Chinguacousy Secondary School

• ENGLISH ENG4U0

• Legends are Made, Not Born in a Gender lens Sometimes all you need is a Saviour The short story Legends are Made, Not Born by Cherie Dimaline gave a voice to queer LGBTQ members of First Nations. A strong feminist perspective was incorporated in the telling of the story, giving it a unique theme of grief, diligence, and queer pride. The portrayal of strong feminine characters incorporated with First Nations traditions discusses symbols such as the White Buffalo which indefinitely sculps the story as a whole towards the end. The narrative starts as an introduction outlining the traumatic childhood of the main character in the story, as a flashback. The child was raised by his grandmother for most of his adolescence as his father was absent in his nurturing and his mother had passed very early on in his age. Already so early on in the story, the reader is reminded of the gender roles placed in the family dynamic as the parenting responsibility seemed to hop from one female family figure to another. The relationship between both genders is completely conflicted as, since the beginning of the tale, the character was met with gender-based conflicts. He is conditioned to find more reliability in female figures since the day he was born as his father, someone biologically related to him, had failed to raise him in his early years or even “explain the death of his mother”, which seemed to clash with their relationship, especially since a child griefing is a call for support. The holes in the father-to-son relationship were extremely evident while the main character’s mother was still alive, as his grandmother often babysat, and took on the role of a second parent, opposed to the father. Other male figures in the young boy’s family dynamic, his uncles per se, were always “too busy drinking” to take care of the child after the mothers passing, which further nested unsettled regards to male figures in the child’s perspective.