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Windspeaker.com Books Feature Writer
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Chyana Marie Sage offers a brutally honest look at the impact intergenerational trauma had on her family in her memoir Soft as Bones.
“It's a story that I knew was important for me to tell, not just for my own personal healing or the healing of my family and the acknowledgement of what we went through, but also recognizing that our story is one small piece of the puzzle that makes up the mosaic of Indigenous people across Turtle Island,” said Sage, who is Cree, Métis and Salish.
Sage earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative non-fiction from Columbia University, in Manhattan. She has been teaching online courses in remote Indigenous communities for Connected North and is also a journalist. Residing in New York City the past four years, she will be returning to live in the Greater Toronto Area in June.
Sage delves into the secrets she and her sisters kept about their sexually abusive, drug-dealing father who eventually went to prison for molesting her older sister. She also looks at the dysfunctional relationships she had with men and the shame and guilt she felt.
It took Sage four years to write her memoir, an “emotional labour” which was cathartic. She says every re-reading of her work as she was editing it resulted in “this sob, a big exhale. Not sadness but just overwhelmed…looking back on everything that I experienced and went through…but yet, ‘Here you are: A happy person…with healthy friendships and genuine happiness in your life’…I never knew that I could be this happy. I never knew that I could feel this full.”
As she lived through her trauma, Sage never had the chance to process or reflect. She was busy dealing with her life, figuring out how to pay rent, where the next meal would come from, and studying at the University of Alberta which would eventually lead to her being accepted at Columbia University.
“The big thing was understanding how determined I was to overcome this and change my life circumstances,” she said.
Some parts of her life were more difficult to revisit than others, but surprisingly her memories and experiences with her father “felt easy” as she had undertaken both Western therapy and Indigenous healing ceremonies over the years to process.
It was the conversations she had with her sisters specific for the book that were the hardest, particularly with her younger sister. In those conversations, Sage realized that they had never processed their experiences together.
“I was learning about my little sister’s experiences and the things that she saw, what my dad was doing. It was devastating and it broke my heart,” she said.
But now, after the tears were shed, her family is closer “because of having those conversations and holding space for each other and acknowledging each other's unique experiences,” Sage said.
Her family flew to Toronto on May 5 for the launch of Soft as Bones. The event, which took place on the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People, was also attended by Sage’s Elder, members of the Indian Girls Book Club, Indigenous creatives and an Indigenous DJ. Sage called the launch “a beautiful community event” in which she felt supported, loved and championed.
In tackling her personal story, Sage weaves in the Cree words for water concepts. Including Cree was an important way for her to fight back against colonialism, to honour what was lost by reclaiming and relearning her language, she said.
Her story is divided into four sections, representing four generations and the different parts of the water cycle.
“I just started thinking about the cycles of water because in my culture water is a very sacred thing. Nipiy, that's the Cree word for water, and we are the protectors of water,” said Sage.
She also uses Cree tales about Witigo and the trickster Wîsahkêcâhk as literary and cultural devices. The Witigo, as she explains in her book, is “an evil spirit and cannibal who preys on the human soul.” Wîsahkêcâhk is a mischievous being whose stories have a lesson.
“Including all of these different cultural elements within is also my way of celebrating and showcasing my culture and the vibrancy of it and the vibrancy of storytelling and all the different ways that us Cree bring that in,” said Sage.
At the end of her memoir in part four, Sage more fully dives into the shared trauma of Indigenous peoples: residential schools, sixties scoop, foster care, and the high numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Sage says she deliberately set up her book this way because she wanted readers to first be “rooted in the microcosm of … the very real family experience” before being drawn into the larger scale of the issues.
“The shape of the book I call a braided spiral and so, every part of the book, I'm braiding multiple narrative threads within each one. And when thinking of part four of the book what I was then doing was I wanted to take every aspect that I had woven through part one, two and three and feed it and braid it together in that final part and make the larger world connections now for the reader to fully experience and see the connections,” she explained.
Sage hopes her memoir helps other Indigenous people to process what they’ve gone through or inspires them to write their own memoirs.
As for non-Indigenous readers, she wants them to understand the lasting impacts of intergenerational trauma in the lives of Indigenous people today.
Sage refers to her memoir as “my call to action” in keeping with the 94 Calls to Action outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools in its final report released in 2015.
As for the title of her memoir, Sage says the phrase “soft as bones” came to her well before she considered writing her story.
“Soft as bones is this philosophy and idea that I have that, human beings, we are equal parts strength as much as we are fragile,” she said. “(Bones) give us structure. They’re very tough, but they also can break very easily. But they also have immense capacity for healing. You can break a bone and it will literally fuse back together and heal, which is just this beautiful metaphor that I have adopted and embodied. Human beings, we are delicate, but we're also strong and very resilient.”
Soft as Bones, published by House of Anansi, hits the bookstores May 27. It is also available to purchase online at https://houseofanansi.com/.
Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada.