A Wholistic Point of View

Indigenous scholars are challenging the academic world from an Indigenous perspective. We’re redesigning the PhD so Indigenous artists can do visuals and stories, and not just written works. A wholistic point of view – much more complete.

Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail in conversation with Antoine Mountain

Antoine Mountain has received many awards for his art, community activism, and athletic achievement—including the NWT Premier's Award, the Queen's Jubilee Commemorative Medal, the Tom Longboat Award—and was recently inducted in the NWT Sport Hall of Fame. Mountain is currently completing a PhD in Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, but will always call Radelie Koe (Fort Good Hope), Northwest Territories home. From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor (Touchwood Editions, 2019) is his first book.

Antoine Mountain. From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor. Brindle & Glass Publishing. $30.00, 416 pp., ISBN: 9781927366806

Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail: When did you start working on From Bear Rock Mountain?

Antoine Mountain: I started five years ago – in May or June of 2014. I was at a friend of mine’s place in Calgary doing a series of paintings for an art show and somehow there was an image of a young woman that showed up in a painting of the northern lights and I just left it like that. When I woke up the following morning there was news of one of my niece’s daughters that was murdered in Fort Good Hope. So it followed along with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s issue – the urgency of issues like MMIW really pushed me to start.

DMC: What was the process of writing the book like for you?

AM: I got an invitation from an organization – Points North, outside of Halifax. As soon as I sat down, the book just started to come out on its own. I think being so close to the ultimate mother of all life, the ocean, helped. 

The writing took two years, and I went to a number of different locations to complete the book:  in Toronto; at a friend’s horse ranch outside of Regina; on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona; in Italy, too. And I was at the Banff Centre for the Arts for two months. Part of the reconciliation effort had to do with furthering one’s education, so I put my financial settlement money toward that and so did one of my sisters. And I had backing from the Canada Council for the Arts for the travel. 

Then it took another three years for the editing and to find a publisher.

DMC: So the editing process was even longer than the writing?

AM: Editing was one of the hardest parts – you have to be ruthless. I’m also dyslexic so it takes me two or three times longer than other people. The original manuscript was over 800 pages and some 380 pages eventually made it in. You need to figure out what to leave out and still get the essential message through. It’s an autobiography, so I was going chronologically. The only thing the publishers told me, was to try and skip every five years of my life. But I knew I had to focus on the earlier years of my life in residential school especially. 

DMC: That must have been challenging to focus on.

AM:  Yes, the hardest part of writing the book had to do with my earliest years, the times of being taken away at a very young age to some of the most horrible places in the history of the world (like Grollier Hall residential school, the site of many criminal cases). But that section also ended up including some of my fondest memories of life on the land. Once I got into the second section to do with being out in the world and reconnecting with Indigenous culture, it got to be easier to do, and toward the end writing the book was a very joyful experience.

Still, editing these difficult times over the phone with a virtual stranger was hard.

DMC: I can imagine.

AM: I’d been pretty much been doing this for the past twenty five years. I touched on residential schools working on my Master’s some years ago;  most of the people that went through residential schools at the same time as myself didn’t want to talk about it. But some of them insisted on having their whole families present while we talked about it. They wanted their own families to know exactly what this whole situation of reconciliation is all about. I see changes in my community now. With the work I do with the RCMP and young people and even women at risk – it’s all about intergeneration residential school trauma. People are talking more.

DMC: How did you handle facing these memories as you wrote them? 

AM:  I’ve been visiting among the Navajo Dine in New Mexico and Arizona. Their spiritual life is pretty much left intact and I’ve had a total of ten all-night ceremonials done over the years for myself. A good part of those were to do directly with the residential schools. I was adopted by different Navajo families and all of them are military families – we share something in common through PTSD. So over all that time I’ve come to have a pretty good handle on possible ways of dealing with personal and emotional trauma from things that happened.

Writing this book was part of that healing. When you write things that are related to your own family, there are things in there that you have to figure out and even correct. There’s one part in the book – when I was in my teens, one of my cousins told me that I had been left out in the cold to freeze because they didn’t think I would make it. But when my sisters read that in the book, they said the mother they knew would never do anything like that. At the time I was told that as a teenager, I only checked with one of my sisters – and she felt that something similar had happened to her, that she was abandoned by the family. It turned out she ended up having to be adopted out of the family. I just assumed that it was true in my case. But when the practice of infanticide was done, it was a long time ago and it was only the female babies that were affected by that. So the book itself has been a learning and a healing experience, because as a family we have to do the whole reconciliation thing amongst ourselves, too. 

But my family has been understanding enough that they all see that I’m not writing things in order to glorify one point of view, that this is my honest recollection of what’s taken place. 

DMC: How did you come up with the structure, weaving together poetry, memories and research/reflections?

AM: I had a general idea in mind for the four sections – like a medicine wheel, which is a teaching tool. The first section is to do with the whole concept of the residential schools itself and how it played into an attempt at cultural genocide here in Canada. And the second part has to do with expanding how these types of cultural experiences are being felt elsewhere, in this case the American Indian Wars in the US, and the political activism of the 60s and 70s. And then the third section goes into the fragmentation of community, of the individual, the family, and the communities that fall apart because of outside pressures that weren’t there before. And the final section has to do with the spiritual meanings of all these events. The editors all had the same question: what is it all really about? My answer was just wait until Donald Trump has been in office for one week and then you’ll know. 

DMC: The sources at the back of the book are incredibly diverse and far-reaching, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Decolonizing Methodologies and biographies of Tom Longboat and Crazy Horse. Why did you decide to include them all for readers?

AM:  Right now I’m in my fifth year of an Indigenous Studies PhD, and research and noting your sources is part of the discipline for any researcher. I know if I hand my book to a colleague, they’ll automatically go into the sources, to see what kind of references you have. That goes into the approach I take. I want to get all my information correct. 

DMC: You talk in the book about oral versus written forms of storytelling. What pushed you to become a writer (in addition to all your other artistic pursuits), and create a book?

AM: It’s basically the recognition and my respect for the written form. But we Indigenous scholars are challenging the academic world from an Indigenous perspective more and more. We’re redesigning the PhD for future artists so Indigenous artists can do visuals and stories, and not just written works. A wholistic point of view – much more complete. 

DMC: Speaking of expression, you say in the book that Dene and English are so different in the way they express emotions and ideas, and that English comes far short of Dene in this regard. How has knowing Dene shaped your thinking? 

AM:  Your mental approach influences whatever you do. I explain to people that whatever I’m watching or hearing has to go through a filtering system – a Dene point of view. For instance, I have to interpret it into my own Dene language and then translate it back into English. There’s no doubt in my mind why our Dene language was used in the Second World War – it’s so exacting that if you make the slightest error you’re talking about something completely different. And yet the format of English itself can produce something as wonderful as Shakespeare. 

DMC: Do you have any wisdom or encouragement for other artists and writers?

AM: Always depend upon and believe in your talent, but take a very disciplined approach. Use your talent in the right way. And always exercise patience. Nothing is going to come to you overnight. The time will come when you can use your talent – it is maturing, so you know what to do with it at the right time and place.

Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail is a Canadian-born, Houston-based author of hidden histories for all ages. She edited the bestselling essay collection, In This Together: Fifteen Stories of Truth and Reconciliation (Brindle & Glass, 2016), which features a piece by Antoine Mountain. She is currently at work on a memoir/history about the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital. www.daniellemc.com