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macham17's review
4.0
I have to admit I have not previously read any Lee Maracle, but I plan on rectifying that ASAP. Memory Serves is a revelation. Moving, thought-provoking, and immensely vivid, Maracle's written oratories had me questioning my role and privilege in society. Not only that, but I'd finish a chapter where Maracle delves into her vision of the future, and have to sit there for twenty minutes to muse on her points - debating the future of Canada and wondering at whether it can even be a possibility.
"Canada says it seeks to emancipate its 'Native Nations.' It does so from the position of total access and control over space and time. It does so from the position of having military dominance. Indigenous people wish to wrest control of the terms of union from Canada, but many Canadians fear the terms we might establish. It is a conundrum. Fairness and inclusion on our terms are required in order for sharing to take place. And Canadians must desire to include us. But we have not the time to determine what our terms are, so this dream is far from its realization. We are all severely damaged goods: on the one hand, Canadians are damaged by their history of plunder, the constant rationalization of their preponderant super-sized entitlement over space, and their control of time; on the other, Indigenous people are damaged by the absence of entitlement, so damaged that sorting this out will be a nightmare. But do it we must."
By the middle of the book, you find yourself thinking, "well this is just too depressing of a thought, Canada can't possibly get to a place of complete understanding and reconciliation the likes of which Maracle hopes for," only to find yourself swept away in her stories once again as she calmly explains her rationale and motivation for moving forward. And by the end, when she goes into detail about her storytelling and oratory methods, you understand the reason each word was specifically chosen in the book; Maracle's ability to carry her readers alongside her comes full circle.
"Canada says it seeks to emancipate its 'Native Nations.' It does so from the position of total access and control over space and time. It does so from the position of having military dominance. Indigenous people wish to wrest control of the terms of union from Canada, but many Canadians fear the terms we might establish. It is a conundrum. Fairness and inclusion on our terms are required in order for sharing to take place. And Canadians must desire to include us. But we have not the time to determine what our terms are, so this dream is far from its realization. We are all severely damaged goods: on the one hand, Canadians are damaged by their history of plunder, the constant rationalization of their preponderant super-sized entitlement over space, and their control of time; on the other, Indigenous people are damaged by the absence of entitlement, so damaged that sorting this out will be a nightmare. But do it we must."
By the middle of the book, you find yourself thinking, "well this is just too depressing of a thought, Canada can't possibly get to a place of complete understanding and reconciliation the likes of which Maracle hopes for," only to find yourself swept away in her stories once again as she calmly explains her rationale and motivation for moving forward. And by the end, when she goes into detail about her storytelling and oratory methods, you understand the reason each word was specifically chosen in the book; Maracle's ability to carry her readers alongside her comes full circle.
talknerdybookblog's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
4.0
Representation: Salish Author
helloimsabrina's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
morgandhu's review against another edition
5.0
Memory Serves is a collection of lectures and speeches by Sto: lo/Salish activist and author Lee Maracle. In her Preface, Maracle says of her work as a communicator:
"Indigenous people have historically hesitated to create books such as this because they express the views of the individuals presenting thoughts on the whole. The individual cannot represent the whole in that way in our communities. We don't assign anyone that kind of authority. I derive my understanding of social theory, of our logic, our processes for thought, discovery, consultation and learning from the stories I have heard and from having witnessed thousands of oral discussions with youth, elders, middle-aged people, even children. As a witness I pay attention to how these discussions unfold, how each individual engages the whole, the subject in question, and how they play with it. I have been witnessing for as far back as my memory serves, but this does not make me an expert on our people.
What makes my words valuable is the thousands of Indigenous people who have said to me: You just articulated everything I was thinking."
Maracle's writing - actually, speaking, for these are the written forms of oratories, spoken word performances - is poetic, evocative, drawing on the shape and style and images of the Indigenous storytelling genre. She uses events, examples, images, and linking all, rhythm and sound, to lead the listener to an understanding. It must be listened to in the heart and the gut as well as the head to be comprehended. In the oratory that gives a title to the volume, "Memory Serves," her re/membering connects pasts and futures, moving from ancient myth/stories of the relationships of men and women, peace and war, life and death, to a speakers panel of Indigenous women to the birth of her daughter. It guides the reader/listener toward the path that leads to 'the good life' - and reconnects them with their hidden selves and their community history.
Her re-membering is a force for wholeness, for understanding, for action, for justice.
"I re-member courage in the face of awesome fear and haul up the courage from every cell, transform it into desire and push it with a will toward freedom. I re-member rage and dig beneath its hoary cap in search if the justice moving me to rage and then I determine to stretch this rage into some kind of energized force and transform it into justice. When I am successful this will become a moment that will live for all time because others will choose to remember. I re-member dark, its seriousness, its sobriety, its sacred ability to hold my life still and call me to alter my conduct, change my direction and commit to participating more fully in my life. I come to the table full feast. I offer the host, the multitudes, the dead, the living, and the unborn this food.
I remember the body is made to move, that life is always worth engaging, that fear is a beautiful friend cautioning me to take care, and that courage is there to mediate this fear and is ever willing to be summoned that this old friend will not capitulate and become some beast that no longer serves me. I move as though sure. I fear no decision as belief in my memory grows; it has always served my spiritual path."
In the oratory "Salmon Is the Hub of Salish Memory," Maracle compares the divisive and reductive European worldview, which ignores connection and sets artificial hierarchies of importance, to the Indigenous worldview which recognises the community of all things. She builds this comparison around two events from 2001 - the suicide of an entire salmon run, and the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center which led to the invasion of Afghanistan.
"At the time that the salmon were committing social suicide, Afghanistan was the object of international invasion. Salish people know that the homelands of the salmon have been the object of chronic invasion by fisheries, pulp and paper mills, the forestry industry and all manner of toxic dumping. Are these events connected? Is there a connection between Western society's devaluation of the lives of Afghanis and and the devaluation of salmon, the degradation of their life conditions such that suicide seems their only option? Are the Afghani people and the sockeye of equal value? Is there a connection between suicidal salmon and suicidal warriors?"
"Who Gets to Draw the Maps - In and Out of Place in British Columbia" questions the authority of those who make not just the geographical representations of land that we think of as maps - complete with boundaries that divide this from that and assign ownership to segments only of the whole - but the maps of reality formed by the accepted language and story we are surrounded by. Who decides the sociological hierarchies, the categories we put humans and other living things into? Who defines the terms that shape our realities, and to what ends?
In these as well as other oratories collected in this volume, Maracle addresses the conditions of colonialism from a variety of perspectives: the absence of a well-developed post-colonial literature in Canada that results from our holding on to colonial power relations; the system of colonialist laws that limit the autonomy of Indigenous people; the impact of colonialism on Indigenous women and on Indigenous traditions of relationship between me and women in families and in society; the devaluing and loss of Indigenous knowledge and the methods of developing and transmitting it.
At the same time, Maracle presents Indigenous alternatives to the Western colonial way of being - ways of relation to the earth and to each other, ways of seeing, learning, studying, developing knowledge bases, thinking, remembering, communicating and teaching. She places particular emphasis on exploring/explaining the oral nature of Indigenous culture - its literature, its teaching methods, are based not on written text as both repository and communication, but on memory and the spoken word, on the real-time communicator of accumulated knowledge and ongoing creativity.
In "Oratory on Oratory" Maracle explicitly addresses the Salish methodologies of knowledge development, a topic which is woven through all of the other oratories collected here:
"Study is tempered by humans studying the space between the beings in the relationships humans engage. From the snow flea on a glacier to barra- cudas and sharks, the small beings and the invisible beings, all beings have a perfect right to be. We respect the barracuda, but we recognize that the charming smile of this predator is dangerous, and so we maintain a good distance from his territory, and we don’t swim with sharks. Principles of fair exchange govern all of our relationships. We pick berries in such a way that the berries are assured of continued renewal, and we are cautious to leave some for the bears. We study from the perspective that, as the variable beings on earth, it is humans that need to transform and alter their conduct to engage in relationship with other beings and phenomena. Relationship engagement is disciplined by conjuring the least intrusive and invasive con- duct possible, respecting the distance and reproductive rights of other beings, and ensuring the greatest freedom of beings to be as they are and always will be. This requires that we study the life of beings and phenomena in our world from their perspective, and not from the perspective of our needs."
This is a volume to be read slowly, to be read with the ears and eyes, heart and mind. It unfolds a way if thinking, seeing, remembering and teaching that is very different from European tradition, in the very act of remembering and teaching about the impacts of colonialist history of the European presence on the people who thought, and saw, and remembered and taught, and who still, in spite of all, think and see and remember and teach in this way.
"Indigenous people have historically hesitated to create books such as this because they express the views of the individuals presenting thoughts on the whole. The individual cannot represent the whole in that way in our communities. We don't assign anyone that kind of authority. I derive my understanding of social theory, of our logic, our processes for thought, discovery, consultation and learning from the stories I have heard and from having witnessed thousands of oral discussions with youth, elders, middle-aged people, even children. As a witness I pay attention to how these discussions unfold, how each individual engages the whole, the subject in question, and how they play with it. I have been witnessing for as far back as my memory serves, but this does not make me an expert on our people.
What makes my words valuable is the thousands of Indigenous people who have said to me: You just articulated everything I was thinking."
Maracle's writing - actually, speaking, for these are the written forms of oratories, spoken word performances - is poetic, evocative, drawing on the shape and style and images of the Indigenous storytelling genre. She uses events, examples, images, and linking all, rhythm and sound, to lead the listener to an understanding. It must be listened to in the heart and the gut as well as the head to be comprehended. In the oratory that gives a title to the volume, "Memory Serves," her re/membering connects pasts and futures, moving from ancient myth/stories of the relationships of men and women, peace and war, life and death, to a speakers panel of Indigenous women to the birth of her daughter. It guides the reader/listener toward the path that leads to 'the good life' - and reconnects them with their hidden selves and their community history.
Her re-membering is a force for wholeness, for understanding, for action, for justice.
"I re-member courage in the face of awesome fear and haul up the courage from every cell, transform it into desire and push it with a will toward freedom. I re-member rage and dig beneath its hoary cap in search if the justice moving me to rage and then I determine to stretch this rage into some kind of energized force and transform it into justice. When I am successful this will become a moment that will live for all time because others will choose to remember. I re-member dark, its seriousness, its sobriety, its sacred ability to hold my life still and call me to alter my conduct, change my direction and commit to participating more fully in my life. I come to the table full feast. I offer the host, the multitudes, the dead, the living, and the unborn this food.
I remember the body is made to move, that life is always worth engaging, that fear is a beautiful friend cautioning me to take care, and that courage is there to mediate this fear and is ever willing to be summoned that this old friend will not capitulate and become some beast that no longer serves me. I move as though sure. I fear no decision as belief in my memory grows; it has always served my spiritual path."
In the oratory "Salmon Is the Hub of Salish Memory," Maracle compares the divisive and reductive European worldview, which ignores connection and sets artificial hierarchies of importance, to the Indigenous worldview which recognises the community of all things. She builds this comparison around two events from 2001 - the suicide of an entire salmon run, and the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center which led to the invasion of Afghanistan.
"At the time that the salmon were committing social suicide, Afghanistan was the object of international invasion. Salish people know that the homelands of the salmon have been the object of chronic invasion by fisheries, pulp and paper mills, the forestry industry and all manner of toxic dumping. Are these events connected? Is there a connection between Western society's devaluation of the lives of Afghanis and and the devaluation of salmon, the degradation of their life conditions such that suicide seems their only option? Are the Afghani people and the sockeye of equal value? Is there a connection between suicidal salmon and suicidal warriors?"
"Who Gets to Draw the Maps - In and Out of Place in British Columbia" questions the authority of those who make not just the geographical representations of land that we think of as maps - complete with boundaries that divide this from that and assign ownership to segments only of the whole - but the maps of reality formed by the accepted language and story we are surrounded by. Who decides the sociological hierarchies, the categories we put humans and other living things into? Who defines the terms that shape our realities, and to what ends?
In these as well as other oratories collected in this volume, Maracle addresses the conditions of colonialism from a variety of perspectives: the absence of a well-developed post-colonial literature in Canada that results from our holding on to colonial power relations; the system of colonialist laws that limit the autonomy of Indigenous people; the impact of colonialism on Indigenous women and on Indigenous traditions of relationship between me and women in families and in society; the devaluing and loss of Indigenous knowledge and the methods of developing and transmitting it.
At the same time, Maracle presents Indigenous alternatives to the Western colonial way of being - ways of relation to the earth and to each other, ways of seeing, learning, studying, developing knowledge bases, thinking, remembering, communicating and teaching. She places particular emphasis on exploring/explaining the oral nature of Indigenous culture - its literature, its teaching methods, are based not on written text as both repository and communication, but on memory and the spoken word, on the real-time communicator of accumulated knowledge and ongoing creativity.
In "Oratory on Oratory" Maracle explicitly addresses the Salish methodologies of knowledge development, a topic which is woven through all of the other oratories collected here:
"Study is tempered by humans studying the space between the beings in the relationships humans engage. From the snow flea on a glacier to barra- cudas and sharks, the small beings and the invisible beings, all beings have a perfect right to be. We respect the barracuda, but we recognize that the charming smile of this predator is dangerous, and so we maintain a good distance from his territory, and we don’t swim with sharks. Principles of fair exchange govern all of our relationships. We pick berries in such a way that the berries are assured of continued renewal, and we are cautious to leave some for the bears. We study from the perspective that, as the variable beings on earth, it is humans that need to transform and alter their conduct to engage in relationship with other beings and phenomena. Relationship engagement is disciplined by conjuring the least intrusive and invasive con- duct possible, respecting the distance and reproductive rights of other beings, and ensuring the greatest freedom of beings to be as they are and always will be. This requires that we study the life of beings and phenomena in our world from their perspective, and not from the perspective of our needs."
This is a volume to be read slowly, to be read with the ears and eyes, heart and mind. It unfolds a way if thinking, seeing, remembering and teaching that is very different from European tradition, in the very act of remembering and teaching about the impacts of colonialist history of the European presence on the people who thought, and saw, and remembered and taught, and who still, in spite of all, think and see and remember and teach in this way.
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