Dreaming of Justice

Dreaming of Justice

A review of Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Dreams of Doom” in Take Us To Your Chief And Other Stories (Douglas & McIntyre, 2016)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Dream catchers have fascinated the cultural imagination and been used by white authors as a plot feature in their stories (such as Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher), so it is powerful that Drew Hayden Taylor, an aboriginal person, reclaims the image of the Dream catcher in his fiction. “Dreams of Doom” is a story about government conspiracy connected to Dreamcatchers. Pamela Wanishin, a writer for a small, Aboriginal newspaper, gets mailed a thumb drive full of secret government documents and finds herself at the heart of a conspiracy by the Canadian government to control and further oppress Indigenous peoples.

This is a common tale of a reporter who finds herself followed by government agents who want to silence her, but Hayden Taylor puts a spin on the tale, combining the traditional story with aspects of the Canadian government’s oppression of Aboriginal people. Hayden Taylor uses metatextual approaches to point out the way that he has played with a common text by putting an Indigenous slant to stories, even referring to some of these stories in his tale, but with names altered to highlight their Indigenous connection like All the Prime Minister’s Men, Ojibway Holiday, The Blue Heron Brief, and The Girl with the Orca Tattoo. He also connects the events of his story to other aspects of Canada’s oppression of Indigenous people, bringing up attempts in the past to pacify First Nations through things like the White Paper, the Oka Crisis, Ipperwash, and Idle No More.

Hayden Taylor disrupts Canada’s image of itself as a “Just Nation” by illustrating the history of injustices the country has perpetrated as well as the country’s ability to hide its injustices and erase them from history or wash over them. As for the connection to Dream catchers, I will leave that for Hayden Taylor to tell you all about in “Dreams of Doom”.

To discover more about Take Us To Your Chief, visit http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com/book/take-us-to-your-chief

To find out more about Drew Hayden Taylor, visit https://www.drewhaydentaylor.com

Derek Newman-Stille

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