Obituary: Lee Maracle, pioneering indigenous writer and poet

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Lee Maracle touched many people as a pioneering indigenous author, poet, teacher, and activist.

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But his journey was not always easy.

“My life has been a long, slow ride over very sharp rocks, but damn if I didn’t dance on every one of them,” he said.

Maracle died Thursday night at Surrey Memorial Hospital. She was 71 years old.

A member of the Sto: lo Nation and granddaughter of the late Tsleil-Waututh Nation Chief Dan George, Maracle was born in Vancouver on July 2, 1950. She grew up as one of eight children in North Vancouver, in a largely single household. parental environment.

“It was tough,” Maracle told The Vancouver Sun’s Marke Andrews in 1991. “My mother worked as hard as she could to keep us alive. We didn’t see much of it. “

Maracle dropped out of high school and traveled to California and Toronto before returning to BC to study at Simon Fraser University.

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In 1975, he wrote an autobiographical novel, Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, which Dallas Hunt of UBC’s English department calls one of the “foundational” works in Native American writing, along with Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed.

“It’s hard to overstate the influence Lee Maracle had,” Hunt said.

“Lee Maracle is central not only to what we study in indigenous studies and indigenous literary studies, but he is also a fundamental figure for many indigenous creative writers.”

But he had a hard time publishing it.

“They told me, at the time I wrote Bobbi lee They didn’t publish Indian books and we couldn’t write, ”Maracle told CBC Books.

It was initially published by an editorial that was part of the left-wing Liberation Support Movement.

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“It was not very well received, but it was a rarity,” he told CBC. “I was the oddity, actually. Who wrote this to you? It was always the first question from the audience. And I said I wrote it. But I also spoke it; I am an oral historian. “

But he couldn’t be denied that he went on to produce several influential novels and poetry books, including I Am Woman, Ravensong, and Celia’s Song.

“Today there is a wave of revolutionary indigenous literature due to the impact that Lee Maracle created decades ago,” Anishinaabe writer Waubgeshig Rice said on Twitter. “She always fought hard for indigenous stories and for those who carried them.”

Maracle taught at several universities, including a long stint at the University of Toronto. He also co-founded the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton.

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He received many honors throughout his life, including the Order of Canada. But he regretted how indigenous writers were received in Canada.

“In general, Canada puts Indigenous writers, in particular Indigenous women, last,” Maracle said at the 2020 Margaret Laurence Conference, an annual event organized by the Writers Trust of Canada on “the life of a writer.” .

“The conquest is understandable, but not acceptable. I understand this because if you accept that we are here first, you would lose your place here and all this conquest would be in vain.

“Although I am grateful for the opportunity to speak, I remain aware of how irrelevant he has made us to believe in his raison d’être of ‘pursuit of religious freedom’ that masks colonialism.”

He is survived by his two sons and countless admirers such as the indigenous writer Nilgaan Sinclair.

“I cannot imagine a world without Lee Maracle, a generous, kind and talented spirit that I was honored to listen to, learn from and spend time with,” Sinclair wrote on Twitter.

“Each indigenous writer follows in his footsteps. Travel well, auntie.

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