures are illustrated with moving stories from his own life as well as dramatic, often humorous stories from Indigenous mythology. Many of these stories feature the Trickster (Nanabush in Anishinaabe, Weesageechaak in Cree), a spirit who shifts identity from male to female, human to animal and naughty to nice.

Highway points out that “all cultures in the world have Tricksters… they are here to remind us that the reason for existence on planet Earth is not to suffer, not to wallow in guilt, not to apologize for a crime we didn’t commit, but to have one blast of a time.”

Faith Johnston loved Permanent Astonishment and is looking forward to Highway’s next memoir about his life in Winnipeg and after.