Kiss of the Fur Queen

“‘Down! Put him down, or his little bum will freeze!’ cried Mariesis Okimasis, though she couldn't help but laugh and, with her laughing, love this man for all his unpredictable bouts of clownishness. Jumping up and down, the short Mariesis was trying to get the tall Abraham to put his World Championship Dog Derby trophy down so she could put their baby back into the warmth and safety of his cradle-board. This was, after all, a tent, not a palace, not even a house, and this was, after all, mid-December and not July, in a region so remote that the North Pole was rumored to be just over that next hill.”

Author Tomson Highway has praised the love and beauty of his early childhood, and Kiss of the Fur Queen—a semi-fictional account of Highway’s life—follows suit. Although the Okimasis brothers spend their childhood in the northern, wintry wild with little that could be called an indulgence—let alone a luxury—it is idyllic, romantic, and gorgeous because of the communion between parents and children, humans and nature.

“The journey back up to the surface was not as easy as the journey down, the spirit baby in the loincloth of rabbit fur discovered. For he had to squirm and wriggle and flail and punch his way through soil and rock and minerals so thickly layered they were all but impassable, through permanently frozen clay, tangled roots of trees and dormant fireweed, and shards of animal and human bone. He pushed and pushed until a tunnel eased his passage, replete with a viscous wetness.”

Gabriel’s birth is more difficult than Jeremiah’s, foreshadowing Gabriel’s tragic fate. Gabriel’s spirit baby excitedly jumps too deep into the snow, lands under the permafrost, and subsequently claws his way up into his mother’s womb. The contiguous spaces of frozen clay, tangled roots, animal and human bone, and the wet tunnel that is the mother’s womb depict the harmony between spirit, nature, and humans.

“Then his full lips parted, his white teeth glinted, and his tongue formed the words, ‘Abrenuntias satanae?’ The words, meaningless to Cree ears, pierced the infant’s fragile bones and stayed there.”

Father Bouchard’s words to the baby Ooneemeetoo refer to the phrase “Do you renounce Satan,” often spoken during baptism. The words are incongruous in the Cree setting, and their ideas of good, evil, and human culpability are alien to both Cree speakers and infants. The fact that they pierce Ooneemeetoo’s bones and stay there refers to the pernicious effect of the Christian doctrine of guilt. Ironically, while the Church asks newborn babies to renounce Satan, its own members will later perform evil acts against innocent children.

. “To his dying day, Kookoos Cook claimed to remember floating glumly about in his mother’s womb, mere days before his birth. Jane Kaka McCrae claimed to remember, clear as crystal, the filthy white ceiling high above her cradleboard well before she reached the age of one […] Gabriel Okimasis, for as long as he was to live, would insist that he remembered his entire baptismal ceremony. Champion Okimasis would accuse him of lying; it was he, he would point out, who had told Gabriel the story. In truth, it was Kookoos Cook, sitting on the pew with Champion on his lap, who would never tire of telling his nephews the yarn, which, as the years progressed, became ever more outrageous, exaggerated, as is the Cree way of telling stories, of making myth.”

Since oral storytelling serves to keep alive collective memories in Indigenous cultures, tales sometimes involve memories of one’s birth. Of course, the memories are not people’s own but taken from the accounts of their elders, like Gabriel borrowing the narrative of his birth from Kookoos Cook. Shared memories are an important narrative technique in Kiss of the Fur Queen, with Abraham, Jeremiah, and Gabriel often sharing recollections. The cyclical and shared nature of memories strengthens the bonds of community and kinship.

“Taking a chunk of white chalk in hand, Father Lafleur printed ‘GOD’ on the black slate beside the chart, evidently intending that the meaningless word be copied down. ‘But to see God after you die,’ he lectured on, pointing—to the old man in the chair, ‘you must do as you are told.’ The words swept over the students like a wind. Champion-Jeremiah peered at the image of God and thought he looked rather like Kookoos Cook dressed up as Santa Claus except that his skin was white and that, for some reason, he was aiming a huge thunderbolt down at Earth and glaring venomously.”

These lines reveal the terrible hypocrisy that characterizes Father Lafleur, who tells children what they must do to see God after they die but practices little of what he preaches. Further, he plants in the children’s heads the idea of God as a punitive being, which is anathema to the Cree concept of the Great Spirit. The passage depicts both God and Lucifer as sitting in chairs or thrones; later Jeremiah and Gabriel recall or imagine Father Lafleur sitting in a big black chair, tellingly conflating him with one or both.

“‘So, Jeremiah,’ chortled the priest as he set Gabriel lightly down on the dock, ‘you've brought your little brother this time.’ ‘Yes,’ piped Jeremiah in a tiny, humble voice. We didn’t have much choice, he would have added, if the language had been his.”

Young Jeremiah is wise enough to see the irony of Father Lafleur’s statement; however, he cannot express this wisdom because he has been robbed of his native language. The use of the words “piped,” “tiny,” and “humble” here is interesting, since it depicts Jeremiah learning to appease white people.

“Hello merry, mutter of cod, play for ussinees, now anat tee ower of ower beth, aw, men.’ Gabriel rattled off the non-sensical syllables as nimbly as he could, pretending he knew what they meant. But, his knees hurting from the cold, hard linoleum, he couldn't help but wonder why the prayer included the Cree word ‘ussinees.’ What need did this mutter of cod have of a pebble?”

These lines should be funny, depicting the way children mangle canned speeches and unfamiliar words; however, in the book’s context they are also sad, reflecting the unfairness of a system that forces children into learning an alien prayer. “Merry mutter of cod” is the beginning of the prayer, “Mary, Mother of God.” The word “usineess”—a mash-up of “us sinners” means “pebble” in Cree, leaving Gabriel wondering why a mutter of cod would need a pebble.

“Slowly, Christ wobbled to his feet. What choice did he have? The crowd jostled, they slavered at his pain: ‘Kill him! Kill him! Nail the savage to the cross, hang him high, hang him dead! Kill him! Kill him!...’ And this was only his first fall; the script demanded he have two more. The Son of God wailed at fate but dragged the cross around the bend.”

“Christ” here refers to a playacting Gabriel. The text sometimes compares Gabriel to Christ in the sense that both are tragic figures. Gabriel also likes playing Christ because he has come to associate suffering with pleasure. Further, the fact that the Okimasis brothers reenact the Passion of the Christ for fun shows how deeply Christianity has seeped into their world. Lastly, the motif of Gabriel as Jesus foreshadows Jeremiah as Judah; Jeremiah will repeatedly deny or betray Gabriel as they grow older.

“Wars start when two parties haven't taken the time to learn each other's tongues.”

This line occurs in the context of the Okimasis family dog Kiputz chasing a squirrel whose chatter he can’t understand, but it applies to human affairs as well. The most obvious parallel is to colonialism’s imposition of English on the Cree, but it also suggests one way of understanding Gabriel and Jeremiah’s eventual falling-out: as a breakdown of communication.

“‘You goddamn fucking son-of-a-bitch!’ a woman of untold years screamed, as she landed with a crunch on the hood of a parked car and slid to the curb. ‘You can’t do this to me,’ she shrieked. ‘This is my land, you know that? My land!’ Precariously, she pulled herself up by clinging to a parking meter; her coat white, yellowed with age, polyester fur.’”

The city is a site of transformation for Jeremiah and Gabriel, but for many other Indigenous people it is a space where they are marginalized and stranded. The drunk woman thrown out of the bar brings home the irony that she is being barred from a building that stands on her ancestral lands, but her outrage is ineffectual. The fact that she wears a soiled, fake fur coat signifies her poverty and positions her as a parody of the Fur Queen. She also represents the text’s missing Indigenous women, predestined for violence.

“‘Tansi.’

Jeremiah stopped breathing. In the two years he had spent in this city so lonely that he regularly considered swallowing his current landlady’s entire stock of angina pills, he had given up his native tongue to the roar of traffic. ‘Tansi,’ repeated Gabriel. ‘Means hi, or how you doing? Take your pick.’ He was smiling so hard that his face looked like it might burst. ‘Why? Cree a crime here, too?’”

The fact that the absence of Jeremiah’s native tongue causes suicidal loneliness highlights how central one’s language is to one’s being and experience. Gabriel’s cheeky question, “Cree a crime here, too?” illustrates his rebellious nature and suggests the city may yet hold some hope for the Okimasis brothers. Because Cree is not a crime in the city, it is a space where the brothers can perhaps forge a new identity from both Cree and English.

“As, like Odyssean sirens on treacherous shoals, the hundred violins slid shamelessly into ‘Ave Maria,’ socks began to wave at Gabriel, in colours, weaves, and textures that made his heart strings fibrillate. He had never heard of argyle socks, for instance, and was scandalized to hear that Argyle was a Scottish earl who drank his enemies’ blood on the battlefield and then went home to eat their children. So brutal was the tale that Gabriel threw a curse at an entire rack of the lugubrious knitwear. He announced, instead, his preference for a six-pack of wool-polyester socks so white they looked like snow.”

The magical excess of the mall, a symbol of intoxicating consumerism, seduces the Okimasis brothers—especially Gabriel, who is new to the city. However, the story behind the Argyle socks throws a small wrench in the proceedings, sounding a note of caution on excess. The violence of the story is also a comment on the blood-soaked enterprise of imperialism and capitalism, once again figured as cannibalizing children. It is ironic that white Christians consider Indigenous peoples “savage” when their own history is replete with tales of bloodshed and cruelty.

“And here, the mouth of the caribou hunter’s son was taken by this city-tasting mouth, its tongue moist, alive upon, around, inside his own, the teeth, the breath all beer and cigarettes. His jacket was opened, his T-shirt pulled up, his zip-per pulled down, his maleness flailed. The cold November air was like a spike rammed through the hand—his feet floated above the earth—and he saw mauve and pink and purple of fireweed and he tasted, on the buds that lined his tongue, the essence of warm honey.”

Gabriel’s sexual awakening draws on several recurrent motifs. Fireweed—an indigenous American flower—symbolizes the beauty and seductiveness of Cree culture, warm honey is a metaphor for sexual pleasure and semen, and the spike is a symbol of torture and crucifixion. The juxtaposition of the symbols shows the complex way in which Gabriel experiences pleasure, associating it with his native heritage and his childhood abuse, since the honey motif often also occurs in conjunction with his memories of Father Lafleur.

“Two days later, the brothers Okimasis would see, on a back page of the Winnipeg Tribune, a photograph of Madeline Jeanette Lavoix, erstwhile daughter of Mistik Lake, her naked body found in a North Main alleyway behind a certain hotel of questionable repute, a red-handled screwdriver lying gently, like a rose, deep within the folds of her blood-soaked sex. Jeremiah would recall, with a simmering rage, one Evelyn Rose McCrae. Gabriel would say nothing.”

The novel describes violence against Indigenous women in deliberately graphic and disturbing terms to shock the reader. Since such murders and rapes have often gone unreported, readers (particularly at the time of the work’s publication) might not know that Canada has very high rates of kidnappings and murders of Indigenous women. The crimes the text mentions echo real events, such as the crimes along the “Highway of Tears”: murders and kidnappings of Indigenous women along a 725-km stretch of highway in Canada’s British Columbia province.

“Dad told me. Ever since they opened up that little airport, ever since—civilization—has come within one daily flight of Eemanapiteepitat, the booze has been flowing in like blood from slaughtered caribou, as Dad puts it. So now, he says, they don’t shoot guns into the air to mark the new year, they shoot each other.”

As Gabriel’s comment to Jeremiah shows, perceptions of “development” and “modernity” are extremely subjective. While the evolution and availability of technology is often considered a move forward, the truth is that it often comes at a very high human cost. This is especially true for communities that are suddenly and inorganically exposed to the forces of technology, as when the opening of an airport creates upheaval in Eemanapiteepitat. Therefore, the text questions the Western idea of what constitutes progress.

“The tuxedoed businessmen’s northern Manitoba was miraculously transformed: mines spewing diamonds at the northern end of Nameegoos Lake, oil wells on the shores of Kasimir Lake, uranium gushing from Mistik Lake—the nickel, gold, and copper deposits of Smallwood Lake, Thompson, and Flin Flon were piffle by comparison—pipelines, skyscraper jungles, freeways, the Churchill River a leviathan providing light and heat to half of North America. The boys’ dreams were on fire: they saw Cree Indians so wealthy they could commute to Las Vegas for blackjack every weekend, to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival, to Disneyland on a moment’s notice to teach Kookoos Cook's favourite jig, ‘Kimoosoom Chimasoo,’ to Mickey Mouse—Chopin’s arpeggios had become mere ambience”

These lines encapsulate rapacious corporate greed for natural resources and the false, but seductive, promise of development. Though Jeremiah and Gabriel assume the natural riches of their homeland will make them rich, the historical truth is that those who live on the land rarely profit from it. Profit is reserved for settlers, colonizers, and corporations. The dreams of the Okimasis brothers are fantastical, absurd, and possibly even dangerous to their culture. That the text satirizes this daydreaming is apparent from the fact that it uses symbols of capitalistic excess such as Las Vegas casinos and Disneyland. Chopin’s arpeggios—a more positive product of Western culture—fade in the presence of this loud music.

“‘You northern people,’ she sighed, as with nostalgia, ‘it’s too bad you lost all them dances, you know? All them beautiful songs? Thousands of years of…But never mind. We have it here.’ She, too, was looking at the dance now. The drumming, the chanting crescendoed—pentatonic mush, Jeremiah opined. And what the hell was this tired old bag yattering on about anyway? What dances? What songs? ‘Kimoosoom Chimasoo’? The ‘Waldstein Sonata’?”

Jeremiah’s disdain for both the Ojibway elder Anne-Adele Ghostrider and his own culture reflects his self-hatred. It is clear he thinks Western classical music is far superior to the songs of the Cree, which he derides for their bawdy content, the energy of “Kimoosoom Chimasoo” a far cry from the formal beauty of the Waldstein Sonata. The self-hatred indicates Jeremiah has a way to go before finding a way to combine Cree soul and beats with Western symphonies. “Pentatonic mush” is a derisive way to describe the pentatonic or five-note scale that Cree music uses. Because Western classical music uses 12 to 16 notes, Jeremiah considers it more evolved than Cree music.

“These church-goers, they talk about respect, and love and peace and all that jazz, and the minute they're out of that church, they're just as mean and selfish as they were before. It's as if going to church gives them the right to act like, well...like assholes […] Every war in the history of the world has had religion at its root. And what about those guys who beat the shit out of their wives while the host is still melting on their tongues? All that does is make one lose respect for organized religion.”

Gabriel’s sharp comments to Jeremiah are a searing indictment of Christian hypocrisy, a prominent theme in the text. Gabriel shrewdly observes that adherence to Christian ritual makes some people believe they’ve done their bit of good by observing a formal structure, leaving them free to “act like assholes” and much worse.

“Sure. [...] If you’re into whips and chains and pain. Where do you think them priests get their jollies?”

When Jeremiah argues that the cross is a sacred symbol, Gabriel argues that the celebration of the cross fetishizes violence. Forced to be celibate, many clergymen use bodily suffering and self-flagellation as outlets for their sexual desire. That is the main reason, according to Gabriel, for institutional Christianity’s veneration of the cross. Gabriel’s statement is deliberately provocative, meant to rile up the devout Jeremiah. However, Gabriel’s negative perception of Christianity also occurs in the context of his suffering at the hands of Lafleur, Brother Stumbo, and other clerics.

“Jeremiah played a northern Manitoba shorn of its Gabriel Okimasis, he played the loon cry, the wolves at nightfall, the aurora borealis in Mistik Lake; he played the wind through the pines, the purple of sunsets, the zigzag flight of a thousand white arctic terns, the fields of mauve-hued fireweed rising and falling like an exposed heart […] Then Jeremiah saw it, or thought he could: the Fur Queen’s cape—the northern lights—the finish line was near! And there she was, the Fur Queen herself, smiling from the great dome of space, holding out the legendary silver chalice.”

It takes separation from Gabriel, his spirit-twin and counterpart, for Jeremiah to play a music that is Western in form but Cree in spirit. Ironically, it is this piece of music that wins him the Crookshank Memorial Trophy. The appearance of the Fur Queen at the moment of his victory echoes Abraham’s encounter with the Fur Queen when he won the dogsled championship, highlighting the novel’s use of repetition to depict familial and community bonds across time.

“‘Oogimow! Oogimow!’ the voice high-pitched, yet strangely euphonious. ‘Tantee kageegimootee in anima misti-mineeg’wachi-gan?’ Cree? In Winnipeg? Why not? He was, after all, in the Hell Hotel.”

“Chief! Chief! Where did you steal the big cup?” a feminine voice in Cree asks Jeremiah while he is contemplating slicing his hand after winning the Crookshank Memorial Trophy. The voice belongs to Evelyn Rose McCrae, then Madeline Jeanette Lavoix, and finally to the Madonna of the North Main. The voice of the women distracts Jeremiah from self-harm and reminds him of his duty towards the pan-Indian community. Though they didn’t get the chance to live a full life, he still has an opportunity to find himself and help others. Therefore, he must rouse himself from his self-pity and compose himself. The images of women as fairy godmothers are a recurrent motif in the text, leading some critics to question the narrative’s use of women as symbols or archetypes rather than fully fleshed-out characters.

“Suddenly, the brothers understood a word repeated by the singers, apparently the same word in Ojibway as in Cree. An old man passing Jeremiah raised an eagle plume, a woman did likewise.

The crowd shaded eyes to look up at a peerless sky. Half a mile above the field, migisoo—the eagle—flew lazy circles. For the song, apparently, had summoned migisoo—the messenger of God, according to those praying—and she had heard. In a fit of panic—where was it coming from?—Jeremiah closed his eyes and determined he would ask, as soon as possible: where is the nearest bar? But Gabriel saw a people talking to the sky, the sky replying. And he knew he had to learn this dance. Someday soon, he may need it.”

Migisoo marks the confluence of Cree and Ojibway peoples and is a symbol of pan-Indian solidarity. Jeremiah’s panic at the appearance of the eagle shows he still holds onto vestiges of Christian puritanism, frowning on Indigenous ritual as ”savage.” However, for Gabriel the eagle’s appearance shows the communion between man and nature. The mysterious assertion that he may soon need the dance that summons the eagle foreshadows his approaching death. Migisoo will also be the name Jeremiah gives his protagonist in his second play, “Chachagathoo the Shaman.”

“Like a thunderclap, silence struck. Jeremiah leapt from his bench, and with a beaded drumstick pounded at the bass strings of his instrument. The quintet of encircling dancers launched into a pentatonic chant, ‘Ateek, ateek, astum, astum, yoah, hoho!’ And suddenly, the piano was a powwow drum propelling a Cree Round Dance with the clangour and dissonance of the twentieth century.”

Jeremiah has come a long way from considering Cree dance a “pentatonic mush” to directing a Round Dance sequence in the middle of a performance. The image Highway creates here highlights the power of the hunter’s rhythmic chant of “caribou, caribou, come to me.” This sequence marks a shift in Jeremiah both as a character and as an artist. Culturally and creatively, he finds a path to turn the piano into a powwow drum and propel a Round Dance into the “dissonance” of the 20th century. The word “dissonance” here signifies not chaos but a syncopated improvisation, signifying that traditional Cree culture and the 20th century are in a jazzy riff with each other.