Voices among Us

This past spring , while working from home in our downtown Toronto apartment, my husband and I began noticing a large raccoon that would waddle across the street and sometimes lounge on the roof of a nearby house. Fat raccoon sightings soon became our antidote to pandemic-related anxiety. “It’s huge!” we’d giggle. “Think of all the garbage it must eat.” Then, one night, we spotted the raccoon again, much thinner now and trailed by four babies. She hadn’t been fat; she’d been pregnant. Suddenly, I felt like a bad neighbour.

Had I already read Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, I might have held my tongue. In this non-fiction work, from 2011, Simpson recalls being told by her elder Edna Manitowabi that Nishnaabeg do not tell animal stories in the spring , summer, and fall “because these beings are awake and active during this time and they could be around when we are speaking about them.” Such a narrative ethic, requiring that these...