A review by black_girl_reading
Celia's Song by Lee Maracle

5.0

This book, about so much, but for me about how the poison of colonialism, and the erasure of Indigenous People’s knowledge and songs and medicine and ways of being (and the literal genocidal erasure of Indigenous people through disease and displacement and war and patriarchal violence and child removal) creates a harm so deep it is built on centuries of ancestral trauma, is also a book of family love and healing and the way back home in a world forever changed. How’s that for the run-on sentence of a lifetime? Like some of the characters in this book, my feelings about the english language are that I don’t owe it shit. This book enriched me. It taught me that the old agreements between the spirit world and the natural world that we separate ourselves from can explain so much of the brokenness and crises of today. It spoke of how ancestral knowledge will find the dispossessed even if we can’t find it in our living Elders. And it reminded me that resistance is just being in our way, and that our way lives in our blood - it cannot be stolen. This book tells trauma tales in profoundly graphic ways that mark the spirit. This book tells healing tales that comfort a soul in grief and fear about our frightening world out of balance. This book sings honour to Indigenous women and reminds us that it is our job to listen to them and be guided by their knowledge. This novel, like all of Maracle’s work, is sorely under-appreciated, and therefore I am going to revisit Maracle’s entire catalogue of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and I’d encourage you to walk that path with me.