Celebrated Sto:lo writer and activist Lee Maracle dead at 71
Her iconic books include Celia's Song, I Am Woman, My Conversations with Canadians and Ravensong
Celebrated poet, author and activist Lee Maracle has died at the age of 71 on Nov. 11, 2021, CBC confirmed with her family.
Maracle, a member of the Sto:lo Nation, is the creator of iconic books such as Celia's Song, I Am Woman, My Conversations with Canadians and Ravensong.
Maracle was born on July 2, 1950 in Vancouver to a Métis mother and Salish father. She was the granddaughter of Tsleil-Waututh chief Dan George.
Maracle grew up in a poor neighbourhood called North Shore mud flats in North Vancouver, east of the Second Narrows Bridge.
She spent some time in California before returning to Vancouver, where she would begin her writing career in the 1970s.
Maracle first began telling stories to her grandfather as a young girl.
"I recall him staring at me, going through all these emotional shifts, then all of the sudden he laughs and says, 'That's a pretty good story. Now I'm going to tell you one and you tell it back different, but the same,'" Maracle told As It Happens in 2019.
LISTEN | Lee Maracle on As It Happens:
Whole summers were spent that way, she said, playing the game of telling back stories "different, but the same," until storytelling became second nature to her. But she said the game came with a warning, too.
"Don't you ever lie to me again," Maracle remembers him saying.
A writer who forged her own path
Maracle published her first book, the autobiographical novel Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, in 1975. It was one of the first Indigenous works published in Canada and began a critically acclaimed and award-winning career in writing, teaching and activism.
"I was told, at the time I wrote Bobbi Lee, that they didn't publish books by Indians and that we couldn't write," Maracle told CBC Books.
"A leftist publishing house, part of the Liberation Support Movement, actually published it initially. Then it gained notoriety and people liked it.
"It was an oral project, it was part of a course that my editor was teaching. It was teaching us to do life histories because I wanted to do other people's life histories. But he liked the book and thought we should get it published. He went around and shopped it around, but he ended up publishing it himself because people didn't want it and believed that 'Indians can't read.'
"It was not terribly well received, but it was an oddity. I was the oddity, actually. 'Who wrote this for you?' It was always the first question from the audience. And I said I wrote it. But I also spoke it; I'm an oral historian."
In those early days Maracle said many Indigenous people came to her readings and were thrilled to see an Indigenous woman sharing her story.
"I think we were afraid to pick our bundles up in the '70s. We'd just come out of residential school, boarding school and we were afraid of our own cultures. We were afraid of our own languages, afraid of our own our own stories," she told Unreserved in 2019.
"It was like a revolution."
LISTEN | Lee Maracle on Unreserved:
Maracle was also an outspoken activist, founding the the En'owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, B.C. and speaking out on issues such as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the Canadian government's treatment of Indigenous communities.
She had taught courses about Indigenous literature and storytelling at several universities across Canada. She had recently returned to B.C., to teach at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
A lasting legacy
Maracle would go on to publish more than a dozen books, ranging from fiction, including 1993's Ravensong and 2014's Celia's Song, to nonfiction, such as 1998's I Am Woman and 2017's My Conversations with Canadians, as well as poetry, essays and anthologies like 2015's Memory Serves, which anthologizes Maracle's lectures on Sto:lo history, memory and philosophy.
Celia's Song would be her final work of fiction. Its main character, Celia, first appeared in Ravensong. Celia is now in her 40s, and has lost her only son to suicide. As the novel progresses, a five-year-old relative endures a brutal assault, and Celia and her family are left reeling in its aftermath.
Maracle's work would influence many Indigenous writers of the next generation, including Cherie Dimaline, Katherena Vermette, Gregory Scofield, Joshua Whitehead, Waubgeshig Rice and Billy-Ray Belcourt.
She raised me into a space where I could partake in ceremony & community, and, in a way, she gifted me the rock i needed to my medicines when it came to my own voice and confidence in my identity.<br><br>thank you Lee Maracle. you’re kokom to us all and my medicines are for you today.
—@JWhitehead204"They engage with me more than I engage with them. I know Cherie Dimaline and Katherena Vermette always sing my praises every chance they get," Maracle told CBC Books in 2020.
"I help people out — and then you have to let them have the floor. It would be ridiculous not to. You have to praise them and encourage other people to read them. It's a groundswell that's going on with these young writers; I've dreamed of it happening."
One of her last books was the poetry collection Hope Matters, which she co-wrote with her daughters, Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter.
LISTEN | Lee Maracle on The Next Chapter:
In 2018, she was awarded the Toronto Harbourfront Prize for her contributions to literature in Canada. She was also named to the Order of Canada that same year.
Reflecting on her career in 2020, Maracle said her greatest success was her ability to make a living writing.
"I've made my living here. That's all I can say. You can make your living writing if you are true to yourself and you fall into your own story."
With files from Unreserved, CBC News and As It Happens
