Terminal Avenue: Eden Robinson’s Bondage Story After Oka

In contemporary Indigenous science fiction, Eden Robinson’s short story “Terminal Avenue” is a sharp one. It was meant for her 1995 collection Traplines and was left out. Robinson later said that in the mid-1990s, bondage porn did not belong in a serious fiction collection. The story later appeared in So Long Been Dreaming, the postcolonial science-fiction anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, and in Walking the Clouds, the Indigenous science-fiction anthology edited by Grace L. Dillon. Some transcriptions spell the editor Gracle L. Dillon. That is a misspelling. For readers who know BDSM and fetish, the story does not use kink as lifestyle décor. Professional submission, colonial violence, and a near-future dystopia are built as the same structure.

The physical start is Vancouver. The narrator is a Native Canadian man, Wilson Wilson, called Wil. In this slightly futuristic city, Indigenous people have been stripped of their land and confined to urban reservations. Armored security officers watch them and beat them. The officers’ voices are mechanically distorted. They read as sexless and impossible to hurt. Their identities stay inside the uniform. Robinson drafted the story in Vancouver, on the number 9 Broadway bus between Commercial and the University of British Columbia, on the third anniversary of the Oka Uprising, also called the Oka Crisis. In 1990 that standoff set Mohawk people, and Native activists allied with them, against Quebec’s provincial police, over a golf course proposed for land local Mohawk said had been sold illegally. It became an armed conflict. The person killed was a Quebec police corporal. Robinson has called the story her speculative-fiction, bondage, Aboriginal response to Oka and the Fraser River salmon wars. The prose jumps in time, so the reader has to put Wil’s sex work, the family damage, and the beating that is about to happen into one system of power.

At work, Wil is a professional submissive at an exclusive BDSM club. His lover is unnamed and marked as white. The lover and other people dress as security officers and do sadomasochistic acts on Wil in front of an audience. The political tension is the private reversal: when the audience is gone, Wil tops, and the lover is still in the security uniform, the costume of state violence. That uniform fetish is where desire and occupation leak into each other. The armored figure that beats people on the urban reservation is the same figure that gets eroticized. Professional submission is how Wil makes a living and it is the political nightmare.

The family history thickens the uniform. Before the family was moved from the Douglas Channel area to the urban reservation, Wil’s father held an illegal potlatch. Security officers later stopped him on the road and beat him nearly to death. He never recovered psychologically and died by suicide soon after. Wil’s brother Kevin took part in the 1990 Oka Uprising. After it failed, Kevin joined the security force himself, and the family disowned him. Resistance and co-option both end up in the same uniform that shows up in Wil’s club scenes.

The story’s present is very short. A group of security officers walks toward Wil to beat him. By the end, the suggestion is that they may beat him to death. Wil wonders whether Kevin is among them. There is no sentimental way out. Professional SM, colonial policing, and the suspicion of a brother in the assault collapse into one attack on the street. For BDSM readers, the bondage labor, the uniform fetish, and the audience sadomasochism are built like the machine that cages Indigenous bodies. In the mid-1990s, serious literary publishing kept the story out. Bondage imagery was treated as contamination until postcolonial and Indigenous science-fiction anthologies made room for it.