The Frog Lake Massacre was a defining moment in western Canadian history. In 1885, a group of young Cree warriors led by war chief Wandering Spirit attacked a settlement in early April, killing nine of them. Three others were taken as hostages. The uprising was all in response to unfair treatment by the Canadian government, and by its agent, Thomas Quinn.
The response by the government was to quell the rebellion and to hang both Wandering Spirit and five other warriors. Big Bear, another Cree leader, was jailed for three years for treason, even though he opposed the attack.
For one former St. Albert author, the events spurred a book of poetry, the likes of which I’ve never seen. Now based out of Calgary, Paul Zits appears to have artistic flair. Perhaps that’s why Massacre Street seems so experimental, so creative and so captivating.
It seems like an unlikely subject for a book of poetry but the 34-year-old, an admitted history buff, explained that it was absolutely perfect for his purposes.
“I love prairie history. I think it’s fascinating,” he began mentioning that he never pursued that study as an academic.
It wasn’t until he picked up one book that prompted him to merge his literary talent with his passion for the past.
He was at Fort Edmonton when he first picked up Son of the Fur Trade, a book that detailed the memoirs of Johnny Grant. The Fort Edmonton-born man later played a role of great importance to the Riel Resistance.
“I was actually quite taken by this memoir, that he dictated to his wife before he died. The book captures a really unique and idiosyncratic language from the period. I found that the prairies – especially what was captured in this text – to be this strange and surreal place.”
Idiosyncratic and strange might also be apt adjectives for the poems themselves. Zits used collage and cut-up techniques to challenge the recorded history and put the difficult past into the context of the present. Even describing the literary tactics sounds idiosyncratic and strange.
For example, some of the poems read like straight court transcripts (“I simply allow a single speaker and I string their statements together and allow that speaker to speak in a monologue just to capture the language”) while others are extrapolations of personal account, shifting from person to person. Another poem, titled “And the official twenty-three words of Big Bear leftover from his trial (translated from Cree)”, is exactly what it says it is: 23 simple words, alphabetized and taken totally out of context and sentence, leaving the reader only to absorb a small breath of the atmosphere of the punishments laid out.
“We have a lot of words that are attributed to Big Bear but essentially that has been filtered through other speakers.”
“There are limitations. There’s obviously a language barrier. I wasn’t able to go in the direction of perhaps interviewing people who come from an oral tradition. My own particular interest was with archival material which in itself is quite limiting. It’s a view of history that’s quite biased, quite polluted… it often has an agenda.”
Zits celebrated the official launch of his book on Tuesday. He said he has other events planned in support of his book but nothing around St. Albert just yet.
Review
Massacre Street<br />Poetry by Paul Zits<br />128 pages<br />$19.95<br />University of Alberta Press<br />For more information, call Cathie Crooks at 780-492-5820 or visit www.uap.ualberta.ca.
