When I was asked to write about the influence of libraries on my life, the furthest thing from my mind was the incarceration rates of Indigenous peoples. The more I think about it though, the more I can’t help wondering about the correlation between incarceration and literacy. The statistics speak for themselves. As it stands, Indigenous people are more likely to end up in jail than to graduate from highschool. I do not say this lightly, because one of the things I learned early on in my life is that to be Indigenous is to run into the strong arm of the law. Many of us have been either incarcerated or have relatives who have been incarcerated. (My own cousin ended up in Collins Bay Penitentiary.) When I first moved to Kingston a few years ago, I heard there was a so-called book club in the Collins Bay Penitentiary, and I contacted the man in charge. I introduced myself and told him that I taught Indigenous literature at the university, and I would like to bring some of those texts to the book club. Straight away he told me that there were no Indigenous people in the club. When I asked him why, he bluntly stated it was because they were illiterate, at least in English – assuming some of the inmates knew an Indigenous language.

For all intents and purposes, it is nearly impossible to function without a working knowledge of either French or English in Canada, in at least one of the first colonizer’s languages, which raises the question: how do people who are illiterate manage? While Indigenous culture may be grounded in orality, we nevertheless live in a written world, and it is something that Indigenous writers contend with in their work. It is also something that Indigenous people have been negotiating for over a hundred years. Prominent 19th century figures such as Chief Joseph Brant, the Rev. Peter Jones, Catherine Soneegoh-Sutton, and, most famously, the poet E. Pauline Johnson come to mind: individuals who championed literacy and the written word. This was of course before church and state decided that the best way to deal with Indigenous peoples was to take our children away from us. It isn’t too difficult to trace the issue of illiteracy directly to residential schools, and other forms of institutional incarceration, which have done their utmost to denigrate, if not to completely eradicate, Indigenous cultures. The dismal consequence is for generations of Indigenous peoples to equate bad education, founded on racist policy, with literacy and writing – and, moreover, the loss of their own cultures.

And yet despite the incredibly high incarceration rates among Indigenous peoples, something positive has been slowly building over the last thirty years. I am referring here to literature written by Indigenous authors and the incredible inroads this literature has made in the consciousness of Indigenous peoples themselves and Canadians in general. Fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, creative non-fiction, film-scripts, librettos: you name it and we are writing it. Indigenous people always had a literature based on the oral tradition, and, as I noted, we have been writing for well over a hundred years. But what is happening today is unprecedented. There is literarily a plethora of new writers who happen to be winning nearly every literary award in the country. Who would have thought?

I like to think of what is happening as a marriage between the oral and the written.

While Indigenous people have been holding the pen, or quill, since the 19th century, our writing is still indelibly influenced by orality, as it is with other cultures like Irish and African. The writing of the respected Ojibwe Elder and activist Art Solomon, who wrote two books of essays and poetry in the 1990s before he passed on to the spirit world, comes to mind. I think of his texts, Songs For the People: Teachings On the Natural Way and Eating Bitterness: A Vision Beyond the Prison Walls, because I recently put them on a course I was teaching on Indigenous incarceration. Now, these books are long out of print and so naturally I turned to the library system. Had it not been for the library I would have had to locate them by internet and purchase them from a second-hand book dealer. Not everyone has the means to do this. That they were available free of charge through the library was a dream come true. All I had to do was pick them up a few blocks down the street.

I remember years ago during an Anishinaabe ceremony talking to Art about his book Songs for the People, which had just been published. I mention this because Art was a deeply spiritual person who was particularly respected for his advocacy work in prisons on behalf of Indigenous prisoners. He told me that most of the inmates he had met over the years were in prison because they simply did not know who they were. Decades of assimilationist governmental policy in all its vile forms had taken its toll, and Indigenous peoples had not fared well. Art recognized this lack of cultural knowledge and personhood as the crux of the problem, and he was determined to do something about it. Suffice to say he saw his writing going hand in hand with his advocacy work in the prisons. To read his books is to hear his voice at times angry, at times sad, at times provocative, and always compassionate and committed.

The role of the library in getting me access to Art Solomon’s books naturally returns me to the issue of literacy. The relationship between literacy and libraries is not a far stretch; on the contrary, it is rather obvious that to access a library one needs to know how to read. This leads me to ask: can libraries facilitate literacy? The immediate answer is yes, especially if there is a kindly librarian ready to offer help, but for a definitive answer I need to return to my own journey to becoming a reader and later a writer. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s deep in the boreal forest in the isolated town of Chapleau, formerly a Hudson Bay Company post, but by then a railroad and lumber town. In those days there was one gravel road into the town and the CPR. Our house was located down in “lower town” banged together from the lumber salvaged from old box cars, barely room for the six of us. Our family library consisted of a Bible and the Eatons, Simpson-Sears and Army and Navy catalogues. A couple of “pot boiler” novels and the odd book of “Indian Legends” also made it into the house. Suffice to say we were not a family of big readers.

My father had grade six, taken in a CPR school car that parked for a few months every year at a railway siding near the village of Metagama, and my mother had grade eight, taken at the village school in Biscotasing. This is not to say they didn’t know the value of an education, and my mother especially encouraged me to stay in school. One memory I’ve held onto is of my mother taking me by the hand when I was about six years old and walking me to the library. In those days it was located on the main street in a small white house just up the street from where we lived. She introduced me to the librarian, whom I imagine led me to a lower shelf where I immediately fell in love with the many colourful books within my child size reach. I remember going there often with my mother until the day I could go alone.

A few years later the library moved to the former auditorium in the town hall down near the waterfront. Television had arrived, local drama had fallen out of fashion, and the space was given over to the library. To me the library was now even grander in this old brick building with its Dorian columns welcoming patrons. By then I was around ten or eleven and could ride my bike there, and I did it a lot. I suppose I was a bit of a loner, and I found the library the perfect hideaway. I have to admit though that the building’s attraction was more than just the books. Growing up in a house where the wind whistled through the walls, I found the library toasty warm in the winter and cucumber cool in the summer.

Over the course of countless visits that stretched from weeks to months to years, I eventually worked my way from the children’s section to the youth’s section to the out-of-bounds adult section. There were no computers in those days to lose oneself in and therefore books took precedence. The feel of them. The smell of them. All ensconced in an atmosphere of quiet. In all honesty, I have to admit that initially I was not a good reader, and it took me a while to become one. I stayed with picture books longer than I probably should have, and when I did graduate to chapter books, I was what you might call a skimmer. Neither having role models nor anyone at home reading with me didn’t help. But do anything long enough and one becomes good at it, or at least, competent.

Because I could not read very well, writing was certainly not on my radar as a potential career choice. I am not one of those people who can say I kept a childhood diary, knew I was born to be a writer, and was certain that one day I would see my name in print. No, not me. I read for pleasure, and I visited the library for escape. As fate would have it though, one day I came across a book called Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, the story about a white journalist who disguised himself as a black man and traveled throughout the southern United States. To this day I’m not sure what attracted me to that book when there were so many others to choose from, but having an Ojibwe mother in a predominantly “white” town in the 1960s undoubtedly had something to do with it. I had felt the sting of racism, and I suppose even at the tender age of twelve or thirteen, I was trying to understand it. Black Like Me was an international bestseller back in the 1960s, and it probably caught my attention simply because someone had left it lying on a desk. That’s the wonderful thing about libraries: you never know what you are going to pick up.

When I think back, texts like Black Like Me, and later Native Son by Richard Wright and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, helped keep me reading. You may notice that I haven’t mentioned any Indigenous texts. That’s because when I was growing up they were few and far between, and I was simply never introduced to them. The few ostensibly “Indigenous texts” that I did come across in fact were not even written by Indigenous peoples. I won’t mention the titles because they aren’t worth mentioning. Most were inaccurate, if not blatantly racist. The good news is that today is like another world. There is literally a plethora of Indigenous writers waiting to be discovered. If we as Indigenous peoples are to move out of our state of despondency, then I think books like Art Solomon’s are critical to the process. There is no excuse for any library in Canada – whether public or school library – not to have shelves of books by Indigenous authors.

Considering my own experiences, I believe it is only by having cultural appropriate material that Indigenous youth (and adults for that matter) will feel compelled to read and stay in school. I was fortunate that I was able to gleam something from the experiences of other marginalized people. This is not always the case. The only thing worse than teachers teaching texts that have nothing to do with the lives of their students is teaching texts that deny their presence altogether. It is no surprise to me that so many Indigenous youth simply give up and drop out. Growing up at a time when Indigenous authored books were virtually unavailable in Canada, I speak from experience. Whether or not my destiny was written, and I was meant to stay in school and eventually write this essay, I have no way of knowing definitively. But what I do know is that without having access to a library — whether a public library or a school library — in my formative years, my life would have undoubtedly been very different. By this I mean it is highly unlikely I would be sitting on a train on my way to Hamilton to give a literary reading. Maadagindaaso.