Darrel J. McLeod was a Nehiyaw (Cree) from Northern Canada, Treaty 8. He published two memoirs, Mamaskatch and Peyakow, as well as a novel, A Season in Chezgh’un. McLeod was a French immersion teacher, School Principal, Director of a curriculum center, Executive Director of Education and International Affairs at the Assembly of First Nations, and Chief Negotiator for the Government of Canada. He was also an accomplished Jazz singer.
Peyakow, a sequel to Mamaskatch, recounts McLeod’s time working in secondary education and within International Affairs and as Chief Negotiator for the Government of Canada. Through the novel, McLeod documented his journey, finding hope and facing the complexities and conflicts of negotiation between the federal government and Indigenous peoples. Incredibly moving, emotionally fraught, often frustrating and occasionally tragic, the book shows McLeod’s courage, his humour and his deep vulnerability in a book that can barely contain a life lived so richly.
Interviewed by Sarah Roberts
Sarah Roberts (SR): The first thing that struck me is the title, Peyakow, which translates as “one who walks alone,” and I found that so interesting; because within the book, there are so many people coming in and out of your life all the time; you are always working with people, and in communities. Could you tell me more about that title and how it came to you?
Darrel McLeod (DM): Sure, well first of all, Solitude is a big part of Cree Culture. I’m Cree Nehiyaw. I’m from Northern Alberta. Solitude is an important cultural feature. Elders and even young people go on vision quests that involve solitude. I’ve read stories of Elders, collections of stories of Elders and it’s quite normal for Elders to go for a month or two onto the land by themselves, into a trapping cabin, or a tent or campsite they set up, for a month, two months. Women as well as men, used to do that. I don’t think they do anymore. So, solitude isn’t necessarily seen as a negative thing, but in my case, a lot of it was involuntary because, this is a bit of a tragic note, but I had so much loss in my family. My family was disrupted, my culture was horribly disrupted. I always say it was rapid and brutal, the disruption of our culture, because of the Klondike gold rush.
The Hudson’s Bay Company came 200 years earlier, but they sort of let us be, they just wanted to get rich from the land and the resources, fur, beaver fur, the fur trade—so the Hudson’s Bay, the French traders sort of let us be for the 200 years they were here—until the gold rush, and then all hell broke loose. Literally, a rush of Americans up north, and it was unruly, unmanageable, so the government felt they had to impose some order. So, I say, that they coerced my people into a treaty, Treaty 8, and then forced Cree people onto reserve lands, to free up the rest of the land. With that disruption came a lot of social unrest and social problems, social trouble and instability. My extended family, who had been semi-nomadic, living in our territory for millennia, were forcibly relocated to our closest town, which was all basically white people, so that disrupted my extended family and even my nuclear family.
There’s been so much loss in my adult life, I’ve found myself alone a lot. By alone, I mean not accompanied by the people you’d usually expect, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Because a lot of my friends were Indigenous, I even had a lot of loss there, from really close friends, so I found myself alone a lot in my adult years. I still do, I’m dealing with it because there’s all this publicity about social isolation as a health issue for people as they age. I’m working on, as I have during different periods of my life, having more company and being more frequently accompanied by people I enjoy and people who contribute a lot of my life.
SR: I think it’s an interesting choice for a writer. So much of the time as a writer, you wind up spending in solitude. Diving right in, there were so many things that come up in the book. Quite often, you do talk about that disruption to the Cree people and to Indigenous people across Canada with the cultural genocide and that destructive force. I know you spent so long in government and working on treaty negotiations—what people might consider “activism”, in a very traditional sense, but I wondered how writing feeds into that. Is there a place for writing as a tool for systemic change?
DM: There sure is, because as an author mainly, if your writing gets any uptake. Just as a side note, I’m so glad you picked Peyakow. Even though it was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust prize, non-fiction, it got little attention there. I haven’t checked the numbers with my agent, but I think it’s gotten the least uptake. Of course, I love all three of my books as I would love all three of my children.
When a book gets some uptake, and not only the book itself sells, but people are curious, so they call you, and [like you are] interview. I’ve had great interviews with the CBC and with writer’s festivals, and most of that is on my website. It’s mind-boggling actually, the number of interviews I’ve had over the years. Peyakow did get some good attention. I had a full hour interview with Shelagh Rogers, just after it came out.
And when you’re a finalist, with the Writer’s Trust, things happen as a result of that too. When you have an audience, of course they’re reading your book and they’re processing and thinking about what you’ve written. I think a book, as opposed to a speech or a song or visual art…. Well visual art stays too, but usually it’s a brief exchange, a relatively brief exchange in an art gallery or something.
With a book, if you’ve taken the effort to buy it or get it from the library, and you’ve taken the time to read it, it’s a slower process. You have a lot of time to process, and you can fact-check too if you want to, you can do related research, if it prompts some questions. So, for me, it has worked as a form of activism.
I’ve been asked to write columns about current topics and current issues by the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail and other places, so you do get a chance to influence public opinion somewhat. It is an important form of activism.
Although, that isn’t why I went into writing. I just wanted simply to tell my story and [those of] my family and my people. My people, where I am, the Cree tribe, is a huge tribe that spans Canada, from northern Quebec all the way to northeastern B.C., so that’s a huge story if you include all of those people. The people in north-central Alberta where I’m from, the Nehiyawak, from Treaty 8 territory, I wanted to tell our story a bit more.
SR: I loved the analogy you used, of all of your books being like children. I know, you wrote a memoir prior to Peyakow, Mamaskatch and you’ve written a novel, too. I wondered, are there ways in which having these children was different, or they were “birthed” differently?
DM: I wanted to tell the story of my family, myself, and my people, but I also wanted to create. My undergrad was in French and Spanish literature, so as you can imagine I read a lot, and studied a lot of English literature too, in the process. I wanted to create a work of art. That came out in interviews, I didn’t realize that was one of my fundamental goals, but I wanted to create something beautiful, and I knew as I was editing Mamaskatch and Peyakow I wanted there to be true beauty in that work, because some of the stories are so difficult so that the art form would carry people through the difficult topics and some of the difficult passages. I wanted to tell my story and writing an art form.
In terms of the three books, and the relationship between them. Oddly, Peyakow is a sequel to Mamaskatch, and people always say, whoever gets to write a sequel to their memoir? Right. I had one good memoir. Working with my second mentor, Shayna Lambert, who’s a real master of the craft and particularly of short-story writing, she studied with Alice Munro. When I was doing the editing, I was very aware that with just subtle changes and attention to the form, as a piece of art, I could really ramp it up. Shayna really helped me do this.
For example, there’s a difficult story in Mamaskatch, called the Frenchman (mistikôsiw), and it’s about a suicide in my family, and it was very hard to write, so I told it as a story within a story, and that helped me to write it, and it made it a really interesting art form.
Peyakow, it was the same thing. The first chapter is about the negotiation of Treaty 8, so it’s a piece of historical non-fiction, but fiction, it’s kind of a blend because I had to imagine. I did a lot of research, tons of research on the negotiation of Treaty 8, and I wanted to put my great-grandfather into the story. Because he was alive then, he was a young man at the time Treaty 8 was negotiated. So I wanted to put him there and so I had to fictionalize it. And it was so incredible to do that. And I ended again with my great-grandfather. It was a chapter based on a dream, in which he and many of my family, who have since passed on, came to visit me for an important birthday in my little house on the West Coast, and it turns out my great-granther, Mooshum, is a bit of a visionary in that story.
SR: I loved when I read; there was a place in which you began the book, you speak about almost feeling grateful that you had lighter skin than some of your siblings because it helped to mitigate some of the racial prejudice you faced, but by the end, you are jealous of your ancestors and their darker skin. I loved that way of telling the story with it coming full circle like that, and the subtitle is “Reclaiming Cree Dignity”. When you were writing, did your relationship to your identity as Cree change? Did that come up as you wrote, or was it in your mind before?
DM: About dignity, the concept in the subtitle? It came from the research I was doing; I was reading journals and notebooks from commissioners and clerks who travelled with the treaty commission and one of the commissioners, and the priest who was there, Father Lacombe. When they landed, they landed late because of really bad weather. When they finally landed their boats in one section of Lesser Slave Lake, when they met the Indigenous people there, the Nehiyawak, some of my ancestors and others. The first thing that struck them was their dignity, how dignified they were, how they carried themselves, in the way that they dressed. They had this true, innate sense of dignity; that really struck them, and they mentioned it in their journals and notebook, and that really, I wasn’t surprised, but it really moved me, that left a huge impression on me. I’m not surprised at all by that.
My great-grandfather, my Mooshum, and my great-grandmother, Kookum, on the other side of the family, both lived to be in their eighties and nineties. Mooshum in his eighties, Kookum in her nineties. They were very proud and very dignified people, and strong, proud of our language and proud of our culture. Increasingly I see young people, and middle-aged people who have managed to have a healthy life and they carry themselves with incredible dignity and pride; and I think “yeah, we’re getting it back”. But it was important to talk about that because there’s so many negative stereotypes, of Indigenous people, particularly in urban settings and across the country and I just wanted to set that record straight a bit.
SR: You talked a lot about the difficult cultural impacts, and trauma. And things that have touched your life, including suicide, youth suicide in particular. And do you have hope for the future that things are getting better, sometimes it seems almost one step forward, and three steps back?
DM: Right, that’s a good analogy. I do have hope for the future, because of the young people I see who are incredibly healthy, and who are getting an amazing education. I write about that in the book, about a time when I was working for the BC Government, as a special advisor to the deputy minister on Indigenous post-secondary education. And I started visiting universities and colleges at the time in BC, in the mid-90s, and I kept that up, even though I left that job, I still had connections with UBC, I was the chair of the President’s advisory committee for fifteen years. That was in the mid-90s. So I would get invited to graduation. They would have the graduation ceremony with everyone, and then the Indigenous grads in the First Nations House of Learning. When I first started going in the 90s, there would always be a cluster, a good cohort of teachers, and a couple might have their M-Eds. There might be one or two lawyers, in those days, but virtually nobody in science or accounting fields. Fast forward to the last time I was going, around 2012. Now there were still 30-50 teachers, 20 M-Eds who were going to be educational leaders, maybe 30 or 40 nurses,12 doctors probably 30-40 lawyers and 30-40 people with master’s degrees in other fields. Maybe 10-15 with doctorates and a handful of accountants and forestry managers, fisheries managers and experts. The change was phenomenal.
You see these bright young faces, receiving their degrees and their professional credentials and their families are all there, and they’re so proud, and you know they’re going to work to make a difference, and they are. They’re out there now doing their thing and getting a lot of attention and making big changes for our people. I see optimism on that side.
On the other side, the crisis of youth suicide and drug overdose have gotten worse, and it’s taking a lot of lives in Indigenous communities- it’s really tragic to see and there’s no obvious solution. Nobody is coming up with solutions, so far, and it’s really disheartening to see. There was a newspaper article, a couple of months ago, saying life expectancy for Indigenous Canadians has plummeted. I haven’t looked into the stats, but that’s really concerning.
SR: I wondered, particularly about writing, and coming into the publishing industry. A theme throughout your book were the instances when you faced systemic racism, particularly working in the government. One of the lines was “having to work twice as hard, to be seen as half as good”, as some of your peers. Do you see those issues arising in the publishing industry, and do you have thoughts on how that could be better?
DM: Fortunately, my first book, Mamaskatch, that won the Governor General’s award, and that just cleared the field for so many things. My career has been wonderful, and I haven’t felt any systemic barriers in the publishing industry, to the contrary, I felt I had so many amazing opportunities. Part of it because of the subject matter I write about. There’s one slight angle but it’s not huge: developing writers, for example, might approach me as an expert on the subject matter of Indigenous issues but not simply as a writer. Not as an expert in that field, so that’s kind of unfortunate. But I think that’ll change.
SR: I was wondering, you spoke a little earlier about how the storytelling was sometimes short stories within a bigger story. I got the sense that many of the stories were organized through place. It starts in Yekooche, and then there’s a part when you are working in Vancouver and later Buenos Aires. It seemed to move depending on where you were geographically. I wondered how is that process to you, or organizing those stories, how do you decide where to put them. Are there stories you end up moving around somehow?
DM: Right, when I prepared for Mamaskatch. and Peyakow, because they were sort of written at the same time. I had a collection of twenty-six short stories. So my first mentor, Betsy Warland, said well, just play with them, play with the order and see what happens.
I also did some research about the sequencing of stories, and the order of events, in fiction and non-fiction. I forget who said this, but one of the sources said if you’re going to ask people to do mental gymnastics in relation to a situation in time, in your work, then you better have a very good reason to do that, because it’s work for people to flip back, this took place in 1945, this took place in 1977, then 1930 and back to ‘99. if you’re doing that to people, you better have a good reason, because people have to work, mentally. So I ended up putting things mostly chronologically. I just did that, I said well I’ll just try, putting things in order in both Mamaskatch and Peyakow, and it was just great and it worked out very well. Even though I say, and it’s true, that Cree storytelling is in spirals, rather than linear.
SR: I loved the decision to end the book on a vision, and there’s a sense of you finding your spirituality and really reconnecting with this throughout. Did the process of writing help you understand [your spirituality] better? Were there new things that came up as you wrote about that journey.
DM: There definitely were, I think a stronger connection with my ancestors, particularly those who I knew. Who lived, my great grandmother, I was in my twenties when she died, and my great grandfather- I was about eight or nine when he died. So a stronger connection with them, and also a powerful reflection on the relationship with my family, the ones who had passed, my mother, my father, my sister Debbie, and my trans sister Trina. A really powerful reflection on my relationship with them, in the past and also presently. That was quite a process. That was profound to go through that.
In terms of spirituality itself, yes it did give me more hope. The last chapter of Peyakow was based on two dreams that I had. One dream was this was partially inspired, even though it was from my subconscious, it was partially inspired by Gabriel García Marquez’s Cien años de soledad (100 Years of Solitude)— because in that book, people live 200 years; they don’t die, there are several generations that live simultaneously. So, in my subconscious, it sort of allowed my subconscious to go there. In this dream, I was going to have a birthday alone, and it was a significant birthday, and I was thinking “Gee, I’m going to be celebrating this birthday alone in my little home, that’s really sad”.
So the dream, everybody who had lived in my family for the past 200 years, came to life and came to visit. It was busy and it was lovely, and it was a phenomenal experience. That was one part of the dream, where everybody shows up to my real home, I have an acreage by the sea, and by the forest; so they came and set up camp in the forest and in my yard, and in the dream they were fishing, it was just amazing.
The second dream was about my great grandfather and it goes back to the Cree creation story, and so he built a boat, and we go out on the boat. And it turns out he was a visionary and he was telling us that we don’t need cellphones and if we can get back to our true roots we had telepathy. and he also projects the future, where we’ll replace wi-fi and Bluetooth with neural lace, embedded in the back of our neck— and that will enable us to communicate without any cellphones or devices like wi-fi or Bluetooth, so that was intriguing.
And he talked about travel, too, and we wouldn’t be using cars anymore, we would have individual aircraft devices. I could go from my home in Sooke to Victoria in one of these devices in about ten minutes. It was quite lovely, and it was getting “back to the future”; we’re on this boat that he builds and he was using telepathy to channel English, because he didn’t speak English and he wanted to speak to the younger ones. The funny thing was he spoke with an accent, and not a Canadian accent and of course everybody just cracked up, they thought that was so funny— and the younger people speak to him in Cree, they channel the waves for Cree language. that was a really lovely part of the book to work on, to write. It’s really optimistic at the end, I loved that. Because, there’s so so much evil in the world, and these days, with a capital, E — we need to counter that with some hope.
SR: It’s so insightful that he saw people in little vehicles flying around. And I watched something at the museum the other day, that they imagined we would travel around in a circuit above our cities in these individual pods.
Music is in [Peyakow] everywhere, there’s times you have a memory that’s connected to hearing a song in the car, or quite often you introduce a person through the sound of their voice, the timbre, the tone of their voice. Do you listen to music as you write? How does your work as a musician influence your writing?
DM: I always listen to music as I write, always, particularly if it’s a difficult passage emotionally, there was more of that in Mamaskatch than Peyakow. I always put on music. There’s a French soprano, Emma Shapplin whom I just love, she’s been my go-to for about twenty years now and I put that on when I’m writing and, in the background, when I’m working on difficult passages.
I’m listening to jazz usually, as I write. I think it does open the mind and calms me and gives me the focus to stay still and write, as opposed to going about the house and doing other things. It gives me focus and staying power for my writing practice. But also I sing, and I have to sing every day. I do that in part just to practice, because the good musicians I listen to really inspire me. I know they work hard, people think you can get up there and it looks so easy, but it’s real work, just like any other instrument, you have to practice. I sing daily, it puts me into a great space, which keeps me grounded and healthy, which enables me to keep writing.
SR: What are you working on now, will you write another novel?
DM: I’m working on two projects right now. The first is a creative nonfiction book. I think the title will be “The Daze After and the Days Before.”
It deals with four themes, its situated in time from 2018- when Mamaskatch was published and I won the Governor General’s award- and it’s how becoming a successful writer like that, from a beginner to an award winner, overnight, how that impacted my life. There’s been tremendous things that have happened, so that’s the thread of continuity throughout the book. And then I get into the rise of the right, around the world and particularly in North American, and the impact of that on my life, living in a small town like Sooke, and my family still in rural Alberta.
Then Covid came along, and me spending nine months in my little house, by the forest and on the beach and then how those two things melded together, and changed how things were managed—the conspiracy theories that came about, Q-Anon and the acts of the anti-vaxxers and the huge and even violent movement there.
The last theme is reconciliation, on a personal level. As a result of the publication of my book, I had phenomenal reconciliation, with my grade 2 teacher, she read my book, someone gave her a copy and she wrote to me on Facebook. My primary school sweetheart, who I had a huge crush on, from grade 1-4, somebody gave her Mamaskatch because she’s mentioned in it, so somebody gave it to her, and we reconciled, so we wrote each other daily for about six weeks and my grade 9 debating partner, and my family, a lot of my family hadn’t seen me, my oldest cousin, who is 77 or so, they got in touch with me and said we had to have a feast to honour, to honour you and to honour your accomplishment. Then of there was the residential school thing that happened, the really sad, tragic, the reveal of nmarked graves in residential schools across the country. That floored me. I was flying high and I was floored with that news. Including the residential schools that my mother went to in Northern Alberta, they found something like 135 unmarked graves up there.
I’m working on that book, and I’m working on another novel. The title of that is “The Negotiator”. The premise is my life, when I was working as a treaty negotiator. But only the premise, the protagonist isn’t me, he’s not even remotely similar to me. The protagonist is a new character who has come to me, and he’s like my invisible friend right now, he’s with me so much of the time. And I think to myself, his name is Kihîw which means eagle in Cree, I say well “what would Kihîw do in this situation, what would Kihîw be thinking”. Other things are coming to me, too, in dreams. I’m getting input about the novel and it’s so exciting and I’m thrilled.
The non-fiction project is kind of “ripening” right now, I have a solid first draft and I’ve set it aside to ripen for a few months. And I’m working on the novel. I learned that from Shayna Lambert, my second mentor, she puts projects aside for six months, and then does her own edit, before she sends them to other people. I can’t do six months, but I can handle two or three months.
SR: Is there anything perhaps we haven’t talked about yet, that you’d like to?
DM: I’m really happy that you looked at Peyakow;I’m thrilled. I love that book, and I think it’s a really powerful book. Because it followed in the shadow of Mamaskatch, so it was in the shadows, but I think it stands on its own as a piece of work.