Katherena Vermette's new novel, Real Ones, tells the story of two sisters dealing with their mother's falsely claiming Indigenous identity.Vanda Fleury/Supplied
In her award-winning, recently completed trilogy of novels, which includes The Break, The Strangers and The Circle, Katherena Vermette confronted a host of bleak issues – among them addiction, intergenerational trauma, racism and violence – affecting Winnipeg’s Michif (Métis) community, which happens to be her own (Vermette, like some of her characters, is also part Mennonite).
Her latest book, Real Ones, once again delves into fraught, not to mention highly topical territory through the story of sisters June and lyn Stranger (distant relatives of the Strangers of The Break et al.), a potter and Métis scholar, respectively, who are forced to deal with the fallout when their mother, Renee, an artist, is publicly – and accurately – accused of being a pretendian (someone falsely claiming Indigenous identity).
Vermette spoke to The Globe from her home in Winnipeg.
You would have had a lot of real-life material to draw from for this novel. Was there a single incident that tipped you to write it, or was it just the non-stop deluge of stories?
It was a bit of both. There was a lot that happened as I was exiting grad school about 10 years ago. And there’s just been an onslaught of all these different stories since. I found myself talking about them in different ways all the time, because, of course, we’re always asked these questions. We’re thinking about these things.
These race-shifting incidents make me think of my identity and my motivation for identifying publicly [as Métis]. But I was also really concerned with how it impacts us as Indigenous people, having to constantly explain ourselves and having our identities put in question because of other people’s choices.
Have you been affected personally by pretendianism?
I had colleagues, acquaintances who were accused of this. I had people in my circles who were directly impacted by different cases. And there were some where it was family members. There were some where it was people in positions of authority. I’m conscious of not naming any names, because every one of these people has a story around them: what their motivations were, where they might have been coming from, whether they were malicious or something a little less so.
And so many people around them were impacted. When you come into a position of authority – like a teacher – people look up to you. So it’s devastating for those of us who feel betrayed by this.
And that’s what I wanted to come back to, the individual Indigenous folks who were impacted, which is why I thought: If a mother is directly stealing stories from her children and mining her children for information, how devastating is that? And more importantly, how do these children, these strong Michif professional women, deal with that?
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Renee, the mother in question, is convinced she’s Indigenous by association because she was married to an Indigenous man, and because her children are. That struck me as naive and misguided, but not necessarily nefarious. Is that how you see her as well?
Renee was a side character in The Strangers. She was someone who really admired Michif culture, whereas the Stranger family never got to be proud of their culture. So Renee was coming from a point of privilege.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what motivates people like Renee. I think there’s a lot of immaturity in her. There’s a search for identity. She’s an artist. She’s just kind of exploring herself. She wants attention – that’s the word her daughters use. But I think she also wants to feel belonging. She wants to feel place and home.
I don’t know if she has any more serious mental-health issues than that, but she is definitely someone who’s stunted in her emotional growth. She’s taking cultures and adorning them like costumes over and over again.
But no matter what her motivations are, she’s still doing this thing that is inherently white supremacist. It is inherently consumeristic. It is inherently wrong.
Real Ones, like your previous novels, is written from multiple perspectives. What draws you to that form of storytelling?
I just find there’s so much richness in it, because you get to keep telling the same story over and over from different perspectives. I’m always looking at things like that. In order to make a decision, I have to think about things in 17 different ways.
I like throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. I love how characters play off one another and show their differences and interact in that difference. In a lot of ways, lyn and June feel like two sides of myself, battling it out. I think all the magic is there.
What didn’t you know about this story when you started it?
I didn’t know where it was going to end. I didn’t know what it was going to mean. But I knew I wanted to take two siblings who were very much like me, but also very opposite. So I started with them having conversations. Those conversations, in particular their telephone conversations, run like script because that’s how it felt to me. I was just hearing the voices.
Often when you have dialogue, there’s all the fluff around it that drives the points home. But I felt like their conversation really did that. It felt really spare in that way. I originally thought I was going to have a third point of view in Renee …
… It would have been a very different book if you’d done that.
Yeah. It was the right decision. For me, the greatest crime in race-shifting and pretending and imposing into this space, is the space they take up. They interpret our cultures in a way that is essentially wrong. Even if it’s highly educated, and even if they’re a total ally, if you’re not living the experience, you’re going to get things wrong.
I wanted the novel to be about lineage, so I didn’t want to give Renee any more space. And I didn’t want to give the pretendians any more space.
This interview has been edited and condensed.