Keeping it real

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This article was published 07/09/2024 (682 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Real Ones by katherena vermette seems ripped from the headlines. It’s about the effect a “pretendian” has on her family, and on the “real ones” — Indigenous peoples. (A pretendian is a non-Indigenous person who claims to be Indigenous. Pretendians typically accept work, awards and other accolades, stealing opportunities from Indigenous people.)

One of the first pretendians was Grey Owl. A writer, public speaker and conservationist, he faked Indigenous identity after moving to Canada as a young man. Following his death in 1938, his real identity — he was born in England as Archibald Stansfeld Belaney — was exposed.

And this past year, one of the biggest blows to Canadian Indigenous culture was the CBC exposé that revealed Buffy Sainte-Marie is neither Canadian nor Indigenous — she’s an Italian-American born in Massachusetts.

In Real Ones, vermette’s shapeshifting character Renee goes by the name Raven Bearclaw. She has passed herself off as an Indigenous artist for years. Her family knows, and the public is about to find out.

Vermette, who is Red River Métis, plays homage to her previous novels, with characters in Real Ones being adjacently connected to the Stranger family of her books The Break, The Strangers and The Circle.

The story is based in Winnipeg and centres around the pretendian’s daughters, June and lyn, whose first-person narratives alternate throughout Real Ones. June is a Métis Studies professor, moving back home from B.C. with her husband and dog. Lyn is a pottery artist and mom to Willow. The sisters are close with each other and with their Métis dad (Renee’s ex-husband).

Lyn grew up living with Renee, when she was around; June, the older sister, lived with their father and stepmother, wishing lyn was under the same roof. As the pretendian news becomes public, childhood trauma resurfaces, with June’s feelings of guilt and lyn’s abandonment issues colouring many of their conversations.

Vermette’s talent for exploring tough topics with passion, humour and hope helps the story unfold. Through the family’s experience, tributes are paid to the hard-fought battles of Michif (Métis) people who have regained and maintained ownership of their identity.

A deep understanding of art and a love of language abounds in vermette’s careful prose. Throughout the sad story, moments of simple beauty shine, such as when lyn talks about her pottery work: “Art is something to do with all the feelings that would otherwise do nothing.”

Vermette is passionate about her ancestry and inserts lived experience and cultural awareness through family discussions. “My sister and I are Michif via my Dad’s family, also called Métis, also called Red River Métis, also called you know, the not fake ones,” says lyn.

Real Ones gets pretty real about pretendians — from multiple perspectives. The daughters by no means endorse their mother’s behaviour, but lyn attempts to understand it: “Renee is an artist and very stereotypical in her way of being that kind of person, she impersonates and reinvents herself by the season (or mood).”

June has a different take. “I work in academia — you can’t shoot an arrow without hitting a pretendian in a university. I have degrees in this stuff. Michif/Métis history, literature, native studies. I teach, write academic articles, constantly research everything surrounding contemporary, Indigenous identity, and our history and ethnogenesis.”

Renee’s true identity is explored when June shares an opinion on her mother’s past, which includes being Mennonite: “It’s a rich, colourful, surprising, exceptional culture in its own right. By taking our stories, she is effectively discrediting her own, and those of her actual ancestors.”

Though Real Ones explores a lot of anger caused by the pretendian theme, there’s heartfelt experience from the daughters’ perspectives; conflicted feelings about Renee being a lot of horrible things, but also, being their mother. That core struggle makes Real Ones so very real.

Deborah Bowers is Red River Métis and walks in two worlds. In addition to Real Ones, she highly recommends Michelle Good’s Truth Telling and Jesse Wente’s Unreconciled be added to your reading list.

Katherena vermette launches Real Ones on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location. For an interview with vermette, see Monday’s Free Press.