Restorying Métis-Nêhiyaw Telepathies and Reading Unsettling Stories

Restorying Métis-Nêhiyaw Telepathies and Reading Unsettling Stories Mylène Yannick Gamache (bio) Not ghosted or reconciled to somehow fit into Western society, to come to terms with being colonized. No. An unsettling presence that brings awareness of relationships that have too long been occupied with erasure. Maya Ode’Amik Chacaby A short story entitled “Mister X” from Lisa Bird-Wilson’s 2013 collection Just Pretending “make[s] actionable” an “unsettling presence” of the kind Chacaby envisions above: “An unsettling presence of Indian that disturbs the norm rather than a consignment to failure at achieving the norm” (Chacaby 137). In the “(The Missing Chapter) on Being Missing: From Indian Problem to Indian Problematic,” Chacaby insists on Anishinaabeg realizing their disruptive potential as “un-settlers” on the streets of Winnipeg and Toronto. If Saskatchewan Métis-Nêhiyaw writer Bird-Wilson at once disturbs and fails to approximate early psychoanalytic conflations between Indigeneity and the occult, “Mister X” also stories deep inter-relations between “Indigenous [urban] land and life” (Yang and Tuck 1) in ways which actively strengthen Métis-Nêhiyaw land bases and lifeways. Far from suggesting that Freudian psychoanalysis can ever [End Page 73] be “free[d …] from its colonial baggage” (Brickman xviii), I retrace several ways in which this twentieth-century institution “steeped in colonial, racist thought” is repeatedly unsettled by figures it strategically imagines and all too often misapprehends. If Bird-Wilson’s story “unlocks the [most] confounding aspects” of colonialist psychic imaginaries (Tuck and Yang 3), “Mister X” at once unfixes and loosens something else entirely. “Telepathy” appears a total of three times in Bird-Wilson’s ten-page story. Shortly after the character Beate announces to the nurse that she is “here to see Mister X” (87), Bird-Wilson draws the reader’s attention to the patient’s ambiguous name: In a pile of comics in [Beate’s] room at home lies a first edition, in a plastic sleeve, where Mister X made his debut. Mister X: Marvel supervillain. Mister X can read his opponents’ minds during a fight by using his powers of telepathy. He sees his opponents in advance and can stay one step ahead at all times. Since his only superpower is telepathy and not strength, he’s worked hard to master every form of combat and to build the strength he does have to the highest level possible. Even though he’s a villain, Beate sees the possibility for good in him. (87–88) The brief repetition of “telepathy” in Bird-Wilson’s story prompts unexpected engagements across two otherwise unconnected spaces. Mikita Brottman suggests that “Freud worked hard to keep the boundaries of psychoanalysis distinct from those of the occult” (6). She returns to Freud’s persistent concern that any easy association between psychoanalysis and “the supernatural” might endanger the scientific credibility and reputation of “his new discipline” (5). Yet Freud makes a number of curious admissions in several of his published works, including The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, where, in the final chapter, he fleetingly entertains “the question of whether we are to deny entirely that superstition has any real roots: whether there are definitely no such things as true presentiments, prophetic dreams, telepathic experiences, manifestations of supernatural forces and the like,” and to which he immediately responds: “I am far from meaning to pass so sweeping a condemnation of these phenomena” (261). If Freud confesses in this same piece to having “a few remarkable experiences which might easily have been explained on the hypothesis of telepathic thought-transference” (261–62), a footnote indicates that this last line was added to the original 1901 publication in 1924, at a time [End Page 74] when Freud’s publications betrayed a growing preoccupation with matters of the occult.1 Despite these more public admissions, in a private letter written on 18 February 1926 to Ernest Jones, “the most resistant of psychoanalysis’ inner circle to the occult” (Morlock 336), Freud insists that his own “acceptance of telepathy” (Morlock 344) is his “own affair [Privatsache], like my Jewishness and my passion for smoking, etc., and that the subject of telepathy is not related to psychoanalysis” (F/Jon 597, Morlock 344...

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