Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land by Toni Jensen
“This isn’t a story, then, so much about being Indian in America or even being Métis in America. It’s a story about being those things and striving toward whiteness; it’s about the cost of that striving.”
Toni Jenson’s voice is one we need in this country. Her work, Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, brings to the fore an image of America we would rather normalize or ignore. Jensen confronts the language we choose to tell our stories of racism, white adjacency, violence, gender, family, poverty, sex, and how we carry these narratives bodily. There is a dissonance created between the poetic language she writes in and the subject she writes about. The elegant prose pushes up against images of profound injustice. She shows through uncontestable facts, unrelenting repetition, and visceral imagery that language matters, words matter, images matter as we seek to bring to light personal and cultural histories of indigenous people long ignored and denied.
As Tommy Orange did for Urban Native Americans, Toni Jensen sheds light on what it is to be Metis in this, “our America.” She does this by first clinically defining the word Metis, according to Webster. This repeated reference to Webster’s Dictionary happens in every chapter. The constant dissection of words almost acts as an illustration of how we quantify and categorize everything from objects to people.
“Though the word Métis doesn’t join the lexicon until 1816, at least according to Webster’s, it too first defines the people by the European concept of “mixing,” as “a person of mixed blood,” and adds, ‘especially, often capitalized: the offspring of an American Indian and a person of European ancestry.’”
Jensen goes on to extend this definition by adding additional research and sometimes personal experience to make a fuller vision of what we are trying to name. Ultimately, “being Métis is about land and people and belonging.” She complicates and simplifies at the same time.
Carry does not stop with defining Metis. Jensen adds her own confrontations with stereotypes. She writes about her father’s drinking, but then explores all the ways it can be categorized and perceived by others. He is Metis, and with this comes America’s stigma of Native Americans being drunks. But Jensen reminds us,
“My father’s drinking is about many things, not the least of which is the pressure to fit in, to comply with the dictates of whiteness... When I show him day drinking, then, please note there are other day drinkers lined up beside him on their stools...They are all striving to be better at whiteness, at prosperity. They are all failing. These are not stories of people embedded deeply in culture, but, rather, they are the stories of the people who left. These are American stories; these are stories of trying to move into the American space we call whiteness, about trying to live, instead, there.”
Jensen goes on to challenge the complicated concept of what it is to be a “good woman” and challenges the idealization of domesticity and compliance, even in the face of abuse. She explores the many ways we categorize women, including the gendered connotation we attach to women labeled difficult when in the author’s experience, these are the women she gravitates towards, those who choose to live outside conformity. She explores the mythos America builds by attaching power to one gender, one class, one experience over another.
Especially poignant for me, were her thoughts on violence. She takes issue with categorizing violence into domestic and extraordinary. In defining it this way, she asserts, we normalize one while sensationalizing the other. She starts with the narrow lens of an experience her nephew has at a family gathering where he is mistaken as black and dangerous. No matter he was invited, no matter his uncle owns the lake-adjacent house, no matter he is studying Biology at a university. In this moment, they are Black boys in a wealthy suburb, by a private lake. For me, the scene brought back the images of Ahmaud Arbery being gunned down for running in a neighborhood near his home, or Elijah McClain choked to death and shot with ketamine because he was “suspicious,” or Christian Cooper being reported to police as dangerous because he asked a woman to leash her dog. In all of these situations we see skin color, not people.
She widens the lens to incorporate larger incidents of violence including the shooting at Pulse in Orlando, and the terrorism in Charlottesville, as well as many others. Jensen proposes a change in the language we use to define types of violence we see as separate to examine the intersections and see them not so much “...places of sharp corners, but, rather, as places that exist most often in the actual, in the physical, in the soft bodies of our children, of ourselves.” She also asserts that domestic abusers do not isolate themselves, “...they leave their domiciles at regular intervals. They go to the nightclub in Orlando; they go to the concert in Las Vegas; they go to the elementary school in Newtown; they go to all the places in between—they take down their guns and go.” Jensen exposes the interconnected threads of violence, and the tapestry it weaves in our homes, schools, and country through the rhetoric of freedom, and the right to bear arms.
Though slim in volume, Carry stoutly shows its powerful relevancy to so much going on in our world chapter after chapter. Each one opens and finishes as stand-alone essays, seemingly disconnected in narrative arc, but the unity displays itself in retrospect as you look at their commentary on “this, our America,” and all the ugly parts we don’t want to confront. Each chapter I found myself interrogating my own “...white privilege raincoat,” and how because of white skin and middle class income, I am not afraid of routine traffic stops; I don’t worry about going to the doctor; I can protest and vote without fear of being choked to death; I don’t think about the stolen land my university probably sits on, and I don’t have to worry about the erasure of my culture or heritage. Jensen opens the door to her life and welcomes readers in to glimpse what an indigenous woman carries with her daily — tangible and intangible. Carry is an important read that asks us to reevaluate the language we use to define and how that language comes with an inherent power structure crafted to disadvantage one race over another, one culture over another, one economic class over another, one neighbor over another. We can choose to tell a different story, and Toni Jensen has given us the tools to start writing it.
Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land
by Toni Jensen
2020. 304 pages
About Carrie Honaker
Carrie Honaker is a writer currently based in Panama City Beach, Florida. She is a voracious reader and kitchen sorcery addict who found her inner writer at the Blue Ridge Writing Project in 2010. Most days you can find her plowing through a book, writing or dabbling with a new recipe. Currently, she is working on a memoir encompassing themes of motherhood, food, and loss interspersed with family recipes. You can find her on Twitter: @writeonhonaker, Instagram: @corkdorkva, and on her blog Strawbabies and Chocolate Beer.
