by Margaret Macpherson
NEWEST PRESS
2022/$24.95/296 pp.
Novelist Margaret Macpherson wrote Tracking the Caribou Queen: Memoir of a Settler Girlhood to understand “the insidious ways systemic racism shaped my youth in Yellowknife” during the 1960s and 1970s. Macpherson draws from first-hand experiences to “reveal how my thinking about Indigeneity in those days was warped by stereotype, prejudice and white privilege.” If settlers can name their participation in past injustices, she writes, “only then can we make way for a right and equitable future as true Treaty People.”
Macpherson’s personal history begins with her family moving to Yellowknife, where her father worked as a school principal and later as a federal bureaucrat. The memoir’s structure tracks a series of incidents from her early childhood to late adolescence. From the jokes she hears about a woman living in a hotel, to uncomfortable play dates with a scooped neighbourhood girl, to a pair of cringe-inducing sleepovers, her anecdotes reveal the sometimes subtle but always toxic sting of interpersonal racism.
Other moments explore the complicated relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In a scene near the end of high school, Macpherson goes on one last date with a young Dene man from the Akaitcho First Nation. Their dialogue brims with adolescent longing and confusion. They camp beneath the stars and then go their separate ways, with no dramatic conclusion or goodbye. The author renders moments like these with a natural authenticity, casting aside stereotypes.
Macpherson is less effective at scrutinizing systemic racism. Though she hints at broader patterns of institutional practices, she never examines them or their impacts in detail. Consider when she was 13 and wrote a story for a class assignment. Her submission appropriated Indigenous history and used several racist typecasts. Macpherson takes personal responsibility for writing the story. But she was 13, still young and impressionable. No doubt several forces influenced her thoughts and actions, but these go unexamined. Where did she learn the stereotypes she used? Who or what taught her that appropriation was okay?
These and other social factors are a discernible gap throughout the memoir. Macpherson never tells what her school curriculum taught her about Indigenous peoples. We learn almost nothing about the hostel next to her school that housed Indigenous youth. She divulges little about her father’s job managing Indigenous education in the North. Her stated purpose at the outset is to understand how systemic racism shaped her youth, but these institutional details are largely absent. As important as personal accountability is, Macpherson takes on more than her fair share while letting the surrounding racist structures off the hook.
Andrew Torry is a curriculum designer for the City of Calgary.
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