How many gods is too many?
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in October, 2023.
My love affair with Tomson Highway (intellectual and at a distance) began in the late 90’s when I saw his outrageous play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, a shocking excavation of misogyny on the reserve, Indian on Indian violence, long before inter-generational trauma was a construct. Then he MC’d a fund-raising event in a decommissioned church on Bathurst below Bloor where he was funny and nurturing. Recently I read his memoir, Permanent Astonishment: Growing up Cree in the Land of Snow and Sky (Penguin Random House, 2022), which I consider to be among the best in a crowded field. And now the 2022 Massey Lecture, Laughing with the Trickster: on Sex, Death and Accordions (House of Anansi, 2022).
Why do I love Tomson Highway? Let me count the ways….
I love his resilience: he sucked what goodness he could out of residential school and refused to take on the badness. He continued his education to speak (currently) five Mooney-Ass (white) languages, several Indigenous ones, be a concert-level pianist, and play intellectual hard-ball (more later).
He doth bestride cultures like a Colossus. He was born in a snowbank in sub-arctic Manitoba, eleventh of twelve children, and by his early 70s may have outlived many of them, including his beloved younger brother, Rene, who died of AIDS. He revers the traditional skills and social nimbleness of his father and mother. He is comfortable at the podium of a Massey Lecture event.
He embraces a gender spectrum. He claims his space without dislodging other’s. He is confident that two-spiritedness brings needed colour into a sharply gendered world.
But mostly I love Tomson for how he uses humour. He spins it like the Archangel Michael spins his two-edged sword to keep the fallen out of the Garden of Eden. Tomson uses his two-edged humour to keep humanity from falling into the Slough of Despond.
The well-spring of Tomson’s humour is the Cree language, which he retained during his sojourn in the residential school system by returning home for summers. Language is how we name our world. It defines our world: we see what we say. It creates mythology – how the named world works. Mythology is where theology meets cosmology, where discourse about gods meets discourse about the universe.
Of the many spinning triads in Tomson’s lecture, the one I most loved was the comparison between monotheism (one God, as in the Judeo-Christian culture), polytheism (many gods, as in ancient Greek/Roman culture) and pantheism (everything is god, as in Indigenous culture). He turns the isms upside down, shakes the shekels out of their pockets and groups and regroups them while bouncing a ball and chortling.
(Does anyone other than me remember playing jacks? You pile ten or twelve many-legged metal pieces on the back of your hand, throw them up and catch what you can, throw up a small ball and snatch up the landed pieces in specified and diminishing size groups without disturbing the others before catching the ball on the first bounce. I challenge the educators among us to make a list of the skills that game taught! And if I wanted to be provocative, I’d say that only girls playing it is why they left the boys in the dust academically. I wonder if there’s a Cree game like jacks.)
The Cree mythology is not kind and gentle; it does not point the way to perfection or goodness. And I’m not sure how the Trickster fits in: Tomson says he was the third of five creatures created by the female force of energy, Oomaa-maa (Great Mother): thunderbird, frog, Trickster, wolf, beaver. Trickster, who didn’t seem to have a job like the others did, created humans: he’s a clown, he has a bent sense of humour, he screws up, he can shape-shift to escape the trouble he creates: choosing to introduce humans into the world seems reasonable given those characteristics. Trickster represents (for me, on the outside looking in) the ambiguity of goodness, the unattainability of perfection. I don’t think the Trickster aims for good: I think he’s just trying to survive the mess he made.
And that feels like exactly the mythology we need at this time in history (look at me, using monotheistic time words rather than pantheistic space words: let me try again…). That feels like the mythology we need in the world we inhabit. Some – cosmologists? Scientists? Space travellers? Artificial intelligencers? -- believe we can shape-shift our way out of this mess. Others, me among them, think our hope is to reclaim our connection to Mother Earth, roll up our sleeves and do the hard and never-ending work of sharing space.
