Review: Antoine Mountain has seen the world
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2019 18:00:00 +0000
From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor
Antoine Mountain | Brindle and Glass
$30, 377 pages
Antoine Mountain was born to Dene parents in 1949 near what his people call Radelie Koe and settlers call Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories.
It was a tough time to be born Indigenous, not that there have been many good times for Indigenous people since first contact and colonialism arrived in the Americas.
The story Mountain has to tell in his new memoir is a difficult read. It includes the cultural genocide, sexual and physical abuse he and his generation (and earlier cohorts of Indigenous kids) experienced in residential schools, and his years lost to alcohol and rootlessness.
Yet in the end it is a triumphant narrative of recovery and renewal. Mountain has rediscovered his Dene roots and has emerged as an important visual artist, journalist and activist. This book records how he found his way home, and his commitment to helping other Dene people make that journey of return.
There is much here for non-Dene readers as well, especially for Canadians of settler origin who take seriously the currently much vaunted national project of truth and reconciliation.
Mountain embeds his personal narrative in what he has learned about his people’s traditions, history and way of life. But his scope is expansive. Not only does the reader learn about how Dene people lived and thrived in a challenging environment, and about current attempts to rescue yet another generation of Indigenous kids from anomie and rootlessness.
Antoine Mountain is the author of From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor. Photo: Nathalie Heiberg-Harrison.
The author also links what was done to him and his people to other great historic crimes, particularly the Nazi Holocaust.
The book includes a sharp appreciation of Claude Lanzmann’s brilliant Holocaust documentary Shoah. And he has important things to teach about the links between his nation and their southern cousins, the Navajo. He retells the still too little known story of how Navajo speakers served heroically as “code talkers” in the Second World War combat zones.
Mountain has been a great traveller, venturing far to study the art treasures of Florence and the Indigenous cultures of Siberia. He has also been an assiduous student of many non-Dene cultures, linking his narrative to quotes from Aeschylus, Dante, Eldridge Cleaver, Margaret Atwood and Franz Fanon.
While sometimes presented with the distinctive and self-conscious flourish of the autodidact, these quotes and references are on point and enrich his story, as do the many quotes from Dene and other Indigenous elders.
Highly recommended.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net
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