What I'm Reading: A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby (2016)

[delphi]

✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Free Space - Indigenous Author

A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer is a 2016 autobiography that covers writer/activist/artist Ma-Nee Chacaby's life from 1950 to 2014, from her birth in a tuberculosis sanatorium, to her childhood in Ombabika, through her adulthood in Thunder Bay where she's become a community elder and helped lead the city's first Pride parade.

This was the fifth of this year's Canada Reads nominees that I've read, and I saved it for last, feeling like it was a sure thing in terms of something I'd want to read. I wasn't wrong, and I was happy to see it win in the debates, championed by Shayla Stonechild.

The book is very candid, frank, and factually self-reflective, with a conversational tone that feels like sitting in on the friendly interviews that brought these stories forward. The author has lived through a lot of violence, as well as discrimination, addiction, disability and economic hardship. She is also someone who loves truly and deeply, gathers family, and builds community in a way that I really needed to read about right now.

I also really appreciated the book's afterword, which provides a lot of transparency on the writing process, which was assisted by social scientist and friend Mary Louisa Plummer due to Ma-Nee Chacaby being low-vision and speaking English as a fourth language.

My grandmother was a storyteller, so at social events people gathered around the open fire to hear what she had to say. One of the main characters in her stories was a traveller named Chacaby, who could transform. Sometimes Chacaby was a man and sometimes Chacaby was a woman, depending on the story. My grandmother also told a legend about a woman who created the first madayigan (drum). She explained that, a long time ago, the men in one community had all gone away to war and not returned. When a woman from that same community was walking in a forest one day, she heard a voice that told her to make a song to bring the men back. Soon after, that woman went hunting and killed an elk. After she had prepared the elk's hide, she had a vision of making a large circular shape, like a section of a hollowed-out tree trunk, and stretching the hide tightly over it to make music. And that is how she made the first drum. When she played a song on that drum, it brought many people together, including the men who had travelled far away.

I did not always understand the stories my grandmother told. Sometimes I listened and enjoyed them, and sometimes I found them boring, so I left. But I remember how adults listened closely to her and often laughed heartily while she told a tale. When I was about seven or eight years old, some white people came to interview my grandmother. I realize now that they wanted to record her stories, but at the time I did not understand what they were doing. My kokum was supposed to answer their questions inside of a tent, using an Anishinaabe interpreter. The white men had set up a battery outside the tent, and connected it via wires running underneath the canvas to a machine with big wheels inside. I watched a man set it up and test the equipment by talking into the machine and then playing back his own voice. I understood they wanted to do the same thing with my grandmother's voice, but I feared they might capture her entirely, and keep her inside the machine. So I waited outside the tent until I heard my grandmother say, "Eya (Yes)," agreeing to talk. They then played her voice back as a test. As soon as I heard that, I took the little hatchet I carried on my belt, chopped through the wires, and moved away quickly. It took a while for the men to figure out why their machine had stopped working. They said they couldn't repair it there, so they just wrote down my grandmother's responses to their questions instead. Nobody knew who had cut the wires, except for my grandmother, who guessed it was me. She talked to me about it later and tried to reassure me that they would not have hurt her.

My grandmother had a gentle way of teaching me when I had done something I should not have done. When it was something serious, she took me out on Blusky Lake in a canoe to talk to me. On the lake, I could not run away, so I had to listen to her. That worked very well. My grandmother also told me stories to teach me lessons, and sometimes maybe to frighten me away from dangerous activities, like taking off into the snow to go sledding by myself. She probably worried about me being out alone in the bush in winter. One time I remember she told me a story about travellers who stayed overnight in a little dome they built out of snow and branches. While they were there, she said, the people saw someone speed toward them moving incredibly fast. When he arrived at their dome's entrance, they saw he was huge—much bigger than normal people—and he had eyes like blue knives, which they thought might be made of frost. That story frightened me. For a little while, it made me too scared to go far away to toboggan each morning. But soon I got over it, and continued as I had before.

My grandmother was always very loving with me. When other people called me weird or poisonous, she would tell me that I was curious and smart in ways that some people did not understand. She said that in my life I would have a long and difficult bimose (walk or journey), and I would have to be courageous, like a warrior. As a small child I did not understand her. I thought she meant that one day I would actually stand up and walk a great distance. She used to touch my hands and tell me, "When you grow up, you're going to be a great teacher of our people. You will help others. You will be a medicine woman."

Comments

[peasina]

I can’t say too much, but oh my goodness I did a double take when I saw this on my reading page. I work with the Anishinaabe community! I’m stoked to hear that the themes in Ma-Nee’s book were something you needed and that her stories found a way to you 💓💓💓 Seeing your post has really brightened my morning :)

[delphi]

No kidding, what a small world! A part of my family is Anishinaabe—some branches of Ojibwe, but mostly Algonquin. I found myself thinking about my grandmother a lot while I was reading this. She would have been more in Ma-Nee's mother's generation, but she was the one in our family who made a similar transition from a more traditional childhood in an area where multiple peoples met to living in a small northern city as adult. For a long time, she firmly did not talk about her youth, but she started to share more stories in bits and pieces as she got older, and I've always wished I'd been able to ask her better questions and invited her to share more if she wanted to (but I was a dumb teenager and we were living in separate parts of the province by ten).

The book—and the explanation in the afterword about how much time and special organization it took to tell these stories, even for someone who'd been meaning to write a memoir for a long time—really got me thinking about how to be a better listener for the elders in my life, and how to make more space for storytelling.

[lookfar2]

I put this on my Paperbackswap wish list, and will be surprised and mystified when it appears five years hence!

[delphi]

I'm happy to take the credit and/or blame for any Canadian works that mysteriously show up in future.

[lokifan]

What a lovely (and bittersweet - the childish fear that the white men might take their grandmother away makes too much sense) passage, thanks so much for writing it up!

[delphi]

Very happy to share!

[greghousesgf]

this is really interesting.

[delphi]

I thought so!

[scintilla10]

This one's on my list! Thanks for posting about it.

[delphi]

Glad to hear other people are reading it!