Why Indigenous literature sucks
A transcript of an extremely discursive discussion of Indigenous identity
The morning after our recent show in Hamilton some members of the Discordia collective, some Fellow Travellers, and our hosts at the Wormhole fell to hungoveredly chatting on the living room floor. When Eris, who is of mixed Anishinaabe, Red River Métis, and European ancestry, and Tara McGowan-Ross, Mi’kmaw and Irish-Scots, started discussing Indigenous identity I thought the talk might be worth recording without their knowledge. And it was! Enjoy. — Sire
Eris and Tara McGowan-Ross are The IDF (Indian Defence Force)
Tara: I recently got hatemail on Substack about my name because I was claiming Indigenous ancestry but have this super fucking Celtic name. And like, I don’t quote unquote “claim” Indigenous ancestry, I’m a fucking status Indian. And I do believe that there’s something very important to the idea that it’s that’s not like there’s just this fraction of me that’s Indian, it’s more like a layer of me. I’m not only this “percentage” allowed to have the family that I do, and the familial experience that I’ve had, and like the, the…
Eris: The cultural experience…
Tara: …right, the cultural experience that I do, which has been very Indigenous from the moment that I was born. So anyway yeah this person was being all fucking shady about it and I’m like, bitch, that is an Indigenous name actually, it’s an Indigenous name because it’s my name, fuck you, you know?
Gwen Aube, who is white: Did [redacted name of an annoying Indigenous Canadian writer] do this to you?
Tara: No, it was just some, like, underachieving guy who thinks the reason why he doesn’t get the things that he wants is not because he’s bad at those things but because DEI or whatever, you know, and it’s, like, no, I have what I have because I’m way better than you and that’s why.
Eris: I think there’s too much of a stream of cultural conservatism among a lot of Indians today, these attempts to return to a certain concept of traditionalism. Often this “traditionalism” is partially understood through Western media about Indigenous people, because we have this weird feedback loop where so much of our culture was destroyed to the point that I think a lot of what has been supposedly “rebuilt” has been constructed out of cowboy movies.1
Tara: Right, it’s like when people are talking about their traditional outfits and it’s a ribbon skirt and it’s, like, that’s a post-contact outfit, this is my traditional food it’s fucking fried bread, it’s a post-contact food, etc. And I get especially kind of [fed up noise] about it because it’s, like, “let’s return to this traditional thing that’s just happens to be the earliest, by European standards, verifiable record we have of whatever Indigenous people were doing.” And those are really a document of people who were in the middle of getting genocided you know? I’ve had so many trad Native people be like, “It’s traditional to dress modestly or whatever, and I’m like, “My ancestors had their titties out shut up.” They’re talking about a snapshot of the moment that Western cultural imperialism was beating us into the ground during, like, the greatest genocidal act in human history. That’s not actually traditional, it’s just a historical moment.
Eris: And recognizing that our traditions actually changed.
Tara: Yeah.
Eris: They grew and changed over time. And I think that’s also why I hate all the discourse around “traditional knowledge” and “traditional ways of knowing,” because the fact of the matter is that Indigenous people did do science. That is how they found those things out, and they passed those things down through stories, yes, but that knowledge was discovered through experimentation, through something not so different from the roots of the Western scientific tradition in spirit.
Tara: It wasn’t magic!
Eris: It wasn’t like you just wake up and know something, like how a goose knows what a hawk looks like.
Tara: “Indigenous ways of knowing” such as knowing “Jeff died eating that so maybe don’t.”
Eris: Knowledge of the healing properties of plants and medicines clearly speaks to an extensive history of trial and error, which requires a deep “scientific” culture of curiosity and inquisition and experimentation that so much of this “traditional” discourse erases. It’s effectively primitivist. “Yeah, this knowledge just came into me from the Earth.” Like, no, it didn’t! People discovered these things through their ingenuity!
Tara: This traditional thing is my dad’s constant struggle. When my dad was trying to launch his music career2 he felt like he really had to downplay how Indigenous he was because he wasn’t going like [briefly imitates a stereotypical Native chant] hi-ho-wy-ya, hi-ho-wy-ya or whatever in his music, he was like yeah I’m a city kid from Montreal and that’s an “Indigenous experience” because we are normal people and we live here.
Eris: I mean, so much of my fucking life is feeling guilty about whether or not my experiences are, you know, “valid” enough. You know, my my sister grew up on on the res and was much more immersed in that world than I am. So there’s always that feeling of constantly having to remind myself that, yeah, all of these are kinds of Indigenous experiences.
Tara: Yeah, yeah, I feel like there’s a certain kind of healthy entitlement that I’ve got that you can borrow if you want.
Eris: I feel like my sister has always seen me as less Indigenous. Or has treated me that way. Maybe I’m projecting.
Tara: That sounds like kind of a childhood story you gotta let go of now.
Eris: Yeah yeah yeah…
Tara: Yeah, it sounds like something that made sense when you were eight that doesn’t have to make sense anymore.
Gwen, still white: I admire your like bullheadedness about this, it’s clearly something that you’ve fought for and that’s cool.
Tara: Thank you!
Eris: Actually, you know, she came to visit recently and I realized that I still have this relationship with her where, like, I’m always trying to show her that I’m also Indigenous, and so we’ll like be sitting there and she’ll be talking about all this cool Indigenous stuff she’s doing or whatever, and she’s doing this Indigenous artist’s fair or something. I told her, “oh, I was booked for a reading focusing on urban Indians,” and she was just… [voice dripping with condescension] “Ohhhh, look at you…” And I was so sad! I feel like she’s being doing this my entire life…
Gwen: Why does she feel this way about you?
Eris: I think there’s some bitterness because she grew up without my dad and I grew up partially with him. Because my dad left us too, but she never even had him…
Tara: Fuckin’ Indians…
Eris: …classic Indian experience, I guess, right? But, yeah, I grew up with more of him around and she basically didn’t grow up with him around at all. I think she resents that about me, even though he wasn’t… he wasn’t always the best dad growing up, let’s say, he didn’t have the best role models for it, and he didn’t stick around for me either… but I think she still resents that sometimes. Again, maybe I’m projecting, but I think that she knows that there’s something I want from her experience, which was that she grew up on the res, that she has that connection to our roots that I don’t, and so she could always wave that over me, like “you may have grown up with the thing that I wanted my entire life, but I know that I have this thing you will never have, the thing you want more than anything in your fucking life.” And yeah it is. There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more than to have that, and to be able to feel authentically Indigenous.
Gwen: “The unlived life…” as [Sire] says.
Sire, racially ambiguous: [indistinctly in the background, finishing the quote] “…will have its revenge.”3
Eris: The unlived life, yeah, it’s the one thing that torments me. Every single day I think about it. Every single day I also think about the fact that like if I have a kid, the fact that I’m condemning them to feel like even more of a fraud than I am, because I have a white wife.
Gwen: You have a phenomenally white wife.
Eris: I know. But I think about the race aspect a lot. Back when I was dating [redacted]…
Gwen: Was this the five-foot liberal?
Eris: Yeah, the five-foot liberal. I felt like, hey, if this got serious and we wound up having kids, if they didn’t feel Indigenous, at least they might feel Jewish. Or Filipino. Or Korean. Or any of her identities. At least they might have some strong sense of identity to cling to, to feel more connected to. But they’d probably just feel phony about those too. My wife has every right to feel authentically Newfoundlander, that’s a rich cultural identity, but even she feels insecure about that connection, maybe that’s just…
Tara: …oh my God that reminds me so much of a story...
Eris: Yeah?
Tara: So I made like one Indigenous friend when I went to university in Montreal, and it’s funny because he is so much more pushy about the Indigenous thing than I am. He has super fair skin but has been using like bronzer and tanning beds since he was a kid so that he would look more Indian and extremely downplays all his other ancestry, which is like, Nordic. And his name is literally Karl Ove Knausgaard.4 He is so fucking from Norway it’s ridiculous but he downplays it like crazy. And now his kids, with a white woman, are gonna get to have the whole, “Well, my dad’s Native…” because he has built this entire other identity up around it. Which, I mean it’s not like it’s not accurate, but it’s almost like the inverse of your sort of situation. This guy has sort of formulated an Indigenous identity that had very little to do with his actual Indigenous culture…
Eris: Okay, interesting…
Tara: …which is the actual Indigenous culture of…
Eris: A Pretendian Indian!
Tara: Like yeah! The actual Indigenous culture that I have access to is that of a dude who wore like little peacoats and a short hat in Montreal for his whole life you know. This guy’s mother, which is his Indigenous side, is a bureaucrat in the Norwegian government. Literally the Nordic system! But he’s got this other identity that he has constructed specifically because he felt like he didn’t have access to his mother because he couldn’t get along with her, and that’s the identity that he’s like handing off to his kids... which is none of my business [laughs].
Eris: Yeah… I get so anxious thinking about my kids and what their relationship with Indigeneity is gonna be like, like, it stresses me out so much…
Tara: Um, you could just like not actually have any biological ones and just like, take some of the spares…
Eris: It’s just, like…
Tara: The foster system is full of spares!
Eris: It’s true, it’s true…
Sire: There’s nothing wrong with just picking something off the rack…
Tara: [evil laughter]
Eris: I want to have at least have one biologically. The plan is I think I’m going to adopt one kid from my community…
Gwen: That’ll make the other one feel greaaat…
Eris: Well, I hope that they might be able to sort of like exchange with each other, but the other thing is I also feel like I need to produce a biological child too because of the sort of genocide that my family has survived. I feel like somehow that if I don’t “propagate my seed” that, like, I’m also doing a disservice…
Tara: Pretty Jewy of you…
Eris: I knowww…
Gwen: Don’t worry, if you die we’ll jerk you off.
Eris: [laughing] Indian Defense Force?!
[general hysterics]
Eris: But I mean, you know, I would just feel so bad, like I was betraying so much of my like ancestry by not like continuing the line a bit further, because of they had to just crawl through the fucking… I just, I know too much about my family’s direct history to not.
Tara: Like I’ve never in my entire life ever ever ever had the impulse to have a child ever even for one second, and I think that it’s very interesting. There’s a stand-up comedian who said this thing where it’s like, reproduction is the coolest thing that my body can do and I’m not interested, even though it’s like being a bird who’s like, “Ahh, I’ll walk, it’s fine.” It’s like this insanely cool thing that I can do, and there’s this feeling that it’s like being a stock boy of being alive, you know, like at least I did something that’s basically kind of important. Like if you run out of ideas, if you can’t manufacture your own meaning yes you can because you have a uterus.
Gwen: [transly] Thanks, thanks a lot.
Tara: We’re talking about me, you have to appropriate everything, you’re trying to take it all… I’m joking.
Gwen: [laughing] Appropriating womanhood.
Sire: That was crazy we almost got through a conversation for the first time on this trip that didn’t [pinching nose] concern transness.
Gwen: There was— I’m sorrrryyy…
Tara: But yeah I mean like but there’s so much pressure to have kids when you’re Indian.
Eris: I feel the same way…
Tara: We could have kids.
Eris: Yeah let’s do the IVF thing.
Tara: Yeah I’ll give your wife an egg, I’m not using them.
Eris: I’d take one of your eggs, yeah.
Tara: I’m actually not kidding.
Eris: I would 100% be down to do that.
Tara: Fabulous!
Sire: Do we have any latex gloves around somewhere…
Tara: [to Gwen] We’re gonna need some of those hormones and a funnel…
Eris: This is gonna be extremely dark little anecdote here, but whenever I think about having kids, I think about how my great-grandmother, in order to like keep her kids alive, had to like prostitute out her daughters when they were kids. They were so fucked up that when the government came to get them they got sent to Warrendale Child Psychiatric Hospital instead.
Tara: Oh my God… that’s...
Eris: Yeah, brutal. So it feels like if I don’t produce it’s like those girls went through all that for nothing. Like that will to survival was so strong, I need to pay some respect to that by producing something continuous. You know?
Gwen: Umm but [Eris], you do it through your poetry…
[general laughter]
[later]
Eris: A lot of identity-oriented work turns me off because I often find it very dishonest. There is a tendency to swallow down a lot of critical and unflattering thoughts about one’s own people, or to avoid confronting anything too uncomfortably, or to be anything other than optimistic, and I think that’s the thing that Darius James got a lot of flak for. He’s both extremely angry about racism and the history of injustice but he’s also, I think, willing to prod at some sore spots within his own community and play around with things, even poke fun at them, that a lot of people consider to be in very bad taste. But I think that a lot of the best work on identity is the work that does that.
Tara: You can’t make good work on identity without going there.
Eris: And that’s why I think most identity literature sucks, because you need to be willing to step through that. For example, the reason why I love Mordecai Richler so much is that the thesis of his work is basically, “Why does everyone hate the terrible Jews so much?” And it’s that thing where, if you’re going to talk about identity in those terms, you have to grapple with the fact that everyone has that natural self-resentment that comes out in a resentment of their own community. That doesn’t mean you “hate” yourself or your community. There’s this feeling that because love is always, I think, and I don’t know maybe it’s just me projecting my own feelings here, but love of anything is always sort of married to some frustrations with that thing, you know? Because the things you love are always things you’re going to in turn idealize, and there’s that struggle in love between idealization and reality where you will constantly expect more from the things you love in various ways, even when you love them unconditionally. And I think a lot of people try and choke down those frustrations and like…
Tara: You know… sorry, go ahead, I just I have something to follow up on that whenever you’re done, sorry.
Eris: I’m almost done, yeah. I think one of the big things I hate about, for instance, a lot of Indigenous literature in this country, is that I just don’t see anything genuine in it. It also often feels like it’s written for white people to show them…
Tara: It’s absolutely written for white people.
Eris: It’s written for white people to like show them what we are, and because of that it feels like it flinches away from certain unflattering representations of ourselves, or at least doesn’t prod them very deeply, and it becomes dishonest. It feels like what we would like to show them. It feels like PR.
Tara: You need to read Pitiful by Brandi Bird though.
Gwen: Oh yeah, you were talking about this.
Tara: It rips. It’s really good.
Eris: [barreling through] If you want to show me how much you really sort of like think about and care about and love our community, I don’t believe it unless you’re willing to point to the things about it that disappoint you, the things that upset you, the things that frustrate you, the things that make you uncomfortable, or are more complicated.
Tara: [also barreling through] I don’t think Brandi Bird’s politics are perfect, because they’ve been MFA’d hardcore by the UBC program, but like also I think that there’s time yet to get them back, you know? But like okay just to circle back around for one second to that, like the love thing. I heard someone say that the the moment that characterizes love as an emotion is not when you find things about people that you like; it is the moment that you decide to suspend judgment about the things about them that you don’t like. Basically by definition we don’t love people because of the things about them that we like we love them because of the things about them that we don’t like that we are we are willing to carry. Everybody sucks in some way you know? At what point do you enter into what I have been calling an economy of goodwill with them, where it’s like “we’ve built up enough goodwill that I can cash it in for these things about you that honestly fucking drive me nuts but like I love you so much that it’s a very fair exchange.” We don’t love people or things because they deserve it, we do it because it’s a biological imperative. We must.
Gwen: [Exaggerated fawning sigh] There’s a specific, just, sigh, that you make me do…
Eris: Yeah, you just did it, I heard it.
Tara: It was God speaking through me.
Eris: “You’re so wiiise…” Honestly though, you will make a great Elder.
Tara: Thank you!
—04/05/2026, The Wormhole, Hamilton, ON
MORE TARA MCGOWAN-ROSS
Eris: Additionally, many elements are treated as if they are traditional, when they’re not. The notion of “two spirit,” for instance, is not “traditional” but a recent, muddled, pan-Indian flattening of a variety of Indigenous peoples’ historical conceptions of gender and sexuality into something which is basically just identical to contemporary progressive Western understandings of gender and sexuality but with an Indigenous-sounding name. I’m obviously not against our culture developing and changing (I say as much), but it’s worth acknowledging when it does, and it’s worth acknowledging when we are in fact synthesizing our traditions with colonial ones. For more on this, I recommend readers read Kwame Nkrumah’s Conscientism, where he discusses the efficacy of this adaptive process at length.
This is a quote from Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business.
Not really, we just redacted the real name. But it’s pretty much that.
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