Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway
I had never heard of this novel, first published more than twenty years ago, until I read Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed. Whitehead’s tale of processing daily life, memory, and connection to the world and community centers around a young indigiqueer man and glitter princess who is finding his way in the city while simultaneously preparing for a return to the Rez where he grew up. While the reference to Kiss of the Fur Queen made in Jonny Appleseed is only a passing one, following this line of connection proved rich and revelatory.
Kiss of the Fur Queen is humorous, visionary, profound, modern, timeless, and full of heartache. At the heart of the novel is the Okimasis family, Cree Indians who live in Northern Manitoba and provide for themselves through their connection to the land: hunting caribou, fish, and other animals for fur. Abraham Okimasis, world champion dog sled racer, and Mariesis Okimasis are the roots of this family, who not only bring it into being but also attempt to hold it together even as the violent, assimilating forces of White colonizers insinuate over the years, tearing it almost inexorably apart.
This novel is “about” a lot of things: what it’s like to grow up in a tight-knit, rural, majority Indigenous community; the trauma of boarding schools for Indigenous youth; the alienation of feeling one’s culture denigrated, suppressed, and disrespected; the simultaneously healing and damaging possibilities inherent in making art and being family. The way these threads of content are woven, through dream and vision, through the voices and appearances of trickster godxs, through a narrative that appears chronological on its surface but ultimately reveals itself to be something much deeper, a gleeful and glimmering snow-spiral of fate, identity, spirituality, and family.