November 4, 2021

The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour, by Dawn Dumont

I’ve gone back in my archives to remember when it was that Dawn Dumont, from the Okanese Cree Nation, became one of my favourite Canadian authors, and turns out it was 2015 when I read Rose’s Run, “a book that’s funny, breezy and heartwarming, and then manages to include a terrifying demon in the mix who feeds on the strength of women, so I was hooked in a cannot-turn-out-the-light-until-I’m-done kind of way, an I’m-going-to-have-nightmares kind of way (and I did!)…”

She followed up Rose’s Run, her second novel, with Glass Beads two years later, a novel in stories in which the demons were less literal, the narrative tracing four friends through decades of their lives, loves and losses, ups and downs, a novel that similarly irreverent if more realist, as well as heartbreaking and hilarious at the very same time.

Heartbreaking and hilarious is a tricky balance but in her fourth fiction release, Dumont has done it again. The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour is set in 1972 as food poisoning has taken down the Prairie Chicken dance troupe on the eve of their European tour, cowboy John Greyeyes reluctantly agreeing—even though he hasn’t danced in years—to lead a cobbled-together team of subs as a favour to his brother who’s Chief of the Fineday Reserve. (Politics factor large in all Dumont’s novels; she also served as a Liberal candidate in the September 2021 Federal election, something else on her CV now, in addition to novelist, lawyer, and stand-up comedian).

As can be expected of any novel that begins with diarrhea and features a hijacking within the first three chapters, The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour is indeed a string of madcap adventures, funny and ribald, over the top and unconstrained, and unrelentingly amusing. Greyeyes has to contend with a young dancer who flirts with anything that moves, her uptight Catholic auntie, plus a fourth member of their group who isn’t who he says he is, not to mention the original leader of the dance troupe whose stomach has finally recovered and is on her way over to Europe to take up the job that should have been hers to begin with.

The book is fun, but it also pulls no punches. Set in 1972, its main characters are survivors of residential schools in a country that has not even begun to reckon with this, living with the trauma and broken bonds of these experiences. Dumont showing too that every person who’s able to survive has their own way of doing so, which can be complicated, as is the case with Edna, who finds strength and solace in the Catholic church and whose processing of her experiences doesn’t immediately make sense from the outside.

But Dumont shows us each of these characters from the inside, deftly using fiction set fifty years ago to consider ideas and issues of racism, cultural genocide, and the possibility of reconciliation that have never been more timely. Using humour too to diffuse the pain, to create the chance for some kind of happy ending.