A Two-Spirit Journey is a memoir about a Objibwe-Cree elder — read an excerpt now
Shayla Stonechild will champion Ma-Nee Chacaby's memoir on Canada Reads 2025
In A Two-Spirit Journey, Ma-Nee Chacaby, an Objibwe-Cree lesbian who grew up in a remote northern Ontario community, tells the story of how she overcame experiences with abuse and alcohol addiction to become a counsellor and lead Thunder Bay's first gay pride parade.
A Two-Spirit Journey will be championed by podcaster and wellness advocate Shayla Stonechild on Canada Reads 2025.
The great Canadian book debate will take place on March 17-20. This year, we are looking for one book to change the narrative.
The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and on CBC Books.
You can read an excerpt from A Two-Spirit Journey below.
My grandmother was a spiritual person. She believed in the sacred powers of giizhik (cedar), wiiskwemushgan (sweetgrass), nasemaa (tobacco), and mashkodewashk (sage). She used them to cleanse and bless people when they came to her for spiritual help. She did this by smudging, which means she talked with the Great Spirit while she burned sweetgrass or sage, using her hand or a feather to guide the smoke gently over a person's head and body. I remember her smudging me like that while praying for me to learn to speak Cree and Ojibwe when I was small. From time to time my kokum also went into the bush to fast and cleanse herself physically and spiritually in a madodoigan (sweat lodge).
In Ombabika, people also sometimes came to my grandmother when they were sick. She prepared herbal medicines for them to drink or rub on their bodies. Because of her blindness, I helped her to find the specific flowers and plants she wanted gathered during the spring, summer, and fall. She also made a mashkikiiwazh (medicine bag) for each of our family members to wear, to protect and care for us. These were small, beaded, leather pouches with sacred items permanently sealed in them. They were to be worn around the neck. I recall she once made a medicine bag for my aunt Renee's son, Justin, after his parents complained that he misbehaved. I remember her telling them, "Oh, well, that's just the way he is. You have to accept him." Justin was a few years older than me. He had lived with my grandmother before I came to live with her, and sometimes he still came to stay with us for a few nights. Justin was a bit jealous that I got to live with our kokum all of the time. He liked to tell me that he was her first baby.
My grandmother was a storyteller, so at social events people gathered around the open fire to hear what she had to say. One of the main characters in her stories was a traveller named Chacaby, who could transform. Sometimes Chacaby was a man and sometimes Chacaby was a woman, depending on the story. My grandmother also told a legend about a woman who created the first madayigan (drum). She explained that, a long time ago, the men in one community had all gone away to war and not returned. When a woman from that same community was walking in a forest one day, she heard a voice that told her to make a song to bring the men back. Soon after, that woman went hunting and killed an elk. After she had prepared the elk's hide, she had a vision of making a large circular shape, like a section of a hollowed-out tree trunk, and stretching the hide tightly over it to make music. And that is how she made the first drum. When she played a song on that drum, it brought many people together, including the men who had travelled far away.
When she played a song on that drum, it brought many people together, including the men who had travelled far away.
I did not always understand the stories my grandmother told. Sometimes I listened and enjoyed them, and sometimes I found them boring, so I left. But I remember how adults listened closely to her and often laughed heartily while she told a tale. When I was about seven or eight years old, some white people came to interview my grandmother. I realize now that they wanted to record her stories, but at the time I did not understand what they were doing. My kokum was supposed to answer their questions inside of a tent, using an Anishinaabe interpreter. The white men had set up a battery outside the tent, and connected it via wires running underneath the canvas to a machine with big wheels inside. I watched a man set it up and test the equipment by talking into the machine and then playing back his own voice. I understood they wanted to do the same thing with my grandmother's voice, but I feared they might capture her entirely, and keep her inside the machine. So I waited outside the tent until I heard my grandmother say, "Eya (Yes)," agreeing to talk. They then played her voice back as a test. As soon as I heard that, I took the little hatchet I carried on my belt, chopped through the wires, and moved away quickly. It took a while for the men to figure out why their machine had stopped working. They said they couldn't repair it there, so they just wrote down my grandmother's responses to their questions instead. Nobody knew who had cut the wires, except for my grandmother, who guessed it was me. She talked to me about it later and tried to reassure me that they would not have hurt her.
My grandmother had a gentle way of teaching me when I had done something I should not have done. When it was something serious, she took me out on Blusky Lake in a canoe to talk to me. On the lake, I could not run away, so I had to listen to her. That worked very well. My grandmother also told me stories to teach me lessons, and sometimes maybe to frighten me away from dangerous activities, like taking off into the snow to go sledding by myself. She probably worried about me being out alone in the bush in winter. One time I remember she told me a story about travellers who stayed overnight in a little dome they built out of snow and branches. While they were there, she said, the people saw someone speed toward them moving incredibly fast. When he arrived at their dome's entrance, they saw he was huge—much bigger than normal people—and he had eyes like blue knives, which they thought might be made of frost. That story frightened me. For a little while, it made me too scared to go far away to toboggan each morning. But soon I got over it, and continued as I had before.
My grandmother was always very loving with me.
My grandmother was always very loving with me. When other people called me weird or poisonous, she would tell me that I was curious and smart in ways that some people did not understand. She said that in my life I would have a long and difficult bimose (walk or journey), and I would have to be courageous, like a warrior. As a small child I did not understand her. I thought she meant that one day I would actually stand up and walk a great distance. She used to touch my hands and tell me, "When you grow up, you're going to be a great teacher of our people. You will help others. You will be a medicine woman."
Copyright © Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer 2016. Published by University of Manitoba Press. Reproduced with permission from the Publisher. All rights reserved.
