Chyana Marie Sage crafts a memoir steeped in Indigenous tradition and a strong sense of empathy
The Cree, Métis and Salish writer discussed Soft As Bones on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Chyana Marie Sage's memoir, Soft As Bones, is her quest to better understand the childhood trauma and abuse that scarred her family.
It's also a tapestry of poetry, history, Cree language, traditional ceremony and folklore — and delves into her experiences and those of her family with compassion and strength.
"Writing this book has been the most cathartic experience of my life," said Sage on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
"Healing is a lifelong journey and it never ends and we're continually growing. But writing this book allowed me to release, to process and release so much that was stored up in my nervous system."
Sage is a Cree, Métis and Salish writer from Edmonton who is now based in New York.
She joined Roach to share the catharsis she felt from writing about painful memories and the care she took to portray everyone with empathy.
Soft As Bones is a phrase that I understand has been part of your life for a few years now. It's your Instagram handle. It's the name of your YouTube channel and now the name of this book. What do those three words mean to you?
Soft As Bones is this phrase that came to me and this was years before the book was the book. I was living in London, Ont. at the time and I was sitting there just having my morning tea. Then, in my head, came the words "soft as bones."
I sat with it and I ruminated on it and it kind of encapsulates my philosophy on human beings, like specifically Indigenous folks, but really all people. It's this idea that we are equal parts strength as much as we are delicate and fragile, because our bones are our foundation, they're our building blocks.
They're very strong. They give us the capability to stand and give us structure, but yet they can also break very easily. However, they also have immense capacity for healing as well.
I just think it's this beautiful metaphor for us as human beings, like holding space for us to be strong as much as we are fragile, and allowing those to coexist together.
In the second section of the book, you share a lot about your mom's back story and her own struggles when she was growing up. What did you want readers to know about your mom?
How could I write this story without her and her voice and her experience? Because I needed to go back into the past, and not just my own past, but all of our past to to understand how all of our stories came together and and how what happened in our family unit unfolded.
Because on paper, you can look at a fact and think, "Well, oh my God, my mom fell in love with the guy that was in prison. Of course, this wasn't going to go well, right?"
And you can insert all of these judgments for what a terrible decision or this and that. But life is not that simple. Life is not black and white. And so I wanted to not just write, "OK, my mom fell in love with this charming man in prison, but it was how does one get to that point?"
I tried my best to do this with everyone in the book, but I really want people to understand the full scope of the person because we are not just the bad things we do. We are so much more than that.
I really wanted to do everybody justice, especially my mother, so readers could understand where she was at, mentally, in all of that.
One of the other things that you do in the second section of the book is you weave this story of your mom's teen years and that of your own teen years with the eight stages of a drum making ceremony that you attended when you were 14. What was important about that ceremony for you as a young person?
Oh, so much. It's an honour to be able to make your own drum. It's not something that everybody gets to do, even if you're Native.
It's like a coming of age thing, right? So now my time has come and I get to make this drum. And when you're making this drum, you're so connected to, A, everyone that's there, the elder that's leading it, and B, you really feel connected to your entire ancestry.
As much as there is a lot of difficulty in this memoir, it was really important to me to capture a lot of the beauty of my culture.- Chyana Marie Sage
The history and the importance of that is so strong because I just think about my family members who were not allowed to do that. And I'm not talking about my ancestors, I'm talking about my family members. I'm talking about my grandparents. I'm talking about my aunts and uncles who were in residential schools who are still alive today.
For me to be able to do that and have that ceremony was just a very emotional and powerful experience, even if at the time, at 14, you don't feel the scope of it then, but you know that it's special and you know that you're grateful for it.
It felt like such a celebration and a moment of beauty. Because as much as there is a lot of difficulty in this memoir, it was really important to me to capture a lot of the beauty of my culture because there is so much beauty and love and healing and connection in my culture.
I wanted to share a little bit of that with the rest of the world.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Sarah Cooper.
