Sharron Proulx

she is reading her blanket with her hands

my son tells me that he writes depressing songs sometimes. people
say to him that he must be depressed a lot. he says, no, that he’s
not. that he can’t write when he feels down anyway. he says he just
writes what he sees, man.

I like the way my son looks at things. for instance I very recently
unrepressed my metisness. I’'m metis. I used to say, “my mother
was metis.” I thought I wasn’t because I’'m white-skinned. I
thought it would be rude to say I’m metis because I don’t experi-
ence racism like my mother did. I’'m not oppressed in the unrelent-
ing way that aboriginal people are and I don’t want to be accused
of jumping on the minority bandwagon in order to appropriate
other people’s perspectives as a way of getting published. I think
that would be cheesy and unethical.

my son looks at me and gives me his best knowing smile. he says,
“mom, listen to what you’re saying. metis means mixed blood,
mom. you shouldn’t have to be ashamed of who you are.”

“you’re right,” I say. when my mom was a kid, the word was
“assimilate!” my mom and all her brothers and sisters were fos-
tered out into my dad’s family. I didn’t learn about my mom’s fam-
ily because nobody talked about them. they were all ashamed of
that family. my grandfather (my mother’s father?), they say he was
a falling-down drunk who did because he froze himself up to his
waist when he fell asleep in some gutter in the middle of winter.
I’ve never even seen a picture of him, they say he was white,
though. but then they said my grandmother was white too. she did-
n’t look too white to me. I met my grandmother but not very often
because after all she was a bad mother and she had her kids taken
away from her by the children’s aide. shameless, unnatural hussy,
is what my father said.

my father was an evangelical white supremacist. I wondered why
white skin was such an issue in my family.

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