In this tremendous autobiography, Ma-Nee Chacaby recounts more than sixty years of her life with stunning detail. This is a fairly short book, densely packed with so many years and hardships. I keep typing out and deleting a list of Chacaby’s experiences, but I’d actually rather not summarize the entire book. This one is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in autobiography/memoir, in Indigenous history through a personal lens, in rural life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, in disability (Chacaby is blind), and/or in a wide LGBTQ2S+ canon. Chacaby very naturally realizes a highly intersectional story, but the book is first and foremost completely personal. ⁣
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This text was created through collaboration between Chacaby and Plummer, who conducted extensive interviews then wrote out and organized Chacaby’s narrative chronologically, using her exact wording often, and editing collaboratively to keep the entirety of the text in clear English that reflected Chacaby’s words and tone. It was fascinating to learn in the afterword some of the history of “told-to” narratives of Indigenous peoples’ lives, and how Plummer sought to incorporate both Western social science theory and Indigenous knowledge-sharing methods in the construction of this book. ⁣
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Cw for rape, sexual violence, domestic violence, homophobic violence, alcoholism and drug use, children taken to residential schools and by the foster care system, death both of children and adults.