For Rosh Hashanah 5784: An excerpt from "Israel - War and Peace," a work in progress for young people by Brian Henry

 

Chapter 3 – Jews, Christians, Muslims

3.1 Judaism – The religion of the Jews

Not all religions are the same. Judaism is the name of the religion of the Jewish people. Someone is born Jewish if their mother is Jewish. Whether their father is Jewish doesn’t matter. Only mothers count – that’s the rule. Or at least it’s been the rule for a couple thousand years and it’s the rule most Jews follow.

But Jews are famous for arguing with each other; indeed, arguing is a core Jewish value. So do all Jews say it doesn’t count if the father was Jewish? Of course not.

Besides being born Jewish, you can also become Jewish by converting. In that case, the new Jew, the convert, joins the Jewish people. In joining the Jewish people, the convert takes on the religion of the Jews.

The Jewish holy books known as the Torah, plus the books of the prophets and the writings {which Christians call the Old Testament} are mostly about the ups and downs of the relationship between the Jewish nation and God. The basic idea is that there’s a deal between God and the Jews called a covenant.

You may have heard of the 10 commandments. Jews traditionally count another 603 commandments in the Torah for a total of 613. These are the terms of the deal that God and the Jews made with each other. 

In the Torah, Jews are called the Chosen People.  Jews have been arguing about exactly what this means for a few thousand years, but the most basic meaning is that Jews have been chosen to follow those 613 commandments, and other people don’t have to.

This is not a list of 613 “thou shalt nots.” Many of the commandments are positive. For example, the first commandment in the Torah is “Go forth and multiply” – meaning, Go have kids!

So why did God decide Jews should observe these 613 commandments? Traditionally there are two answers to this:

(1) It’s a good way to live. Jews haven’t been chosen to uphold the Torah; rather the Torah is there to help Jews live good, meaningful lives.

(2) In observing all 613 commandments and more generally following Jewish values, Jews serve as “a light unto the nations” (which is a famous quote from the Jewish prophet Isaiah). That is, Jews are supposed to try to be a good example to the other nations of the world. This doesn’t mean Jews go around telling anyone else how to behave or how they ought to practice their religion. As far as Jews are concerned, that’s none of our business.

Jews who try to observe all 613 commandments are called Orthodox. But most Jews aren't Orthodox. Some aren't religious at all. Are they still Jews? Absolutely. 

What has Judaism given the world?

The Torah does have a lot of important stuff that other people and other religions have adopted, especially:

One God, creator of Heaven and Earth – not a whole sky full of squabbling gods and not a universe that’s all chaos, but an orderly universe that makes sense, and a world with moral values of right and wrong – not a world in which kings or other powerful people declare what’s right and wrong.

 

One humanity, made in the image of God, with every person in the world descended from the same original mother and father, Adam and Eve. All people, everywhere, are one family. And each and every person has something of God in them, which gives each person infinite worth, regardless of whether they’re rich or poor, king or beggar. 

The ideal of equality, as in the words of the American constitution: “All men are created equal,” comes originally from Jewish beliefs.

The ideal of human rights also comes from Jewish values. There can’t be such a thing as human rights for everyone without the idea of there being one humanity and moral values that apply to everybody.

Of course, the ideas of equality and human rights don’t just come from the Jewish tradition – really big ideas always grow out of more than one place.

 

The Ten Commandments. If you haven’t heard of these, Google them.

 

A heroic origin story about escaping from slavery in Egypt – Jews retell this story every year in the Passover celebration. {Yay, Moses!} The story of the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt has been made it into a couple big Hollywood movies. More importantly, the Passover story inspired both Black slaves escaping from slavery in the American south and the Civil Rights movement that created legal equality for Blacks throughout the US in the 1960s.

For Jews, freedom is a core value that, like equality, has been adapted by good people the world over.

 

Other core Jewish values

Besides a belief in freedom, we should add at least a couple more core Jewish values that much of the world has also come to value:

Literacy and study: Jews are known as the People of the Book, “the Book” being the Torah. But Jews don’t just read the Torah and our other holy books, we study them. And it’s not just rabbis or other religious leaders who study, but everyone. This weird habit of studying has long set Jews apart, because until modern times, most people in the world haven’t been able to read at all.

 

Argument for the sake of Heaven: People argue for two reasons: to get their own way or to get at the truth. Jews call argument to get at the truth, argument for the sake of heaven.

Besides the books of the Jewish bible, the other main Jewish text is The Talmud. This is a long collection of interpretations of the Torah and of Jewish law. Almost every page of the Talmud includes an argument among different rabbis about the correct interpretation – and all sides of the arguments are given.

That’s actually very weird. No one else has holy books that feature disagreements on every page. But it’s through arguing and testing ideas that we understand them. If all we have is a conclusion, we can’t really understand it.

Besides, as long as everyone is arguing for the sake of heaven, they're pursuing truth. And the pursuit of truth is sacred.

            This book you’re reading is meant as one long argument for the sake of heaven – me trying to explain a complicated history as best I can.

While the Jewish devotion to reading, studying, and the pursuit of truth come out of our religious practice, it has spilled over into Jewish culture in general. Traditionally, Jews study hard. These days, they go to university. They become writers, doctors and scientists. They also become comedians and accountants, artists and lawyers, diamond merchants and business people of all kinds – all sorts of things. As such, Jews keep giving to the world.

On our whole planet, there are just 16 million Jews. That’s .2% of the world’s population – just one out of every five hundred people is Jewish. Out of Nobel prize winners – that is people who have been recognized for making outstanding contributions to literature, medicine and science – more than 20% are Jewish, or one out of five. That’s one hundred times the number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners you’d expect from the number of Jews in the world.

Why so many?

People give different answers to that question, but a big part of the answer is simply that reading, studying, and the pursuit of truth are core Jewish values.

Connection to the Land of Israel

One more core Jewish value that’s highly relevant here: A connection to the Land of Israel or in Hebrew to Eretz Yisrael. Today, about seven million Jews live in Israel, a bit less than half the world’s Jewish population. But Israel isn’t just important to the Jews who live there; it’s important to most Jews everywhere, and always has been.

Jews aren’t just a religion. We’re a nation. And we’re not just a wandering nation. We have a home – Eretz Yisrael. At the spiritual centre of Israel is Jerusalem, which is also known as Zion, the nation’s capital and the site of the ancient temple. This is where the Jewish heart lives.

High Holidays prayers at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

Interview with Hart Snider, author of The Basketball Game

 

Hart and Brian

The Basketball Game is a fun and inspiring short film and graphic novel, but comes out of a dark story in Canadian history. For more than a decade, until 1982, Jim Keegstra taught children in Eckville, Alberta, that Jews are treacherous, subversive, sadistic, money-loving, power-hungry child killers, that Jews are behind a worldwide conspiracy to destroy Christianity, to create depressions, anarchy, wars, and revolutions.  And that the Holocaust was just a Jewish hoax.

Keegstra was eventually fired, stripped of his teaching licence, and convicted in the courts of willfully promoting hatred.

But what to do about his students who’d been taught that Jews are the devil?

The Basketball Game tells the story of a brilliant idea that the Edmonton Jewish community and the local school board came up with – invite students from Eckville High to the B’nai Brith summer camp in Pine Lake, Alberta, to actually meet some Jews. 

Originally, a short animated film for the National Film Board and now a graphic novel geared to children 12 and older, The Basketball Game is Hart Snider’s memoir of that memorable day, back when he was a nine-year-old kid and these other kids who’d been taught Jews have horns came to play basketball.

I interviewed Hart Snider for The J [The interview has been tidied for brevity and clarity]:

Brian Henry: Welcome to The J. Glad to meet you online. [I hold up The Basketball Game.]

Hart Snider: Oh, cool – you have the book!

Brian: The Basketball Game was first a short film for the National Film Board back in 2011.

Hart: Finished in 2011 and I think had its first screening in 2012.

Brian: What led you to make the film?

Hart: It grew out of me telling the story ever since it happened back in 1983. A workshop at the National Film Board led to this five-minute version of the story. Through animation I was able to show what happened and how I felt about what happened.

Brian: So you were nine back then. To clarify, these students from Eckville, they were a lot older than you?

Hart: Yeah, Jim Keegstra taught grade nine and grade twelve social studies. It was a junior high and high school, so that was grade seven to grade twelve. There was definitely an age difference, and I tried to get that across in the film and the book. The kid having a mustache was something I both remembered and a signifier of the age difference.

Brian: How did you decide to turn the film into a book?

Hart: From the very beginning I’ve loved graphic novels and comic books, so the part of the story when you see me at camp reading this Super Mensch comic – that was me. From nine up to now, I’m still reading comics and graphic novels. The idea of doing it as a book was always sort of there. And there was a treatment of the imagery in the film so that it had an old-used-book texture on top of all the frames, because I felt it was like some story that got left behind in a cabin, and all these years later it’s being discovered.

The NFB collaborates with Firefly Books to turn some of their animated films into books. I proposed doing my film as a graphic novel incorporating the original art from the film, but getting to fill out the story, because in graphic novel format I could add more context – a map, a glossary. It’s got some thought-provoking questions at the end, and I was hoping, just as the film has been, the book could be a resource to teachers in schools and to parents.

Brian: I notice the questions at the end were done by two other people {Benje Bondar and Anna-Mae Wiesenthal}.

Hart: Yes, two teachers. [The Discussion Questions] were based off the questions they had talked about in class after showing the film. Benje, I actually know from going to camp BB.

Brian: I was looking at the Glossary and thinking, Wow, define Holocaust Denial in 30 words or less in a way that’s helpful to a 12-year-old.

Hart: Yeah, it’s a challenge. And twelve years old is the age that Holocaust education does start so that’s why we have 12 and up as a guide.

Brian: In the ten years between the film and the book, did you rethink things?

Hart: I think the world changed on me. When I was making the film, I was looking back on something I remembered, and I was learning things about what Keegstra had taught in his class, things I’d never heard of before. And I feel now ten years later, I’m seeing some of those things in the news or talked about online and in social media and I’m realizing just like in 1983 when the community had this response to it, that it’s something now that parents and kids and teachers need to talk about, because it’d be nice if they’d heard of it before they might see some of these ideas.

Brian: When you say, “I’m seeing some of those things,” what things?

Hart: Conspiracy theories, which was at the heart of what Keegstra was teaching. I think they’re repeated online now in a way Keegstra couldn’t have imagined. I’m hoping the story of what happened back then can be a positive way to talk about some of these antisemitic ideas.

Brian: I remember the Keegstra affair well, but I never heard this story of the kids coming to Camp BB before now.

Hart: Well, no. In the Red Deer Advocate article at the back [of the book], the Principal of Eckville High is saying we agreed to keep this out of the press. So it was intentional. The CBC was there making a documentary, and the New York Times. But this part of the story was not talked about.

Brian: You’ve got 31 editing credits listed on IMDB {International Movie Data Base} and three writing credits and numerous other film credits, but this is your first book. What was that like?

Hart: I did end up finding similarities. [In both the film and the book] it’s how do these words and these pictures fit together? Both are driven by creating a sense of empathy in the viewer. They’re a way to tell personal stories, real stories. Both my films The Basketball Player and Shop Class are autobiographical, and I was very influenced to make them based on some of the graphic memoirs I’ve read. Maus had a huge impact on me, and the writers Harvey Pekar, Gene Luen Yang – there are all these brilliant graphic memoirs that I love reading, and it’s exciting that I finally got to adapt one of my films into one.

Brian: What do you like most about the book?

Hart: Wow.

Brian: Or what’s one thing you like a lot?

Hart: [Moans] Oh, gosh.

Brian: Okay three things.

Hart: It’s definitely the art. Seeing Sean’s art in a book format, because it’s so great. I spent a few months back in 2011 working with him and it turned into this film and then I spent years adapting the film into this book – it happened over four years. And I was carefully thinking: This frame or this frame – which really best does it? I appreciated his art so much that to see it in book form and get to hold it and to look closely at the drawings, it’s endlessly thrilling to me.

It’s been really fun sharing it with friends and family, as the book has just come out – this is a few days after the release – and getting to talk to people who were there [at Camp BB] or who I’ve included in some way in the book. It’s been a thrilling few days.

I’m also starting to hear from people who love graphic novels. A high school teacher from Alberta reached out to me and said, “This will be a mainstay in my social studies class.” That was probably the best thing I’ve heard so far.

Brian: I read a lot of books – it’s kind of my job – and this one works really well. The big turning point in the book when the other kid says, “Hey, nice shot” …

Hart: Yeah, it gets me. Even though I know it’s there. I read it and I feel emotional every single time. And it’s what I remember about the game: being really scared at the start and then this easing of everything where it became the other team just being other kids playing basketball with us.

Brian: Well Hart, congratulations. It’s really good short film and a great book.

 ***

The Basketball Game by Hart Snider, art by Sean Coverton, from Firefly Books, is available here. Watch The Basketball Game at the NFB site here.

Brian Henry is a writer, editor, creative writing instructor, and publisher of the Quick Brown Fox blog. He was a book reviewer for Books in Canada and The Toronto Star and has written opinion pieces for the National Post and the Toronto Star. He was also a regular contributor to the (now defunct) Jewish Tribune and the Engage and Harry’s Place websites in the UK.

This interview was previously published on TheJ.ca. 

Kerfuffle in the agenting world

During the period of protests and rioting that followed the police killing of George Floyd, the owner of Red Sofa Literary, Dawn Frederick, tweeted that she was phoning the police because people were looting a gas station by her house. All told rioters in the twin cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul torched, looted or vandalized 1,500 gas stations and bookstores, restaurants, homes, and other locations during rioting.

Remains of Uncle Hugo's, the oldest sci-fi bookstore in the U.S.
and its brother store, Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore

Following Twitter attacks on Dawn, Kelly Van Sant, who was an agent at Red Sofa, tweeted that she’d quit the agency because her boss had phoned the police “on protesters in St Paul who were demonstrating to demand justice for George Floyd." Apparently, Kelly was unaware or uninterested in any distinction between looters and protesters. 

The Twitter mob hasn’t concerned itself with such fine distinctions either and continued to pursue Dawn, accusing her of racism. Calling the cops on looters is not a Woke thing to do. {More details here}

Two other agents at Red Sofa also tweeted their resignations. Amanda Rutter cited “racism” {apparently assuming the looters Dawn had reported to the police were Black} and Stacey Graham referred to “recent events.”

Dawn posted an explanation of these recent events and her actions on the Red Sofa website, then in an apparent attempt to placate the mob or possibly because she believes she did something wrong, Dawn posted an apology (both here). More recently, she’s threatened law suits.  

Kelly Van Sant has since joined kt Literary {see here}. Stacey Graham has joined 3 Seas Literary Agency. 

Dawn Fredericks is now closed to queries. Hopefully she and Red Sofa Literary will have only been wounded, not destroyed, by this instance of cancel culture. 

Update Aug 26, 2020: Good news! Dawn is once again open to queries, though the Red Sofa website has yet to be thoroughly updated. See here.

What took so long to control the borders and why is your barista still not wearing a mask?

April 7 – McDonalds in Toronto closes after employee tests positive for Covid-19 

Update, April 20, 2020: Writing in the National Post, Chris Selley offers an explanation I hadn't imagined for why Public Health did so little to prevent or slow down Covid-19 coming to Canada:

Andrew House, who was chief of staff to Canada’s minister of public safety and emergency preparedness from 2010 to 2015, said he detected a “quietly Malthusian” streak among some officials in the department — i.e., “(the) strong will live; (the) weak will perish; (it’s) nature’s way.”

“As a result,” he said, “these experts do not believe in the doctrine of containment. At all. They do not believe in closing borders. Ever. … They advise ministers accordingly, without revealing underlying worldviews.”

Read the full piece here.

Originally posted April 9, 2020:
Canada’s health authorities have done another U-turn. Since the start of the pandemic Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, has insisted that, unless you’re a health care worker, wearing a mask is a bad idea. Now, Dr. Tam has noticed that a mask might prevent people from spreading the virus. 

This shouldn’t be a startling revelation. In Taiwan, for example, where they’ve had far more success controlling the virus, masks are standard wear for everybody. It’s not rocket science: wash your hands and avoid touching your face to protect yourself; wear a mask to protect others.  

And still, the health authorities haven’t gone far enough. Across Canada, there are thousands of coffee shops, with thousands upon thousands of people working in them who each interact with hundreds of customers every day. Some of those people making your coffee – in Tims, Country Style, Starbucks – some of them have the corona virus. It’s a statistical certainty.

It takes five days to show symptoms, and 25% – 50% of people with the virus never do get symptoms or symptoms so mild they may not realize they have Covid-19, yet throughout the weeks they have the virus, they’re still contagious. And every single person they come in contact with – hundreds of customers a day – are in danger of catching the virus from them. The same goes for all the take-out restaurants. Pizza Pizza, anyone?

Wearing masks would not provide 100% protection – nothing does. But a simple mask does reduce the odds of any virus-laden droplet spraying from their mouth or nose to your coffee cup.

Masks should be mandatory for anyone whose work brings them into contact with many  people. The real question is, why aren’t they? Why have our health authorities been so slow on the uptake?

They have their rationales. The U-turn reflects "emerging information" Dr. Tam says; it's now apparent that people without symptoms can transmit the disease. Hmm. This "emerging information" has been apparent since mid-March {see here} and has been suspected for months.

Surgical masks need to be reserved for health care workers, they say. True. But a homemade cloth mask is better than nothing.

The main argument has been that cloth masks don’t protect you from infection; they might even make you touch your face more, increasing your chance of catching the virus. Maybe, though cloth masks might provide some protection. They don’t have to be good enough to screen out the virus; just the droplets the virus is carried on. But really the argument is beside the point. The purpose of a mask is to protect others, not yourself.

How well do masks do this? No one really knows. And in truth, this seems to be the main sticking point for health authorities. Their guiding principle seems to be: Until we know for sure, do nothing. Which would be fine, except with a pandemic, a time-lag can kill people. 

The last enormous U-turn was Canada closing its borders to international travel. Until basically the day before this happened our federal health minister Patty Hajdu was claiming that closing the borders would do more harm than good.

Her argument seemed to be that we had only two choices: a wide-open border or a completely sealed border, and that a sealed border would be a disaster. There was never any such dichotomy. 

Even today "closing the border" means leaving it open to trade, to Canadians returning from abroad, and to essential personnel such as health care workers. Moreover, between the mostly closed border we have today and the wide-open border we had until March 17, there were many intermediary steps Canada could have taken and didn’t.

We could have instituted strong screening on international travellers – including travellers crossing from the U.S. We could have taken temperatures – checked for fevers. True, as our health authorities continue to point out, temperature checks aren’t full proof, but so what? Better to catch some people who haven’t reported symptoms than to let all of them in.

Even today, we still don't screen travellers effectively. According to the Globe and Mail, since March 13, 158 flights have come into Canada with confirmed cases of Covid-19 on board {here}.

We could have issued more travel advisories – and stronger advisories. For example, we knew there was uncontrolled community spread of the virus in the U.S. but did nothing for weeks. Yes, some people would have ignored advisories against visiting the U.S. But some would have paid attention. Quebec has the largest number of Covid-19 cases in Canada. Why? Because their spring break came before the U-turn, before the federal government finally started telling Canadians not to travel.

From a distance, it’s hard to guess what ails our senior health authorities. 

Life in Taiwan, where they quickly controlled their borders
and the spread of Covid-19. No public lockdowns ever, 
and as of April 20 they haven't had a new case in days.
Read how they did it here.  

Perhaps on the question of borders, they've been too wedded to the image of Canada as a team player, that we must follow the advice of the World Health Organization. 

Unfortunately, the World Health Organization seems more interested in pandering to China than in  protecting world health. And China was strongly against the world closing its borders, particularly to flights from China because that would have hurt the Chinese economy. 

Of course, now that China has its outbreak under control, it's reversed its stance and has closed itself off to flights from stricken countries. {Read more in the G&M here}.

Or perhaps our health authorities are too used to reacting when what’s needed is for them to figure out how to get out in front of the virus. Perhaps it’s a certain lack of imagination, a certain rigidity to their thinking, an unwillingness to consider that something might be less than 100% effective and 100% proven and still make a real contribution.

Or maybe we need more action from the ground up. Perhaps it's up to us to put on masks, to suggest to our local coffee shop {super-nicely!} that people preparing and serving food be masked, and to get on the phone to our MPP and suggest they make it a rule. Maybe we ought to suggest they also be checking temperatures of everyone who works with the public a couple times a day, like they do in Taiwan. Clearly, there are many more measures we could be taking, but our politicians may need a nudge; after all, they're pretty busy.

P.S. Ontario's Minister of Health, Christine Elliott – who I’ve met and is a real nice lady – can be reached at: christine.elliott@pc.ola.org

Brian Henry is an editor, writer, creative writing instructor and the publisher of the Quick Brown Fox blog.

"On cultural appropriation, some answers for worried writers" by Brian Henry

The identities of most of the people in this photo are unknown, but the little girl on the far left was Hanka Lamet.
She perished in the gas chambers at Majdanek 

I'm reposting this piece, because there's been some interest in my take on the topic of late.  ~Brian

I meet many writers these days who dread that they might be accused of “cultural appropriation.” Are they allowed to write about Indigenous characters if they’re not Indigenous; black characters if they’re not black?

As I’ve often said, writers are allowed to do whatever they want; it’s a perk of the job. Indeed, writers are obliged to write what they want, even if it pisses people off; it’s a responsibility of the job.

I do get the indignation over cultural appropriation. Currently, I’m seeing endless memes comparing the Trump administration’s separation of children at the American-Mexican border to the Holocaust. This is an appalling comparison. The Nazis killed 1.5 million Jewish children. American immigration control has murdered none. As Amy Rosenthal points out on Facebook:

Children being separated from their parents at the US border is horrible and disgusting and anyone reasonable would oppose this practice 100%.

So, too, is comparing this solitary act (and everything wrong or immoral) to the Holocaust. Here is a short but by no means exhaustive list of terrible things Jewish children endured in concentration and extermination camps during WWII:

Starvation

Summary execution

Rape

Disease (typhus, dysentery, etc)

Medical experimentation

Severe beatings

Slave labor

Burying dead bodies

Digging *their own grave* before being shot and thrown in

Stop appropriating one of the worst things that ever happened to the Jews to suit you. You people will try and take anything from us, including our tragedies.

I agree with Amy on almost everything here, particularly her disgust at the Holocaust being used to score political points – I agree with everything, except the term “appropriation.”

Novelist Lionel Shriver

For Jews, the Holocaust was a unique and overwhelming catastrophe. But Jews don’t own this catastrophe. The Holocaust was an historical event, not property. So while people regularly trivialize the Holocaust and they make ridiculous comparisons to it so often that it’s become a law of online discussions, people cannot actually appropriate the Holocaust.

Similarly, no one owns any bit of history, whether it’s the residential school system in Canada or the history of slavery, segregation and prejudice in the U.S.

By all means, Indigenous people and black people and all sorts of people should write from their own perspectives. However, this doesn’t mean anyone else should stop writing or should try not to stray outside their own narrow cultures. As Lionel Shriver points out (here), if we follow that logic, we’ll all end up writing autobiography.

Just as it’s nonsense to talk about some people owning a bit of history, it’s just as nonsensical to talk of people owning any aspect of a culture. If Koreans own Korean food, who should I apply to for permission to try my hand at making kimchi? Can I just ask a friend or is there a ministry of the North Korean government which handles this sort of thing, and if I make kimchi without permission should they throw me into a labour camp?

The simple fact is that humans imitate each other. The impulse is older than humanity (animals do it, too), and it’s the reason we’re not all standing around in caves naked and grunting at each other. Can you imagine how much appropriation of each other’s utterances it took to get the whole language thing going?

Indeed, without appropriation, we’d each be in a solitary cave, all alone, because this imitation thing is at one with our social nature. It’s not merely that as social animals we imitate each other, but also it’s mutual imitation that binds us together.

Alan Kurdi, child of Syrian refugees, drowned 4 Sept 2015 

Imitation is also adoption; we feel our kinship to one another through our shared cultures. We gather in cafés to shout at the TV because that’s “our” team playing in the World Cup – and it’s “my” team even if I’m cheering for Iceland that day. And when we see a photo of a Syrian toddler washed up dead on the shore of the Mediterranean, we weep, because that child also is ours.

So to be clear: making cultural appropriation a crime is a way of criminalizing our shared humanity.

Yet sometimes when people complain of cultural appropriation they have a legitimate complaint; they’ve just misnamed it. So, for example, it’s wrong to make spurious comparison to the Holocaust because this falsifies history, dishonors the dead, and may cause needless grief to survivors and their descendants.

Speaking more to the point for writers, it’s wrong to write characters who perpetuate negative stereotypes or to write a novel that gets someone’s culture wrong. Not because of “appropriation” but because it’s disrespectful or may even be racist, and it makes for a bad book – or at least a book that’s not as good as it should be.

When writers are dipping into any area they’re not intimately familiar with, they’re always well advised to have a beta reader who is. You’re writing a YA novel? Having a teen reader look over your manuscript is a good idea. You have an Indigenous character? Having an Indigenous beta reader would be a good idea. Even better if your reader comes from the same First Nation or perhaps the same milieu. (If your Indigenous character grew up in Toronto, that urban environment might be more relevant than the specific First Nation your character belongs to.)

Novelist Angie Abdou

That said, writers do need to keep in mind that it’s their novel. “Sensitivity readers” as they’re called can’t become censors. I think the story of Angie Abdou (best known as the author of The Bone Cage) serves as an excellent example of how not to do things.

For her most recent novel, In Case I Go, Abdou hired an Indigenous consultant and rewrote her novel according to his advice, changing it from a ghost story to a story about her character’s relationship with a flesh and blood Indigenous character. 

Then she consulted with the cultural liaison for the First Nation people she was writing about, and following the liaison’s advice, rewrote her novel again, bringing in residential schools. Then Abdou asked the elder council for their okay for her representation of their Nation. Finally, after all this, once her book came out, she was still attacked. 

Jonathan Kay tells the whole sorry tale here.

What lessons might a writer learn from this story? First, perhaps it’s better to use a fictional name for the specific First Nation you’re writing about – just in case. Second, there’s a danger in being overly sensitive. A writer’s job is not to act as some group’s P.R. agent. It’s not your job to write the novel someone else wants to see written. You’ve got to remember it’s your book.

More generally, don’t pay attention to people with an axe to grind. The cry of “cultural appropriation” is a political attack, rooted in a peculiar ideology. Cultural appropriation is a made-up crime and simply has nothing to do with the art of writing.

Brian Henry is an editor, writer, creative writing instructor and the publisher of the Quick Brown Fox blog.

See Brian’s schedule here, including writing workshops, weekly writing classes, and weekend retreats in Algonquin Park, Bolton, Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Cambridge, Georgetown, Guelph, Hamilton, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland, Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Saint John, NB, Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.