Kiss Fur Queen in Kiss of the Essay

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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.

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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….....

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