Prada Marfa, one of Marfa, Texas' notable artworks. Marfa became a modern art destination when Donald Judd opened a museum there in the 1970s.

When you drive into Marfa, Texas, from El Paso the first thing you come across is a tiny Prada store. No one works there and no one shops there—it’s a sculpture, built in situ by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Marfa, current population 2,121, became an unlikely modern art destination when the famous minimalist Donald Judd opened a permanent museum here in the ’70s.

I came to Marfa not for its art, but for its light. I’m interested in how we see light, how we think about light, and how light behaves. I’ve been working on a collection of poems that use light as their material, and that concentrate on proportion and balance.

About 15 kilometres outside Marfa there is a viewing station where, at night, light behaves in ways that can’t be explained. During the day, this field is flat and the grass is dried yellow. There is so much sky out here you don’t notice anything else.

But at night, balls of light come into this field. They split, hover, move backwards, flash. For decades, locals and tourists have come out here to look and to guess at what these lights are. Some believe this is what happens to lightning after it hits the ground. Others believe it is swamp gas or cars from a nearby highway. The lights look like circles. They flash for a few seconds, or bounce lightly off of each other, or hover by themselves. They pop up nearby or they get close together and split. I don’t know what this is and can’t reason this not-knowing with some theory or study. Were they fireflies? No. They seemed too big and too bright to be fireflies. Was it someone with a flashlight? There was one hovering close but no human figure near it. Was it light from a house far in the distance? Silly—a house wouldn’t move around like that. And the clusters? Are they from an airport? No. Airplanes don’t fly that close together and they don’t move backwards.

None of these things could explain what was out here. I turned to look at the other side of the viewing station. Here. This is light I know. The thing I felt most moved by. Brief flashes of thunder and stars sprinkled across a big dark beautiful wide sky. At first I could only see a few stars, but I kept looking, and in that looking tinier ones made themselves visible between the ones already there. After a while, the stars started to look like tiny needle pins that floated into the night sky, poking holes. Then they started to look like shards of the sun, if the sun could break and had broken into little pieces. The stars. I know what those are. A thin piece of light scrawled across the sky. Lightning. I know what that is too.

A frame from Mike Holmes' new book, "This American Drive." Courtesy Invisible Publishing.

When Mike Holmes passed through Toronto on his reading tour last fall, he warned the audience, “I’m a cartoonist, not an author.”

Holmes is, in fact, both. His latest work, This American Drive, is not just a novel with pretty pictures. Weaving traditional storytelling and elements of the graphic novel with unexpected ease, the book is Holmes’s memoir of his road trip from Halifax to his then-girlfriend’s parents’ home in Texas. Along the way he passes through the America of our imagination—full of fast food joints and rock ‘n’ roll icons.

Aside from Holmes’s dry wit and and hilarious drawings, the book is also pleasant to the touch. Its thick, textured cover and smooth cream pages alert the reader that Invisible Publishing’s books aren’t your average corner-store-comics fare. Publisher Robbie MacGregor stresses the importance of making books that are as appealing to the eye as to the brain. This small Nova Scotia publishing house makes a point of finding new authors who might otherwise slip under the radar.

Holmes says he’s never really noticed a difference between Canadians and the world south of the border—a fact he drives home in his book with a humourous illustration of the first few miles beyond the Maine border: a Tim Hortons, a Walmart, and an Irving station.

“Oh Maine. Come join us,” he coaxes from the page. “We’ll treat you right.”

No one has conducted an official poll on the matter, but I’m fairly confident that the first reaction of most sound-minded Canadians to this news is one of disgust, perhaps even outrage, at the existence of such blatant state-sanctioned gender injustice—especially in such relative proximity to our own progressively thinking northern hub. And, while this may be a stretch, I’ll bet the next response is a smug “only in America,” twinge of moral superiority. This is Canada, after all, hotbed of progressive politics and European socialism lite; there’s a reason why U.S. travelers abroad pretend to belong to our half of North America.

Unfortunately, the truth is less than cut-and-dry. Sure, we don’t charge rape victims for their disclosure, but when it comes to the nationwide epidemic of sexual violence against Native girls and women, we are willing to turn a cold shoulder. Which is worse?

According to studies conducted by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in both 1996 and 2001, Native women with Status are five times more likely to die as a result of violence than any other Canadian woman. In addition, 75% of Native girls under the age of 18 have been sexually abused. Yet, the ongoing scourge of violence against Canadian women of Native descent remains a virtually silent struggle.

Despite the disproportionate incidence of violence against Native women in Canada, “[cases are] grossly underrepresented in our mainstream media,” says Robyn Bourgeois, a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who teaches a course on Gender and Violence at the University of Toronto.

Bourgeois cites the highly publicized disappearance and murder of Victoria “Tori” Stafford as a current example of the preferential treatment of non-Native violence by mainstream media outlets. Bourgeois explains that on the same day that Tori disappeared, Regina police renewed their efforts to locate Tara Lyn Poorman, a Native girl who had already been missing for four months. “In this case, neither the original disappearance, nor the renewed search efforts, garnered [much] media attention,” says Bourgeois.

Bourgeois points out that while dominant cases such as that of Vancouver’s missing women do bring such brutalities into the mainstream, coverage is skewed. In that particular case, the emphasis was placed on the women’s involvement with addictions and prostitution rather than their Aboriginality, failing to make connections to the larger national scope of violence against Native women. In less lurid cases such as that of Tara Lyn Poorman, a straight-A student and regular volunteer at a Regina drop-in centre, coverage is either grossly limited or entirely non-existent.

This poses the question: what exactly does violence against Native Canadian women have to do with Texas rape kits?

The act of charging the victims of rape—who are primarily women—to pay for their own rape kits implies that these individuals are somehow responsible for—and therefore deserving of—the violence perpetrated against them. Similarly, in opting to dismiss the epidemic of violence against Native women, we are quietly enabling the process. We say, through our silence, that these women deserve to be abducted and abused because they are implicitly less-than.

With regard to the Lone Star State’s rape kit record,  someone seriously ought to mess with Texas. But, we shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily either.