The Kiss of the Fur Queen: colonialism, westernization, and indigenous culture

Kiss Fur Queen

In Kiss of the Fur Queen, the natives in 20th Century Canadian society experience mass poverty, disempowerment and violence, including the rape and murder of native women in Winnipeg, which Jeremiah witnesses. Tomson Highway, Canada's leading native playwright, is "obsessed with history and the native legacy of European colonization," which is also a common theme in his plays (Howells 83). He tells the story of imperialism and its impact on native culture and society through the semi-autobiographical life stories of two brothers, Jeremiah and Gabriel Okimasis, who were members of the Cree nation in northern Canada. Sent away by their father to a Catholic Church boarding school at a yond age, they experienced forced assimilation as well as physical and sexual abuse that damages them for life. This was a common feature at all of those schools, whose main purpose was the destruction of native languages and cultures. Like many other natives in real life, they also suffered from poverty, alienation and loss of identity in urban capitalist society. Even though both of them were relatively successful within that system, at least in the material sense, they also felt culturally and emotionally divided, having many visions of their dead father, for example, and of the cannibal creature Weetigo and the Fur Queen-Trickster who follows them throughout their lives.

Throughout the novel, both brothers have frequent flashbacks to their father Abraham, with visions of him hunting in the woods or fishing on the lakes of the far north. All the furs he collected were "the soul winter source of life-sustaining income for the northern Cree," who live on government reservations that were little more than instant slums (Highway 104). Yet Abraham believes that the Catholic Church saved the Cree from extermination, and that anyone outside its ranks will go to hell. In short, his mind has also been colonized by the imperial power that conquered his people, and he is certain that the Birch Lake mission school will enable his sons to advance in life or at least teach them to survive in white society. For the boys, their first memory of the school was having their long hair shaved off, a "rain shower of jet-black hair," and that they did not even understand a word of the language but were not allowed to speak their own. This was also the typical experience at these boarding schools, which were designed to abolish the language and culture of all native peoples and force them to assimilate. Although largely unknown until fairly recently, sexual abuse was also very common in these institutions, and all four hundred boys at the Birch Lake school were raped by Father Lafleur. For Jeremiah, the school meant only "steel mesh fences and curfews…tasteless institutional food…nuns and brothers -- and priests -- watching every move, every thought, every bodily secretion" (Highway 102).

Like the characters in the novel, he and his brother Rene were sent away to a Catholic boarding school, where they were physically and sexually abused. He really did attend high school in Winnipeg for two years, where he felt so alone before his brother joined him that he often thought of suicide. Like alcoholism and drug abuse, that problem also affects native communities at much higher levels than whites. At age fifteen, he was alone in the city, knowing no one and having nowhere to go. Although he was glad to be free of Birch Lake and to be studying with the famous music teacher, "in this metropolis of half a million souls where he seemed to be the only Indian person" the piano was his "one friend" (Highway 100).

Rene became a world-famous ballet dancer, and like Gabriel died of AIDS in the late-1980s. He was always taller and stronger than his older brother, who was more of a reclusive, asexual ascetic and intellectual. In the distant past, before colonization, he might have been a shaman, a wise man and storyteller, while Gabriel would have been a warrior. In fact, Jeremiah's first successful play was "Chachagatakoo, the Shaman." Highway dedicated the book to his Rene-Gabriel, and the story ends with his death. He was reluctant to tell his brother and mother that he was ill, for "how to explain the virus in his bloodstream, let alone how he had come by it? Please, brother dear, please don't ask" (Highway 293). Looking in the dressing room mirror, he wonders what illness will come next, such as leukemia or rectal cancer.

Both the characters in the novel and the real-life brothers had identities that were ambivalent and hybridized, which is why Kiss of the Fur Queen is "filled…with doubles and split selves, mirror images, parallels and contrasts" (Howells 85). Trickster appears in many guises from beginning to end, including the forms of Raven, Coyote and the Fur Queen, who kisses Gabriel at the moment of his death and guides his soul into the spirit world. In this case, the kiss of the Trickster is literally the kiss of death, and "Jeremiah, Gabriel, and trickster are onstage throughout their lives" (Lane 197). Jeremiah attempted to escape the native world completely by rejecting his identity, until the crisis brought on by the death of his father -- when the Fur Queen also appears -- leads him to become involved in social work in native urban communities. Gabriel sought escape from poverty through "the glorification of his body" as well as becoming a male prostitute, and indeed male and female prostitution was always one of the legacies of colonialism (Howells 89). So were disease epidemics, for that matter, with AIDS just being one in a very long line of epidemics that affected native communities. For hundreds of years, these have experienced numerous disasters, and "it is precisely the community that is damaged in the catastrophe" that will also "become the site of healing" (Lane 195).

In imagining the monster that the Cree called the Weetigo, it would be too simple as to describe all whites as the cannibals and all natives as the victims. In Jeremiah's writings, of course, one manifestation of the "evil Cree cannibal spirit" is Father Lafleur, the priest who raped the boys at the boarding school (Howells 91). Even Gabriel feels like the Weetigo sometimes, however, for his identity is often as confused and problematic as Jeremiah's. He also dreams that the abusive priest is God, the Father, and wonders "why did God look so angry, so embittered, so dreadfully unhappy," and asks God-Weetigo "have you feasted enough on human flesh?" (Highway 297). In Gabriel's vision, then, God, church and humanity are all cannibals, and surely the mercy showed by the Fur Queen in the end was something he never would have expected or anticipated.