EYE TO EYE: With Ma-Nee Chacaby

As told to Matt Prokopchuk, Photo by Shannon Lepere

Writer, Elder, activist, artist, teacher: those are just a few of the many roles Ma-Nee Chacaby continues to excel in. Chacaby is the Two-Spirit Ojibwe and Cree author of A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder (which, she says, is in the process of being translated into OjiCree) and has worked and volunteered throughout the Thunder Bay community for decades, mentoring and working with everyone from young people and those dealing with addictions and homelessness, to grassroots community safety and advocacy groups. Last year, she was also made a knowledge keeper for the region. Chacaby spoke with The Walleye about what she gets out of being a mentor, her recent trip to where she grew up, and the importance of her art.

On all the mentoring she does:

It’s about love. To me, that’s the way to show love to people and to teach them

about love and respect for one another. I feel there’s so much violence and so much racism in our community that if I keep working really hard, maybe I will break it in half or something, or something will happen where one day we might not have racism, and maybe one day we will not have that much violence, maybe people will start coming together, and maybe people will love each other for who they are, what they are, and respect one another rather than hurting each other all the time. We are human beings, we’re supposed to care for one another, not violate each other. […] My grandmother used to teach me “no matter what people treat you like, you just keep loving them, ‘cause one day maybe they will learn to love you.”

On producing a documentary film about returning to where she grew up:

We’re thinking of making a film about my Ombabika trip, which is where I grew up [Ombabika is located between Armstrong and Nakina along the CN Railway line]. That’s my next thing that I want to do—continue talking about where I grew up and what it was like, and what it’s like now that I went back home, and the difference.

On the trip itself:

Four of us went to Ombabika last fall, in October. We did filming around Ombabika. It’s a beautiful place now—there’s nobody living in Ombabika, not one single soul. We went to the graveyard and we went to where the old school used to be […] and we went on the railway tracks to look at the trains go by. We went to a place where the Hudson Bay store used to be. We also went to the CN station where the famous thing we used to do was visit and go meet the train every time it came, the passenger train. We would go meet the train—that was our excitement in the evening. It was really more exciting ‘cause it was something to do in the evening on a weekend, go look at the train and see people get on and get off [laughs].

On presentations she’s given at Lakehead University about the trip:

It went really well. People were asking lots of questions about Ombabika, what it’s like now and what it was like when I went back, how I felt. The first time I went back to Ombabika was 1991 with my friends. It was a hard trip because I went there to do a journey, but it wasn’t a good journey because I had not worked on my personal stuff with me then, so when I came back home I had hard nights. I had nightmares because I went back [to Ombabika] to see where things happened— bad things happened—and all the stuff that I witnessed. After that, I started to work on my personal healing. I started to do work on myself. Every summer I go to Pukaskwa National Park, and that’s where I work on my personal stuff. [...] This last fall here when I went back, I didn’t have any nightmares. Everything was beautiful in Ombabika as I would see it. Even though it was painful memories, it wasn’t as painful as it was the first time when I went. It was a good journey.

On her art:

My dad showed me how to mix colours from the earth—the ashes and the earth and a certain tree we used to mix the colours, and then the berries we used to make it liquid. It’s really good to work with stuff like that—bush painting [laughs]. That got me interested, and when I got older I became an artist and I started to draw lots of pictures, books of art. Then my step-sister, who was very jealous of me, burned all my stuff in the bathtub. This was 1979. […] I didn’t do [art] for a long time, but then I started doing it in Kaministiquia when I was living there [in the 1990s]. I’ve continued to paint. I’ve got about 60, maybe, hanging up on my walls right now— they’re all framed. I’ve got a box full of my paintings. They’re the ones I did a show in Vancouver [with]. I went to Vancouver before COVID [and] they invited me to come there and do a talk with my book, and they also asked me to bring some of my paintings. They framed them and then they put them up and […] three months they held that in Vancouver.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.