Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada 0887556817, 9780887553899

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TRAVELLING KNOWLEDGES

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TRAVELLING KNOWLEDGES Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada

by RENATE EIGENBROD

UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PRESS

© Renate Eigenbrod, 2005 University of Manitoba Press Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 Canada www.umanitoba.ca/uofrnpress Printed in Canada on acid-free paper by Friesens. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYRIGHT (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6. Cover Design: Doowah Design Cover Image: While the Caribou was in Europe, the Stag asked, 'Would you help me be spiritual again?'1 by Ahmoo Angeconeb Text Design: Sharon Caseburg

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Eigenbrod, Renate, 1944Travelling knowledges : positioning the im/migrant reader of aboriginal literatures in Canada / Renate Eigenbrod. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88755-681-7 1. Canadian literature (English)--Indian authors—History and criticism. 2. Immigrants—Books and reading—Canada. I. Title. PS8089.5.I6E55 2005 C2005-902261-2

C810.9'897

The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP); the Canada Council for the Arts; the Manitoba Arts Council; and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism.

/ want to dedicate this book to the not-yet-published Aboriginal writers in Canada, those First Nations, Metis, or Inuit in remote communities or urban centres who are writing poetry and plays, who want to tell the stories of their people, and who hesitate to get that novel manuscript out of the closet. . . . May this book serve as a reminder of the literary, social, and political importance of Aboriginal literatures in Canada, and may it encourage all of you to join those discussed on the following pages.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements / ix Preface: Coming to Theory / xi Introduction: Bridging the Gap or Squaring the Circle? A Retrospective / 3 ROUTES OR ROOTS? The Rhetoric of Mobility /21 AN ETHICS OF READING Positioning the Immigrant Critic /39 The Question of Cultural Literacy / 59 READING FOR BOUNDARY DE/CONSTRUCTIONS Contextualizing the Other / 69 The Problem of Essentializing /111 READING FOR MOVEMENT AND MIGRATION Colonial Boundaries, De-Colonial Movements / 121 Moving between Cultures, Languages, and Literacies / 139 TRAVELLING KNOWLEDGES The "Trickster's" Wanderlust and the Continuum of Reading/161 The Quest for Identity / 173 The Global Search for Truth and Justice: Lee Maracle's "Sojourner's Truth"/191 Conclusion/201 Endnotes / 209 Bibliography / 251 Index/275

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There is no "first" or "last" in my acknowledgements, only a beginning and an ending dictated by the linearity of writing. Early in this book I identify the class of Cree students in Alberta with whom I began my journey of learning about Aboriginal literature. Here, I also want to acknowledge all the other Aboriginal students in my classes at Lakehead University as well as the Native communities in Thunder Bay, in Sandy Lake, and in other places in northwest Ontario for helping me to shape a focus for this study by sharing with me their stories about their lives and their insights into the literature. I also want to thank Aboriginal writers and scholars whom I got to know personally, such as Craig Howe, Jeannette Armstrong, Emma LaRocque, Alootook Ipellie, Armand Ruffo, Ruby Slipperjack, and George Kenny, for their encouragement and inspiration. During the time when I was teaching while simultaneously writing the dissertation that forms the basis for this book, I found my work with graduate students particularly beneficial. Many of them offered helpful references and fresh ideas—those at Lakehead University (like Taina Chahal in English and Women's Studies) or far away (like Nicola Renger at the University of Braunschweig, Germany). But I feel especially indebted to the Aboriginal graduate students whose MA theses I co-supervised and from whom I learned so much in return: Dan Rice, Doris O'Brien, Peter Rasevych, and Michele Sam. My dissertation, and hence this book, might never have been written if Dr. Hartmut Lutz had not offered to accommodate my pursuit of a PhD degree at his university in Greifswald, Germany. By avoiding residency requirements away from Thunder Bay, I was able to continue my teaching and to stay with my family while writing the thesis. A modified version of a portion of the chapter entitled "Positioning the Immigrant Critic" was previously published in English Studies in Canada (March 2000). In conclusion, I want to mention the help of colleagues at various academic institutions: Professor Joan Dolphin at Lakehead University, Dr. Lawrence Guntner and Dr. Victor Link at the University of Braunschweig, Germany, and Dr. Helen Hoy at Guelph University. Last but not least I want to express my gratitude to the University of Manitoba Press for their

interest in my manuscript, and in particular to editor Patricia Sanders for her thoughtful guidance through the final editing stages. Thanks to all! Meegwetch!

The publisher and author wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce and reprint work: Ahmoo Angeconeb, "While the Caribou was in Europe, the Stag asked, ' Would you help me be spiritual again?'" Reproduced by permission of Ahmoo Angeconeb. Norval Morrisseau, The Great Flood. Reproduced by permission of Kinsman Robinson Galleries. Maurice Kenny, "Going Home" from Carving Hawk: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © Maurice Kenny. Reprinted with the permission of White Pine Press, Buffalo, New York, www.whitepine.org. Louise Halfe, "My Ledders," from Bear Bones 6" Feathers, published by Coteau Books. Used by permission of the publisher. Louise Halfe, lines from Blue Marrow. Used by permission of Louise Halfe. George Kenny, "I don't Know This October Stranger," from IndiansDon'tCry Cry. Used by permission of George Kenny. Armand Ruffo, "The Season." Used by permission of Armand Ruffo.

PREFACE

Coming to Theory

[The] image of work—whether the work of everyday life or the work of intellectuals—as travel (transformation) ... allows us to see the complexity of intellectual alliances and disputes: sometimes people travel with you, or near you, or against you; sometimes they help you, or distract you, or interrupt you, or redirect you; sometimes we take a wrong turn, or a detour, or a dead-end; sometimes we are "hijacked" (Hall, 1988) by another position and sometimes we are the "hijackers." —Lawrence Grossberg1 Our model for academic freedom should ... be the migrant or traveler— —Edward Said2 I remember being on the train— And I am looking at the school until I could see it no more. And then I am sitting there and crying. And a few minutes later, I am sitting there giggling. I am free, I am free, I am thinking to myself. Oh my god! Free! Nobody is going to tell me what to do again, when to blow my nose, when to go to the bathroom, when to pray, when to go to bed, or whatever. We couldn't even yawn. We couldn't even cough. —Rita Joe3

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In this book, you will follow the different paths I took in order to come to an understanding of Canadian Aboriginal literatures.4 I started with a phrase from a tide of an article by Stoh:Lo writer Lee Maracle, "Oratory: Coming to Theory" (1990).5 From the point of view of orally communicated knowledge, she argues in favour of the contextualized story, or "oratory," instead of decontextualized theorizing. Aligning myself with her reasoning, I introduce my own work in the personal storytelling mode, this way "speaking" to you, the reader, not just through the persuasiveness of my intellectual arguments but also through my lived experiences. Or, "hijacking" literary critic Brill de Ramirez's "conversive" approach, I place my scholarship within "the oral engagement"6 of assisting you to become a participatory listener/reader of literary texts rather than to remain a distanced critic. Also, in a further movement away from or beyond the written text, I begin with a visual image: Migration, The Great Flood by Anishnabe (Ojibway) artist Norval Morriseau (Morrisseau). At a time when Thunder Bay, the city where most of this book was written, was not Thunder Bay but consisted of two towns, Port Arthur and Fort William (amalgamated in 1970), Morriseau went for two years to the Indian Residential School in Fort William, and later to the tuberculosis sanitarium in the same place. Of those years in his life he writes: "Lets leave it void—too much Involved."7 The agonies in his life contrast sharply with the fact that, in addition to the late Bill Reid, Morriseau is one of the most well-known Native artists in Canada. His biography presents, therefore, one of the many paradoxes and ironies I try to come to terms with in writing this study about Aboriginal literatures as a white, middle-class academic.8 There are several other reasons why I chose his painting as an introduction. For one, it visualizes one of the themes of this study, migration; also, it crosses cultural boundaries as it depicts a story known to many cultures, the great flood, but from a distinctly Aboriginal perspective; thirdly, this particular kind of Native imagery, also known as the Woodland School of Art, is often stereotypically equated with the generic definition of "Canadian Native Art." Hence, Morriseau's visual image suitably prefaces discussions about a positionality that hinges on personal connections with the topic, but also emphasizes the challenges and pitfalls of cross-cultural interpretations from the vantage point of an outsider who may assume familiarity too easily and tends to overlook differentiations.

Preface

Migration, the Great Flood, by Norval Morrisseau

As my book's title suggests, I read Canadian Indigenous literatures from an immigrant perspective, but in a migrant fashion. The immigrant label denotes my outsider position in relation to the Indigenous text; the migrant signification alludes to what Rosi Braidotti calls the "nomadic consciousness"9 of any critic reading for border-crossing movements and migrations. The negotiation of both, the immigrant and the migrant perspective, acknowledging yet also crossing boundaries, constitutes the interpretive method of this study, analogous to Dasenbrock's search for a "hermeneutics of difference . . . that can understand texts different from us and understand them to be different from us" (emphasis added).10 Regarding my racial identification as "white," I would argue with German scholar Hartmut Lutz that although the term race is "highly questionable and loaded," it "continues to be pertinent... for as long as racism and racist violence continue to exist" (as they do in Canada and in Germany).11 I question Brill de Ramirez's praise of scholarship on Aboriginal topics, even "truly conversive" scholarship, as a "tool for changing reality"12 as long as most of the scholars are white, middle-class academics whose freedom to move in any possible way differs distinctly from Aboriginal peoples' experiences of multiple boundaries. The quotation above by Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe expresses the relief she felt when, at sixteen, she

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was able to leave the residential school. As a third epigraph to this preface, her words, implying how she suffered from her lack of freedom to move, suggest the problematic of the rhetorical framing of theory as travel. The quotation serves a similar purpose as Carole Boyce Davies's introductory sequence of "migration horror stories" in her book on theorizing migrations of the subject.13 However, Rita Joe's words are not just a "reality check," but, more fundamentally, a reminder of the limitations of Western theorizing. According to Cree scholar Willie Ermine, in Aboriginal epistemology, "[experience is knowledge."14 In residential schools, which many Native children were forced to attend,15 students were not allowed to form their own "intellectual alliances"; education was not about choices but about conforming to rules set by an oppressive institution.16 These schools, along with the ghettoized reserve system, the confining definitions of the Indian Act, and the racist preconceptions of Aboriginal people in the media of mainstream society, are just some examples of restrictions of physical, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic mobility through colonization. Included in my theoretical migrations from my position of privilege are the shifting alignments as suggested by Grossberg in the first epigraph, in particular my "shuttle" movements between Native and nonNative writers and critics, emulating Krupat's ethnocriticism.17 In tune with James Clifford's prologue to his work Routes, a title I can no longer read without simultaneously hearing its British and Canadian homophone, I do not provide a map but "contours of a specific intellectual and institutional landscape, a terrain I have tried to evoke by juxtaposing texts addressed to different occasions and by not unifying the form and style of my writing."18 Clifford's assertion that scholarly genres "are relational, negotiated, and in process"19 illuminates, in the context of my own work, my attempt at a participatory, "oral," and non-coercive study, but also corresponds with my analysis of literatures that are evolving in reaction to, and as a reflection of, rapidly changing socio-economic and political conditions and cultural changes. The "simple" style of writing in some Indigenous texts is misleading and may effect simplistic interpretations. For example, the novel by Metis author Beatrice Culleton-Mosionier, In Search of April Raintree (1983), is often read reductively as either juvenile fiction or as a commentary on

Preface

social problems, but not as a carefully crafted literary work. Although the interdisciplinary nature of many texts by Indigenous writers lends itself to other than literary approaches, if critical interpretations disregard the complex layering of a work, they simplify not only a style of writing but also a way of thinking. As Helen Hoy explains in her analysis of CulletonMosionier's work, this autobiographical novel does not simply tell "nothing but the truth" about certain Native experiences, but is constructed as a multi-layered text.20 One of my objectives is to demonstrate the complexities of Native literature—complexities one would expect from any other literature. I use migration as a central metaphor to emphasize movement and process in my readings, resistance to closure and definitiveness; however, as Meaghan Morris points out in her critical analysis of nomadic theory, "colonization may be precisely a mode of movement (as occupation) that transgresses limits and borders."21 Readings of Indigenous literatures within the authoritative discourse of a scholarly publication could easily become another "conquest," in Todorov's meaning of the term. Despite "the impossibility of establishing a grand synthesis in which different view points are reconciled,"22 as Trevor Barnes says, a migrating approach of continuously shifting positions—or even Brill de Ramirez's "conversive" approach of the listener/reader—does not guarantee a noncolonialist reading of texts. Barnes explains with reference to Donna Haraway: '"The Western eye has fundamentally been a wandering eye, a travelling lens,' and its movements have often been instruments of coercion and oppression."23 Therefore, as much as I am aware of the complexities of the texts under scrutiny, so do I problematize my subjectivity, the situatedness of my knowledge, and the context of my subject position in order to underscore partiality and de-emphasize assumptions about the expert: "We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific," Stuart Hall says. "What we say is always 'in context,' positioned."24 With Jewish scholar Arnold Krupat, I recognize that rather "than my origins explaining my ends, my ends, it seems have forced me to consider my origins."25 Part of the position from which I read Native literature is "locatable" in "the 'contrapuntal' awareness" or the "double vision,"26 in Sneja Gunew's words, of my hyphenated immigrant position as GermanCanadian. Although I will refer to my German background throughout

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this study, it is the hyphen in my identification that is of at least as much importance because I was writing in the context of living in Canada and teaching Aboriginal literatures to Native students in northwest Ontario. Therefore, I introduce my contextualized methodology with an autobiographical speech/essay that traces sites of my coming to an understanding about my topic (including my connections with Germany). I have kept the oral character of this piece, which was originally composed for a lecture on Canadian Native literature at a German university. When I was invited to give this lecture, I felt uncomfortable with my expected "expert" position, and therefore chose to situate myself in space and time, outlining "an itinerary rather than a bounded site—a series of encounters and translations,"27 as Clifford says, in my trajectory of "coming to theory."

TRAVELLING KNOWLEDGES

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INTRODUCTION Bridging the Gap or Squaring the Circle? A Retrospective1

Little of what I encountered in books through thirty-five years as an academic prepared me adequately for the voices and life experiences that Native students and colleagues have taught me. I am having to learn new ways of learning and to speak with my own voice, not the disembodied "one" of traditional academic discourse. My approach will be narrative and heavily subjective. —Ron Marken2 In the following I revisit places that foreground important stages in the history of my teaching of Canadian Aboriginal literatures. Outlining the geopolitics of my position, I contextualize diverse theories on reading and teaching literature cross-culturally. Instead of proceeding in a strictly chronological manner, I go back and forth between past and present, layering my experiences and insights. I also alternate between a storytelling and an analytical mode, following the method of scholars like Todorov, who, in his book The Conquest of America, hoped that by using both he would avoid repeating the colonialist discourse he was trying to expose.3 As a narrative about my teaching experiences, my account is personal, "a middle place between scholarship and experience," as Joni Adamson defines her "narrative scholarship" approach in her ecocritical study,

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KNOWLEDGES

American Indian Literature: "life experiences shape and define the critic as a person and cannot be discarded when the critic enters into a piece of writing."4 I could align myself here with other Western postmodern and postcolonial5 philosophers and feminist scholars who emphasize the importance of "positionality";6 however, it is essential for my personal trajectory in Native Studies to emphasize that it was not Western but Aboriginal thought that made me rethink notions of truth, objectivity, and scholarship, especially as the influence of Aboriginal conceptualizations of knowledge on North America's intellectual climate has been hardly recognized. Basil Johnston, an Anishnabe author who worked as an ethnographer at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, explains the difficulty of translating the Anishnabe language into English: When an 'Anishinaubae' says that someone is telling the truth, he says 'w'daeb-awae'. It is at the same time a philosophical proposition that, in saying, a speaker casts his words and his voice only as far as his vocabulary and his perception will enable him. In so doing the tribe was denying that there was an absolute truth; that the best a speaker could achieve and a listener expect was the highest degree of accuracy. Somehow that one expression 'w'daeb-awae' sets the lim-

its of a single statement as well as setting limits on all speech.7

Johnston's (postmodern) adage that there is no absolute truth or no truth

at all, but instead only accuracy defined as "positioned" knowledge, questions "notions of objectivity," against which scholar Emma LaRocque, to introduce another Aboriginal thinker, asserts her own voice "as an integrated person" coming from her perspective of "the oral literature of the Plains Cree Metis, which does not separate the word from the self."8 My story of gaining an understanding of Native literatures did not start in Germany, the country where I was born and where I received my first post-secondary degree, but in Alberta, Canada, where, after completing my Master's in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, I taught a survey course in English literature to an all-Native class at a Native-owned and -run college, the Blue Quills Education Centre in St. Paul, Alberta. Until 1970, this school building had been a residential school similar to the one Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe attended, i.e., an educational institution where Canada's Native students were forced to forget their own literary and other traditions, their language, their way of life, and their beliefs.9 At that time I did not fully grasp how ironic it was

Introduction

that I asked the students in those rooms about their cultural heritage, and I could then not fully appreciate the trust they demonstrated by sharing their knowledge with me—but I do now. It was these students who made me want to learn more about Indigenous literatures—not a compatriot who introduced me to the topic with his books "about Indians," nor the infamous nineteenth-century German author Karl May, whose "Indian books" I never read, nor an encounter with "Indian clubs" in Germany. My initiation into Native literatures and cultures in Canada differs greatly from that of the German literary characters I am going to discuss in a later chapter, but I emphasize my students' input as the catalyst because my scholarly interests are frequently understood as stereotypically German, assumed to be somehow linked with Germany's often quoted fascination with all things "Indian." However, as Aboriginal author Thomas King quite rightly says: "Assumptions are a dangerous thing."10 I feel indebted and very grateful to my class of Cree students at the Blue Quills Native Education Centre in 1982 for putting me on the right path in a pursuit of knowledge that changed my life. Never again were books quite good enough— These were my students: June Cardinal, Leon Cardinal, Noella Steinhauer, Margaret Stern, Patricia Half, Rhonda Pasquayak, Brenda Makokis, Velma Quinney, Freda Turcotte, Denise McGilvery, Beatrice McGilvery, Ferlin McGilvery, Celine McGilvery, Bruce McGilvery, Rose Quinn, Gloria Anderson, James O'Leary, Debra Noyes.

Blue Quills Native Education Centre, Summer 1982

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From my first reading experiences in Native literature, I remember particularly well a book written by two authors: No Foreign Land by Wilfred Pelletier from the Odawa Nation and his Euro-Canadian friend Ted Poole, published in 1973.11 It was the first time I was taught about the differences between a linear and a circular way of thinking. One observation in that book stays with me still, the authors' criticism of a history teacher who did not teach "the only thing she really knew": her own history. I often thought about that comment when I read or heard literary criticism noting that Canadian First Nations literatures are not universal enough, that they only tell their own stories. "But that's what I know best," said Anishnabe writer George Kenny to me, years later. In 1983,1 moved with my family to Thunder Bay, northwest Ontario, where most of this book was written. Because of the encouragement I had received from the Cree students of the Saddle Lake reserve in Alberta, I had begun research on Aboriginal literatures and by this time had gathered enough material for a university course. In Thunder Bay, Penny Petrone, whose anthology of Native writing, First People First Voices, had just come out, had taught a course titled "Canadian Indian Literature" in the School of Education at Lakehead University. It was under this heading that I started to teach Native literature as a course for the Department of English, i.e., as a "proper" literature course, in 1986. Petrone's book contains a large section of archival material, such as speeches and letters written by missionaries, traders, and explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and only a few pieces of twentiethcentury literature, as not much was known at that time. When I wanted to design my own course in Native literature, I encountered categorization problems that still linger in university courses about this subject today. I was allowed to teach only one half of the course; the other half was about "Indian Art," as it was believed that there was not enough literature—or, to put it differently: that there was not enough "literature" in the European, canonized meaning of the word. In her criticism of postcolonial discourse, writer Lee Maracle confirms this observation: "Our words, our sense and use of language are not judged by the standards set by the poetry and stories we create. They are judged by the standards set by others."12 In her opinion, one cannot talk about postcolonialism in literature as long as such an attitude dominates. In 1986,

Introduction

when I taught "Canadian Indian Literature" in the small community of Nipigon, an hour's drive east from Thunder Bay, I tried to explain to my students (who were non-Native teachers) that a literature that evolves out of a history of oppression and within or side by side with an oral culture must differ greatly from the literature with which they were familiar. I wish I could have had at that time Janice Gould's words, who wrote in 1995 from the perspective of a Native American writer of mixed ancestry: But what constitutes literacy? In Western culture, I believe it means more than the ability to read or write. It means, as well, the ability of an individual to generate those texts that constitute a canon of knowledge and experience. I think we should reclaim an idea of orality that would allow us to embrace that writing that is 'spoken' from the borders, the speech/writing of the marginalized, the ignored and the censored.13 I found it very difficult to make students "embrace that writing that is 'spoken' from the borders" in an English course for which they got an Arts credit. The simple style of the legends, of the memoirs and the poetry, the storytelling in the works of fiction (if it was fiction), the plain speaking voice—was this literature? the students asked. Were Native people capable of doing anything more abstract and complex anyway? Wasn't it all children's literature? Or, if offered in a literature class, was there more to be gained than cultural and historical information? Is it of any literary value? In the nineties, English professor Helen Hoy still had to deal with such dismissive statements in her graduate classes. Further, English scholar Renee Hulan observes the following in her article on the teaching of Native literature that she published as late as 1998: I would argue that the reason for doubt about the literary value of Native literature is that most literary critics are not sufficiently prepared to analyse the cultural differences that prevent them from understanding it. Naturally, critics look for the innovations and allusions that they can recognize based on knowledge of their own cultural heritage, but that they cannot go beyond that knowledge is a great shame.14 "Cultural differences" that influence literature are shaped by political and socio-economic circumstances, for Native people, quite specifically, by fighting for their treaty rights and by coping with often appalling living

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conditions on reserves. Traumatic residential school and other child removal experiences add to the stress many Aboriginal people face and influence their writing. Non-Native students in my classes were largely ignorant of the background to the Aboriginal texts they read. In that particular course in northwestern Ontario in 1986,1 had to be careful not to leave the teaching about cultural differences to the one Aboriginal student who attended my classes. I had always maintained I would not like to teach a Native literature course to Native students because I would feel uneasy talking about their literature (for me, something I have to express in the third person) when "they" are sitting right in front of me; "they" who could talk in the first person about the subject matter. I never thought I would have to deal with that situation; I saw myself merely as a facilitator for the discussion of literatures that I felt should be read widely, especially by Euro-Canadians. I had never imagined that Indigenous people would come to me, a new immigrant, to learn about their literatures. However, I quickly realized that in the educational institutions in Canada, hardly any courses looked at art, literature, history, or science from a Native point of view, which I tried to do through the voices of my texts; hence, I understood why this one Aboriginal student was in my class, and tried not to make her into a spokesperson for all things Native. One of the leading scholars on postcolonialism, Gayatri Spivak, explains in an article where she struggles with the question "How to read a 'culturally different' book" that it would not be "necessarily helpful" to get the advice of a person native to India when trying to understand Narayan's novel The Guide: "To think the contrary is to fetishize national origin and deny the historical production of the colonial subject."15 The above-mentioned Native student in my class could have been totally or largely ignorant of her language and her culture if, for example, she had been brought up in white foster homes or been adopted by a white family (both happened frequently), or if her parents and grandparents hid cultural knowledge from her because they were traumatized by residential school experiences. It may be argued that, if I would have believed that Anishnabe student in my class strictly on the grounds of her Native ancestry, I would have fallen for—in the words of Salman Rushdie—"the bogy of Authenticity."16 Nevertheless, I tried to understand what she was

Introduction

saying as a Native person without making assumptions about her "Nativeness." Over the years, and responding to an increasing number of Aboriginal students in my classes, I learned better not to essentialize but to value their personal perspectives. Instead of looking for a representative voice, I started to appreciate "the accuracy" Basil Johnston explains as a cultural value. In fact, my own research and scholarship that evolved in parallel with my teaching became increasingly attuned to discerning differentiation and complexities within Native cultures and their literatures, eschewing colonial discourses of homogenization and reification. Native American scholar Greg Sarris, commenting on the performance of a non-Native teacher in a reserve classroom, emphasizes in relation to the Kashaya Indians not only the differentiation among Native cultures and between different Native people, but also the fluidity of any individual's identity, "the trajectory of... experience": "The individuals who make and remake the culture are complex and different; they make and remake the culture as they negotiate and mediate a range of cultural and intercultural phenomena in a variety of ways to fashion a sense of identity and self."17 For this reason I see a place for theorizing "nomadic subjectivity" in an investigation of Aboriginal literature. With a growing number of Aboriginal students in my Aboriginal literature course, my outsider position became more pronounced. In a 1988 off-campus class in the small northern Ontario community of Dryden, I was relieved to hear from a student that an Aboriginal employee of hers had told her that "I was okay," meaning I did not use my classes for the purpose of listening to Native stories and writing them down afterwards with the aim of selling them for a profit. However, in subsequent years, the whole issue of "appropriation," as explained from a Native perspective in the pivotal article "Stop Stealing Native Stories" by Anishnabe Lenore Keeshig-Tbbias in The Globe and Mail in January 1990, became more complex. After the publication of Thomas King's anthology All My Relations (1991), I used Emma Lee Warrior's short story "Compatriots" and Maurice Kenny's story "Rain" in the beginning of my classes for the purpose of positioning myself in relation to my German background and, more generally, to my teaching of Native literature as an "outsider." When I first read "Compatriots," I did not question my interpretation that in this story Warrior exposes an appropriation of Native culture in

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which I did not partake. I had no problems in distancing myself from the German character Helmut Walking Eagle, who turns Native. However, the question of when such interest would become appropriative became more complicated when I familiarized myself with criticisms of "speaking for the other." I started to understand that my own research and teaching were more closely linked with the fictional character Helmut Walking Eagle than I had cared to admit at first. On the other hand, complex theories of identity came more into focus, and I heard myself talk about "identity construction" and the pitfalls of "essentializing" identity. In these conceptual frameworks, Warrior's German-gone-Indian character, Helmut Walking Eagle, became a "cross-dresser," as Petra Fachinger argues—if not excused for his behaviour, at least understood in a larger, not Indigenous-specific, and depoliticized context. Looking back at my methodology and pedagogy in the Native literature classes in the late eighties and early nineties, I see myself moving back and forth between acknowledging and crossing (ethnic and racial) boundaries. I saw a distinct "gap" between Native texts and the Western paradigms within which they were taught and analyzed, although not an unbridgeable gap.18 On the other hand, I did not want to assimilate "difference" into mainstream frameworks. Regarding my own otherness, students often viewed me as the ignorant new immigrant, clearly an outsider; however, by explaining to them how Aboriginal people draw parallels between the genocidal colonization in North America and the genocide of the Jewish people,19 and how the Holocaust caused a deep sense of alienation in the post-war German generation, (ethnic) boundaries got blurred. We started to see each other as all being affected by dehumanizing ideologies. In later years I would read with my students right in the beginning of the course the speech/essay by Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong, "The Disempowerment of First North American Native Peoples and Empowerment Through Their Writing" (1992), in which she clarifies "that it is systems and processors which we must attack," that it is not "a people that we abhor."20 Although I personally had no problems acknowledging the guilt of the white race in oppressing othered peoples, I came to understand that—like persisting stories of denial of anti-Semitism in Germany—"the guilt question" was not being dealt with in Canadian educational institutions and in Canadian society in general (apologies by

Introduction

the Department of Indian Affairs and by the United Church were only made in the late '90s). For my pedagogy, it was important to aim at a balance of exposing a disturbing past and its long-lasting effects in the present with constructive solutions for a better future, a balance Armstrong achieves in her essay. Although institutional discourses neatly compartmentalized the Aboriginal literary texts I taught in the eighties and nineties into a course separate from mainstream Canadian literature and as a mere elective for students majoring in English, I found headings and categories increasingly problematic. When I began to teach in this field, I was concerned about "purity" and "authenticity" and excluded overtly hybridic texts like No Foreign Land. With a changing intellectual climate valuing hybridity and eschewing purity, I started to reconsider my definition of Native/Aboriginal literatures. I was influenced not only by scholars like Edward Said but also by writer and academic Thomas King of Cherokee and Greek ancestry. In his preface to the anthology All My Relations (1991), he argues, "when we talk about Native writers, we talk as though we have a process for determining who is a Native writer and who is not, when, in fact, we don't."21 He explains that there are so many variables in the cultural, social, linguistic, economic, political, and educational aspects of "Nativeness," it is impossible to come up with an exclusive definition. However, many of my Anishnabe students in the later years of my classes at Lakehead University did not concur with King's view. They often felt they did have a definition of indigenity and that Thomas King, for one, did not qualify because he did not speak his Indigenous language and had not grown up in "the traditional way," two criteria that were very important for them and that they could define. Who was I to tell them otherwise? One argument in support of grouping Thomas King as an Aboriginal writer—if it has to be done at all—might be his purported sense of audience. Although he knows that for various reasons many Aboriginal people rarely buy books, his included, he explains in an interview with Constance Rooke that "I'm really writing initially for a Native audience— it sustains my writing to keep that audience in mind."22 His notion of an "implied" or an "ideal" reader echoes similar statements made by authors whose Aboriginality is rarely questioned, such as Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, or Ruby Slipperjack.

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Slipper] ack, an Anishnabe novelist from Thunder Bay, who was a guest in many of my classes at Lakehead University, even at those off-campus, writes for Aboriginal readers as the privileged audience. In an interview with German scholar Hartmut Lutz (who met her at my home), Slipperjack says she hopes her Native readers will understand "the unwritten communication between the lines"23 implying that non-Native readers probably will not. One may say about both her novels, Honour the Sun and Silent Words-, what Lutz also claims about Lee Maracle's work, that they "document a determination to write 'home'" rather than to "write back," as postcolonial critics describe the literature of colonized peoples.24 Therefore, her work cannot easily be subsumed under the rubric of "post-colonial literature," as is also argued by Thomas King.25 She expects her readers either "to know" or to be satisfied with the meaning they get out of it; she certainly would not explain it, neither in her fiction nor as a guest lecturer because, she says in the interview with Lutz, "I cannot tell you why this and this and that happens, you figure that out yourself."26 In addition to feeling a commitment to their own people, many Canadian Aboriginal writers consider it no longer their responsibility to explain their "writerly" texts (to borrow from Roland Bardies), to work things out for the white readers, "the other" audience, because they feel it is just about time that they work at it themselves. Not only Slipperjack but also Anishnabe writer George Kenny, author of a collection of short stories and poems tided Indians Don't Cry, came to my class in 1989-90 in Sioux Lookout, another small community in northwestern Ontario, the nearest town to many reserves in that region. With a growing number of Anishnabe people either visiting or moving to town, racism also increased. Shortly before I started my course, an old Native man had been beaten to death by two white males. The subsequent tension between Native and non-Native groups in the community also affected my class of Euro-Canadian and Anishnabe students. When George Kenny dared to address the problem of racism in the community, one of the students took offense and the dialogue turned into a verbal (and almost physical) fight. This was the first incident in my teaching career that challenged conventional notions of a literature course. Our discussions with George Kenny went far beyond the realm of the literary. I would have felt like a hypocrite if I had concentrated on the aesthetics of

Introduction

his writing (and he would have refused to dwell on it) while we were all surrounded by a reality that partly shaped his work. In the years following I considered it always important to make students aware of "the reality" behind the texts they are studying; I invited not only writers to class but anybody who wanted—and here I modify Maria Campbell's words on the back cover of her autobiography Hal/breed—"to tell what it was like, what it still is like" to be a Native person in Canada. In 1990-91,1 was in a totally different classroom. I was asked to teach Aboriginal literature on the reserve of the Oji-Cree-speaking people of Sandy Lake, a community about 750 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay. At that time, Sandy Lake had a population of about 1500 people; it could be reached only by plane except in winter, when they used an ice road to cross the lakes. The people lived mainly on welfare, except for a few jobs generated by the airport, the nursing station, the store, and the school. At that time, plumbing and running water were available only for non-Native people, such as the teachers, store owner, and the missionaries and priests (of the seven congregations or sects). In short, I saw in real life "the setting" of the story "Compatriots" by Emma Lee Warrior (only in a different region of Canada). As the community thought that their regular housing was not good enough for me, they gave me a room in one of the trailers for the teachers. Among these was a couple from Newfoundland who participated in the Native literature course I taught, and they were the ones whose voices were heard the most. Yet, their presence was only one of the reasons why the Native students were often silent. Looking back at that teaching experience, I see the characteristics of a "contact zone," as described by Marie Louise Pratt, "the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters ... copresence, interaction ... within radically asymmetrical relations of power."27 As well, I come to similar conclusions as Native American scholar Greg Sarris in his analysis of "the challenge of reading in a reservation classroom." Commenting on the problems of a non-Native (more specifically, non-Kashaya) teacher teaching supposedly "culturally relevant" material to Kashaya students, he points out that although these texts were related to their experience as Kashaya people, the con-text of being asked to engage with the material did not include their experiences.28 Not only did nothing in his school environment indicate that this was a school for the Kashaya people (as

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nothing in the Sandy Lake school reflected the Anishnabe people: the walls of the English classroom were exclusively decorated with portraits of non-Native authors), but, given the history of schooling of Native peoples, reading as such is an alienating experience. Having learned how to read with Dick and Jane stories that in no way reflected their own reality,29 students subscribed "to the tacitly understood contract of reading," which means to "keep their lived experience separate from what they read."30 Hence, in my class on the reserve, the Anishnabe students would hesitate to respond to a text in a class discussion (but—with some encouragement—would make connections to their own lives in a journal). Paradoxically, they welcomed literature that would relate to life as they knew it—for example, Slipperjack's novels—yet the context in which they were expected to process their answers to the texts, including myself "as an outsider with perceived authority,"31 was still reminiscent of the colonial chasm between "school" and "home" and thus prevented them from a full learning experience. Also, after all, it had not been too long ago that Native people were told their stories are inferior to European literature; hence, my request to the Anishnabe students to come forth with culturally informed knowledge, when some of their or their parents' generation had tried to forget the teachings in order to survive,32 created an uncomfortable paradoxical situation for them. All these complexities, which are part of the colonial legacy, taught me that, as Sarris says, "the notion of culture ... as something fixed, homogeneous, and uniformly shared not only becomes obsolete and naive but also, as a result, impedes sensitive working relations with the community."33 For example, I could not assume that, given the harm done to Indigenous peoples by the churches, all Anishnabe students in my class opposed Christian religions, but instead had to be careful with my own criticism of the church. Also, a colonial experience like attending the residential school, although seen by most as something harmful, varied greatly from one individual to the next, including positive views. I remember one assignment in that reserve classroom in 1991 that bonded us together as a group. I asked the students to comment on a written version of the legend "The Raven Steals the Light." The publication of this story was the result of a collaboration between a Euro-Canadian poet (Robert Bringhurst) and a Haida storyteller (the late artist Bill

Introduction

Reid)—information I deliberately had not revealed to the students before they did the assignment. They immediately detected "alien" stylistic elements, such as humour and witticism that seemed contrived. They also pointed out the recurrence of explicit and explanatory comments that one would not often find in a story written/told by a Native person. Lee Maracle, for example, observes: "When our orators get up to tell a story, there is no explanation, no set-up to guide the listener—just the poetic terseness of the dilemma is presented."34 However, today, I question the methodology I used in that particular assignment and in other assignments with similar objectives. I no longer support the assumption of a clear binary of "the Native" and "the non-Native" style of writing a story, a boundary distinction also blurred by the oral turned into writing and by the written taking on oral characteristics. Such generalizing dichotomies are often founded on ideological preconceptions and leave no room for the complexities of literary creativity and fluid perceptions of culture. Rather than playing the role of the tourist who essentializes difference, I agree with Grossberg's identification of "the theorist as a tour guide who knows that the authentic is always and already contaminated by the inauthentic."35 But at that time, in that historical situation, and in that classroom, my "alliance" with the position taken by the students—Native and non-Native alike—felt right. The ability to draw boundaries provided all of us with a sense of certainty we needed, faced with Sarris's "challenge of reading in a reservation classroom." In later years I was no longer teaching this course off-campus in various communities with adult students but on-campus at Lakehead University, with students from different ethnic and disciplinary backgrounds and of different age (the adult students were often of Aboriginal ancestry). From those classes between 1991 and 1995,1 remember my paradoxical observations about the educational background of my students: although Euro-Canadian students were much better educated in basic skills like reading and writing than the Aboriginal students, they were shockingly uneducated about the colonization of Native people in Canada. Because of unqualified and continuously changing teachers as well as lack of resources and a limited curriculum in reserve schools, Aboriginal students were deprived of an adequate education and hence disadvantaged in classes in which they had to compete with non-Native students. This

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imbalance was often perpetuated in the university environment where Aboriginal students hardly dared to voice their opinions, although, as the privileged audience of the discussed texts, they had much to contribute. I also remember the New Age thinking and the obsession with political correctness that obstructed critical analysis. An additional factor that sometimes created uncomfortable silence in the classroom was the distrust and anger on the part of the Native students, and guilt feelings on the part of the Euro-Canadian students. I also remember my own Betroffenheit (affliction) when analyzing texts as English "literature," which I knew would bring back painful memories for certain students in the class. In the preface to her collection of short stories Food and Spirits, Mohawk author Beth Brant asks, deliberating her "right to tell" about the murder of Betty Osborne, "Betty, do I betray you by writing your name for people to see who will not love you?"36 What is the role of the reader/critic and teacher of a literature that transforms traumata into texts? Students of literature find it hard to learn without the help of formalized, recognized literary criticism, but that is what they had to do in my class for the longest time, as there was almost no (appropriate) literary criticism on Canadian First Nations literature.37 Euro-Canadian critics either chose to ignore the "new" literary voices, or did not know what to do with them, or misread them; First Nations scholars initially did not respond critically to their peoples' writing for a variety of reasons. Margo Kane, for example, a playwright from the Blackfoot nation, warns not "to judge from a place of omniscience— It is not for me to presume to know the most effective way to tell a certain story or experience. I may have preferences but I do not sit where the other sits and my view of life is different."38 Basil Johnston observes: "If you tell a story properly, you don't have to explain what it means afterwards."39 Literary criticism is not only considered redundant and presumptuous because nobody can understand a text for another person, but also disrespectful (as it implies more than just listening). Asked by interviewer Hartmut Lutz if she would "get a lot of feedback from Native readers," Slipperjack answers: "No, you don't do that (LAUGHS). It is like questioning someone! You don't question people. You don't make comments. That is why the lecture theatres are such a foreign environment in universities, the debates, and the discussions, the

Introduction

panels—those are totally foreign. It is just like pointing a finger at somebody (LAUGHS)."40 In more recent years, an increasing amount of literary criticism on Native literature in Canada has been produced, in spite of the above deterrents.41 In the vogue of postcolonial studies, Aboriginal literature has gained more attention from European scholars and, in some way reacting to this, from Aboriginal scholars as well. Jeannette Armstrong's seminal collection of essays, Looking at the Words of Our People,42contains literary criticism by Aboriginal authors only. In her article in that collection, "Native Literature. Seeking a Critical Center," scholar Kimberly Blaeser, of Ojibway and German ancestry, points toward a way of reading Aboriginal literature in which "text" and "critical context" are linked in a similar fashion as "performance" and "commentary" in oral storytelling. Her discussion made me aware of the arbitrariness of separating "literature" from "criticism" and showed me a direction for my own study of Indigenous literatures. Her suggestion to look for connections that cross conventional (genre) boundaries seems to be a valid alternative to any "squaring the circle" methodology that makes experts impose their "preferences" (Margo Kane) on other peoples' stories and lives. In the above, I have attempted to show that my insights into Indigenous literatures come from a person, a "positioned subject," and not "an information centre," as Pelletier and Poole describe their teacher. There are, as well, connections among the marginalization of my position as a long-term sessional lecturer, the marginalization of Aboriginal literature courses, and the marginalization of Aboriginal students in Canadian universities in the nineties, but such links deserve a separate study. However, I want to emphasize that my position in academia did influence my theorizing about colonization and my reading of the literatures of colonized peoples, and, also, my interactions with Aboriginal students. Although, like Professor Helen Hoy, I acted from "a position of race privilege," my "academic activity" was not "as seriously implicated in the very systems of stratification and dominance it critiques,"43 an advantage in one way and yet also a source of disempowerment. As is being explored by feminist and anti-racist educators such as M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, decolonization as a ''''new political culture" means change in all "the spaces of domination."44 I wanted to exemplify through my autobiographical essay at the outset

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of this book that I understand my research as positioned and hence partial, rather than objective. Also, although I finished "telling my story" at a certain point in time, the ending is perfunctory. The complexity of the topic yields an infinite number of meanings (stories) in an ongoing hermeneutic process. Connected with this indefinite/non-defining concept of research is my migrant/immigrant biography, which epitomizes a vantage point of shifting positions. Since notions of migrancy and nomadism will be discussed in the following text, I want to end this section with a quotation by Rosi Braidotti, whose "occasionally autobiographical," so-called nomadic approach to feminism I often "hijack" in this study: "Thus, I can say that I had the condition of migrant cast upon me, but I chose to become a nomad, that is to say a subject in transit and yet sufficiently anchored."45 In a discussion focussing on the ethics of positionality in relation to literary analysis, I feel challenged by her differentiation to find my own position as either "migrant" or "nomad" because it is exactly the tension between being "anchored" and being on the move, between "roots" and "routes," that is at the centre of the ethical question.

ROUTES OR ROOTS?

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THE RHETORIC OF MOBILITY

We pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. —Salman Rushdie1 Fanon recognizes the crucial importance, for subordinated peoples, of asserting their indigenous cultural traditions and retrieving their repressed histories. But he is far too aware of the dangers of the fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification of colonial cultures to recommend that 'roots' be struck in the celebratory romance of the past or by homogenizing the history of the present. —Homi K. Bhabha2 The brochure advertising the 1999 Canadian Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities at Bishop's University and 1'Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec includes the following passage about the history of this region of Canada: The area has a storied past which goes back well over two centuries. While the presence of nomadic Aboriginals who travelled the rivers in the area has been traced back over 5000 years, it was first settled by colonists of English, Scottish, Irish and American descent. They left a rich and diversified heritage for future generations. To help you discover this stately past, we suggest a walking tour....

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In this text, thousands of years of Indigenous history are marginalized in a subordinate clause, subordinating a nomadic lifestyle to the more highly valued settled way of life. According to Stephen Greenblatt, the argument in Columbus's time that land could be conquered was "proven" by the fact that there were no inhabitants as Europeans knew them, i.e. people living in "settled dwellings."3 Apart from undue generalizations about the nomadism of pre-contact cultures of Aboriginal people in Quebec, the evaluative language of this tourist brochure still conveys the Eurocentric bias that permeates Canadian nineteenth-century literature, with its many evocations of "the wandering Natives" who did not inhabit the land.4 Similarly, it echoes the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists like Eileen Jenness, who, comparing "the tribes" among each other, gave the highest ranking to the peoples who appeared most sedentary: "Of all the natives of Eastern Canada the Five Nations of the Iroquois alone seem to have possessed the seeds of greatness. They had anchored themselves to the soil with agriculture."5 Contrary to this still prevailing belief in the superiority of sedentary cultures6 who leave "a rich and diversified heritage" (which recently has been challenged by Hugh Brody in his book The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World) are contemporary academic discourses in cultural and postcolonial studies predicated on the same dichotomy of the "nomadic" (and migratory) versus the "settled," but privileging the nomadic. Edward Said, for example, a Palestinian living in the US, laments the "horrors endured in our century's migrations" but then exalts the significance of intellectual mobility: Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes and between languages.7

Although Said singles out the migrant as the impersonation of the Zeitgeist, there are, according to Geraldine Pratt, three sets of spatial metaphors in popular use: ones that draw upon the rhetoric of mobility (for example, 'nomadism,' 'travelling,' 'migration,' 'flaneur'); others that emphasize the position of

The Rhetoric of Mobility

23

marginalty and exile; and a third that represents the borderland as a place. Each opens up and closes down thought in different ways. ... Given my concerns about the politics of presence—the grounds for finding a speaking position and the possibilities for speaking across differences—I concentrate my comments on the first use.8

AsI align myself with her concerns, I will also dwell on "the rhetoric of mobility." However, scholars frequently find it important to differentiate between the spatial metaphor of the migrant and that of the nomad. For example, Deleuze and Guattari, in their influential study on nomadism, argue: "The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principal, points for him are relays along a trajectory."9 In this definition, Said's exiled intellectual "between" places is clearly a migrant and not a nomad. Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, in their Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology, dedicated "To the nomads of Broome [in Australia] always there and always on the move," distinguish between the two in a similar way but also refer to the colonial history of (im)migrants as disrupting nomadic lifestyles: "The migrant might leave a country embittered, never to return, and then try to appropriate the nomadic spaces of another country. In this the nomad is different from the migrant. S/he is always coming and going, but more or less in the same place."10 Similarly, Braidotti privileges the image of the nomad over that of the migrant and the exile, because the nomad is "a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity," but is at the same time "not altogether devoid of unity; his/her mode is one of definite, seasonal patterns of movement through rather fixed routes."11 In my own rhetoric of mobility, I use both the image of the migrant and that of the nomad; the first one creates a link with my political status and ethnic origin as an immigrant in North America, positioning me on the "other" side of Indigenous peoples, while the openness and yet cohesion of the conceptual framework of nomadism provides a model for a non-hegemonic discourse that Muecke and Roe understand as contesting the Graeco-Roman philosophical traditions.1^ With the awareness of "my

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place" and, to come back to Basil Johnston, quoted earlier, of the limitations of my vocabulary and my perception, I will not travel to the fixed place of "the other," but to a plurality of continually changing places. In this way I will blend together my (im)migrant positioning with nomadic movements, neither essentializing myself nor "the other." With the postmodern privileging of non-fixity, the question arises whether Native cultural expressions are seen as a part of, or apart from, this Zeitgeist; or whether indigenity—the quality of being "born in a place or region" (OED)—will again be constructed as "otherness," this time based on preconceived notions of Native cultures and peoples as "static" and on mystifications of a land-based ideology. In this study I want to argue, with Emma LaRocque, that endeavours that put Indigenous peoples, cultures, and literatures "in their place" are an expression of "intellectual genocide against contemporary Native people,"13 and that socalled rootedness and movement culturally complement each other. Cultural critic James Clifford acknowledges that tribal groups "have, of course, never been simply 'local': they have always been rooted and routed in particular landscapes, regional and interregional networks"; however, he still refers to "the oxymoronic figure of the traveling native."^ Earlier in his book Routes he includes the story of the Moe family from Hawaii who were fifty-six years on the road, almost never going back to Hawaii, in order to bring "traditional" Hawaiian music to the world. Clifford doubts not only the "traditional" quality of their music but also their identification as "indigenous." Using this term with quotation marks, he seems to imply that "ex-centric natives" like the Moe family cannot have an Indigenous identity15—an example of "accusations of inauthenticity,"16 which parallels Euro-Canadian valorizations of writing as taking away from indigenity. However, Aboriginal author Thomas King, in one of the episodes of his novel Medicine River (1990), exposes the stereotypical or colonial perceptions of Indigenous peoples that inform such reasoning. In this narrative, a Blackfoot elder from the fictional community of Medicine River tells the story of his travels, on which he was consistently asked for old stories: "But those people in Germany and Japan and France and Ottawa don't want to hear those stories [about today]. They want to hear stories about how Indians used to be. I got some real good stories, funny ones,

The Rhetoric of Mobility

about how things are now, but those people say, no, tell us about the olden days. So I do."17 While people do not want to hear stories about the contemporary life of Native people, they still expect the elder to be welladapted to contemporary life as they know it because he is always asked for his credit card when he checks into a hotel. He finds it "confusing" that a receptionist insists on a credit card and does not want to accept cash: "I hadn't heard that before, but we don't hear everything on the reserve."18 The character in King's novel, listening to the story of the elder, is (re)learning about his culture. As he is also the first-person narrator, readers are learning with him, drawn into making sense of the contradictory desires in white societies. On the one hand, white people want to keep Natives in their place—as Salman Rushdie says about other colonized peoples—so that they may easily consume their confined/defined culture as different and exotic. On the other hand, they want Indigenous people to be adapted (assimilated) to such a degree that they do not cause any friction or problems (they should own a credit card). Also, not desiring to hear present-day stories keeps Europeans in ignorance about living conditions that might stir guilt feelings; not knowing "protects" them from feeling responsible. If they cared to know, however, they would find out that many, if not most, Native people in Canada are not only too poor to own a credit card but also so removed from the conveniences of socalled progress in the ghettos "reserved" for them that especially an older person would not even know how to get a credit card, which is why, in King's story, the elder meets with the younger protagonist. It is this younger, formally educated person with the "un-Indian" profession of a photographer19 who does have a credit card, but he is not invited to places all over the world in order to represent the old or "authentic" Native ways. Cultural critic Ian Chambers does not argue from an Aboriginal perspective but still deconstructs the motivations behind the West's desire to uphold "authentic" Native cultures.20 In Western societies "identities can no longer be grounded in the notorious referents of'earth and blood,'" he explains. In the West... we have inherited an authoritative testimony that has always regarded cultural fragmentation and mobility with horror. Intent on conserving the timeless sanctuary of the unique and singular expression of the work of art against the dispersive

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movements of industry, urbanisation and capitalism, it has fought an endless rearguard action against modernity. In disavowing the discontinuous tempos and cultures in the city, commerce and modernity, this critical tradition has persistently sought radical alternatives in the assumed continuities of folk cultures, 'authentic' habits and 'genuine' communities. To go elsewhere to find such 'authenticity,' now that local roots, histories and traditions in the West have apparently been dispersed and destroyed, only perpetuates the mirror phase of that infantile drive. We seek to return to the beginnings, no longer our own, but that of an 'Other' who is now requested to carry the burden of representing our desire.21 In these lines, Chambers summarizes an ideology I am writing against in this study. Chambers explains the mentality of the colonizers who do not only want land and its resources but also, as the result of increasing discontent with developments in their own societies, the culture, as presumably contained, for example, in the old stories of Thomas King's elder. Further, they want it "uncontaminated" or, as Jane Jacobs, referring to feminist literary scholar Minh-Ha Trinh, argues in relation to "nostalgic desires of environmentalisms and feminisms," they want it "unspoiled," "truly different" 22 from the modern society and its conveniences, to which they have privileged access. Also, Chambers introduces his reasoning with an allusion to Heidegger's infamous Rector's address of 1933 about the Fascist "earth and blood" ideology. The period of Nazism created an extreme sense of alienation from the past in European societies, and especially in Germany, which may partly explain why many German people seem to be particularly fascinated with Native cultures where they perhaps find a "grounding" they have lost in their own culture. The tendency of an immigrant culture to construct a dichotomy between migrancy and indigenity that benefits their own society is also reflected in Arnold Krupat's work, Ethnocriticism. Developing a methodology for literary criticism of Native (American) literature, Krupat, with frequent references to Clifford, claims that "the otherness" of Native people lies in their different perspective on place and moving away from a place. "Indians, that is to say, travel a good deal, but they don't 'go places'. The sense of rootedness seems extraordinarily persistent in Native American peoples today, so there is really no place to go, no matter where one travels for one purpose or another."23 He finds his perception of

The Rhetoric of Mobility

Indigenous cultures in discordance with his understanding of literary criticism, a clash that explains the hybridic nature of his ethnocriticism: If civilization ... is the product of neurosis (see Freud), then criticism may be considered the product of restlessness; centered people don Y produce it in forms recognizable to the West. Thus ethnocriticism cannot strictly be based on the rootedness and sacrilized sense of place that the indigenous people of this continent had and continue to have.24 (emphasis added) In other words, according to Krupat, Indigenous criticism is a contradiction in itself, an oxymoron, and the term "migrant critic" a redundancy. Pointing out the meaning of the Greek roots of the word theory, Clifford maintains that theory "is a product of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To theorize one leaves home."25Likewise, Krupat understands theoretical criticism as a form of movement ("translation") and therefore as non-Indigenous because, in his reasoning, Indigenous thinking is rooted in a place, not based on movement. In their "geocentrism" he sees, as he explains in a later publication, "the party line" of Native Americans. 26 Although Salman Rushdie criticizes the stereotypical assumptions about the rootedness of colonized peoples, in an interview from 1983 he also asserts it "is clear that the ability to see at once from inside and out is a great thing, a piece of good fortune which the indigenous writer cannot enjoy. "27 One may compare non-Indigenous notions of theorizing literature with Indigenous concerns about literary criticism mentioned in the introductory chapter. However, that type of reasoning seems to be based on an ethical code of responding to someone else's stories, which are always created out of a certain context and hence are in a certain place, rather than on a reader's ("critic's") unwillingness to leave familiar territory, so to speak. As will be discussed in more detail later, the mere distinction between the spatial categories of "insider" and "outsider" is centred on an Aboriginal ethics of accuracy that is inherently limited and "grounded" in accountability. It should also be noted here that it was and is colonial society that deprived Aboriginal people of the choice of movement by creating "homelands" (among other actions). Their often-cited "sense of place" is complicated by factors that have nothing to do with Aboriginal cultural identity. In the poem "I Don't Know This October Stranger," Anishnabe

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writer George Kenny illustrates the experience of estrangement and alienation when leaving home but also the necessity of having to leave the confining boundaries of a place that is no longer home. I Don't Know This October Stranger I don't know this October stranger each dawn groping for an alarm clock, selecting a blue polyester suit that used to belong to an indian from the backforests of northwestern Ontario. This autumn stranger washes a once familiar face, runs windburnt fingers over a cowlick topped head of black hair, the exact image of a man I swear I once knew. This October stranger adjusts his blue tie, flips through documents before sliding them into a $40 briefcase and then rides off on a rocking subway train to his 2nd story office on Eglinton Avenue E. in Toronto I don't know this autumn stranger that writes his stories and poems as if Chaucer himself was kicking him along, never letting him rest, this indian dedicated to becoming published I don't know this October stranger that left a love of three years behind without a kiss;

The Rhetoric of Mobility

this autumn stranger that knew his 14 year old sister would be left all alone in a boarding school and yet migrated south— I don't know this October stranger.28 The speaker of this poem has a dilemma. He knows that in order to become a published writer he has to leave the reserve, but if he "migrates south," he will become a stranger to himself. Although the speaker seems to have a choice, the whole notion of having to choose between two different worlds if one wants to realize one's potential was introduced through colonization, which made all so-called choices into dilemmas, i.e., choices "between two ... alternatives, which are or appear equally unfavourable" (OED). To stay on the reserve would have had the advantage for the speaker of staying in his familiar environment and with his family, but the isolation, the poverty, and the lack of appropriate education in these communities would not have provided him with a future in which he could eventually realize his talents in mainstream society—if that is desirable. Because of its imposed nature, the reserve community, together with other interferences, caused drastic changes in the way of life of Native people. Thus, it is difficult for an individual to find fulfillment in a so-called traditional role. The author George Kenny himself moved to the city but eventually became a migrant, moving back and forth between the city and the reserve. If Europeans consider connectedness with place an important value in Indigenous societies, their impositions of settlements, removals, and relocations certainly have not acknowledged this perception. Among Indigenous writers, identification with a place is often the primary component of self-identification, as for example in Jeannette Armstrong's words: "I am Okanagan. That's a political and cultural definition of who I am, a geographical definition, and also a spiritual definition for myself of who I am because that's where my philosophy and my worldview comes from."29 And she feels that even within the global language of English, her local perspective will be preserved: "albeit I speak English to you rather than my own language I might as well speak my language because the meaning of English words I use arise out of my Okanagan understanding of the world."30 In this sense, Indigenous identity, locally and regionally "rooted," is set off against the European settlers who built

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their nests in foreign countries. European and Indigenous people alike use the metaphor of migrating birds in their underscoring of settlement ideologies. For example, Canadian literary critic W.H. New refers in his book Land Sliding, a deconstructive reading of settler discourses about landing and the land, to the image of nest building as seen in a Canadian Pacific Railway poster that encourages settlement in western Canada "with the promise of home."31 Similarly, in her short, allegorical tale "This Is a Story," Jeannette Armstrong portrays European settlers as migrating birds. She juxtaposes two different types of people: the (Indigenous) People and the (European) Swallows. It is an "old story" framed within the modern context of polluted rivers, which sometimes remind the narrator of the old story. The main character, Kyoti, travels to meet his people, whom he has not seen for a while (he overslept). When he finds them, he notices they have changed: they no longer eat the "real food," salmon, and they no longer speak their language. They have adopted the Swallows' way of living because their livelihood based on the land and the water was taken away by the Swallows, a migratory people who "took over any place and shitted all over it, not caring because they could just fly to another place."32 Ironically, the Swallows do care about their individual homes, an attitude that characterizes them as different from the People, who "didn't seem to care to keep up the houses the way the Swallows worked at it, day in day out, non-stop until they dropped dead" (132). Eventually, Kyoti finds an elder and a young man (named Tommy like the protagonist in Armstrong's novel Slash) who had waited for him because they want to restore the old ways. They know that Kyoti has power, as he proved some time ago when he broke the dams the Monster people had built. But now, they tell him, it is worse: Kyoti could see that them Swallows were still a Monster people. They were pretty tricky making themselves act like they were People but all the while, underneath being really selfish Monsters that destroy People and things like rivers and mountains. Now Kyoti could see the reason for being awakened early. There was work to be done. It was time to change the Swallows from Monsters into something that didn't destroy things. Kyoti was Kyoti and that was the work Kyoti had to do. (133) Kyoti's migrations, needed to make the world less "monstrous,"33 are

The Rhetoric of Mobility

in distinct opposition to the careless attitude of the migratory Swallows' coming and going. In this story, the contrast between the attributes of "sedentary" (characterizing the People) and "migratory" (characterizing the Swallows) takes on another connotation: "sedentary" describes a responsible relationship with the land, whereas "migratory" signifies exploitation. However, although the so-called trickster (Kyoti) is also known as a migrant, his or her wanderlust brings into focus cultural and spiritual mobility that makes it possible "to change the Swallows from Monsters into something that didn't destroy things." Hence, the allegory undermines a good/bad binary of sedentary and migratory, as the worth of each state of being depends on context or purpose. In her article "Unclean Tides: An Essay on Salmon and Relations," Jeannette Armstrong explains "monstrous" environmental destruction in scientific language. She documents "an increasing tide of malevolence" in the salmon war in which "the Pacific salmon are moving toward disappearance." Paralleling the extinction of the salmon with the extinction of the buffalo, she also explains how "the spirit of a whole people becomes wounded beyond expression when that source [of life] is annihilated."34 Her essay confirms the truth of the allegorical tale "This Is a Story," in which the narrator comments at the end: "That story happened. I tell you that much. It's a powerful one. I tell it now because it's true. "35 In Armstrong's narrative, Kyoti's intellectual mobility is expressed in his multilingualism; for his role as a teacher and saviour he is required to speak "all languages." However, the story emphasizes that of primary importance for the well-being of the People is the knowledge of the mother tongue, not "Swallow talk"—i.e., the colonizer's language. For Indigenous writers the question of language is a challenging issue. If they want to reach people with different educational backgrounds from their own communities as well as society at large, they have to be innovative in their use of language and dialect. The different methods and techniques utilized to appropriate English for "anticolonial purposes"36 echo the adaptability of orally practised languages; the latter, a mental mobility, is seen by Anishnabe poet Annharte Baker as closely linked to her peoples' history of trading and travelling, a history, she is keen to point out, not exclusive to the British people. By means of the canoe, Native people took advantage of the inland

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water systems of the continent. But they also had, and have, a way of travelling in which the mere awareness of the relatedness of all beings and elements of the earth allows for staying in one place physically while travelling spiritually. An example of a story about a "spirit journey" is the short text by Anishnabe guide and healer Ron Geyshik, "Around the World in a Big Trout," published in the 1998 edition of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English: When I came to Toronto from Thunder Bay in the big Air Canada plane, it was a lot like the time when I went around the world inside a big trout. Those little round windows—the trout had windows just like that. And that humming noise inside Air Canada, that's the exact sound the trout makes when he's going. I guess that trout would be the size of a jet at least. This trout took me all around the world, heading West and come home again from the East. It didn't take long—about four days and four nights. You can get anywhere in the world from just a drop of water, because every drop of water connects to all the lakes and oceans in the earth. Also, the big trout can travel by means of underwater tunnels. So I wasn't too surprised when I got on that Air Canada jet.37 Although Geyshik speaks in his vision from a specific place, he does not see this place as isolated but as connected, like in a web. In his holistic view, he moves back and forth between the natural world and modern technology, and describes them as mutually explanatory, not as mutually exclusive.38 Renowned Laguna Pueblo/Sioux poet and scholar Paula Gunn Allen, arguing against incorrect characterizations of "American Indian cultures as static," explains an Aboriginal world view in words that read like a commentary on Geyshik's visionary text:

The tribal systems are static in that all movement is related to all other movement—that is, harmonious and balanced or unified; they are not static in the sense that they do not allow or accept change. Even a cursory examination of tribal systems will show that all have undergone massive changes while retaining those characteristics of outlook and experience that are the bedrock of tribal life. So the primary assumptions tribespeople make can be seen as static only in that these people acknowledge the essential harmony of all things and see all things as being of equal value in the scheme of things, denying the opposition, dualism, and isolation (separateness) that characterizes non-Indian thought.39

The Rhetoric of Mobility

In this understanding, the "rootedness" of an Indigenous person, on which Krupat bases his ethnocriticism, is not an expression of immobility but of the significance of context. However, if all things are perceived "as being of equal value"—illustrated in Geyshick's text in the comparability of a trout and an airplane and a journey in both—the dualism constructed between "Indian" and "non-Indian" thought seems to contradict "the essential harmony of all things." Indigenous intellectuals negotiate this contradiction in different ways; the selection of texts for this study reveals both: maintaining and challenging binary oppositions, and constructing and crossing boundaries. In an interview, Anishnabe artist Ahmoo Angeconeb, whose work is featured on the front cover of this book, revealed to me that his people had always travelled spiritually but that they would not talk about such travels publicly. Writing and print changed the context of transmitting knowledge, and today, publications like Ron Geyshik's stories are met with controversial responses from First Nations people, especially when they are included in a literature anthology—that is, even removed from the context of Geyshick's book Te Bwe Win (Truth) so that readers are encouraged to analyze such a piece like a literary text, without concern or respect for the purpose of its existence.40 The ethics of telling, sharing, and understanding stories are an important component of Indigenous world views as "stories show how a people, a culture, thinks."41 For Jane Sequoya, of mixed Chickasaw descent, the question of indigenity is not just a question of a biologically or racially constructed identity, not only of "Who is an Indian" but of "How (!) is an Indian," as in relation to "the ways of having stories (cultures)."42 In the context of her argument, which contains a critical commentary on Native American authors Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko, she asserts that to be an Indigenous writer/storyteller does not only mean to have "a geocentric sense of identity" ("to point to the hill or river and say 'This is our culture'"), but also to have responsibility and accountability to the place or community one is drawing on or linked with. There are certain restrictions to the availability of stories that must be observed but are often unknown to the outsider. "The problem ... is precisely one of context: what is misuse in relation to the sacred cultures of particular tribal communities evokes authentic atmosphere in relation to the secular humanist and popular cultures of Euroamerican

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tradition."43 A responsible, ethical understanding, or, to take her point further, literary criticism of stories, should therefore be positioned in relation to the community from which it comes. In this way, the freedom to move intellectually "away from home" is, indeed, as Krupat claims, not the Indigenous way of making sense of cultural and artistic expressions. However, I want to question the valorization of freedom of critical movements not restricted by ethical values. These values may be defined as respect for individual knowledge and experience, as Mohawk scholar Rick Monture explains, or, like for Sequoya, may be expressed as community links. An emphasis on "rootedness" does not reflect stasis, as Paula Gunn Allen outlines, but asserts the "harmony of all things" against a "separateness" that informs Western theorizing (which Allen describes in another article as "life-alienating practices").44 Therefore, Thomas King's Coyote character in his novel Green Grass, Running Water (1993) warns the reader that, although everyone makes mistakes, "Best not to make them with stories."45 For my own approach to Indigenous literatures from a non-Indigenous perspective, in which I negotiate several movements, I want to adopt the interpretation of the "roots" image in the work by Native American Jack D. Forbes. Arguing against cannibalistic selfishness, he reminds his readers of the value of "all my relations" in Native cultures: We are not autonomous, self-sufficient beings as European mythology teaches We are rooted, just like the trees. But our roots come out of our nose and mouth like an umbilical cord, forever connected with the rest of the world. Our roots also extend out from our skin and from our body cavities— Nothing that we do, do we do by ourselves— That what the tree exhales, I inhale. That which I exhale, the trees inhale. Together we form a circle.46

Different from Salman Rushdie's use of the image "roots," which connotes immobility (and is resented by Rushdie in its application as a ghettoizing stereotype against othered peoples), Forbes's description of "rooted" connections echoes Braidotti's interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari's use of the figuration of the rhizome. Relating it to the context of nomadism, they play the rhizome as "a root that grows underground, sideways ... against the linear roots of trees," as Braidotti explains in her own study of "nomadic consciousness."47 Both figurations, Forbes's roots and the

The Rhetoric of Mobility

nomadic rhizome, emphasize creating links horizontally. The ethical implications of a non-static, yet rooted or anchored, consciousness lie in the fact that it avoids "the irresponsibility of flight" in postmodern discourses, which makes the seemingly liberatory rhetoric of mobility "the wrong language" to use.48 I originally designed this book as a comparison between migrants' literature in Germany (in the 1980s called Gastarbeiterliteratur—literature by foreign workers) and Aboriginal literatures in Canada, but decided against it except for the inclusion of a German migrant's story in my discussion of "Sojourner's Truth." The reasons for my decision highlight some important aspects of my methodology. Migrants' literature in German has indeed been analyzed under the postcolonial heading by German scholar Arlene Teraoka: "in the so-called Gastarbeiterliteratur the opaque Other has broken its silence and begun to speak to the West; moreover, in speaking 'our' language, it has begun to speak back."49 This literature in German is similar to Indigenous literature insofar as both are mostly written in a language other than the author's, or, as Mohawk writer Beth Brant says, "in the enemy's language."50 Besides, they are comparable in their demonstration of the creative ability and revolutionary thrust by which they respond to a condition of dominance. However, this comparison is also made on the basis of an identification of the two literatures as emerging from "minorities." While the binary of minority/majority is questionable in many ways, I find it particularly problematic when applied to Aboriginal literature. After all, it is the oldest literature of this continent and, as such, powerful, not "minor." As Daniel David Moses states in the introduction to An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature: "I don't think we are worried about being 'subsumed.' If we become part of that mainstream we're going to be the deep currents."51 Another basis for comparing the two literatures lies in the use, or, rather, "appropriation," of a language that is not their own. Although similar strategies could be discussed here, one difference concerning the role of language became increasingly important to me: while migrant authors are able to go back to their country and relearn a language they may have been forced to forget during their years in Germany, Indigenous people, whose languages are threatened with extinction (or have already become extinct), do not have this option. A language that is lost on this continent

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is lost forever. Often, Native people pointed this out to me when we compared our experiences with English as a second language. This difference adds another layer to Aboriginal writers' reflections on their choice of language. Further, for Aboriginal people, language is closely linked with the land, and from this link emerges a spiritual self-identification that permeates their literature. Anishnabe writer Lenore Keeshig-Tobias emphasizes at the end of her interview with Makeda Silvera: "We have no other place to go. We don't come from somewhere else."52 Migrants' literature is, by definition, created in an/other land; strategies of hybridization have therefore a different meaning and purpose from those of Indigenous writers. It seemed to me, then, that to add to my already problematic outsider approach another ghettoizing strategy that would make Native literature "fit" the comparison would take away from any attempts to show from multiple perspectives its richness, diversity, and complexities. Further studies should become less, not more, generalized. With increasing urgency, Aboriginal writers and scholars point toward the need for "culture-specific" interpretations or for "a national body of literature,"53 a demand, as Womack says, that will certainly change the role of the nonIndigenous critic: Tribes recognizing their own extant literatures, writing new ones, and asserting the right to explicate them constitute a move toward nationhood. While this literary aspect of sovereignty is not the same thing as the political status of Native nations, the two are, nonetheless, interdependent. A key component of nationhood is a people's idea of themselves, dieir imaginings of who they are. The ongoing expression of a tribal voice, through imagination, language and literature, contributes to keeping sovereignty alive in the citizens of a nation and gives sovereignty a meaning that is defined within the tribe rather than by external sources.5^ I position my own work not so much in regards to furthering a nationspecific understanding of Aboriginal literature, but rather in the context of Canadian discourses of redress and reconciliation as a contribution to facilitiating Aboriginal voices.

AN E T H I C S OF R E A D I N G

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POSITIONING IMMIGRANT

THE

CRITIC

I would like to think that there is a vast reserve of silence that can never be colonized, that can never be forced to speak, that can never be taught to speak. I would like to imagine that there is a place of power that never becomes knowledge, a place of knowledge that never becomes power. I would like to believe there are places that cannot be imagined, inviolate places no one can enter, no one can know, that will remain forever sealed off, unexplored, and that no amount of humbling will make available. —Janice Gould1

OUTSIDER/INSIDER DIALECTICS

Jeannette Armstrong's story "This Is a Story" is a foundational narrative for this study about cross-cultural readings of literature because it compares an Indigenous with an immigrant/migrant world view. The short story "Compatriots" by Peigan author Emma Lee Warrior plays a similarly significant role on another level, as she conveys through the medium of fiction an Aboriginal perspective not only generally on immigrants or immigrant attitudes, but specifically on German perceptions of Native people. In my teaching of Native literature, Warrior's story became the text through which I positioned myself in comparison with the two German characters of the narrative, Hilda and Helmut. Hilda, who is "studying

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about Indians,"2 sets the story in motion through her visit to a Blackfoot reserve, where she hopes to meet her compatriot Helmut, who writes books about "Indians." But Helmut has "become Indian," speaking the Blackfoot language and dressing in full regalia in his teepee at the sun dance. Both characters are clearly placed as outsiders, tolerated by the community out of commitment to a culturally requested hospitality, but outsiders nevertheless: "She [her Blackfoot hostess] had an urge to tell her [Hilda] that most of the Indians wished Helmut would disappear" (50). From their outsider position they essentialize Blackfoot culture by objectifying it through material things, by writing about it and by defining it. For example, Hilda tells her Blackfoot hostess that she should be interested in sun dances: "'It's your culture!' Hilda's face showed concern" (50). As Ian Chambers states in relation to a different colonial context, this perspective invokes "its own surreptitious form of racism in the identification by the privileged occidental observer of what should (a farther ethnocentric desire and imperative) constitute the native's genuine culture and authenticity" (emphasis added). Warrior's editorial narrator clearly criticizes Hilda's "talk of authenticity" and her "anthropological gaze" that pretends that "peoples and cultures exist[ed] outside the languages of time."3 However, both Hilda and Helmut Walking Eagle are constructed as flat characters representing stereotypical aspects of Germany's relationship with Native Americans, and of outsiders who make a profession out of "studying about Indians." Creating characters who are not allowed to change in spite of the teachings they receive, Warrior's narrative illustrates a form of criticism of the colonizer that—to paraphrase Jeannette Armstrong—attacks "the systems" but does not abhor a people.4 When Marilyn Dumont (who is Metis) exposes "the image making machine" in Canadian society,5 which constructs "Nativeness" as something predetermined, she also addresses "internalized colonialism" when preconceived notions about "your culture" are used by Native people themselves. A colonial conceptualization of a culture denies the "multiplicity of experiences" and understands culture as "static" and "monolithic."6 However, if one follows her nomadic mode of thinking as suggested in Chambers's "ethics of difference," where "there is neither the stability of the 'authentic' nor the 'false,'"7 or if one favours, in David Moore's terms, "the dialogic" over "the dialectic,"8 one must question

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

colonial binaries including any outsider/insider polarity. In a discourse of hybridity, a character like Helmut Walking Eagle would express just another "direction" of cultural difference. Against the background of this tension between a need for "essentializing"—calling a German turning Native "a phony"9-and the equally important call for deconstructing colonial boundaries, I want to discuss the ethics of "outsider" approaches toward reading Indigenous literatures. Although I emphasize the unsettling and uncomfortable aspects of an ethics aiming at decolonizing literary criticism, I am also attentive to Arnold Krupat's reminder that we are always both insiders and outsiders: To continue with the obvious, it should be clear that we are each at every moment inside and outside of some experiences and some knowledges and that any aspiration to expand that part of the truth we may grasp needs the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders—in this case, those of a range of Native people and those of a range of non-Native people.10

Armand Ruffo (who is Anishnabe) and Beth Brant (who is Mohawk) assert a definite boundary between the Native "inside" the culture (as reflected in the literary text produced by an author of Native ancestry) and the non-Native critic or reader "outside" it. I understand their insistence on being "inside" as a response to the outsider status that so-called minorities have been relegated to, and not just in the workshop Beth Brant refers to and protests against: The title of this workshop, "From the Outside Looking In," implies that those of us on this panel are somehow on the outside of the normal, the real and the truth. I must protest this abrogation of our thoughts and words to fit a white-defined framework of what constitutes racism and writing. As Mohawk, I am very much inside my own world-view, my own Nation, and I am looking at you—descendants of European fathers who colonized that world. 11 By reversing the imperialistic centre-periphery dualism, Aboriginal writers centre themselves and place non-Aboriginals on the margin, looking in from the outside. It is a strategic positioning that I, as non-Aboriginal academic, have to accept. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam explain in their introduction to Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994), in the European and "neo-European" (or Euro-Canadian) popular culture, we are still today

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surrounded by "Eurocentrism," which "organize[s] everyday language into binaristic hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our 'nations,' their 'tribes'; our 'religions,' their 'superstitions'; our 'culture,' their 'folklore'; our 'art,' their 'artifacts'; our 'demonstrations,' their 'riots'; our 'defense,' their 'terrorism.'"12 Although I agree with Said that "binary oppositions are dear to ... the imperialist enterprise"13 and should therefore be altogether eliminated, I cannot deny the existence of a binary discourse as outlined above and the effect it has on Aboriginal people (for example). Also, Western or "First World" scholars, who had always been "us," are conspicuously quick in wanting to eliminate a situation in which they are "them." If it is true that "a postcolonial... critique must by definition be non-oppositional and heteroglossic, because colonial hegemonies are based on dualistic oppositions,"^ then academics like Moore have the choice to be postcolonial, whereas the authors whose texts they analyze do not live in port-colonial societies. Therefore, they re-present the colonial situation by reversing it—through resistance writing that Moore devalues as "dualistic competition."15 This scholarly debate is closely linked to the controversy about the notion of essentializing. WJ.T. Mitchell's cautionary reminder of the "strategic location and historical timing of a critical idea," warning scholars that criticism "may find itself preaching a rhetorical de-centering and de-essentializing to cultures that are struggling to find a center and an essence for the first time,"16 seems to respond to the words (if he ever heard them) by Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau: "It is just now, when we are starting to tell our stories that suddenly there is no truth."17 Similarly, in my double positioning as a migrant critic reading for border-crossing movements in Indigenous narratives and as an immigrant whose ancestors were on the side of the colonizers and not of the colonized, I want to distance myself from Jamil Khader's (and others') postulation of "postcolonial Nativeness" as an ideal literary strategy. He seems to imply that good Indigenous writing (i.e., writing worthy of literary criticism) by definition strives for hybridic discourses and downplays existing colonialism; but, to repeat my point, it is only from the perspective of the so-called postcolonial critic that colonialism is over. Although I learned for my own analysis of Indigenous texts from Khader's "aesthetics of dislocation," in which he closely aligns himself with Deleuze and Guattari as

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

well as Braidotti, I do not read with the (Eurocentric) expectation that Aboriginal writers should "abrogate all forms of essential, unified identities."18Such readings perpetuate the presumptuous colonial discourse of "the image making machine" Marilyn Dumont and others so forcefully undermine. Indigenous writers challenge preconceived identity constructions in a variety of ways. In reading "as an outsider," not only openness is required but also the realization of being excluded from knowing fully. For Helen Hoy, referring to Uma Narayan, "humility and caution recognize presumed limitations to the outsider's understanding and the importance of not undermining the insider's perspective."19 This important epistemological prerequisite for understanding texts primarily written for "insiders," people of the culture the writer is from, is emphasized in some Indigenous texts, for example in the poetry by Cree author Louise Halfe, by the insertion of Indigenous words and phrases. But even if the writing is in English only, non-Aboriginal critics of an Aboriginal text must understand, as Ruffo argues, that they are reading "coded" material.20 The cultural information implied is "not readily available" and hence: For the outsider... attempting to come to terms with Native people and their literature, the problem is not one to be solved by merely attaining the necessary background, reading all the anthropological data that one can get one's hands on. Rather, for those who are serious, it is more a question of cultural initiation, of involvement and commitment, so that the culture and literature itself becomes more than a mere museum piece, dusty pages, something lifeless.21 Ruffo's words echo the conclusion of Keeshig-Tbbias's Globe and Mail landmark article on appropriation of Native stories in which she demands of those who want the stories that they "live with us." In a society in which centuries of genocide and culturecide have ruined relationships between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, such simple advice is hard to follow. Just to visit a reserve, for example, is complicated by the fact that Section 30 of the Indian Act, the statute imposed on Canadian Aboriginals by the Canadian government in 1876, declares this as trespassing. And even if nonAboriginals have the opportunity to live in a Native community for a short while (as teachers and researchers sometimes do), they should remember the warning by Wendy Rose (who is Hopi/Miwok) not to

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develop the "arrogance ... to believe that book-knowledge, emotional identification, and—perhaps—a limited participation in Native American life entitles one to be a spokesperson for or interpreter of that life."22 She explains that, as a non-Aboriginal will always be an outsider, the only ethical way of writing about and studying Aboriginal culture in its varied expressions is to demonstrate "integrity and intent." This can be partly achieved by representing Aboriginal culture in an approach that clearly marks it as re-presentation: viewed from the outside. "The reader should not be misled into thinking that they are reading, seeing or hearing a Native work; they must be helped to understand that they are being given an interpretation by a representative from another culture."2^ From an Anishnabe perspective, Basil Johnston might add to this that any kind of truth is perspectival, that there are "limits on all speech" set by vocabulary and perception,24 so that this realization of one's positionality should be a prerequisite for scholarly integrity in general. If, as Hoy says, "[methodological—or epistemological—humility and caution"25 and a clear identification of one's outsider position are demanded in an ethical reading of Aboriginal literature, a reading performed with integrity, such marking of boundaries cannot be had unproblematically. Bearing in mind Said's claim with regard to "a European or American studying the Orient... that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second,"26 I am aware of the associations linked to my historic subjectivity as a German. However, to give a precise "inventory" of the "infinity of traces" the historical process has deposited in me, as Gramsci explains,27 is difficult, if not impossible. Also, since "identity is formed on the move," it is even questionable if the "consciousness of what one really is," the "starting point" Gramsci demands for critical elaboration,28 may be defined at all. As Chambers argues: In this movement our sense of identity can never be resolved. I might self-consciously try to halt the journey and seek shelter in the comforting categories of being, let us say, white, British and male, and thereby cut off further conversation. But the movement in which we are all caught, the languages and histories into which we are thrown, and in which we appear, lies beyond such individual volition.2 9 Therefore, regarding the complexities of identity formation and hence positionality, my "comforting categories" of white, German-Canadian,

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

female, and middle class only define me in a general way as an outsider in relation to the text I want to interpret, Slipperjack's novel Silent Words. Yet, I concur with Linda Alcoff, who asserts in "The Problem of Speaking for Others" that one should "recognize one's identity as always a construction yet also a necessary point of departure"30 (emphasis added). In order to emphasize this point, I add the "primarily German genre"^ of the Bildungsroman as a component of my cultural inventory. If it is also true that, as Jeffrey Sammons remarks, if "a person interested in literary matters commands as many as a dozen words of German, one of them is likely to be Bildungsroman,"32 I may legitimately introduce my "Germanness" in this way. This particular genre has been related to Aboriginal literature by other scholars. Renee Hulan, for example, claims that Penny Petrone describes Slipperjack's first novel Honour the Sun as "a Native bildungsroman"33 although Petrone herself does not use the term—and Virginie Alba discusses Armstrong's novel Slash "as a 'bildungsroman' that associates non-fictive and fictive elements" and, as such, "tells the story of Aboriginal nationalism's re-emergence and of the complexity of its contents: spiritual, cultural, and ideological."34 Both interpretations of the genre, either as a novel that traces the main character's development or as an allegorical "coming of age" novel, do not consider the layered connotations of the signifier Bildungsroman that I am going to use in my reading of Silent Words. ILLUSTRATING POSITIONALITY: READING SILENT WORDS AS A BILDUNGSROMAN

"There is a silence that cannot speak. There is a silence that will not speak." —Joy Kogawa1 On his journey away from home, Danny Lynx, the young protagonist in the novel Silent Words by Anishnabe author Ruby Slipperjack,2 is repeatedly asked the same question: "Where are you from?" It is only when Danny feels safe with "a grandfather" that he dares to answer this question fully, and it is only then that his learning about himself and his

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environment may begin in earnest, because it is often stated by Indigenous peoples that one needs to know where one comes from in order to know at all.3 For Slipperjack's protagonist, the search for knowledge is confusing and painful. There is no easy answer to the question of where he comes from because the home he tries to escape is contaminated by abuse and no longer the original home out in the bush. On the other hand, displacement and abuse, frequent traumata in the lives of colonized peoples, make it even more necessary for him to tell his story in order to establish a sense of identity. If one wants to follow Maria Lima's line of reasoning, the quest narrative Silent Words could be read as a Bildungsroman: "The novel of Bildung has been 'chosen' in virtually all countries undergoing decolonization because it is the Western form of discourse that constitutes identity in terms of relation to origin."4 Although a case can be made for interpreting Silent Words in the context of decolonization, I do not want to assume that Slipperjack "chose" the Western genre of the Bildungsroman—not even unintentionally—in order to create her format. I would argue instead that / chose the genre of the Bildungsroman (and its analysis by scholars like Lima) to explain where I "come from" in my interpretation because, quoting Jonathan Culler, to "speak of the meaning of the work is to tell a story of reading."5 However, my epistemological location is, to borrow from Clifford once more, "an itinerary rather than a bounded site—a series of encounters and translations"6 as I migrate in my "ethnocriticism" (Krupat) between Euro-Canadian and Indigenous cultures. Indigenity often signifies closeness with the land and the natural environment. As Slipperjack explains in her interview with Hartmut Lutz: "Everything is tied with nature— They may be just rocks to you, but... these are things that we know the land by.... The land, rocks, trees are part of our history, a part of us."7 On the back cover of Silent Words, she frames her text with the following context: "I have been to all the places I write about. I know the smell, feel, and texture of the earth I walk on. I belong to it." Although Slipperjack's statements emphasize the importance of links with the land, such intimate relationships with a place are not static. The wanderlust of the so-called trickster in Native cultures is just one expression of the philosophy, in the words of Viola Cordova, "of persons who envision themselves in a world of motion, change, and complexity."^

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

William Bevis's categorical conclusion that in Native American novels, "coming home, staying put... is a primary mode of knowledge and a primary good"9 would classify Slipperjack's first novel, Honour the Sun, as "more Indigenous" than her second book, Silent Words, just because the protagonist in the first novel "stays put" in her home community, knowing every tree and every rock, whereas in Silent Words Danny is continuously on the move, leaving home, not coming home, as "home" has become "that place" (210, emphasis added) with "Father" as the abuser. Yet, the protagonists of both novels are shaped by similar formative influences. It could be argued that differences in traditional Ojibway gender construction account for the theme of a journey versus a more confined setting. While male adolescents were expected to go on a "vision quest" to find out about their purpose in life, women "were exempt" from this because of their "special gift of giving life and being."10 In her November 1992 Globe and Mail review of Silent Words, Eve Drobot emphasizes movement, being on a journey, as well as the importance of place when she summarizes the novel as "a log book of wilderness meals." However, the term "log book" suggests the mere linearity of "chronicling"—a word Drobot uses often—and devalues the literary or artistically constructed quality of the novel. The expression "wilderness," not only in this phrase but also in the tide of Drobot's review, places the novel to be discussed on the "savage" (i.e., "non-cultivated," "primitive") side of the scale of social and literary values reminiscent of Richardson's Wacousta ideology. As W.H. New explains in his analysis of explorer discourses, an image like "wilderness" is not an objective reference "to a neutral empirical reality," but a trope.11 Drobot's use of the word also conveys her (mis)understanding of the link between protagonist and setting as a distant if not hostile relationship—nature as something to be "outwitted," as she puts it. Her attitude is contrary to the notion of harmony, which is "the central principle in the way the Indians look at the land," Anishnabe writer Richard Wagamese explains, adding that "there is no word in Indian language for wilderness. Wilderness, or the idea that something is wild, is a typically European term."12 I cannot simply dismiss Drobot's review as culturally illiterate; since I am a migrant/immigrant, i.e., non-Aboriginal, myself, I do not have the

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authority to define what is culturally literate in relation to Native cultures. Nevertheless, I would argue with Barbara Pittman that it is the chronotopes of the readers that are of concern in crosscultural reading. The burden of readers is to recognize their chronotopic situation and to engage in a dialogue that releases meaning—that produces a creative understanding—instead of overpowering the work from outside or being swallowed up in a futile attempt to shed their own positions in the world.13 Drobot implicitly positions herself by comparing Slipperjack with James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, whom she praises as "the greatest English-language chroniclers of the quintessential New World experience," but as she does not recognize her chronotope, defined by Bakhtin as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships,"14 as the place where she is speaking from, she cannot acknowledge the limitations of her perspective. In my own attempt at a "creative understanding" of Silent Words, I use the genre of the Bildungsroman with Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lebrjahre (1796) as its prototype in order to indicate one important "encounter" in my "story of reading." This novel by one of Germany's canonized writers contributes to my "Bildung" and, hence, positions me in my interpretation of a Native text.15 The act of positioning myself creates tension between me, the interpreter, and the work under scrutiny, but I intend to engage in my reading with the "playful attitude" suggested by Maria Lugones, "travelling across 'worlds'" in a "loving" and not in an "agonistic" sense.16 The two novels by Goethe and Slipperjack are indeed "worlds" apart; for example, the teleological concept of progress in Goethe's apprenticeship novel is based on an ideology I started to question when I learned more about the history of colonization and when Indigenous literatures were added on to my story of reading. However, both novels are Bildungsroman in the sense of Marianne Hirsch's definition of the genre as telling "the story of a representative individual's growth and development within the context of a defined social order."17 Moreover, beyond the genre definition, the complex cultural connotations of the word Bildung (which means "education" as well as "formation") provide a meaningful context for my understanding of Slipperjack's educational novel. In contemporary German society, "Bildung" implies education through an institution, but the term is also associated with a wider concept of being "learned." In contrast to "Ausbildung" (institutionalized education and

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

training), it describes the process of integrating knowledge into a fuller realization of personhood. In reality, this concept of "Bildung" was and still is linked with the " Ausbildung" of the upper and middle class able to afford it, but the popular usage of the word still connotes individual growth, independent from economic factors. In Silent Words, Danny's learning does not happen in an institution. Most of the plot is set in the school-free summer, and, when school is mentioned, its importance is marginalized in a few passing comments; education, "Bildung," is brought about during the character's seemingly purposeless "wanderings in the bush" (Drobot), and "lessons" are taught by the elders. Contrary to Forrest Carter's controversial story, The Education of Little Tree, which is built on the clash between European and Indigenous pedagogical philosophies, Slipperjack "avoids centring the story ... on a conflict between the two cultures."18 According to King's definition, Slipperjack writes "associational literature," which, for non-Native readers, "provides a limited and particular access to a Native world allowing the reader to associate with that world without being encouraged to feel a part of it.... NonNatives ... remain, always, outsiders."19 Since I try to understand Slipperjack's novel about the education of a young Ojibway boy as an outsider, I resort to conceptual frameworks with which I am familiar. Although the Bildungsroman carries the historical baggage of German idealism and bourgeois elitism, in its emphasis on the interaction between individual and society it lends itself well as a temporary "intellectual alliance"20 in my reading of Slipperjack's novel about the socio-cultural integration of a young Native person. Moreover, the signifier, "Bildung," rests on the interplay of "Bild" ("aesthetic representation") and "Bildung" ("formation") so that the Bildungsroman suggests, as Redfield says, "a profound homology between pedagogy and aesthetics, the education of a subject and the figuration of a text."21 This link between aesthetics and pedagogy is meaningful to First Nations literature for different reasons. For one, storytelling has always been a way of teaching for Native people. Additionally, in the case of Anishnabe author Slipperjack, this tradition links her two careers as an educator and a writer. She wrote the novel Silent Words concurrently with her Master's thesis in education on "Native Teaching Methods," in which she discusses the significance of non-verbal communication in a chapter titled "The Use of Silence." In her role of

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"novelist as teacher," to borrow from Chinua Achebe's tide of an essay, I find another explanation for the theme of the journey in Silent Words. Both the main character and the readers become involved in the process of learning, in the quest for knowledge. Thus, understanding the genre of the Bildungsroman as aesthetic and pedagogic formation, my discussion of Silent Words will outline the figuration of the text and the formation of a character. For Drobot, the generating principle of the novel centres on Danny's "flight" or "wandering," his life "on the run," and "a series of events ... chronicled" in a "log book." The language of the review reveals her linear reading of the novel. However, the ending of Silent Words (if no other clues are picked up earlier), where the first-person narrator switches to second person, suggests a non-linear reading. At the end of the Epilogue, the protagonist, now a young adult looking back, sums up his life in the following words: "You can't escape the silent words of your memory. They grow on you, layer after layer, year after year, documenting you from beginning to end, from the core to the surface. I built my cabin with silent words" (250). In this concluding passage, the reader is told not only about the story of a life but also about the life of a story—growing layer by layer, spatially arranged.22 The narrator's retrospective analysis of the layered composition of his personality, expressed in the image of a cross-section of a log,23 also adds meaning to the layered structure of the novel's plot and theme of learning. Danny's travels are arranged in such a way that toward the end of the narrative he revisits places and people; in addition, Danny, the learning and maturing narrator, continuously remembers and thus (re)joins different places, teachers, and teachings. For example, he is taught about analogies between human and plant (and animal) life three times on his journey—first, by Mr. Old Indian's teaching (59), then on the canoe trip with OP Jim (143), and finally by an experience that confirms the truth of Mr. Old Indian's knowledge (229). The lessons are connected in Danny's memory as layers of understanding building on each other. Knowledge that in the beginning he finds difficult "to sort out" and to relate to—its strangeness "pronounced" by Mr. Old Indian's dialect— eventually becomes his own, helping him to make sense of his environment and thus survive a life-threatening situation. The fact that he knows is as important as how he knows: having just lost an elder who had become his grandfather, his remembering of the situation in which he heard the

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

story for the first time connects him with the only other people he trusts, the Old Indian couple, and therefore helps him to cope emotionally. In this way, the linear progression of a consecutive order of events (and the lessons connected with them) that forms one narrative strand of the novel is overridden/overwritten by Danny's contextualized way of remembering. His mapping of experiences teaches readers how to read this novel: not as an episodic, wandering novel, as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been defined, but, rather, attentive to the non-linear undercurrent of a log-book-like series of events (and meals) and of the seemingly linear character development of a quest story. In Silent Words, the vertical time of a traumatized memory is more dominant than calendar time.24 In this circularly structured narrative, which begins with Danny's running away from his father and ends with his meeting him, only a few dates are given: from the initial issue of the railway ticket up to the Epilogue (the protagonist's wedding day), exactly ten years have passed—from July 11, 1969, to July 11, 1979 (but within this time span not even a year is covered in the narrative present). The dates in-between are telling indicators of institutional time—work and school (77, 182). The "other" time is lived by Mr. and Mrs. Old Indian, who have "no clock and no calendar" (53) in their home. The visiting boy Danny finds out that it is Sunday morning "when a man in a black shirt with a white collar appeared" (53). Also, the elder, OP Jim, who takes on the role of a grandfather for Danny, does not teach him the days of the week (182) but rather, like the Old Indian couple, about patience (59, 129). He prefers to speak in Ojibway, and it is made clear that an Indigenous language best expresses a non-European concept of time: "'By the way, how long is this trip?' I said in English. He pretended not to hear me, so I switched to Ojibway. 'When are we going to get to where we are going?'" (116). Another dimension of time is related by OF Jim's stories about beings "who have no time value" (172), "a mass burial ground all but forgotten now" (156), and ancient people who had lived on sandcliffs (172). Ol' Jim's (spiritual) readings of the land while travelling through it not only illustrate the significance of place in Indigenous world views as outlined by Native American scholar Vine Deloria,25 but also explain the journey as a chronotope, constitutive for the novel; whereas for Drobot, the story is "chronicled" and therefore not a novel but "a story told, not written."

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When the protagonist explains, after many train rides in his flight from home, "I turned off the tracks and followed the trail" to the lake (91), the reader is bound to notice "a turn" in the novel. Up to that point in Chapter 9, the presence of the train cannot be forgotten—with Danny in it or not. If it cannot be seen or heard, it can be smelled (44). Associated with the need for money, with the absence of home-cooked meals, with the police and the fear of getting caught, it serves as a constant reminder of Danny's homelessness, of his search and longing for his mother—in short, of his trauma: "The evening train went by just as we finished supper. I tensed up again and kept glancing down the path" (186). In a child's way of reacting, feeling quite helpless and not knowing whom to hold responsible for his plight, Danny "gave the railroad track a big kick" (65). In this reading, the train, like the canoe, is not just a means of travelling but another chronotope. Both the train and the canoe journey, "the two ways of valuing time-space in the novel,"26 are interconnected; they echo each other in their chronotopic motifs of meeting/parting or escaping, of search/discovery and recognition/non-recognition,27 but are contrasted in the emotive values attributed to them. The fear and despair Danny experiences on his train rides give way to feelings of belonging, trust, and safety in his canoe trip with a grandfather who teaches him how to survive—the Anishnabe way. If proceeding in time is not just a linear activity, places in this novel are neither isolated spots on a map (or cabins on a lake), nor only connected by the line of the railway tracks or by trails or canoe routes and portages; they are related to each other through people's knowledge of each other: "Have you noticed that Native people are generally like one big family?" Danny's father asks his son at the end (244). One way for Danny to grow and mature is to learn about the importance of community. Places in this novel are not just points of geographic orientation (so accurate that my students drew a map), but they map the emotional stages of the main character's journey. Danny likes or dislikes a place (165, 168), feels "out of place" (90), and he makes connections between different places (64). Places are so beautiful that he finds "no words" to describe them (156), but they are also sites of death, decay, and abuse, and echo each other in that way. Such echoing adds to the layering of Danny's character formation, in particular when his own story is twinned with the story of his

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

friend Henry, who lives with his father in a cabin that "looked just like the one Mama, Dad and I had in the bush" (64). Both boys are traumatized by the displacement from their home and the loss of a mother. Although they give brief accounts of the events, their stories are largely untold: "We walked in silence for a few steps. ... We walked in silence a bit more ..." (86). The first place that reminds the escaping protagonist of his own home is that of Mr. and Mrs. Old Indian's: "This place reminded me of our trapper's shack" (50). Their cabin functions in the narrative formation of the novel as the time-less place (no clock, no calendar), and during his stay with this couple (who are actually brother and sister, as he finds out later), the advice to "listen, watch and learn" (45) gains special significance in Danny's educative journey. This instruction, a leitmotif in the novel, emphasizes a learning style that pays attention to silences, so-called absences. If the storied events of Danny's life are marked by silence and if his journey is predicated on absence—in search of a mother he never finds—it is important for his sense of self that he develop a sense of place, as Kathleen Donovan argues.28 Native American writer Joy Harjo explains: "All landscapes have a history, much the same as people exist within cultures, even tribes. There are distinct voices, languages that belong to particular areas. There are voices inside rocks, shallow washes, shifting skies; they are not silent."29 The elders in Slipperjack's novel recognize such distinct voices and languages and know these will help Danny to find his own voice. Readers "blinded by ... presumptions about the preeminent value of human life over all of life's other forms, and made deaf perhaps" by "[the] preconceived idea that silence signifies an absence of life,"30 as Robert Nelson says, will have to learn with Danny to improve their sensual perception: "OP Jim spoke behind me. 'Tell me what you see, Danny Lynx? Look around you.' His arm swept the area" (123). Danny does not see what he is then taught to see, that this seemingly empty place in "the wilderness" has a story to tell about the life of people a long time ago. He also does not know that there exist "sacred rocks," not to be pointed at. OP Jim explains: "We would stop to offer tobacco if we had to pass by them. But right now we have no business going there" (157). OP Jim's refusal to take Danny "there" reflects on the author's refusal to take the readers "there." The quest for knowledge is contextualized: "right now" is not a good

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time. The author's ambivalent attitude toward informing about the sacred—revealing and withholding at the same time—is another device for placing the reader as an outsider in a text in which "not the information received but the silences"31 are most apparent. Drobot's comparison of Silent Words with Huckleberry Finn as stories about "a young boy ... travelling across an unfamiliar ... landscape" does not take into account that, in the words of Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko, for "the human consciousness" that "remains ... within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading "32 An anthropocentric view of landscape, "predesigned as barren and unhabitable"33 by the first Europeans, contradicts the way of seeing as it is taught in this novel. Johnston explains that an Anishnabe world view recognizes an order in which the human world is the last of the four worlds: "First is the physical world; second, the plant world; third, the animal; last, the human world." The role of humans is to recognize how all "four parts are so intertwined that they make up life and one whole existence."34 Danny, the student, comes to a close understanding about the dependence of human beings on the animal world by his encounters with the wolves, of whom he is at first afraid (114), but who seem to know him "from somewhere" (118) and who eventually save his life (221). Comparable to his intellectual learning about similarities between humans and plants, his growing understanding about spiritual guidance is shown as a layered experience: from ignorance and fear to an acknowledgement of non-human protective powers. Dee Horne asserts that, "From OF Jim and others, Danny learns that he has the ability to transform himself by re-memorating and practicing his culture."35 If a character's formation in a European Bildungsroman is constructed, according to Hirsch, "within the context of a defined social order,"36 I would argue that the social order in Silent Words is shaped by the interrelatedness of "the four orders of creation" named above. At the same time, this particular social order in Indigenous cultures marks one of its differences from the genre of the European Bildungsroman. Although, Maria Lima argues, the "hero of the classical Bildungsroman is ... engaged in the double task of self-integration and integration into society,"37 principally, the individual is understood as separate from society. The individualistic

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

focus of the Bildungsroman has already been questioned by feminist critics who understand Bildung as "less aimed toward autonomy, more affiliative and relational."38 In Indigenous thinking, as explained, for example, by Native American writer Silko, an individual character is conceived as "human consciousness" "within," not "separate from,"39 an interrelated community. Hence, Danny's journey of maturation does not depict "the traditional tension ... between personal ideals and social reality";40 on the contrary, Danny's "personal ideal" is shown as being realized by understanding how the Anishnabe social reality works. Contrary to the runaway Huckleberry Finn, Danny is always part of a community—although he does not always know it. In fact, as Home says, he "undergoes a learning process in which he acquires experiential knowledge and realizes the value of sharing and community."41 The tension in the novel conveyed in the theme of the protagonist's flight lies between a nurturing and an abusive environment, which are both part of the Native setting in the novel—and of the Native social reality. While the nurturing environment is central to the teachings, abuse is often silenced. Danny does not dare talk about the beatings he got from his father and his stepmother because as a child he feels powerless and is afraid of retaliation. And after he nearly killed his father (foreshadowed in the novel), he cannot talk at all for a long time. Such silences, generated by trauma, fear, and oppression, modify my reading of this novel as a Bildungsroman of "the German type" and bring it closer to a so-called postcolonial novel of formation. With my senses sharpened by the teacher Ol' Jim, I "hear" the silences and "see" what is absent—like the stories of the silenced women, especially of the absent mother(s), and the disempowerment and traumatization not just of a child but of a whole people. The novel ends on a positive note (the celebration of a wedding), bringing together the formation of text and character in the image of the cross-section of a log in which each layer adds to the growth of what is being created before (in contrast to the linear structure of a log book). Also, the conclusion of the novel itself is layered; Slipperjack added an Epilogue to the first ending in which the protagonist accidentally shoots his father and cries out for his dead mother. One may perceive (and originally I did) of both endings as dialectically aufgeboben, but Aufhebung, as Spivak explains, is "a hierarchial concept,"42 ideologically organized, and

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therefore does not quite fit the structure in Slipper] ack's novel in which each layer is significant in its own right. It may be more suitable to infer from the double ending that Silent Words concludes in the hybridic manner of a so-called postcolonial Bildungsroman, which "paradoxically attempts both to represent the movement from fragmentation and loss toward wholeness and homeland, and to deny the possibility of such recovery."43 The above conclusion is one way to end the discussion of a novel whose silences make readers aware of the impossibility of a totalizing interpretation. Parallelling the novel's layered composition, I want to unravel another layer of meaning, which corroborates my bicultural "story of reading" (which David Moore would consider heteroglossic rather than dualistic) and my ethnocritical movements. The Bildungsroman is one narrative paradigm I associate with Silent Words; the other is derived from the Anishnabe legend "Ayash," a widely known legend in northwest Ontario.44 The version dramatized by Jim Morris, Anishnabe writer and politician, and performed in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, in 1983, tells the story of the son of Ayash, who was accused by his stepmother of having sexual relations with her when, in fact, he had rejected her advances toward him. The stepmother, similar to "the witch" in Silent Words, lies to Ayash, his father and her husband, who consequently punishes the son. In this legend, the father is shown as an abusive husband to his first wife, the son's biological mother, whereas Slipperjack's novel leaves a gap regarding this relationship. Also different from the novel, the son does not escape from the abusive situation but is led away by the father himself to an island where he is left to perish. However, the son makes the journey back home, overcoming many challenges. At the end, he takes revenge on his stepmother and on his father by killing them in a fire that destroys everything. But, like the novel, the legend has a second ending; it does not end with destruction: The Son: Ehh! I am being too cruel to my father to kill him off completely. ... Come ... let us go find his bones. We will make him a new person in the new world. Narrator: The son of Ayash destroyed the world as it was before. When they saw the new world, they saw a pile of bones— The son gathered up the bones and he flung them into the water. Soon, they saw a white duck and his family. That is Ayash.4^

Positioning the Immigrant Critic

After destruction follows re-creation, just as in many Indigenous socalled creation stories; the new world, which is celebrated in the wedding ceremony in the novel, is shown in the traditional story in the creation of animals—animals made out of humans because, as the teaching added to the end of the play explains, "when one dreams of an animal, one should think of it as human—"46 All through Ayash's journey, animals are important, just as they are for Danny and his journey. The novel's overall emphasis on the significance of other than human life makes the legend "Ayash" an important intertext, exemplary of the oral traditions seemingly silenced in Native cultures and yet still present. Hence, Slipperjack belongs to the "new generation of First Nations writers in Canada," which "has been maintaining, and yet transforming, the traditional oral art of story-telling by means of writing stories of survival."47 My reading of Silent Words through the lens of the European genre of the Bildungsroman opens up only one layer in a necessarily multi-layered hermeneutic process. Paula Gunn Allen explains that "context is important to understanding our stories, and for Indian people that context is both ritual and historical, contemporary and ancient."48 The legend of Ayash is an example of the ritual or ancient context and illustrates her point that intertexuality, "for Indians, is use of oral traditions."49 Such a claim reaffirms Ruffo's assertion about the "coded" Native text that places a reader as either outsider or insider, or, to say it differently, as one who has access to cultural knowledge or one who does not. The Anishnabe students in my classes (particularly on the Sandy Lake Reserve) drew my attention to the fact that the story of Ayash is a well-known legend, and, although I had read the collection Sacred Legends of the Sandy Lake Cree, of which the story of Ayash is a part, many years prior to hearing about it, it was the orally communicated knowledge and experiential context that, for me, highlighted this particular legend as a possible intertext for the novel Silent Words. (Similarly, as outlined earlier, the same kind of communication made me aware of the controversy with regards to Geyshick's publication of certain narratives.) The point of this anecdotal background to my reading emphasizes again that contemporary Canadian Aboriginal literatures in English are "initially," as Thomas King put it, written for Aboriginal people, who are either a part of an active oral culture or can easily access orally passed-on stories and their significance.50 Although some of

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the oral traditions have been published, the mode of production is often questionable and the "fixation" of the stories considered problematic. Readers of Native ancestry are privileged over non-Native readers who have limited access to these narratives, if they have any access at all.51 The significance of inclusion of oral narratives in literary criticism also emphasizes the importance of cultural specificity, as each Aboriginal group or nation has its own oral tradition. Despite shared similarities, Slipperjack's novels, for example, emanate from an Anishnabe, not from a Native, world view—a differentiation difficult to comprehend by outsiders. For example, in a collection of articles published in India, critic M.F Salat frames an interpretation of Ruby Slipperjack's work within the homogenizing and thus colonizing discourse of "the Native Indian." Honour the Sun is introduced as "the ordinary story of an ordinary Native Indian family" and Salat maintains that the narrator of Silent Words "speaks to and for the Native people."52Although the literary analysis of both novels points towards important structural elements, like the parallel naming of characters (two Jims and two Charlottes) in Silent Words, Salat uses an authoritative voice—"This is the Native way."53—without explaining where this authority originates. With a non-positioned perspective "from nowhere," Salat analyzes Slipperjack's work not as positioned within a specific Native culture or community (the identification of "Anishnabe" or "Ojibway" is not even mentioned), but within the colonial discourse of an Indian /White binary.54 Distancing myself from this methodological and epistemological approach, I want to suggest instead that so-called cultural literacy, as a prerequisite for culturally sensitive literary criticism of Aboriginal literatures, should search for links with the distinct cultural communities out of which the writing evolves and to which it is accountable. For an outsider—regardless if from India, Germany, or Canada—the search for these links provides a particular challenge.

THE QUESTION OF C U L T U R A LL I T E R A C Y

Janice Williamson [interviewer]: "What do you imagine my role as a white literary critic should be in relation to your work?" Lee Maracle: "I can't answer that question for you, you see, because I'm not undoing the dilemma you've been caught in, and being deprived of me is a serious thing. It's a serious thing for you to pursue and undo." —-Janice Williamson1 I prefaced my close reading of Slipperjack's novel Silent Words with a quotation from Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan. The purpose behind such an introduction was not only to create a link—if only on the margins— between Canadian Aboriginal and "other" Canadian literature, but also to suggest a comparison between the critical responses to Kogawa's novel and those to Slipperjack's. The two novels are comparable insofar as they both address injustices in Canadian society, against Native people and against Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s. Also, in both novels the protagonists search for an absent mother on their quest for knowledge and healing, and have to learn to live with the silences. However, not only did the government offer an official apology to the Japanese-Canadians much earlier (in 1988) than to the Canadian Native people (in 1998), but there is also a striking difference between the wide recognition of Kogawa's novel as a

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Canadian literary text and the relative silence about Slipperjack's novel (actually, about both her novels).2 Although Obasan was written ten years earlier than Silent Words, one would imagine that in the early 1990s a novel by a Canadian Aboriginal woman writer would have stirred great scholarly interest immediately. Moreover, Slipperjack's work is not the only example of Canadian Native literature where students have to look hard to find a critical article to help them with their literary analysis — again, not only because many works are fairly recent but because there seems to be a hesitance among Euro-Canadian academics (who concern me right now as they form the majority of literary scholars in Canada) to write about Canadian Aboriginal literature. In her preface to the anthology Writing the Circle (1990) with the revealing title: "Here Are Our Voices—Who Will Hear?" Metis poet and scholar Emma LaRocque gives one answer to the above question about different responses to literatures by Canadian "minorities": "Because our pain is a 'part of this land', we are . . . the Uncomfortable Mirrors to Canadian society."3 As I, an immigrant from Germany from the post-war generation, read this, the German term Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung comes to my mind. It is commonly used in Germany to describe the nation's efforts to come to terms with their collective past. The fact that, as Ernestine Schlant argues, "in its approach to the Holocaust, the West German literature of four decades has been a literature of absence and silence contoured by language" attests in just one way to the uncomfortable nature—to borrow LaRocque's descriptor—of such processes.4 Besides the fact that the relationship in Canada between Natives and non-Natives is "so heavily freighted," as Renee Hulan, a Canadian literary scholar who decided not to stay silent, puts it,5 there is, of course, the question of "cultural difference," an outcome of colonial policies like the Indian Act that made "them" into "different" others. Yet, from an Indigenous perspective, this difference is expressed as well, for example by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, who states categorically and emphatically from "within" her "cultural base" of an Anishnaabekwe: The Native peoples of this land are fundamentally different from anyone else. We are fundamentally different from anyone else in this land, fundamentally different from Canadians. The basis of the difference is the land, our passion for it and our understanding of our relationship with it. We belong to this land. The land does not belong to us;

The Question of Cultural Literacy

we belong to this land. We believe that this land recognizes us and knows us.6

Such difference is reflected in various ways in Indigenous literatures. Jeannette Armstrong explains in her interview with Hartwig Isernhagen that "social constructs which promote a certain way of dialogue and a certain specific way of perceiving the interaction with not only people but the rest of creation, I guess ... become paramount in terms of a fundamental difference, and a fundamental difference therefore in the literature" (emphasis added).7 Corroborating their assertion of "difference," Aboriginal authors as diverse as Thomas King and Ruby Slipperjack, and others, also claim that they write first of all for their own people.8 This identification of their primary audience not only reflects their intent but also results, according to Stephanie von Berg and Hartmut Lutz, in "fewer and fewer ethnographic (omniscient) comments or 'translations' to smooth mainstream access or to (re-)educate the majority and decolonize the dominant discourse."9 To put it differently: as Indigenous writers are "writing home" rather than "writing back," an increasing knowledge of cultural context, preferably of the diverse cultural context, is expected from Euro-Canadian literary critics. And, "it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence" as Audre Lorde reminds us. She is quoted in this instance by Jeanne Perreault, who, as a Euro-Canadian scholar, also takes a stance against "retreating into silence and withdrawal"10 in relation to discussing Aboriginal literature. The more non-Native critics understand that silence "can be 'oppressive too'" because it means to "abdicate responsibility," the responsibility "to undo," the more uncertainty there is about how to proceed.11 If "cultural literacy" from fundamentally different cultures is required for an adequate understanding of literatures, what does this mean in relation to cultures that, as a result of century-long oppression, cannot simply be "studied" and known about in the fashion of the German characters in Warrior's narrative "Compatriots"?12 Anyone attempting to understand Indigenous literatures must know about the history of colonization from a Native perspective; i.e., must know, for example, about treaties and assimilation policies like forcefully removing children to be put into foster homes and residential schools; about the Indian Act and its dehumanizing categories and legislations; and about events that became symbols of oppression and resistance like

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Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, and Oka. Symbols like these, which do not feature in E.D. Hirsch's list of "what literate Americans know," but which, according to the way Hirsch defines cultural literacy, 13 should be widely shared information, may be looked up in an encyclopedia or in another reference work. More complicated in regard to Aboriginal cultures is the section on "Mythology and Folklore" that forms another component of Hirsch's Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Many of the Aboriginal rituals and ceremonies were outlawed for a long time and are still largely hidden because of the stronghold of Christian denominations on reserves today; some are mixed with Christian teachings, and there are local variations even within one nation. Also, because of past experiences, Native elders deeply distrust the written word and therefore often do not agree to having something of importance from their "mythology" written down. Some published versions of legends may have been written down in ignorance of the language and the cultural contexts, as Basil Johnston argues in his article "One Generation from Extinction."14 In short, for reasons that demand a study of their own, anything that can be read about Indigenous rituals and ceremonies must be complemented by oral (local) knowledge. If that is not possible, then, at least, written information should not be used in an authoritative manner. Here, the limitations to an approach of "cultural literacy" as pursued by Hirsch, who "promises a 'quick fix,'" become obvious. His "lists of terms, names, great books, and authors as an alternative for critical method and as a substitute for cultural community"15 are deficient in relation to the understanding of Native cultures, which should comprise a knowledge of the process of acquiring data in addition to knowledge of the data itself. As discussed earlier, Sequoya reminds us that not only the stories themselves but the moral code of how to have them distinguishes an "Indian" from a European. Although Sequoya's comments relate specifically to the sacredness of stories passed on orally for generations, the significance of words—written or oral—for more than merely aesthetic purposes is still a part of many Indigenous writers' creeds. Mohawk author Beth Brant, for example, who constructs a boundary between Mohawk "insiders" and Euro-Canadian "outsiders," is afraid that these outsiders with their "different" attitudes toward the written word will "betray" the people whose stories she tells;

The Question of Cultural Literacy

further, she is also afraid that just by writing these stories down she will exploit what was given to her in trust. Although she knows that the "writer has to tell. It is the weapon I know how to use,"16 she is concerned: What kind of picture is painted with the ink I commit to this paper? How will they use it against us? Will I be the same as them? I love. They do not. Will love make the difference?17

In the preface, titled "Telling," to her collection of short stories, Food

and Spirits, Beth Brant engages in a dialogue with the reader. By drawing us into her process of writing and the dilemmas she encounters, she makes us aware that there are consequences to our reading, that as readers we have a responsibility. We could either use these texts she creates for us "against them," or use them "with love," which may be understood as "linking texts ethically to context."18 That such links are missing and that there is, instead, a tragic gap between readings of Native art and literature on the one hand, and realities in our society (contexts) on the other hand, became painfully clear to me in an incident at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Ottawa in 1998. The Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, together with allied associations, had arranged a panel of Native writers, artists, and academics entitled "Native Cultures and the Healing Arts." Alanis Obomsawin, an Abenaki film producer, altered her planned presentation because she needed to tell the story of yet another suicide of a young boy in her community, an incident she had learned about shortly before the beginning of the panel. The question she left the audience with, for a minute of silence, was: how can one explain the discrepancy between the increasing support for Native arts in academic institutions and major conferences, and the desperate situation in Native communities? No answers were provided in that forum, but I believe that many of us found an indirect answer in a presentation given earlier at the conference by Ed Pechter from Concordia University on "Criticism as Contamination: or, Why Working on Othello Makes You Sick." Addressing the overall conference theme of "Literature, Health and Disease," he stated that criticism in the tradition of European or Western scholarship "is not a healing art" and, in fact, is detrimental to our society. Pechter illustrated

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"the sickness" in literary criticism with examples of contributions to an electronic discussion group on Othello, all of which contained misquotations. Although there may be different reasons for each distorted quotation, in the end these amount to a lack of respect for another writer's or critic's words; this also implies a lack of acknowledgement that, from the perspective of the Native creative process, in which "[c]reative acts are continuance links,"19 we build on each other in our creation of knowledges. Such misquotations in an electronic medium also demonstrate the effects of globalized communication, which, while facilitating the dissemination of knowledge, also further its de-contextualization. Coming from "nowhere," messages or texts are sent to "nowhere" so that there is no accountability to a particular audience. Globally mediated literary criticism of literatures by so-called minorities widens the gap between First World critics and the people who should be the primary audience, but who, in many cases, do not have access to this information and cannot contest it. A demand for responsibility in reading/critiquing literature is not only emphasized in the "oral aesthetic" articulated by Native authors like Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser,20 and Lee Maracle, but also in critical discourses at large. The increasingly urgent question, "How do we reaffirm the value of ethics in a postmodern age?"21 has brought to the forefront the ethical philosophy of the Judaic scholar Emmanuel Levinas. In his critique of Western philosophy, Levinas goes "beyond the limit of phenomenology to an ethics of transcendence," as Richard Kearney explains in a prefatory note to an interview with him.22 In Levinas's own words: I am defined as a subjectivity, as a singular person, as an "I", precisely because I am exposed to the other. It is my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other that makes me an individual "I". So that I become a responsible or ethical "I" to the extent that I agree to depose or dethrone myself—to abdicate my position of centrality—in favour of the vulnerable other.23

In his construction of subjectivity, Levinas outlines an inherent link between self and other based on his premise that the self has an inescapable answerability to the other, one that becomes ethical through dethroning. Relating this concept of ethics to a postcolonial discourse, the responsible or ethical reading of a Native text by a non-Native critic—if meant as an act of decolonization—should indeed start with the decentralization of one's

The Question of Cultural Literacy

position. Also of relevance in this context is Levinas's concept of radical alterity developed in contrast to Western ontology, which he understands as "a reduction of the other to the categories of the same."24 His argument against a totalizing knowledge that subsumes the other acknowledges the hermeneutics of difference in the interpretive process. To recognize difference or radical alterity means to acknowledge one's limited perspective, as Basil Johnston, Wendy Rose, and Margo Kane all point out, which in turn results in abdicating one's "position of centrality." Discussing ethical issues in feminist scholarship, Bell Hooks therefore argues "that problems arise not when white women choose to write about the experiences of non-white people, but when such material is presented as 'authoritative.'"25 Positionality is not just a question of self-identification in terms of one's race, gender, and class, but is also linked to procedure, process, and protocol. East Indian scholar Arun Mukherjee explains in her "Report from the Classroom" how decentring herself became the solution to her dilemma of not being "culturally literate" with regard to the cultural contexts of the literature she was teaching: What, then, can readers not familiar with the cultural universe of the text do? I suggest that they ask. Information is all around us. For instance, a student of mine gave a seminar on Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey by distributing a glossary of all the non-English words used in the text. She had asked the assistance of her South Asian neighbour to translate them. In seeking out Lien on e-mail and Isla's seeking out her neighbour in person, the text leaves the printed page to join our day-to-day oral culture and to become embellished with further narrations. Such a hermeneutic, I believe, is far more democratic than the expertdominated literary criticism of the past, where the trained critic spoke as authority. This hermeneutic is built on the premise that knowledge needed to decode the text is dispersed in the social environment the reader lives in and can be had through communications with friends, colleagues and neighbours.26 I see Mukherjee's experience as a model for acquiring "cultural literacy" that makes the search for knowledge transparent and into a process that invites participation from different sectors of society. But even in multicultural Canada, helpful neighbours are not always easy to find (and should not be exploited, either), and people are generally less predictable and more difficult "to read" than information from books. Mukherjee's

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suggestion of a non-linear deviation from the goal-oriented, fast-paced conventional method of literary research may also be unrealistic. Helen Hoy, clearly aware of the dilemma of a white literary critic of Native literature, at one point in her career explained she would find the solution, as she understands it, too demanding. Behind her uneasiness about "an epistemological impasse" and about appropriation of voice lurked an appalled glimpse of the momentous personal and methodological changes entailed in counteracting my cultural ignorance and presumption. Hell, I like my library fortress, my scholarly garrison. I don't even go out of my way to interview Alice Munro, when I am writing on her. The negotiations, the accountability, the loss of control over my time, the necessity of functioning off my own turf, the depressingly poor prospects of avoiding missteps were too daunting.2? Similar to Mukherjee, Hoy apprehends "cultural literacy" as a process that alters established notions of scholarship, and, in the specific context of understanding Native literature, demands non-compartmentalized involvement (personal and methodological changes). Although engaging critically with indigenous texts is challenging and difficult, non-Indigenous scholars should not abdicate their responsibility of attempting to do so. Acquiring cultural knowledge is only a starting point of an ongoing process. David L. Moore, who, while teaching in South Dakota, studied Native history, literature, and the Lakota language, explains in his dialogical model for an ethics of reading (of Native American literature) that "knowing and understanding are processes rather than products. A final product of understanding across cultural differences may be unattainable, while an ongoing process of understanding may remain inescapable."28

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CONTEXTUALIZING THE OTHER

THE INDIGENOUS OTHER: MAURICE KENNY'S "RAIN"

Going Home The book lay unread in my lap snow gathered at the window from Brooklyn it was a long ride the Greyhound followed the plow from Syracus to Waterton to country cheese and maples tired rivers and closed paper mills home to gossipy aunts ... their dandelions and pregnant cats ... home to cedars and fields of boulders cold graves under willow and pine home from Brooklyn to the reservation that was not home to songs I could not sing to dances I could not dance from Brooklyn bars and ghetto rats to steaming horses stomping frozen earth barns and privies lost in blizzards home to a nation, Mohawk to faces, I did not know and hands which did not recognize me

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to names and doors my father shut1 This poem by Maurice Kenny is meant as an epigraph to the discussion of his short story titled "Rain,"2 which foregrounds destabilizing notions of fixed places like "home." The poem speaks about the impossibility of "going home," an impossibility with which many Aboriginal people are familiar. In Maurice Kenny's case, the border between the United States and Canada that divides Mohawk territory may have added to undermining his notion of home. For Aboriginal people living within the borders of Canada, the colonial legislation of the Indian Act of 1876 played an important role in their moving away and returning to the reserve. According to this Act, a Native mother lost her status when she married a nonNative man and therefore had to leave the reservation. After these women and their children had regained their status through the changes of Bill C31 in 1985, homecoming was difficult because they had been estranged from the community and were not always welcomed, sometimes because allocated government funding for a reserve was not adjusted to accommodate more people and scarce resources had to be stretched even more. Also, those who had received an education in the city and could not "sing the songs" came home to a reservation "that was not home." Therefore, Anishnabe author Louise Erdrich states: "We are nomadic, both by choice, relocating in surroundings that please us, and more often by necessity."3 As I am theorizing Kenny's text from the positively valued position of nomadic homelessness, I considered it important to preface my decontextualized metaphors with an evocation of the pain of real homelessness in order to imbue my subsequent analysis with a questioning attitude right from the start, hoping to invite dialogue. According to Susie O'Brien, the parallels between the tourist and the theorist that have been identified in cultural studies discussions point to "a general agreement about the significance of both tourism and theory as contemporary world shaping processes."4 In my reading of Maurice Kenny's story "Rain" about a self-reflexive tourist, I build part of my argument on these parallels. However, I disagree with the attitude of conquest behind such "world shaping processes" in which "the theorist domesticates ... often unruly strands of information into a stable and familiar cognitive framework" (emphasis added).51 favour instead what Gilles Deleuze calls

Contextualizing the Other

"nomadic thought," which, as Georges van den Abbeele explains, "would no longer know the concept 'home'" or a "fixed position ... in relation to which all else can be subordinated, domesticated."6 The culture of nomads, Sioui says, "is centred on lightness, in every sense of the term."7 Intertwining my theorizing about Maurice Kenny's story with the "visiting narrator's" act of reading a "culturally different" text, I investigate questions of positionality and cross-cultural hermeneutics by retelling/writing the story. In this way I hope to parallel "commentary" with "performance"8 in a co-participating manner and thereby counteract the hegemonic theory/story discourse. The plot development of the short story "Rain" fictionalizes crosscultural encounters as visiting an unknown terrain: the narrator, only identified as a stranger, is with a group of people attending a rain dance performance in a Pueblo village of the dry mesa of New Mexico. She tells the reader right at the beginning about the limitations of her point of view. The story starts with the sentence: "I was only visiting that part of the country." In this way the narrator positions herself self-consciously and continues to do so throughout the story. As a visitor—or "stranger," as she calls herself later—the narrator first experiences communication problems: As we approached the truck I could see an old Indian couple selling melons. The man held one up to us in silence I was thirsty myself for the sweet juices of those melons. "They look good." Too late. The driver passed the truck without a thought. "What kind of melons are those?" I asked. The conversation already in progress was so intent upon the trip's purpose, our destination, that no one heard me "The juice of those melons back there would have cooled us off," I offered but received no response. (136) Since her interaction with the group is not very successful, the narrator concentrates on observing what is going on around her. Always conscious of her special visitor's status—"I come from a country where it is not necessary to dance rain ..." (137)—she describes scenes of the gathering of people waiting for the beginning of the rain dance ceremony from a distant and seemingly neutral perspective; yet, as she becomes more involved and participates at their level, she thinks of herself not only as a "visitor" but as a "stranger" who is "spying" (140). The objectification inherent in

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such a gaze is enhanced by her mention of the photo: "We sat there as if figures in portrait, a photograph" (140). From this point on in the story, the image of the photograph recurs. It has connotations on several levels. In Native cultural contexts, photos are often considered to be a fixation of an event or a person similar to the fixations of the written word.9 As photos decontextualize, and, therefore, secularize, picture taking at a sacred ceremony like the rain dance is not allowed. Another reason for this protocol is a lingering fear and mistrust among Native people of the dominant society, which, in the past, had outlawed these ceremonies. Photography as a theme in Canadian Aboriginal literatures features in Thomas King's work (who grew up in the United States but made his literary career in Canada). He addresses the abovementioned taboo of picture taking at ceremonies in his novel Green Grass, Running Water (1993),10 but he also writes against stereotypical notions about Native peoples' views regarding this topic by creating a photographer-protagonist in his novel Medicine River (1990). In Maurice Kenny's story "Rain," the image of the photo is a reminder of the tourist-like experience but, as well, connotes postmodern notions of the blurring of boundaries between life and art, between the immediacy of experience and the mediated, framed text. Linda Hutcheon writes, "Taking pictures is a way of both certifying and refusing experience, both a submission to reality and an assault on it."11 In the context of "Rain," the narrator is not presented as photographer in the manner of the narrator and protagonist Will in Thomas King's novel Medicine River, but the photo is merely an object, taking on a life of its own: it "remains static" (141); it "blurs" (141); it "swims into focus again" (142); and it "is animated" (143). The dehumanized representation of the narrator's sightseeing experience in a photo taken anonymously seems to highlight her alienation as a stranger, which she balances with a narrative in which she assumes agency: "I remember ..." (141). Hence, the photo image in Kenny's story may imply but does not emphasize the self-reflexivity of the narrator's "fixing of experience";12 it certainly draws attention to her perception of the culturally different environment as something from which she feels distant. In response to the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, the narrator resorts to her own history. She describes the place of her childhood as cool rain country, where Mclntosh apples, berries, and plums grow, the

Contextualizing the Other

extreme opposite to the dry, hot mesa where rain needs to be danced. She remembers each fruit and the season it grows in, and the rites that connect the fruit with a family member: the grandparents' "now deserted orchard" (141), the mother's teaching of "the rites of wild berry picking" (141), the old plum tree in her father's pasture. Significantly, the narrator's connection between "back home" and the unfamiliar rain dance ceremony is conveyed as a blending of experiences, of the here and the there, the now and the then, the present and the remembered reality, without determining the exact boundaries of any of those notions. In tune with the rain dance ceremony in which "time is neither recognizable nor of any importance" (143), she does not clearly distinguish between present and past, and uses both tenses indiscriminately. What seems to be the "real" experience, her visit, is, after all, mediated, a photo, but what is only remembered, her own history, is conveyed as "real." The narrator inhabits what Bhabha calls the "in-between" or "third space," "the 'inter'—the cutting edge of negotiation and translation . . . that carries the burden of the meaning of culture."13 Among the other characters in Maurice Kenny's story, the older people stand out, in particular a blind old man who takes part in the festivities together with his grandson. There is a special relationship between the narrator and this grandfather, as emphasized at the end of the story when both characters are juxtaposed—one living in the mesa where his family had been for generations, and the other "a stranger to this country ... visiting a short while" (145). As a visitor, the narrator's first-person perspective is certainly restricted; the reader is therefore surprised when, in portraying the grandfather, the narrator assumes omniscience, as if she could read his mind: "What chance has rain with this mechanical noise [of the merry-go-round] frightening the cloud and the spirit of the sky.... His people stuffing themselves with hot dogs and Coke. Changes. Everything changes now. He was glad to be blind" (144). How could the narrator know this? Did the experience of connecting the strange (the rain dance) with the familiar (the rites of her childhood) in a way that "blurs" one with the other make her believe herself to be all-knowing? Reading the story "Rain" cross-culturally as a story about cross-cultural reading, I want to highlight some points from the discussion above. Of particular importance is the self-positioning of the narrator (or, on the

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meta-level, the reader of "the other" text). According to Chambers, to define one's position means to acknowledge boundaries: I begin to comprehend that when there are limits [of where I am speaking] there also exist other voices, bodies, worlds on the other side, beyond my particular boundaries. In the pursuit of my desires across such frontiers I am paradoxically forced to face my confines, together with that excess that seeks to sustain the dialogues across them.14

Part of the so-called "postcolonial cultural protocol"15 is to face one's confines: not to universalize one's discourse. Yet if one does pursue one's desire of crossing such boundaries by attempting a dialogue, communication may not come easily. It should not surprise critics of European background if they do not find immediate gratification in their interpretation of Aboriginal literature, or if their comments are not being understood or are considered inappropriate. Like the visiting narrator or like the protagonist in Slipperjack's novel Silent Words, they need "to listen, watch and learn." The Laguna Indian woman with whom the narrator is travelling does not explain anything about not eating melons in a certain situation; it is just not done. A culturally literate approach to an Aboriginal text by an "outsider" ideally includes involvement and commitment.16I see in the main character of Maurice Kenny's story, the visitor, an attempt at getting involved when she states that, although a stranger, and although thirsting for the melons, she will not gratify her needs immediately but will wait for the rain like everybody else; it seems she understands that only then can she experience some of "the power" to which the elders in the story allude. In literature by Aboriginal authors, the referents behind the metaphor of "visiting" are manifold: explorers, missionaries, government agents, social workers, ethnologists, anthropologists, other researchers, and, of course, and more and more so, tourists: all came—and are still coming— to visit. Chambers writes, "Discoveries and conquests, and the subsequent Eurocentric domestication of space, reach their furthest point in modernday tourism and the 'neutral' gaze of knowledge."17 As we have seen, in Maurice Kenny's text a visitor's gaze may lose its innocence by becoming that of a spy. When the memories of her childhood become intertwined with the new experiences, when "the rites" in Mclntosh country and the rain dance rites, the waiting for the ripening of the berries and the waiting

Contextualizing the Other

for the rain become one reality, the "strangeness" of the Other is "domesticated" into the familiarity of home. At the end of the story the narrator sums up the mixing of experiences in the image of the blending of different fruit flavours: "At the road side I buy a melon.... I suck the sweet juices, and taste my grandmother's Mclntosh, my mother's strawberries, my father's plums" (145). One sensation is translated into another, but, as Chambers says, "to translate is always to transform."18 Understood as a commentary on cross-cultural literary criticism, this ending of the story "Rain" seems to imply that it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish a genuine hermeneutics of difference, as Dasenbrock postulates it. However, what exactly is being said in this story about the two different cultures? How "different" are they? If the plot of the story is a visitor's experience of an unfamiliar ceremony, one of the themes is the evocation of a mixed world in which different cultures as well as the sacred and the secular, the traditional and the contemporary, are blended. The narrator's travelling companions are couples whose partners come from mixed backgrounds; the car they ride in is a Pontiac,1(? and they participate in a traditional ceremony with a carnival right next to it so that the colours of the paint on the dancers' faces echo the colours of the balloons at the carnival. They eat frybread as well as hot dogs, and they drink Coke. The dancers wear traditional outfits, except for the lead woman, who wears green tennis shoes—a detail reminiscent of the "double vision" of bricolage practised by Aboriginal people in Australia and described by observers as "flexible, economical and unstable. It does not seek continuity or harmony in a world of discontinuity and inequality."20 The hybridity of all these images is highlighted by a reiterated emphasis on movement. Not only are the photos in motion—they "blur" and "swim into focus again"—but also the paints are described as "melting" and "mingling," and the movement in the centre of the story, the rain dance, is evoked in detail as "interchanging" and "weaving" where "men slide between women" (143). Another expression of blurred boundaries can be seen in the characterization of the narrator, who is not defined by name, gender, age, race, or ethnic background. It seems that the narrator is only important in his or her role as a self-reflexive recorder/interpreter in relation to his or her hermeneutic approach: visiting, listening, waiting, spying, contextualizing

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by remembering. Yet, her interpretive methods are always tied in with observations about the land—its seasons and the fruits it bears. Considering Anishnabe (and other Indigenous) peoples' relationship with the land (as shown in the interpretation of Silent Words) and their views about the fundamental difference between Natives and non-Natives regarding attitudes towards the land, one might infer that such a perceptual framework hints at the narrator's Aboriginal identity. A thus-defined cultural perspective of the narrator would explain her omniscient attitude toward the elder: as a Native person, even from a different region of the continent, she might indeed know how elders feel about changes happening to the traditions they grew up in, traditions that had been outlawed and were difficult to regain.21 With further analysis, one may also deduce the European side of the narrator's ancestry as well as the specific First Nation with which she is connected. The repeatedly mentioned Scottish name for the special brand of apples, Mclntosh, may hint at her Scottish background, but the narrator also lists corn, squash, and beans, and emphasizes the importance of strawberries. Listing the vegetables and fruit implies more than nostalgic memories for home in a European sense; they are inserted intertextually, alluding to Mohawk creation stories in which strawberries and "the three sisters" of corn, squash, and beans play an important role. The "culturally literate" reader—i.e., the reader knowledgeable of oral or written versions of creation stories from different First Nations22— will infer from this allusion that the narrative's main character is of Mohawk ancestry; the uninformed reader will not understand this layer of meaning but may still infer a Mohawk context because of the author's Mohawk ancestry. Reading the story biographically, another indeterminacy reveals itself: as the Mohawk territory is divided by the AmericanCanadian border, one may question Maurice Kenny's citizenship unless one argues from the perspective of Indigenous people who do not acknowledge the significance of this border for their nation- and selfhood. The short story "Borders" by Thomas King, a border crosser himself, fictionalizes an Aboriginal view on this particular theme, and it is in Thomas King's edition of An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction (emphasis added) tided All My Relations that Kenny's story is published. It should be noted, however, that a biographical reading of Native literature may easily lead to the search for stereotypical "Native," or, in this case,

Contextualizing the Other

"Mohawk," signifiers, which is a limiting and ghettoizing approach, as exposed, for example, by Marilyn Dumont in her poem "Circle the Wagons."23 A reader/critic must remember that certain knowledge about the cultural background of the author in a text with many indeterminacies about "Nativeness" may unravel only one layer of meaning. The identification of the narrator as Aboriginal would also explain gender ambiguity, since gender categories are viewed differently in Aboriginal cultures; their languages often do not have gender-specific pronouns. But the Mohawk language is slightly different from other First Nations languages. In an interview, Dawn T. Maracle from the Mohawk nation explains differences between Ojibway and Mohawk cultures: "in Mohawk culture most things are called 'she'. But the language does have he/she/it. .. ,"24 In a recorded conversation in English, two Mohawk (Kanien'keharka) women, Osennontion and Skonaganleh:ra, use the combined pronoun "s/he" to make their point, and Mohawk writer Beth Brant explains in one of her essays in Writing as Witness that "Mohawk is a woman language; if gender is not described in other terms, it is assumed to be female."25 The same point is made from a male perspective: Mohawk author Brian Maracle explains: "The Kanyen'kehaka are a matrilineal people and our language appropriately is governed by a female bias." As one example, he states that when "the gender of a person being spoken about is unknown ... the female verb prefix is always used."26 Hence, I chose the pronoun "she" for the narrator of Kenny's story, whose gender is unidentified, although, if awkwardness could have been avoided, I would have preferred ambivalent signification in order to reflect that stage of my reading process in which I understood personhood as being more significant than gender distinction. When I reread the narrator's cross-cultural interpretations by taking into account her Mohawk background, I change my evaluation of her reading of cultural difference. In the non-hegemonic discourses among different Native cultures, it may be less important to separate the different "flavours" of a culture than to blend them and taste the similarities (between the juiciness of a melon and an apple); the narrative emphasizes cultural distinctiveness among Aboriginal peoples as well as their closeness. However, although "cultural difference" takes on a different meaning while the story unfolds, the fictional text still carries a commentary on interpretive practices generally, in particular by drawing attention to the

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interpreter's positionality. For my own reading, the narrator's land-related perspective helps me to define more specifically "where I am coming from." The Biblical creation story, which is part of my background, is not related to where I live; it is a dogma taught to me in abstracto, whereas the three sisters of corn, squash, and beans are an essential component of a creation story that "is history" (Beth Brant) to the people from that land, related to their everyday lives for centuries. In Brant's version of the creation story (which she titles "This Is History"), she tells how human beings were created together with "the creatures and growing things"27 so that, when defining herself as an Indigenous person, she explains: We have been forced to reject and thereby forget what made us real as Native peoples. The dominant society longs for this forgetfulness on our part. It hungers for our assimilation into their world, their beliefs, their code. And it hurries this process along by promises of acceptance and forgiveness. Their paranoia threatens to become our own. But what we may have "forgotten" is still in our blood. Salmon's desire to go home is our desire also. Blue Heron's desire to fly long distances to make a home is ours also. Corn's desire to grow is ours also. For we are parts of them and they are parts of us. This is why we are Indigenous. This is what none of us has truly forgotten, though the false message pounds and thrashes our minds.28 It is noteworthy that the narrator of "Rain" positions herself as a visitor yet does not define, put boundaries around, her subject position. When she leaves, the taste of her mother's strawberries is mixed with the taste of something new, the melon. However, purity of experience never existed in the first place since she describes her mother as remaining "allergic to strawberries" (141). Given the cultural significance of this fruit, the "allergy" may be read as signifying a problematic relationship between her mother and aspects of her heritage. The narrator identifies herself by what she is not—not from "this country," not at home—but leaves the place where she is from open for interpretation. By thus encoding the narrator's subject position, Kenny de-essentializes her (possible) Mohawk identity, constructing it as a text to be (mis)interpreted. The narrator theorizes from a position of "home," yet home is not necessarily where she returns to; at the end of the story she just leaves—the Pontiac "sped on." If one reads "Rain" together with Kenny's poem "Going Home," one

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understands the ambivalence of the theme of home and belonging in Kenny's literary work. The cultural event the stranger/tourist/traveller visits displays the "melange" of a Rushdiean world of "hybridity, impurity, intermingling."29 But also the narrator's subjectivity is characterized by a hybrid consciousness. The hermeneutic process of her understanding of the unfamiliar is shaped by her in-between-ness, and the apparently fixed binary oppositions of visiting/being at home and outsider/insider locations are overridden/overwritten by her movements. She sees herself as part of the "we" of a community and at the same time as distant from it: "as if... a photograph" (140). At certain stages of the narrative, the image of the photo-graph, in which, in Bhaba's words, "the gaze and the grapheme ... are articulated in an ambivalence and splitting of the subject,"30 provides a connection between the different levels of experience she moves between. Although the title of Maurice Kenny's story, "Rain," suggests an emphasis on (the effectiveness of) a rain dance—and it does eventually rain—it is not the ceremony as such that is highlighted but a spectator's perception of it. The intratextual reader (i.e., narrator) is reading the text by telling the story of her reading. In my own reading, I follow the narrator's movements from the vantage point of a hermeneutics of suspicion; my understanding is a process shaped by the indeterminacy of the narrator's shirting positions. I visit Maurice Kenny's text; I get involved; I try to take control, to fix the meaning; I feel estranged and resort to familiar frameworks. My nomadic approach leads me to a construction of cultural difference analogous to Braidotti's nomadic epistemology from the perspective of sexual difference. Her levels of difference between men and women, among women, and within each woman can be paralleled with differences between Natives and non-Natives, differences among Natives, and differences within each Native. In my Euro-Canadian reading of a short story by a Mohawk writer, I identify with the outsider status of the visitor. I am a stranger in this text, "spying," and fixing the story in writing down my interpretation. On the other hand, the narrative of the visitor's specific history—her land-based genealogy, her thinking in fruits and vegetables as a paradigm for identification—places me as different from the narrator. Also, the cultural changes imposed upon Native traditions like the rain dance ceremony, and the fixations in form of a photo,

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metonymic of other fixations, are a reflection of difference within the context of power relations. However, Braidotti's analysis of the difference between men and women as the difference between oppressor and oppressed also makes an important point about differences among the oppressed groups: "this recognition of a common condition of sisterhood in oppression cannot be the final aim; women may have common situations and experiences, but they are not, in any way, the same Attention to the situated as opposed to the universalistic nature of statements is the key idea."31 At this level of difference, the situated or positioned narrator of the story comes into focus. Clearly locating herself as a visitor and as a stranger, she finds similarities, comparability, but not sameness. Her increasing understanding of the event also lets her see differences between the older and the younger generation and among the dancers. At the third level of differentiation, which becomes a layer of my own reading, are the multiple subject positions of the narrator herself. Involved and alienated, estranged and implicated in "the other" story, her own identification is maybe hybridic (Scottish-Canadian/Mohawk) but certainly ambiguous in its signification. A nomadic reading of a narrative differs from the tourist model by giving up "comforting notions of positionality" questioning the "very presupposition of a fixed position or 'home,'"32 to which alterity can be subordinated. Leaving the text as an intra- and extratextual reader with the awareness of "visiting a short while" acknowledges "a theorizing without theory," i.e., as Georges van den Abbeele says, "without feeling the need to possess the authentic sight by totalizing the markers into a universal and unmediated vision."33 Discussing Maurice Kenny's story within the context of an ethics of positionality, two points should be emphasized in conclusion. If read as "theory," this narrative exposes and obstructs non-Aboriginal readers' complicity in the discourses of tourism. We are drawn into a sightseeing experience, but at the same time are hindered in our attempts at "fixing" what we view by continually shifting perspectives and blurred pictures. Foreclosing an unethical reading, "Nativeness" in this text is contingent, indeterminate, changing—ultimately, indefinable. This is one teaching of the story, but it is complemented by another, equally important, one. The fact that indigenity cannot/should not be articulated in definitive terms by

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an outsider does not mean it does not exist. Although the narrator's identity is ambiguous, and although there is no "fixed place" mentioned as home, her self-identification through memory and stories contradicts an exclusively nomadic reading of Maurice Kenny's narrative as "postcolonial." The narrator's land-based genealogy points to the fundamental difference (Akiwenzie-Damm) of Indigenous people, which is not affected ("forgotten") by colonization. Although Aboriginal people are displaced people, they are not immigrants. A similar, seemingly paradoxical, point about the undefmability yet existence of "a Native world view" is evoked in a poem by Nancy Cooper (Anishnabe from the Rama Reserve) revealingly titled "Untitled." The speaker begins by expressing her resentment against any definitions imposed upon her, from "squaw" to "Aboriginal," against any measurements of "Indianness," but ends by reclaiming her self through a process of waiting: I can wait for the full moon. I can wait. For answers that will have been with me Forever. Just forgotten Just hidden.34

CONSTRUCTING THE EUROPEAN: THE REVERSAL OF THE "CIV/SAV DICHOTOMY"1

While the Caribou was in Europe, the Stag asked, 'Would you help me be spiritual again?'2 The previous discussion featured an example in Aboriginal literature in which a character of Aboriginal ancestry, as one may infer, learns about another Aboriginal culture. The Indigenous "stranger" is a rare occurrence in literary Indigenous texts; visiting characters are usually of European background. The following discussion shifts towards those "strangers." They are often constructed as being in the culture, to some degree a part of it, in spite of their different ancestry. Since these characters are not Native, a literary analysis of their role contributes to a reading

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of Aboriginal literatures that challenges boundaries of the outsider/insider dichotomy. In September 1995, I met for the first time Daniel David Moses, Delaware poet and co-editor of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. I met him in Trier, Germany, at an international conference organized by the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, and talked to him on a boat cruise for the conference participants on the Mosel River. When I asked him for an autograph in his anthology, which I had used as a textbook in my Native literature courses since 1992, when it first came out, he wrote the following: for Renata Daniel David Moses in Trier '95 'Stranger and stranger' I remembered this play on words when I started to think about the role of the European stranger in Indigenous texts. Moses's autograph makes sense on several levels. We had not known each other before and thus were strangers to each other. I am also a stranger to him as a non-Aboriginal person and he a stranger to me as a non-German (or, considering the generalizing descriptor "Aboriginal," a non-European) person. The "strangeness" of the situation was highlighted by the circumstances: for him to read his poetry in a strange country; for me to meet him in a place I had become estranged from since I emigrated to Canada; and for both of us to be surrounded by the Germany of tourist guides, by the stereotypical "romantic" German landscape of villages and castles. Cross-cultural encounters were indeed becoming "stranger and stranger." I assume that our meeting in Canada would have been different: I, the immigrant, would still be the stranger, but he, the Indigenous person, would belong here. However, in his conversation with Terry Goldie, in the preface to his anthology, he specifically mentions that while he feels comfortable with Native groups all over the country, he may feel strange wherever there are no Native people: "I feel that I can go to any Native events. Whereas I've lived in Toronto for many years, and there are places here I feel strange."3 In other words, it is not so much the country or the continent but the people who evoke strangeness—in this case because of a perceived difference between Native and non-Native people.

Contextualizing the Other

Such "difference" is constructed in fictional and non-fictional texts by Indigenous writers. Responding to Moses's closeness with other Native people as opposed to his sense of strangeness in a non-Native environment, I want to discuss similarities, rather than dwell on distinctions, among different Indigenous nations. A subsequent study may ask the question if there are certain culture-specific ways of imagining "the European" from a Native perspective. For the sake of emphasizing difference between "Indigenous" and "European" views, I align myself with Lee Maracle's argument: "We come from our own specific place, but we have a commonality and a common dream."4 On the other hand, considering my own positionality in relation to these texts—arguing from the perspective of a German immigrant in Canada—and Germany's peculiar relationship with Native people5 I want to focus my discussion on analyzing images of "Germans" after a brief introduction on Indigenous perspectives on "Europeans" (or Euro-Canadians/Euro-Americans6) generally. The German characters in each narrative are described as searching for something in Native culture that they miss in their own. After centuries of sending over sacred teachings translated into an Indigenous language, shown in the Ojibway translation of

Ojibway translation of German publication of the Bible, 1926.

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parts of the Bible published in Germany in 1926,7 the European stag asks the North American caribou for his own teaching, as Ahmoo Angeconeb visualizes in his print reproduced on the cover of this book. Aboriginal teachings are partly communicated through so-called legends passed on orally for generations, but are also reproduced in a variety of written versions. In his story "The Spirit of Maundau-meen," transcribed by Basil Johnston, corn is "personified as stranger."8 In this version of his story, corn was sent to the Anishnabe to feed them. This "migrant," as the stranger is also called, comes from Mexico and travels to different peoples, among them hunters and fishermen whom he dares "to master" him. He also challenges the Anishnabe people, who eventually overcome him in battle; through his death a new plant is born, which the people name "Maundau-meen, the seed of wonder, or the wonderful food" (104). After the people enjoyed the abundance of food provided by the stranger for some years, the corn harvest (and other harvests as well) begins to fail because of the people's disrespectful behaviour toward plants and animals. Only after they recognize their mistake and change their attitudes do they again have food in abundance. Strangers, the story tells us, bring valuable gifts. If properly hosted, integrated, they will take root and contribute to the welfare of their host culture. Reminiscent of other Native narratives about the origin of life in its various forms, Johnston's text crosses species boundaries between humans and non-humans.9 The newness of the plant in Anishnabe territory is understood as the coming of a stranger; a human being is transformed into a plant. Such transformations do not anthropomorphize non-human life but explain the intimate link among all life forms, an oneness of all life based on equality rather than hierarchy. W.H. New, in his insightful study of conceptualizations of land in Canadian writing, aptly comments: "Aboriginal responses to the land offered a ready paradigm of identification and conservation, for those who were willing to see it. But few were. For most European observers, indigenous mythologies represented a primitive past rather than an alternative future."10 Another legend written down by Basil Johnston, "The Prophecy,"11 raises a cautionary note toward strangers. In this story, Basil Johnston's visionary storyteller prophesies the coming of strange-looking people, "men and women with white skins" (98). They will be resisted "too late," as he says, because, like the corn

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stranger in "The Spirit of Maundau-meen," who was fought with "many reservations," they were treated upon their arrival with hospitality.12 Instead of being "domesticated," like the corn stranger who becomes part of the land, quite literally rooted in it, these strangers come "from the east across a great body of salt water ... in quest for lands" (98). The plural of the word "land" signifies a quantification of land, something to be divided up among different "owners." Wanting to own lands, these strangers use their technology to displace the Indigenous people, driving them "from their homes and hunting grounds to desolate territories where game can scarce find food for their own needs and corn can bare take root" (99). In addition to describing their different skin colour and clothing, Basil Johnston's storyteller Daebaudjimoot compares the predatory strangers with birds: "After them [the first few] will come countless others like flocks of geese in their migratory flights. Flock after flock they will arrive" (98). In an ironic reversal of history, the European strangers eventually turned the Aboriginal people into "a stranger in my own land," as succinctly put in the poem titled "Indian Country" by Ojibway writer David Groulx.1^ The confrontation between sedentary Indigenous people and ravenous birds/strangers, as told by Basil Johnston in his prophecy story, resonates with Jeannette Armstrong's allegorical narrative "This Is a Story." A comparison between the migrations of the Okanagan "culture hero" Kyoti, who wants to help his people, and the coming and going of the Swallows, who have only their own interests in mind, reveals that the important contrast is not between migrant and homesteader, but between those who take care of the land and those who divide and destroy. Also, by emphasizing the migratory nature of the newcomers, both Johnston and Armstrong question the popular notion that the Europeans settled and Aboriginal people did not. Further, instead of equating the settler culture with civilization and the nomads with savages, they reverse the "dichotomy of civilization versus savagery" that Metis poet, scholar, and educator Emma LaRocque considers "pervasive" in colonial discourses.14 In "This Is a Story," Jeannette Armstrong exposes the uncivilized behaviour of the colonizers in the image of the Swallows "shitting all over" the place. In her poem "History Lesson," she makes her point even more strongly by openly challenging the notion of civilization in relation to the arrival of Europeans on this continent. After listing the "gifts" of the

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colonizers: "Smallpox, Seagrams / and Rice Krispies," she adds further sarcasm: "Civilization has reached / the promised land."1^ In this poem, "a blunt parody of the grade school history lesson we have all had,"16 Armstrong reverses the colonial "'civ/sav' dichotomy"1? by depicting the Europeans as savage in their exploitation and greed, harming not only the Indigenous people and the animals (the near extinction of the buffalo can be read metonymically) but also the water "and multi-coloured rivers / swelling with flower powered zee," and the land "burying / breathing forests and fields." Armstrong links the destructive forces of Western history to a search based on wrong ("unholy") motivations. She ends her poem with the following stanza: Somewhere among the remains of skinless animals is the termination to a long journey and unholy search for the power glimpsed in a garden forever closed forever lost (29) It is noteworthy that, as Jeanne Perreault states, in "contrast to the usual evocation [in Native literature] of losses undergone by Aboriginal peoples, Armstrong looks at the losses suffered by the Europeans."18 However, she reinterprets their displacement from paradise from an Indigenous perspective by linking the loss of "the garden" with the "promised land" of the North American continent. Through this connection she also rewrites the unholiness of the search for power: within the Christian paradigm, it is unholy because eating forbidden fruit is constructed as an act of rebellion against God's laws; but in the context of a poem about the history of colonization, the search is unholy because the creation story of the Old Testament teaches domination rather than cooperation. The latter is an important value for Jeannette Armstrong, personally, as she outlines in her article "The Disempowerment of First North American Native Peoples and Empowerment Through Their Writing," and in Aboriginal creation stories generally.19 The linear thinking of the journey and the hegemonic search "for the power" led to so-

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called progress, which Armstrong expresses ambivalently with oxymoronic images of pollution and greed. Profit (paper money) is extracted from the earth: and miners pulling from gaping holes green paper faces of smiling English lady ("History Lesson," 28) If one reads the line "pulling from gaping holes" against Indigenous views about the earth as a sacred giver of all life (as expressed in the often stereotypically misused image of mother earth), it becomes clear that from the perspective of an Aboriginal writer, the Europeans, in their non-spiritual search for dominating the people and the land, desecrate(d) the earth in a "savage" way. Similar to Canadian Aboriginal writers, Native American intellectuals and activists such as Vine Deloria, Russell Means, and Winona LaDuke construct "difference" between European immigrants and Indigenous peoples as different attitudes toward the land. Anishnabe writer Winona LaDuke states that Indigenous people of North America think of themselves as "the North American Host World, the truly landbased people"20 in contrast to the European (im)migrants who cut themselves off from the land. The setders in their "arrogance" created a "synthesis" of an imported ideology with the naturally given conditions so that "a new economic order was forged on the land, not with the land."21 Like Jeannette Armstrong, she sees an "unholy" ideology as the reason for colonization and exploitation of the people and the land. Russell Means, Oglala Lakota actor and lecturer, who is widely known as a major leader in the American Indian Movement (AIM), argues that "American Indians know" that the "belief that man is god" is "totally absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh so that we may live."22 From a Native American perspective, a practice of respect for all life instead of domination over natural resources accounts for a non-hierarchical or circular thinking that is spiritual in its focus on connection instead of on exploitation, and organized, as Deloria says, "in terms of space" instead of proceeding in "a linear fashion."23 These thinkers perceive cultural/philosophical distinctions between Indigenous and immigrant world views as categorically different; Marxism,

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for example, despite its subversive potential, appears to them as just another European model. However, Russell Means makes sure to explain his use of the term "European": When I use the term 'European', I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mindset, a world view, which is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook, they are acculturated to hold it. The same holds true for American Indians or for the members of any other culture.24 In this statement Means claims that "European" as well as "American Indian" culture is a social construct since either world view is not biologically given but may be learned (or unlearned). Similarly, Jeannette Armstrong's teaching story "This Is a Story," although predicated on the dualism between Peoples and Swallows, may be read as crossing racially constructed boundaries. In tune with the significance of symbolic representation in traditional storytelling, as explained by George Cornell, the generic title of her story and the allegorical naming of the different groups of people take away from a culture- or race-specific context and thus emphasize acquired rather than genetically encoded behaviour. All that counts, that which is "true" and "real," are the consequences of the Swallow attitude: "rainbow colors in the oil slicks along the river" (135). In her essay on disempowerment versus empowerment, Armstrong defines such an attitude not as racially determined but as "imperialist thought" that needs to be replaced by "the relearning of co-operation and sharing."25 In light of the above discussion on constructing and challenging boundaries between "Europeans" and Indigenous peoples, the following analysis of three narratives by Canadian Aboriginal writers with European, or, more specifically, German, characters will further explore Native perspectives on the immigrant stranger.26 These German characters seem to generate or entertain a somewhat more "hybrid" in-between position. As go-betweens they problematize the European/Indigenous binaries, suggesting multiple forms of border crossings.

Contextualizing the Other

THE ROLE OF GERMAN CHARACTERS

Lee Maracle's Ravensong: The "Uprooted" Other Of the three texts to be analyzed for the role of the German characters, the novel Ravensong1 by Stoh:Lo author Lee Maracle most openly moves back and forth between constructions of "us" and them" and the undermining of such dichotomization. The title of the novel, which is set in the 1950s along the Pacific Northwest coast, refers to the so-called trickster figure of the West Coast First Nations, Raven, and her larger-thanhuman message (song) about cross-cultural communication. Raven knows that an environmental disaster can be prevented only if the European "others" are "rooted to the soil of this land" (44). Observing from "high up" the events in a Native community located in the immediate neighbourhood of a non-Native community, Raven tries to communicate her insights to Stacey, the seventeen-year-old Native high school student and human protagonist of the novel. However, potentially a "bridging character," as she physically crosses the bridge between both communities every day on her way to the non-Native school, Stacey fails, or nearly fails, in her responsibility of reaching out to "the others"—the responsibility of a Native person, as she vaguely knows (92).2 She therefore forces Raven to send sickness as a means of bringing the two communities together. The novel shows how Stacey's aptitude for becoming a boundary crosser—as she "had all the advantages of Dominic's and Nora's [the Native elders'] good sense and the knowledge of the others" (44)—is hindered by her thinking in irreconcilable oppositions. Hence, the narrative moves between constructing and deconstructing boundaries, a tension reflected in the coexistence of the two central images of the novel, the gulf and the bridge. Mostly seen through Stacey's eyes, the "white" community in this novel is "rootless" (39) on the grounds of lacking a positive "lineage memory" (19): they consider children to be "transient visitors" (26-27) and have no strong family ties. The "lack of connectedness" (17) with biological relatives manifests in other ways as well. As Stacey states, "some white people had no roots in the creative process" so that if "you have only yourself as a start and end point, life becomes a pretence at continuum" (61). While Stacey's thinking about the courage of the salmon on their way over the falls to the spawning grounds makes her feel "rooted ... to a sense of duty she could not explain" (61), this link with all of creation is not seen as a

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solution for "white folks" apparently lacking "this sensibility" (61). Because of their lack of spiritual connectedness, they suffer from a "frailty" that "did not look physical" (29) but leads to suicide and (sexual) abuse, which eventually also affect the Native people. "The old snake [a Native wife abuser] had brought a piece of white town with him to the village. Stacey knew Shelly had been abused and discarded by a white man. It's how they are, she thought. They don't really like us Now the old snake was just like them ..." (149-150). Stacey uses the generalizing third-person pronouns "they" and "them," and images that construct boundaries such as "the outside world" (63) and "the other world" (113), to explain "the gulf between colonizers and colonized, or, in one of her comments, between masters and slaves (75). Toward the end of the novel in her last meeting with Steve, a young man from white town who wants to be her friend, Stacey concludes they cannot be together: "There is this gulf between us. I have no idea how deep or wide it is. I just know it's there" (185). By emphasizing ethnic contrasts, Stacey's voice generates "feelings of dissociative belonging,"3 sometimes to the extent of dehumanizing "the other." Even more extreme than Stacey is Stacey's mother, who has only left the village once. "'They aren't human,' she had told Stacey a while back, categorically dismissing them all" (193). Or: "'She is white and so she don't count'" (123). The rigid dichotomies of "us" and "them" indicate Stacey's and her mother's biased perspective. However, the dichotomies are contested by a series of boundary-crossing devices in the form of imagery, narrative point of view, the character of German Judy, and an "oral aesthetic" of reader response. The often repeated reference to a gulf or a chasm between the two ethnically constructed communities—echoed in the play The Gap by awardwinning Metis playwright Ian Ross4—is set off by the other central image of the novel, the bridge that separates, but also links, white town and the Native village. It is on this bridge that Stacey meets with her two friends from "the other world," Carol, with whom she walks to school every morning, and Steve, whom she does not want on the bridge observing her watching the salmon swim upstream.5 "If she stopped for her habitual private vigil he might ask what she was doing. He might disturb the peace of the vigil, contaminate its peaceful nature by disrupting its privacy" (75,

Contextualizing the Other

emphasis added). Since Stacey considers "the others'" search for knowledge only a nuisance, an intrusion, and even a contamination of the purity of her (spiritual) experience, she does not bother to teach her friend about what is a source of strength for her. In situations like these—symbolically located on or close to the bridge—Stacey's limitations as a bridge-builder between two cultures become obvious. In addition to the use of the obvious image of the bridge, Maracle employs the character of Raven for a less one-dimensional view of "the Europeans" than Stacey holds throughout the novel. Similar to Armstrong's empathy with the losses of the Europeans in her poem "History Lesson," Maracle makes Raven sympathize with the "uprooted" others: "poor pale creatures who had forgotten their ways centuries before. She mused over their recounting of origins from the time Jesus was murdered. Parched throat, he had perished straddling sacred cedar in a land far from their own. They borrowed his spirit, his heroism, but did so in distorted fashion" (44). From the Indigenous perspective of thinking in space, as "Vine Deloria puts it, a religion that was "transplanted" is seen as being only imitated, "borrowed," and not in the right way, either. Vine Deloria's classic work, God Is Red. A Native View of Religion, examines exactly this question of the link between place and religious ceremonies. He explains how sacred lands are "permanent fixtures" in Indigenous cultural or religious understanding (67) and asks, from the point of view of a religion that is "spatially determined," if "ceremonies [are] restricted to particular places" and if they "become useless in a foreign land" (71). He does not give an answer but regrets that a religion "bound to history" and preoccupied with "temporal considerations" has never critically examined these questions (71). Lee Maracle, on the other hand, provides an answer from Raven's larger-than-human point of view, which is critical of such "transplanting." However, in the context of a discussion of boundary-crossing devices in this novel, her choice of words in the depiction of Christian religion merits special attention. The phrase about Jesus "straddling sacred cedar" can be understood on different levels. It may mean that Jesus died on a crucifix made of cedar wood, which would make it "sacred." However, in Native beliefs, cedar is sacred by simply being a cedar tree, without Jesus's death. In the above quotation, a constitutive event in Christianity is joined with a Native world view, thus

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attributing an hybridic quality to her notion of sacredness. The novel elaborates on the spiritual role of cedar insofar as this is the other nonhuman character besides Raven, who tries to guide the humans.6 The word "straddling" in the phrase "straddling sacred cedar" also signifies a bringing together of two sides or a crossing over. Christ straddles both the human and the supernatural world in a way similar to the socalled trickster. To quote Tomson Highway, Raven (and his/her relations) is just "as pivotal and important a figure" in the world of North American Indian mythology "as Christ in Christian mythology," who "straddles the consciousness of man and that of God, the Great Spirit."'7 Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua also uses the term "straddling" to describe her "new mestizo, consciousness," the "consciousness of the Borderlands" from the perspective of a feminist of colour: "Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestizo, undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war."8 In short, although one layer of meaning in Raven's message clearly separates "the uprooted others" from the villagers, another layer hints at possible connections between the two groups so that her plan "to root" the others "to the soil of this land" (44) does not seem to be an impossible task. Although her criticism of "borrowing in a distorted fashion" (emphasis added) seems to suggest a belief in purity and in an essential, original truth, her multi-layered description of Jesus's crucifixion hints at a hybridic notion of culture and a culturally embedded religion, in Homi Bhabha's words, at "the in-between space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture."9 In a novel told from a third-person narrative point of view, Raven is one of the characters through which the narrator speaks. Storytelling in this novel does not emanate from an anonymous narrator but involves a plurality of contextualized perspectives. Although Stacey's view is privileged, the novel would have been quite different if Maracle had chosen a first-person point of view with Stacey as the sole narrator (a narrative technique common in Canadian Aboriginal fiction in general). Her biased, self-deceptive, often confused and hence unreliable perspective would have silenced other voices, in particular those of Raven, Cedar, and Earth, who challenge Stacey's limited vantage point in their criticism. On the other hand, Raven's privileging of Stacey explains, and at the same time

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questions, the construction of racial and cultural boundaries in the novel. Although Stacey dismisses Raven as "a foolish crow" (75), thereby behaving like the assimilated People in Armstrong's "This Is a Story" who do not recognize Kyoti,10 the narrator gives enough context for readers to understand Raven's "indignant shriek" (75) as a critical comment on Stacy's behaviour toward Steve. Raven also criticizes Stacey's mother for having missed an opportunity to teach about their ways to "the others," young men who stayed in her house during the Depression. "'Shame on you, Momma', Raven now sighed from cedar's branch outside 'You could have taken the time to teach these men when first I brought them here'" (54). The corrective voice of the trickster character, Raven, signifies difference within a Native community; it shows Native culture as a contested site, as constructed and multi-layered. Maracle's own interpretation of the novel emphasizes different perspectives also among the four storytellers identified in the Epilogue: Stacey, her sister Celia, their mother, and Rena, another woman in the village, are characters "who come to their culture from four different directions."11 Although their role as storytellers is of unequal weight— most of the attention is given to Stacey's thoughts—these four characters, differing in age, educational background, and sexual orientation, further foreground "difference" against a seemingly homogeneous Native community and thus keep the reader from creating fixed images of "Nativeness." The elder Dominic declares "combined wisdom" (emphasis added) as the Native way: not "just one knowledge or another, but all knowledge should be joined" (67). It is with this philosophy of "human oneness" (67) contrapuntally set against the dualities created in the novel that I want to understand Maracle's characterization of German Judy. The name of the character "German Judy" emphasizes her ethnically constructed otherness, but she is also othered in terms of her sexual orientation, as she lives in a lesbian relationship with Rena, one of the villagers. One may argue that Maracle uses the German identity of one partner as a device to pronounce the "strangeness" of the situation. Although the novel conveys some of the community's discomfort and concerns with the lifestyle of the two women, because of her ethnically different background, German Judy is more discriminated against than Rena, the Aboriginal woman. German Judy is "the white woman" living "in a village that

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virtually ignored her. She was white. No one we know, Stacey told herself (79). And her mother, in the context of her moral outrage about Stacey's "unchaperoned visit" (121) with the women, totally dehumanizes her when responding to Stacey's statement that they are not single: "'She is white and so she don't count,'" (123). Rena, on the other hand, is respected "despite" her sexual orientation, as is shown in her status as a storyteller. Also, the fact that she is Old Nora's daughter, a woman whom the community considered "different," yet who was respected nevertheless (as is revealed through the description of her funeral at the beginning of the novel), clearly makes her "one of us," an insider. A comparison between German Judy and the other female outsider in the Native village further shows that ethnicity is a more significant marker of "difference" than sexual preference. Like German Judy, Madeline, from the Manitoba Saulteaux, speaks with an accent. Her emphasized "difference" (173) draws attention to cultural variations among Aboriginal peoples and, as she is supported by the community, also to acceptance of difference. Although Madeline "was not one of them" (159), she gets help against her abusive husband (who, although a villager, is ostracized). Both strangers, Madeline and German Judy, become Stacey's teachers as they make her question her judgements and assumptions about individual people and society as a whole. In the overall set-up of the novel, with its major division into two ethnically constructed communities, the teachings of German Judy should be of special significance for the protagonist Stacey because she "held the key" (81) to questions about the white world—from reasons for suicide, to the role of women, to registration procedures at a university—but Stacey does not take full advantage of German Judy's knowledge. She does not allow "a white woman" to challenge her opinions; she only "felt a bit uneasy" (81) when German Judy tries to explain how gender may undermine racial binaries. While the novel grants more space to the depiction of Madeline's character than to Judy's, the inclusion of an immigrant outsider still signals the novel's message of "combined wisdom" as the Native way. In her role of providing medical help to the villagers, German Judy becomes part of Raven's design and, hence, an important voice in the novel's "song" of bringing together both cultures for the survival of all. Living as a non-Native person in a Native community and as a lesbian in a patriarchal society, she is also a

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boundary crosser herself. Different from Stacey's failed friendship with Steve, the white young man, German Judy's relationship with a Native woman shows the possibilities of love as crossing the gulf of "us" and "them." As Stacey observes: "They must really love each other ... to have somehow climbed all the hills of complete misunderstanding" (114). German Judy's accent identifies her as somebody who was not born in Canada but who came over as an adult—in this case, given the setting of the novel in the 1950s, probably shortly after World War II. This evocation of a political context for the German character connects her indirectly with another, if absent, character associated with the war and the ideology of Fascism that caused it. Stacey's uncle, her mother's brother, became a so-called naturalized Canadian when he enlisted in the war. For the longest time, her mother did not know what that meant. When Stacey explains to her, "'It means you're not an Indian anymore" (52) and that the soldiers had "to naturalize" in order to fight Fascism, which Stacey explains as "you don't have any rights any more" (52), connections are made between geographically separated but ideologically linked political systems. In each country rights (and lives) of a minority are taken away. Stacey's mother "burned with shame. Benny had gone halfway 'round the world to kill some boys in a fight against something that he had not been willing to fight at home" (53). The irony of this reversal is echoed in the novel's plot: a character linked through her nationality with the Fascism that a Native man had fought against makes the Native community he cannot return to her home, her refuge from the past. "It dawned on Stacey that maybe her [German Judy's] segregation from the village was selfimposed and comfortable for her" (80). Hence, the role of the German character is also in this way a boundary-crossing device showing that national and individual histories are not isolated but intertwined and overlapping or, as Cathy Caruth says, "that history, like trauma, is never simply one's own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas."12 Although the character of German Judy functions as a corrective to Stacey's dualistic thinking, her role is marginalized, as she is not one of the storytellers. It rests with readers who are "as much part of the story as the teller[s]" ("Preface," 11) to understand the significance of her voice. Coming to writing from the perspective of an orator, Maracle assumes

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that readers, at least readers familiar with "the principles of oratory" (11), become responsible participants in the construction of meaning. Lessons in this Indigenous novel are not explicit, but may be inferred. Native readers—if I go along with Maracle's dualistic division of readers into "Europeans" and "us" in her often cited "Preface: You Become the Trickster"— should understand that Stacey's point of view, although Native, is limited and must be complemented by Raven's criticism of a "parochial" attitude and an "imaginary confinement" of the villagers (43). European readers should read the novel with an understanding of colonization and its specific examples in the text. Stacey's mother's seemingly racist views are explained, but not excused, by her experiences of oppression as, for example, in the story about her brother; similarly, Stacey's harsh judgements are often influenced by her observations of the unfair treatment of her people during the flu epidemic when non-Native people make no attempt to cross the bridge and help. As well as making these connections, European readers also should accept Raven, a non-human, as teacher. In her article "Indigenous Peoples and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge," Laurie Whitt emphasizes "a commitment to epistemological pluralism" as a feature of "indigenous knowledge systems": Without glossing over the important differences in indigenous epistemologies (whose full range and richness should be stressed even if it is not here explored), we can note that many indigenous cultures place considerable significance and value on alternative ways of knowing the world, particularly on gaining access to the perspective of the other-than-human.13 If the multiple point of view in Ravensong is read also as an expression of a culturally embedded epistemology, Raven's alternative way of knowing the world, differing from and superseding the human characters' perspectives, may provide an interpretive framework for a non-dualistic reading of the novel. Raven, the teacher, starts the novel by taking the reader into a spatial dimension without boundaries: The sound of Raven spiralled out from its small beginning in larger and larger concentric circles, gaining volume as it passed each successive layer of green. The song echoed the rolling motion of earth's centre, filtering itself through the last layer to reach outward to earth's shoreline above the deep. (9) The spiral movements of her song set the tone for an ethical narrative

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that dialectically moves back and forth between a condition that is—segregation, racism, prejudice, injustice—to what should be: "a combined wisdom" (67). German Judy's relationship with the Native culture is, to use Said's distinction, one of affiliation rather thanf i l i a t i o n : 1 4 , s h ekeeps her own name throughout the novel. Rather than "becoming Native," she functions as a bridge between the cultures, a link. An outsider, she joins in the many voices that make up "community." Gloria Anzaldua, herself a lesbian and "border crosser," identifies two opposite ways of appreciating "a culture that is not your own culture": celebration and appropriation.15 Unlike German Judy, who mediates but neither celebrates nor appropriates, the two German characters in the two Native texts to be discussed next, A Quality of Light and "Compatriots," oscillate between these two poles in their border-crossing identity constructions. Richard Wagamese^s A Quality of Light: "Becoming Indians"

A Quality ofLight16 is the second novel by Anishnabe Richard Wagamese, following his partly autobiographical bestseller novel Keeper 'NMe (1994). His first novel is the story of a young man returning to his Native community, from which he had been taken as a young child. Raised in nonNative foster families, he is confused when he comes back into a Native environment. The elder "Keeper" who guides his journey of (re)connecting with his ethnic roots explains at the beginning of the book the disastrous effects of placing Native children into non-Native homes because of unbridgeable differences between the two cultures: Got raised up all white but still carryin' brown skin. Hmmpfh. See, us we know you can't make a beaver from a bear. Nature don't work that way. Always gotta be what the Creator made you to be. Biggest right we all got as human bein's is the right to know who we are. Right to be who we are. But it's not their fault. When you quit lookin' around at nature you quit learnin the natural way. The world gets to be somethin' you gotta control so you're always fightin' it.17 With this explanation by an elder at the beginning of the story, the protagonist starts his journey of "becoming Native" by being immersed in the predefined and unquestioned Native (Ojibway) culture of his community.

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In his second novel, A Quality of Light, Wagamese challenges the concept of a "naturally" given ethnic identity and instead reveals its constructedness or how it can be changed and "controlled." Again narrated from a first-person point of view by an Ojibway character adopted into a nonNative family, this novel looks at multiple layers of identity construction. Josh Kane, the Ojibway, adopted as a baby by a devotedly Christian family, tells most of the story about his friendship with the non-Native Johnny Gebhardt while travelling from southern Ontario to Calgary in order to bring a solution to a political standoff staged by his friend. Right in the Prologue, Josh highlights the significance of their relationship in the story he is going to tell: "It's about Johnny and me becoming Indians together, one because he wanted to and the other because he had to. It's only now that I understand that those parts are interchangeable" (9). Rather than espousing the concept of a biologically given identity, this story is about choices (or, from Keeper's perspective, the will to control) undermining the born into/adopted or filiated/affiliated binary. As most of the story is told from the point of view of the Ojibway traveller, who sees himself as an "emotional voyageur" (1) and as a "pilgrim" (97-98), reflecting upon nomads while he is travelling, I want to read this novel from the epistemological position of a "nomadic consciousness," as theorized by Rosi Braidotti in relation to feminism. Specifically, I want to focus on how the narrative deconstructs an essentialized concept of difference and instead emphasizes "multiple layers of signification"18 of "Native" or "Indigenous." Johnny Gebhardt's family, like other homesteading families in the agricultural southern Ontario setting of the novel, is of German or, more precisely, of "German Caucasian" (301) ancestry. However, he does not grow up learning about his ancestry or his family's place in Canadian society. Rather, his upbringing is characterized by the lack of any "cultural, historical anchor" (201), and by abuse. Both predestine him to "wanna be someone else" (70, 179). Inspired by books and popular culture, his substitute or chosen identity is "Indian." In one of his letters inserted into Josh's memories, he explains how one summer at camp he found a book in the library "called Indians. That's all, just Indians. / opened that book and I was gone— When you grow up like I did, all your dreams involve being the opposite of the way you are and the warrior thing was directly opposite from me and my

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life" (77). The "warrior thing" shapes his imagination so much that he is confused about "the real Indian," Josh, when he first meets him. This is reflected in his conversation with Josh's parents: "Well, reading's good," he [Josh's dad] said. "Joshua reads all the time too. What do you like to read about?" "Indians, mostly, sir." "Indians?" "Yessir. I like 'em." "You know that Joshua's an Indian, don't you, John?" my mother asked. "Yes, ma'am. But I mean real Indians. You know, warriors and stuff." "I think there's more to Indians than just being warriors, isn't there, John?" my dad asked. "No, sir. I read about it. They were warriors." "Joshua is not a warrior," my mother said. "Yes, ma'am. That's what I mean. Real Indians." (56) Humorously, this conversation captures the dehumanizing, dehistoricizing power of stereotypes, the most overt fixations of a culture and the cultural identity of a person. It also comments on (and questions) belief in the authority of the written word: Johnny is not to be swayed, because he "read about it." For him—as for many Germans—fantasy Indians are "the real thing." However, the dialogue does not simply cast Johnny as ignorant and carried away by his imagination against a reality that speaks for itself. The fact that Josh, the adopted Ojibway, looks Indian does not necessarily make him a real Indian—not just in Johnny's eyes but also within the larger socio-cultural context of the novel. Some Aboriginal readers will indeed question the reality of his "Indian" identity because he grows up in a non-Native home without knowing his Native language and culture. Johnny, on the other hand, will become a warrior in reality, in real conflicts like Oka, Alcatraz Island, Wounded Knee, and Anishanabe Park.19 And, in a further ironic reversal, Johnny, the one who learns from books about "Indians" and comes to celebrate the culture, will teach the real Indian Josh about his history and culture. If notions of fiction and reality are hybridized in this way, definitions of culture are shown as mediated: the question of who is a real Indian cannot be answered simply by referring to physical appearance or blood quantum. Thematic movements in the novel questioning preconceived notions

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of "being Indian" are supported by a narrative structure that defies fixation. Not only is most of the story told by a travelling narrator, but also, past and present events overlap: the story of Josh's travel, told in the present tense, frames his memories of the past to which are added the memories of his friend, interspersed as italicized letters. In this way the novel is narrated by two voices, made up of two stories, each told from a firstperson point of view: one by the Ojibway narrator Josh, who is given the most space, and the other by his friend Johnny. In Wagamese's first novel, Keeper 'NMe, he highlights in italics the oral voice of the Native elder, considered the authentic voice by many Native people. He leaves the more standardized written English to the Native character who has become an outsider to his culture. In A Quality of Light the oral/written binary, which Metis scholar Emma LaRocque explains as "the power struggle between the oral and the written, between the Native in us and the English,"20 is confirmed insofar as the voice of the nonNative Johnny is largely communicated through letters. However, his words are italicized, so that, if the two novels are read together, a new intertext emerges that links Johnny's letters with traditionally valued insights into Native culture. Wagamese complicates conceptualizations of indigenity even further when, at the end of the second novel, the Ojibway character Josh reads the letter of his dead German friend (printed in italics) about being "a warrior of conscience" (319), "disappearing" into the words (317). Their ways of "becoming Indian" had indeed become "interchangeable," as the narrator states in the Prologue. An hybridized cultural identity is also created through the novel's discussions about Native versus Christian beliefs. The relationship between the two is a controversial subject in Native communities21 and attitudes vary from individual to individual. Wagamese questions an often established exclusionary polarity of the two beliefs by creating a character who combines both in his chosen profession of a minister who practises the sweatlodge as well as Christian ceremonies. The twinning of the two beliefs is shown at the beginning of the novel in Josh's father's interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son. This particular aspect of cultural hybridity will be a contested area for the two friends, so the interpretation of a biblical story about two brothers at the welcoming party for Johnny's family may be read as an attempt to show the adaptability of Christian

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teachings to Native cultures. In his interpretation of the parable, Josh's father links Johnny's father, the "agricultural refugee[s]" (22), with himself, who has never left the farm. This connection anticipates the meeting of their sons and the eventual bonding in brotherhood, a theme also addressed in the novel's epigraph from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, referring to the ability of a beautiful childhood memory to offer salvation. Gebhardt's life as a "refugee" made his son's childhood homeless. Johnny remembers his family as nomads "willing to settle anywhere" (201). As an adult he continues the nomadic life—-in a literal sense, since he travelled often (14-15), and metaphorically, since "he wandered alone in the vacuous maze of the wilderness" (185). Josh, on the other hand, belongs to "the lucky ones" who "grow up and out of the land of our births" (89), "salvation and geography intermingled like blood" (89). He considers himself "saved" and, though searching, on a "guided tour" (185). Conversely, Johnny belongs to "the wounded" who are "nomads moving like ghosts, incorporeal, ethereal, leaving no sign on the territories they cross" (185). Wagamese problematizes the colonialist discourse on European settlers and Native nomads in this characterization, for now it is the German Caucasian who roams the wild in contrast to the settled Native who, like a tourist, goes on "guided tours." Josh's link to the land is expressed in hybrid images connecting Native conceptualizations of the sacredness of the land with an agricultural, homesteading understanding of it. The phrase to "grow up and out of the land of our births" echoes Native understandings of connectedness with the land of the ancestors, and the reference to "salvation" and being "saved" in connection with geography recalls an often cited spiritual connection between Aboriginal people and the land. This double-layered wording, linking the experience of growing up on a farm with Native ideas about the sacredness of the land, is explained by the Christian minister Josh in the Prologue. Here, the Ojibway narrator, looking back on his life, says he came to love the land through his father, with whom he worked on the farm since early childhood: "It was my father who brought me the spirit of the land. He'd sink his furrowed fingers deep into it, roll its grit and promise around his palms, smell it and then rub it over the chest of his overalls like he wanted it to seep through

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into his heart. It did—and it seeped into mine too" (7). Read against Lee Maracle's "white" characters in Ravensong, who are criticized by the "Indian" character for wearing gloves for their garden work because "half the joy of gardening was feeling black earth between your fingers" (73), this portrayal of the father deconstructs "whiteness" as a homogenous characteristic and foregrounds class and occupation rather than race. In the same vein Wagamese challenges an essentialist reading of Indigenousness; an Indigenous relationship with the land is substituted by a farmer's attitude that seems to be as nurturing as "the authentic" connection. In this way Wagamese shows that respectful relationships with the land are not "genetically" Indian but, as Russell Means explains, "acculturated" traits.22 After all, as the Ojibway character states, the "land is a palimpsest" (246); the different layers of this "text" ask for different readings. But only the wounded, nomadic character, Johnny, is able to help his friend to decipher the layer that his Christian, non-Native parents, who had never left the security of their farm, had chosen to ignore. Reading about Wounded Knee, Josh learns about the blood of massacred people seeping into the earth: "This land is a palimpsest, but it requires the eyes and ears of the enlightened to hear its songs and see its scars" (246). Because his German Caucasian friend, scarred himself, was enlightened enough to hear and see, he teaches his friend to read the hidden stories of the land and in this way "become Indian." In this novel the German ancestry of the non-Native character seems to be incidental except for a brief dialogue between Josh and Johnny close to the end of the novel, when the latter realizes that he is, after all, only "a whiteman" and specifically a German: "I'm a Germanic Caucasian male because that's what my Creator created me to be. I am not an Indian. I never can be— I was created a whiteman and I need to explore that, and maybe cast it away once my exploration's over and return to the circle anyway. But I can't deny myself any longer. Can't go on living as a displaced person. Besides, I've never tasted Wiener schnitzel, never did the polka or visited the country." ... "Then I guess we'd better get busy getting out of here so we can get you on a slow boat to the Rhineland!" I said. (301) Similar to his learning about Native culture, the uprooted nomad Johnny first falls for the stereotypes23 in his learning about Germany, the country of

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his ancestors. The parallelism in the two strands of his identity construction links the two cultural affiliations and, therefore, together with keeping the option of "return to the circle" open, provides a counterdiscourse to the either/or dichotomization at the start of the above conversation. Although Johnny understands at the end that there is another layer to his self, which he needs to acknowledge and explore, his adopted "Indian" identity helps his real Indian friend, who adopted a non-Indian identity, to discover the other side in himself. Ironically, again blending fiction and reality, the teaching of his friend starts in a bonding ceremony "as seen on TV." Johnny explains to him that they need to keep their meetings about learning how to play baseball secret. The pledge has "gotta be done in blood. Blood's the most magical ingredient We'll smear the blood around and promise each other to secrecy and loyalty. Blood brothers." "Blood brothers?" "Yeah. Indians do this all the time. I saw it on TV." (45) Imitating what is already a fiction, this ceremony creates the foundation of their relationship—fictional and yet very real in its implications and consequences for their lives. It constructs indigenity not as "authentic" and "pure" but as mediated and hybridic and nonetheless empowering. On the plot level, it is linked with the boys' learning about baseball, which initiated their friendship and which they learn from a really existing "epitome of how-to books, especially for hitters," Ted Williams's The Science of Hitting, as Wagamese points out in the same prefatory note in which he comments on the reality of Native political history in his novel. However, the real quality of this book of instructions is fictionalized by Wagamese's changing the publishing date "for the benefit of the story," and the categorical nature of instructions is blurred in the boys' added "inventions" of the game. The connection between learning about a culture and learning about a game affirms Johnny's "how-to" approach to "becoming an Indian," but it also comments on the constructedness rather than innate quality of (an ethnic) identity. To a German reader—or rather, to many German readers—the ceremony of blood brotherhood between a Native and a German evokes Karl May's fictional friendship between the Apache Winnetou and the German called Old Shatterhand in the famous Winnetou trilogy of the 1890s.24

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Reading Wagamese's novel through this lens leads us to understand the homosexual overtones as yet another instance of subversion of a hierarchical encounter model. In a first meeting with Josh, Johnny appears "feminine," sexualized: "The hand that reached out to clasp mine was thin and meatless. Moist. Soft. Girlish, almost" (27). The narrator then explains "the life force" that radiates from this boy in an even more overt feminine image, comparing it to "the feeling you get when you lay your hand upon the flank of a calving heifer" (27). In a reversal of the traditional relationship, the European is cast as the "effeminate," seductive partner who feels betrayed when the Native chooses a woman over him, and a white woman at that. A homoerotic reading of the relationship of these two boys, who discover love as "the answer to baseball" (76), upsets not just the colonized power hierarchy, but any conventional racial divide. Johnny frames his concern about Josh's marriage to a white woman as a question of "race" ("'I don't see her as white.' 'You don't see anything as white!' he [Johnny] spat" [265]), but on the other hand he disregards the "color test" (265) when it comes to him, the white male friend. In this case sex and gender undermine racial boundaries. In conclusion, a brief comment on the title of the novel, A Quality of Light. When Johnny reflects on their blood brother ceremony in which Josh named him Laughing Dog (after the mangy collie of another German family!), he reveals how insulted he was, but he also states that in his memory of the event he finds the empowering effect much more important than the ceremony itself. And he adds, "I was filled with light for the first time" (59). Friendship or love—"a quality of light"—is more important than names or categories—for cultures, peoples, or individuals. In the satirical name for Johnny, Wagamese makes fun of a "wannabe," but, at the same time, he makes readers understand this character's search for a brother, his needs for secrets and for an identity "other" than his own miserable life; in short, his humanness. Read in this way, the title, together with the visual image on the front cover, showing two similarly shaped yet differently coloured faces, suggests the inclusive, boundary-crossing theme of the novel, which, like Raven's song in Maracle's novel, springs "from a desire for common survival" (320).

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Emma Lee Warrior's "Compatriots": Imprisoning a Culture While Wagamese's "German" character Johnny plays the ambiguous role of somebody who exploits Native culture but also supports his people's political struggle, Emma Lee Warrior's German characters in her short story "Compatriots" are shown in a clearly unfavourable light.25 Told from a third-person point of view, the narrator privileges the perspective of the Blackfoot woman Lucy, who tries to educate the German visitor about the complex history and present-day makeup of the community, and who dislikes the other German who lives in the community, Helmut Walking Eagle. Unlike Johnny Gebhardt, Hilda never transcends her preconceptions about "Indians" formed in reading books by "a cultural cross-dresser,"26 like her compatriot Helmut Walking Eagle. She is welcomed in the community and treated as a guest. As outlined earlier in the summary of two stories from the Anishnabe oral tradition, Native people always welcomed strangers with hospitality. However, as Odawa scholar Cecil King explains, this culture trait was detrimental to their own people for many reasons: We, as Indian People, have welcomed strangers in our midst. We have welcomed all who came with intellectual curiosity or in the guise of the informed student But unfortunately, many times we have been betrayed— We have been observed, noted, taped and videoed. Our behaviors have been recorded in every possible way known to Western science, and I suppose we could learn to live with this, if we had not been imprisoned in the anthropologists' words.2^ Cecil King's assertion echoes Basil Johnston's prophecies about "the strangers." It may provide insights into Warrior's motivation for creating a travelling/visiting/studying character and also may be a commentary on the details of her characterizations: the Blackfoot hostess "didn't relish" having a white visitor. Hilda "seemed nice" (50) and helped Lucy with the dishes but because of her preconceived notions, does not understand what Lucy may have to teach her "about Indians," whom she is "studying" (49). In the structural composition of the story there is a revealing contradiction between the narrator's concentration on Lucy's thoughts and Hilda's disregard for her comments. Guided by the narrator, the (learning) reader understands that this "ordinary" woman shares important cultural insights with her visitor, but the presumably learning ("studying") German

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character does not learn from her guide. After Lucy explained to her that practising "her culture" is more complex than Hilda seems to think because of the many interferences by the dominant society, the narrator comments: "Hilda looked at Lucy, and Lucy got the feeling she was telling her things she didn't want to hear" (51). The German student Hilda is not just a traveller or an adventurer who randomly gathers information about "the other." Since she is a student, she would be seen by Aboriginal people as a person with a colonial agenda. In her book Decolonizing Methodologies, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith critically analyzes research in Aboriginal communities by non-Aboriginal scholars and would consider somebody like Hilda "dangerous," coming with "theories to prove, evidence and data to gather and specific languages by which ... [to] classify and describe the indigenous world. "28 She is not filiated with Helmut Walking Eagle, who does not even want to acknowledge her home town in Germany, but affiliated with him, nevertheless, as they are both "inquisitive and acquisitive strangers," whom Smith characterizes in one of her chapter headings as "They Came, They Saw, They Named, They Claimed."29 The title of Warrior's short story "Compatriots" points toward their affiliation: Hilda conceives of Blackfoot culture through the perspective of her compatriot; she says to Lucy, who tries to be her teacher: "I hope he [Helmut Walking Eagle] can tell me things I can take home" (50). Through these words the author of the story clearly exposes the "orientalizing" attitude of her character: that she wants to acquire things to take back does not only explain why she is so dangerous—her image making of Blackfoot culture will be perpetuated in her home country—but also shows her objectification and hence dehumanization of a living culture, alive right in front of her. Her reading or understanding of another culture can therefore be called unethical. With her textbook perspective, which denies complexity, change, and inaccessibility of certain knowledge to outsiders, she arrogantly defines Lucy's culture "for" her. She leaves the story dreaming of the next ceremony as being "real Indian" (59) because ceremonies are important facets in her essentializing view of culture. In 1987, when "Compatriots" was first published in Canadian Fiction Magazine, the name "Hilda" was not fashionable in Germany then. Since naming is an important aspect of Aboriginal cultures generally and of

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special significance in Warrior's work (as reflected in her poem "How I Came to Have a Man's Name"30), I wonder if Warrior intended the name Hilda as an allusion to the second daughter, named Hilda, of John G. Neihardt, a Nebraska poet of German ancestry, who "transmuted" Black Elk's "oral narrative into literature."31 Although in the preface to Black Elk Speaks, Neihardt emphasizes the work of his eldest daughter Enid, he mentions that Hilda also accompanied him on his visit to Black Elk in order to record the stories, and Hilda is the first person thanked in the acknowledgements for her assistance with the book. Hilda obviously participated in the process of "fixing" oral stories; the fictional Hilda of the eighties believes the written word more than the oral: she bestows Helmut Walking Eagle with authority in his knowledge of Blackfoot culture because he wrote a book about it. Lucy, the observing hostess, therefore comforts Hilda, after her conversation with her compatriot failed, with the words, "'[MJaybe you could buy his book'" (58). Of the two German visitors on the fictional Blackfoot reserve, the student Hilda seems to be the "nicer" one. Helmut Walking Eagle, her compatriot who lives in the community and is married to a Blackfoot woman, is so "mixed up" he cannot even be polite. His name reveals the author's critical view on this German "wannabe," similar to Wagamese's choice of Laughing Dog for the German character in A Quality of Light. However, while "the Indian name" for Johnny Gebhardt seems to allude to Wagamese's opinion that such play at "becoming Indian" in a blood brother ceremony "seen on TV" should not be taken too seriously, the connotations of the ironic name Helmut Walking Eagle are more complex. The irony is expressed through the contrast between one of the most highly respected animals in Native cultures, the eagle, and the characteristic given to it: walking. As Hartmut Lutz explains in his interpretation of "Compatriots": For many Native cultures the eagle is a sacred bird, whose feathers are used in prayer. But the "eagle" in the character's name is not a soaring but a "walking" one. The bird is not closest to the sun, does not hover above a sacred Pinetree to watch over the peace of nations, as in the Haudenosaune tradition, but rather it hobbles on the ground.^ But, in addition to the connotations of the "Indian" half of the name, the choice of Helmut as a first name identifies this character not just as a German but as the German. Since two consecutive chancellors in

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Germany were called "Helmut," the name implies that this character represents Germany and the German people, and that he has some leadership qualities. In other words, through the naming, the personality of the character is portrayed ironically: Helmut Walking Eagle assumes authority as "the expert" on Native culture by writing books about it (selling them more cheaply to Indians) so that travellers like Hilda would want to learn from him rather than from the Blackfoot people. As well, in his appearance, Helmut tries to represent "the culture." The omniscient narrator who intermittently comments on the story through the thoughts of the Blackfoot character, Lucy, alerts the reader in the following words: "Whenever Lucy saw him [Helmut Walking Eagle], she was reminded of the Plains Indian Museum across the line" (57). This German character recalls his own culture's essentializing, authoritative way of dealing with Native peoples. Like a chancellor, Helmut Walking Eagle thus "represents" his country—but with an ironic twist: he is not aware that he is only a walking eagle, and "most of the Indians wished Helmut would disappear" (50). The Blackfoot characters in this narrative disagree with his "cross-cultural impersonation" or "ethnic drag" act because it appropriates rather than celebrates their culture. Katrin Sieg's definition of "ethnic drag" as "the impersonation of ethnic others by a subject that stages and conceals its dominance"33 adequately describes this character who lives among the Blackfoot, speaks their language, and yet defines and objectifies "their" culture for "them." Helmut Walking Eagle is a caricature of a German fantasy: like Old Shatterhand in the Winnetou trilogy, he knows more about Native culture than the "Indians" themselves. Warrior utilizes the importance of naming in Native cultures as a "writing back" strategy: Helmut Walking Eagle's stereotyping of Blackfoot culture is ridiculed and exposed through the typically German connotations of his name, but there is still another twist. Hartmut Lutz points out, "the character Helmut Walking Eagle ... is only a thinly disguised/fictionalized impersonation of Adolf Hungry Wolf, the German or Swiss Blood Indian, ... who publishes his Good Medicine Books."^ The intertextual allusion to a "real" Adolf and, by implication, the Fascist German leader, provides another explanation for the choice of the name Hilda for the visiting character (and another link with her "compatriot") because this name was popular in Adolf Hitler's generation; it also helps readers discover the reasons for

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Helmut Walking Eagle's desire to "become Indian." In his marginalization within the narrative, this German character is more comparable to the minor character German Judy in Ravensong, whose German identity is claimed in the name but never explained, than to Laughing Dog, who is one of the main characters and one of the narrators in a novel. Also, Johnny, alias Laughing Dog, is not portrayed as connected with Hitler Germany. He is apparently from a second or third generation of German immigrants, not identified by Germany's Fascist history but by "no history." On the other hand, both German Judy and Helmut Walking Eagle are portrayed as wanting to be left alone. In Maracle's novel, the narrator mentions Judy's self-imposed segregation with which she seems to be comfortable, and in Warrior's short story, Helmut Walking Eagle, who plays the role of "the Indian" when he is in Germany participating in Indian dances over there, reacts with resentment and anger when his compatriot wants to talk with him about her hometown in Germany in the middle of an "Indian" ceremony. In an intertextual allusion to an "Adolf," Warrior suggests that this character's implications in his nation's traumatic history may be a reason for his denial of his background. In light of Warrior's portrayal of the German visitors, the story "Compatriots" can be read as part of the larger Aboriginal discourse of decolonization. In my opinion, Warrior goes further than "writing back" against "the curious infatuation with all things Indian, the German 'Indianertuemelei'"35 because she criticizes this phenomenon in the larger context of colonizing conceptualizations of Native cultures. Hilda's visiting another culture comes from a perspective that imprisons, as Cecil King puts it, a living people. Her act of producing knowledge can also be called anti-nomadic. Her preconceived, fixed, orientalizing, and essentializing notions of a culture are contrasted with many kinds of movement conveyed in the story, like the changes caused by colonization, the geographical variations ("Not here. Over on the Blood Reserve they do —" [51]), and the individualized ways of living within a culture. The onus is on the reader to understand the larger picture and thus learn more than the student Hilda.

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THE P R O B L E M OF ESSENTIALIZING

I never even encountered the word "essentialist" before coming to grad school, and then it was thrown at me like a dirty word, mostly because I wrote something about Native writers and the land in a paper.... The same professor who labelled me "essentialist" said there was no truth, no history, just lots of people's viewpoints. I argued that some things actually did happen. That some versions of history are not just a point of view, but actual distortions and lies. —Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau^ At first impression the German characters in the preceding analyses reinforce what might be termed an essentializing discourse of "us" and "them." However, paradoxically, although they are "the others," it is their role in the respective story to challenge ethnically constructed boundaries. German Judy's character in Ravensong illustrates the novel's emphasis on "combined wisdom" for the sake of the survival of all, whereas the male German figures in the other two narratives question the resilience of boundaries through their cross-cultural impersonations. All three characters are given a nomadic identity in Deleuze's and Guattari's meaning: they are without a sense of history or, rather, with a rejection of or silence about their own history. On the other hand, while these characters enjoy their freedom of movement, their new affiliations become problematic for those they affiliate with, as their learning tends to name, define, ghettoize,

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and fixate—i.e., essentialize—their newly gained knowledge of "the other." Wagamese and Warrior in particular fictionalize the problematics of "the rootless" holding on to "the rooted," which Wendy Rose describes in the following words: "The roots of colonized people are grasped firmly but blindly by the rootless in order to achieve some kind of stability, however superficial and delusional."2 (Her argument recalls Chambers's analysis of the West's desire for authenticity in non-Western cultures.) According to Rose, rootlessness is at the heart of what she calls "whiteshamanism," an appropriative form of border crossing similar to Sieg's concept of ethnic drag. One may argue that Wagamese's German Caucasian character-turned-Native is implicated in those colonial power impositions he tries to abolish, although he does not become a "shaman" but an activist who devotes his life to the struggles of Native peoples for justice and equality. On the one hand, Wagamese illustrates through the development of this character that, as Rose says, the "problem with 'whiteshamans' is one of integrity and intent"3 and not a matter of essentializing racial identity. Johnny Gebhardt, "a guy who's symbiotically attached to Indians" (Quality of Light, 274), is portrayed as uprooted, but not as selfish. On the other hand, Wagamese shows through the death of this "caricature" of a warrior (310)—named Laughing Dog—that the appropriation of Aboriginal world views (or what is perceived as such) lacks a solid foundation, does not serve Aboriginal people, and, selfserving for a short while, in the end, becomes self-destructive as well. The theme of "whiteshamanism" as an appropriative act of border crossing4 is unambiguously criticized in "Compatriots." The narrative ironically undercuts Helmut Walking Eagle's ethnic drag act, particularly in the naming of this German character. In addition, the author reveals her criticism through the words of the character of a Blackfoot elder, who is also an alcoholic: Shit, that guy's just a phony. How could anybody turn into something else? Huh? I don't think I could turn into a white man if I tried all my life. They wouldn't let me, so how does that German think he can be an Indian. White people think they can do anything—turn into Chinese or Indian—they're crazy! (53) While Wagamese draws attention to the phoniness of his whiteturned-Indian character but also to the serious commitment motivating

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his transformation, Warrior grounds her narrative in the socio-economic reality of reserve life and thus highlights the power imbalance that makes whiteshamanism politically unacceptable. Thomas King, however, uses humour to show that ethnic drag acts may be reversible after all. In his third novel Truth & Bright Water, the artist character Monroe Swimmer is introduced in the beginning of the novel in the following way: Lucille Rain, who ran a gift shop on the reserve with her sister Teresa, remembered Monroe as a bit of a joker. One time, she told us, he borrowed a tuba from the Mormon church over in Cardston and got his auntie to make him a pair of short pants out of elk hide with elk hide suspenders. And when Indian Days came around and the crowds of tourists were everywhere, he marched through the booths and tipis, puffing on the tuba, pretending to be the Bright Water German Club. "He said it was the least he could do," said Lucille, "seeing as how Germans were so keen on dressing up like Indians."^ In his act of cultural cross-dressing, the artist, who will be known in the novel for his restorative artwork, exposes the flaws of stereotyping by resorting to it himself: Lederhosen (elk-hide pants) versus buckskin outfit; tuba versus drum; Indian German Club versus German Indian Club. He comments on his role playing that this "was the least he could do," but for whom? Seemingly, he put on the show "for" the German tourists who came to the Indian Days. However, what he phrases innocently as a nice gesture ("the least...") is actually meant to provoke the Germans and to restore a sense of agency in the Native people by "writing back" to those who appropriate and often trivialize their cultural identity; hence, he is doing it for his own people, reclaiming a true "Indian" perspective on Indian Days. By parading "as a German"—when he is supposed to be "Indian," especially on Indian Days—the artist mirrors to the German onlookers their own phoniness when they or their compatriots play "Indians." Also, by catering to the stereotypical image of Germans as Bavarians (who form only a part of the German population with a culture specific to a certain region in southern Germany), he makes a comment on stereotypical representations of Native culture in which one image of one specific culture serves to characterize all Indigenous cultures (like the omnipresent totem poles). But, although some Germans may be offended by the artist's role playing, his ethnic drag—as that of any other Native

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person—would never be as damaging to the people it stereotypes as the reverse act of a Helmut Walking Eagle; and it would not come with the same opportunities, either. Diana Fuss asks, in the context of her differentiation between "imitation" and "identification," if the opportunity of a non-European person (she takes Algerian women as an example) to dress in European clothes (i.e., to imitate) would translate into the opportunity "to engage in cross-national, cross-racial, cross-class, and cross-cultural identifications,"6 with white bourgeois Europeans. The Blackfoot character Sonny in Warrior's short story would answer her question with a clear "no." It is because of societal power imbalance that Aboriginal people are on their guard against appropriation—even if they are accused of essentializing. In her discussion of a "politics of mimesis," Fuss emphasizes that the "deceptively simple details of who is imitating whom, and under what conditions, stand as the most insistent, intricate and indispensable questions."'7 Given the power relations between Native and non-Native people in Canadian society, the practising of Native ceremonies by outsiders who "turned Native" reveals an irony exposed by Cree poet Louise Halfe in her poem "My Ledders." She expresses her serious concerns about this aspect of continuing colonization by transforming standard English into her own "oral" voice, thereby subverting not only colonial English but also colonial thinking (which demands that letters to the authority of the Pope are written in formal English), adding a humorous flavour to her writing at the same time. My Ledders dear pope i no, i no, you dired of my ledders i couldn't let dis one go i dought you could do somedin 'bout it. years ago you stopped nohkom and nimosom from prayin in da sweatlodge and sundance, drummin, singin and dancin. you even stopped dem from Indian speakin and storydellin. well you must have some kind of bower cuz da govment sure listen. well, pope last night on DV i watched some whitemen

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sweat in da lodge, and at dinner dime on da radio i heard dat man dell us dat some darafist was havin a retreat and to register. what dat mean, i not sure anyway he is buildin' a sweatlodge. i never hear anybody before on da radio dell da hole world dat. i sure surprise and kinda made me mad. i wonder if you dell da govment to make dem laws dat stop dat whiteman from dakin our isistawina cuz i dell you pope i don't dink you like it if i dock you gold cup and wine pass it 'round our circles cuz i don't have you drainin from doze schools. i haven't married you jeezuz and i don't knee to him, cuz he ain't my god. dese men, pope, don't know what tobacco mean, what suffer mean, alls dey no is you jeesuz die for dem dey don't no what fastin' mean dey jist dake and gobble our matotsan as if dey own it. dey don't no what it mean to dake from da earth and give somedin' back i so dired of all dis kimoti, pope deach your children. eat your jeezus body. drink his blood. dell dem to go back to dere own deachings, pope.8 The speaker of this poem clearly establishes an us/them divide: our teachings/their teachings, our god/their god. Difference is further emphasized by the expression of key words in the Cree language (translated in a

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glossary), thereby making a point that it takes a special kind of knowledge to understand her culture. Like the character Sonny in Warrior's short story, the speaker in Halfe's poem sees the issue of cultural border crossing grounded in the colonial power relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. First, the Pope had "some kind of bower" to outlaw Cree ceremonies, storytelling, and language; then, "whitemen" stole those teachings and made them into their own for profit (retreats for which one has "to register"), so that the speaker of the poem has to resort to writing to the Pope to demand he use his power again, this time against his own people because they are stealing. In Halfe's reasoning, whitemen are not entitled to use the teachings of her people, because they do not even understand what they are taking (otherwise they would not announce the building of a sweatlodge "on da radio"). Halfe's poem illuminates the strategic importance of authenticity and essentialism in Indigenous self-identifications as a defense against the desires of the uprooted European. As Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, the "authentic" self in Indigenous discourses does appeal to an idealized past when there was no colonizer, to our strengths in surviving thus far, to our language as an uninterrupted link to our histories, to the ownership of our lands, to our abilities to create and control our own life and death, to a sense of balance among ourselves and with the environment, to our authentic selves as a people. Although this may seem overly idealized, these symbolic appeals remain strategically important in political struggles.^ (emphasis added) In the same way, "claiming essential characteristics is as much strategic as anything else, because it has been about claiming human rights and indigenous rights,"10 and, in the opinion of Cheryl Savageau, quoted in the epigraph, about Indigenous history. In the context of the essentialism debate at large, Diana Fuss's conclusion in her introduction to Essentially Speaking—"To insist that essentialism is always and everywhere reactionary is, for the constructionist, to buy into essentialism in the very act of making the charge; it is to act as if essentialism has an essence."^—is also worth considering when evaluating criticisms of Indigenous so-called essentializing. If essentialism in Indigenous discourses, understood in Smith's sense as strategically claiming a self-defined positionality (including concepts of

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spirituality), is empowering for Aboriginal people, essentializing definitions from outsiders effect the opposite. Labelling, objectifying, and categorizing a people according to selected "essential" characteristics dehumanizes a people and hence disempowers them. The German character Hilda defines Blackfoot culture as static and homogenous despite the narrative's evidence to the contrary that Hilda either cannot see or chooses to ignore. But, as one of the characters in Lee Maracle's short story "Polka Partners, Uptown Indians and White Folks" puts it: "Difference among us ... frightens them [white people]. They run around the world collecting us like artifacts."12 In Warrior's story, the elder's resentment about "the phony" therefore must be read together with the story's other concern: ghettoizing definitions of culture and cultural identity. The last word is not given to the elder or to Helmut Walking Eagle, but to the editorial narrator commenting on the other stranger in the text, the German visitor Hilda. Her ironically formulated desire for a ceremony so that she may experience what is real Indian (at the end of her day on a reserve) overwrites the elder's comment. The problem of crossing cultural boundaries arises because of the existence of boundaries. To define means "to determine the boundary" (OED), to reify what is in flux, othering a culture and a people. Hence, Hilda's desire for a definable culture complements Helmut Walking Eagle's ethnic drag. With an awareness of such desire, so-called ethnic writers (as Aboriginal authors are often labelled) establish an Indigenous perspective in contrast to the place-less, uprooted, migratory European or German for strategic purposes in their political struggle for decolonization; yet, they counterbalance in their own nomadic writing any kind of definition of indigenity by continuously negotiating their complex cultural sites. To me, this means the methodological framework for this study cannot be seen within the linear thinking of postcolonial studies that espouse, in the words of Jan Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, in their book The Decolonization of Imagination, "the departure from essentialism and dichotomic thinking or binarism," a process "from Authenticity to Mix, syncretism, hybridity," "from Borders to Border crossings" (emphasis added).13 Rather than "departing from," favouring one over the other, a culturally literate reading must understand both, the dualistic thinking of the elder character Sonny and of the narrator's critical comments on any fixation of

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culture; the voice of the high school student Stacey excluding "the others" and the all-inclusive Raven in Maracle's novel Ravensong; an elder's insistence on a "naturally" given racial identity together with validations of cultural border crossing in Wagamese's work. To see only one or the other denies Indigenous peoples the right, as Smith says, to be "complicated, internally diverse or contradictory. Only the West has that privilege."14 Instead, what is required is to understand, metaphorically speaking, the travelling Native not as an oxymoronic figure (as Clifford argues), but to realize that migrations on all levels have always been an integral part of Indigenous cultures and literatures.

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M O V E M E N T AND M I G R A T I O N

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COLONIAL BOUNDARIES, DE-COLONIAL MOVEMENTS

The Season (For Linda)

In a week or so we will be travelling these days it is the season and it feels good to be on the move because before we know it we've returned and settled into a stationary existence of boardrooms and timetables where we'll find ourselves pretending we never had a loon a deer or even a whale locked inside us and wanting out1

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Anishnabe poet Armand Ruffo, who lives the "stationary existence" of a university professor and a writer, alludes in this poem to the seasonal movements of the traditional lifestyle of his people. The speaker welcomes movement as a link with the animals who, different from the humans, are naturally a part of the elements—the air (loon), the earth (deer), and the water (whale)—and therefore "wanting out." To acknowledge this connection means to acknowledge a part of the Anishnabe identity that is denied in "a stationary existence of boardrooms and timetables"; the reference to "even a whale" may hint at a quality not only Anishnabe but Indigenous in general. This poem celebrating an instinct of migration is contrapuntally positioned in relation to the poem "Migration Indian" by Rita Joe from the Mi'kmaq nation (whose Mi'kmaq language is similar to Anishnabe languages, as they are both part of the Algonquian language group). In her verses, seasonal migrations are transformed into wage labour, across the border. She ends her poem with the following lines: About the blueberry fields we work All muscle and might. We travel to find work, the migration Indian.2 Read together, these poems illustrate two forms of movement among Aboriginal peoples: in the context of a pre-contact lifestyle, closely linked with nature and its seasonal cycle, and also as migrations imposed by colonization. The latter were induced because of search for work, for education, or for water and land that was not polluted; in addition, the government relocated Aboriginal communities to make room for further resource development, or, as in the case of the Mi'kmaq, for administrative reasons. In his chapter titled "New Nomads and True Nomads" in the book New Worlds for All, historian Colin G. Galloway also dwells on the differences between these two movements: one integral to the culture, the other imposed upon it. "The mobility and movement that were integral parts of traditional Indian life gave way to forced migrations."3 In the various forms of displacement caused by genocidal policies, the connection with the land, the spiritual and cultural "rootedness," is endangered. Against the background of the dialectic tension between "roots" and "routes" in Indigenous cultures, one may be able to understand the interpretation of colonization as both "imprisonment," ending the freedom to move (change),

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physically, mentally, and in every other respect, and as forced migrations and changes. In Aboriginal literatures, both, confinement and imposed movements, are shown in their destructiveness. They are estranging (George Kenny) or uprooting experiences, as the storyteller in Maria Campbell's "Jacob" explains: "I tink dats dah reason why we have such a hard time / us peoples / Our roots dey gets broken so many times."4 Contrary to European eighteenth- and nineteenth-century depictions of North America as unmapped territory or, in writer Fenimore Cooper's words, as "a trackless wilderness,"5 Native people travelled widely all over the continent. However, their mapping, their marking of trails and naming of places, was not acknowledged and literally overwritten in maps created by the invaders. An anecdote in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush (1852) may illustrate this point. After she mentions casually in her chapter "The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends" that "the Indians' ... usual place of encampment for many years," a "favourite spot," "had now passed into the hands of strangers," she gives an account of the reaction of "her Indian friends" to a large map of Canada: In a moment they recognised every bay and headland in Ontario.... How eagerly each pointed out the spot to his fellows; how intently their black hands were bent down, and their dark eyes fixed upon the map! What strange, uncouth exclamations of surprise burst from their lips as they rapidly repeated the Indiansnames for every lake and river on this wonderful piece of paper!6 Enthralled by the exotic appearance of "her friends," Moodie does not acknowledge the theft of their land, which she interprets euphemistically as having "passed into the hands of strangers," nor does she acknowledge that, as Florence Stratton writes, her map is "a palimpsest which overwrites an alternative and prior but also present mode of territorial representation: a Mississauga map of the same area The Moodies' map is more powerful because it accompanies European colonial expansion."7 Maps like this one and the power they represent annihilated the mapping by the "uncivilized," "uncouth" First Peoples, and this led to the myth of an uninhabited, "trackless" wilderness to be "discovered," and to the ignorance about Indigenous peoples' lifestyles. Thomas King, in his novel Truth & Bright Water, acknowledges the layered history of this continent through his "famous Indian artist" character, Monroe Swimmer, who, in

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"restoring" a nineteenth-century landscape painting by "magic," makes visible the "original" painting: "an Indian village on the lake, slowly coming up through the layers of paint. Clear as day."8 This restorative act is linked to another measure correcting colonial displacement: replacing the buffalo—if only as works of art made of iron wire. "He transforms Indian Removals from an intransitive to a transitive process," as anthropologist Robin Ridington notes in his reading of the novel.9 In the myths and legends of the Anishnabe people, it is Nanabush who, on his travels "by canoe and moccasin" in pursuit of the enemies of his people, created place names and hence a map with the stories of his adventures. Winnipeg, for example, Weenipeegosheeng, "the murky watered lake," was named after Nanabush's plunge into the shallow waters of the lake in that area. He fell into it because on his flight with the geese he did not obey their orders and looked down at the end of the trip.10 The oral traditions as retold by Basil Johnston explain more specifically the "Indian names" that Moodie's friends related to the European map and that told the first stories about the land. That "storied past," which the conference brochure published by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada claims only for the European tradition, also confirms the Indigenous view that Indigenous people are not immigrants who had come across the Bering Strait,11 but that they belong to this land. Although he is travelling, Nanabush's adventures are defined through his relationship with the land. According to the oral traditions (corroborated by archaeological findings), Indigenous people of North America travelled widely on waterways and trails throughout the whole continent. In this way, Galloway says, they "participated in the European rediscovery of America providing guides, maps, and a fund of knowledge derived from extensive travels."12 One example of a major migration before European contact, around 900 AD, is given by Anishnabe oral historian Edward Benton-Banai in The Mishomis Book about the migration, the chi-bi-moo-day-win, of the Anishnabe. He states that it is "generally agreed that the Ojibways and other Algonquian Indians were settled up and down the eastern shores of North America" (94)—which explains linguistic and other similarities between the Anishnabe and the Mi'kmaq, for example—but that the prophet of the First Fire (altogether there were Seven Fires) had told the people, "If you

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do not move, you will be destroyed." Benton-Banai adds: "It would come to pass that most all those who stayed behind, including the Daybreak People, were destroyed or absorbed by the Light-skinned Race at the coming of the Fourth Fire" (95). Obeying the prophecy, the Anishnabe migrated to the West, down the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River and eventually to Manitoulin Island and Madeline Island, forming smaller nations on the way. Reading this migration story, which Benton-Banai bases on "the words given to us by the prophets of the Seven Fires" and "old maps of North America" as well as "early written accounts of this country" (94), one understands that "European invasion of America created a world in perpetual motion"13 not only after the arrival of the invaders but already a long time before through the prophecies about their arrival. It was the threat of being destroyed that made the Anishnabe leave the eastern region and move west. Poetry, drama, and fiction by Canadian Aboriginal authors, which gradually became acknowledged in the publishing industry in the early seventies, focusses mostly on themes related to forced migrations in the twentieth century rather than on earlier forms of colonization. Thomas King comments on the phenomenon that non-Native writers like to set their works in the nineteenth century, whereas Native authors "assiduously avoid" this period: Rather than try to unravel the complex relationship between the nineteenth-century Indian and the white mind, or to craft a new set of images that still reflects the time but avoids the flat, static depiction of the Native and two-dimensional quality of the culture, most of us have consciously set our literature in the present, a period that... allows us the opportunity to create for ourselves and our respective cultures both a present and a future.14 A case in point is Maria Campbell's pivotal work Halfbreed (1973), which outlines the displacement of her ancestors in the late nineteenth century, their transformation into "road allowance people," in the brief introductory chapters, but the thrust of her story is on the migrations of a "Halfbreed" woman in the 1960s trying to escape poverty, racism, and sexism. However, Thomas King's comment was published in 1990. Since then, Aboriginal writers engage more often in discovering "ways to make history our own," as King predicts at the end of his statement, foreseeing a future for historical novels from a Native perspective. Among Canadian

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Native writers there has not yet been an historical novel set in the nineteenth century (but there have been historical novels depicting Native history in the twentieth century, like Armstrong's Slash, which "portrays a collective Native history of the last twenty-five years in North America").15 However, narrative poetry fills this gap: for example, The Stories of the Road Allowance People (1995) by Maria Campbell (as the transcriber and translator) give a lot of detail to the sketchy historical perspective of Halfbreed. Particularly important in the context of the present discussion is Louise Bernice Halfe's verse narrative Blue Marrow(1998)16 in which a "contemporary narrator, a Cree woman, draws into her own story the poignant history of her ancestors and the Europeans they tragically welcomed into their lives" (back cover). In this partly autobiographical work, which features the author's great-grandparents on the front cover, Louise Halfe explores from a woman's point of view how one people's migration leads to another people's displacement. During the far trade, "the squaw brides" were not only displaced by the "madams" (59-60), but they also were no longer "Mothers of this land" (59); in addition to poverty and violence, they had to endure spiritual disconnectedness and cultural alienation in "the slapping sting / of our brothers' words" (59) because their men accused them of acting "like white women" (58). From her bicultural positioning, expressed in the italicized voice of the story My teeth have dropped from years of softening hide, but I lift that teacup, proper-like and my breasts are bound (59)

the narrator juxtaposes two views on migration: I watch them. Hundreds of my husband's family. They've travelled across Canada, the United States, rejoice at recognizing one another, some for the first time. Each has brought a book they've lovingly compiled. It contains the history of their migration from England, Norway and into the Dakotas. They are scattered throughout Turtle Island. They marvel at the trek of their ancestors. The click of wine glasses echoes through the arbour of this large family gathering. And five Indians. I the eldest, my children and two other Indian youths. They are not yet aware how this affects their lives.

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Who are we? Adopted. I gather inward. How many of my relatives were cattled onto the reservation during their settlement? How much of my people's blood was spilled for this migration? Laughter and wonder as fingers move across the atlas. This is where great-granddad Arne crossed on the barge. This is where great-great-granddad travelled and preached the law of the land and where his wife Isobel taught the little savages to read. My lips are tight from stretching when my small family is introduced alongside the large extended family. Later, driving home, I weave a story for my children—how their great-grandma rode sidesaddle, waving her .22 in the air trying to scare those relatives away. I tell them how my relatives lived around the fort, starving and freezing, waiting for diluted spirits and handouts from my husband's family. I tell them how my little children died wrapped in smallpox blankets. My breath won't come any more. I stare at the wheat fields. (61-62) For her husband's family, emigrating from Britain proved beneficial. They had the resources to "lovingly" put together a book about the history of their migration; they rejoice, they marvel and celebrate with the click of wineglasses. In their family gathering, they proudly trace on an atlas the places where their ancestors had brought religion and literacy to the "savages." However, the narrator undercuts such praise of their glorious past by pointing out that "those" relatives were not wanted by her relatives; in other words, the sermons and lessons were forced upon them. She also explains that her relatives were starving and freezing and being killed by smallpox blankets. The invasion of the Europeans, which started innocently enough as crossing "on the barge," created a new map for Aboriginal people. Their lives were decentred, they were made to inhabit the periphery "around the fort," waiting for handouts, a marginal existence in a land they had occupied since time immemorial. The genocidal practices of "those" relatives explain why there is only "my small family... alongside

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the large extended family," only "five Indians" in this "large family gathering," so that the speaker asks: "How / much of my people's blood was spilled for this / migration?" Diminished in numbers, her relatives became "adopted," a section of society later to be labelled "minority," assimilated into the "majority" culture. However, in the face of dispossession and disempowerment, the narrator claims rights and ownership. In her reading of Blue Marrow, Meira Cook, whose work involves researching post-traumatic narratives, emphasizes the "radical subtext"17 of the above segment, explaining how the word "my" gathers "children and history, reclaiming family and land." Also, "[l]ike her foremothers, the narrator employs the medium of storytelling to reverse misfortune ... and to teach her children (as she herself has been taught in the preceding pages) that narrative is the nourishing food... ,"18 Although conscious of the small number of her people, the speaker of the poem presents an unassimilated "minority view" about the history of the so-called settlement of this country. Rejecting the teachings of literacy, she tells her children, who "are not yet aware how this affects their lives," about history from her point of view. "Settlement," comfortable living for the Europeans, meant (and still means) confinement and imprisonment for the Cree people, fenced in like cattle, but also, as Cook points out, "a spurious nomadism" of people "deprived of home, land, language." On the meta-narrative level, dispossession "provides a creative means of articulating her [the narrator's] fluctuating position in this text; listener and speaker, vocal writer and aural reader, she is the wandering signifier whose aimless and purposeful trajectory is the only means of fixing the story in memory."19 Another Cree poet, Beth Cuthand, describes the history of her family also as a process from moving freely, like the buffalo, to fighting "for a place in the neighbourhood" in her narrative poem "Four Songs for the Fifth Generation."20 Tracing the history of four generations of a Cree family, the speaker for the first generation laments the vanishing of the buffalo who once gave life to her children, but who were exterminated by those who "were stronger" and "thought they knew / what it was their God wanted" (64). The speaker representing the next generation makes it clear, however, that those who gave the Cree people "no freedom" and thought they had the superior knowledge were proven wrong:

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Back in the thirties, things weren't so bad for us as it was for the homesteaders We hadn't cut our trees or tore up the land. We still had deer and fish rabbits and gophers and fat dogs heh heh But the settlers really suffered. It was pitiful. (65-66) As long as the Cree people lived in unison with the land, they survived, even without the buffalo (whereas the settler old Simmons in the poem committed suicide), but things turned badly for the third generation, "when dad and mom / got the vote," and they migrated to a town "with a pool / not a lake" in which they were not allowed because they were told they would "get it dirty" (67). Life in a society in which their copy of Canada's "Declaration of Human Rights" did not protect them against racism makes the last speaker, a young person, wonder about her children's place in this society. However, the poem does not end with skepticism but with a chorus line: Drums, chants and rattles pounded earth and heartbeats heartbeats (71)

Since the chorus is repeated five times throughout the poem, each time introducing a "song," it does not really conclude the poem but, rather, creates a new beginning: the song of the future generations. Lutz notes that, linking the different parts of the poem, the refrain "ties the Native people of past, present and future generations to the 'pounded earth and heartbeats, heartbeats' of all their relations."21 In this way, Beth Cuthand writes back into her poem those movements in time and space that colonization attempted to stop: her people are not doomed to vanish, nor will their connection with the "pounded earth" ever end, even if their livelihood no longer comes from the pounding hoofs of the buffalo. Scholar and poet Emma LaRocque, "whose roots of pride, independence, industriousness and skills go back to the Red River Metis, back to

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the Cree," traces her family's history in an autobiographical essay tided "Tides, Towns and Trains."22 Like Chief Dan George, whom she quotes, she felt "flung across the ages" (106) in just half a lifetime as she and her mother went through drastic changes.23 She says, "I was born into a complex community that was open to natural change but that simultaneously experienced forced change.... And change that is forced is oppression" (107). She explains how colonization interfered with the "rhythm" of her culture, which "cut across all seasons and some geography" (108) so that a new type of migration evolved: moving back and forth, physically and mentally, "between a land-based lifestyle" and "a lifestyle that could accommodate school" (108). She links the forced mobility of her people with the technology that made it possible: the train. At the same time, she exposes this signifier of "progress" as one of the tidal waves of colonization: "the crushing wave of Confederation and the 'national dream'—the building of the railway" (110). In Ruby Slipperjack's novels, the image of the train carries mostly negative connotations (in Honour the Sun, the children leave the community—and the story—when boarding the train for residential school; the train running through the community also causes many fatal accidents; and in Silent Words, the train, different from the canoe, is associated with trauma and fear). LaRocque remembers taking the train "over and over again on my way somewhere in pursuit of 'higher' education" (109). The geographical distance between home and school reflects cultural distance and the pain of displacement: "Each time I took the train away from them I was not only leaving a family and a place I loved so much, I was leaving a culture, a familiar way of life, for a world that was, initially, foreign, frightening and, at times, excruciatingly lonely" (109). Besides the images of mobility, "train" and "wave," LaRocque uses her third key concept, "Town," also in a non-static way with a "metaphorical meaning, a point of uneasy contact between our land-based life and Town's urban, industrial, and profit-based culture, with its condescending attitudes towards Aboriginal ways" (125). Town is invasive, bringing priests, diseases, and storekeepers to the Metis community. After LaRocque outlines all these changes imposed upon her people, she turns toward her own inner change, a journey of decolonization, of "talking back" as Marilyn Dumont puts it in her poem "The Devil's Language."24 She became politicized as a Native and as a woman exposing both racism and sexism.

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Political mobilization as an answer to colonial displacement of one's people and one's culture is also a theme in the novel Slash (1985) by Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong. She makes her character change, develop, or move on several levels: as a male in search of the female part in himself (his female partners both die and at the end he is left with the task of being a parent); as a young man raised in a traditional family who needs to bridge its values not only with "whiteman's" world but also with non-traditional, so-called assimilationist views among his own people; and lastly, as a move toward justice for all Indigenous people and protection of the land. "We are Indians, Tommy. Them spirits are crying out to the people, the young people, because the land is in pitiful shape and with it, our people."25 Two groups are identified in this novel: "the people on the move" and "the people on the reservation" (132). To be "on the move" means to work toward change. Slash is physically "on the move," joining caravans, demonstrations, and the American Indian Movement, but he is also searching mentally and spiritually in his movements back and forth between home and elsewhere. The novel's emphasis on movement defies closure; instead, it draws the reader into the protagonist's search for answers by a narrative style that favours conversations over authorial/ authoritative description and analysis. The novel Slash articulates movement as resistance against colonization of the people and the earth. These movements are a necessity, resulting from contemporary conditions for Native people; they do not emulate a traditional lifestyle because, different from the Cree nations, the Okanagan were more sedentary. One should read this differentiation, which also explains the brevity of the discussion of Slash here, against Thomas King's "historical" story featuring Indians "generally": the wording of the title "A Short History of Indians in Canada" right away insinuates his ironic take on the topic, not only because of the stereotypical naming but also because of the sarcastic allusion to colonial summative representations of a whole range of culturally diverse peoples.26 The title sarcastically echoes European historiography in which the history of "Indians" is often relegated to mere footnotes and afterthoughts, summed up under the overall headings of primitive and savage, in the detailed history of sophisticated settler societies. King's story, originally published in Toronto Life in August

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1997, and reprinted in a 1999 issue of Canadian Literature, "develops a complex voice that criticizes, laments, horrifies and yet gives hope in the humour. "27 The narrative starts out with telling about Bob Haynie (and not the Indians), a businessman who is visiting Toronto, staying at the King Edward Hotel. He suffers from insomnia and decides to follow the advice of the doorman to walk down Bay Street at three in the morning. On his stroll, this lover "of the smell of concrete ... the look of city lights" and "the sound of skyscrapers" (62) has to leap out of the way of "Indians" falling from the sky: "Smack! Smack! ... Whup! Whup!" (62-63). One of "nature's mysteries" he is told by Bill and Rudy, who clean up the bodies, "A natural phenomenon" (62-63). Bill and Rudy, who reappear in King's novel Truth & Bright Water as tourists, which means, in the context of King's work, as negative characters,28 can identify the tribal affiliation of the bodies by looking at the feathers categorized in a book; they also know that Ojibways are more common in the area than Navajos. The businessman, Bob, is told that only some Indians who have come down from the sky are dead. "Most of them are just stunned, says Rudy" (63). The reasons given for their flight and fall are that they're "nomadic, you know... And migratory" (63) and that "Toronto's in the middle of the flyway.... The lights attract them" (64). But even when Bill and Rudy turned off the lights in the building, they came. Very casually Bill and Rudy explain what they do with the fallen Indians. The dead ones we bag, says Rudy. The live ones we tag, says Bill. Take them to the shelter. Nurse them back to health. Release them in the wild. Amazing, says Bob. A few wander off dazed and injured. If we don't find them right away, they don't stand a chance. Amazing, says Bob. (64) The only concern of these two city employees is that the dead or injured Indians may become a public nuisance: all signs of them must be eliminated by "the time the commuters show up." However, the Indians are valuable as a tourist attraction, and it is a pity that sometimes people came through Toronto and "didn't even see an Ojibway." For Bob, the businessman, the "lucky guy," the spectacle was worth it—"spectacular!" But

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the doorman informs him that it is not "like the old days." Then, when "they came through, they would black out the entire sky" (64). King's satire works on several levels. Already the brevity of the story makes satirical comment on all homogenizing discourses about "Indians in Canada." Further, he seems to say that, in a nutshell, the history of the Indians in Canada can be summarized as the tagging and "protecting," the confining and labelling, of peoples who want to have the freedom of movement, but who got hurt in an environment alien from and hostile to their own. It is also a reversal of the settlement discourse that considered Aboriginal people as obstacles in immigrant visions of development and progress. Here, the point is stressed that "civilization" is obstructing an "Indian" way of life ("in the middle of the flyway"). The solution to the "problems" their existence causes, their contamination of the civilized world, is a quick and orderly (bureaucratic) clean-up according to certain categories. Numerous Aboriginal artists, writers, and poets, including Thomas King with his poem "Coyote in the City," evoke in their work Native people's experiences of the urban environment as unlivable. As also the last line of George Ryga's play The Ecstasy ofRitaJoe 29 intimates, the concrete of sidewalks kills them in more ways than one, and the so-called culture shock leaves many Native people "stunned." Revealingly, King constructs viewing the spectacle, the voyeuristic tourist experience, as the focal point of the whole history and satirically portrays the viewer as somebody whose sensory perception is unusual, if not "unnatural," at least when it comes to smelling concrete or hearing skyscrapers. In other words, this is a person who, in his adoration for the city, has lost touch with nature but is "amazed" by the "spectacular" "natural phenomenon" of Indians falling from the sky. The fact that the Indians' relationship with "nature's mysteries" can only be experienced within the orderly environment of a city is, of course, King's way of ridiculing stereotypes and at the same time critiquing the denial of the presence of another world (view). King takes the stereotype of the "feathered Indian"—the tide of Emma LaRocque's book about exposing stereotypes in the education system, Defeathering the Indian^ is noteworthy here—a step further by transforming "Indians" into birds. The imagery may not only come from Aboriginal connections with nature and King's intention to debunk stereotypical notions about them, but may also be inspired by the fact that it sometimes

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happens in Toronto that birds, attracted by the lights, get hurt and indeed fall from the sky so that their dead bodies have to be cleaned up in the morning. Reasons why "the Indians" keep coming to Toronto, although the lights that apparently "attract" them are sometimes turned off, are not known to Bill and Rudy, as these are not spelled out in their book. It may be because the name "Toronto" goes back to an Ojibway name meaning "the place of meeting,"31 also suggesting an explanation why it is "in the middle of the flyway." Through the bird image—"a flock of Indians" (62)—King also evokes nomadic, migratory aspects of Indigenous cultures, similar to how Armand Garnet Ruffo, in his poem "The Season" quoted at the beginning of this chapter, refers to the loon "locked inside us" expressing a desire to be "on the move" with the seasons. In "This Is a Story," by Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong, the Europeans are the migratory Swallows, a metaphor chosen to signify in the context of the story that they will carelessly pollute one place only to migrate to the next one, whereas the Okanagan People stay within a certain territory. However, Kyoti, the other migrant in this story, is the transformer character in Aboriginal oral traditions who, under many names and guises, represents nomadic and migratory aspects of the respective culture. When Nanabush, the Anishnabe trickster, flies with the geese, he will eventually fall down to earth, but he will survive, and his fall generated by his disobedience will teach a lesson and will literally leave a mark on the spot where he falls—recreating nature. Other cultural connotations with falling from the sky are in stories about the sky people who come down to earth to work as healers among the people, and in the Anishnabe creation story in Basil Johnston's version, Sky Woman comes down to earth on an invitation from the animals, who then create Turtle's back as something for her to land on.32 Different from in Milton's Paradise Lost, "the fall" is not from good to evil but merely a transformation. However, the transformation of the falling Indians in King's story has tragic outcomes for them: not only are some killed, some "dazed and injured," but the "live ones" are changed from free-flying creatures to beings whose life will be controlled; they become a passive "them" to whom certain things are done: "tagged" (status or non-status), taken "to the shelter" (the animal shelter comes to mind as well as the shelter for

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homeless people, the reserve, and residential schools), nursed "back to health" (welfare), released "in the wild" (where they are told to belong). In his painting titled Adjusting to Reservation Life, Cree artist George Littlechild illustrates the confinement experienced by Native people living on the reserve by showing the human figures within the moulds of cut-out paper dolls. Also, in the context of the book from which this image is taken, which compares the Holocaust with colonization in North America, assimilation policies of the government "rounding up" Indians are seen (as indicated in the caption at the bottom of the picture) in analogy to the "rounding up" of Jews, the red circle on each figure a "marker" that parallels the Jewish star. In the Cree language, reserves are called shkoonigan, "leftovers," and yet Native people are restricted to the reserve if they want legal protection. According to Anishnabe lawyer Dennis McPherson, Aboriginal people are defined by the Indian Act as "Indians" first and citizens second; hence, they are not protected by the Charter of Rights (as also Beth Cuthand suggests in "Four Songs for the Fifth Generation") and are therefore compelled to think that they should stay on the reserve where they are "sheltered." "Indians off reserve are susceptible to various suspensions of the law," McPherson says.33 And even the choice of coming and going, a pattern of migration Anishnabe poet Blaeser celebrates in "Studies in Migration,"34 is made difficult because the reserve culture does not always willingly make room for migrants. "Going home," as Maurice Kenny suggests in his poem, is not that simple. In two well-known "rez plays" by two Cree playwrights, Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters (1988) and Ian Ross's fareWel (1998),35 the characters feel ambivalent about their community. They dislike the isolation, the poverty, and certain attitudes among people caused by being "cattled," as Louise Halfe calls it. fare Wel, a more recent play, addresses issues currently of concern, such as the corruption and lack of accountability of the band leadership. On the other hand, these communities are home, as Rachel, one of the characters in the play, states: "I hate this place. But it's my home" (92). According to statistics, "Aboriginal people aren't moving off reserves as often as people think"; on the contrary, there is proof "of increasing migration to reserves,"36 which causes socio-economic problems because funding for the reserves does not increase at the same pace.

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For a writer with "a nomadic spirit," such as Cree author Paul Seesequasis, "The rez represented a closed world, an insular life that conflicted with my urban existence."37 In his short autobiographical essay "Trick or Treat" he explains how he "ESCAPED TO THE BIG CITY, TORONTO," a move that echoes King's notion about the nomadic nature of "Indians" who are "attracted" to a meeting place like Toronto (also echoed in the trip to Toronto by the seven female bingo players in Highway's Rez Sisters). It seems, however, that Seesequasis did not have a fall, but, avoiding the tagging of the Bills and the Rudys, "came to the gleeful realization that being Native could be undefinable, unimprisonable and outrageous. In short, it could be in the spirit of the trickster."38 It is one of my objectives to show how Indigenous writers convey this "trickster" spirit—in spite of the peoples' being stopped in their migrations and being badly hurt and imprisoned in many facets of their lives. One of the features that make their writing "unimprisonable" is reflected in the varied ways they bring together different cultures. Emma LaRocque, for example, does not see her culture in the one-dimensional perception of Longfellow's Hiawatha—to choose one of the works she mentions. Although, when she was growing up she could relate to the poetics of this text as it depicts "the world of magic" she was surrounded by in her small Metis community, she makes it clear that she was "not born into a garden of Hiawathian paradise."39 Questioning in the beginning of her essay one of the "classics" in literature written about Native people, she asserts that purity of a culture is an outsider concept. As Gareth Griffiths states (echoing Ian Chambers) in relation to non-Indigenous notions of authenticity, such confining labels are "grounded not in their practice but in our desire."40 Against the ghettoizing stereotype of the noble savage, Emma LaRocque describes a culture that is a hybrid. Even as we lived off the land, we also lived off the railroad.... Even as we ate moose, trout and berries, we also ate canned Spork, sardines and white sugar. Even as my grandmother's lover shook tents in the ancient ceremony of the Cree, we were kissing the Stations of the Cross in the annual pilgrimages of the Roman Catholic Church. And even as my mother chased away Pehehsoo, soon after I entered school I was lecturing her about the physics of thunder and lightning. And even as my father spoke of smelling swooping night-spirit dancers, I lectured him about the gaseous flickers of aurora borealis.41

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LaRocque's view of her mixed culture includes the European side without the assimilationist attitude of, for example, the nineteenthcentury Methodist Ojibway minister George Copway. While he constructs his upbringing as serving "the imaginary gods of my poor blind father,"42 LaRocque does not devalue the spiritual world she was "born into." The difference in outlook here can be argued as difference between Metis and Ojibway, but also as difference between hybridity and assimilation,43 or as difference between generations. Metis writer and film producer Christine Welsh told and showed her story of Women in the Shadows as the result of her search for her history. Her research was complicated by her grandmothers' denial of their Native ancestry, a "silence that is the legacy of assimilation"44 and, for her foremothers at their time, a way of surviving. In Christine Welsh's interview with Emma LaRocque about her film, LaRocque comments on the differences between generations as a difference in responsibilities: You and I are survivors.... But unlike Margaret and your grandmothers and my grandmothers, the challenge for us today is to survive—to be who we are—without paying the price of hating ourselves and rejecting a part of ourselves. That's the big issue— not just that we survive, but that we survive well and healthily and without having to abandon anything that is ofus.45 (emphasis added) It is with consideration of this demand for surviving as a Native person without self-denial that I want to discuss Wagamese's notion of "movin' between," or strategies and forms of hybridity in Indigenous texts. Since the publication of Beatrice Culleton-Mosionier's novel about a character who sees assimilation as the only way to survive, In Search of April Raintree (1983),46 more and more overtly bicultural texts have been written by Canadian Aboriginal writers that clearly assert a Native perspective. Discursive strategies reflecting back-and-forth movements between cultures, languages, and literacies may be understood with Seesequasis as part of the "new nomadic age," but they also echo the mobility and "trickster" movements of "the old nomadism" in traditional Native societies.

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MOVING BETWEEN CULTURES, LANGUAGES, AND LITERACIES

The truth is that most of us are movin' between Indyuns. Movin' between our jobs and the sweat lodge. Movin between school and pow wow. Movin' between English and Anishnabe. Movin' between both worlds. Movin' between 1990 and 1490. Most of us are the kinda Indyun. —Richard Wagamese1 Richard Wagamese's quotation from Keeper 'NMe emphasizes movement between rather than destination or arrival at a fixed place. Called "nomadism" by Braidotti and "migrancy" by Chambers, the state of being in transit is understood by the character Keeper in the political context of colonization. These movements are forced upon, not chosen, as Emma LaRocque explains in her autobiographical essay "Tides, Towns and Trains," and therefore are radically different from my own immigration and the many forms of theoretical migrations of the postmodern intellectual. For this study, Keeper's emphasis on movement is noteworthy because the elder's explanation of what it means to be "Indyun" points toward a complexity that defies categorization and definitions and, hence, is the other voice that needs to be read together with Keeper's "beaver or bear" dualism. As a migrant reader, I am thus encouraged to read for hybridic strategies in Wagamese's and, by extension, other Aboriginal texts. Homi Bhabha explains his understanding of hybridity in the following way: "What is at

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issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, 'opening out,' remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference—be it class, gender or race."2 Whereas an assimilationist point of view has given up agency, to borrow a term from postcolonial theory, a construction of culture and race that understands the performative nature of differential identities demands an active presence, a continuous involvement in the remaking of boundaries. Although cross-cultural and cross-racial intellectual movements may be theorized in the above manner, I want to draw attention to the pitfall of hiding "behind a vocabulary which, on the one hand, overlooks one's privileged position and, on the other, makes everyone look equally privileged."3 One of the poets oscillating among various styles, genres, literacies, and languages is Louise Halfe; through her innovative use of italics in Blue Marrow, for example, she writes in "different" English, sometimes, for example in "My Ledders," also inserting Cree words. She explained in a lecture that she uses such variations deliberately in order "to overcome the shame instilled in her while at the Blue Quills Residential School."4 Ironically, this is the school where, after it had been transformed into a First Nations-controlled Education Centre, my journey of learning about Native literature started. In my opinion, this coincidence of her being silenced at a place where I, some years later, started to build a career based on the stories told by her and other Aboriginal people expresses a symptomatic dissonance that should unsettle us as non-Aboriginal scholars and remind us of our place of privilege. Unlike Louise Halfe, I never had to unlearn my native tongue and my way of thinking and being; all through my academic research following my first contact with Aboriginal thinking, I adapted what I learned to what I already knew; I did not have to deny any part of myself. Although I let myself be challenged and questioned rethinking the values of my cultural and literary background, my attempts at a transformed outlook5 were always voluntary, whereas Indigenous peoples were forced to change. As Creek scholar Craig Womack points out, qualifications for academic positions in Native literature do not include connections with Native communities,^ so that a non-Aboriginal scholar may become a specialist in this area by theorizing about it in an idiom familiar to him or her but without being linked to the people from whom it evolved. It is in this context of the ethically uprooted academic that scholar

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Hartmut Lutz understands Maria Campbell's statement about the English language in Canada having "lost the mother": Unless such a comment is brushed aside as "non-academic" in a gesture of colonial arrogance and/or academic provincialism, it posits a serious challenge to contemporary academia. It would require an amount of cross-cultural learning on the side of the non-Natives, which could seriously question ... the progress of literary-theory-development in mainstream academia, where ... literary scholarship and literary scholars have removed themselves further and further from the literary texts and the voice, the intentions, social conditions and the history of its authors—particularly, of authors of Color.7 The situation of non-Native writers/scholars who are able to choose their discourse contrasts with the dilemma of Native writers, as Maria Campbell explains in her interview with Lutz. She gives an insight into the difficulties Aboriginal writers face in finding the appropriate language and diction for their work. Since, in a still colonial society with English and French as the two official languages, they cannot publish in an Indigenous language, the onus is on the writers to find a linguistic medium that carries the cultural perspective of their voices and yet is understood by all (so that it can be marketed). This "exquisite balancing act," as Native American novelist Louis Owens describes such efforts, results in "a matrix of incredible heteroglossia and linguistic torsions and an intensely political situation."8 For Maria Campbell, "village English," rather than the standardized written English, reflects the cultural perspectives of the voices of her storytellers: "I've been working with dialect for about 10 years, and a lot of my writing now is in very broken English I can ... express my community better than I can in 'good' English. It's more like oral tradition, and I am able to work as a storyteller with that."9 Similarly, Louise Halfe gives voice to one of her foremothers in the medium of the "below standard," non-literary language of the patois. Looking into a room where her European husband, now with a European wife, is reading, the Native woman concludes ... My inglish no good. Me stink of rawhide an burning drum. Smoke my hair, greased in bear fat. I no no udder way^

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The "no good" of the language, seemingly just a deficiency, is highlighted as difference to be acknowledged in the description of the speaker's outer appearance, and in the typeface of italics. Likewise, Jeannette Armstrong uses so-called "Rez English" in her prose text "This Is a Story" as a variant of standard English, which enables her "to construct a ... sense of movement and rhythm through sound patterns" similar to the Okanagan language." She believes that "Rez English from any part of the country, if examined, will display the sound and syntax patterns of the indigenous language of that area and subsequently the sounds that the landscape speaks."11 By selecting "their own English," these writers make English "their own," or, in Emma LaRocque's explanation, in "due time, I have 'appropriated' this language [English] without abandoning my Cree. I have sought to master this language so that it would no longer master me."12 Even if the Indigenous language is no longer known, an Indigenous author's awareness of the presence of an Indigenous language will influence the choice of language as a strategy. Although Indigenous authors express their voices in a context that is by necessity "syncretic and hybridized," coming out of experiences that refute "the privileged position of a standard code in the language and any monocentric view of human experience,"131 concur with Margery Fee that "[Bill] Ashcroft has made too much of this 'perpetual confrontation.' Indigenous English derives its nature also from the discourse conventions of the indigenous language, lost or not."14 Also, I agree with Thomas King's argument in his article "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial" that there is much more to First Nations literatures than that they emerge "out of the experience of colonization" (Ashcroft's phrase15): "the idea of post-colonial writing effectively cuts us off from our traditions, traditions that were in place before colonialism ever became a question, traditions which have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization... ,"16 Although Indigenous literatures oppose, refute, and contest dominant (literary) discourses, they are not merely abrogating "the privileged position" of English, but are asserting cultural distinctiveness without continuously looking at "the centre": they centre themselves within their own cultures, communities, traditions, and languages, and as the oldest voices of the Americas. As Womack states: "We are the canon."1? If one acknowledges with Fee that

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"the influence of standard English on indigenous writers may be far from central and we, as literary critics, cannot rely on our knowledge of our own discourse conventions to see us through an interpretation of their work,"18 speakers of the respective Indigenous language need to be involved in the literary analysis of texts that, to those who do not speak the language, all look "the same." The absence of such teamwork in my study here explains its limitations and, therefore, a positionality of non-authority. Campbell and Armstrong both emphasize language that expresses culturally distinct voices (and so does Halfe in the above excerpt from her narrative in which the speaker links her "no good" English with her "no good" culturally informed outer appearance) and thus aim at finding the right linguistic medium in a society that still does not include Indigenous languages as being equally worthy as the languages of the two "founding nations." Armstrong explains that the differences between Okanagan and English "have great influence on my worldview, my philosophy, my creative process, and subsequently my writing"; further, each of these two languages (and by extension not only Okanagan, but all Indigenous languages) shapes the "perception of the way reality occurs."19 Similarly, Anishnabe author Ruby Slipperjack expresses a close link between language and culture and how she tries to solve the dilemma of having to write in English: [TJhere were times I was just totally frustrated. I cannot get the right meaning of what I am trying to say, so what I do most times is, I parallel it. I use English words, I devise situations where the English language would fit, still keeping the Native content intact, hopefully, so that you would get the flavour of what I am trying to say in the Native language by using this English system in there. So the feeling comes across.20 Each Aboriginal author's attitude toward the significance of language contradicts Ashcroft's, Griffiths's, and Tiffin's assertions about the "fallacy of both the representationist and culturally determinist views of language."21 Their arguments about "essentialist assumptions" about language reveal again that Indigenous literatures are indeed not part of the postcolonial world they construct in their theories. Not only should an outsider refrain from undermining the repeatedly made claim by Indigenous writers that they lose important nuances and layers of meaning when writing in a non-Indigenous language, but outsiders must recognize that

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the emphasis on essential differences between Indigenous languages and English is also an important point in the political struggle for decolonization. Aboriginal students in my university classes increasingly question "the Native content," as Slipperjack says, of literatures written in English and hope that the tide of the anthology I use—Native Literature Written in English—foreshadows an anthology of literatures written in Indigenous languages. Albert Memmi, in his classic study The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), maintains that "the most urgent claim of a group to revive is certainly the liberation and restoration of its language."22 On the other hand, while Indigenous languages are of great importance in self-identification of colonized peoples, they are not considered the only cultural marker. Again, it is important to pay attention to diversity of experiences and background, and individual preferences, among Aboriginal people. While Basil Johnston explains categorically that "only language and literature can restore the 'Indian-ness,'"23 Lee Maracle maintains: "Language is one means of expression of culture, but it is not the main expression. .. ,"24 In this (transitional) stage of Aboriginal literatures, writers who do consider their respective Indigenous language a significant aspect of their creative process often "move between" finding ways of making their first language known, and "translating" and appropriating English for their own uses. Anishnabe writer Basil Johnston, for example, includes Anishnabe (Ojibway) words and sentences in his autobiography Indian Schooldays (1988). Arun Mukherjee interprets this strategy as "a declaration of cultural survival against insurmountable odds." Although she could not find anyone in her "immediate community" to explain to her "the intricacies of Ojibway"—different from her experience with getting help on a South Asian language—so that she had to acknowledge "gaps" when teaching the text, she found those "gaps themselves ... instructive": The interruption of English by Ojibway forces us to take cognizance of the colonial nature of the Canadian state, in that no Native language (except in the Northwest Territories) enjoys the status of "official" language in Canada. We are also forced to ponder the fact that Johnston's fluency in English was forced on him, while we did not have to undergo a forced immersion in Ojibway.25 For Mukherjee, the Ojibway words "are directly metonymic of that cultural difference which is imputed by the linguistic variation,"26 but she

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also explains that the fact that "cultural difference" is, for her, not more than a "gap" is an expression of colonial rather than post-colonial power relations.2? Based on experiences with student responses to texts that include this type of linguistic variation, I would argue that the inserted words situate the readers: for some they carry more than a metonymic meaning by creating a close, personal link with the text (even if not all words are understood) and granting a certain ownership of this literature, an insider perspective denied to them if the text were written only in English. A similar familiarity is created for Aboriginal readers through the use of the vernacular. Native students in my class enjoyed the stories by Okanagan elder Harry Robinson28 because they were reminded of elders at home. His collaborator Wendy Wickwire successfully preserved, in writing, storytelling as an oral performance by not editing his Rez English and by conveying the rhythm of the telling in the fragmented lines of poetry. Again, for those students, the linguistic variant does not "introduce the culture synecdochally," as W.D. Ashcroft argues in relation to an African text,29 but validates some aspects of their experiences as Aboriginal people, although not of #//Aboriginal people. The device of inserting Indigenous words, phrases, or sentences in an English text varies from author to author and also depends on publication context. In Moses's and Goldie's Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, the poetry by Louise Halfe and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm presents a particular challenge because the Ojibway/Anishnabe or Cree words are left untranslated (in contrast to Halfe's own glossing at the end of her book Bear Bones & Feathers}; whereas, in Tbmson Highway's excerpt from The Rez Sisters and in Gregory Scofield's poetry, words and phrases are glossed in a footnote. Jeannette Armstrong believes that literature should be clear— "clarity for every person, whether it's people who are from that cultural group or not,"30 and that for clarity's sake Indigenous words should be translated in a glossary. However, in her collaboratively written books of

meditations The Native Creative Process (1991),31 in which she creates a

whole essay in order to explain one word or phrase in Okanagan, she demonstrates that such translation is complex. With respect to novels written by Canadian Aboriginal authors, most are in English. An exception is Lome Simon's Stones and Switches (1994),32 which has a glossary of Mi'kmaq words and phrases at the back of the

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book. This was recommended by Jeannette Armstrong in her role as the director of the En'owkin School of Writing where Simon was studying. There are also a few phrases of Cherokee in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water (which are left unglossed). In both her novels Honour the Sun (1987) and Silent Words (1992), Slipperjack avoids what she considers an inappropriate intrusion of glossing and footnoting.^ Using English throughout, she does not deviate from the first-person narrative voice of her protagonists, but uses other techniques to convey the cross-cultural character of her novels. She may remind her readers of the presence of another language in the following way: "Then the older boy said in Ojibway 'Where did you come from?'"34 Ojibway speakers in my Native literature course liked Slipperjack's way of including "difference" without using translation. They thought the English phrase would give both groups of readers, those fluent in Ojibway and those who are not, the possibility to think seriously about the implications of this question. These students also pointed out that it would have been difficult and problematic to find a standardized Ojibway wording for the phrase, as there are so many dialectic variations of the Ojibway language. In another dialogue from Silent Words, quoted earlier in a different context, Slipperjack's translation of Ojibway into English creates a gap between two signifying systems: "'By the way, how long is this trip?' I said in English. He pretended not to hear me, so I switched to Ojibway. 'When are we going to get to where we're going?'"-*5 The elder's non-verbal response in this novel about silences further highlights cultural difference and a seemingly unbridgeable gap implying that the English language cannot convey the Ojibway culture (in this case, a different time concept). The elder's refusal to understand— although he does understand English—shows his resistance to participate in the hegemonic discourse and, as well, his intention to teach the protagonist his own way of perceiving his world. In Silent Words, the protagonist's search for his mother and for his identity is often tied in with his learning about different types of "languages." As he seems to be almost bilingual, he can converse in both Ojibway and English, but he has to figure out which language is appropriate in a particular situation. It is not just a question of simply switching linguistic codes. The awkwardness of the English version of the question asked in Ojibway signifies a cultural gap between thinking in Ojibway and thinking

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in English. Appropriate communication depends on being attuned to a cultural protocol; for example, the passage "Suddenly I said in English, 'Why don't you just go and buy a spoon and not have to go through such pain to make one?'" (32). The context of this quotation clarifies that, even if Danny had said those words in Ojibway, they would have been considered rude because he did not comply with the culturally requested behaviour of non-interference; he did not just "listen, watch and learn" (45), advice he will be taught frequently on his journey. The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Old Indian epitomize the idea that communication is not merely dependent on verbal literacy skills. Danny has to get used to their language because they "did not speak Indian. They were speaking in some kind of strange-sounding English" (50), like: "Da oP fool 'as let da stobe go out agin" (50). And to make things more confusing for Danny, they pray in Latin! But it is this couple who teaches the boy for the first time about the silent words of non-verbal language: "No one said a word, but we said a lot. I was learning" (61). This newly acquired literacy skill helps Danny later on in a crucial moment of his life when he meets again with his father, who had abused him. "I watched him closely, reading him the way Mr. and Mrs. Old Indian had taught me" (234, emphasis added). The novel's inclusive definition of language, even including the languages of the non-human environment, farther enhances hybridized cultural (rather than strictly linguistic) literacies: I looked at OP Jim and asked seriously, "Why do people say 'the lonely call of a loon', or 'the eerie hoot of an owl' when I have never heard these things by themselves. There are always two or a whole bunch of them!" OP Jim chuckled and said, "Well, when you don't understand the language, all the voices sound the same, don't they?"(159) Without using "devices of otherness" (Ashcroft's phrase)36 like neologisms or glossing, Slipperjack introduces her readers to different voices— certainly more fully grasped by an Anishnabe person "understanding the language" and knowing about the "other" side of the parallel she is creating. To the monolingual/monocentric reader, all her writing—with exception of "the strange-sounding English" of the Old Indian couple—may "sound the same." However, if one pays attention to the silences of the novel as another language, one may conclude with non-Aboriginal critic Dee Home that Slipperjack's above-quoted "parallelism strategy" does

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not "exemplify colonial mimicry" but, by referring to "implied meanings, the unspoken words and feelings between the lines of print" (a writing style Dee Home calls "implicature"), "she foregrounds the Ojibway culture."37 Slipperjack's narrative technique is quite different from Basil Johnston's way of writing difference through code-switching. Not only does he insert Ojibway language phrases but in his earlier work, the collection of short stories Moose Meat and Wild Rice (1978), he also alternates between an informal and a formal English. For example, in the story "The Honey Pot," Johnston employs a third-person narrator whose comments in the English of a formally educated person are set off against the dialogues of the Native characters, who speak in a vernacular: "Hmm," said Shigun. "Yeah. Mebbee we can take dat honey. Make a good meal dat, and we could split what's left tree ways." They walked thoughtfully back to the shore. All the while Shigun cleaned his pans, he tempted his comrades with thoughts about the goodness of honey. Not only did honey sweeten tea to ambrosia, it turned scone into cake of the finest delicacy. A little honey was good for the flagging energies of man, woman, and child. It turned a meal into a veritable feast. Adam and Tikip listened, were intrigued, were convinced. "Hell," said Tikip looking at the swale, "We'll never be able to get t'rough dat stuff."38 This story is one of the examples of "an amusing account of Indianwhite man relationships," Johnston explains in his preface to the collection (9). Neither the formal diction of the narrator nor the demotic English of the characters (with the insertion of the occasional Ojibway word) provides "the authentic" Native voice, but both together signify a complex reality. The hybridity of the textual construction points toward the multiplicity of responses to major changes imposed on Anishnabe people in the 1940s and 1950s, and toward the divisiveness such differences create in the small, forced-together community "about twenty or so miles away... of Blunder Bay" (7). It also is a reflection of the composite identities of the "Moose Meat Point Indian Reserve" population, described by Johnston as "westernized in outward appearance but in soul and spirit very much still Ojibway" (7). The characters' failed attempts at imitating "the white man" illustrate humorously the impossibility of assimilation.

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In this particular story about three men trying to find a way to get some honey out of a tree stump, the characters' involvement with white society is shown by the juxtaposition of their seeming stupidity with the stupidity of European tourists who, watching the men's struggle with the bees in the water through their binoculars, misinterpret the scene as a verification of their knowledge about "Blood-thirsty savages" (30) and report it to the police as "Indians ... killing one another" (30). The ignorance and narrow-mindedness revealed in the tourists' stereotypical thinking foregrounds the resourcefulness rather than the stupidity of the "Moose Meat Point Indians." Their imagination is not any more misguided than that of the tourists, but the tourists and the police are ultimately the more stupid, since they think they know when in fact they are totally mistaken. Although readers may laugh at the stupid Ojibway characters yelling in pain after being attacked by the bees— "Eeeeyawh!" gasped Adam. "Eeeeyawh!" Tikip screamed. "EEEeeeyawh!" bellowed Shigun. (29) —they will also feel empathy; whereas, they will hardly side with the tourists screaming "with avid bloodlust" (30)—even if it is in "proper" English—"'Oh! Murder! Murder!" she howled" (30). In each of Basil Johnston's stories, the formally educated narrator mediates between different literacies, commenting on, and in a way "translating," the unassimilated characters' diction and behaviour. In Maria Campbell's The Stories of the Road Allowance People (1995), on the other hand, the storytellers' vernacular is left unmediated; on the contrary, these stories were translated by Campbell in the opposite direction, having "come a long journey to be with us from Mitchif [the language of the Metis] through literal translations through the Queen's imperial English and back to the Earth in village English."39 "Village English," which Campbell explains as "very broken English,"40 reads in the story "Jacob" like this: Dey get married day Indian way an after dat my granfawder he help him with all hees doctoring. Dats dah way he use to be a long time ago. If dah woman he work den dah man he help him an if dah man he work

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dah woman he help. You never heers peoples fighting over whose jo* he was dey all Know what dey got to do to stay alive.41 The style of Campbell's "village English," explains Susan Gingell, is distinguished by "the syntactical marker of difference known as reduplication, which is a feature of both French and Cree, and therefore Mitchif syntax interacting with English syntax."42 Examples of reduplication in the above passage from the story "Jacob" include "dah woman he work" or "dah man he help him" (emphasis added). The intersecting of languages also shows in the usage of the pronoun "he" to denote both the male and female gender as well as the impersonal "it." Since in most Indigenous languages there are no pronouns signifying gender, Campbell uses one and the same pronoun in all her stories. Through this technique she alerts readers to context, to reading the whole sentence "all at once" in order to understand the meaning of the pronoun. This is exactly the way the Cree language is structured. Further, attention to context is also important in her depiction of the functioning of Metis communities "a long time ago." The storyteller explains indirectly that preconceived gender roles were insignificant; what counted was the job that needed to be done. Her choice of the masculine (instead of the feminine) as the only pronoun may be related to the male perspective of the stories. She explains in the introduction that the old men of her father's generation became her teachers; hence, each story focusses on a male character. Campbell's use of non-standard orthography and grammar contrasts with Wendy Wickwire's transcription of the stories told to her by the Okanagan elder Harry Robinson. Wickwire explains that "in order to minimize confusion for readers new to these stories," she "edited the pronouns to make them consistent with their antecedents."43 Although Campbell's stories are difficult to understand for somebody with a monocentric view and may have to be read several times, the striking difference in her use of pronouns overrides/overwrites "the norm" and, hence, claims a discourse to be understood on its own terms. In her introduction to the story about Jacob quoted above, Campbell asserts a cultural way of thinking that, although affected by the Europeans, was not destroyed by them. Instead of providing such comments at the end, she begins her tale with them, emphasizing a history that started

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before colonization. The colonial story she is about to tell leads back to "day Indian way" told by Mistupuch, who "never gets a whitemans name" (89). It is the tale about the man Jacob, who had been taken to a residential school when he was very young and who came back to the community many years after his parents' death. Totally uprooted, with a new language and a new name, he did not know his family history and ended up marrying his sister, who eventually committed suicide. Campbell tells this story as one of the stories "of the" people, as the title of her collection emphasizes, in a voice not "authentic" but constructed as other than "the Queen's imperial English." Here, she indeed seems to practise the "abrogation or denial of the privilege of English"44 by self-consciously othering her storytelling. Marilyn Dumont, like Campbell of Metis background, calls this "resistance writing" or, sarcastically, "the devil's language": as if violating God the Father and standard English is like talking back(wards) as if speaking the devil's language is talking back back (words)45 Jacob, in Campbell's story, does "talk back," explaining to the priest who wants to convince him that suffering in residential schools is good for the children because Jesus suffered too: "But day Jesus he never lose his language an hees peoples" (95).There is no code-switching in the stories in the sense that the priests would speak in proper English as in Basil Johnston's Moose Meat and Wild Rice, but Cree words are woven into the text. As in her other stories, Campbell emphasizes Cree names since naming is linked to cultural identity. Her narrator points out Mistupuch, the one who "never gets a whitemans name," as the one who "knowed lots of stories" (89). Naming is of special significance in "Jacob" as the colonizers' renaming of the people led to an erasure of their identity in relation to their family history and ultimately caused a person's death. If Jacob had known his father's "Indian name," the tragedy would have never happened; in a small way this story illustrates how cultural genocide cannot be separated from physical genocide. Indirectly, the name "Jacob" links her story with the genocide of the Jewish people, as it was Jacob to whom God had promised, in his dream of a ladder reaching into heaven, the well-being of his people. He eventually re-named Jacob Israel. The story

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from the Old Testament is a foundational narrative in Jewish beliefs, although, in the face of centuries of persecution, also contested. Campbell's narratives are stories told from the "Halfbreed" perspective, with their definition of "dat word 'civilize'" (75) and their understanding of education as edjication/ejication. If a non-Metis audience has to make a special effort to understand the "backwards" language, they should be reminded of Gloria Anzaldua's reasoning (which contrasts Armstrong's concern for clarity for all readers): Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas, Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without always having to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.46 Like some of Louise Halfe's poetry and like the dialogues in Basil Johnston's stories, the narratives of the so-called Road Allowance People must be read aloud in order to be understood at all; it is spoken English that is brought onto the page. Maria Campbell transcribed the stories given to her orally in the fragmented lines of poetry: such visual arrangement draws attention to the distinctiveness of the stories as a hybrid genre—the blending of the oral and the written becomes a blending of prose and poetry. This form of "interfusional literature," as Thomas King calls it,47 may be motivated by "the desire to script rhythms."48 Wendy Wickwire thus explains her choice of lineation for Robinson's narratives: "I have therefore set the stories in lines which mirror as closely as possible Harry's rhythm of speech."49 Campbell and Halfe (as well as Wickwire) appropriate the genre of poetry for their own uses; they utilize the oral quality of poetry (which, like the Native narratives, should be read aloud) without abiding by other genre definitions like metaphoric language or lyricism. The use of an "Indigenized English"50 parallels the indigenization of a genre that should, therefore, be evaluated in its own context. Besides the fragmented poetry line, italics may be used as a device to highlight the oral, as in Louise Halfe's Blue Marrow and in the novels Stones and Switches by Mi'kmaq author Lome Simon and Keeper 'NMe by Anishnabe novelist Richard Wagamese. Halfe uses both, the genre of poetry and the italics, to script "different" voices or, as she puts it, to let

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"our memory and our talk ... walk on paper."51 In her historical narrative Blue Marrow, passages in conventional typeset alternate with italicized stanzas. For example, the section quoted in the beginning of this chapter is followed by lines in italics, which, in this instance, signify a change in perspective: after telling the story about the impact of European immigration on her people, emphasizing colonial attitudes, the narrator focusses on her grandfather and his view: We were eating summer pups, buffalo heaped in sour heat— no rabbits, no berries to fill our dying bellies. Our warriors crying, the Sundance tree falling from the paskisikana. Ghost Dancers in bleeding shirts We were dying. We were dying. Dying. (62)

Here, as Meira Cook says, "The use of italics . . . acts as a border between the living and the dead, between the colonizer's language and the 'whispering' but subversive words of the dispossessed."52 Whereas in the stanza in conventional font, the marginalization of the narrator's people is emphasized, the telling of her own story a mere afterthought ("Later, driving home"), in the lines above it is Grandfather speaking, "bent over the paper leaves" (62), followed by a conversation with Grandmother, who responds by saying that "River blood will always be our milk. / This talk will stain the leaves" (62). Spoken in the context of treaty-making processes (the paper leaves), her words are a warning to her husband not to lose touch with the strength to be gained from nature. Because, if he does, not only the paper leaves but also the leaves of trees will be stained. Hence Grandfather ends up drawing suns moons lakes winds and grass. (63)

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In the above example, Halfe uses the typographic device of italicizing to highlight the oral voice of elders, which, for many Native people, would be considered the "authentic" cultural voice. However, I maintain that the whole history that Halfe is telling is rendered from the perspective of a Cree person; it seems to me that each voice contributes to a fuller understanding, each one truthful and "authentic" in its own way, a layering of different stories (often not clearly distinguished) summarized in the syncretic image of the title: "blue marrow."53 Similar to Halfe's use of italics to accentuate different voices and thus perspectives, Lome Simon employs typographic variation in the characterization of the protagonist Megwadesk in his novel Stones and Switches. Overall narrated from a third-person point of view, the thoughts of the main character are set off through italicization. Again, this device highlights an oral and a distinctly Aboriginal, in this case Mi'kmaq, voice because these thoughts are interior monologues in which the protagonist Megwadesk is literally speaking to himself, often inserting Mi'kmaq words. Like the textual divisions formed in Basil Johnston's short stories, the style of these monologues is distinguished from the omniscient narrator's descriptions in standard English. In the juxtaposition of these two styles, a written, more objective and comprehensive, view is visually separated from an "oral," more subjective, questioning of the situation. The novel tells the story of Megwadesk, caught in a conflict that is only partly solved at the end. Megwadesk has bad luck with his fishing, but the reasons for his lack of success are complex, part of a web of connections he is trying to understand. Using the conversational style of interior monologues—or dialogues with Nisgam (God)—Simon draws the reader into the main character's philosophical musings: It's our silly old beliefs, eh, that keep us from getting anywhere, he thought. Everything is taboo with us, eh. An' these beliefs go deeper than the head. Nisgam, just look at me, eh? Last night I could've taken advantage ofSkoltch's net but I ran away instead! An' why? 'Cause I was afraid of the spirits getting back at me! (18)

As only the reader, and no other character, is privy to Megwadesk's thoughts, the reader understands best the confusion this character is in and the different positions he moves back and forth between—the "old beliefs" that his future wife Mimi adheres to, on the one side, and the

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Christian, in particular Catholic, religion on the other side. The reader knows about Megwadesk's doubts, but also, in the non-italicized text, learns about validations of Mi'kmaq beliefs, for example in the characterization of the two ministers. The Catholic priest is punished for not honouring Mi'kmaq ways, and the Protestant minister prefers to tell Megwadesk and Mimi a spider, rather than a Bible, story. These and other events, together with the fact that Mimi helps him to get his fishing luck back with her so-called superstitions, convince Megwadesk toward the end that Mi'kmaq beliefs are as powerful as Christian beliefs. In a chapter titled "The Second Coming," this character is also told it will be Gluskeb who will return, rather than Jesus. The allusion to an important figure in Mi'kmaq oral traditions—in his Christ-like role comparable to Nanabush, Raven, Coyote, or Weesageechak in the oral traditions of other First Nations—implies the hoped-for end to colonization.54 In the version of the story about Gluskeb's departure recorded by the Baptist minister Silas T. Rand in 1869 (and as told by Josiah Jeremy), the narrative ends with: "Glooscap went on his way. The Micmacs expect his return in due time, and look for the end of their oppressions and troubles when he comes back."55 Megwadesk experiences, individually and together with his community, many "oppressions and troubles," among others from the stone-throwing non-Mi'kmaq people whom he finds so powerful that he wonders if a belief in the return of Gluskeb— that is, in their own power—is not just "wishful thinking" (45). He knew that "nothing he did in his dreams could stop the stones falling from the bridge" (146). References to such hostility, mentioned throughout the novel, complicate further the duality of the title. Stones and switches are described as powerful objects; within Mi'kmaq culture they are associated with spiritual power. The switches of Old Molly may be used for healing but also as evil power, whereas Mimi's rocks or stones are seen as only good (23). Contact with European society creates another layer to these meanings: stones, rocks may become objects of physical violence (also reminiscent of the Oka crisis) or they may be commercialized, thus violating the culture spiritually (in Mimi's but not Megwadesk's opinion). The double meaning of stones signifies the confusion created by colonization; however, the distinction between good and bad medicine had always been part of the

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cultural discourse so that European interference gave added meaning to something that was part of an ongoing debate, nothing static. On the other hand, the change from a land-related to a human-centred world view imposed by Christianization made the "switching" (another double meaning in the title of the novel)—from Mi'kmaq to Christian and, in addition, among Christian denominations—disorienting for a young person like Megwadesk.56 Through the technique of interior monologues, Simon creates an audience "listening" to his musings. Because of the use of Mi'kmaq words, the audience is placed as either Mi'kmaq or non-Mi'kmaq speakers and will interact with the character accordingly. Each in their own way will, as Native American writer and scholar Louis Owens explains, "contribute a wealth o f . . . knowledge to the telling o f . . . [the] story, to thus actively participate in the dynamics of the story's creation."57 Hence, through this technique the novel succeeds in creating a link with storytelling performances. Further, by including numerous references to "old beliefs" contained in the oral tradition, like the Gluskeb stories, and in the detailed telling of a story about Nujisawed, The One Who Weaves, this "Indyun" writer is "movin' between" two different literary discourses. On the one hand, Simon works in the "foreign" medium of the novel, as Owens explains, an "intensely egocentric genre," signed by him as the author, and, on the other hand, he incorporates stories passed down for centuries, a "communal, authorless" literature. Hence, Simon creates a composite work by highlighting the complex discourse on Mi'kmaq traditions in a double-voiced narrative. He also "plays off and moves beyond (and challenges the reader to likewise move beyond) this faint trace of 'Rousseauist' ethnostalgia—most common to Euroamerican treatments of Native American Indians—toward an affirmation of a syncretic, dynamic, adaptive identity in contemporary America" (emphasis added).58 The only other Indigenous novel written in Canada that alludes to dualities already in the wording of the title, apart from Thomas King's Truth & Bright Water, predicated on his juxtaposition of two communities, is Wagamese's Keeper 'AT Me, published in the same year as Stones and Switches. The wording of the title Keeper 'NMe promises not only a different English but also a focus on two characters, and the discursively linked persons are not only the two main characters—Keeper and Garnet

Moving between Cultures, Languages, and Literacies 157

Raven—but also the two narrators. The italics in this novel are used not to set apart an/other voice within one character, but to distinguish between two characters/narrators. Because of their double role, they are tellers as well as listeners. Their stories are told side by side—sometimes the same event told from each perspective—but the two characters also listen to each other as the plot evolves. Garnet, the younger one, learns from the teachings of the elder called Keeper, which he incorporates into his life and thus into his story about his homecoming; Keeper, on the other hand, who, in the telling of the story, "just come[s] along for the ride, make sure he's doin' right" (4), relates his part as a commentary on Garnet's experiences. Therefore, Wagamese includes, not only through the conversational style (in which especially Keeper expresses himself), but also in the dialogic voice, a link with the oral traditions in which, as Owen states, "speaker and listener are coparticipants in the telling of a story."59 As the teachings of Keeper are visibly set off as "different" by means of italicization, one may assume at first glance that Wagamese wants to give priority to a socalled authentic voice; however, his story is intertwined with Garnet's. The young man has been taken away from his family as a small child and is now reconnecting with family and community. When he arrives on the White Dog Reserve, he is very confused, lost, and therefore called by Keeper "a real tourist" (3), but that does not mean that Keeper himself has arrived at "the truth." He explains to Garnet, for whom he wants to be a guide, that in the same way as Garnet lost a number of years in his life because of the interference of Children's Aid Society, he himself lost many years because of his alcohol addiction. "Been gone long time myself. Could use a good guide too. See, you'n me got a lot in common. Lotsa things the same. You, you're tryin' to learn to fit in, tryin' to be at home here, tryin'to win back all them years got stolen on you. Me, same thing. Got a lotta years to win back." (73) The similarities Keeper repeatedly observes between himself and Garnet de-essentialize his talk as an elder. His acknowledgement of his own continuous search—"we're all tourists" (2)—takes away any pretense of authority and makes him believable as a human being. A similar effect is achieved by his humour. Although he believes, or maybe I should say,

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because he believes, in traditional values, his often inserted "heh, heh, heh" after he explains something counteracts or even subverts any interpretation of a lesson that might be too dogmatic. Further, his dualistic biological identity construction of "Indyuns" and "Whites" in analogy to the distinction between a beaver and a bear (3 7) is mitigated by the image of a composite identity at the end of the novel. After Garnet has completed his vision quest, his mother gives him a ribbon shirt, which is made in the traditional style but from clothes he wore before he knew what it means "to be an Indyun" (and tried on an Afro-Canadian identity): As I unfolded the shirt the material felt familiar. It wasn't until I had it all held out in front of me that I knew what it was. It was the balloon-sleeved yellow shirt I had on the day I arrived at White Dog. The sleeves were cut back regular, the long pointed collar was gone and the ribbons ran across the chest and back and down the arms. It was beautiful. (209) When the mother further explains that our "way got built onto the way you had to grow up" (209, emphasis added), Wagamese seems to express a similar thought as Cree writer Seesequasis, from the same generation of Canadian First Nations authors but from a different—yet linguistically closely related—nation, whom I quoted in the beginning of this chapter: "Nothing is pure and the only two constants are love and change. In these new meetings I think the trickster can thrive."60 The transformer/ teacher/trickster, in the novel embodied in the humorous teacher, Keeper, is linked here to an "impure," "movin' between'" existence and cultural identity. Further, it should be noted that Keeper identifies the "real Indyun" against the foil of "that Hollywood kind" (4). In a nutshell, his juxtaposition exposes the two types of essentialism explained by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith cited earlier, one used strategically by Aboriginal peoples to empower themselves and the other used by outsiders to further disempower Aboriginal peoples. "Real Indyun" from an "Indyun's" perspective is not understood as an easily definable, unchangeable entity but as "syncretic, dynamic, adaptive," as Owens states. In this sense, the novel Keeper 'NMe, which may easily be read with some "'Rousseauist' ethnostalgia," challenges the reader—any reader— to "move beyond" set cultural boundaries and join the border crossings of the trickster.

TRAVELLING KNOWLEDGES

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THE

"TRICKSTER'S"

W A N D E R L U S T AND

CONTINUUM

THE

OF READING

Tricksters wander; their intentions are ambiguously and complexly related to what they actually wind up bringing about. —Jim Cheney1 In a conversation with German scholar Albert-Reiner Glaap, which took place in Duesseldorf, Germany, in November 1998, Drew Hayden Taylor (Anishnabe) and Dawn T. Maracle (Mohawk) explained differences between Ojibway (Anishnabe) and Mohawk (Iroquois) cultures. In their brief comparison, they emphasized the "nomadic" nature of the Ojibway and the "more stationary" lifestyle of the Iroquois; one group was hunters and gatherers, and the other "was matrilineal and agricultural." Also, the Iroquoian languages are different from Algonquian (and other Indigenous) languages insofar as they do have the pronouns he/she/it; however, Dawn T. Maracle, as mentioned earlier, adds that in Mohawk culture most things are called "she." The above comparison clearly illustrates diversity in Native cultures and may explain why Mohawk writer Maurice Kenny, in his short story "Rain," makes such difference thematic by emphasizing the outsider status of an/other Indigenous character. In my own conversations with Mohawk people, I learned that the so-called trickster character does not

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exist in their culture but reflects the nomadic characteristics of other Indigenous cultures (although stories travel: Beth Brant wrote the lesbian Coyote story "Coyote Learns a New Trick," and Delaware Daniel David Moses, who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve, was inspired for his play Coyote City by a Nez Perce story).2 The title for this section promises a discussion of "the trickster"; however, the quotation marks already problematize the topic. One may approach it in the manner of Jim Cheney, non-Aboriginal Rockefeller participant in the Lakehead University Native Philosophy Project, who, in a lecture at a conference in 1996, entitled "Tricksters in the Shadow of Civilization," explained that he is reading "trickster figures in Indigenous narratives" through "the lens of certain themes in contemporary postmodern theory." He legitimized his reading by stating that if he is explicit about "this method of projection," he hopes to avoid "more egregious assimilations and reductions of Indigenous to Western thought." Although, as a nonAboriginal scholar myself, I align myself with his legitimization, I still want to add another angle to my own positioning in relation to "the trickster." As I have explained, my understanding of Canadian Aboriginal literatures is shaped by conversations with Aboriginal peoples in my university classes on and off campus, particularly in northwest Ontario. In writing this book, I consider those people my constituency. During class discussions, for example, I often encountered a certain resistance to analyzing stories about "the trickster" as ordinary literary texts. Of course, responses among my students varied according to age and upbringing as well as to individual preferences,3 but for the present argument I want to side with those who felt their stories "demeaned," as Basil Johnston explains,4 by disrespectful interpretations that—largely out of ignorance of the respective Indigenous language—have been present for centuries. For Anishnabe writer Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, who is from the same reserve as Basil Johnston, it is "through the Trickster that we learn our place in the family, in the community and in society, how we sit in the universe," as she explains in an interview with Makeda Silvera.5 If this is the meaning of the descriptor "culture hero," stories about this character are indeed central to an understanding of cultural values and world views. Observing just recently during my teaching on the Sandy Lake reserve in northwest Ontario how the stronghold of Christian denominations still suppresses

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an unhindered, open discussion of the oral traditions, I am concerned, regarding my own work, about any kind of further intrusion. Categorizations and definitions from the outside may become detrimental to a culture still under attack. "The trickster" by the name of Nanabush (Anishnabe), Weesageechak (Cree), Gluskeb (Mi'kmaq), Raven (Pacific Northwest nations), and Coyote (adopted in the stories of many First Nations)—to mention the most often occurring names—has become a literary character in contemporary Aboriginal literatures written in English, in Canada particularly emphasized in the work of Lee Maracle, Tbmson Highway, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, and Thomas King. Contrary to the beliefs of those Aboriginal people who are called "traditional" that stories transmitted orally for centuries should not be written down, these authors revive the old stories and songs by "translating" them into a new medium. As Armand Ruffo points out, and as already discussed in relation to the intertextual inclusion of the legend "Ayash" in Silent Words, "these myths and sacred songs of the oral tradition, which ... were forced to go underground to survive ... ironically... offer new possibilities for literary creation."6 These writers, then, make it possible for outsiders to gain some understanding of Aboriginal philosophies and values passed down for generations. At the same time, it should be understood that we are reading an individual author's personal interpretation of the oral traditions and not an authoritative voice on "Native spirituality." For the following discussion, I chose to introduce my understanding of "the trickster" as mediated in Aboriginal fiction by coming back to Maracle's novel Ravensong in order to demonstrate how the inclusion of the oral tradition with an emphasis on that particular character may complement the writing of a novel. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the rather well-known story by Thomas King, "The One About Coyote Going West," examining the theme of migration in a "trickster" narrative that stylistically fuses the oral and the written and, in further hybridizations, synthesizes "Native" and "Western" stories as well as Native and postmodern discourses. Maracle's novel Ravensong ends with an Epilogue that makes it clear that the context of the novel, the reason for telling the story in the first place, is the suicide of a young person in the Native community. The four

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women tell the story to Celia's son, who wants to know why little Jimmy shot himself. However, in spite of the seriousness of the event, the Epilogue ends with Celia laughing. She is amused at her son's "pouting" about not getting a satisfactory answer to his question "how 'not enough Raven' had decided their fate" (199). The women tell him—and these are the last words of the novel—'"Don't worry son. You'll know the answer when you need to'" (199). This ending of Ravensong is significant on several levels. Although the novel is a written narrative, it is framed as a story told in a certain situation out of a certain need to a specific audience. Understood in this way, the novel continues a cultural practice from the oral tradition, which uses storytelling as an indirect form of teaching and giving advice. It also emphasizes that understanding the story not only depends on the individual reader's background, but that one's need is a determining factor in the hermeneutic process as well. The assurance given to the boy, the primary audience or the reader in the text, is an assurance given to the reader outside the narrative: if no answer is found now, it will be found eventually because the story goes on transgressing the boundary of page 199. This Epilogue, as a second ending of the novel in itself defying a rigid notion of closure, integrates the cultural characteristic of "the continuum" embedded in stories without beginnings and endings and languages that, as Cree community worker and writer Joy Asham Harasymchuk (Fedorick) puts it, were alive Before educational institutions Adopted it Fitted it Into English boxes'7 The self-reflexive and culturally embedded interpretation of multiple readings of the novel is also connected with the inclusion of the so-called culture hero Raven. Throughout the novel, the exclamation "Too much Raven" signifies rebellion, "disregard for propriety and authority" (125), and therefore is sometimes valued with some ambiguity. At the end, in hindsight, the characters involved realize they have not shown enough of the Raven spirit, but what that really means, they cannot simply explain to the young boy; he has to figure that out for himself by understanding the story.

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One aspect of a Raven attitude is the ability to laugh. Raven is, after all, a so-called trickster, representing a philosophy of balance in which "no one was ... is ever bad ... or wrong," a comic rather than a tragic world view.8 Anishnabe author Gerald Vizenor, who lives and works in the United States, understands the trickster in Indigenous cultures in the context of postmodern discourse as "a comic trope," denying monologic "responses to colonialist demands or social science theories."9 In Ravensong, the trickster Raven, whom Maracle characterizes as "the spirit that just wants everything to move and shift and change and [who] loves chaos," "liberates imagination,"10 as Vizenor would put it. In the case of Raven's Song, it is liberation from the confinement of binary oppositions articulated in the novel by the protagonist Stacey. As shape shifters with an undefined gender and as wanderers, these characters personify the belief that nothing is ever static and, hence, subvert "the image making machine" of the dominant culture that Metis poet Dumont feels confined by11 and the "parochial" attitude Raven criticizes in the villagers. Defined by Tomson Highway as "the core of the Indian culture,"12 tricksters are not "rooted" to a specific place but are linked to a wider area or region inhabited by a group or several groups of Indigenous peoples: Raven is known in the Pacific Northwest, Nanabush in the Great Lakes area, and Coyote is known throughout North America. These so-called culture heroes are identified by their wanderlust,13 which, for the Anishnabe Nanabush, "not even love nor marriage altered."14 In the work titled "The Shivering Tree,"15 retold/written by Anishnabe (Mississauga) artist John McLeod, the creation of the poplar tree is explained as the transformation of a "restless" person into a tree. The Juggler "Restless as the Wind" is Nanabush's adversary, whose tricks are seen in contrast to Nanabush's as he has no other purpose in life than his vanity, whereas Nanabush has "a great deal of work to do in this world"16 and, therefore, needs freedom of movement; his wanderlust is more than mere restlessness. Regarding Coyote, his or her animal name suits the wandering nature of the character. In the "mythic traditions" as interpreted and mediated by Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson (as well as in Armstrong's allegory "This Is a Story"), Coyote, the mythical ancestor of the Okanagan people, learns about his purpose in life, which is intimately linked to his wanderings in the naming ceremony. In Robinson's story, titled "Coyote

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Gets a Name and Power," Coyote prefers the name Shin-KLEEP (i.e. Coyote), so that he "can go all over the place," to the name SWEELSH-tin (i.e. Sweathouse), which empowers him "to be only in the one place all the time." But if you take the name, Shin-KLEEP, (well, that's Coyote), If you take the name Shin-KLEEP, you going to be named Shin-KLEEP and I can give you power and you'll have the power from me. Then you can go all over the place. You can walk everywhere. You can go all over in this island here. And wherever you was in this island, that's your right wherever you are. And there's a lot of danger, a lot of bad animal and monster in the country and I want you to get rid of that. You try to kill 'em. You kill the monster.17

With the power to move comes the power to destroy evil ("kill the

monsters"); immobility would prevent Coyote from being a saviour of his people. Similarly, Anishnabe author Basil Johnston links the tales of Nanabush's travels "in pursuit of the enemies of his people" with the creation of place names around the Great Lakes at a time when "there were no boundaries." 18

noboundaries."18The theme of boundary crossing has become a central trope in postmodern discourses. It is more than a trope for colonized peoples who have been held within boundaries and, by internalizing colonization, continue to confine each other. Cree writer Seesequasis therefore combines literary with political mobilization and imagines a "republic of tricksterism" that gets rid of "bureaucratic apartheid."19 In his narrative "The One About Coyote Going West," Thomas King epitomizes Coyote's travels as a boundary crossing of many kinds. In this version of a so-called creation story, a journey links Coyote with her "relation," Raven, whom she wants to visit and, intertextually, with her other relations Nanabush and Wee-sa-kay-jac, who are characters in "The 'close your eyes' dance" practised by Coyote.20 These intercultural connections are taken further in the retelling of the

The "Trickster's" Wanderlust 167

"discovery" story in which "Whites" are cast against "Indians," homogenizing an all-Native experience. If Coyote is thus constructed throughout the narrative as "the Native" character, at the end, her racial identity is no longer so certain: "When that Coyote's wandering around looking to fix things, nobody in this world is safe" (80). Here Coyote could be every (wo)man or anybody who likes to fix things. Inconclusiveness is also created in the ambiguous identity of Coyote, who comes in two—as the listener and as the main character in the story she listens to—and in the double gender of the elder grandmother/grandfather. Also, the beginning of the title "The One About..." and the opening of the story—"This one is about Coyote" (67, emphasis added)—suggest an infinite number of other stories; another one might be about one of her relations. The wording of the title "The One About ..." sounds casual, evoking the postmodern "lightness" that Vizenor sees as characteristic of trickster discourses. However, this story, which operates in different discourses, should be read from different perspectives. Thomas King's postmodern literary creation is based throughout on aspects of Native cultures and Native storytelling. His ambiguity about the elder's gender echoes, for example, Maria Campbell's beginning of her narrative poem "Jacob," and the opening of his story also tries to capture the fact that in stories passed on orally in Native cultures, there never was a beginning or an ending.21 The destination of Coyote's journey playfully synthesizes different associations of "going west." The listener, Coyote, goes west because her relation, Raven, lives on the West Coast; also, the character's "heading west" brings her in touch with Western civilization, and intertextually/ interculturally "to go west" means for the relation Nanabush to settle a score with his father, the West Wind.22 The search for materialistic satisfaction and conveniences "in the west" is satirically exposed in images of a department store catalogue that provides portable gas barbecues "but no Indians," and of the nice, straight rivers flowing both ways. Each time, Coyote fixes these creations, which she made "by mistake." The mistake, created by Coyote herself, is reminiscent of the younger twin, the white man, in Harry Robinson's creation story, "Twins: White and Indian."23 Robinson ends the telling about the creation of the human twins in the following way:

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And that younger one, now today, that's the white man. And the older one, that's me. That's the Indian. And that's why the white man, they can tell a lie more than the Indian. (45^6) In Thomas King's creation story, "The One About Coyote," right and wrong are "twinned" differently. Coyote is unaware of the mistake as being a part of her, but her "fixing" of the world is not perfect at all. At the end, "those duck-Indians aren't too happy" (79). Regarding the shaping of the natural world, the listener, Coyote, is left with the unsatisfactory explanation that "Coyote must be doing the right thing" (75)— although it does not make much sense. In addition to leaving the listener and us, the readers, to wonder "why Coyote changes that happy [straight] river" (74), the narrator also questions our assumptions of what is natural and what is constructed. The world as we know it outside the text is perceived not as naturally given but as the corrected version of something created before. Similarly, King's narrative provides us with an insight into the constructedness of culture. Not only are European histories written "in that old book" (68) undermined as "Baby stories" (a reversal of the infantilization of Aboriginal stories) and retold from a different perspective, but the Native texts are also shown in their adaptability to the storytelling situation. For example, "The 'close your eyes' dance" story, in which the trickster plays a trick on the ducks so that s/he can eat them, is modified in the retelling of King's narrative, modified in comparison to versions in widely published collections of legends. This well-known story ends with Coyote's killing of the ducks; however, while he lets them roast in the fire, he falls asleep, so they will either burn to a crisp or Fox will steal them and eat them all. In King's version Coyote also does not get to eat the ducks, but the reason is the intervening mistake who/that pulls the duck out of Coyote's throat, explaining "You could hurt yourself dancing like that" (78). Coyote's reaction—"You are one good friend, look after me like that," (78)—is not only ironic as, of course, she would have liked to eat the duck rather than have it pulled out of her throat, but this scene may also be read as a satirical comment on the colonizers' "friendship" with the Indigenous people. There are many cases of "well-intended" interventions in First Nations ceremonies (like sun dances and potlatches),

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legitimized as preventing people from "hurting" themselves. King's ironic adaptation of a story that "travelled" across several Indigenous cultures also challenges expectations of readers who know the "traditional" version. His whole creation narrative may be understood, in Linda Hutcheon's terms, as written with "a postmodern urge to trouble, to question, to make both problematic and provisional any such desire for order or truth through the powers of the human imagination."24 A more detailed comparison between Thomas King's and Harry Robinson's Coyote story illustrates farther the individualized interpretation of the oral traditions of each storyteller/writer. King's Coyote is allowed to make mistakes and, when the story ends, we know that more mistakes will be made. Coyote is bad when she tries to stuff the green duck "down that greedy throat" (78), but things work out anyway. Robinson takes a more fundamentalist approach; when Coyote dares to challenge God, not understanding that he was the one who gave him power in the first place, God takes the power away from him because he has done "a lot of bad things" (122). He is punished by being put "in a certain place" (122); whereas, King's Coyote is allowed to keep wandering. Both Coyotes have the power to tamper with nature, but Robinson's Coyote can only move mountains as long as God grants him this power (120-121); King's Coyote is free to "fix" things as she considers it right—although not everybody likes it, but in a constantly changing world everything can be redone. Also stories. Robinson tells his stories with the authority of an elder and of a skilled storyteller, often assuring his listener of the veracity and accuracy of the story. King, the established author of written literature, needs the device of a listener as a character in his story who questions the narration in order to challenge the teller to prove his or her knowledge and "to get the story straight."2^ The concept that all beings, including the creator, have only limited power is part of Robinson's and King's world view as expressed in their stories, and part of a wider Aboriginal world view as well.26 In Robinson's creation story, God cannot change the double leaf so that twins instead of a single human being have to be born, and King's creator Coyote is bound by rules: "I've made four things already, she says. I got to have help" (76). Also, as mentioned above, there is no absolute beginning in King's stories: creation is ongoing. As in other Indigenous "creation stories," the

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"trickster" re-creates, reshapes something already in existence. Unlike Robinson, however, King does not combine these elements of traditional Native stories with the Christian dogma, which adds a superior being who controls the moving of mountains, and who has the power to decide about good and bad and to punish accordingly. In his postmodern, nonmoralizing text there are no value judgements as there are no dualistic divisions; he illustrates effectively that, in Ridington's words, "stories from First Nations oral tradition are interpretive rather than canonical."27 Coyote's mistake is not apart from her—like "White man" is clearly apart from his "Indian" twin in Robinson's creation story—but a part of her, her "something" she is looking for. She herself does not come to what Khader calls "the recognition of the slippage of Otherness in ... [her] own identity,"28 but the listener/reader is told and it is him or her whom the story ultimately affects, because "nobody in this world is safe"29 as long as Coyotes are around fixing things/making mistakes. The last words of King's story are noteworthy in several ways. For one, they foreground the fact that there is no literature without a reader. The integration of the listener, Coyote, all through the telling of the story, emphasizes the co-participation of teller and listener, as Louis Owens points out, for the oral storytelling performance. The ending about the lesson this listener learns—or, rather, does not learn—farther highlights that the story goes on beyond the page, that it always has an effect on the one to whom it is told. Coyote, never an idealized character, has not been a good listener in this particular story.-50 She often does not "pay attention" and interrupts impatiently. On the other hand, the device of a listener, an implied reader, so to speak, never makes the reader of King's text forget about the importance of the role of the reader and his or her active participation. Lee Maracle explains about "oratory" that "the listener is as much a part of the story as the teller."31 In his interfusional piece of writing, King achieves a similar effect. Thus, I come back to the ethics of hearing/reading Indigenous texts. Readers learn that if there is too much disruption of stories that are "doing just fine"32 and too many attempts at fixing the meaning, movements will not be noticed or, if readers are coming from a position of power, may be stopped altogether. As Edward Said explains, "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and

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emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them."33 Also, a colonialist approach to the story, not moving beyond textual boundaries, may overlook a reader's co-implication in his or her shaping of society and impact on the environment, or reduce the significance of the story for others by transmitting a definitive or authoritative reading of it. It is the inability of non-Aboriginal people to recognize Aboriginal modes of "the continuum" that Cree poet Joy Asham Harasymchuk (Fedorick) makes responsible for the culture clash, concluding "It does not surprise me / That we are misunderstood."34 However, the continuum includes relationships with European forms of knowledge and ways of thinking. "Indigenous literatures will resist the boundaries and boxes" also because Indigenous writers "look with two sets of eyes and hear with two sets of ears," states Akiwenzie-Damm.35 Blaeser echoes the same assessment in her claim of "a dual vision" needed to adequately appreciate the richness of Indian literature."36 With a similar kind of acknowledgment of "in the least bi-cultural" characteristics of Aboriginal writing, Ruffo provides an interpretation of King's story from the perspective of the aesthetics of postmodern and semiotic theory as well as from a specific Native American perspective explaining the culturally coded content. Bringing both together, he demonstrates how, for example, Linda Hutcheon's analysis of self-reflecting texts, with her emphasis on reader involvement, illuminates King's narrative. He concludes that "the story that we have just heard is not a 'White man's story,' it is a Native American story geared to the contemporary world. Grandmother does not tell us this explicitly, just as she does not tell us that the very act of participating in her world has implicated us, the listener/reader, into considering her history and concerns in North America."37 The concerned reader Armand, therefore, self-reflexively ends his own reading of the narrative by acknowledging limitations of his approach, wondering (echoing the concerns of my students) if the use of postmodern theories is problematic "at the level of ideology."38 Reasoning that in Aboriginal world views aesthetics are not as isolated from other aspects of life, and quoting Lee Maracle that "theory is useless outside human application," he concludes his argument by asserting that although Western methodologies may be useful "for further study of the growing body of Native literature, much work remains to develop a criticism that is intrinsic to the literature itself."39

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The problematic of postmodern interpretation of trickster texts is further illuminated by Susie O'Brien. From her position as a non-Native scholar, she argues that postmodernist valorization of indeterminacy, ambivalence and, perhaps, most significantly, marginalization, permits the co-option of native culture under the guise of rehabilitation; the reader can approach the Native text as a form that is 'equal,' in both meaning(lessness) and (in)accessibility, to the white text.40 She strengthens her argument with a quotation by Anishnabe writer Lenore Keeshig-Tobias from her essay "The Magic of Others": "While readers may feel a kinship with Native people because of this literature, they do not recognize it is their own image and reflection they see and love. As is sometimes said of the Trickster when he falls victim to his own folly, this creature never learns."41

THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY

Momaday gives us the myth of the Kiowa and that myth is a journey. It's always been a journey. It's a journey about the myth of creation. It's not a static, monotheistic 'God dropped you or created you from clay.' It's the journey. In most Native communities it's a journey to other life forms—animals, birds, other zones of consciousness. These are all journeys, creations. There is no static creation, no one moment like the delivery table. —Gerald Vizenor1 The complexities of Indigenous cultures that are the result of continuity and disruption are not recognized by the "orientalizing" German characters in Emma Lee Warrior's story "Compatriots." As outsiders they both adhere to preconceived notions about the culture and even contribute to further essentializations of it. Maurice Kenny, on the other hand, reveals "cultural difference," in his short story "Rain" through the I/eye of a travelling narrator, as constructed and interpretable. Unlike Slipperjack's quest narrative Silent Words, which is solely narrated from the perspective of a young person—a narrative technique Slipperjack finds important for her writing2—the female character in Margo Kane's play Moonlodge^ who is also forced to leave home, narrates/performs her story as a memory, so that a naive retelling of the character's life is blended with the critical voice of the adult. In Lee Maracle's "Sojourner's Truth," there is no one-dimensional telling of a truth-finding journey, either, since the narrator is no longer

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among the living. In both texts (and in others mentioned briefly) travelling narrators serve as a device to explore and to question cultural, racial, and gender-related boundaries. In her overview essay tided "The Good Red Road: Journeys as Homecoming in Native Women's Writing," Beth Brant interprets the image of the journey as signifying society's place for Aboriginal women's literature: Our work is considered 'too political' and we do not stay in our place—the place that white North America deems acceptable. It is no coincidence that most Native women's work that gets published is done so by small presses: feminist, leftist or alternative. These presses are moving outside the mainstream and dominant prescriptions of what constitutes good writing. The key word here is 'moving.' There is a movement going on that is challenging formerly-held beliefs of writing and who does that writing.4 As discussed earlier, Ruby Slipperjack's novel Silent Words was criticized in a review for lacking conventional novel characteristics: "a story told, not written" (Drobot). The text Moonlodge (1990) by Saulteaux /Cree artist Margo Kane also challenges genre fixations, since it is a oneperson play as well as a frame narrative told from a first-person point of view. After giving repeated oral performances of her story, Kane "fixed" one version of it as a script for a play. The genealogy of the text (which she outlines in her article "From the Centre of the Circle the Story Emerges"^) foregrounds an oral/written or interfusional quality characteristic of the dramatic genre generally but more pronounced in Aboriginal theatre. According to Anishnabe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, "theatre is a logical extension of Native storytelling."6 Kane fuses a oneperson storytelling event with the dialogic character of a play by scripting the text for one actress only. Montagneise-Cree author Jovette Marchessault describes a good storyteller as a person who has "the gift of being able ... to incarnate herself in flesh and blood in her subject matter. For example, when she told me about the whales she became a whale—"7 Similarly, the actress in Moonlodge transforms herself at various stages into her parents, her foster mother, a biker, "wannabees," and Native people who become her friends and guides. Hence, in this play, Kane expresses "travelling" not only as a theme but also as a movement built into the performance of an actress who continuously shifts voices/perspectives. In addition, Kane comments on her own movements in the process of

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creating the text when she emphasizes, in her account of the genealogy of the published text, the "years of travelling that would be fuel for this work."8 As an interdisciplinary artist, Kane literally moved around in her experimentation with style and technique, "using storytelling methods learned from formal Western theatre and drawing on ... experiences of storytelling in the Native community, formal and informal events from stories around the campfire to witnessing various ceremonial 'performances' in the West Coast Bighouses."9 All these movements, those that generated the play and those that are an intrinsic part of the oral (performed) and written text, correspond with the meaning of this particular character's journey. Through much "seeking" and "sourcing," Kane "found a journey for Agnes, the main character, to travel," a "journey from separation to reunification,"10 which she tells to a group of women in "the moonlodge," a safe healing place for women (as an Aboriginal student explained in one of my classes). Agnes is displaced from her home at an early age, taken—the term "abducted" comes to mind—in one of the infamous "50s scoops"11 by Children's Aid. After the car ride, in which she bangs and flutters like a caged bird,12 she is moved "from foster home to foster home" so often that "I remember moving and moving until I didn't know where I was or where I was going or where I came from" (327). After still more "moving and moving" she "came to live with a woman named Aunt Sophie" (328). When looking back at her life from her location in the moonlodge, she feels ambivalent about this place where her journey stopped for a while. Aunt Sophie is a character who speaks with a Jewish accent, as playwright Kane explains about her piece,13 and is shown in interaction with other Jewish people and "the Moonies." Herself from a persecuted so-called minority group and shown as caring for Agnes, Sophie generally plays a positive role.14 On the other hand, her ignorance about Agnes's cultural background when she identifies Brownies with Agnes's "tribal heritage" (329) is also viewed critically (if humorously) and associated with a whole set of stereotypes about the nature-loving Indian that Agnes encounters in Brownie camp. Agnes "loved camp" (330), but, looking back, she connects that experience with other stereotypical images of "the Indian" she had to grow up against, as they were all around her—images of "subservient or sexy" women (331), of the dumb Indian who "couldn't see

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anything," and of "primal, savage love" (331). Agnes flees from Aunt Sophie's world, which has no room for "real Indians" (332), and follows the movements of young people in the sixties to California and San Francisco. As Kane's story is a dramatic performance, most of the text—i.e., the "dialogues"—is worded in the present tense; however, the whole story is framed as a memory. Such a dual approach accounts for a dual viewpoint: the perception of events as they happened or are remembered, and the critical, often ironic and sarcastic, analysis years later. This movement between two layers of experience adds another unsettling perspective to the movement of the plot: Agnes's displacement from home and subsequent moves. In the manner of Bakhtin's "intentional" rather than "organic" hybridity, it "sets different points of view against each other in a conflictual structure," as Robert Young explains in his comprehensive study on hybridity.15 In the script, it is expressed in a variety of ways. Aunt Sophie's insensitive gossiping—"Agnes and I are going shopping today for her first brassiere" (328)—is commented on by the older Agnes: "I hated everyone knowing our business!" (328). Also, she uses sarcasm in her stage directions to question the value of her "first Indian song": "[Earnestly drums in Hollywood tom-tom tradition]'1'' (329). Similarly, by ridiculing cartoon versions of "Indians," she exposes the stupidity of the stereotypical "Indian pose" and so-called Indian names. As the actress playing Agnes personifies all the characters, Kane problematizes the notion of a coherent identity and creates an hybridic or syncretized voice. The storyteller/playwright succeeds in showing both the colonizing discourse that subjugated the child and young adult as well as its unmasking by the mature person telling her story. Retelling—that is recontextualizing—a situation of her childhood in a foster home when she had to say grace, she does not change the words of the prayer "Come Lord Jesus be our guest. And let this food to us be blessed. Amen." (328), but, instead, her tone of voice as described in the stage directions "[Sing-songie without feeling]" is used subversively to produce "colonial mimicry which, as Homi Bhabha has shown, 'is at once a mode of appropriation and resistance.'"16 The play's hybridized discourse, recognizable in the "ability of one voice to ironize and unmask the other within the same utterance," as Robert Young explains with reference to Bakhtin,17 is also noticeable in Agnes's characterization of Sophie, who, after being called "a very practical and

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sensible woman" (328), is introduced in the following way: "Now Agnes, if you're going shopping with me today button up your coat. I won't have you catching your death. And get that hair out of your eyes or I'll scalp you. Now stand up straight. Put your shoulders back. Come along" (328). As the audience finds out later, Sophie has some perception of her foster child's "tribal heritage" and therefore uses the phrase about scalping "knowingly," presumably in an attempt to be witty. Agnes does not respond to her words directly, but the context of the whole utterance undermines this phrase because "I'll scalp you" is as untrue as that she will catch her death if she does not button up her coat; in other words, the first exaggerated saying unmasks the next one. However, originally, Sophie's words were addressed to a young confused Native girl for whom the notion of scalping became just one of the many racist sayings used by people controlling her life. It is only through Kane's writing the story/Agnes's telling her story that this disempowerment of the main character is overwritten by another discourse creating, in Young's terms, an "intentional hybridity, which enables contestatory activity" ^ and empowers, in Armstrong's sense of the word, the writer and the readers or viewers. The "dialogic monologue" (Harvie and Knowles) ofMoonlodge may be understood more clearly if contrasted with a play by another Aboriginal woman writer about a similar theme. Path With No Moccasins (1991)19 by Cree playwright Shirley Cheechoo is also a monodrama about the life journey of a female character. Consisting of four parts, this journey starts with the traumatic residential school experience, which causes selfdestructiveness in the character's next stage of life, but it continues with a turn away from disempowerment toward "the water spirits" and to a gradual recovery of her power. Although past and present also intermingle in this (autobiographical) story, the stage directions [Reliving] and [Remembering] name thought processes in the script of the play that are set apart from addressing the audience, the moon, the water spirits, and the dead father. Memories are not integrated as another voice or perspective within one and the same utterance, but they are added on. While in Moonlodge "the presence of the actor over character"20 is foregrounded by Agnes's playing the "other" characters, in Path With No Moccasins the voice of the autobiographical "I" dominates. In the script of Cheechoo's play the character is in dialogue with her environment as she speaks to different

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audiences: To Moon, To Bottle, To Us, To Water Spirits, To Her Father. However, compared to Agnes's role playing, such apostrophizing again separates the addressees from the narrator, instead of making them a part of her. In short, in spite of the dialogic structure of the play, it is a predominantly monologic performance, as it does not disrupt as much as Moonlodge "the notion of a coherent self which can be told in a story."21 In this way Cheechoo's play emphasizes the healing of a broken self, but a self grounded in cultural memory, nevertheless; Kane problematizes the very notion of a unified identity through the shifting positions of a character physically and mentally always on the move. Differences between the two plays by authors of comparable cultural backgrounds may be partly accounted for by two different forms of displacement related in the stories of the characters—the residential school experience, which in most cases left some, if only a damaged, link with the family, and placement in foster homes at an early age, which often meant total ignorance about one's origins (as also related in Keeper 'NMe, for example). I want to stress such differences and caution against generalizing postcolonial conclusions about the multi-voiced nature of Aboriginal drama. Comparing dramatic performance to "indigenous writing," which, in postcolonial criticism, has been termed "necessarily 'double-voiced,'" Helen Gilbert calls Aboriginal drama "voluntarily 'multi-voiced.'"22 In her analysis of oral discourse as cultural expression, she privileges textuality and linguistic strategies over socio-political and other differentiating factors that make "performative heteroglossia" context-specific. Her understanding of a "multi-voiced" text or performance is based on the postcolonial theorizing of "splitting and hybridization of dominant discourses." However, although this may be a useful approach to reading Moonlodge, it does not apply to all Aboriginal drama. For example, "irony, mimicry and ambivalence, key linguistic strategies in post-colonial texts,"23 are not only insignificant for the understanding of Path With No Moccasins but also for dramatizations of legends like "Ayash" (which was related to the interpretation of Silent Words). This play is "multi-voiced" in the sense that it is "a journey to other life forms"24 so that colonization is decentred as merely human rather than a strategy for "writing back." The inclusion of nonhuman voices in many works by Aboriginal writers, like Ravensong and

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Path With No Moccasins, lends a transformative quality to the literature that tends to be ignored in postcolonial readings. In the second half of Moonlodge, Agnes resumes her journey to an unknown destination away from the stifling world of her foster mother Aunt Sophie. Doubly vulnerable, as a Native woman travelling alone and as a young, naive person, she is raped. This scene, in which the actress has to play both the perpetrator and the victim, emphasizes in its brutality the restrictions to free movements for women (another reason why the travel metaphor for intellectual, liberating, border-crossing movements is problematic), and for Aboriginal women in particular. After growing up with the images of "Walt Disney Injuns" (330), which objectified Native women as either "subservient or sexy" (331), only capable of "[primitive, primal, savage, supernatural love" (331), she is now totally dehumanized as the "Indian Woman," which Jeannette Armstrong describes in her poem with that title: I am a squaw a heathen a savage basically a mammal25 In his article about Native theatre, Drew Hayden Taylor states that "in 75 percent of the Native plays written and produced there is a rape." He explains this frequency with "the horrific amount of sexual abuse that exists in Native communities because of the residential school system experiences, because of alcoholism, because of the breakdown of the extended families, because of adoption." He does not discuss racism as another reason for violence against Native women, but he comments on the "dramatic version of rape" as "the perfect metaphor for what happened to Native culture."26 After Agnes's encounter with male violence, which takes away her joy of travelling, she meets a Native man who could have also hurt her, since she is still vulnerable in her misled search for her "Indian" identity, as is shown in the way she introduces herself: "My name is Turtle Dove" (3 3 5). However, this man, named Lance, becomes one of her guides. Meeting him and the Native woman Millie, and being immersed in many facets of Native culture in Santa Fe turn the narrative around "in the right direction" (339) so that, in her travel, Santa Fe becomes, to use a Bakhtinian expression, "a chronotope of threshold."27

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Her role playing, in which she played "the Indian part" by imitating representations in society, is tested and challenged. This second part of her journey confronts her so powerfully with "the Indian" in her that she has to come to terms with it. Before, when she meets the "real Indian" boy at high school, he scares her: "I knew he could see the Indian in me. He looked right in and touched it with his eyes" (332), and she discards the encounter because "I didn't belong to his world" (332). "Her world" consists of images about the Indian, as seen on TV or in the movies. In Santa Fe, she still conceives of her surroundings through that lens; her experience of the powwow becomes at first sight a mediated experience, "like a scene out of the movies" (336). But the difference this time is that she gets involved by starting to dance in the powwow and also that she observes details, variations obscured in homogenized outsider images of (Native) cultural activities. Kane creates a detour in the homecoming journey of her character. Agnes does not end up on a reserve "to find herself but in Santa Fe, a centre for Native American art, and at the same time the pinnacle of commercialization of Native culture and of the image-making industry with, for example, the display of the wooden Indian statue in front of several galleries. The place Santa Fe is in tune with Agnes's character, who looks for something "groovy" (332), and characteristic of her whole journey on which she sorts out what is meaningful to her among multiple representations of Native culture. Only the Sophie part in Agnes has ready-made answers: "Sophie's voice 'You know, peddling their wares. It's good they are getting something for their handicrafts. Lord knows, they need jobs!'" (335). Kane unmasks Sophie's patronizing colonial attitude by adding a comment in which she lets her wonder if the Indian paintings are art. Sophie's voice also shapes Agnes's first reaction to a shaman "dressed like an Indian, sort of (338): "Aunt Sophie always says, 'Never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins'" (338). But her new Native friend, Lance, simply calls him a "Wannabe" and helps her to make sense of encounters she has with women who "looked like Edna Feinstein who lived down the street." These women told her she "don't look Injun" and explained what she should know about "her culture" (338). In Agnes's quest story, the "Wannabe" characters, reminiscent of Hilda and Helmut Walking Eagle in "Compatriots," play the role of clarifying

The Quest for Identity

her own path for her. When she talks to the Native woman, Millie, whom she befriended, the answer she gets from her does not deal with racial boundaries of who is (or has a right to be) a Native, but with everybody's journey in life. Millie does not talk about essentialized roles of "a pipecarrier" and a "Medicine-Woman" (338). She leaves that to the nonNatives' reifications of Native cultures. Instead, she talks about "all kinds of medicine for all kinds of people" and she directs Agnes to her own people for her medicine. Her inclusive attitude is reminiscent of the character Keeper in Wagamese's Keeper 'NMe, who explains: "we are all tourists. Indyun or not, we're all lookin' for a guide to help us find our way through" (2-3). For Agnes, the guide is the grandmother figure, Millie, who understands that her confusion is not so much caused by her ignorance about her "totem animal" or "the colour of North on the Sacred Medicine Wheel," cultural knowledge a "blonde woman who called herself Yellow Moon Rising" (3 3 8) would teach, but rather by the deepseated purposelessness of her journey: "I didn't know I was looking for anything" (338). In the dialogic monologue of the play Moonlodge with its multi-voicedness and hybridization, only Agnes's foster mother, Aunt Sophie, and the Wannabe characters speak in the discourse of "monologue" as defined by Bakhtin: it "pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons."28 For Agnes's search those guides were of little help. The young protagonist of Margo Kane's dramatized narrative is remembered as being on a journey to self-knowledge without being aware of it for the longest time. Until told this by Millie at the end, she travels in a nomadic manner, without purpose. This character without a history, uprooted, piecing herself together, may also be called "nomadic" in the sense in which Khader uses Deleuze's and Guattari's conceptual framework of nomadology for his reading of the novel The Crown of Columbus by Louise Erdrich (Anishnabe) and Michael Dorris (Modoc). Regarding Moonlodge, all the roles the character Agnes plays show her as "fashioning ... a nomadic subjectivity based on fragmentation and multiplicity."29 Another expression of her nomadic journey is her destination of Santa Fe, a place where she meets Native people but not her Native people. Although Millie asks Agnes about her cultural affiliation, if she is Stoney or Cree, which Agnes cannot answer, of course (337), Millie herself does

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not explain where she is from, and no other comment is made about culture-specific identification; on the contrary, the emphasis in this play on the spiritual importance of the eagle highlights a pan-Indian cultural context. In this "deterritorialization" of the main character's identity, she can be understood with Deleuse's and Guattari's definition of a nomad for whom "it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself."30 Mindful of the reality of imposed changes and movements (which Emma LaRocque terms "oppression"), I do not want to essentialize that description of nomadism. Also, like all other theoretical vantage points, a nomadic reading of Moonlodge uncovers only one layer of the narrative. Nomadism's "anti-genealogy and anti-memory,"31 as reflected in a character moving around aimlessly, is counterbalanced by other movements in the text. Agnes's friend Lance repeats her father's words in his political resistance to colonial oppression: "I'm not going to take this lying down" (336). In this way an anti-nomadic connection, a link between the generations, is created. Also, Millie brings up the theme of memory in the song her husband used to sing ("Oh I have a very good memory," 337), and her making fry bread triggers a memory in Agnes, a first intimation of a memory of "home." Besides, against her history-less journey is set the journey of the people of the desert mountains. The mystery and sadness around their displacement ("Where did they move to? And why did they leave? ... It feels like something has died here....") makes her "want to go home" (339). In this anti-nomadic move she finally ends up being connected with her ancestors in the moonlodge—her "grandmothers and sisters and daughters all around" (339). The nomadic journey in this play is, after all, contained within the circle of the moonlodge, which makes the character remember so that the story becomes a memory play. In Aboriginal literatures, individual and collective memory is an essential (in Tuhiwai Smith's definition of the word) aspect of the decolonizing process because colonization attempted to impose "forgetting"—of Indigenous culture, language, and history32 Remembering is also a healing process, as it puts back together a dismembered past. In Emma LaRocque's words: "Some themes unique to a people dispossessed stand out: a haunting and hounding sense

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of loss that drives one to reminisce. 'I remember,' many of us write, 'I remember.'"33 In their reasoning that a dialogic monologue, like the play Moonlodge with its hybridic character, "de-privileges absolute, authoritarian discourses," Harvie and Knowles view the "empowering community of Native women—a counter hegemony"34 in the play as essentialist. This appears to be an inappropriate conclusion, as Aboriginal writers should have the right to articulate their own truth without being accused of essentializing (as discussed in a previous chapter). In addition, the construction of gender relations in this play hardly justifies the label "counter hegemony" for the women's community, and the stage direction about the "playful sound of women's voices in Cree and English," functioning as an opening note to readers, is another indicator that there is no fixed or pure "Nativeness," in this case the Native language, but multiple perspectives and "play." Harvie and Knowles also disregard, in their comment on the essentialism of the moonlodge community, that Kane's narrative does not come to a closure by ending in the moonlodge. Although the performance is framed by "the setting" of the moonlodge, which, far from being only a formalistic device, enables the story to be told in a healing place, the main character "travels further" to tell a dream. Given the importance of dreams in Indigenous cultures, this dream provides a commentary on the story, an interpretation; it also takes the story on another path, travels on— or creates another dialogue. In Native oral traditions, stories do not have endings; they are connected among each other, and are continuously recomposed because they are recontextualized in each telling (a point I also made about Thomas King's version of a creation story, "The One About Coyote Going West"). With Bakhtin, one may argue the following: "There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits— Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth."35 Two images connect the dream with "the main" story: the bird and the road. Each image, as it is used in the main narrative and in the dream story, connotes a dual perspective: the bird as being freed of conditions that tie down humans, and the bird as being caged. The road connotes movement but also destinations: it is assumed there will be a stop at some point. In the dream, Agnes travels with a cage with a white bird she has been given by a woman she does not trust but thanks anyway. As she is in

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the process of moving, she places the cage on the front seat between her and her "big Indian friend." The bird keeps escaping from the cage and gets so big that she can't see where she is driving. The bird, eventually "the size of an Albatross," leans out the window gasping for air—"If it doesn't get enough air it's gonna die" (340). She finally stops the car, wraps the bird in her jacket, and holds it very close, soothing it like a child. Kane's story—which takes the protagonist on a quest journey, leading her in the end to a restorative women's circle—creates a character of multiple voices. The ambiguities of a character searching for her self are mirrored in the multiple connotations of the image of the bird. A bird in the house is an omen for something bad to happen,36 but discursively, in the description of its "fluttering," the bird is also connected with the busy hands of the grandmother Millie (327) as well as with Agnes's helpless struggle in the car when she is taken away. Further, the image is linked to representations of Native culture—from the stereotype of Little White Dove or Turtle Dove to the respected eagle; this cultural significance is also emphasized in the description of the powwow bird dancers. The thought of a fluttering bird leads Agnes into reliving her memory, which starts the story proper, and the bird is also the image that ends the story. The bird is associated with both bad and good: linked to disempowerment (the welfare scoop) and to empowerment (the eagle feather Agnes is given and the guidance she receives from the "fluttering" hands of Millie). This may explain why she soothes that which she was given and which started to become a destructive force (blocking her vision)—and why she does not want this "white bird" to die: although the bird is given by somebody who is not trustworthy (white foster mother?), Agnes holds it very close, as part of her. The reference to the albatross may be read as an allusion to Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), a narrative poem about the serious consequences of ungrateful behaviour toward a bird. While she tries to contain, keep close, and soothe a (self-)destructive growing force, she "is moving," on the road. As this whole story negotiates the freedom of movement (away from Sophie), the hardships and dangers of movement (displacements and rape), and the desire "to go home," the caged bird placed between her and her Indian friend, wanting to get out, may also signify what Khader calls "the claustrophobia of belonging"37— if belonging means to be caged in the stereotypes of "Indianness" against

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which this character keeps moving on her journey toward an understanding of herself. I have emphasized a reading of Moonlodge in which a multiple self, whose shifting perspectives are expressed in the voices of different characters, is set against an homogenized, "fixed" idea of Nativeness. The foster mother's preconceptions of "her heritage," stereotyping through the media, and commercialization and exploitation of Native culture all around, prevent "a real Native," like the boy she meets at high school, from "fitting in." The complexities of Native peoples' individual histories find no place in a system that silences their voices. It is important to remember in this interpretation that the fragmented self of the character Agnes is constructed as the result of specific colonialist practices by "the power culture." While it is true that "the image making machine," as Marilyn Dumont explains, hurts all Native people, as they have to develop a sense of identity against the dominant society, individual circumstances vary. An Aboriginal person who has grown up with his or her family, with a Native language, and without the residential school experience, will be much better equipped to combat discrimination and racism than a person as portrayed in the character Agnes, who has lost her family at an early age. In each case, however, colonial perceptions of Aboriginal people, and in particular of Aboriginal women, form such a pervasive and oppressive voice in their lives, that self-identification becomes dialogic by necessity. Texts like Chrystos's Interview, Jeannette Armstrong's Indian Woman, Marilyn Dumont's Squaw Poems, and Diana Burns's "Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question" are just some examples of dialogic monologues in poetry form by Aboriginal women writers. Both Agnes and Danny, the young protagonist in Slipperjack's novel Silent Words, leave home because of circumstances imposed upon them: Agnes is taken away by the child welfare agency, and Danny escapes from abuse. Neither quest story, Silent Words or Moonlodge, can be understood outside the socio-political context of colonization; the protagonists' respective journeys are set in motion by displacement, by enforced changes. Both female authors express what Metis scholar and writer Emma LaRocque states in her characterization of Native women's writings: "So we share our humanity—over and over again. We share our dreams, our fears, our loves, our hates, our mourning for the dying of the

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Grandmother, our culture, the Mother, our land, the Children, our future."^8 I understand LaRocque's identification of abstract ideas of culture, land, and future with one's ancestors as a way of explaining an intimate and personal link between both; it seems that these abstractions are not perceived as unrelated ideas but within a kinship relationship: grandmothers as teachers of culture (in their role as storytellers, for example), mothers as life givers, and children as the future generation. In Moonlodge, a mother and children are absent after the government's interference, but a grandmother directs the protagonist toward her people. In Silent Words, a grandfather, two mothers, and a child die, but the novel ends with a wedding ceremony, which emphasizes the significance of the female in the journey of a male character and the (future) m/Mother both in the capitalized way of LaRocque's understanding and on an individual psychological level. It is noteworthy that Slipperjack, a female Anishnabe author, emphasizes the fathers' and grandfathers' responsibilities of teaching and nurturing a young boy in a motherless environment. Agnes's story in Moonlodge is mainly a woman's journey; however, men give her nomadic identity a sense of history: the young Native man whom she meets in Santa Fe repeats her father's words. They both proclaim: "I'm not gonna take this lyin down!" (327, 336). Yet, while the father is portrayed as helpless— being taken away shortly after he uttered these words—the young man links this proclamation, adapted to grammatically correct English, to his revolutionary intentions, in which he wants Agnes to participate. This change from one generation of Aboriginal men to the next shows a movement from disempowerment caused, among other factors, by a lack of education, to empowerment through better education, affirmation of cultural values, and a renewed solidarity with all "red brothers and sisters" (336). His pan-Native expression is politically motivated, implying that all Indigenous people are joined in the "red power" fight against oppression. He also mentions Alcatraz and Wounded Knee as symbols of Native resistance everywhere. As Leonard Peltier, wrongly convicted of the murder of two FBI agents, writes out of his prison cell in his twenty-fourth year of confinement: "We Indians are many nations. But one People."39 In the play, it is significant in the context of gender relations that it is the grandmother, Millie, who gives Agnes an eagle feather, but that it is the

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man, Lance, who teaches her about the cultural significance of such a feather and about her role as a "red sister." She needs both on her road to self-discovery. Comparable to the role of the circle of women in the moonlodge in Kane's story is Shirley Cheechoo's "awakening" in her autobiographical play Path With No Moccasins: "I have seven friends, seven women sitting in a circle. All different in colour I must take my position in the sisterhood because I am a woman" (45). At the same time, however, she gains power from a male Nanabush, "the trickster in everybody" (45), and dedicates the play to her father. In the fourth part of her journey, before she is able to conclude her travels "with no moccasins" with "a beginning," a "move towards ... healing without fear and into the new light" (48), she needs to let go of the traumatic experience of her father's death: "To Her Father: Baba, I'm letting you go now, you can go now" (48). These examples of themes of gender relations illustrate that Indigenous writers reaffirm cultural values that are considered lost by mainstream society— in this case "the reconciliation of both male and female" in Jeannette Armstrong's words,40 or teachings about "carryin two sets of gifts. The gifts of the father an' gifts of the mother," in the elder's words in Wagamese's Keeper WMe.41 Their writings signify both the reality of colonialism and the reality of the survival of their cultures. Although, as Drew Hayden Taylor points out in his comments about the theme of rape in Native theatre, in Native communities today relationships between males and females are tainted by abuse, this situation does not mean that traditionally passed-down values about the complementary roles of men and women and of "the masculine" and "the feminine" in a spiritual sense are no longer believed in or no longer valued. Daniel David Moses comments on the continuation of cultural values regarding the Iroquoian Six Nations Reserve in a way I also witnessed—listening to students' stories— on the Anishnabe Sandy Lake reserve: "Even though a large part of our population has been Christian for centuries and a lot of our traditional cultural forms have changed, a lot of our values haven't."42 As Thomas King explains, the focus on postcolonialism tends to eschew the issue of continuity of cultures (maybe because it is in the interest of economic development to overlook Indigenous claims of connections with a precontact past), "traditions that were in place before colonialism even

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became a question, traditions which have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization."43 Therefore, Maori scholar Powhiri Rika-Heke, presently working on a study comparing Maori and Canadian First Nations literatures, challenges literary critics by asking: "And what about these ideas of postcolonialism, ideas of the hybrid, the syncretic and the ambivalent Do they apply to Maori? Do they apply to Aboriginal Australians? Do they apply to the First Nations people of North America? I think not." From the perspective of an Indigenous person who identifies herself as belonging to a people who "are still responsible for that land which was gifted to us from our ancestors," regardless of various claims to ownership in written documents, the postcolonial discourses continue to use "words and concepts which we do not have in relation to the land";44 in other words, they perpetuate colonialism. In my own development of criteria for a literary criticism on Aboriginal literatures, I initially understood a text like Moonlodge only within the context of Aboriginal voices, with which I became familiar inside and outside the academic setting, orally and in writing. Consequently, I interpreted a multi-voiced character like Agnes from the perspective of the relational world view of Aboriginal peoples, which differs greatly from the individualistic ideology of my own background. Given the understanding that each "creature is part of a living whole and ... all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole being,"45 Agnes's quest for her self can be interpreted as a series of relationships. The emphasis on gender-crossing relations in a narrative told in a culturally gendered space (the moonlodge) makes a point about communal identity that conflicts with the fragmented thinking of some strands of feminism, a point even more pronounced in Lee Maracle's short story "Sojourner's Truth." Also, as the philosophical and spiritual concept of transformation is one expression of a connected and non-hierarchical world view (most often shown in stories about the shape-shifting "trickster"), Agnes's journey is constructed on the performance level as a series of transformations, each time "becoming" somebody else, making each perception a layer of her identity inclusive of diverse voices of non-Native society. Although I was able to make sense of the composition of Moonlodge with the "cultural literacy" I had acquired, I eventually added theories of

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hybridity and dialogism to my interpretation of the text in order to unravel more layers. Bicultural or multi-voiced literary criticism may be considered a legitimate approach, not only to Thomas King's postmodern narrative as shown by Ruffb, but also to a multi-voiced, "travelling" text like Moonlodge. Anishnabe scholar Kimberly Blaeser demands for all Native literature a type of criticism that is "at least bi-cultural" in order to do justice to "the border quality of native speech, writing and criticism."46 However, if Aboriginal scholars like Ruffo, Blaeser, or Louis Owens, who quotes Bakhtin in order to explain the "richly hybridized dialogue"47 of the Indigenous novel, appropriate non-Aboriginal canonized theories for their own use, they change the dominant discourse, in an act of, one may say, intentional hybridity, so that this discourse, in Young's words, "loses its univocal grip on meaning."48 Conversely, if non-Aboriginal scholars apply established theories in order to read Aboriginal literature critically, they do not decentre the dominant discourse but, on the contrary, emphasize its centrality as it often seems that they intend to "validate" marginalized voices. Hence, a critic has to move in the right direction, making the Aboriginal context (in all its complexity) the centre out of which other critical movements evolve—rather than the other way around. If "a dual vision" is needed "to appreciate Aboriginal literature," non-Native critics should follow the advice of Rick Monture and Sylvia Bowerbank, who state in their introduction to an annotated bibliography on Native American literature that they include both strands of criticism "to demonstrate how the two approaches can be used in tandem. This time, however, the Lone Ranger will be assisting Tbnto "4^ Assisting rather than dominating also means to acknowledge Aboriginal forms of theorizing (as) different from European-derived modes, a point stressed by Julia Emberley, a non-Aboriginal scholar: "In other words, the popular fictions, testimonials, and poetics of Aboriginal women writers engaged in a critique of colonialism themselves theorize gender and 'race' subordination and the epistemological effects of colonial violence."^ Ultimately, the play Moonlodge creates its own theory.

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THE GLOBAL SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND JUSTICE Lee Maracle's "Sojourner's Truth"

If Slipperjack, in her novel Silent Words, paradoxically articulates the unspoken, Lee Maracle expresses silence even more radically in the voice of the dead in her short story "Sojourner's Truth" (1990).1 The dead man is not just a character, but the first-person narrator who, from his perspective "inside ... [the] box" (121), comes to some understanding about lies and truths in his life, in which he abused his wife and the earth. His spirit journey takes him to encounters with Jesus, to "rebels" who fought for justice, and finally, to Sojourner Truth, the Black woman whose journey from slavery to freedom parallels the experiences of his former wife, Emma. Native people often say that a person who died "has passed on" (rather than "has passed away"). It seems to me that they do not see as much of a boundary between life after death and life on earth as do people from Western cultures. Links between the dead and the living are a recurring theme in Native literature. In the Mi'kmaq novel Stones and Switches by Lome Simon, for example, the non-Mi'kmaq priest Father Colerique is punished ("haunted") for not giving the Mi'kmaq elder, Old Set-Bol, a proper burial. The community warns the priest, but he considers their concerns superstitious and does not believe that a dead person has the power to affect the living.2 The philosophy of what Allen calls a "unitary

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notion of reality"3 that does not divide life in a linear way also becomes a literary theme in Drew Hayden Taylor's play Toronto at Dreamer's Rock, in which a character from the present meets with an ancestor from a precontact past and with a future person. As well, in the story "A Mountain Legend" by Metis writer Jordan Wheeler,4 a present-day character gets help from his ancestor. Reminiscent of the opening scene in Lee Maracle's story, a dead character watches his own funeral in Tomson Highway's novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. Here, the deceased is a Cree hunter who led a good life, whereas Maracle's character lived a life of abuse and therefore must realize "that there are not as many living bodies gathered around ... [his] box as ... [he] expected" (122). For both authors, crossing boundaries of human knowledge does not mean connections only between the dead and the living, but also between humans and non-humans, like relationships with Raven and Cedar in Maracle's Ravensong, In Tomson Highway's (autobiographical) novel, a Cree nomadic family is described as attuned to the voices of trees (104) and communicating with a talking fox (232), so that not only existence after death but also life on earth is part of an expanded consciousness in which the reader is invited to partake. The "trajectory beyond the grave, the village, the earth" (236) is made by Gabriel, the dancer, raising his naked torso from his father's corpse, the same Gabriel whose life before birth as a "spirit baby" (20) falling from the stars is also shown.5 The "marvellous" in this novel links the mystery of death (and birth) with the marvel of the theatre, thus joining ontological with aesthetic and imaginative movements. Similarly, the dead first-person narrator in the story "Ascension of My Soul" by Inuk writer Alootook Ipellie6 travels with ease "throughout the cosmos," rejoicing in his new state of a "free spirit." Although Inuit literature in English developed differently from the literatures of the southern First Nations, this particular story by Ipellie illustrates the pain of many Native people whose semi-nomadic lifestyle was abruptly terminated and transformed into a stationary existence. In the voice of a spirit, Ipellie, who has not "forgotten about being someone with a fabled past" (x), communicates a stark message: it will only be through death that "a soul... finally acquires the distinction of being the 'free spirit' it had longed to be for the better part of its life on planet Earth!" (14).

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All these narratives may be subsumed under the fantastic genre in which writers from different First Nations resort to what Michael Dash calls "a counter-culture of the imagination," which "could not be tampered with" by the impact of colonization.? However, this postcolonialist explanation and categorization are misleading. As Anishnabe artist Ahmoo Angeconeb informed me, so-called spirit travelling has always been practised as part of, for example, Anishnabe culture and, hence, was not only developed as a "counter-culture" reacting to the oppressive forces of European encroachment. In the "supernatural" aspects of Native literature written in English, I see a continuation of the (creative) power of age-old practices because this writing subverts a dualistic division, as Paula Gunn Allen asserts, "between what is material and what is spiritual, for it regards the two as different expressions of the same reality... of a reality that is essentially more spirit than matter, or more correctly, that manifests its spirit in a tangible way"8 (emphasis added). Because of the difference between, in Allen's terms, "American Indian" and "Western" thought, the above genre definitions, like the fantastic and the supernatural, as well as the categories of marvellous and magic realism, describe only one layer of this literature. At least as important is a reading that understands it in the context of a non-dualistic world view that does not doubt "the reality" of a spiritual perspective. If interpreted in this way, Maracle's narrative, which does not include conventional signiflers of "Nativeness," may be called a Native story. In Ipellie's narrative, the reader has to translate the narrator's spirit voyage into a meaning for the living. In Maracle's story, however, the narrator is employed explicitly to communicate a moral message. Through the first-person point of view of this character looking at himself "from the vantage point of death" ("Sojourner," 122), evils of human society and his complicity in them are exposed: racism, violence against women and against the earth, despotism, slavery, and other kinds of oppression and injustice. The topic of racism is first addressed in his evaluation of the crowd gathered for his funeral. His response exemplifies his journey from denial to "truth," from his racist thought "(At least there aren't any Chinamen)" (122)—a racism caused by ignorance—to his insight following right after his "aside": "Oh God, there are a hundred thousand chinamen living in this city and I cannot count even one of them as a human being who will

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miss me" (122). He continues to analyze the gathered people according to race. "There aren't any Indians or Blacks. Oh God, there aren 't even many white people here" (122). It seems he expects many white people at his funeral because he is white himself, and also, considering the emphasis created by the italics, he values white people more highly than the aforementioned people of colour. However, his demeaning categorization of people by race is immediately undermined by his subsequent realization that he lived "in a sea of almost a million people and only fifty show up" for the funeral (122, emphasis added). The complex introduction of the character in relation to race by constructing and then deconstructing racial identifications, and in the end leaving his racial identity indeterminate, leads well into a story that crosses racial boundaries but exposes racism, particularly against Black people. Each section of the narrative makes frequent allusions to Black people and their history. Before Sojourner Truth is mentioned in the second half, criticism of apartheid and allusions to brutalities in its name (Soweto) evoke the theme of oppression that comes from "the white guys" and "the whole business of lords" (124). It is noteworthy how Maracle criticizes the notion of hierarchy in Christian religion (God the Lord) but, on the other hand, accepts Jesus with "the truth of his African heritage" (125).9 It is Jesus who answers the dead man's questions because of the latter's careless use of his name: "(Jesus, I am getting tired of this guy. Every rhetorical or philosophical remark prefaced by his name calls him forth.}" (125). In this "other" existence words and discourses take on a new meaning; they become real. His swearing "Holy mother of Jesus" (127) makes Jesus's mother appear—as a "mom"—while the narrator muses that in his "mortal life the idea of Mary as Jesus' mother ended with his birth" (127). Cursing his wife Emma that she "is relieved" at his death by exclaiming "Shit," he makes shit appear, "mountains of it," which turn out to be the "three million metric tonnes of untreated sewage dumped into the Eraser River" (123), a pollution he did not protest when alive. His thoughtless treatment of his wife and the earth is connected on the discursive level: "Shit." In all these passages Maracle illustrates the real impact of discourses by eliminating the divide between the concrete or physical and the abstract in her own discourse. This is also characteristic of her style in the story "Who's Political Here?" in Sojourner's Truth where, O'Brien

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says, "distinctions are seldom drawn between modes of speech, thought and action."10 Although Maracle emphasizes oneness in crossing ontological boundaries in her story, she also draws a reader's attention to distinctions by italicizing certain passages. Earlier, I discussed italicization as a print device differentiating another voice; for example, the (oral) voice of the elder in Keeper W Me. However, I also noted that, for example in Louise Halfe's poetry, such distinctions are fluid, foregrounding indeterminacy, ambiguity, and hybridity. In Maracle's story, the words and thoughts of the husband's spirit are italicized and thereby set off against utterances by other spirits like Jesus and Sojourner Truth; however, this typographical device also suggests that this story about a search for truth focusses on the questioning of a tormented soul rather than on answers or solutions. At the beginning of the story, the narrator states that the "truth of me has long left the box" (121). This non-italicized statement about himself implies that an important part of him is no longer among the living and from now on, he will speak "in truth." Maracle emphasizes his transformation by distinguishing his thoughts and words in print, but at the same time her narrative makes it clear that this truth is a trajectory, a continuous spiritual quest. The travelling narrator crosses space and time boundaries. British Columbia, South Africa, the southern United States, and Russia are some of the places included in a journey that also crosses centuries. Emma, the dead narrator's former wife, who murdered her second husband because he turned out to be another abuser, identifies herself with the former slave woman Sojourner Truth, who lived from 1797 to 1883. At the trial, Emma's elliptic sentence "I wandered the world a slave ..." is continued by the Black woman herself: "'Why, I'm Sojourner Truth. An' Emma an' me was born on the same day. I was delivered from slavery at fifty-six years ol and so was she'" (131). A discursively created link between the two women from two different centuries is thus explained by their experience of oppression. Among Indigenous people, the view expressed by Alexander Wolfe that from "centuries past comes a path"11 is usually interpreted as a link with Aboriginal ancestors. For example, in Jordan Wheeler's story "A Mountain Legend," the journey of a young Metis boy to the top of a mountain is told as a quest that successfully completes an ancestor's similar quest.

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The understanding is that the boy in the present would have failed without help from the past. In Maracle's story, it is interesting to note that the importance of connecting with ancestors is articulated by a Black character. Maracle may have created a cross-cultural connection between her and Emma, but as Emma's racial identity is left undefined, all that can be said with any certainty is that a commonly experienced injustice—oppression because of race and/or gender, rather than racial origin—is important in this link between past and present. The vantage point of this story is not anchored in any culture, race, or geography, since it is a spirit traveller's vision; hence, no group of people is privileged. The author's philosophy may be described with Shohat and Stam as "polycentric multiculturalism"12 but a better label, if any label is needed at all, may be found in writer Kaarina Kailo's concept of "trance-cultural" travel in Indigenous women's aesthetics: The prefix "trans" in "trans-cultural" connotes a merely horizontal movement in cross-cultural communication. "Trance-cultural" as a term adds the analogic, "vertical" dimension to such cultural contacts; it refers to the many ways in which non-dualistic, holistic challenges and paradigm alternatives to mainstream Western thought and practices can affect not only our cognitive, mental superstructures but our psychological depths as well.13 Such inclusive and holistic border-crossing movements also bring together the abused and the abuser, victim and perpetrator. The dead narrator finds himself beside the nine Black Scottsborough boys "who were hung for a rape they were much too innocent to commit" (130), a "dirty deed" that he sanctioned in his life "before truth." On his spirit journey he learns that they had their vengeance by participating "in every glorious riot" (130). The point here seems to be that although individuals have been victimized, in a larger context, justice has been done. This also relates to the narrator's own victimization of his wife Emma. Within his lifetime he was the abuser; now, having migrated to "the other" perspective, he unites with her to make her strong in her rebellion: "I stretch my truth throughout her body, grow small around the tear, my soul rhythmically undulating with my fervent desire for her salvation" (129). Seeing her in court, after she murdered her second husband "with his help," he emphasizes their newly established union: "my own madness her defence" (130). In a surprising border-crossing move, the female character, who

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does not have much good to say about her deceased husband at the funeral, is later shown as needing his understanding and support in order to liberate herself. By unlocking "the door to Emma's rebellion" (131), the former abuser helps the abused, so that balance is restored. (Whenever I read this story by Lee Maracle, I am reminded of attempts at "restorative justice" in Native communities today, in which perpetrators and victims come together in "sentencing circles.") Emma's trial for the murder of her second abusive husband is preceded and thus contextualized by a perception of history from the perspective of "the meek and courageous" (130), of victims who become rebels. Maracle constructs history in such a way that the victims will be avenged, that there is meaning even in the cruel acts of a racist "justice" system, because such acts stir up rebellions. One may say she understands human actions within the philosophy of the circle or "the trickster" in which, as Anishnabe Mary Lou DeBassige says, "nothing is ever static ... so-called negative ways are there for us to learn from to understand our importance in creation ... and understand accept balance in all things ... therefore ... no one was ... is ever bad ... or wrong."14 Or, to use the approach of a "decolonializing" literary critic, David Moore, Maracle's view of history may be called "dialogic" (relational) rather than "dialectic."15 Maracle lists men like Marx and Lenin as "rebels" in their fight against other men, "the lords of violence" (130), and transforms the dead husband himself into "a rebel" by protecting his former wife from another abusive man. The existence of violence is therefore not gender-specific (and not only related to racism), but part of "the whole business of lords," of a hegemonic ideology that "has no roots in heavenly reality" (124). Possibilities "lay ahead for woman and earth should Emma win" (132). In the link between the narrator's violence against a woman and his pollution of the earth, both abuses are connected. Considering that this story is written by a Native author, the link may also be read as related to Indigenous peoples in particular, to their views on mother earth and the colonization of both, the earth and the people. Despite Maracle's emphasis on the abuse of the earth, by which Indigenous peoples are particularly affected and which they express in their writing and their art, she does not allude to Native artists but to Thoreau (joy is as "visible as Thoreau's lily") and to Emily Carr (as a member of a

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"congregation"), who chose Aboriginal west coast culture as a major theme for her art. There is a hubbub of discussion about the possibilities that lay ahead for woman and earth should Emma win. Joy hangs in the air, visible as Thoreau's lily. Even the old woman next me, grimfaced most of the time, chuckles now and then. What is your name? "Emily." Carr, the artist? "Hmph." / am honoured, I pule. "I would rather you be enjoyed." (132) In the context of Emma's (and the earth's) anticipated victory in the courts, Maracle evokes "heaven" as "'the one place that does not discriminate'" (130) and therefore seems to disregard divisive debates about appropriation of voice16—quite different from Metis Joane CardinalSchubert in her poem "oh Canada." An artist herself, Cardinal-Schubert expresses her critical view of Emily Carr or, more precisely, of the recognition of her "Native" art by Canadian society compared to the marginalization of artists of Native ancestry. 17

In Maracle's story, names—the dropping of names as well as the care-

less use of names—create a map for the narrator's travels and also place the reader. Sojourner Truth is most significant, as this name engendered the title of the story and of the whole collection. The slight modification of the name in the title, the addition of a possessive case, illustrates a slippage reflective of the complexity of the narration. This is the story of two enslaved women who liberated themselves—the historical Sojourner Truth and the fictional Emma, who is praised at the end as "this sojourner" who "saw the light" (132). But it is also the story of the narrator, a sojourner (in the OED definition a "temporary resident") whose truth consists of learning about the limitation of knowledge, of showing through his journey that truth is dependent on one's vantage point. The former slave woman, Sojourner Truth, gave herself that name when she became a travelling preacher. According to Margaret Washington, "At that point Isabella Van Wagenen became Sojourner Truth, a woman whose proclaimed mission was to 'sojourn' the land and speak God's 'truth.'"18 Her "ecumenical philosophy" was supported by women's rights

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advocates, abolitionists, and spiritualists. She was a powerful orator and became widely known for her "Ar'n't I a Woman" oration, addressing the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, which is also alluded to in Maracle's story. She became a social activist after she liberated herself—not waiting for the law to change—in 1826. The brief biographical sketch may explain why Maracle chose this nineteenth-century woman as a character in her short story and why she did not just mention her but let her speak in the first person. This woman became influential through her words as much as through her deeds. However, Maracle does not provide closure to Emma's story. At the end, "the heavenly congregation" (132, emphasis added) pronounces a verdict in her favour, but "on earth" no verdict is spoken—"the jury retires" (132). Readers are left with intimation more than a definitive conclusion that the law of Christ will absolve Emma. We are drawn into this open ending and have to decide the court verdict for ourselves because, as Maracle states in her preface to Sojourner's Truth: "As listener/reader, you become the trickster, the architect of great social transformation at whatever level you choose" (13). Like Margo Kane's play Moonlodge, Maracle's story "Sojourner's Truth" is a multi-voiced text. In both, the dialogical style and discourse create indeterminacies, of Native identity in the case of the first text, and of "the truth" in the second one. Each narrative uses the theme of the journey differently. Moonlodge is a quest story centred on the character of Agnes, who needs to find her people and her (Native) self; Maracle's narrative engages in a philosophical search for truth and justice, making justice (Emma's freedom from abuse) dependent on a spiritual, boundarycrossing understanding of truth (the dead husband's "help"). Only "when the body of the people stop hiding from the truth of the spirit" (126) will "the butchery" (125) of earth and humans be ended. "Sojourner's Truth" is the last Indigenous text discussed in detail in this study of a literature predicated on ethnic boundary categorizations. The emphatic location for a narrative not overtly Native in subject matter may well reflect my (im)migrant position in looking for boundary-crossing migrations in Indigenous literatures. However, Lee Maracle is not the only Aboriginal author with a vision of society that emphasizes human values and de-emphasizes racial identifications. Daniel David Moses, for example, ends his reflections on the role of ghosts in his plays with a

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statement that corresponds with Maracle's inclusive vision "from the vantage point of death" (122) and, at the same time, is a first conclusion to this study, which found in every single text categorized as Native or Indigenous "rich and strange complexities": White as a color exists only because some of us get told that we're black or yellow or Indians. I think my ghosts exist to probe this white problem, this tonal confusion, to spook its metaphors. ... Once white itself is a ghost, color will be just a too simple beginning of rich and strange complexities. We'll all have tender skins. 19

CONCLUSION

One of the roots of education, which makes it specifically human, lies in the radicalness of an inconclusion that is perceived as such. —Paulo Freire1 I have declared the position I am arguing from as limited, accurate only as far as my perception through the lens of a white, middle-class (new) immigrant allows. Hence, my conclusions will, by necessity, be inconclusive, unfinished, expecting you, the reader, whom I addressed in the beginning of this work, to continue where I ended, to add insights from your own perspective.2 My ethnic background as a German-Canadian may not be yours, but it may help you to identify your own positionality. At the end of my own "outsider notes," I want to align myself with Lynette Hunter's explanation of her rhetorical gesture of addressing the reader off and on as "you." She chose this writing style "in order to avoid the illusion of the impersonal and the naturalized. Although it is mildly shocking, and often irritating, to be included within the sentence, the inclusion reinforces the need to position ourselves with respect to it."3 In this Conclusion, I hesitate "to fix" the fluidity of my theoretical migrations and of the texts investigated, to dehumanize through summative statements and categorizations the literature of people that, as literature, "may be one of the most effective ways," as Emma LaRocque states, "to shed light on Native humanity."41 chose the metaphor of the migrant

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(and the nomad) to describe my attempts at (cross-cultural) border crossings and at a counter-discourse "interrupting, disrupting linearity, fixity, sedentariness," in the words of Carole Boyce Davies.51 travelled to many sites, questioning the shifting of my epistemological position each time. Coming to conclusions may lead to creating a monologue that singles out my own voice (of authority) at the end of a multi-voiced study. My understanding of Canadian Indigenous literatures is, to a large extent, informed by my dialogues with Indigenous people, which makes it even less acceptable to rank main points; however, as you travelled with me on many paths, you may be uncertain where to continue in your own journey. Here, then, are some observations of particular importance, at least from my perspective, which may be helpful for further studies. It was one of my objectives to demonstrate, through the selection of a great number of texts written by Canadian Aboriginal authors, that their writings help to build bridges, that they teach about their ways and views of life, implicitly and explicitly. For that reason alone—not to mention aesthetic richness and innovative styles—non-Native Canadians should read, study, and disseminate this literature in any way possible. By the same token, it is exactly this close link with "reality" that makes this literature "different," asking for approaches that are not merely library-based. "Difference" evolves out of culturally defined world views but also results from oppression. Both influences together create coded texts that can only be decoded, as Armand Ruffo explains, by getting involved with the people themselves. Books alone cannot be trusted. If non-Aboriginal critics find "gaps" in a Native literary text, they can educate themselves about contexts, so as not to criticize the text inappropriately. On a similar note, critics should also be cautious in making assumptions about "culture loss" when, in fact, they may not be educated enough to understand how cultural values are written into the texts. Further, my discussions in this book show the complexities, the multifarious discursive movements of the texts, interpreted in order to encourage readers or critics to go beyond their preconceived images of "Nativeness" and to look for multi-vocality and diversity. As we do not live in a post-colonial society, Indigenous writers articulate how colonization is still imprisoning them—their cultural and artistic expressions (by essentializing outsiders) as well as the individual people (quite literally, if one considers the

Conclusion

disproportionate number of Aboriginal people in prisons). Resisting assimilation, they resort to essential values of their cultures in an ongoing political struggle for equality and justice. Coming from a position identified as im/migrant, I highlight both my identity as a "new" Canadian as well as my theoretical travels among scholars from different backgrounds. It is another objective of this study to draw attention to culturally embedded scholarship because an interpretation of Indigenous writing challenges conventional criteria and categories like, for example, the distinction between imaginative literature and "criticism." I deliberately used a variety of Indigenous voices on a certain topic—regardless of their classification as poetry, journalism, scholarly writing, or fiction; and I also included visual images. However, collaboration and participatory research have to go further than in the present work. If one engages in a democratic, non-elitist and de-colonial scholarship that makes connections "sideways," one will welcome all contacts with Aboriginal communities because all voices will be valid. It is unethical for the outsider to identify an "authority" in a certain field of knowledge, especially as knowledge is constructed communally; however, by privileging the written, authored text, I did exactly that, in spite of my added conversations with many different people. Dismissing a whole connotative set of hierarchically organized values in her poem "The Devil's Language," Marilyn Dumont undercuts the analogy between "the King's English" and "the Chief's Cree" by redefining the latter as "your mother's tongue" leading "back to that clearing in the bush" and, ultimately, in her resistance discourse, as "the devil's language."6 There is no doubt that knowledge of an Indigenous language will help scholars of Aboriginal literatures to understand more fully the reversal of the "civ/sav" dichotomy: from "talking back(wards) violating "the Great White way" to "talking back / back (words) / back to your mother's sound."7 The present study represents Aboriginal voices through interpretations and recontextualized quotations. Edward Said asserts about all representation that the "act of representing (and hence reducing) others, almost always represents violence of some sort to the subject of the representation, as well as a contrast between the violence of the act of representing something and the calm exterior of the representation itself, the image— verbal, visual, or otherwise—of the subject. .. ."8 This book may indeed

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provide "the calm exterior of the representation itself; however, I hope that the reading has sometimes been unsettling, inspiring my non-Native compatriots "to develop a politics of accountability as opposed to a politics of inclusion," as Sherene Razack postulates.^ My own journey of coming to some understanding about Aboriginal writing by exposing societal and personal tensions in processes of decolonization has often been troubling, disorienting, and painful as I became increasingly aware of my complicity. My own creation of representations of Aboriginal people— unavoidable if writing from an outsider's point of view—became part of building my career, and yet seems to have done little to effect change. However, I still contend that a significant aspect of the work of Canadian non-Aboriginal literature scholars on Aboriginal literature lies in their role as disseminators of a range of literary texts that are still not widely known in this country but may contribute to processes of decolonization. All that is being requested of us is to be respectful and fair. I want to conclude on the note of fairness by returning to the beginning of my own journey at the Blue Quills Native Education Centre in northern Alberta, where I learned for the first time about Aboriginal literature. Cree poet Louise Halfe was a former student of Blue Quills when it was still a residential school. She opens her prose poem "Returning" with the following lines: "I have been asked many times, wasn't residential school better than the fires that raged at home? I don't find that a fair question."10 She explains that at home and at the residential school, bad things happened. "Mean little butterflies at home, and at residential school" (106). However, her descriptions suggest that it is not a fair question to ask because sexism and violence at home are the result of residential school experiences of family members. In her memory, the two worlds of residential school and home are intertwined by a mixture of hate, shame, and love. At the end, the title "returning" takes on a double meaning: she did return to the log cabin of Blue Quills Residential School, but she also returned (when she was pregnant) to "the sweetgrass smoke and the sweatlodge rocks" (106) and decided that this is where her "roots" are ("where I was cradled"). A double returning makes a further comment on the unfairness of considering the colonial residential school as a solution to problems created by the colonizers and their residential schools. Histories and identities are

Conclusion

complex, in particular for oppressed people who, as commented on earlier, are often left with dilemmas rather than choices. Also, no simple answers or solutions fit into binaries like bad school/good home or vice versa because experiences are interconnected.11 Analogous to the colonial situation evoked in Halfe's poem is the unfairness of so many Aboriginal communities, particularly in northern Manitoba, having "to choose" between unemployment and the further destruction of their land by the building of dams that, on the other hand, create jobs. To ask if an elimination of poverty would not be preferable to being on welfare is again not a fair question, as the economic base for Aboriginal people in this area had been eroded through imposed relocations and environmental destruction of their land in the first place. In each case of being confronted with unfair choices, Aboriginal societies were not allowed to change at their own pace, but changes were forced upon them. For outsiders, to ask fair questions implies to acknowledge the colonial history of Aboriginal people in Canadian society. Regarding Aboriginal culture and aesthetics, another unfair question is sometimes asked by non-Aboriginal people. In analogy to Halfe's poem's point about the unfairness of comparing two evils, each one effected by the colonizers, one may think of the often raised argument that preservation of Aboriginal oral stories in writing—however distorted—is better than the loss of these stories. However, like the fires raging at home and like the lack of economic resources, the threat of extinction of an oral culture is caused by enforced assimilation. Still, this threat does not legitimize the other colonialist option, in this case the preservation through the written word at all costs. Similar to attendance at residential schools causing (self-)destructive behaviour in generations to come, the so-called preservation of the oral traditions by outsiders often led to perpetuation of racist stereotypes as these stories were "demeaned" (Basil Johnston). The solution is not the oral or the written, the "traditional" or the "modern"; the solution for the Aboriginal person (and writer) is, according to Louise Halfe, a double returning. In the same way as the speaker of the poem goes back to "the sweetgrass smoke and the sweatlodge rocks," Aboriginal people still know the land and still resort to the oral traditions as they were passed on for centuries, if only underground. Although traditional cultures have been under attack, they have not been lost—despite

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mainstream media emphasis to the contrary. Unless colonialism will be repeated all over again, it is crucial that any initiatives regarding preservation—if that is the right term—come from Aboriginal people themselves. If, as Euro-Canadian critics, we want to approach literature by Aboriginal authors in a fair manner, we have to rid ourselves of preconceived notions of linear and dualistic thinking and be open to complexities and indeterminacies. Instead of applying either/or categorizations and labels, we have to come to terms with our complicity in the colonization of the peoples and find the courage to let this literature be unsettling. Given the still existing power imbalance between Aboriginal people and mainstream society, the insinuation that residential schools were, after all, beneficial for Aboriginal people has a better chance of being heard than the traumatized voice of Louise Halfe and other Aboriginal writers in Canada. Hence, fairness in literary scholarship on Aboriginal texts by non-Aboriginal academics starts with disseminating and facilitating these texts at as many different levels as possible. This does not mean to essentialize the Aboriginal truth, but multiple facets of truths of Aboriginal experiences. In a fair reading of the literature, we have to do our best to understand contexts, as this is what positionality is all about, and yet, ultimately, we have to admit that we do not control the meaning; that, instead, the literature should haunt us, draw us into an hermeneutic process that will require from us a continuous engagement and reshaping of meaning. An ethical reading of Aboriginal literatures implies a re-visioning of notions of expertise; however, as academics, as persons in positions of influence, we should not ignore our responsibility as educators. Not only should we ensure that voices like Louise Halfe's are widely heard, overriding unfair questions, but also that those voices are listened to/read responsibly. Literature, all literature, has the potential to heal and to transform; this does not mean that it is "only" therapeutic. Aboriginal writing, as Margo Kane, in her article "From the Centre of the Circle the Story Emerges," points out, is too quickly ghettoized as such; the unfairness of this and other labels shows in the scarcity of literary awards for Aboriginal writers. However, ultimately, Aboriginal literatures are, in all their aesthetic richness, literatures of survivors so that as readers and critics we become witnesses of traumatic histories. Having gained this knowledge,

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we have a responsibility to work towards the elimination of racism in our society as it retraumatizes the people. It is in this role of "architects of great social transformation," as Lee Maracle says, that we, as privileged academics, should position ourselves.

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ENDNOTES PREFACE

1. Lawrence Grossberg, "Wandering Audiences, Nomadic Critics," Cultural Studies2, 3 (1988): 377. 2. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 403. 3. Quoted in Hartmut Lutz, '"Talking at the Kitchen Table: A Personal Homage to Rita Joe of Eskasoni Reserve, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia," in Down East— Critical Essays on Contemporary Maritime Canadian Literature, ed. Wolfgang Hochbruck and James O. Taylor (Trier: WVT, 1996), 278. 4. In this study I will use the qualifiers "First Nations," "Native," "Indigenous," and "Aboriginal" interchangeably, as they are all in use. A preference for one name falsely standardizes a varied and always changing praxis of naming, by the peoples themselves and by the government and society at large. "Aboriginal" is more often used than "First Nations," as this name includes the Metis. The most appropriate adjective in naming the peoples and their literatures would be a nation- or culture-specific identification like Anishnabe, and whenever applicable this will be used. The word "Anishnabe" has several spellings, and I have chosen to use this spelling for consistency. Although some Native people refer to themselves as "Indians," for different reasons, I, as a non-Native person, will not use this term because of its colonialist and racist connotations. 5. Lee Maracle, "Oratory: Coming to Theory," in Give Back: First Nations Perspectives on Cultural Practice (Vancouver: Gallerie Publications, 1992). 6. Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 6. 7. Norval Morriseau, Legends of My People, The Great Ojibway, ed. Selwyn Dewdney (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1965), xv. 8. Therefore, although I am differently positioned in relation to my topic than Stan Dragland in relation to Duncan Campbell Scott, I align myself with his ambivalent attitude towards objectivity for similar reasons. In his introduction to Floating Voice he writes: "I haven't tried for objectivity at every point, feeling that the stresses of a study like this ought not to be concealed, feeling that I can trust the reader to weather the turbulence" (The Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9 [Concord, ON: Anansi, 1994], 12). 9. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 12.

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NOTES PAGES xiii TO XV

10. Reed Way Dasenbrock, "Do We Write the Text We Read?" in Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1994), 248. 11. Hartmut Lutz, "'Is the Canadian Canon Colorblind?': On the Status of Authors of Color in Canadian Literature in English," Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik 44, 1 (1996): 52.1 agree with Thomas Parkhill (Weaving Ourselves into the Land [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997]) that "'Whiteman,' 'White,' 'White Man,' as well as their substitutes, 'non-Indian,' and 'non-Native' are, in most usages, stereotypical foils for images of the 'Indian'" (5). When I use these terms, I follow the reasoning of the literature I am discussing. Given the key words in the tide for this study, I often use the qualifier "migrant" and "immigrant" but also Euro-Canadian or Euro-American. 12. Brill de Ramirez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures, 13. 13. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 14. Willie Ermine, "Aboriginal Epistemology," in First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds, ed. Marie Battiste and Jean Barman (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), 10. 15. In her autobiography Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet (Charlottetown: Ragweed Press, 1996), Rita Joe explains how she came to enrol herself at Shubenacadie Indian Residential School—a rarely told story. 16. The importance of routine and mechanically regulated days is emphasized in Basil Johnston's autobiographical narrative about residential school experiences titled Indian Schooldays (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1988). The longlasting effects of these aspects of life at the schools are analyzed by Greg Sarris in Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 17. Arnold Krupat (in Ethnocriticism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992]) uses the image of the shuttle when he distinguishes his ethnocritical movements "between Western paradigms and the as-yet-to-be-named paradigms of the Rest" (113) from James Clifford's "perpetual shuttling back and forth between the privileged Western narrative paradigms of tragedy and comedy" (James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 112). Although I agree with Krupat's distinction, I neither subscribe to the marginalization of non-Western paradigms as "the Rest" (even if capitalized) nor to the desire to name them. 18. Clifford, Routes, 11. 19. Ibid., 12. 20. Helen Hoy, How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Her chapter on In Search of April

Notes Pages xv to 4 211

Raintree is tided '"Nothing but the Truth': Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April Raintree." 21. Meaghan Morris, "At Henry's Park Motel," Cultural Studies!, 1 (1998): 43. 22. Trevor Barnes, "Worlding Geography: Geography as Situated Knowledge," in Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry, ed. Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory (London, New York, Sydney, Aukland: Arnold, 1997), 20. 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222. 25. Arnold Krupat, The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism & Culture (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 127. 26. Sneja Gunew, Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 38, with reference to Said. 27. Clifford, Routes, 11.

INTRODUCTION

1. The oral version of this introductory chapter was presented at the University of Mainz-Germersheim on 9 May 1996, as part of a series of lectures on the topic of "Convergent Voices: Issues in North American Public Debates," and I thank Dr. Sandra Carolan-Brozy for her invitation. 2. Ron Marken, '"There Is Nothing but White between the Lines': Parallel Colonial Experiences of the Irish and Aboriginal Canadians," paper given at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College. Published in Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Renee Hulan (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999), 157. 3. In Todorov's (translated) words: I could not separate myself from the vision of the 'conquerors' without at the same time renouncing the discursive form they had appropriated as their own. I feel the need (and in this I see nothing individual, it is why I write it) to adhere to that narrative which proposes rather than imposes; to rediscover within a single text, the complementarity of narrative discourse and systematic discourse. (Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Harper and Row, 1984], 253). 4. Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ethnocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), xviii. 5. Although it is noteworthy that Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin differentiate between the spelling of 'post-colonial' and 'postcolonial,' the reason why they

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NOTES PAGES 4 TO 5

prefer the hyphenated version clearly shows that the whole concept of post/postcoloniality hardly relates to Indigenous peoples, as they never gained "political independence," so that in their societies colonialism is not in "a neocolonial mode" but has just never ended (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Postcolonial Studies Reader [London and New York: Routledge, 1995], xv). Therefore, I will not use the term as a temporal marker but will adopt Barker's, et al., definition of 'postcolonial' "to indicate the analytical concept of greater range and ambition, as in 'postcolonial theory' or the 'postcolonial condition...." See Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson, eds., Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 4. 6. To quote one of the leading scholars on postcolonialism, Gayatri Spivak, who explains in an interview, first published in 1987, "The idea of neutral dialogue is an idea which denies history, denies structure, denies the positionality of subject" ("The Post-colonial Critic," in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym [New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 72). Building on her and Said's work, Gunew, therefore, introduces her own study with the following statement: Whatever else we may feel about postmodernist and postcolonialist debates, they have undoubtedly precipitated a widespread acceptance of the fact that positionality—where you stand in relation to what you say—is central to the construction of knowledge. In other words, they have made it more difficult to talk about literature in terms of universal propositions or about texts without reference to their contexts" (Framing Magina lity, 1). 7. Basil Johnston, "One Generation from Extinction," in An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, ed. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 101. 8. Emma LaRocque, "Preface, or Here Are Our Voices—Who Will Hear?" in Writing the Circle, ed. Jeanne Perreault and Sylvia Vance (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1990), xxi. 9. Geoffrey York, in The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada (Toronto: Lester and Orpen, 1989) gives a brief account of the transformation of the Blue Quills residential school into "the first Canadian school to be controlled by an Indian [Saddle Lake] community" (45) (and see also J.R. Miller in his later study titled Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996]). 10. Thomas King, "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism, ed. Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and J.R. (Tim) Struthers (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 241.

Notes Pages 6 to 13 213

11. Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole, No Foreign Land (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973). 12. Lee Maracle, "The 'Post-Colonial' Imagination," Fuse 16, 1 (1992): 13. 13. Janice Gould, "American Indian Women's Poetry: Strategies of Rage and Hope," Signs 20, 4 (Summer 1995): 806. 14. Renee Hulan, "Some Thoughts on 'Integrity and Intent' and Teaching Native Literature," Essays on Canadian Writing 63 (Spring 1998): 216. 15. Gayatri Spivak, "How to Read a 'Culturally Different' Book," in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al., 143. 16. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 67. 17. Sarris, Slug Woman, 179. 18. In his discussion of "a pedagogy of intercultural understanding," Lothar Bredella juxtaposes "the aim of traditional hermeneutics to bridge the gap between the other and oneself with "the aim of 'sceptical hermeneutics' to keep the gap unbridgeable" ("Toward a Pedagogy of Intercultural Understanding," American Studies 37, 4 [1992]: 565). 19. For example, in the book of art and poetry In Honour of Our Grandmothers (George Littlechild et al. [Penticton: Theytus Books, 1994]), which connects both genocides through images and poems. 20. Jeannette Armstrong, "The Disempowerment of First North American Native Peoples and Empowerment Through Their Writing," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie, 241. 21. Thomas King, ed., All My Relations (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), x. 22. Constance Rooke, "Interview with Thomas King," World Literature Written in English 30, 2 (1990): 73. 23. Hartmut Lutz, Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991), 213. 24. Hartmut Lutz, "First Nations Literature in Canada and the Voice of Survival," The London Journal of Canadian Studies 11 (1995): 66. Similarly, Arun Mukherjee quotes Dionne Brand's comments made at a panel discussion "that she does not write back to anyone but 'writes home'" (Arun Mukherjee, "First World Readers, Third World Texts: Some Thoughts about Theory and Pedagogy," in Postkoloniale Literaturen, ed. L. Glage and M. Michel [Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1993], 29). 25. King, "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial." 26. Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 209. 27. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transmigration (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.

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28. Sarris, Slug Woman, 188. 29. Ruby Slipperjack, in her interview with Hartmut Lutz, answers the question how she got started with her writing by relating the following: "This had started back at the day school at home before I left [for residential school]. All we had was Fun, Fun, Dick and Jane and some other readers that we had in school— I was just flipping pages looking at the pictures. We could not identify with the stories we read at school" (Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 204). And hence, she started to write her own when she was about ten years old. 30. Sarris, Slug Woman, 189. 31. Ibid., 190. 32. In her search for her history as a Metis person, film producer Christine Welsh found out that "the denial of our Native heritage" is not "a betrayal" but "a survival mechanism" (see her "Women in the Shadows: Reclaiming a Metis Heritage," in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism, ed. Heble, Pennee, and Struthers, 64-65). Similar to the experience of Australian Aboriginal writer Sally Morgan, recounted in her autobiography My Place, Welsh encountered resistance from her family when inquiring about the past. 33. Sarris, Slug Woman, 178. 34. Lee Maracle, "Preface. You Become the Trickster," in Sojourner's Truth and Other Stories (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1990), 12. 35. Grossberg, "Wandering Audiences," 378. 36. Beth Brant, Food and Spirits (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1991), 13. 37. The situation was different, however, in the USA with Native scholars such as Gerald Vizenor and Paula Gunn Allen as well as Euro-American literary critics such as Andrew Wiget and Arnold Krupat. In general, it may be stated with Hartmut Lutz that "a substantial deconstruction of the American Literary Canon" led to recognition of writers of colour much earlier than in Canada. "While there are fundamental differences between the U.S.A. and Canada, there are also some striking parallels, albeit along a transplanted time frame in which the development in Canada seems to lag behind some of the processes in the U.S. during the last thirty years" (Lutz, "Canon Colorblind," 55). 38. Margo Kane, "From the Centre of the Circle the Story Emerges," Canadian Theatre Review 68 (Fall 1991): 28. 39. Quoted in Hoy, How Should I Read These?, 65. 40. Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 213. In their article on Ruby Slipperjack, Sylvia Bowerbank and Dolores Nawagesic Wawia take this answer by the author as a point of departure for further reflections on the problematic role of literary criticism in relation to Native literatures (see their "Wild Lessons: Native Ecological Wisdom in Ruby Slipperjack's Fiction," in Homemaking: Women Writers

Notes Pages 17 to 22 215

and the Politics and Poetics of Home [New York and London: Garland Publications, 1996]). 41. In addition to numerous critical articles, the following books, published after Looking at the Words of Our People, are noteworthy (listed in chronological order): Julia V. Emberley, Feminist Critique, Native Women's Writings, Postcolonial Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Simon J. Ortiz, Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Dee Home, Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) [about Canadian Aboriginal texts]; Hulan, ed., Native North America; Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Hoy, How Should I Read These?; Armand Garnet Ruffb, ed., (Addressing Our Words: Aboriginal Perspectives on Aboriginal Literatures (Penticton: Theytus Books, 2001); Renate Eigenbrod and Jo-Ann Episkenew, eds., Creating Community: A Roundtable on Canadian Aboriginal Literatures (Penticton and Brandon: Theytus Books and Bearpaw Publishing, 2002); Hartmut Lutz, Approaches: Essays in Native North American Studies and Literatures (Augsburg: Wissner, 2002). As well, see the Canadian Literature special issue on First Nations Writing, Winter 2000. 42. Jeannette Armstrong, ed., Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1993). 43. Hoy, How Should I Read These?, 18. 44. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), xxviii. 45. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 10.

ROUTES OR ROOTS? THE RHETORIC OF MOBILITY 1. Salman Rushdie, quoted in Rosemary M. George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996), 199. 2. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 9. 3. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 66-67. 4. Discussed, for example, by WH. New in Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence and Power in Canadian Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), as

216

NOTES PAGES 22 TO 24

well as in the earlier study by D.M.R. Bentley, The Gay/Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690-1990 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992). 5. Eileen Jenness, The Indian Tribes of Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1933), 41. 6. In the Krieghoff exhibition in December 1999 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the paintings featuring Native people were revealingly framed by the language of the curator who separated "the Habitants" from "the Natives" (whose "difference" was further emphasized with "authentically" Native music and crafts in the gift shop where the visitors unavoidably ended their tour of the exhibition). 7. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 332. 8. Geraldine Pratt, "Spatial Metaphors and Speaking Positions," in Reading Human Geography, ed. Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory (London: Arnold, 1997), 169. 9. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 380. 10. Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, eds., Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984), 22. 11. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 22. 12. Muecke and Roe, eds., Reading the Country, 217. 13. Emma LaRocque, "Three Conventional Approaches to Native People in Society and Literature," Mary Donaldson Memorial Lecture, Saskatchewan Library Association, Saskatoon, 1984, p. 3. 14. Clifford, Routes, 254, 364. 15. On July 27, 1998,1 interviewed Anishnabe artist Ahmoo Angeconeb, who is rarely at home on his reserve Lac Seul—Obishikokkang (White Pine Narrows)—and so often in Europe that his friends jokingly locate him as "somewhere between Berlin and Lac Seul." His art, however, is closely linked with his Anishnabe language and the stories from the land of his ancestors. He certainly identifies himself as "Indigenous" or, more correctly, as Anishnabe. Also, Greg Sarris makes us reconsider conventional notions of tradition: Tradition is often considered as that which is unchanging in a culture, that which is canonical and which governs, or at least influences in significant ways, peoples' lives. Like commonly accepted notions of culture and ethnicity, tradition, according to this view, is understood as a thing complete and still.... Seen in the context of Kashaya culture, tradition is not fixed, but an ongoing process. That which is

Notes Pages 24 to 29 217

viewed as tradition or traditional is subjective, dependent on the viewer" (Slug Woman, 179-180). 16. Margery Fee, "Writing Orality: Interpreting Literature in English by Aboriginal Writers in North America, Australia and New Zealand, "Journal of Intercultural Studies 18, 1 (1997): 26. 17. Thomas King, Medicine River (Markham: Penguin Books, 1990), 173. 18. Ibid., 171. 19. In his interview with Constance Rooke, King explains about Medicine River that "there are points in the book where I play off historical stereotypes—one of which is that Indians don't like to have their picture taken because it's going to capture their soul" (Rooke, "Interview with Thomas King," 62). 20. Other non-Indigenous scholars may be quoted here. Terry Goldie, for example, explains (in Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures [Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989]) that Euro-Canadian society expresses its desire for the "rooted" Native in their literature about them, and Thomas Parkhill's book about the fascination with "Indians" based on "positive stereotyping" (book cover) also scrutinizes the non-Native desire for "the timeless, tradition-respecting 'Indian' (Weaving Ourselves into the Land [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997], 111). 21. Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 71-72. 22. Minh-Ha Trinh, quoted in Jane Jacobs, "Earth Honoring: Western Desires and Indigenous Knowledges," in Writing Women and Space, ed. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1994), 190. 23. Krupat, Ethnocriticism, 114. 24. Ibid., 115. 25. James Clifford, "Notes on Travel and Theory," Inscriptions 5 (1989): 177. 26. Krupat, Turn to the Native, 125. 27. Salman Rushdie, "A Dangerous Art Form," Third World Book Review 1 (1984): 4. 28. George Kenny, Indians Don't Cry (Toronto: NC Press, 1982), 36-37. In collaboration with Dennis Lacroix, George Kenny wrote a play with a title inspired by the poem "October Stranger," and based on the whole book Indians Don't Cry (out of print). The play was performed at the Sixth Annual International Amateur Theatre Festival in Monaco by the all-Native theatre company KEMATEWAN in September 1978. The poem "I Don't Know This October Stranger" is quoted here from the original publication in Indians Don't Cry, but it has been reprinted in Jeannette Armstrong and Lally Grauer, eds., Native

218

NOTES PAGES 29 TO 33

Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001). 29. Quoted in Janice Williamson, Sounding Differences: Conversations 'with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 11. 30. Jeannette Armstrong, "Racism, Racial Exclusivity and Cultural Supremacy," in Give Back, 75. 31. New, Land Sliding, 86. 32. Jeannette Armstrong, "This Is a Story," in All My Relations, ed. King, 133. 33. In one of so-called traditional stories by Okanagan elder Harry Robinson, titled by Wendy Wickwire "Coyote Tricks Owl" (Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller [Vancouver: Talonbooks/Theytus, 1989], 66-74), Coyote transforms Owl from a people-killing monster into a mere "scare." 34. Jeannette Armstrong, "Unclean Tides: An Essay on Salmon and Relations," in first fish, first people: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, ed. Judith Roche and Meg McHutchison (Seattle/London: University of Washington Press, 1998), 191,182. 35. Armstrong, "This Is a Story," 135. 36. Arnold Krupat, "Postcoloniality and Native American Literature," The Yale Journal of Criticism 1, 1 (1994): 170. 37. Ron Geyshick, "Around the World in a Big Trout," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie, 200. 38. Also, Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson incorporates current events in a meaningful way in his "mythical" stories. Wendy Wickwire, who transcribed his stories, gives a good example with Robinson's interpretation of Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon. "When news of this event reached Harry, it was not surprising to him at all because he knew that Coyote's son had gone there years ago Armstrong was not the first to land on the moon. He had simply followed the path that Coyote's son had learned about long ago " (Write It on Your Heart, 22). 39. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 56. 40.1 owe this insight to Aboriginal students from the Lac La Croix reserve (where Geyshick is from) who participated in a Native literature course I taught via telecommunication in 1998. 41. Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, "Stop Stealing Native Stories," The Globe and Mail, 2 6 January 1990. 42. Jane Sequoya, "How(!) Is an Indian?: A Contest of Stories," in New Voices in

Notes Pages 34 to 40 219

Native American Literary Criticism, ed. Arnold Krupat (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 460. 43. Ibid, 459, 456. 44. Allen, quoted in Bowerbank and Wawia, "Wild Lessons," 227. 45. Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (Toronto: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 14. 46. Jack Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1992), 146. 47. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 23. 48. Janet Wolff, "On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism," Cultural Studies 7, 2 (May 1993): 235. 49. Arlene Akiko Teraoka, "Gestarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back," Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 81. 50. Brant, Food and Spirits, 17. 51. Moses and Goldie, eds. Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, xxi. 52. Makeda Silvera, The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1995), 251. 53. Armstrong, Looking at the Words of Our People, 7. Womack, Red on Red, 18. 54. Womack, Red on Red, 14.

AN ETHICS OF READING POSITIONING THE IMMIGRANT CRITIC OUTSIDER/INSIDER DIALECTICS

1. Janice Gould, "Disobedience (in Language) in Texts by Lesbian Native Americans," Ariel 25, 1 (January 1944): 43. 2. Emma Lee Warrior, "Compatriots," in All My Relations, ed. King, 49. 3. Chambers, Migrancy, 81, 82. 4. Armstrong, "The Disempowerment," 24. 5. Marilyn Dumont, "Popular Images of Nativeness," in Looking at the Words of Our People, ed. Armstrong, 49. For a more detailed discussion of the image of "the Native" specifically in Canadian society, see Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992). 6. Dumont, "Popular Images," 47-49. 7. Chambers, Migrancy, 82.

220

NOTES PAGES 40 TO 45

8. David L. Moore, "Decolonializing Criticism: Reading Dialectics and Dialogics in Native American Literatures," SAIL 6, 4 (Winter 1994): 7-33. 9. Warrior, "Compatriots," 53. 10. Krupat, Turn to the Native, 13. 11. Beth Brant, Writing as Witness (Toronto: Women's Press, 1994), 49. 12. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. 13. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxiv. 14. Moore, "Decolonializing Criticism," 17. 15.Ibid. 16. WJ.T. Mitchell, "Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism," in Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 477. 17. Quoted in Womack, Red on Red, 3. 18. Jamil Khadar, "Postcolonial Nativeness: Nomadism, Cultural Memory, and the Politics of Identity in Louise Erdrich's and Michael Doris's The Crown of Columbus," Ariel28, 2 (April 1997): 85, 82. 19. Hoy, How Should I Read These?, 18. 20. In his article on Thomas King's short story "The One About Coyote Going West," Armand Ruffo includes Roland Barthes's narratology in developing his own methodology of decoding the text ("From Myth to Metafiction, a Narratological Analysis of Thomas King's 'The One About Coyote Going West,'" International Journal of Canadian Studies 12 (Fall 1995): 135-154. 21. Armand Ruffo, "Inside Looking Out. Reading Tracks from a Native Perspective," in Looking at the Words of Our People, ed. Armstrong, 174. 22. Wendy Rose, "Just What's All This Fuss About Whiteshamanism Anyway?" in Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization, ed. Bo Schoeler, The Dolphin 9 (April 1984): 14. 23. Ibid., 21, 23. 24. Basil Johnston, "One Generation from Extinction," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie, 101. 25. Hoy, How Should I Read These?, 18. 26. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 11. 27. Quoted in ibid., 25. 28. Ibid. 29. Chambers, Migrancy, 25. 30. Linda Alcoff, "The Problem of Speaking for Others," Cultural Critique 20 (1991-92): 432.

Notes Pages 45 to 48 221

31. Marianne Hirsch, "The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions," Genre XII (Fall 1979): 293. 32. Quoted in Marc Redfield, "Ghostly Bildung: Gender, Genre, Aesthetic Ideology, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre," Genre XXVII (Winter 1993): 377. 33. Hulan, "Thoughts on 'Integrity and Intent,'" 223. 34. Virginie Alba, "The Construction and Representation of Aboriginal Cultures, Identity, and Community in the Writings of Canadian Aboriginal Women: The Example of Jeannette Armstrong," in Canadian Issues/Themes Canadiens XXI, ed. Michael Behiels, Ronald Rompkey, and Fernand Harvey (Montreal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1999), 191. ILLUSTRATING

POSITIONALITY

I.Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1983), epigraph. 2. Ruby Slipperjack, Silent Words (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1992). 3. Explaining her "perspectival approach," Apache philosopher Viola Cordova asserts: "The Native American gives notice of not only who he is but where he is 'coming from'" ("The Perspectival Approach," unpublished paper, Rockefeller Project, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, 1997, p. 3). 4. Maria Helena Lima, "Revolutionary Developments: Michelle Cliff's 'No Telephone to Heaven' and Merle Collins's 'Angel,'" Ariel 24, 1 (January 1993): 36. S.Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 35. 6. Clifford, Routes, 11. 7. Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 207.

8. Cordova, "The Perspectival Approach," 1. 9. William Bevis, "Native American Novels: Homing In," in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 582. 10. Basil Johnston, Ojibway Heritage (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), 17. 11. New, Land Sliding, 26. 12. Richard Wagamese, The Terrible Summer (Toronto: Warwick Publishing, 1996), 35. Patricia McCormack, in her article "Native Homelands as Cultural Landscapes: Decentering the Wilderness Paradigm," in Sacred Lands, ed. Jill Oakes et al. (Edmonton: University of Alberta Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1998), explains further spiritual, environmental, and political implications of the Eurocentric terminology. 13. Barbara Pittman, "Cross-cultural Reading and Generic Transformations: The Chronotope of the Road in Erdrich's Love Medicine," American Literature 67, 4 (December 1995): 778.

222

NOTES PAGES 48 TO 50

14. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 15. In my approach I hope to avoid the "universalist methodology" criticized by Mukherjee, although it seems that I come "armed" with exactly those "readymade categories of... motifs such as journey or quest, bildungsroman" (Oppositional Aesthetics [Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1994], 21) that she does not want a Western critic of non-Western literature to use. But in my opinion, such categories can be used not to neglect but to better understand "referentiality and context" (21). 16. Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception," in Making Face, Making Soul, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1990), 400-401. Christine Sylvester interprets Lugones's article in the context of feminist theory: "This form of world traveling relies on empathy to enter into the spirit of difference— It moves us ... to places of subjectivity that shift and hyphenate into the worlds of others" ("African and Western Feminisms: World-Traveling the Tendencies and Possibilities," Signs 20, 4 [Summer 1995]: 946). 17. Hirsch, "The Novel of Formation," 296. In the following I will not dwell on the question in how far Slipperjack's protagonist is "representative" of Anishnabe society and culture in the 1970s. May it suffice in the context of this study to mention that the Anishnabe students in my First Nations literature classes at Lakehead University, of whom many were mature students, could easily relate to the character Danny. 18. King, "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," 245. 19. Ibid., 245, 246-247. 20. Grossberg, "Wandering Audiences," 377. 21. Redfield, "Ghostly Bildung," 378. 22. One might even argue that this observation at the end of the novel is an example of built-in "critical contexts needed for ... interpretation," which, according to Anishnabe writer and critic Kimberly M. Blaeser ("Native Literature: Seeking a Critical Center," in Looking at the Words of Our People, ed. Armstrong, 59) characterizes contemporary Native texts and should be recognized before imposing critical contexts "from outside." 23.1 owe this idea to Slipperjack's explanation of her work in a presentation she gave in one of my First Nations literature classes at Lakehead University some years ago. It is ironic and yet appropriate that I must admit in a chapter that discusses an ethics of reading that in my first mentioning of this image in my publication "The Oral in the Written: A Literature between Two Cultures" (The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 15, 1 [1995]), I failed to acknowledge her input.

Notes Pages 51 to 55 223

24. It would be worthwhile to compare the layered structure of Silent Words with the imagery of geological layers in Anne Michaels's Holocaust novel Fugitive Pieces (1996). 25. For Vine Deloria, "thinking in time" and "thinking in space" mark the cultural and ideological divide between American Indians and Western European immigrants (God Is Red [Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994]). 26. Pittman, "Cross-Cultural Reading," 788. 27. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 97-98. 28. Kathleen Donovan, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 144. 29. Quoted in ibid. 30. Robert Nelson, Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), 135, 31. King, "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," 247. 32. Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 27. 3 3. New, Land Sliding, 71. 34. Johnston, Ojihvay Heritage, 21. 35. Dee Home, "Listening to Silences in Ruby Slipperjack's Silent Words," Studies in Canadian Literature 23, 2 (1998): 126. Home adds the following footnote: "Here, I am using re-memoration to describe commemoration from a position of having been silenced. Toni Morrison coined the term 're-memoration' and Homi Bhabha elaborates on it..." (136). 36. Hirsch, "The Novel of Formation, " 296. 37. Maria Helena Lima, "Decolonizing Genre: Jamaica Kincaid and the 5/7dungsroman," Genre XXVI (Winter 1993): 438. 38. Marianne Hirsch, "Jane's Family Romances," in Borderwork, ed. Margaret Higgonet (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 166. It goes beyond the focus of my discussion here to show how the cultural and racialized variations of the Bildungsroman intersect with gendered perspectives. In the case of Ruby Slipper]ack, this question is complicated by the fact (as it is for Armstrong's Slash) that a female author writes in the voice of a male protagonist. 39. Silko, Yellow Woman, 27. 40. Bonnie Hoover Braendlin, "Bildung in Ethnic Women Writers," Denver Quarterly 17 (1983): 78. 41. Home, "Listening to Silences," 125. 42. In her "Translator's Preface" to Jacques Derrida's OfGrammatology (Baltimore:

224

NOTES PAGES 56 TO 58

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Gayatri Spivak translates the concepts ofaufgehoben and Aufhebung in the following way: Aufhebung is a relationship between two terms where the second at once annuls the first and lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence; it is a hierarchial concept generally translated 'sublation' and now sometimes translated 'sublimation'. A successful preface is aufgehoben into the text it precedes, just as a word is aufgehoben into its meaning (xi). 43. Lima, "Revolutionary Developments," 54. 44. The most well-known print version of the legend in form of a story can be found in the collection Sacred Legends of the Sandy Lake Cree, ed. Carl Ray and James Stevens (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971). 45. Jim Morris, "Ayash," in First People First Voices, ed. Petrone, 212. 46. Ibid. 47. Bowerbank and Wawia, "Wild Lessons," 225. 48. Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989), 2. 49. Ibid., 21. 50. The whole quote from the interview reads like this: "And so with Medicine River I'm really writing initially for a Native audience. It's a real irony because as I see my audience out there, and as I think about the Native audience and how much I hope they'll enjoy the book and the kind of storytelling that goes on in the book, I'm also reminded that the book costs twenty-five bucks for the hard copy.... Nonetheless, it sustains my writing to keep that audience in mind" (Rooke, "Interview," 73). 51. However, in some reserve communities, stories (legends) are still or again silenced by the strong influence of Christian denominations. Often, elders tell their stories with a Christian slant. In addition, many (traditional) older people hardly speak English, but the young generation growing up now with the influence of television in most cases does not know the Native language well or not at all, so that access to oral knowledge could become difficult because of language barriers. 52. M. F. Salat, "Other Words, Other Worlds: Of Ruby Slipperjack," in Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women's Writing, ed. Coomi S. Vevaina and Barbara Godard (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1996), 78, 82. 53. Ibid., 87. 54. In another article on Native literature by the same East Indian Canadianist M.F. Salat, the tendency to overgeneralize is also noticeable, yet in a different

Notes Pages 59 to 61 225

way. In "Reading Native Women Writing" (in Feminist Spaces: Cultural Readings from India and Canada, ed. Malashri Lai [New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1997]), the critic provides an interpretation of the two (fictional) Metis autobiographies Hal/breed and In Search of April Raintree. Although Salat acknowledges the specific Metis content in both narratives, the conclusion is still about "the Native quest" (133) and about "major preoccupations in Native writing" (134).

THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL LITERACY

1. Williamson, "Interview with Lee Maracle," in Sounding Differences, 168. 2. At the time of writing, two articles have been published in Canada, the first one in the book Homemaking (1996) by Sylvia Bowerbank and Dolores Nowagesic Wawia with an environmental reading of the novel, and the second one by Dee Home in Studies in Canadian Literature (1998). Only very recently has there been an article on Honour the Sun (by Helen Hoy in her book How Should I Read These?). Obasan, on the other hand, as Lutz remarks, "'made it' into the Canadian canon" ("Canon Colorblind," 161). 3. LaRocque, "Preface," xxvii. 4. Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1999), 1. 5. Hulan, "Some Thoughts," 219. 6. Katerie Akiwenzie-Damm, "We Belong to This Land: A View of 'Cultural Difference,'" in Literary Pluralities, ed. Christl Verduyn (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998), 84. 7. Hartwig Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 139. 8.1 would like to give two more examples from interviews with Native authors: Lee Maracle states: "the people that I see when I am writing are Native people" (Jennifer Kelly, "Coming out of the House: A Conversation with Lee Maracle, "Ariel 2 5, 1 [January 1994]: 76); and Jeannette Armstrong asserts that she wrote her novel Slash in a way that is "readable for our people" (Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 16). 9. Stephanie von Berg and Hartmut Lutz, '"Pounded Earth and Heartbeats': 20th Century Poetry by Native Women of North American," Revista Canaria de EstudiosIngleses 37 (1998): 30. 10. Quoted in Jeanne Perreault and Joseph Bruchac, "Notes from the Co-editors," Ariel 25, 1 Qanuary 1994): 10. 11. Alba, "Construction and Representation," 201; Bell Hooks, Talking Back

226

NOTES PAGES 61 TO 66

(Toronto: Between the Lines, 1989), 47; Williamson, "Interview," 168. A case in point is Alba's discussion of Slash, a ten-page article with a two-and-a-halfpage footnote in which she contextualizes and legitimizes her writing with many references to the appropriation debate. 12. This was one of the questions raised in a panel discussion at a conference in 1994 that I facilitated and titled "It Is Literature, Isn't It?" The two Aboriginal students involved in the panel, Doris O'Brien and Julie Rupert, both pointed out that context is needed for understanding this literature, context that is difficult to access. Consequently, readers or critics coming from the outside should make sure that their (mis)interpretations are not worded in an authoritative manner, making Native literature "stationary; and it's not, it's very fluid" (see "It Is Literature, Isn't It?" in Indigenous Learning, Proceedings from the First Biennial Aboriginal Peoples Conference, 14-16 October 1994, ed. Sylvia O'Meara and Douglas West [Thunder Bay: The Aboriginal Resource and Research Centre, Lakehead University, 1996], 144). 13. Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Hough ton Mifflin Company, 1987), xiv. 14. Johnston, "One Generation from Extinction," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie. 15. Mitchell, "Postcolonial Culture," 478. 16. Brant, Food and Spirits, 17. 17. Ibid., 14. 18. Moore, "Decolonializing Criticism," 29. 19. Douglas Cardinal and Jeannette Armstrong, The Native Creative Process, photographs by Greg Young-Ing (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1991), 82. 20. Kimberly Blaeser, "Writing Voices Speaking: Native Authors and an Oral Aesthetic," in Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts, ed. Laura J. Murray and Keren Rice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 21. Heble, et al., New Contexts of Criticism, 84. 22. Richard Kearney, "Emmanuel Levinas," in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 48. 23. Quoted in ibid., 62-63. 24. Quoted in ibid., 53. 25. Hooks, TalkingBack, 48. 26. Mukherjee, "Teaching Ethnic," 167. 27. Hoy, How Should I Read These?, 61. 28. Moore, "Decolonializing Criticism," 17.

Notes Pages 67 to 15

READING FOR BOUNDARY DE/CONSTRUCTIONS CONTEXTUALIZING THE OTHER THE INDIGENOUS OTHER 1. Maurice Kenny, "Going Home," in Literature Across Cultures, ed. Sheena Gillespie, Terezinha Fonseca, and Carol A. Sanger (Toronto: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), 145.

2. Maurice Kenny, "Rain," in All My Relations, ed. King. 3. Quoted in Khader, "Postcolonial Nativeness," 83. 4. Susie O'Brien, "The Place of America in an Era of Postcolonial Imperialism," Ariel 29, 2 (April 1998): 170. 5. Ibid. 6. Georges van den Abbeele, "Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist," Diacritics 10 (December 1980): 13. 7. Georges Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory, trans. Sheila Fishman (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992), 15. 8. Blaeser, "Native Literature," 59. 9. For further discussion see, for example, Silko's essay in Yellow Woman on "The Indian with a Camera." 10. Lionel is a character in the novel who learns about Blackfoot culture. As Doris O'Brien explains, his ability "to confirm his cultural identity" is shown when he stops another character from taking pictures at the Sun Dance ("Reading Tricksters, or Tricksters Reading? One of Many Readings of Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King," MA thesis, Lakehead University, 1999, p. 78). 11. Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), 47. 12. Ibid., 48. 13. Bhaba, Location of Culture, 38. 14. Chambers, Migrancy, 5. 15. Alison Donnell, "She Ties Her Tongue: The Problems of Cultural Paralysis in Postcolonial Criticism,"Ariel26, 1 (1995): 106. 16. Ruffo, "Inside Looking Out." 17. Chambers, Migrancy, 31. 18. Ibid, 4. 19. Daniel Francis, in The Imaginary Indian, discusses the misuse of the name of the Ottawa Chief by General Motors within the context of appropriation of images (171-172). 20. Muecke and Roe, eds, Reading the Country, 151.

227

228

NOTES PAGES 76 TO 81

21. Drew Hayden Taylor offers a humorous Anishnabe perspective on the changes of traditional ceremonies (which, for so-called traditionalists, are of serious concern) in his article "Powows Evolving from Traditional to High-Tech," in Voices of the First Nations, ed. Freda Ahenakew, Brenda Gardipy, and Barbara Lafond (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1995). 22. Here I want to insert an anecdote similar to the one in my introductory chapter about how I came to understand the importance of the Ayash legend in Anishnabe culture. In this case, it was an Onondaga student who calls herself a traditional woman who pointed out the significance of strawberries in their creation stories. In the written tradition, as I knew it, the three sisters of corn, squash, and beans are fairly well known, but the strawberries are not always mentioned. 23. Assuming a link between the cultural background of the author and the meaning of the text seems to be characteristic for readings of Aboriginal literatures. One reason may be that many Aboriginal writers write out of their own experience because so many stories about "them" demand to be rewritten from the first-person perspective. However, non-Aboriginal readers may have difficulty avoiding a colonial approach when searching for "Native" aspects in a work by an author of Native ancestry, an hermeneutic challenge that Helen Hoy explores in her discussion of Eden Robinson's "not very Native" book Traplines (How Should I Read These?). 24. Albert-Reiner Glaap, "Diversity in Native Cultures: A Conversation with Drew Hayden Taylor and Dawn T. Maracle," Zeitschrift fuer Kanada Studien 19, 1 (1999): 93. 25. Brant, Writing as Witness, 58. 26. Brian Maracle, Back on the Rez: finding the way home (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1997), 261. 27. Brant, Food and Spirits, 21. 28. Brant, Writing as Witness, 74. 29. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 393. 30. Homi Bhabha, "Unpacking My Library ... Again," in The Post Colonial Question, ed. Ian Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996), 206. 31. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 163. 32. van den Abbeele, "Sightseers," 13. 33. Ibid., 14. 34. Nancy Cooper, "Untitled," in The Colour of Resistance: A Contemporary Collection of Writing by Aboriginal Women, anthologized by Connie Fife (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1994): 73-74.

Notes Pages 81 to 84 229

CONSTRUCTING THE EUROPEAN

1. A shortened version of this chapter (Renate Eigenbrod, "Stranger and Stranger": The [German] Other in Canadian Indigenous Texts") is published in Colin G. Galloway, Gerd Gemunden, and Susanne Zantop, eds., Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), and I want to acknowledge Susanne Zantop's editorial help, which also shaped the revising of this chapter. 2. Ahmoo Angeconeb, caption for the Stag and Caribou print used on the cover. 3. Moses and Goldie, eds., Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, xxvi. 4. Williamson, "Interview," 176. 5. For a discussion on Germany's past and present history of relationships with Indigenous peoples in North America, with special emphasis on Native literature, see Hartmut Lutz's article "Nations Within as Seen from Without: Ten Theses on German Perspectives on the Literature of Canada's First Nations," in Native North America, ed. Hulan. 6. Although in positioning myself in relation to Canadian Native literatures, I emphasize my immigrant status in Canada rather than identify myself simply as German, from the perspective of (some?) Indigenous people there is no great difference between a European and a Euro-Canadian or Euro-American. Lee Maracle, for example, in her interview with Hartmut Lutz, does not agree with her German interviewer's differentiation between "European-derived Canadians" and "Europeans": LM: Is a cat in Egypt a cat? HL: Sure! LM: A European here is a European! (Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 173). Coming from a different angle in his reasoning, Ward Churchill, in Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1994), also conflates both groups of people. After having discussed hobbyism in Germany, he explains: Much of what has been said with regard to Germany can be transposed for application in North America, albeit there can be no suggestion that Euroamericans are in any way indigenous to this land.... What is meant is that the imperative of reconnecting themselves to their own traditional roots pertains as much, and in some way more, to this dislocated segment of the European population as it does to their cousins who have remained in the Old World (243). 7. Anishnabe elder Fred Nowgesic, residing in Thunder Bay, Ontario, translated the Ojibway title of the book (which he owns) as follows: "The story before the birth of Jesus Christ and the life of Jesus and his death." Mr. Nowgesic

230

NOTES PAGES 84 TO 86

explained to me that he thinks the small book was printed in Germany because of structural linguistic similarities between German and Ojibway (the diminutive), which facilitated the printing not much developed in Canada at that time. 8. Basil Johnston, "The Spirit of Maundau-meen [Maize]," in The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1995), 103. 9. Another example is the Haida story about the origin of the cedar trees in which "all the bad people had been changed into cedar trees." The story ends: "Thus from greed and evil deeds came good. For the cedar trees gave the Haida people most of the things they needed in life" (Ella Elizabeth Clark, Indian Legends of Canada [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995], 58-59). Although this version of the story is written down by Clark based on secondary written sources, Salish/Metis author Lee Maracle also emphasizes the importance, even sacredness, of the cedar tree in her novel Ravensong. 10. New, Land Sliding, 71. 11. Johnston, "The Prophecy," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie. 12. Desmond Morton, in A Short History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), considers curiosity and "eagerness [of the Aboriginal people] for new technology ... their downfall," (16) rather than their hospitality. "A less curious or adaptable people might have ignored the Europeans and their goods.... Instead, with the enthusiasm of natural free traders, Canada's first peoples welcomed the Europeans and their goods into existing trading systems. Any second thoughts came too late" (16). 13. David A. Groulx, "Indian Country," in Night in the Exude (Sault Ste. Marie: Tyro Publishing, 1997), 51. 14. Emma LaRocque, "On the Ethics of Publishing Historical Documents," in "The Orders of the Dreamed": George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojihway Religion and Myth, 1823, ed. Jennifer Brown and Robert Brightman (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1988), 199. 15. Jeannette Armstrong, Breath Tracks (Stratford/Vancouver: Williams-Wallace/ Theytus Books, 1991), 28-29. 16. Jeanne Perreault and Joseph Bruchac, "Memory Alive: An Inquiry into the Uses of Memory in Marilyn Dumont, Jeannette Armstrong, Louise Halfe, and Joy Harjo," in Native North America, ed. Hulan, 260. 17. LaRocque, "On the Ethics," 200. 18. Perreault and Bruchac, "Memory Alive," 260-261. 19. Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo/Sioux), for example, states in her seminal essay "The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective," which became a chapter in her book The Sacred Hoop, that for "the American Indian, the ability

Notes Pages 87 to 89 231

of all creatures to share in the process of ongoing creation makes all things sacred" (57). 20. Winona LaDuke, "Preface. Natural to Synthetic and Back Again," in Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Ward Churchill (Boston: South End Press, 1983), vii. 21. Ibid., iii. From the perspective of a Euro-Canadian scholar trying to understand different conceptualizations of the land, W.H. New argues that for both generations of settlers, those "travelling through the land" and those "concerned with settling on the land, digging into the land," ... "the land as given is a problem. For the first group it is a physical obstruction; for the second it is an impediment to commerce, valuable only when reconstructed or rearranged" (Land Sliding, 74). 22. Means, "Same Old Song," 28. 23. Deloria, God Is Red, 63. 24. Means, "Same Old Song," 30. 25. Armstrong, "The Disempowerment," 241. 26. In two other novels by Canadian Aboriginal writers, German characters play minor roles. In Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), one of the teachers in residential school is of German ancestry, and Thomas King's novel Truth & Bright Water (1999) features German tourists. ROLE OF GERMAN CHARACTERS

1. Lee Maracle, Ravensong (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1993). 2. At the end of the novel Stacey is shown as planting "the seeds of shame" (191) in Steve, a doctor's son, by making him feel guilty about the doctor's neglect of her people during the flu epidemic. Raven interprets this positively as starting a transformation in one of "the others." The responsibility of an Aboriginal person is often expressed by Indigenous writers from "the Seventh Generation." For example, Metis artist Joane CardinalSchubert: "and we have begun to return to our customs, beliefs and methods as they relate to the land base that we come from. We will teach the world, as one of the aboriginal peoples, how to again live in harmony—to create a balance. We can do this as a people because we have not lost our connection with the earth and the position we occupy as one of the components of the whole" ("in the red," Fuse 13, 1-2 [Fall 1989]: 24). Or Anishnabe Richard Wagamese: "Because the prophecies say that Indigenous people will lead the way to a new harmony, a new balance and a newer and stronger relationship with all that is. In that light, we need to begin preparing ourselves to fight a new kind of fight and become a new kind of warrior— But we also need to begin taking responsibility for passing on the intent of

232

NOTES PAGES 90 TO 100

those traditions and teachings to those who have not been graced with them" ("New Warriors," Wawatay News, 5 November 1998, p. 4). 3. Werner Sollors, "Ethnicity," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 303. 4. Ian Ross, The Gap (Winnipeg:}. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 2001). 5. The theme of a human character gaining strength from watching the salmon in their struggle of swimming upstream is also in the story "Swimming Upstream," by Mohawk writer Beth Brant, in her collection of short stories Food and Spirits. 6. This may go back to the oral tradition about the significance of cedar trees. In her article "Where Love Winds Itself Around Desire," Lee Maracle argues: "Cedar feels every emotion worthy of our expression. Trees help you to grow those emotions up, respond with grace and dignity to the emotional invitations others extend" (in first fish, first people, 176). 7. Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1989), 12. 8. Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul, 378. 9. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 38. 10. The non-recognition of the so-called trickster is a frequently occurring theme in Canadian Aboriginal literatures. See alsoTomson Highway's play The Rez Sisters (1988) and Drew Hayden Taylor's play Toronto at Dreamer's Rock (1990). 1 I.Jennifer Kelly, "Coming out of the House. A Conversation with Lee Maracle," Ariel25, 1 (January 1994): 86. 12. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24. 13. Laurie Anne Whitt, "Indigenous Peoples and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge," in Issues in Native American Cultural Identity, ed. Michael K. Green (New York: Peter Lang Publications, 1995), 246. 14. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19. 15. Gloria Anzaldua, "Border Crossings," Trivia (Spring 1989): 46. 16. Richard Wagamese, A Quality of Light (Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1997). 17. Richard Wagamese, Keeper 'N Me (Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1994), 37. 18. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 171. 19. Wagamese acknowledges the inclusion of these political events in his work of fiction in a brief preface to the novel.

Notes Pages 100 to 107 233

20. LaRocque, "Preface," xx. Okanagan storyteller Hariy Robinson expresses the oral/written binary as racial difference in his creation story about twins, one of whom is the literate "white man"; the other, older one, "the Indian" who does not have "the paper" (Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller, comp. and ed. Wendy Wickwire [Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1989], 40-52). 21. The article by Joyce Atcheson titled "Who's God? Whose God" in Waivatay News, a bilingual (Oji-Cree/English) newspaper published in Sioux Lookout, northwest Ontario, illustrates the different views. 22. Means, "Same Old Song." But Linda Hogan, whom Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm quotes in her article on "cultural difference," asserts that "although it's possible for immigrants to have the connectedness to the land ... it's not the land all your stories took place on, the land all the myths come from, your ancestors" (Akiwenzie-Damm, "We Belong to this Land," in Literary Pluralities, ed. Verduyn, 85). 23. Besides being stereotypical, Johnny's associations with Germany hint at a European, more than a specifically German, culture: Wiener Schnitzel is a dish originally from Austria, the polka a dance from Bohemia, and the Rhineland a region in Germany. It may be assumed that Wagamese deliberately created this incongruent mix of signifiers in order to write back against the colonial view of an undifferentiated North American Native culture. 24. For further insights into the topic of Karl May's story of blood brotherhood and its significance for the Indianertuemelei of present-day Germany, see Katrin Sieg's essay "Ethnic Drag and National Identity: Multicultural Crises, Crossings, and Interventions" (in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998]), in which she interprets the blood brotherhood as "Wiedergutmachungsfantasie (fantasy of restitution)" (301). 25. Emma Lee Warrior, "Compatriots," in All My Relations, ed. King. 26. Petra Fachinger, "Cross-Dressing as Appropriation in the Short Stories of Emma Lee Warrior," Studies in American Indian Literatures 8, 3 (Fall 1996): 40. 27. Cecil King, "Here Come the Anthros," in Indians and Anthropologists, ed. Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmermann (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 115.

28. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 82. 29. Ibid., 3, 80. 30. Emma Lee Warrior, "How I Came to Have a Man's Name," in Reinventing the Enemy's Language, ed. Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird (New York: Norton, 1997), 59. 31. John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 291.

234

NOTES PAGES 108 TO 118

32. Hartmut Lutz, "Confronting Cultural Imperialism: First Nations People Are Combating Continued Cultural Theft," in Multiculturalism in North America and Europe: Social Practices—Literary Visions, ed. Hans Braun and Wolfgang Klooss (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995), 147. 33. Sieg, "Ethnic Drag," 297. 34. Lutz, "Confronting Cultural Imperialism," 147. 35. Ibid., 145.

THE PROBLEM OF ESSENTIALIZING

1. Quoted in Womack, Red on Red, 3. 2. Rose, "All This Fuss," 15. 3. Ibid., 21. 4. Von Berg and Lutz provide an overview of the discussions on "whiteshamanism" and cultural appropriation in their article '"Pounded Earth and Heartbeats'. 5. Thomas King, Truth & Bright Water (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1999), 25. 6. Diana Fuss, identification papers (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 152. 7. Ibid., 148. 8. Louise Bernice Halfe, Bear Bones & Feathers (Regina: Coteau Books, 1994), 103-104. The following translations are provided: nohkom: grandmother; nimosom; grandfather; isistaivina: understanding, teachings, beliefs; matotsan: sweatlodge; and kimoti: stealing. 9. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 73. 10. Ibid, 74. 11. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 21. 12. Lee Maracle, "Polka Partners, Uptown Indians and White Folks," in Sojourner's Truth and Other Stories (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1990), 90. 13. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, eds., The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1995), 12. 14. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 74.

Notes Pages 119 to 128 235

READING FOR MOVEMENT AND MIGRATION COLONIAL BOUNDARIES, DE-COLONIAL MOVEMENTS 1. Armand Ruffo, "The Season," in Opening in the Sky (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1994), 92. 2. Rita Joe, "Migration Indian," in Lnu and Indians We're Called (Charlottetown: Ragweed Press, 1991), 24. 3. Colin G. Galloway, New Worlds for /4//(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 142. 4. Maria Campbell, "Jacob," in Stories of the Road Allowance People (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1995), 88. 5. Quoted in Galloway, New Worlds, 135. 6. Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 281. 7. Florence Stratton, "Cartographic Lessons: Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush and Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water" Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1999): 84. 8. King, Truth & Bright Water, 130. 9. Robin Ridington, "Happy Trails to You. Contexted Discourse and Indian Removals in Thomas King's Truth & Bright Water," Canadian Literature 167 (Winter 2000): 103. 10. Basil Johnston, By Canoe and Moccasin: Some Native Place Names of the Great Lakes (Lakefield, ON: Waapoone, 1986), 37. 11. As is, for example, asserted by Ward Churchill and Dora-Lee Larson: "American Indians did not migrate to this hemisphere" ("The Same Old Song in Sad Refrain," in Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Churchill, 66). 12. Galloway, New Worlds, 136. 13. Ibid., 151. 14. Thomas King, "Introduction," in All My Relations, ed. King, xii. 15. Helmut Lutz, "Contemporary Native Literature in Canada and 'The Voice of the Mother,'" in 0 Canada. Essays on Canadian Literature and Culture, ed. Jorn Carlson (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1995), 86. 16. Louise Bernice Halfe, Blue Marrow (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998). 17. Meira Cook, "Bone Memory: Transcribing Voice in Louise Halfe's Blue Marrow," Canadian Literature 166 (Autumn 2000): 103. 18. Ibid., 104. 19. Ibid., 105. 20. Beth Cuthand, "Four Songs for the Fifth Generation," in Voices in the Waterfall (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1989).

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NOTES PAGES 129 TO 134

21. Helmut Lutz, "'O Canada' The National State and International Ecology in Contemporary Native Literature in Canada," in Literary Responses to Arctic Canada, ed. Jorn Carlson. Proceedings from the Third International Conference of the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies, University of Oslo, 1990 (Lund: The Nordic Association for Canadian Studies, 1993), 111. 22. Emma LaRocque, "Tides, Towns and Trains," in Feminist Spaces: Cultural Readings from India and Canada, ed. Malashri Lai (New Delhi: Allied Publishers Limited, 1997), 106. 23. A similar sentiment is expressed by Inuk writer Alootook Ipellie in his poem "Waking Up": Waking up From what was literally A nomadic life the night before To a lifestyle where Inuit hunters Spend all their precious time Sitting in front of a computer Pushing predetermined buttons and keys, (in Moses and Goldie, eds. Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, 319.) 24. Marilyn Dumont, "The Devil's Language," in A Really Good Brown Girl (London, ON: Brick Books, 1996). 25. Jeannette Armstrong, Slash (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1985), 133. 26. Thomas King, "A Short History of Indians in Canada," Toronto Life 32, 11 (August 1997). Reprinted in Canadian Literature 161-162 (Summer/Autumn 1999). 27. Lynette Hunter, Literary Value/Cultural Power: Verbal Arts in the Twenty-First Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 63. 28. In a conversation, Hartmut Lutz suggested that the name Rudy may allude to Rudy Wiebe; continuing such a reading, I would speculate that Bill may be an allusion to William P. Kinsella, another Canadian writer interested in Native themes. 29. George Ryga, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1970). 30. Emma LaRocque, Defeathering the Indian (Agincourt: The Book Society of Canada, Ltd., 1975). 31. Johnston, By Canoe, 9. The play Toronto at Dreamer's Rock by Anishnabe Drew Hayden Taylor, which emphasizes naming as an important aspect of Anishnabe culture, explains the name Toronto in the following way: Keesic [character from the past]: "Those people to the south have a word for where people gather to trade, but it covers any place where important things happen. It is called 'Toronto.'"

Notes Pages 134 to 137 237

Rusty [character from the present]: "So we're like a little miniToronto right up here. That's cool." Michael [character from the future]: "Actually in my time, the metropolis of Toronto almost reaches to the shore of Huron. Traders, eh?" 32. The fall of the Sky Woman is called "the myth of the Earth-grasper" by William Fenton, who also claims that although this myth can be regarded "as a mirror of Iroquoian culture," its "principle motifs . . . are at home in the mythology of neighboring Woodland peoples" ("This Island, the World on Turtle's Back," in Critical Essays on Native American Literature, ed. Andrew Wiget [Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1985], 140). 33. Dennis McPherson, class lecture, Winter 1999. 34. Kimberly M. Blaeser, "Studies in Migration," in Gatherings, vol. vii, ed. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Jeannette Armstrong (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1993). 35. Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1988). Ian Ross, fareWel (Winnipeg: Scirocco Drama, 1998). 36. Leanne Yohemas-Hayes, "Natives' Migraton an Urban Myth," Chronicle Journal (24 July 1999). 37. Paul Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat? What Kind of Indian Are You?," in Why are you telling me this? Eleven Acts of Intimate Journalism, ed. Heather Elton, Barbara Moon, and Don Obe (The Banff Centre for the Arts: Banff Centre Press, 1997), 146-147. 38. Ibid. 39. LaRocque, "Tides," 106. 40. Gareth Griffiths, "The Myth of Authenticity," in De-Scribing Empire: PostColonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffins and Alan Lawson (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 83. 41. LaRocque, "Tides," 106. 42. George Copway, Life, Letters & Speeches, ed. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Donald B. Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 69. 43.1 often discussed this distinction with Michele Sam from the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket First Nation, graduate student in Social Work at Lakehead University. She integrated Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity into the discussions of her MA thesis on "The Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Perception of the Welfare of Children." 44. Christine Welsh, "Women in the Shadows: Reclaiming a Metis Heritage," in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism, ed. Heble, Pennee, and Struthers, 65. 45. Ibid. 46. Beatrice Culleton-Mosionier, In Search of April Raintree (Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1983).

238

NOTES PAGES 138 TO 144

MOVING BETWEEN CULTURES, LANGUAGES, AND LITERACIES

1. Wagamese, Keeper 7VMe, 137. 2. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 219. 3. Mukherjee, "Ideology," 37. 4. Susan Gingell, "When X Equals Zero: The Politics of Voice in First Peoples Poetry by Women," English Studies in Canada 24, 4 (December 1998): 454. 5. It was, in particular, my graduate student Peter Rasevych (Anishnabe) who made me understand the transformative power of Native literature and Native philosophy. 6. Womack, Red on Red, 7. 7. Lutz, "Contemporary Native Literature," 85-86. 8. Louis Owens, "Other Destinies, Other Plots. An Introduction to Indian Novels," in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 15. 9. Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 48. 10. Halfe, Blue Marrow, 35. 11. Jeannette Armstrong, "Land Speaking," in Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, ed. Simon J. Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 192, 193. 12. LaRocque, "Preface," xxvi. 13. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen, The Empire Writes Back (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 41. 14. Margery Fee, "Discourse Conventions in Fourth-World Fiction in English," in Defending New Idioms and Alternative Forms of Expression, ed. Eckhard Breitinger. ASNEL Papers 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 45. 15. Ashcroft, et al., The Empire, 2. 16. King, "Godzilla," 243. 17. Womack, Red on Red, 7. 18. Fee, "Discourse Conventions," 45. 19. Armstrong, "Land Speaking," 187, 191. 20. Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 206. 21. Ashcroft, et al., The Empire, 42. 22. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (1957; Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 110. The most fervent proponent of the importance of Indigenous languages around the world is Kenyan writer and scholar Ngugi Wa Thiongo'o (e.g., Decolonizing the Word: The Politics of Language in African Literature [Oxford: James Currey Ltd., 1986]).

Notes Pages 144 to 150 239

23. Johnston, "One Generation," 100. 24. Lee Maracle, "Ramparts Hanging in the Air," in Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures, ed. Sky Lee, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, and Betsy Warland (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1990), 169. 25. Mukherjee, "Teaching Ethnic," 168. 26. Ashcroft, et al., The Empire, 53. 27.1 find it very revealing that it was obviously easier for Arun Mukherjee and her students to contact a South Asian immigrant than an Aboriginal Canadian. Her experience demonstrates the flaws of a so-called multicultural society in which Aboriginal people are still segregated. 28. However, some Aboriginal students in my classes also resented this style because they interpreted it as representing their peoples as illiterate. Gingell addresses this concern by pointing out that the poetic style should take away from the impression that this is a stylistically inferior literature. She argues that these writers (or a transcriber like Wendy Wickwire) appropriate "to their own purpose the Western hierarchy of genres that places poetry above prose" ("When X Equals Zero," 458). 29. Ashcroft et al., The Empire, 7. 30. Hartwig Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 148. 31. Douglas Cardinal and Jeannette Armstrong, The Native Creative Process (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1991). 32. Lome Simon, Stones and Switches (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1994). 33. Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 206. 34. Slipperjack, Silent Words, 30. 35. Ibid., 116. 36. W.D. Ashcroft, "Is that the Congo? Language as Metonymy in the PostColonial Text," World Literature Written in English 29, 2 (Autumn 1989): 4. 37. Home, "Listening to Silences," 123. 38. Basil Johnston, Moose Meat and Wild Rice (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978), 27. 39. Ron Marken, "Foreword," in Stories of the Road Allowance People, trans. Campbell, 5. 40. Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 48. 41. Campbell, trans., Stories of Road Allowance People, 87. 42. Gingell, "X Equals Zero," 453. 43. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, 15.

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NOTES PAGES 151 TO 156

44. Ashcroft, et al., The Empire. 45. Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl, 55. 46. Gloria Anzaldua, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," in Ways of Reading, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996), 41. 47. King, "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," 244. 48. Gingell, "X Equals Zero," 456. 49. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, 16. 50. Gingell, "X Equals Zero," 452. Chantal Zabus defines indigenization of language in an African context: "Indigenization refers to the writer's attempt at textualizing differentiation and at conveying African concepts, thoughtpatterns, and linguistic features through the ex-colonizer's language." Indigenization then means hybridization, creating an "interlanguage or third code." (Zabus, African Palimpsest, 3, 4). 51. Louise Bernice Halfe, "The Tears that Wove Our Songs," NeWest Review (April-May 1995): 13. 52. Cook, "Bone Memory," 96. 53. In her review of Blue Marrow, Shea criticizes Halfe for lack of distinction among different voices and between prose and poetry. However, I see in Halfe's "lack" of clear delineation of both form and content an expression of her evocation of intertwined cultures and (hi)stories: Snot rainbow babies Parliament chieftains Fancy Dancers. Symphony. Drummers. Ballerina. (Blue Marrow, 63) 54. In a CBC radio documentary from January 3, 2000, a report on the background behind the fishing disputes between Mi'kmaqs and Euro-Canadians in Burnt Church, Nova Scotia, was titled "Gluscap Returns. The Rebirth of a Nation." The documentary made it clear that Gluscap and stories about him are not just legends and myths but the cultural and spiritual backbone of decolonization. 55. Silas T. Rand, Legends of the Micmacs, ed. Helen L. Webster (New York and London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 229. 56. As repeatedly stated at a Suicide Prevention Conference in January 2000 in Thunder Bay, "switching beliefs" and the resulting disorientation are part of the reasons for an increasing number of suicides of young Anishnabe people in northwest Ontario, where the reserves are under the influence of a variety of Christian denominations. 57. Owens, "Other Destinies," 13.

Notes Pages 156 to 165 241

58. Ibid., 10, 11, 12. 59. Ibid., 6. 60. Paul Seesequasis, "Notes on Authors," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie, 519.

TRAVELLING KNOWLEDGES THE "TRICKSTER'S" WANDERLUST 1. Jim Cheney, "Tricksters in the Shadow of Civilization," lecture at the Aboriginal People's Conference, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, 18 October 1996. 2. Daniel David Moses explains the genealogy of this play in his article "How My Ghosts Got Pale Faces," in Speaking for the Generations, ed. Ortiz. 3. Individual preference cannot be emphasized enough. I had one graduate student who wrote a whole thesis on "the trickster" and another one who did not want to integrate any orally passed down stories and teachings into academic writing. Both identified themselves as Native students. 4. Johnston, "One Generation," 103. 5. Makeda Silvera, "Keeper of the Culture," in The Other Woman (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1995), 229. 6. Armand Ruffo, "Why Native Literature?" in Native North America, ed. Renee Hulan (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999), 118-119. 7. Joy Asham Harasymchuk (Fedorick), "It Was No Surprise to Me" / "Es hat mich nicht ueberrascht," in Four Feathers: Poems and Stories by Canadian Native Authors (Isnabrueck, Germany: VC Verlags—Cooperative, 1992). 8. Mary Lou DeBassige, "Nothing Was ... Is ... Ever Bad ... or Wrong," The Magazine to Re-Establish the Trickster (1998), 11. Rockefeller scholar Jim Cheney follows Meeker's argument in The Comedy of Survival: In Search of an Environmental Ethics when he asserts: "Comedy and ecology are summed up in Raven, the ecological trickster" ("Tricksters"). 9. Gerald Vizenor, ed., Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Literatures (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 19, 4. 10. Quoted in Jennifer Kelly, "Coming out of the House: A Conversation with Lee Maracle,"y4nW25, 1 (January 1994): 87. Vizenor, Narrative Chance, 6. 11. Dumont, "Popular Images," 49. 12. Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1989), 13. 13. Interesting in this context is Rogan Taylor's observation that "nomadism is

242

NOTES PAGES 165 TO 169

religious life" (The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar [London: Anthony Blond, 1985], 61). Also, Australian Aborigine Sally Morgan mentions in her autobiography My Place that the "walkabout" is a "period of wandering as a nomad, often as undertaken by Aborigines who feel the need to leave the place where they are in contact with white society, and return for spiritual replenishment to their traditional way of life" (My Place [London: Virago Press, 1998], 325, footnote). 14. Basil Johnston, "Nanabush," Canadian Children's Literature Journal 31/32 (1983): 43. 15. John McLeod, "The Shivering Tree," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie, 510. 16. Ibid, 273. 17. Harry Robinson, "Coyote Gets a Name," in Write It on Your Heart, comp. and ed. Wickwire, 62. 18. Johnston, By Canoe, 10. 19. Paul Seesequasis, "The Republic of Tricksterism," in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie, 411. 20. This legend may be found, for example, in Basil Johnston's Tales the Elders Told. Ojibway Legends (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1981) with the character Nanabush, titled "The 'close your eyes' dance," and in Ray and Stevens, Sacred Legends of the Sandy Lake Cree, in the version of "Wee-sa-kay-jac and the Ducks." See also Louis Bird and Paul DePasquale, "Wissaakechaahk and the Geese," in Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America, ed. Brian Swann (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). 21. This is oral knowledge that I hear often. In writing, Paula Gunn Allen comments on the non-fixity of beginnings and endings in Spider Woman's Granddaughters, 21. 22. McLeod, "The Shivering Tree," 268. 23. Thomas King read Robinson's story "Twins," he admired the interfusional quality of the Robinson/Wickwire collection Write It on Your Heart, and acknowledged the influence of Robinson's storytelling style on his writing. In his Globe and Mail review "The Voice and Performance of the Storyteller," King states that "in reading Robinson, one is virtually forced to read out loud, thereby closing the circle, the oral becoming the written becoming the oral" (10 February 1990). In his interview with Peter Gzowski ("Thomas King on Green Grass, Running Water," Canadian Literature 161-162 [Summer/Autumn 1999]: 72), Thomas King states: "I read those stories [by Harry Robinson] and they just sort of turned things around for me." 24. Hutcheon, Canadian Postmodern, 2. 25. In this autobiographical essay, titled "How I Spent My Summer Vacation:

Notes Pages 169 to 172 243

History, Story and the Cant of Authenticity" (1997), Thomas King tells the story of learning how to tell a story right. It also comments on the right way of listening: "not to interrupt as the other man had done" (in Landmarks, ed. Robert Birks, Toni Eng, and Julie Wlachli [Scarborough: Prentice Hall, Allyn and Bacon Canada, 1998], 252, 250). 26. Paula Gunn Allen explains in her comments on Aboriginal creation stories: even the All Spirit has limited power as well as a sense of proportion and respect for the powers of the creatures. Contrast this spirit with the Judeo-Christian God who makes everything and tells everything how it may and may not function if it is to gain his respect and blessing and whose commandments make no allowance for change or circumstance For the American Indian, the ability of all creatures to share in the process of ongoing creation makes all things sacred (The Sacred Hoop, 57). 27. Robin Ridington, "Re-Creation in Canadian First Nations Literatures: 'When You Sing it Now, Just Like New,'" Anthropologica XLIII (2001): 221. 28. Khader, "Postcolonial Nativeness," 93. 29. King, "The One About Coyote," 210. 30. Doris O'Brien's MA thesis "Reading Tricksters" focusses on the topic of "the trickster" as reader in Thomas King's novel Green Grass, Running Water. 3l.Maracle, "Preface," 11. 32. King, "The One About Coyote," 72. 3 3. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii. 34. Asham Harasymchuk, "It Was No Surprise." 35. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, "Says Who: Colonization, Identity and Defining Indigenous Literature," in Looking at the Words, ed. Armstrong, 24. 36. Blaeser, "Native Literature," in Looking at the Words of Our People, ed. Armstrong, 56. 37. Ruffo, "From Myth," 152. 38. Ibid., 153. 39. Ibid. 40. Susie O'Brien, "'Please Eunice, Don't Be Ignorant: The White Reader as Trickster in Lee Maracle's Fiction," Canadian Literature 144 (Spring 1995): 87. 41. Quoted in ibid., 87-88.

244

NOTES PAGES 173 TO 175

THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY

1. Vizenor quoted in Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat?," 162. 2. In her interview with Hartmut Lutz, Slipperjack emphasizes that, as a writer, she does not want to "pop up in the middle of a page somewhere" because she wants the character to be "authentic and true to the story" (Contemporary Challenges, 209). 3. Margo Kane, Moonlodge, in Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, ed. Moses and Goldie. 4. Beth Brant, Writing as Witness (Toronto: Women's Press, 1994), 8. 5. Margo Kane, "From the Centre," 5. 6. Drew Hayden Taylor, "Alive and Well: Native Theatre in Canada," in Literary Pluralities, ed. Verduyn, 224. 7. Jovette Marchessault, "Song One: the riverside," trans. Yvonne M. Klein, in All My Relations, ed. King, 188. 8. Kane, "From the Centre," 27. 9. Moses and Goldie, eds., Anthology of Canadian Native Literature,507. 10. Kane, "From the Centre," 26-27. 11. In her article about the creation of Moonlodge ("From the Centre"), Margo Kane mentions "the infamous 'scoops' by Children's Aid in the '50's" (27). Usually, as in the study by Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Grey, Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1997), this forced removal of children is referred to as "the Sixties Scoop," but there are variations from province to province. I want to acknowledge here the help of Social Work graduate student Michele Sam, herself an adoptee, who researches concepts of child welfare in her home community of the Ktunaxet Nation in interior BC, for providing me with background information on this topic. 12. Fournier and Grey emphasize the traumatic impact of the image of the car taking the child away on the memory of Native people who went through this experience: "'Big, shiny American cars would come on the reserve, followed by the social worker's car', says Maggie Blacksmith, now a Dakota Ojibway Child and Family Services social worker who herself lost a son to the Manitoba government. 'When they left, there'd be a little Indian child sitting in the back of the American car, bawling their eyes out" (Fournier and Grey, Stolen, 89). 13. Kane, "From the Centre," 27. 14. Margo Kane points out in her article: "At the same time I needed to acknowledge non-Native women I was raised with and raised by. They, too, nurtured me and taught me and laughed with me. Strong bonds had been forged that would never be denied" ("From the Centre," 27).

Notes Pages 176 to 186 245

15. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 15, 22. 16. Helen Gilbert, "De-Scribing Orality. Performance and Recuperation of Voice," in De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffins and Alan Lawson (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 101. 17. Young, Colonial Desire, 20. 18. Ibid., 22. 19. Shirley Cheechoo, Path With No Moccasins (West Bay, ON, 1991). 20. Castagno quoted in Harvie and Knowles, "Dialogic Monologue," 140. 21. Wilson quoted in ibid., 146. 22. Gilbert, "De-Scribing," 104. 23. Ibid. 24. Vizenor quoted in Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat?," 162. 25. Armstrong, Breath Tracks, 106. 26. Taylor, "Alive and Well," 231. 27. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 248. 28. Ibid, 292-293. 29. Khader, "Postcolonial Nativeness," 88. 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 381. 31. Khader, "Postcolonial Nativeness," 96. 32. An example of colonization's attempt to impose "forgetting" is well illustrated in Ignatia Broker's historical novel Night Flying Woman (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983) about the encroachment of European settlers on Anishnabe territory. 33. LaRocque, "Preface," xxviii. 34. Keyssar quoted in Harvie and Knowles, "Dialogic Monologue," 147. Also, Harvie and Knowles, 152. 35. Quoted in ibid., 155. 36. In a conversation, Anishnabe author George Kenny told me that, for Native people, anything that is taken out of its natural environment means bad luck. 37. Khader, "Postcolonial Nativeness," 89. 38. LaRocque, "Preface," xxviii. 39. Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sundance, ed. Harvey Arden (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 63.

246

NOTES PAGES 187 TO 189

40. Jeannette Armstrong explains in her interview with Janice Williamson her choice of male protagonist for her novel Slash: For practical reasons I decided the male character would be best in my storytelling, so I looked at everything I was angry and frustrated in the Native male who was torn between role and ego. In the end, through his metamorphosis into a personality, this character reconciled him to his feminine qualities. By "feminine" I mean the capacity for compassion, love, sensitivity, and understanding that's required by the soft non-aggressive approach. We call it "feminine" or "feminist" thought, but really it is the reconciliation of both male and female and the wholeness and healthiness of who we are as human beings that I wanted to move this character towards. (Williamson, Sounding Differences, 19) 41. Keeper teaches: ... we get sent out into the world ... carryin' two sets of gifts. The gifts of the father an' gifts of the mother.... We get told as men that we gotta be strong, gotta be fearless. Lotta us kinda start ignorin' the gifts of our mother.... But if you do that you can't be whole. Be complete. Gotta use the mother's gifts too. Like gentleness an' nurturin, livin in the heart (Wagamese, Keeper 'N Me, 115). 42. Moses, "How My Ghosts," 127. 43. King, "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," 243. 44. Powhiri Rika-Heke, "Tribes or Nations? Post or Fence? What's the Matter with Self-Definition," in Not on Any Map, ed. Stewart Murray (Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 177, 175, 174. 45. Allen, Sacred Hoop, 60, 46. Blaeser, "Native Literature," 56, 58. 47. Owens, "Other Destinies," 14. 48. Young, Colonial Desire, 22. 49. Monture and Bowerbank, Approaches to Studying, 3. 50. Julia Emberley, "Aboriginal Women's Writing and the Cultural Politics of Representation," in Women of the First Nations, ed. Christine Miller and Patricia Chuchryk (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1994), 105.

Notes Pages 190 to 198 247

THE GLOBAL SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND JUSTICE

1. Lee Maracle, "Sojourner's Truth," in Sojourner's Truth and Other Stories (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1990). 2. Simon, Stones and Switches, 29-31. 3. Allen, Sacred Hoop, 59. 4. Jordon Wheeler, "A Mountain Legend," in achimoona (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1985). 5. The fall of another Gabriel comes to mind here, not just the Biblical archangel, but its recreation in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1992), a novel that opens with the fall out of the sky (because of an airplane disaster) of two actors, Gabrieel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Their fall gives rise to a series of transmutations. 6. Alootook Ipellie, "Ascension of My Soul," in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1993), 14. 7. Michael Dash, "Marvellous Realism: The Way out of Negritude," in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 200. 8. Allen, Sacred Hoop, 60. 9.1 understand the mention of African heritage as a reference to Jesus's stay in Egypt. 10. O'Brien, "'Please Eunice,'" 91. A similar dissolution of boundaries has a humorous effect in Thomas King's story "The One About Coyote Going West" when, for example, Coyote's thoughts bump around and run into each other and when his mistake becomes a character in the story. 11. Alexander Wolfe [told by], Earth Elder Stories (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1989), xi. 12. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 48. One of their definitions, formulated against the background of their understanding of "the problematic agency of 'postcolonial hybridity'"(43), states the following: "Polycentric multiculturalism is not about 'touchy-feely' sensitivity toward other groups; it is about dispersing power, about empowering the disempowered, about transforming subordinating institutions and discourses" (48). 13. Kaarina Kailo, "Transcultural Travel: Indigenous Women and Mainstream Feminism," in Transcultural Travels: Essays in Canadian Literature and Society, ed. Mari Peepre-Bordessa. The Nordic Association for Canadian Studies Text Series, vol. 11 (Lund: Repro Lund University, 1994), 19-20. 14. DeBassige, "Nothing was . . .," 10-11. 15. Moore, "Decolonializing Criticism," 11. This is one of Moore's definitions of the terms in question: "The dialectic ignores the dialogic by reducing issues to binaries, while the dialogic continues to 'dialogue' with the dialectic by opening up more than binary possibilities" (10). 16. There is controversy not only about Emily Carr's work but also about Thoreau.

248

NOTES PAGES 198 TO 205

In her article "Native American Identity and Survival: Indigenism and Environmental Ethics," Native American scholar M. Annette Jaimes remarks that Thoreau "gave no credit to his local Native guides who, as Eastern Woodland Indians, provided him with information and insight" (in Issues in Native American Cultural Identity, ed. Michael K. Green [New York: Peter Lang, 1995], 274). 17. For a brief discussion of this poem, see Lutz's article "'O Canada!'" 18. Margaret Washington, ed., Narrative of Sojourner's Truth (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xv. 19. Moses, "How My Ghosts," 147.

CONCLUSION

1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart (New York: Continuum, 1997), 93. 2. It was only after I had finished writing my dissertation, which forms the basis for this book, that Helen Hoy's How Should I Read These? was published. I was very pleased to see that her last chapter "In/Conclusion" is written with a similar intent as my own, but I did not incorporate any of her specific ideas into my own inconclusive reasoning. 3. Lynette Hunter, Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers, Readers, and Publishing (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996), 10. 4. LaRocque, "leaching Aboriginal Literature," 217. 5. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 45. 6. Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl, 55. 7. Ibid. 8. Russell Ferguson, Marcia Tucker, and John Baldessari, eds., "In the Shadow of the West: An Interview with Edward Said," in Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art/MIT Press, 1990), 94. 9. Sherene H. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 170. 10. Halfe, Bear Bones, 105. 11. Shirley Sterling's autobiographical narrative about her residential school experience, titled My Name Is SEEPEETZA (Toronto: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1992), is seemingly structured around the home/school binary, but this binary is undercut in several ways.

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INDEX A Adamson, Joni 3 Adjusting to Reservation Life 135, 145, 171

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri 60 Alba, Virginia 45 Alcoff, Linda 45 Alexander, M. Jacqui 17 All My Relations 9, 11, 76 Allen, Paula Gunn 32, 34, 57, 191, 193 Angeconeb, Ahmoo 33, 84, 193 Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, An 32, 82, 145 Anzaldua, Gloria 5, 92, 97, 152 Armstrong, Jeannette 10, 11, 17, 29, 30,31,39,40,45,61,85,86,87, 88,91,93,126, 131,134, 142, 143, 145, 146, 152, 177, 185, 187 "Around the World in a Big Trout" 32 "Ascension of My Soul" 192 Ashcroft, W.D. 142, 143, 145, 147 "Ayash" 56, 57, 163, 178

B Baker, Annharte 31 Bakhtin, Mikhail 48, 176, 179, 181, 183,189 Barnes, Trevor xv Bear Bones & Feathers 145 Benton-Banai, Edward 124, 125 Bevis, William 47 Bhabha, Homi K. 25, 73, 92, 139, 176

Bildungsroman 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55,56,57 Black Elk Speaks 107 Blaeser, Kimberly 17, 64, 135, 171, 189 Blue Marrow 126, 128, 140, 152, 153 "Borders" 76 Bowerbank, Sylvia 139 Braidotti, Rosi xiii, 18, 23, 34, 43, 79, 80,98, 139 Brant, Beth 16, 35, 41, 62, 63, 64, 77, 78, 162, 174 Brill de Ramirez, Susan Berry xii, xiii, xv Bringhurst, Robert 14 Brody, Hugh 22 Burns, Diana 185 C

Galloway, Colin G. 122, 124, 125 Campbell, Maria 13, 123, 125, 126, 141, 143, 149, 150, 151, 152, 167 Cardinal-Schubert, Joane 198 Chambers, Ian 25, 26, 40, 44, 74, 75, 112, 136,139 Cheechoo, Shirley 177, 178, 187 Cheney, Jim 161, 162 Chrystos 185 "Circle the Wagons" 77 Clifford, James xiv, xvi, 24, 26, 27, 46, 118 Colonizer and the Colonized, The 144 "Compatriots" 9, 13, 39, 40, 61, 97, 105-109, 112,117, 173, 180

276

TRAVELLING K N O W L E D G E S

Conquest of America, The 3 Cook, Meira 128, 153 Cooper, Nancy 81 Copway, George 137 Cordova, Viola 46 Cornell, George 88 Coyote 34, 155, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170 Coyote City 162 "Coyote in the City" 133 "Coyote Learns a New Trick" 162 Crown of Columbus, The 181 Culleton-Mosionier, Beatrice xiv, xv, 137 Cuthand, Beth 128, 129, 135 D Dasenbrock, Reed Way xiii, 75 Dash, Michael 195 Davies, Carole Boyce xiv, 202 Decolonization of Imagination, The 117 Decolonizing Methodologies 106 Defeathering the Indian 155 Deleuze, Gilles 25, 34, 42, 70, 111, 181 Deloria,Vme51,87, 91 Dictionary of Cultural Literacy 62 "Devil's Language, The" 130, 203 "Disempowerment of First North American Native Peoples and Empowerment Through Their Writing, The" 10, 86

Drobot, Eve 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 174 Dumont, Marilyn 40, 43, 77, 130, 151, 165,185,203 E Ecstasy of Rita Joe, The 155

Emberley, Julia 189 Erdrich, Louise 70, 181 Ermine, Willie xiv Essentially Speaking 116 Ethnocriticism 26 F Fachinger, Petra 10 fareWel 135 Fee, Margery 142 First People First Voices 6 Food and Spirits 16, 65 Forbes, Jack D. 34 "Four Songs for the Fifth Generation" 128,135 Freire, Paulo 201 "From the Centre of the Circle the Story Emerges" 174,206 Fuss, Diana 114, 116

G Gap, The 90 Gastarbeiterliteratur 35 Geyshik, Ron 32, 33 Gilbert, Helen 178 Gingell, Susan 150 Gluskeb 155, 156, 163 God Is Red 91 "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial" 142 "Good Red Road, The" 174 "Going Home" 69, 78 Goldie, Terry 82, 145 Gould, Janice 7, 39 Green Grass, Running Water 34, 72, 146 Greenblatt, Stephen 22 Griffiths, Gareth 136, 143 Grossberg, Lawrence xi, xiv, 15

Index 277

Groulx, David 85 Guattari, Felix 23, 34, 42, 111, 181, 182 Gunew, Sneja xv H Hal/breed 11, 125, 126 Halfe, Louise 43, 114, 116, 126, 135, 140, 141, 143, 145, 152, 154, 195, 204, 205, 206 Hall, Stuart xi, xv Harasymchuk, Joy Asham (Fedorick) 164, 171 Haraway, Donna xv Harjo, Joy 55 Harvie, Jennifer 177, 183 "Here Are Our Voices" 60 Highway, Tomson 92, 135, 136, 145, 165, 192 Hirsch, E.D. 62 Hirsch, Marianne 44, 54 "History Lesson" 85, 87, 91 Honour the Sun 12, 45, 47, 58, 130, 146 "Honey Pot, The" 148 Hooks, Bell 65 Home, Dee 54, 55, 147, 148 Hoy, Helen xv, 17, 43, 44, 66 "How I Came to Have a Man's Name" 107 Hulan, Renee 7, 45, 60 Hunter, Lynette 201 Hutcheon, Linda 72, 169, 171 I "I Don't Know This October Stranger" 27, 28

Indian Act xiv, 45, 60, 61, 70, 135 Indian Affairs, Department of 11

Indian Schooldays 144 Indian Woman 179, 185 "Indigenous Peoples and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge" 96 In Search of April Raintree xiv, 157, 195 Ipellie, Alootook 192 Isernhagen, Hartwig 61 J "Jacob" 125, 149, 150, 151 Jacobs, Jane 26 Jenness, Eileen 22 Joe, Rita xi, xiii, xiv, 4, 122, 123 Johnston, Basil 4, 9, 16, 24, 44, 54, 62, 65,84,85,105,124,134,144, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 162, 166, 205

K Kailo, Kaarina 196 Kane,Margo 16, 17, 65, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 187,

195 Keeper 'NMe 97-100, 139, 152, 156, 157, 158, 178, 181, 187, 195 Keeshig-Tobias, Lenore 9, 36, 43, 162, 165,171 Kenny, George 6, 12, 28, 29, 125 Kenny, Maurice 9, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76,77,78,79,80,81, 155, 161, 173 Khader, Jamil 42, 170, 181, 184

King, Cecil 105, 109 King, Thomas 5, 9, 11, 12, 24, 25, 26, 34,49,57,61,72,76,113,123, 125,131,132,133,134,136, 142, 146, 152, 156, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 183, 187, 189 Kiss of the Fur Queen 192

278

TRAVELLING K N O W L E D G E S

Knowles, Richard Paul 177, 183 Kogawa,Joy45, 59 Krupat, Arnold xiv, xv, 26, 27, 33, 34, 41,46 Kyoti30, 31,85,95, 134

L LaDuke, Winona 87 Land Sliding 30 LaRocque, Emma 4, 24, 60, 85, 100, 129,130, 133, 136, 137,139, 142,182, 185, 186,201 Levinas, Emmanuel 64, 65 Lima, Maria 46, 54 Littlechild, George 135 Looking at the Words of Our People 17 Lutz, Helmut xiii, 12, 16, 46, 61, 107, 108, 129, 141 M "Magic of Others, The" 172 Maracle, Brian 77 Maracle, Dawn T. 77, 161 Maracle, Lee xii, 6, 11, 12, 15, 59, 64, 83,89,91,92,93,95,96, 102, 104,109, 117, 118, 144,163, 165,170, 171, 173, 188,191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 207 Marchessault, Jovette 174 Marken, Ron 3

May, Karl 5, 103 McLeodJohn 165 McPherson, Dennis 135 Means, Russell 87, 88, 102 Medicine River 24, 25, 72 Memmi, Albert 144 "Migration Indian" 122

Migration, The Great Flood xii Mishomis Book, The 124 Mitchell, WJ.T. 42 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 17 Momaday, Scott 33, 173 Monture, Rick 34, 189 Moodie, Susanna 123, 124 Moonlodge 173, 174 177-179, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 199 Moore, David L. 40, 42, 56, 66, 197 Moose Meat and Wild Rice 148, 151 Morris, Jim 56 Morris, Meaghan xv Morriseau, Norval xii, xiii Moses, Daniel David 35, 82, 83, 145, 162, 187, 199 "Mountain Legend, A" 192, 195 Muecke, Stephen 23 Mukherjee, Arun 65, 66, 144 "MyLedders"134, 140 N Nanabush 124, 134, 155, 163, 165, 166, 167, 187 Native Creative Process, The 145 "Native Literature. Seeking a Critical Center" 17

NeihardtJohnG. 107 New, William H. 30, 47, 84 New Worlds for All 122 No Foreign Land 6, 11 O Obasan 59, 60 Obomsawin, Alanis 65 O'Brien, Susie 70, 172

"oh Canada" 198

Index

"One About Coyote Going West, The" 163, 166, 168, 183 "One Generation from Extinction" 62 "Oratory: Coming to Theory" xii Other Side of Eden, The 22 Owens, Louis 141, 156, 158, 170, 189 P Path With No Moccasins 177, 178, 179, 187 Parekh, Bhikhu 117 Pechter, Ed 63 Perreault, Jeanne 61, 86 Petrone, Penny 6, 45 Pelletier, Wilfred 6, 17 Peltier, Leonard 186 Pieterse,Jan 117 Pittman, Barbara L. 48 "Polka Partners, Uptown Indians and White Folks" 117 Poole,Ted6, 17 Pratt, Geraldine 22 Pratt, Marie Louise 15 "Preface. You Become the Trickster" 95,96 "Problem of Speaking for Others, The" 45 "Prophecy, The" 84

Q,R

Quality of Light, A 97-106, 112 "Rain" 9, 70-79, 161, 173 Raven 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 104, 118, 155, 157, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 192 "Raven Steals the Light, The" 14 RavensongS9-97, 102, 109, 111, 118, 163, 164, 178, 192

Reading the Country 2 5 "Report from the Classroom" 65 Reid, Bill 15 Rez Sisters, The 135, 136, 145 Ridington, Robin 124, 170 Robinson, Harry 145, 150, 152, 165, 167, 169, 170 Roe, Paddy 2 3 Rooke, Constance 11 Rose, Wendy 43, 65, 112 Ross, Ian 90, 135 Roughing It in the Bush 123 Routes xiv, 24 Ruffo, Armand 41, 43, 57, 122, 134, 163, 171, 189,202 Rushdie, Salman 8, 21, 25, 27, 34, 79 Ryga, George 133 S Sacred Legends of the Sandy Lake Cree 53,57 Said, Edward xi, 11, 22, 23, 42, 44, 97, 170,203 Salat, M.F. 58 Sards, Greg 9, 13, 14, 15 Savageau, Cheryl 42, 111, 116 "Season, The" 121,134 Seesequasis, Paul 136, 137, 158, 166 Sequoya, Jane 33, 34, 62 "Shivering Tree, The" 165 Shohat,Ella41, 196 "Short History of Indians in Canada, A" 131-134 Sieg, Katrin 108, 112 Silent Words 12, 45-61, 74, 46, 130, 146, 147, 163, 173, 174, 178, 185,186,191 Silko, Leslie Marmon 33, 54, 55

279

280

TRAVELLING KNOWLEDGES

Silvera, Makeda 36, 162 Simon, Lome 145, 146, 152, 154, 156, 191 Slash 30, 45, 126, 131 Slipperjack, Ruby 11, 12, 14, 16, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 74, 130, 143, 144, 145, 148, 173, 174, 185, 186, 191 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 106, 116, 118, 158,162 "Sojourner's Truth" 35, 191-195, 198, 199

Truth & Bright Water 115, 125, 132, 156 "Twins: White and Indian" 167

U,V "Unclean Tides" 31 "Untitled" 81 van den Abbeele, Georges 71, 80 Vizenor, Gerald 165, 167, 173 von Berg, Stephanie 61

Te Ewe Win 55

W Wagamese, Richard 47, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 112,118, 137, 139,152,157, 158,181,187 Warrior, Emma Lee 9, 10, 15, 39, 40, 61, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114,116,117,173 Washington, Margaret 198 Weesageechak 155, 163 Welsh, Christine 137 Wheeler, Jordan 192, 195 While the Caribou was in Europe 81 Whitt, Laurie 96 "Who's Political Here?" 194 Wickwire, Wendy 145, 150, 152 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 48 Williamson, Janice 59

Teraoka, Arlene 3 5

Wolfe, Alexander 195

"This Is a Story" 30, 31, 39, 85, 88, 95, 134, 142, 165

Womack, Craig S. 36, 140, 142

"Tides, Towns and Trains" 130, 139

Writing as Witness 77

Sojourner's Truth 194, 199 "Spirit of Maundau-meen, The" 84, 85 Spivak, Gayatri 8, 55 Squaw Poems 185 Stam, Robert 41, 196 Stones and Switches 145, 152, 154, 156, 191 Stories of the Road Allowance People, The 126, 149 "Studies in Migration" 135 "Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question" 185 T

Taylor, DrewHayden 161, 174, 187, 192

Tiffin, Helen 145 Todorov, Tzvetan xv, 3 Toronto at Dreamer's Rock 192 "Trick or Treat" 136 Trinh, Minh-Ha 26

Women in the Shadows 137 Writing the Circle 60

X,Y,Z Young, Robert 176, 177, 189