Northern Exposure

As one of the characters in Katherena Vermette’s Real Ones says, “You can’t shoot an arrow without hitting a pretendian in a university.” If you’re paying attention to Canadian academia and arts, that seems to be the case. A couple of times a year, someone is exposed for donning “redface” to gain personal, political, or professional advantage. So Vermette’s fourth novel is certainly timely — a must-read for any Métis questioning the validity of their own identity or any person looking to put on a minority mask as if it were a Halloween costume.

Real Ones is the story of June Stranger-Savage and her sister Lyn, told from each of their first-person perspectives in punchy chapters that alternate between the two. Lyn (whose name Vermette styles in lower case) is an artist, currently working on a pottery project, and June holds a doctorate in Indigenous studies. Their Michif heritage has been passed down paternally; their mother, Renee, who produces art under the name Raven Bearclaw, is white.

At times written simply, at other times wistful and poetic — poetry being very much the language of Lyn and of Vermette herself — the novel catalogues the fallout and media storm surrounding Renee after she’s exposed as a pretendian and cancelled. The plot raises numerous issues of identity that are worth exploring.

As a white-passing Métis person, I found myself connecting with the subject matter, asking questions like “What’s in a name, anyway?” This exploration is spurred on by literal, on-the-nose names like Raven Bearclaw and Stranger-Savage, while some other characters go unnamed entirely. Renee jumps from abusive relationship to abusive relationship with men known as CokeHead and ShitFace. And her faux identity isn’t the only thing at stake. June and Lyn explore their own right to the label Métis: what it means to them in a white world that looks at them differently and what the term means more generally, for an entire people.

But ultimately this is a story about family and the emotional burdens of generational trauma. Lyn, the younger sister, grew up with Renee, while June stayed with their father. The latest wound — their mom stealing their paternal ancestry — is just another in a long list of maternal failings inflicted upon them. Renee was an absent parent who forced Lyn to sleep on the couch, who would often choose herself and her artistic career over her girls, who brought dangerous addicts and men around her children, and who would disappear for days or weeks or months at a time, with no warning. The final straw comes when it is revealed to Lyn that Renee may have been using her for monetary gain, evaporating the childish belief that the daughter had a special place in her mom’s heart.

Nothing in this novel is black and white. Perhaps its most clearly defined theme is that relationships, like people, are complicated. Lyn’s father was also an absent parent who went out every night of their childhood, a fact generally ignored by the girls; June, who is married to a lazy man she seems to resent, has a crush on a colleague; Lyn’s last relationship failed, a consistent source of sadness; and the sisters are constantly fighting with each other. What’s more, many characters in the book reiterate just how much Renee loved the two of them but succumbed to her own distress: her father was killed at a young age, and Renee was the one who found him. Her sister believes Renee might be suffering from PTSD because of this ordeal, while exhibiting a desperate need to be accepted and loved. The family’s past and present give the reader — and the sisters — room to understand but perhaps not enough room to forgive.

What complicates the picture further is that it was Renee who taught Lyn how to be an artist, and those lessons form a through line: the gift Renee has given Lyn is also what the daughter uses to move on. It is a powerful example of art’s capacity to heal our past wounds.

So in a story ostensibly about pretendians, we get big, important themes — identity, art, generational trauma, the complications of people and relationships — contained in a short work with quite short chapters. I found the novel a touch slow at times, especially in the middle. Perhaps this pace is by design, as the narrative starts with a bang — when the world whips up a storm in response to another identity thief — before getting into the more middling fallout of familial wrongs and personal history. The resulting tension is mostly internal, with Renee offscreen and her daughters rarely challenging the driving force of the story head‑on, choosing for the most part not to engage with their mother’s story publicly. Instead, they discuss it among themselves as they explore their inner lives and their shared past. The real fallout when a pretendian is exposed, Vermette seems to tell us, is the pain it causes the people closest to them, the hurt that happens behind closed doors.

That being said, the unhurriedness is a small complaint in an otherwise beautiful novel. Readers will find within it well-rounded characters with rich backstories — and writing full of verisimilitude, true to the Métis experience.