Helen jumps up, feeling the wetness on the back of her blouse. She, Agnes, Mable and their nieces take off running, screaming, “Mamaskatch! We're free!”
Bertha hears their voices in the distance and yells back, “Tapwe! Mamaskatch! MAMASKATCH!”
The above passage concludes the escape of some little girls from an abusive Residential School in Northern Alberta, and as it says on the dust jacket for Mamaskatch, the title is taken from “the Cree word used as a response to dreams shared”. Just as his mother, Bertha, had escaped her fate at the hands of the despicable nuns, author Darrel McLeod was able to escape what was surely his own fate: that of intergenerational abuse, addiction, and poverty. Through education, resilience, and determination, McLeod defied immense odds to become a respected health care worker, educator, and land claims negotiator (he is apparently working on a second memoir now which I assume will cover his professional life). While McLeod embraces and celebrates his Cree heritage – which makes Mamaskatch an important addition to the Canadian national narrative – this moving memoir would be inspirational to the hopeless and oppressed everywhere.
The pattern of my mother's stories is different from the ones I hear at school. The timelines are never linear. Instead, they are like spirals. She starts with one element of a story, moves to another and skips to yet a different part. She revisits each theme several times over, providing a bit more information with each pass. At first I find it hard to follow, but I've learned that if I just sit back and listen without interrupting, she will cover everything and make each story complete.Just like with his mother's stories, McLeod “spirals” themes throughout his narrative – jumping ahead years at a time, but always circling back to pick up a thread here and there and show how different influences played out over his life. His father died of cancer just before he was born, so McLeod was raised by a grieving mother who soon turned to other men and alcohol for comfort, giving his childhood an unstable and dangerous atmosphere. Unable to care for her seven children, McLeod's mother lost some to foster care, sent others off to live with family (including young Darrel himself, who would live with a sexual predator for years), and then periodically regained custody of them again. Despite the instability this meant for his schooling (and the frequent racism he encountered at school), McLeod was always a stellar student and embraced education as his pathway to something better. Throughout the years, he tried to find escape in Classical music, and Christianity, and anonymous sex, but transcendence didn't really come until he discovered ways to reconnect to his own heritage. The details of this coming-of-age, the long-lasting psychological effects of his experiences, and the big-hearted resilience that McLeod demonstrated make for a remarkable story; I am unsurprised that Mamaskatch won the 2018 Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction.
That night, I wondered what it would be like to be normal – happy-go-lucky and cheerful, raised by both a mother and a father, bringing girls home to experiment. Many other evenings, alone in my room, I lay on my bed daydreaming about Guy's life, imagining I had parents like his, even though I had never met them.What McLeod does best is to share a sense of what his life (and through sharing her stories, what his mother's life) was like in the moment. What Mamaskatch lacks is deep introspection; a sense of what the older and wiser McLeod makes of it all. However, this was McLeod's story to tell and I won't quibble too much about how he chose to share it – which is a gift either way.
