PEYAKOW: RECLAIMING CREE DIGNITY
by Darrel J. McLeod
Milkweed Editions, 2021 $16.00
Reviewed by Brendan Curtinrich
Darrel McLeod’s book, Peyakow: Reclaiming Cree Dignity (Milkweed Editions, 2021), begins with the basest of atrocities: the theft of indigenous land. With an opening chapter of historical nonfiction, McLeod takes us back to the principal moment when the British Crown liaised with the Nehiyaw near Lesser Slave Lake. Of Treaty 8, McLeod writes, “The landmark treaty that would eventually cover roughly 841,487 square kilometres, including portions of northern Alberta, northwest Saskatchewan and the modern Northwest Territories and BC, was ostensibly negotiated between two sovereign nations in less than twenty-four hours on June 20 and 21, 1899, through a Cree-English interpreter whose linguistic skills were questionable” (12).
This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book, which tells of McLeod’s journey from child of Treaty 8 land to executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations, his navigation of the distrust, enmity, and atonement rooted in that 1899 treaty and others like it. During his career working to repair the ongoing harm of Treaty 8 and other calamities, he straddles two different worlds. He carries his Cree identity always, of course, but also works within and for the Canadian Government. This portal jumping has its consequences as McLeod deals with addictions, broken relationships, and animosity from all sides. The book is an intense journey through the innerworkings of policy making, a reminder that the wheels of bureaucracy—ergo, change and progress—are big, heavy, and slow, and that they can grind their turners alive. “Maybe I could smooth the rough edges, the areas of friction between Indigenous and white culture, but at what cost? Sandpaper, once used, is left torn and ragged,” McLeod writes (40).
Through this saga of high-profile negotiations and personal reckoning we learn that life and identity—as well as the things we have built to manage them: government, society, and politics—are more complex and confusing than many of us imagine. We also learn that land is both our salvation and our corruption; while it is the fundament of our identity, it is also the root of dispute and hostility. Chapter after chapter, reflections on the natural world, airy and bright with ravens, blackberries, and hemlocks, abut onerous meeting proceedings inside austere conference rooms. Married, irrevocably, are the things meant to unite and civilize us and the things that embitter and divide us most deeply.
There are more poetic books out there, books more beautifully written. Some lines in Peyakow might still earn the workshop comment, “Tell me more.” Nonetheless, this memoir is honest, unashamed, and worth reading. Why? Because the book is timely, which is to say long overdue. If you’ll indulge in an aside:
My hometown’s baseball franchise recently changed its name from the Indians to the Guardians, replacing its red-faced, blunt-nosed, big-grinned logo with the likenesses of the local stoneworks that tower above the boilermakers, pipefitters, and nurses who travel over the Cuyahoga River each day. It’s a change that’s been needed for a long time, and one that only came about after similar trends (Washington trading Redskins for Football Team, for example) and national protests over social justice issues made the proponents of change more persuasive than the masses who yet cling to Chief Wahoo as an emblem of their “sporting heritage.”
And there’s that statue of Theodore Roosevelt recently removed from the outside of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Roosevelt sat, shirt sleeves rolled up in his rugged, everyman way, atop a horse, above and in front of both a Native American man and an African American man, their eyes humbly diverted. Roosevelt preceded these two like a hero, like a champion. Like a savior.
Native Americans—after being slaughtered through violence and disease, coerced into insincere treaties, shunted onto reservations, shipped to residential schools, assaulted, made impoverished, and subjected to racism and prejudice—are largely permitted to exist today only as a Hollywood stereotype or the caricaturized jester for a sports team. Mainstream society continues to recognize Native Americans only in the white-washed, frozen-in-time moment of European contact. If the most naked offenses—like Chief Wahoo and the visual rhetoric of a public sculpture—are just now being reluctantly addressed, think how far there is yet to go.
Peyakow shows us the reality of indigenous existence today. McLeod lifts the curtain on the long, convoluted process of governmental procedure, tours the sausage factory so to speak, but also shares the intimate realities of his life and the lives of his family, friends, and colleagues. It’s a book that pairs the large and systematic with the immediate and disorderly. We are not all in the position to direct multilingual negotiations, but we can all at least do the good work of reading about the people doing the good work. We can read as an act of empathy, to learn more about the frameworks of society and culture—our own and others’—and books like this are where we can start.
Brendan Curtinrich grew up on the north coast of Ohio and in the sheep pastures of New York. He studied creative writing at Hiram College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University where he also served as the Nonfiction Editor and Book Review Manager for Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. He has walked long trails both in the U.S. and abroad, and writes nonfiction and fiction about ecological issues, particularly the ways human animals affect and are affected by the environment. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Trail Runner, Appalachia, Gigantic Sequins, Sierra, and Footnote.