"Terminal Avenue" is a
short story by
Canadian author
Eden Robinson. It was originally intended to be included in her 1995 short story collection ''Traplines'' but was omitted because, in Robinson's words, "back in the mid-90s, bondage porn didn't belong in a serious fiction collection."
It was later included in ''
So Long Been Dreaming
''So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy'' (2004) is an anthology of short stories by African, Asian, South Asian, and Indigenous authors, as well as North American and British writers of colour,''So Long Been Dreaming'' cov ...
'', an anthology of
postcolonial science fiction and fantasy
Speculative fiction is a term that has been used with a variety of (sometimes contradictory) meanings. The broadest interpretation is as a category of fiction encompassing genres with elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, nat ...
edited by
Nalo Hopkinson and
Uppinder Mehan. It was also included in ''Walking the Clouds'', an anthology of
Indigenous science fiction edited by Gracle L. Dillon.
Background
Eden Robinson wrote "Terminal Avenue" "in Vancouver, Canada on the number 9 Broadway bus between Commercial and the University of British Columbia" on the third anniversary of the
Oka Uprising. The uprising, also known as the Oka Crisis, was a 1990 confrontation between a group of
Mohawk people
The Mohawk people ( moh, Kanienʼkehá꞉ka) are the most easterly section of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy. They are an Iroquoian-speaking Indigenous people of North America, with communities in southeastern Canada and northern Ne ...
(along with allied Native activists) and
Quebec's provincial police force over the proposed construction of a golf course on territory that, according to local Mohawk people, had been sold illegally. The conflict escalated to the point of gun battles between activists and provincial forces, resulting in one fatality (a
QP corporal). According to Robinson, "It was my spec fic, bondage, aboriginal response to
Oka and the Fraser River salmon wars."
Plot
Set in what appears