Scratching River is a name that considers the gratchias, the burdock that grows thick along the river’s banks. It’s this stout weed Louis spoke of all those years ago when his memories were recorded. It’s a plant you can’t forget really. Gratchias grows in wet and mud, and the banks of rivers offer the perfect conditions for the burdock to grow. Gratchias is a name for all those burrs that dig at the river’s quick hips, for the stout purple clusters that hook and irritate, born to be tenacious and prickly.
In a poetic and unconventional work of narrative nonfiction, Métis author Michelle Porter uses several different threads of story and style in Scratching River to braid together meaning from the history of her immediate family, her ancestors, and the entire Métis people. Primarily centered on Porter’s older brother Brendon — and the personal trauma that the author suffered when she, as a teenager, learned of the abuse Brendon was experiencing at a group home — Porter hearkens to the vanished landscape that her people so closely identified with to claim for them the tenacity of the gratchias, the adaptability of a rerouted river, and the strength of prairie bison. This is such a personal story, told in an engagingly provocative manner, that “rating” it feels meaningless: this is a perfect manifestation of its intent. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. As a matter of fact: There were quirks in the digital copy — “ff”, “th”, “fi” were all dropped from words — and I took it upon myself to fix those errors in my quotes; and to be honest, I appreciated that I had to slow down my reading to mentally fix words along the way.)
My brother was drying up. He had become closed up and so cracked and so oozing we didn’t know if he would survive. If it can, a river will keep on moving, no matter what, but there are times when rivers stop flowing. Contributing to the stoppage are factors that include the meander of the river, the history of trauma written in the layers of rocks and sediment, the patterns of autism, schizophrenia, and poverty, and the way these braid themselves across the landscape, and the riverbank histories of the people he doesn’t know are his.
Brendon would eventually be diagnosed with schizophrenia and autism, but as an uncommunicative and uncontrollable (if mostly watchful and impish) child, his loving mother made the hard decision to place him in a residential institution for autistic children. Porter relates many trips by Greyhound bus to visit her brother from their home outside Edmonton to his in Calgary, and Brendon was always happy to see them; was obviously well cared for and safe. But when he turned eighteen, Brendon’s mother was forced to find an adult facility for him, and although “The Ranch” was presented as an excellent home, it was horrifying for her to discover, a few months later, that Brendon was in hospital with third degree burns to his lower legs and what looked like cigarette burns on his thighs and genitals. Unable to vocalise what happened to him, and the owner of The Ranch denying any responsibility, there seemed to be no interest by the police or government to seek justice for Brendon. This awful story is unspooled slowly, interspersed with transcripts from contemporaneous newspaper and television investigations into complaints about The Ranch, along with Porter’s happier memories, and excerpts from a book made out of the transcriptions of oral stories as related by Porter’s great-great-grandfather's brother — noted Métis storyteller and musician, Louis Goulet. Goulet’s stories relate the old ways of the Métis people — the buffalo hunts, long trading trips with oxen and Red River wagons, prairie fires that bring both danger and renewal — and against this historical perspective, Porter juxtaposes the modern Métis struggle for recognition, land, and treaty rights. And it all works together to weave a picture both personal to Porter’s family and common to the Métis people; a picture of tenacity, adaptability, and strength. In an Afterword, Porter explains her intent:
We continue and we thrive when we recover our ability to tell our stories from the land seven generations back, pointing them in the direction of the seven generations that are coming ahead of us all. We survive because we are always moving and we bring our stories
Porter also explains that she wrote Scratching River as a way of dealing with the trauma brought on by watching Brendon recover from his burns when she was fourteen, but she doesn’t dwell on these hard parts in the book. Instead, she writes that he was eventually placed in a very good home closer to family; choosing to dwell on happier memories:
My big brother taking me by the hand, pulling me into his world. One hand cupping one ear. Tapping a wall, a tree. A big smile. In a sing-song voice: da-da-da, and da-da-da again. Off I went with him.
Lush landscape writing, maps with handwritten notations, a bibliography that reads like poetry: There's just so much here, and it all works together perfectly.
