Terminal Avenue By Eden Robinson Summary

Eden Robinson’s short story “Terminal Avenue” presents readers with the dystopian near-future of Canada where Indigenous people are subjugated and placed under heavy surveillance. The story’s narrator, Wil, is a young Aboriginal man who struggles with his own inner-turmoil after the suicide of his father and his brother’s subsequent decision to join the ranks of the Peace Officers responsible for “adjusting” the First Nations people. Though “Terminal Avenue” takes place in Vancouver there are clear parallels drawn between the Peace Officers of Robinson’s imagination and the Canadian military sent to enforce the peace during the stand-off at Oka, Quebec in 1990. In writing “Terminal Avenue” Robinson addresses the armed conflict and proposes

a hypothetical conclusion in which First Nations people of Canada are conquered and their traditions are outlawed. By presenting the Oka crisis through a dystopian lens Robinson asks readers to examine their own preconceived notions of the Canadian Government’s treatment of Indigenous people, and to condemn the use of violence in policing Indigenous sovereignty.
Robinson, a member of Haisla First Nation in British Colombia, wrote “Terminal Avenue” over a two-month period on the “third anniversary of the Oka Uprising” (Hopkinson and Mehan 62).

The Oka Uprising was initially a peaceful protest over the expansion of a golf course on Mohawk territory that turned violent after Quebec’s provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec, responded to the protest with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, eventually escalating to a gun battle between protesters and police. Years after the stand-off, revisionist military historians have praised the Canadian military for avoiding bloodshed because of their “personal commitment [and] calm and attentive approach to native reality,” in which they ought to be commended for “carrying the burden of peace” (Conradi 548). However, Robinson rejects this notion and instead proposes a re-imagining of the Oka conflict through the “adjustment” of First Nations people who fought at Oka with the “bombing of the last Canadian reserve” (Robinson 211). Through “carrying the burden of peace” the Officers are given the power to destroy any semblance of Indigenous tradition, such as the potlatch, and to violently corral all First Nations people to sectioned off “Urban Reserves”. By disrupting popular Canadian perception of law enforcement Robinson succeeds in creating a dystopian image of corrupted power that allows readers to sympathize with the subjection of First Nations people of

Canada.
When Wil’s brother, Kevin, returns from fighting with the Mohawk Warriors at Oka a Peace Officer, Wil understands his motivations: “Kevin would survive the Adjustment. Kevin had found a way to come through it and be better for it. He instinctively felt the changes coming and adapted” (Robinson 211). Yet Wil himself feels he will be unable to adapt to the changes and fears he will go “the way of the dodo bird,” and end up annihilated by the “Adjustment” (Robinson 211). Wil’s tumultuous confliction between the need to acclimate to change by joining the Peace Officers and his desire to remain true to his Indigenous heritage is represented through his clandestine meetings at the S&M club Terminal Avenue. It is there that Wil relives his father’s beatings by the Peace Officers nightly as he submits to the bouncers of the club who frisk, strip-search, and beat him while dressed in the robin’s egg blue uniform of the Peace Officers. Wil is seen as an oddity in the club and many people pay to watch as he is beaten into submission: “He knows that he is a novelty item, a real living Indian: that is why his prices are so inflated. He knows there will come a time when he is yesterday’s condom” (Robinson 212). Yet, in private he subverts the submission and instead takes the role of dominant over his white lover, who wears the Peace Officer’s uniform as he inflicts pain on her. It is through this infliction of pain that Wil learns “that it wasn’t just easy to do terrible things to another person: it could give pleasure. It could give power” (Robinson 210). Wil becomes addicted to this act of release and worries that without it he may become “dead like his father, talking and breathing and eating, but frightened into vacancy, a living blankness,” and so he continually searches for that fleeting sense of power in a world where Indigenous human rights are denied (Robinson 212).
Wil’s fear of becoming like his father reflects his fear of engaging in traditional ceremonies and customs in a world that has criminalized Indigenous ways of knowing. Throughout the slipstream narrative of “Terminal Avenue” the reader is allowed glimpses of Wil’s memories as he stands frozen in fear of the automaton Peace Officers that bear down on him. He relives memories of his childhood, meetings with his lover, and most vividly, memories of the surreptitious potlatch his father organized before they left Kitamaat. By resisting his fears of becoming like his father and embracing his Aboriginal heritage Wil engages in a radical act of self-governance. Instead of resisting the Peace Officers or running for his life Wil chooses to stand tall and relive the memory of his father twirling exuberantly in his button blanket as they cross the Douglas Channel. It is in this moment that Wil finally understands why his father would go to such dangerous lengths to preserve their heritage and by choosing to relive that moment Wil finds power in resisting the tyranny of the so-called Peace Officers.
Through imagining the military escalation of the peaceful Oka protest as the beginning of a violent suppression of Indigenous rights, Robinson has successfully created a story that sympathizes with the historical wrong-doings of the Canadian Government in dealing with the Aboriginal population. By presenting Wil’s conflict of assimilation versus subjugation, Robinson sheds light on the centuries of injustices the First Nations people of Canada have felt at the hands of their European colonizers. Robinson destabilizes the enduring public opinion of Canada’s military and police forces as “peacekeepers” and asks the question of whose peace is being kept? In imagining a future where First Nations people are forced onto reserves, forbidden to participate in cultural ceremonies, and violently reprimanded for demanding their ancient territory be respected, Robinson forces readers to come to terms with Canada’s disturbing history. “Terminal Avenue” is not an improbable story of science fiction that occurs on a planet far away, instead it deals with the horrific realities faced by the Indigenous people of Canada in the past with the hopes that we may never repeat them again.