Katłıà, Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a
Even though I have family in Yellowknife, this summer was my first visit there, previous trips having been scrubbed for various reasons late in the planning stages (fires, COVID, etc). As a result, I wanted to get something to read that would give me a better grounding in the place, so I spent some time at Yellowknife Books, which was lovely (and I would've said that even if I hadn't been helped by someone I recognized as a student at my university!).
That's one reason behind my buying the utterly facinating Ndè Sı̀ı̀ Wet’aɂà: Northern Indigenous Voices on Land, Life, and Art, but I wanted some fiction as well. Based purely on what was on the shelves at Yellowknife Books, it seemed that one of the more prolific local authors was Katłıà (sometimes Catherine Lafferty), and I spent some time browsing her work. Setting aside her memoir, Northern Wildflower, it seemed to me that Katłıà's debut Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a might bring me closest to something like what I might need.
From the always reliable Fernwood Books, these six episodes--not stories, in a literary sense, but possibly in a traditional sense--add up to what reads to me like a novella. At 170 pages, it's a short novel, but it has the allusiveness and flexibility that I appreciate in the contemporary novella. As in Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality, the episodes are organized around both place and a larger sub-surface story, in this case the place being an island in a thinly disguised Great Slave Lake, and the larger story linking up to legends from the area.
Each episode has a different protagonist, though some don't clearly have a protagonist, and some may have more than one; clues come from the meanings of their names, though, some of which are spelled out in the acknowledgements section ("Yat'a is sky, Dahtı̀ is dew, Deèyeh is calm water, Golı̀ is ice, Lafı̀ is girl" [p174]). The novel's through line, as a result, isn't character-driven but instead has to do with the forms of violence that can come from living in a place that isn't yours.
(I use the term "legends" because that's the term used on the book's back cover, and Katłıà has used it in some of her interviews, too. My own default term for these things is "story," which tries to evade the potential for judgment embedded in "legend," "myth," "history," and so on, but I'll cheerfully use her term when talking about her book.)
Reviews of the book have been a little mixed, but that's rarely something that should put someone off, and I'd say that's more likely to make sense with Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a.
As the author told CBC's Shelagh Rogers when it came out, this book was written with Indigenous youth in mind, and those aren't the folks writing reviews of novels. Among those whose reviews were more negative, at least one admitted something like that in answer to a comment, but other readers (like this more positive one) tend to acknowledge this up front. But if you want a brief author-interview plus summary, you'd be best served by visiting Prairie Books Now (or as I'd prefer to read their URL, Prairie Book Snow).
I enjoyed the reading experience, even if I wished it had had a slightly more forceful copy editor (it twice should've been "teeming," not "teaming," and I wished it had twice avoided the phrase "zoned in"), but it hasn't yet given me quite what I'd hoped for. Maybe another read will, but I don't think so at this point. No one novel can ever give a person a good enough sense of a particular place--fight me in the comments, if you must--so it's unfair to put that on Katłıà and Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a, but I wanted more of a sense for Yellowknife's deeper reality than I ended up getting. That's on me for choosing wrong, of course, and there've been some seriously positive reviewers out there, but it's hard to read against your own expectations.
Recommended, yes, but frankly, I'm unsure how highly. It's intriguing, but you might want to trust a different reader on this one.
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