Goodbye Snauq: a review
Title: Goodbye Snauq
Author: Lee Maracle
Publisher: Theytus Books
Who will like it? Decolonization and reconciliation is a conversation all Canadians (Indigenous, non-Indigenous, newcomers and immigrants need to have together).
Lee Maracle passed away today, leaving behind a legacy for us. “Goodbye Snauq” is a synthesis of memoir and fiction. Lee Maracle lives on in our hearts and intentions, in the power of words she has written.
With all of the events that have happened in the past year, we share a burdenous amount of grief. Residential school survivors had old wounds torn open, when we almost “forgot” about our dark past. Decolonization has become a heavier topic. That gives us all the more urgency to approach it.
This short story is told from Maracle’s semi-autobiographical point of view. She grew up watching the lands change at Snauq, or Sun’ahk, what we now call False Creek, the narrow inlet in the heart of Vancouver. She shares her vulnerabilities and her pain with us the readers, and as a teaching assistant in a western institution to the next generation of students pursuing Master’s degrees in Indigenous Governance.
Maracle employs irony to accentuate the injustice. She receives a letter from the new Squamish government with the promise of reconciliation, yet she sweats at the trudgingly slow change (even slower than Canada Post). She teaches at an educational institution with electric lights, yet it is eerily dim (not intentionally and warmly dim like the longhouses that were here before). The Chinese were discriminated against decades ago by head-tax and arsonists, and yet a Chinese multi-billionaire developed False Creek without living here.
Irony.
But this irony isn’t bitter. She walks us through the history of the land, as if explaining stories behind the scars on her body. The landscape starkly transforms with the events happening across decades, and as an individual coping with disenfranchisement, disentitlement and insult, and a sharp wave causes her to lunge forward and faint as she stood there at the podium. Colonization has brought about heaps of change, and the white man decides the food, the buildings, and the pricing of goods. She watched with her own eyes, on the sidelines, as everything she knew disintegrated. And she let the sloshing of wine intoxicate her being out of grief.
This could be an essay exploding with resentment, but Maracle manages to deliver in an open and hopeful tone. She sings, “Goodbye Snauq” at the unfinished Longhouse at Granville Island, and expresses gratitude for what she has instead. She brings closure to a twisted history we can no longer rewrite, and she has gentle faith in that light coming from the future.
“Find freedom in the context you inherit.”
“Khahtsahlano dreamed of being buried at Snauq.
I dream of living here.”
“Today we are situated on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh peoples.” The land acknowledgement we’ve all heard for the billionth time that our ears are quietly sealing up and growing numb. Land acknowledgements aren’t a copy-paste standard procedure. They are not a mandatory nuisance, like the nameless, miscellaneous fees packaged in university tuition. “Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh” have stories and scars behind the uttered syllables that we must recollect and reconcile. There is every opportunity to reflect on our past actions, and to look to the future with hope and action. Maracle envisions an embodied, sanguine practice of Indigenous sovereignty.
