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Windspeaker.com Books Feature Writer
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Balance in his novel Ninan: Tiohtiá:ke, Montreal is important, says author Michel Jean, but it has little to do with being a former journalist or news anchor. It has to do with being Innu.
“I see both sides of the fence, and I wanted to tell the story from both sides of the fence. Being a journalist helped me doing the research. But when I write a book, I don't feel compelled to, or an obligation to, balance the story as we do in a report,” said Jean, whose roots are in Mashteuiatsh in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec.
“For me, I don't exaggerate things. So if something happens in my book…my characters aren't going to do things that normally in real life they wouldn't be doing. So that's where the constraint is to me,” he said.
Ninan, the English translation of Tiohtiá:ke, was published in French in 2021. It tells the story of NHL-bound 18-year-old Élie Mestanapeo who is banished from his Innu community of Nutashkuan, a First Nation reserve in Quebec.
The impetus for the character came from a real-life situation Jean was made aware of. As a reporter, he kept seeing an Indigenous man on the subway and on the streets and “he was always drunk.”
A friend told him the man’s name and that he had been banished from Pessamit, a First Nation reserve and Innu community in Quebec.
“So, I said, ‘Well, maybe I could inspire the story of his life, without being really his life’,” recalled Jean.
He was also looking to continue the story from his award-winning novel Kukum, the fictionalized account of his great-grandmother’s life.
“In Kukum, you see how Indigenous people are taken away, how they are brought to reserves, a lot of them live in difficult conditions. In the residential school, the drama of it…continues, goes on and we still live with the consequences. That's what I wanted to talk about,” said Jean.
In Ninan, Élie is charged with killing his alcoholic father and spends 10 years in jail. Upon release and his banishment, he heads south to Montreal where he starts out homeless. However, it doesn’t take long for him to find a supportive community with the Cree, Nakota, Inuit, Innu, Mohawk, and Atikamekw who come together in Cabot Square.
“I know our history is tough and difficult and it's colonization. It's difficult lives. It's residential schools and all those stories that I myself write about it. But if history is tough, not all of our stories are bad,” said Jean. “I wanted to put some light in the book…(because) Indigenous people, they know that our stories aren't always bad…even though it's often difficult…You should want to get the whole picture, not only focus on what is negative.”
All of the characters in Ninan are inspired by Indigenous people Jean observed in Cabot Square.
“As a journalist, I was often there and I was able to see how people lived there,” he said.
The Inuit sisters, Mary and Tracy Nappatuk, are based on twin sisters Jean used to see in the area, right down to Mary who is a missing a tooth. Jimmy, the Nakota man with the food truck, is based on two Mohawk women who would come in their old van with plastic tubs full of meals they handed out to people in the park. There are characters who leave the streets and characters who return just as there is in real life.
Jean fleshes out his characters fully in short chapters that are titled by a single word which puts “the reader in a mood where he's following the flow of the story that goes up and down” and provides rhythm to the storytelling.
He also fleshes out Ninan, the Atikamekw word for the territory that includes Montreal. (It is known as Tiohtiá:ke in Mohawk). It’s much more than the setting for the story. Ninan also means “we” or “us” in Innu-aimun.
“The territory for me is always a character because that's who we are. It seems to me like we don't exploit the territory, we live on the territory and we see ourselves as being protectors of the territory,” said Jean.
“I wanted to show that although Montreal is a big city, the territory is still there, and we are still there, even though few people see us. They live their life and they think we don't exist anymore, but we are still there. The mountain is still there, the river is still there, we are still there, and things can turn around.”
Works by Indigenous authors in Quebec are slowly growing in popularity, observes Jean. Tiohtiá:ke sold 65,000 copies.
“I don’t think it’s because people are racist. I think it's because in Quebec, the way they define their literature, Quebec's literature, it has a certain voice, a certain language, a certain way of telling things, characters. And the way Indigenous people write their stories often is different. We don't have the same stories. We don't have the same way of telling. And I think we're not considered as on the same level as Quebec writers in a certain sense,” said Jean.
However, the population is changing in Quebec, he points out, noting that the public treatment and subsequent death of Atikamekw woman Joyce Echaquan at the hospital in Joliette in 2020 “opened their eyes and they wanted to get more informed and started reading our stories.”
“The literary scene is evolving slowly but not, in my opinion, not as fast as the population, which is okay with me. Because a revolution never starts from the head. (It) always starts from the base. They'll have to follow one day,” said Jean.
On Sept. 15 Ninan will be released in English, translated by Susan Ouriou. Ouriou was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 2023 for translating Kukum from French to English.
Jean is pleased that Ninan will be available for all Canadians to read.
“For me, it's also very important that the book is being read across Canada because the story that the book tells is the same story happening right now in Calgary and in Vancouver and in Edmonton,” he said. “They are universal, so I'm very happy to see the book out in English, and I'm just hoping people will like it.”
Ninan is published by House of Anansi Press and can be ordered at https://www.indigo.ca/products/ninan-tiohtia-ke-montreal