Quite the trip

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/09/2020 (2234 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From the title to the cover art to the very first paragraph, Thomas King’s latest novel sounds like it should be a funny book and, truly, it is. King’s dry, acerbic wit is in full force, from the musings of Bird, his protagonist and narrator, to the repartee Bird shares with his longtime life partner Mimi.

Likewise, the story itself is comedic but far from a comedy. There are layers and undertones and textures here, both between the jokes and within them. It might be overstating it to call this a dark novel, but it certainly is a novel touched by darkness.

As a younger man, Blackbird Mavrias, carrying the surnames of his lost Cherokee father and Greek mother, respectively, was lured to Canada from the United States by a charming, brilliant and challenging Blackfoot artist, Mimi Bull Shield. At first glance the well-practised verbal jousting of Bird and Mimi, now retired with two adult children, resembles something seen on The Honeymooners, but they quickly take on a subtler shape, revealing well-worn paths and cracks alike.

At the novel’s opening Mimi is dragging Bird around Prague from one tourist site to another, and he is complaining the whole way. We also find out they have a quest beyond photo ops — tracking down her long-lost great uncle, who absconded with a family heirloom to Europe a century earlier, only a few postcards telling the tale leading up to his eventual disappearance.

Interspersed with the present-day adventure are many flashbacks — to previous trips, to Bird’s youth in a pre-Civil Rights-era America, to Bird and Mimi’s long-ago courtship. There is also time to dig into the demons Bird has long carried around in his head, the fresher regrets that still gnaw at him, and Mimi’s determination (as well as fatigue) at lifting Bird up.

Born and raised in the U.S., King has spent just over half of his 77 years in Canada. The shift from American Indian to Canadian First Nations gives him a broader perspective on anti-Indigenous racism, land theft and cultural genocide, one focused on the broader views and motivations of those in power rather than the minor quirks unique to either country’s legislative history or self-constructed narrative.

In King’s 2012 book The Inconvenient Indian he tackled this topic head-on, writing something that was part media studies, part popular history, part personal meditation. He described it as mostly non-fiction. Conversely, in Indians on Vacation the biographical similarities between the author’s real life and that of Bird and Mimi perhaps make this a novel that is mostly fiction.

The Inconvenient Indian came out a bit past the midway point of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work, and just prior to many Canadians learning about residential schools for the first time. Indeed, the book covered many other shamefully underappreciated historical and cultural touchstones, the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Alcatraz, the Trail of Tears and a lot of generation-defining cowboy movies.

This novel is ultimately grounded in the context of its primary characters, yet it manages to range widely across subject matter both timeless and topical: from refugee crises to relationship crises, from the wholesale government apprehension of Indigenous children to the scars left by individual absent fathers, from the ever-increasing awareness of the importance of fighting for change to the ever-deepening apathy that threatens to drown us.

A poignant, expertly crafted story in its own right, the themes King has laid out in Indians on Vacation seem sorely appropriate to our present moment. But what many of us are belatedly realizing is that this present moment has actually been going on for a long time. There are no pat answers or forced resolutions — just grim determination and the lesson that however old you get, you still have your whole life ahead of you.

Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.

Thomas King will be part of Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, that will be available online at thinairwinnipeg.ca as of Sept. 20.