Interview
"Interview"
BCBW: As a British Columbian, what do you think we aspire to in this place?
What’s your definition of who we are?
AC: I think our main aspiration is to be left alone. I think that is what most of us out here want. We’ve got this belief, a belief that is probably illogical, that we are not the ones who raped the forest. And now they’re doing it to the ocean with their fish farms. They are doing it. And they are companies from somewhere else. And we want them to go away, to take their goddamn money with them, and to leave us alone with our beaches the way they used to be… We’ve learned bugger-nothing. The Indians had a lousy immigration policy.
BCBW: What are the origins for Daughters of Copper Woman?
AC: Daughters of Copper Woman is a gift that was passed to us from some wonderful, gentle, tough and enduring old women. It has been classed as ‘fiction’ by some but for me it is as true as the Bible is true. These stories were told to me a few at a time, in no particular order, over several years. I didn’t even tell them. The native storytelling tradition holds that a story belongs to the one who tells it, not to the one who hears it, and so I listened, and I retained and I made no move to tell what had been shared with me. Later one the women who had shared stories with me told me to put them in some kind of order, get them published, put them out to the world at large. So I did. I had no idea what a shit-storm THAT would create!
BCBW: The appropriation of voice debate.
AC: Yes. But AT NO TIME did any elder speak out against the stories, or the publication of Daughters of Copper Woman, or my part in any of it. Annie Yorke, one of the all-time treasures of native oral history, gave the book her blessing. George Clutesi, who wrote Son of Raven Son of Deer, used it as a teaching tool in his work with young men. The Traditional Council of Elders approves of it. But I listened. I let the people with their political agenda have their say. For more than a dozen years I ‘stepped aside.’ I made a point of not including any ‘native content’ in my work. I waited for any of the noisemakers to start doing what they claimed I had been keeping them from doing. Well, I’m still waiting.
BCBW: Are you changing your stance?
AC: Yes. I am not going to deliberately avoid Native content in my stories anymore. For this new edition, permission was given to me to include some stories that were not available at the time of the first publication. My reality includes a Native reality. Five of my grandchildren are ‘registered status’ Natives. It is my obligation to speak for them until they are big enough and old enough to speak for themselves. I would betray them if I neglected their First Nations background. I have other grandchildren who are not registered status as defined by the laws of this fair land, and to them, too, I have an obligation. And that obligation includes melding and merging Native and non-Native reality as it is lived on this coast. And anyone who doesn’t like it can get in line to kiss my arse.
BCBW: How did Copper Woman first get published?
AC: I took it to the Press Gang Collective. We did not have a written contract; we had an understanding. I retained ‘control’ in that no translations, no foreign publications, etc., could be done without my permission. For years I did not allow translations because I had no way of checking how well the work was done, and part of the job I had, as writer, was to try hard to retain the oral storytelling flavour.
BCBW: What are some of the causes you’ve underwritten from selling 200,000 copies?
AC: The royalties have gone towards funding the defense of Meares Island and Lyell Island. And for four years they kept the Stein Rediscovery Program running. It bought a big roto-tiller so Native women in Washington State could prepare ground and transfer healing plants that would have otherwise been destroyed by bulldozers that were clearing what ought to have been their sacred land for a subdivision. It has kept money going into transition houses and shelters for women and kids. The list goes on. Along the way I hope it has encouraged, in some small measure, a re-examination of non-Native ‘pre-history,’ the stories which we have been denied. Because it has been read by so many people, it’s safe to say Daughters of Copper Woman has helped the Ainu people of Japan, the Sami people, the Maori. And see if I apologize for any of that. The line forms for those who wish to kiss my arse.
BCBW: Do you ever scratch your head and say, ‘Jeez, if only I’d kept all those royalties for myself…’
AC: Not really. Daughters of Copper Woman has been like a ‘gift which goes on giving,’ It has prompted people to tell me stories from their ‘lost’ backgrounds, their lost cultures. When I went to England on a reading thing sponsored by, I think, the Canadian government, I swapped Celtic stories with some of the Travelling People, and from that came The Tales of the Cairds. They’re similar but in a different tone, more mocking, more irreverent. I think we heal ourselves with our stories. Little kids are bombarded on all sides by TV, by video games, by CD ranting, and yet let one person start to tell a story and the noise is ignored, the kids are there, wide-eyed and breathless.
BCBW: Is that why you’ve done about 10 kids books?
AC: Sure. Right now I’m working on a story called ‘Freedom Ride’ with Ms. Lynn Aspden’s grade 3-4 class at James Thomson Elementary. It is such fun! I go down the road there, to the school, every now and again, always unscheduled, and we review what we’ve put together. It’s about a polar bear cub born in a zoo and how she decides to find ‘north.’ They let their ideas pour forth. They seem to really want the polar bear to go to Hawaii. I tell them it’s too hot. They say, “She could go swimming all the time.” I say she doesn’t have any money, all she has is a rickety old bicycle, how would she get there? One wonderful kid wants the polar bear to find an abandoned rowboat, set the bike over the back, put shingles on the rear wheel, then pedal to Hawaii by using the shingles as paddles.
I have this theory about kids and their imaginations. When you stop and think about it, every kid gets eased into automobile ownership in some pretty wonderful ways, practically seduced into it. Baby, go, bye-bye. Baby, go to Dairy Queen for soft ice cream. Baby, get taken to the municipal pool to swim. Baby, see Grandma. If that kid had to be able to take apart, fix, and put back together the engine of the car before she ever got a chance to ride in the car, I betcha she’d never bother buying one. So just look at the way we teach our kids to write. We ask kids where is the noun? Where is the verb? What’s the subject? The theme? And so, by the time we get around to telling kids to INVENT something, to IMAGINE, they’ve been pretty much turned off.
BCBW: So you’re busy being a revolutionary inside the school system?
AC: [laughter] Well, it gets me lots of hugs.
A compiled 1982 and 1987 interview with Cameron by Alan Twigg
for his book Strong Voices: Conversations with 50 Canadian Authors (Harbour, 1988):
T: Looking back, how did you evolve into a writer?
CAMERON: Nanaimo was a coalmining town. Really ugly. Every weekend somebody was beating somebody up, usually under the noses of their kids. The world was crazy. The only place there was any real order was in books. I could read before I started school. I don't know how that happened. Nobody remembers teaching me to read. I just loved it. I was about eleven when I realized that everything I ever loved to read had to be written by somebody. And I was hooked. My dad used to say I didn't need a babysitter. All I needed was a roll of toilet paper and a pencil stub. When I ran out of books to read I'd write my own.
My dad was coal miner, and then the mines closed. People not brought up on Vancouver Island have no idea what it used to be like. You can read about the Deep South and you could be reading about the Island. Or you could read about Wales a hundred years ago. It was insular and ugly. Neither side of my family had ever been anything but hard-working, dirt poor. So when it came to writing my mother said, "Well, that's a nice dream, dear, but you have to be able to feed yourself." Yet at the same time, when I was thirteen or fourteen, even though my mother could not afford it, she found the money to buy me a typewriter. She said, "After all, if you're going to spend so much time scribbling, you might as well learn to type because there's always room in the world for a good typist." But that was not why she gave me that typewriter. It was sort of like, thou shalt not offend the gods. You don't put the dream into words or else they'll take the dream away from you.
T: From that fairly rough environment, how did you acquire the organized mind that makes a book? Did you consciously teach yourself form?
CAMERON: It was totally unconscious. I have virtually no education that way. I don't have enough credits to go to university. I had the equivalent of about grade ten. Because I did horrible things like refuse to take home economics. I wanted to major in library and they wouldn't let me. But if you listen to storytellers, each story has a beginning and an end. How you get between the two places is like the individualism of the storyteller. If that is form, then I learned it by listening to Welsh coal-mining women telling their stories. And they, in turn, had a different form than North English women telling stories. And their form, in turn, was very different from an Indian's.
I got English stories from my maternal grandparents and Scots stories from my paternal grandparents. I lived with my maternal grandmother for a couple of years. That was really strong, really positive, really beautiful. One side of the family would be talking about the Battle of Bannockburn and the other half is talking about the time they went up and they freed the slaves in the Highlands. Then there were Chinese stories, which are very different, too. I grew up halfway between Chinatown and the Indian reserve.
T: Was starting Tillicurn Theatre the first transition you made from doing writing privately to doing
things publicly?
CAMERON: Well, I was writing and typing for a newspaper called the Indian Voice. I was living on the mainland. There was a centennial playwriting contest. just sitting around rapping about that, we decided to put together this play based on a bunch of my poetry. That dragged on eternally. At one point we were going to pull our entry out. But then we said, hey, one of the things they're always saying about Indians is that they never finish anything, so we'll leave our play in the competition. Lo and behold, we won. So they took the play out to Matsqui Penitentiary and got the cons doing it, knocked everybody on their backsides with some guerrilla theatre. So I figured, hey, why did we need them? We could have done it right here. So we did. And that was Tillicurn Theatre. We used kids from high school who were either dropouts or still in school trying to pass remedial reading. It gave them something to do instead of slinging rocks at cars. As far as I know, none of the kids involved with Tillicurn Theatre have been adversely involved with the law.
T: One of the best evenings of theatre I ever saw was in the Matsqui Penitentiary. They did Threepenny Opera.
CAMERON: Yes. There's something to be said for finding another way to make your protest. Because I really do believe that most of the people in prisons are political prisoners. That we're conditioned and educated in such a way that there really is no conceivable option of protest. So people adopt what some call criminal lifestyles. Not because they're inherently rotten people. Now society needs ten percent of its population in some kind of conflict with the law or else a multi-billion dollar industry falls down. We set up another world into which these people go. And once they're in prison, it's none of our business what they do to each other or what other people do to them. I believe most prisoners are no more of a threat to me than most members of the RCMP.
T: Is that based on theory or experience?
CAMERON: It started out political. It has become very personal. The RCMP don't like it when somebody says, hey, hang on, you're not supposed to read my mail. You say it publicly and the next thing you know they're hassling your kids. They pulled my kid over and checked his motorcycle four times on the way home one night. He had long hair and he was my kid. The first time they're doing their duty. The second time it's an accident. But four times in one night?
T: You've written, "Politics is something the women allowed to happen to keep the men occupied during the long dark months of winter, but sometimes, for a woman, it's as if your whole life is ruled by politics of one kind or another until it gets to where you can't even mind your own business." Do you see hope in terms of educating women to vote collectively?
CAMERON: Yes. Vote as a block. Vote for the one who promises the best deal for women. And if they don't deliver, vote them back to hell out again. I would love to see the women band together so that in the next provincial election, they voted out the incumbent. Don't vote for anybody. Vote against the incumbent. Even if it means putting Jerk-off George in. Then you could tell him, hey, look George, count the number of people in this town who are women. That's the majority of the vote that got you in. You toe the line or you'll be out next time. They're killing themselves for the chance to be fools. So get a tame fool and send him in. If you get enough of them in and you tell them what to do, you can change the overall system.
T: It mentions in Copper Woman that the book is for women dissatisfied with the learning in "men's universities." But it's really in opposition to much more than that.
CAMERON: It's in opposition to so-called "history." The stories in Daughters of Copper Woman are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old and were given to me over a period of about a dozen years by extremely old women on reserves all over the island. The question that gets asked most often about them is, "Is this history or is this fiction?" Nobody ever stops to ask if the crap they push down your throats at school is history or fiction. History as it is taught in the schools is the conquerors' version of what happened. Daughters of Copper Woman is very different. That book has more truth for me, as a person who was born on the Island, and certainly for me as a woman, than anything the school system ever came up with.
Once upon a time maybe four percent of the population controlled military and economic power. They took language and made it another kind of power. At first it was only the first-born son who was given the gift of being taught to read and write. That first-born son used his gift to communicate with other first-born sons until he found someone who thought the same way he did, so they could combine their armies and take more power. For years neither the women nor the poor were allowed to read and write.
Since women have only recently started to read and write we have done a remarkable job of catching up. But we have found we have inherited a flawed tool. All the words have been given their meanings by someone else -- by men. When you say this is National Brotherhood Week, it means something wonderful. But if you say it's National Sisterhood Week the president of your bank will laugh. A master is a great thing. But what's a mistress?
It gets very upsetting. We don't know whether to start inventing a new language or try to reclaim the one we've got. Or just go back to bed. The boys control the television, the newspapers, the movies. And the government. Some people call it democracy. And some people call it oligarchy. But whatever it's disguised under, it's something even older than that. It's a patriarchy.
Daughters of Copper Woman suggests that there was a time on the Island when the boys didn't control everything. You inherited from your mother. When a woman married a man, he moved where she lived with her mother and her aunt and her sister. She didn't have to go out somewhere and get her face punched in with nobody to help her. He moved, And if he didn't behave, he got sent home and the children stayed with her. It was not the man who asked the woman to get married. It was the woman who honoured the man by inviting him to be the father of her child. Then the patriarchs came and brought rape. The Social Credit government, as big a patriarchy as you're going to find, cancelled the funding for Rape Relief because those uppity bitches who run it aren't doing what they want them to do. They want battered women to go to the police for help. But if you had just been raped, beaten, humiliated and pissed upon, would you particularly want help from the police? When the patriarchy has just raped you, they expect you to go to the patriarchy for help. You write the Attorney General to complain and he sends back four pages of complete babblerap.
Politics sucks. The system sucks. Once you realize it sucks, your next step is to try and do something
about it.
T: As a writer you can work on your own, outside the system. What happens when you move into positions such as writer- in -residence at SFU?
CAMERON: It's difficult. All of the film instructors at SFU were male. I know of at least four women in film who are professors with incredible qualifications who applied for jobs at Simon Fraser University. One of them made the short list. None of them got hired. I say that's no accident whatsoever. They all teach film from a feminist perspective. Meanwhile, you get a bunch of teenage boys turned loose with cameras and you get sexist film. One guy wanted to make a film about rape. There's a lot of rape at Simon Fraser, particularly with the women out jogging. He thought it would be interesting to do a comedy. I'm sorry, I didn't laugh. They're all into stereotypes in their film. It's always the woman who gets the pie in the face. Nobody's saying, hey, will you look what you're doing? Take out all the women and put in blacks and call them niggers and see how long it would last.
T: Have you also had problems working with organizations like the National Film Board and the CBC?
CAMERON: Yes. The CBC and I clashed head on on the film I was working on concerning battered wives. I felt there was a commitment that had been given to me from the very beginning that I could write my script from my perspective. That commitment, which I felt was very firm, seemed to hold until about four-fifths of the way through the script. At the last minute I was told they say... They say? I said who are they? I took my name off it because I would not make the changes to my script. There was a hell of an uproar. They wanted to do a whole publicity routine "From the Award-Winning Typewriter of. . . " They finally brought in a male writer. He made the changes. At the end of the film the woman walks out of Interval House in Toronto with a set of matched luggage. In reality, 87 percent of the women who walk out of Interval House walk out with their stuff in a black garbage bag.
T: People have no difficulty agreeing there is a Newfie culture. Or that Quebec has a separate culture. But there are no generally observed definitions of what we have become in British Columbia.
CAMERON: That's because the same thing has happened to BC and our provincial identity and psyche as happened to women. They have been defining us. Back in Toronto they make jokes like, "The continent slopes to the west and all the nuts roll to the West Coast." That's a crock. We know the nuts roll as far as the Rocky Mountains. That's why we put those mountains there. Only the crafty ones make it through to this side.
T: You really have a an "us" and "them" sense of the East and West.
CAMERON: Because I lived back there for over a year. It further convinced me that people out here are not really part of their country. My mother grew up here. My father grew up here. I was born here. Anything that I am is because of that. I think many people in BC feel this way. We identify with British Columbia much more than we identify as Canadians.
T: In some societies it's been standard practice to consult the major writers about major social issues. But in BC I'd say most of the people working for BC's newspapers and TV stations don't even know who the leading BC writers are. A writer who tries to interpret BC in any depth ends up feeling like a subversive against the global village culture.
CAMERON: Well, I'm not socially acceptable anyway. But look at Jack Hodgins. I mean, he taught high school in Nanaimo and won the Governor General's Award. And those pizmyers at Malaspina College couldn't even get it together to get the guy to go up there and read his stories. So finally Jack leaves Nanaimo and goes to Carleton University and everybody in Ottawa is kissing his feet but he's dying of homesickness. I used to send him care packages. We sent him a souvenir of Nanaimo Bathtub Day. A picture of Mayor Frank Ney in his pirate's costume
T: So the universities are not much further ahead than the major media outlets.
CAMERON: Well, when I had three kids under school age and I was living in New Westminster, Simon Fraser University was advertising for mature students. I was just about ready to come out of my gourd. I was bored. I was having an identity crisis all over everybody's life. I thought, well, I can get a babysitter for the kids. I'll go to university. So I applied. Somewhere in all my junk I keep lugging around I still have this letter from Simon Fraser saying I didn't have the academic qualifications even to go as a mature student. So twenty years later, with no more academic qualifications than I ever had, they had me teaching out there. My kids were rolling in the aisles! Mom's too stupid to go as a student but they'll take her as a teacher. For me, that just says it all. It's like you have to prove that you're mentally competent before you vote but you don't have to prove the same thing before you run for office.
T: So if you were suddenly education minister, how would you change things?
CAMERON: I'd have some classes only for girls. So that the girls don't get overshadowed by the boys vying for the teacher's attention. Because those are things still as a society we don't allow girls to do. I find it really interesting the number of really incredibly bright women who have come out of convent schools. Also I'd want much more sex education. And I would want much more physical stuff for the girls in the first three grades. Balancing. Dance exercises. Softball. Competition can be good, really good, when you realize that you are the one you're in competition with.
T: What about simply having sexually segregated schools?
CAMERON: No, I think we're strangers enough now.
T: As a British Columbian, what do you think we aspire to in this place? What's your definition of
who we are?
CAMERON: I think basically our main aspiration is to be left alone. I think that is what most of us out here want. We've got this belief, a belief that is probably totally illogical, that we are not the ones who raped the forest. And now they're doing it to the ocean with their fish farms. They are doing it. And they are companies from somewhere else. And we want them to go away, to take their goddamn money with them, and to leave us alone with our beaches the way they used to be. What I find really weird is that people come here, usually first on holiday, and they wander around saying how beautiful it is. How marvellous. Then they go home. Then they retire here. They no more than retire here than they set about agitating for the things they had back home where they admitted it was ugly! During the Lyell Island controversy I wound up stamping my foot and saying that as far as I was concerned if you haven't been born on this goddamn coast for at least two generations you keep your mouth shut. And of course that would include our premier, who only came snuffling in here at age twelve. And I was halfway around the bend and totally illogical and I even hurt some of my friends' feelings but I didn't want to hear opinions from any folks from Saskatchewan who hadn't seen a tree before they retired out here. We've learned bugger-nothing. The Indians had a lousy immigration policy.
Essay
In a recent favourable review of Anne Cameron's native myths for children, BCBW columnist Judith Saltman concluded, "The only curiously non-traditional note that seems imposed upon the material is found in the revisionist, feminist treatment of How Raven Freed The Moon, in which Cameron changes the traditionally male figure of Raven to a female persona." Anne Cameron has responded:
WE HAVE SOMEHOW, AS A SOCIETY, come to believe that the native culture which existed here for thousands of years before our arrival was a culture of simple people with a few basic life-support skills and little else. Oh, they carved wonderful canoes and we all appreciate the totems and house poles but...
The language of the native people was incredibly rich and much more complex than our own. Not only was there a "low" speech and a "high" speech, there was a language for children, which all people learned, then as part of preparation for puberty, the girls were taught Women's language, and the boys taught Men's language. There was language for royalty and another language taught only to those who were being trained in the spiritual arts and sciences.
There were no gender specific pronouns as we know them. Indeed, unless the gender of a person or character was a specific part of what was being discussed, gender wasn't mentioned.
In the telling of certain stories, animals were used, and the stories dealing with people are of a different kind than the stories told using the creatures. Originally, the translation into English ought to have been something much different than what we now know; "Raven and Raven's spouse", became "Raven and his wife" because of some sexist peculiarities the English laws of grammar and because of some other sexist peculiarities in the minds of the men who "translated" the stories.
The storytellers who first taught me often got gender specific pronouns mixed up and would say things similar to "the cow, he. .:' or "that father, she. .:' simply because "he" and "she" didn't really mean anything to them. This mistake is often made by those for whom English is not a mother tongue, and not unique to native people.
We have also managed, somehow, to convince ourselves that "feminism" is something which was invented and perfected by upper-middle class academic white women. They may have wrapped it in polysyllabics and had the time and money to tidy up the syntax and grammar, then present us with a polished analysis and even some sort of dialectic, but they are really the last ones to catch on to what has been known for untold generations by women of every race and culture. Feminism is not imposed on these stories; all I did was remove the patriarchal male supremacist gender imposition. The "traditional male figure of Raven is not part of the tradition of coast native storytelling.
Storytellers told stories to children to introduce ideas and concepts which would teach them how to behave as patriarchs decided to deprive the people of their own language and force a foreign language on them, then present them the stories in such a way that the only active figures were male, something was taken away from little girls which had been theirs by right for centuries. Many of us today are trying to find ways to get sexism out of the literature available to children. Our language doesn't allow me to use a pronoun which does not suggest gender, so all I have done is, quite simply, remove the patrist prejudice and make Raven female. It is something non-native people have mentioned several times and native have not questioned.
The Raven in the stories is a supernatural; a supernatural can do or be anything she decides! In this case she decides it was time girls had the opportunity to relate to the stories.—by Anne Cameron
[Spring / BCBW 1989] “Essay”
Article
Our unofficial foreign correspondent Anne Cameron, who lives far beyond
the urban shenanigans of the Lower Mainland, sends us her first report.
Rain. Such a novelty. Pussy willows, crocus and primroses are starting, columbine is beginning to re-grow... and the Tahsis Legion is fully occupied with planting oriental poppies
around the cenotaph.
Most poppy seeds don’t produce plants so I have patriotically offered to contribute my own poppy plant babies. In spite of Harpoon and his warbirds in Snottawa, one does feel the odd twinge of rah rah. Anyway I’m tired of having to weed grass out of the damned containers.
I would LOVE to come to Reckoning 07, that publishing conference in September, and talk about B.C. books. Be interesting to get a discussion going on the huge split between what is accepted by the illiterati in the rarefied circles and what is actually read by the unwashed who use the libraries and used bookstores.
Are publishers turning into tremulous old farts, tip-toeing their way through manuscripts like a banker en pointe through columns of percentages because the dwindling number of readers are voting neo-con for no reason other than the Left has lain down like fat poodles gone mute or are the voters giving the nod of approval to Harpo because the publishers fear “political” or “radical” the way the citizens once feared the plague, rats and fleas? Or am I just blowing smoke out of a particular orifice and writing absolute shite these days?
I continue to plug away at what I think is important and hey, you never know, I might win the 6/49. When that happens, don’t even bother packing, we’ll buy new stuff when we get there.
Meanwhile I am declaring war on General Motors. DO NOT BUY A BLAZER!!! You will wind up in the poor house because of buying new brakes. Three times in the past year-and-a-half I had to buy brakes. We have hills, we have gravel roads going up or down mountainsides, so, yes, by all means, let’s have brakes.
So the damned things started to screech again, which I’m told is how “they” warn you you’re running out of brake power, little cunningly placed pieces of metal to howl and wail when you get down so far...
This time Agatha, my daughter-in-law, drove the bitch of a little red hen out to Campbell River to see the GM people at their big shiny garage. Totally hooped. Going to be sixteen hundred for parts and at least four hundred for labour, take a full day, they said. F---. Last month it was the computer. Double F---. Have I, at some point in some previous life, accumulated sour karma with regard to things with moving parts? Did I chop down a gibbet or take a sledge hammer to a guillotine? I repent! If, in another incarnation, I was wont to saw through wooden spokes on the wheels of wagons heading westward, I apologize.
Speaking of C.R., one entire area of C.R. is now mainly First Nations people. So many of my daughter-in-law’s reserve members have moved away, they now hold band meetings in Campbell River where they live marginalized lives in truly crappy apartment buildings. Sociologically, I think that is hugely significant but I betcha none of the academic-y types are even aware of it, let alone think it’s important. So I got Hard Times by Charles Dickens and I’m re-reading it. I am really struck by how NOW it is!! He had much to say about how entire populations were being forced into cities by industrialization. But not to worry, Gorderator has met with the Governator and they’ll fix it all up just fine ‘n’ dandy.
Thank God for my long-time acquaintances at the Powell River Credit Union. When I win the 6/49 I’m letting them handle it for me after they come back from a holiday in the Bahamas. “Wendy” phoned to say, ‘Listen, Cam, you’ll be 69 in August, and you HAVE to do something about your vast fortoon, it has to go from RRSP to....’ And I said HUH and she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll mail you the forms, all you’ll have to do is sign, I’ll do the rest for you.’ So they came, I signed and sent ’em back and then sat in the bathtub and thought, hey, my mom was pregnant for nine months so by the time I was three months old I was really a year old so a birthday means you’re finishing the year not starting it so... I’m almost seventy!! I didn’t think I’d live to see thirty.
Anne Cameron is a novelist and humourist who lives in a trailer home on the West Coast of Vancouver Island at Tahsis.
[BCBW 2007]
The following interview was conducted at Cameron's home, nine miles north of Powell River, located up a gravel road and only recently wired for electricity. After neighborhood petitions failed to convince B.C. Hydro to service her area, Cameron took her type-writer down to the local Hydro office, plugged it in, and began working until B.C. Hydro relented. Cameron is an accomplished screenwriter (Ticket to Heaven, Dreamspeaker) and one of the most clearly indigenous writers British Columbia has ever produced. This year she is publishing five new books. Stubby Amberchuck and the Holy Grail ($19.95) is a novel about a woman's coming of age in rural B.C., a story 'about mothers and daughters, base-ball, high-stakes poker and women's wrestling.' Other publications are Dzelarhons ($8.95), a sec-ond feminist retelling of coastal Indian legends, and The Annie Poems ($7.95), a follow-up to Earthwitch, now into its fifth printing. Orca's Song ($4.95) and Raven Re-turns the Water ($4.95) are two new children's books.
BCBW: People have no difficulty agreeing there is a Newfie culture. Or that Quebec has a separate culture. But there are no generally observed definitions of what we have become in B.C.
CAMERON: That's because the same thing has happened to B.C. and our provincial identity and psyche as happened to women. 'They' have been defining us. Back in Toronto they make jokes like, "The continent slopes to the west and all the nuts roll to the West Coast." That's a crock. We know the nuts roll as far as the Rocky Mountains. That's why we put them there. Only the crafty ones make it through to this side.
BCBW: You really have an 'us' and 'them' sense of the East and West.
CAMERON: Because I lived back there for over a year. It further convinced me that people out here are not really part of their country. My mother grew up here. My father grew up here. I was born here. Anything that I am is because of that. I think many people in B. C. feel this way. We identify with British Columbia much more than we identify as Canadians.
BCBW: In a way 'They' gave us the name of our province. Do you think it's inappropriate?
CAMERON: Oh, for sure. We should just call ourselves The Coast. And across the water is The Island. And once we get the names straightened out we can go back to square one and decide if The Coast is joining The Island. 'Cuz I'm originally an Islander. And we're not joining you again. You guys join us next time. It didn't work out this time.
A lot of people don't realize we had a language and a culture on Vancouver Island that was as unique as the one Newfoundland still has. But where Newfoundland held out until 1949, we got sucked in a hundred years before that. We lost a very unique way of talking. For instance, I can remember we used to say 'I amn't' as a normal word. Now my publisher has given me this computer to finish this new novel and this computer has a built-in dictionary on a disc to check spelling. Well, I mean, Jesus! We didn't get to page two of Stubby Amberchuck and the Holy Grail before the West Coast terms started coming up. The computer kept getting stuck. The computer nearly burned itself out when it came to arseltart. (Laughter)
BCBW: What's an arseltart?
CAMERON: An arseltart is along the lines of a nerd. We hadn't even got to buggerlugs yet. (Laughter) A buggerlugs is often a kid, as in "Hey, Bug-gerlugs, bring in an armload a' wood for the stove."
BCBW: In some societies it's been standard practice to consult the major writers about major social issues. But in B.C. I'd say most of the people working for B.C.'s newspapers and tv stations don't even know who the leading B.C. writers are.
CAMERON: That's true. But look at who has taken control of the newspapers here. Southam News. I mean, Jesus. Southam News wouldn't know truth if it kicked them up the arse. They're not in it for news. It's just part of the thing that makes them some money. And yet most people don't even realize that Southam News almost has a stranglehold on what is news around here. They don't just own The Sun and The Province. Here in Powell River we have this Powell River News and the Town Crier. It's virtually the same goddam newspaper out of the same goddam of-fice but it comes under two different titles. They're both owned by the Southam News chain. And with all due respect to everybody who works there, there's none of them can write. Even with their computers a proofreader is needed. And who do they hire? Kids out of grade twelve. (Because) Those kids don't know any better. It's much the same at our local radio station. They talk on the news about Marcel Mace (Masse) and Jean Sove (Sauve). I can't even listen to it anymore. I heard one guy on there talking about something called a 'jillnetter' (gillnetter).
BCBW: I've talked to Brian Fawcett about this. We agreed that for any writer to interpret B.C. in any depth, he or she ends up feeling like a subversive against the global village culture.
CAMERON: Well, I'm not socially acceptable anyway. But look at Jack Hodgins. I mean, he taught high school in Nanaimo and won the Christly Governor GeneraI's Award. And those pizmyers at Malaspina College couldn't even get it together to get the guy to go up there and read his stories. Instead they bring in Northrop Frye or that guy from Montreal who's always whining about how awful it is to be a Jew in Canada. They bring Mordecai all the way to Nanaimo and ignore Jack. So finally Jack leaves Nanaimo and goes to Carelton University and everybody in Ottawa is kissing his feet but he's dying of homesickness. I used to send him care packages. We sent 'im a souvenir of Bath-tub Day. A picture of Frank Ney in his pirate's cos-tume.
BCBW: So the universities are not much further ahead than the major media outlets.
CAMERON: Well, when I had three kids under school age and I was living in Queensborough (New Westminster), Simon Fraser University was ad-vertising for mature students. I was just about ready to come out of my gourd. I was bored. I was having an identity crisis allover everybody's life. I thought, well, I can get a babysitter for the kids. I'll go to university. So I applied. Somewhere in all my junk I keep lugging around 1 still have this letter from Simon Fraser saying I didn't have the academic qualifications even to go as a mature student.
So twenty years later, with no more academic qualifications than I ever had, they had me teaching out there. My kids were rolling in the aisles! Mum's too stupid to go as a student but they'll take her as a teacher. For me, that just says it all. It's like you have to prove that you're mentally competent before you vote but you don't have to prove the same thing before you run for office.
BCBW: So if you were suddenly Education Minister, how would you change things?
CAMERON: I'd have some classes only for girls. So that the girls don't get overshadowed by the boys vying for the teacher's attention. Because those are things still as a society we don't allow girls to do. I find it really interesting the number of really incred-ibly bright women who have come out of convent schools. Also I'd want much more sex education. And I would want much more physical stuff for the girls in the first three grades. Balancing. Dance exercises. Softball. Competition can be good, really good, when you realize that you are the one you're in competition with.
BCBW: What about simply having sexually segregated schools?
CAMERON: No, I think we're strangers enough now.
BCBW: As a British Columbian, what do you think we aspire to in this place? What's your definition of who we are?
CAMERON: I think basically our main aspiration is to be left alone. I think that is what most of us out here want. 'Get those bastards to leave us alone.' We've got this belief, a belief that is probably totally illogical, that we are not the ones who raped the for-est. And now they're doing it to the ocean with their fish farms. 'They' are doing it. And they are compa-nies from somewhere else. And we want 'Them' to go away, to take their goddam money with them, and to leave 'Us' alone with our beaches the way they used to be.
BCBW: So anarchism, beyond a mere theoretical base, is a real force in this society. Psychologically but not politically.
CAMERON: Well, I think that people out here have never really trusted the government. And I think that oddly enough that's why we get the Social Credit so much. We don't expect anybody to do any better and at least we know those guys. Whereas the one time we put in the NDP they did a whole bunch of stuff and didn't do the stuff they were put in to do. Bar-rett stood up in the Okanagan and said, yes, he had promised certain things to the women's movement but once he got to Victoria he had seen that he, as a social worker, was much more concerned about the future of the children. Well, who the hell did he think has them and looks after them? If he had improved social-anything-at-all for women, kids would have automatically benefited. But he just put on fifteen pounds and got himself voted out again. All that was missing from his showboat schtick was a little straw hat and a cane.
BCBW: But Barrett was perceived by many other people as someone who was doing too much. Ironically, Bill Vander Zalm might be vulnerable for the same reason Barrett was vulnerable.
CAMERON: No. I think where Vander Zalm is vulnerable is that this has always been a racist and clas-sist society. "It was good enough for our grand-fathers..." And this guy's got an accent. Every time he says, "Britiss Columbia," the necks get a little bit redder. People will say, "Oh, Jesus,.that guy's a D.P." That's what he's got to 100k out for.
BCBW: And yet one of the most important and strange things about B.C. is that probably more people are born elsewhere than here.
