Introduction

Reading Indigenous Women’s Life Writing in Australia and North America:

A Twenty-first Century Perspective

The main goal of this introductory section is to outline some of the general

characteristics of Indigenous women’s life writing 1 in Australia and North America and

indicate the motives for a comparative structural and thematic analysis of the chosen

narratives. Although it is not my intention to give the impression that Indigenous women’s

life writing is a homogenous textual group, I want to foreground certain parallels this genre

offers in both regions. These parallels derive first and foremost from the common histories

of European invasion of the two continents and the subsequent process of colonization of

1 Throughout this work, I use the term “life writing,” rather than “auto/biography,” to refer to the genre of personal narratives. Generally speaking, I understand the term “auto/biography” as being closely related to the

Euroamerican literary tradition which has developed its own theory of auto/biography. I use the term “life

writing” as a broader term, which can incorporate auto/biographical accounts, as-told-to auto/biographies,

collaborative oral history projects, confessional and trauma narratives, testimonies, as well as collective and

communal life narratives. In my view, this term is particularly relevant as it is often positioned as challenging

the foundations of Western auto/biography of portraying one’s own or the other’s individual life and self. In

Australia, the term “life writing” is used almost exclusively to designate Indigenous women’s life stories,

hence the rationale provided by Moreton-Robinson: “The term ‘life-writing’ has been used because

Indigenous women’s texts that have been analysed do not fit the usual strict chronological narrative of

autobiography, and they are the products of collaborative lives” ( Talkin’ Up to the White 1). On the

other hand, the term “auto/biography” (e.g. Arnold Krupat) as well as the term “personal narratives” (e.g.

Kathleen Mullen Sands) are usually used in scholarly debates about Native North American life writing. Even

here, however, the relevance of the term “auto/biography” for Native North American narratives has been

contested (e.g. in Hertha Dawn Wong’s Sending My Heart Back Across the Years ). Therefore I use the term

“life writing” as the best one possible, although there are certainly texts, such as the life narratives discussed

in my first chapter, that do transgress even this broadly defined term.

1 the peoples native to both areas. The similar treatment of Indigenous people in Australia

and North America 2, which included genocide, relocation, assimilation, and omnipresent

oppression and discrimination, has lead to a shared sense of injustice and disempowerment

among Indigenous communities.3 Since Indigenous literary production in Australia and

North America is chiefly concerned with the aftermath of colonization in the form of racism

and cultural imperialism on the part of the dominant societies, I have decided to apply a

thorough comparative approach to Indigenous women’s life writing in both areas and trace

the characteristics that the texts share. Some of the suggested features are not exclusive to

the genre of Indigenous life writing and can relate to Indigenous literatures in general (e.g.

re-writing history, political and representational nature), some of them are more relevant to

Indigenous life writing only (e.g. testimonial and scriptotherapeutic elements, collective

selves), and some are specific for Indigenous women’s personal narrative (e.g. writing life

2 At this point, I would like to justify the exclusion of New Zealand Maori life writing from this dissertation,

even though Maori women’s narratives would certainly fit my arguments here and New Zealand comes

forward somewhat naturally as a fourth settler colony where the process of colonization by the British Empire

and the subjugation of Indigenous population is historically, socially and politically comparable with the

situation in Australia, Canada, and the USA. However, being trained in North American literature, the

research on Aboriginal women’s literary production in Australia for the purposes of the comparative analysis

has started as a kind of a self-study and has proved to be such an extensive area that to include another, i.e.

Maori literature, would simply be impossible to manage. Nevertheless, this particular area remains something

that can be elaborated on in the future.

3 A note on terminology: although, especially when drawing more general conclusions, I use “Indigenous” as

an umbrella term for Aboriginal people in Australia, in Canada and Native Americans in the

USA, I also refer to “Aboriginal,” “Native North American,” “First Nations” or “Native American” people

where I speak about a particular area, e.g. Aboriginal women in Australia, and where my sources explicitly

use these specific terms. I am aware that some of these terms are considered problematic by some Indigenous

scholars and writers who prefer to be identified, for example, by their tribal affiliations rather than by a

homogenizing, Western-constructed category.

2 as an act of empowerment, re-presenting Indigenous womanhood, motherhood and sisterhood). Thus I want to emphasize that it is possible and desirable to theorize

Indigenous women’s life writing from a wider, comparative perspective, linking the narratives to a larger framework of human rights, social injustice, the process of healing from the colonization trauma, and subsequent reconciliation. The texts also invite exploration of the various ways in which they may impact the mainstream readership’s sense of the self and the other, its own whiteness as a category of power and privilege, so that readers can interpret Indigenous life stories through the lens of what Kay Schaffer calls the “ethics of recognition” (“Narrative Lives” 22). In other words, this introductory section should answer the question of why it is important, enriching and rewarding to read and interpret Indigenous women’s life writing in the twenty-first century.

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global perspectives and human rights

In Human Rights and Narrated Lives , Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith underscore an important connection between the enormous popularity of life stories and memoirs published since the 1990s and the coincidentally increased public interest in the domain of human rights around the world (1). Even though these two contemporary interests have been, until recently, explored in the separate disciplines of literature and politics, Schaffer and Smith relate them in an interdisciplinary approach that “understands ‘the political’ as inclusive of moral aesthetics and ethical aspects of culture,” treating life narratives and human rights campaigns as “multidimensional domains that merge and intersect at critical points” (2). The genre of life writing has become an extremely important source for human rights campaigns since many of the personal, eyewitnessed accounts tell of human rights violations. Publicizing accounts of Indigenous people’s painful histories in Australia,

Canada and the USA – some of the richest and most privileged countries in the world – has

3 become a significant means of addressing the global abyss between the powerful and the disempowered within the so called “first world.” In a situation in which Indigenous voices had been historically silenced and excluded from the public discourse, published life stories have become an alternative site for Indigenous people’s resistance to various oppressive regimes imposed by the dominant society. Life writing at least partially redresses the previous invisibility of Indigenous people who can at last assert control over their representations and tell their versions of colonial histories.

The Australian historians Bain Attwood an Fiona Magowan situate Indigenous life writing within the context of globalization and the rise of identity politics, arguing that

Indigenous issues have been “accorded a critical place” in the settler colonies’ nationalism

(xi). Attwood and Magowan draw attention to the intrinsic relation between storytelling and history-making in Indigenous communities that stems from the basic functions of telling stories – to understand and to remember (xii). Since Indigenous people used storytelling as a means to make sense of the colonial appropriation of their lands and cultures and as a way to remember the past at the same time, their life stories are mementos of both individual fates and of the global process of colonizing Indigenous populations. Thus telling stories and telling history has recently acquired a strong political charge because the recounting of what I later call “alternative (hi)stories” can construct a powerful critique of the nationally accepted myths of the European settlement in Australia and North America. Additionally, the political nature of life (hi)stories becomes increasingly important to establishing

Indigenous identities and human rights in contemporary Australian and North American societies. Using the optics of global perspectives may prove beneficial for Indigenous civil rights struggles, particularly regarding land claims, environmental justice concerns, sovereignty and self-government issues, and control over education. In these areas,

4 may be inspired by similar struggles in other countries or even cooperate across national borders in gaining access to power and resources.

The role of Indigenous life writing in the process of empowerment of Indigenous people in Australia and North America then consists in its potential to intervene critically in the taken-for-granted stories of domination over Indigenous populations in the settler colonies. In the words of Penny van Toorn, the strategy of using life stories not only as a raw historical material for history, but also as a genre of history in itself is crucial (2).

Indeed, life stories, both in the oral and textual forms, have become an increasingly respected and highly effective source for political as well as ethical agenda, as has been most prominently demonstrated with the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. Australia’s

Bringing Them Home report (1997), amassing oral accounts of the Stolen Generation(s),

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (1998) on the human rights violations under apartheid and Canada’s Report of the Royal Commision on Aboriginal

Peoples (1996) on the impact of the residential school system are the most visible examples of the attempt to acknowledge Indigenous people’s voices in the 1990s (Schaffer and Smith

104). 4

Looking at the history of the colonization of new territories by European powers from a global perspective has proved crucial for human rights campaigns that struggle to recognize Indigenous people’s suppressed histories as well as their present difficult position as the marginalized “other” in dominant cultures. Most importantly, employing global perspectives can justify a comparative analysis of issues concerning Indigenous peoples in the settler colonies, in spite of local differences and diversities. The Maori scholar Linda

4 More details about the Australian report and Canadian Report of the Royal

Commission are provided at the beginning of the second chapter which deals particularly with the stories of separation.

5 Tuhiwai Smith comments on the global interconnection of Indigenous peoples and their shared histories as follows: “Thus the world’s indigenous populations belong to a network of peoples. They share experiences as peoples who have been subjected to the colonization of their lands and cultures, and the denial of their sovereignty, by a colonizing society that has come to dominate and determine the shape and quality of their lives, even after it has formally pulled out” (7). On the theoretical level, the global approach can, for example, deepen our knowledge of the development of racism and the politics of eugenics, suggesting the interconnection of such policies in different parts of the world. 5

Just as it is possible to draw parallels between the socio-historical development of the relationship between Indigenous societies and the settler colonies during the colonization period (involving the acts of invasion, land appropriation, settlement, genocide, and forced assimilation on the part of the latter), it is also possible to trace similarities in the rise of Indigenous movements for the recognition of human rights, political sovereignty and cultural renewal. Within the cultural domain, then, it is illuminating to compare the development of Indigenous literary production, from the renaissance of the 1960s to the rich and diverse literary tradition today. The common goals of many Indigenous writers are expressed by Armand Garnet Ruffo who stresses the sense of collectivity and shared values among Indigenous peoples:

As an expression of voice, or, more correctly, a community of voices, Native

writers are attempting to find expression in a society that does not share their

values and concerns. The form of these voices, like content itself, varies

5 In her article “Aboriginal Life Writing and Globalization: Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof

Fence ,” Anne Brewster implies that the extermination and assimilation policies of the 1930s were a global phenomenon that connects Hitler’s policies in Europe and assimilationist policies towards minority groups such as Native Americans n the USA. She also argues that this “transnationality of instrumental terror and genocide” is nothing new to Indigenous writers in Australia.

6 according to individual author, but as community, theirs is a collective voice

that addresses the relationship between colonizer and colonized, the impact

of colonialism, and, moreover, functions on a practical level by striving to

bring about positive change. (110)

All this said, it is, however, necessary to emphasize that the comparative analysis in this dissertation, while foregrounding the parallels in the political, historical and cultural development of Indigenous societies in Australia and North America, does not pretend to homogenize Indigenous experiences. Neither does it want to promote simplified versions of the colonization process in the settler colonies. On the contrary, it endeavours to acknowledge the complexities of specific regions, historical circumstances and local particularities. Nevertheless, in spite of the danger of making the impression of a homogenized discourse, the method of employing global perspectives in political, historical or cultural analysis of Indigenous existence may, in my view, significantly contribute to the future process of reconciliation in the settler colonies.

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re-writing history and educating readers

By re-writing history I understand the process of bringing to light previously silenced or suppressed versions of historical events that somehow challenge the interpretations accepted by the dominant societies. As such, this process is therefore always a political act. Since they reveal the hidden and dark sides of the violent past, Indigenous life writing narratives often resist the settlers’ accounts of the “discovery” of the two continents. The official national narratives form part of educational programs and thus

Indigenous versions often become confrontational towards the dominant society which may feel threatened (Grant, “Contemporary Native Women’s Voices” 125). Obviously, the degree of this confrontation varies immensely, with some texts accommodating the

7 difference and challenging only implicitly, and some being very radical and accusatory in their tone. Most Indigenous life writing, nevertheless, is generally far from producing a

“neatly packaged book” ready for easy consumption (Nettleback 52). Apart from disturbing the majority society’s sense of its own history, Indigenous life writing also fills in the gaps in Indigenous history itself which frequently lacks textualized accounts and has to rely on oral histories only. In her best-selling autobiographical narrative My Place (1987), the

Aboriginal writer Sally Morgan addresses explicitly the issue of the invisibility, as well as inaccessibility, of Aboriginal history: “I want to write the history of my own family … there’s almost nothing written from a personal point of view about Aboriginal people. All our history is about the white man … A lot of our history has been lost, people have been too frightened to say anything. There’s a lot of history we can’t get at” (163-64). In this way, publicizing life stories is also beneficial for Indigenous people themselves as it helps to re-write their histories as well.

In the domain of Indigenous women’s life writing, re-writing history acquires yet another dimension: if Indigenous peoples’ history was generally ignored by European settlers, then the lives of Indigenous women were virtually non-existent in the colonial social and textual landscapes (Allen, The Sacred Hoop 9). Even though in many pre-contact tribal cultures Indigenous women often held respected posts as elders and bearers of cultural knowledge and family ties, enjoying certain powers in decision-making, the imposition of the European economic and patriarchal system on Indigenous communities relegated Indigenous women to a position of inferiority, to the bottom of the social ladder

(Grant, “ the Lineage House” 44; Kilcup 2; Mihesuah, “Commonality of

Difference” 20; Green 250; Browdy de Hernandez 48; Bird and Haskell 19; Brewster,

Literary Formations 42-43; Hamilton, “Aboriginal Women” 178). That European colonizers assessed Indigenous social realities in terms of their own cultures is also noted

8 by Linda Tuhiwai Smith: “Observations [by explorers and early settlers] made of

indigenous women, for example, resonated with views about the role of women in

European societies based on Western notions of culture, religion, race and class. Treaties

and trade could be negotiated with indigenous men. Indigenous women were excluded from

such serious encounters” (8). In North America, in spite of the huge diversity among tribes,

it is possible to argue that in the pre-contact and during early contact times Indigenous

women were socially more valued than their European counterparts, “perhaps because they

lived within communal cultural organizations where every member of the group contributed

to its well-being” (Kilcup 2). In Australia, pre-contact gender relations were comparable,

with Aboriginal women having a great deal of independence, both in ritual and economic

terms, and forming a “separate gender-specific power base” (Brewster, Literary Formations

44). 6 The abrupt change in Indigenous women’s status after European conquest as well as

the representation of female Indigeneity in subsequent cultural production are naturally

6 It is necessary to acknowledge that the shift in Indigenous women’s status from the traditional, pre-colonial period to the colonial times has incited vigorous debates among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars.

That Indigenous women were assigned inferior positions in relation to both Indigenous and white men in the post-contact period is generally agreed upon. The controversies, however, surround the social positions of

Indigenous women in traditional societies. Due to a great diversity of tribes in North America and

communities in Australia, it is almost impossible to generalize without risking distortions. One premise that

scholars do agree on is the substantial misunderstanding of Indigenous gender relations in traditional societies by early white settlers, including the anthropologists and missionaries who used a Western model of male-

female relationships (Hamilton 169). Although Indigenous women’s status in traditional societies has been

classified as anything ranging from strong leadership power to positions inferior to Indigenous men, it should be noted that even when Indigenous women did not hold prestigious positions, their work and opinions were

valued and their role was characterized by equality rather than inferiority (Mihesuah, “A Commonality of

Difference” 20; Hamilton 170). For more complex discussions see, for example, works by Karen Kilcup,

Andrea Smith, Devon A. Mihesuah, Paula Gunn Allen, Rayna Green, Annette Hamilton and Anne Brewster.

9 elaborated on in Indigenous women’s accounts of their own lives. The life writing narratives therefore fulfill an important function in the re-writing of Indigenous women’s own histories, interrogating the invisibility and disempowerment imposed on them by the colonial power.

Re-writing history in Indigenous women’s life writing is closely linked to its educational function, and most Indigenous women write about the efforts they are prepared to take in order to document the past for their family and community as well as for a wider cross-cultural audience. They want to make their life experience a public knowledge in order to acquaint others with the suppressed histories of Indigenous people during colonization. Amanda Nettleback touches upon both the objective of re-writing history and the didactic elements in Aboriginal life narratives in saying that they are “educative in numerous ways because they offer, of course, not only testimonies of individual experience but also accounts of mission life, government surveillance, stolen childhoods, and other forms of twentieth-century race politics which are the inheritance of every Australian” (43).

This of course draws attention to a crucial question in relation to Indigenous life writing in general: What audience are the narratives aimed at? In the case of Indigenous women in

Australia and North America, the answer is twofold: on the one hand, Indigenous women are perceived as educators passing on knowledge to the younger generation of Indigenous people who have not had the same life experience. Yet, simultaneously, they acknowledge the urge to educate the non-Indigenous audience suffering from historical amnesia

(Brewster, Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography 43). 7 Given this didactic

7 Often, Indigenous women complain about the amount of ignorance on the part of the dominant society about the history of the settlement. The Aboriginal writer Ruby Langford Ginibi, for example, gets upset at the total absence of Aboriginal culture and history in schools’ curricula. In an interview she observes: “You have to educate our mob who don’t know where they are coming from, or where they belong, along with non-

Aboriginal people who don’t know nothing about us anyhow” (“It Is Our Turn” 83-84).

10 motivation, Indigenous women writers become what Barbara Godard calls “cultural brokers” who wish to spread their knowledge of Indigenous existence among the mainstream society through more accurate accounts (“Voicing Difference” 103). Writing in

English therefore becomes a convenient means of teaching values and speaking across to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous target groups.

The reason for the didactic function in contemporary Indigenous women’s life writing, apart from the desire to articulate the Indigenous perspective on the history of

European settlement in the new colonies, is its close relation to the storytelling tradition that is embedded in most Indigenous cultures of Australia and North America. In this oral tradition, stories were supposed to entertain, but also to educate and pass on knowledge.

They were not only informational but also taught social behaviour, kinship structures and family affiliations, the history of the community and land, myths and creation stories – in other words, the shared worldview (Larson 59; Schaffer and Smith 101). This aspect is echoed in contemporary Indigenous women’s life writing typically in the opening chapters which frequently start not with the writer/teller’s own life story, but rather with the history of the region and people occupying the land, often going back to almost mythical times, as well as with the history of the author’s particular people, community, group, tribe, and extended family. For example, in the first chapter of Half-breed (1973), Maria Campbell presents the revolutionary history of the Métis people in Canada from the 1860, and continues in the second chapter with her family’s history, going back to her great- grandparents. Doris Pilkington (Nugi Garimara), one of the analyzed authors in the second chapter, opens the life stories of her and aunts in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence

(1996) with a mytho-fictional account of the pre-contact life and the first contacts of the

11 Nyungar 8 people with white explorers in Western Australia. This account is followed by story of the Mardudjara people’s early contacts with the whites in the Pilbara region in the twentieth century, which is based on her family’s stories. After that the narrative traces the history of establishing the first government depots and the gradual movement of Aboriginal people into these white settlements, and finally it recounts the removal of Pilkington’s mother and her two cousins from their families to the infamous Moore River Native settlement. Thus Pilkington’s didactic strategy succeeds in providing the entire history of her people from the very beginnings of contact with the settlers. These are only two examples of Indigenous women’s life writing narratives which show how telling and teaching Indigenous history is inseparable from telling individual life stories.

In spite of what was said above, the task of having to educate non-Indigenous readers in cross-cultural reading of Indigenous life writing while exposing traumatic life histories may be perceived as exhausting by some writers, especially by political activists and frequent speakers on Indigenous issues. The Aboriginal feminist scholar and political activist laments the lack of respect on the part of non-Indigenous

Australians, and is very straightforward in her “advice” about exploring Aboriginal issues:

“Do some homework first. Read books, watch films, do Aboriginal Studies courses. You should never expect Aboriginal people to do all the education because it’s unfair and a personal drain” ( Sister 84). A similar fatigue and anger is reiterated by the First

Nations writer Emma LaRoque who complains: “Many speakers and writers have been cornered into the hapless role of apologists, incessant (and very patient) explainers, and overnight experts on all things Native” (xxii). Facing this dilemma, some Indigenous writers suggest reducing the amount of energy spent on what Patricia Monture Angus

8The spelling may vary between Nyungar, Nyoongar, Noongar, or Nyoongah. Nyungar is a term for the

Indigenous people of the southwest corner of Western Australia.

12 (Mohawk) calls “talking out” to other cultures, i.e. the process of educating non-Indigenous people and cultural outsiders about the experience of racism, and focusing instead on

“talking in,” i.e. opening a discussion about the experience of colonialism and racism among Indigenous people themselves. These quotations indicate that re-writing history, storytelling with its didactic function, and political charge are intrinsically related in

Indigenous women’s life writing and become the cornerstones of its narrative structures.

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speaking position and methodology

One of the hardest things in the process of researching and writing this dissertation has been the negotiation and justification of my speaking position. The crucial question that runs invisibly but all the more pressingly through the text concerns the problematic issue of a cross-cultural reading and interpretation of Indigenous texts through the critical lens of a

Western scholar. Since in the context of Indigenous writing it is impossible to separate literary analysis from the broader socio-cultural, historical and political framework, it is inevitable that I had to become acquainted with the contexts that shape Indigenous existence today, even though these contexts are geographically, culturally and mentally distant from my own experience. Being a “double” cultural outsider – non-Indigenous and from Central Europe – I have to face potential criticisms regarding my abilities to recognize and appreciate the nuances that permeate the analyzed narratives. Although I did my best to be culturally sensitive and avoid controversial or offensive statements stemming from my misunderstanding of certain Indigenous realities, I am fully aware that my interpretations are biased and that I project my own cultural background, education and voice into my theoretical position as well as writing style. At this point, I can only reflect on a citation by

Laurel Richardson who in her Fields of Play provides a reply to my doubts:

13 [N]o matter how we stage the text, we – the authors – are doing the staging.

As we speak about the people we study, we also speak for them. As we

inscribe their lives, we bestow meaning and promulgate values. I concluded

that the ethically principled solution to issues of authority/ authorship/

appropriation required using my skills and resources in the service of the

others less beneficially situated. (148)

The speaking-for -others position has been much criticized by numerous Indigenous scholars and writers who demand the right to speak for themselves. The intensity of this tension has to do with the long-term interest of the European settlers and their descendants in the native populations, characterized by the dichotomy that Terry Goldie has named “fear and temptation” (215). This dichotomy went hand in hand with creating false stereotypical images based on projecting the colonizers’ own cultural values onto distinct societies, of which the notorious binary Noble Savage/Brutal Beast is a typical example. Thus the

Western society has come to formulate the Indigenous Other without allowing the Other to articulate its own existence. In this context I am all the more conscious of the ambiguous position of a researcher carrying problematic image of a “white middle-class woman academic” who epitomizes what Julia Emberly has aptly named the “relationship of the liberal feminist academic to her new colonized subject of study – Native women,” running the danger of perpetuating the binary of colonizer/colonized (109). In spite of all the risks when conducting research in this domain, however, I hope that being aware of the history of the relationships between non-Indigenous researchers and their “subjects” and trying to avoid some of the misinterpretations can at least partially do justice to my own project.

Having thought carefully about the drawbacks of my research, I cannot leave out the reasons that led me to it. First and foremost, this work is about textual representations of

Indigenous women’s lives. Although I have suggested that it is inevitable to consider the

14 realities from which these cultural representations stem, they are explored primarily from the position of literary criticism. I have chosen to analyze texts by Indigenous women writers that I find extremely rewarding and exciting, both on the formal and thematic levels.

I openly admit that my intention in this project is to promote these texts as in my opinion they deserve more scholarly examination: some of them, in particular Shirley Sterling’s My

Name Is Seepeetza , Ann Lee Walters’ Talking Indian and Jackie Huggins’ Sister Girl , have gained little critical attention, if any at all. Other texts, such as Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman and Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred

Hoop have already been subject to many scholars’ interpretations. Some authors (e.g.

Maracle, Allen, Huggins) are better-known for their other work, especially fiction, others

(e.g. Sterling) are still mostly unknown. One of the most important contributions of this project, I believe, is the comparative analysis of three life writing narratives in each chapter and the inter-textual references to all six texts throughout the body of the dissertation. The intention to foreground the parallels originates in the need to stress the interconnected histories and cultural contexts of Indigenous people in Australia and North America, some of which, I would suggest, are illuminating for our understanding of the global colonization processes. Finally, the disadvantage of my cultural distance from the “subject” of my research can hopefully be turned into an asset as it allows me to keep a somewhat detached view of the complexities in the sometimes confrontational relationships between Indigenous and settler populations in Australia and North America, as well as of the sensitive issue of reconciliation. Personally, I have benefited from the research particularly in terms of re- defining my own sense of the self and the other, fulfilling Laurel Richardson’s motto for cross-cultural research: “Writing the Other, Rewriting the Self” (147).

15 *****

My methodological and theoretical approach to the analyzed narratives is primarily post-colonial and feminist. Although I am aware of the complexities and somewhat problematic application of the two theories with all their potential ramifications, it was nevertheless through these two interests that I was introduced to Indigenous women’s literatures. For obvious reasons, both the primary and secondary Indigenous texts led me to re-evaluate some of the theoretical positions I held, such as the way in which mainstream constructs female Indigeneity. Not surprisingly, Western/mainstream cultural and literary theories are sometimes considered insufficient for the full understanding of non-

Western literary production. Post-colonial theory is the result of one of the attempts to negotiate this discrepancy, being born out of the “third world’s” resistance to colonialism, but it has quickly been appropriated and incorporated into Western critical theory and some critics have already showed the inaptitude of post-colonial theory for Indigenous discourse

(L. Tuhiwai Smith 14; Brewster, Literary Formations 20; Battiste 212). 9 Even so, as is shown later on, some of the principles developed by post-colonial theory prove useful for theorizing Indigenous women’s life writing. They include the notions of cultural hybridity, writing resistance, and subjugated knowledges, which provide effective tools for exploring the techniques of writing difference – a shared characteristic of both Australian and North

American Indigenous life narratives. Being conscious of the scholarly attention that has been paid to the differences between Western and Indigenous epistemologies and research methodologies, I have attempted to include as many voices of Indigenous scholars, writers

9 For example, in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples , Linda Tuhiwai Smith advocates the full academic recognition of Indigenous research methodologies. Smith maintains that Western methodologies may be sometimes useless, irrelevant, or even damaging to Indigenous ways of analytical research. For more specific overview of the basic characteristics of Indigenous methodologies, see Smith’s

“Introduction,” pp.1-18.

16 and public speakers as possible and where relevant I quote them directly rather than paraphrase their words. As far as is concerned, I have mainly relied on the

Anglo-American version and tried to work mainly with Indigenous as well as other

“minority” feminist sources. My interest in feminist theory is also responsible for my choice to work primarily with women’s texts, since I am particularly curious about the construction of gender-based texts and literary representations of women’s life experiences such as motherhood. Incidentally, throughout my research I was “discovering” how much the feminist actually overlaps with the Indigenous: the common interests include not only the critical dialogues between Indigenous and mainstream feminist discourses but also some of the crucial issues related to the genre of life writing such as the collective and relational selves, the preference of the dialogic mode over the monologic one, and the “personal is political” principle.

The key concepts that informed my research in a fundamental way are cultural synthesis and hybridity, the dynamic between resistance and accommodation, and the dialectic between oppression and activism. These were the primary principles that attracted me to the narratives I analyze later and that in my opinion permeate most of Indigenous women’s life writing today. The same characteristics are, I believe, crucial for thinking about the future directions in the development of the genre of Indigenous women’s life writing, as will be mentioned at greater length in the concluding part.

The principle of cultural synthesis and hybridity is addressed in my analyses mainly on two levels – formal and epistemological. On the formal level, I emphasize the generic hybridity, often using terms such as “multi-generic” or “generically rich.” By generic hybridity I generally mean the strategy of combining several genres of non-fiction – personal essays, auto/biography, memoirs, history writing, community stories, myths – with fiction such as short stories and creation stories, and with poetry. This generic mixture on

17 the one hand resists the conventional Western genre categorization, in particular autobiography, and on the other hand it incorporates Western genres or even intentionally plays on the generic conventions. The very same goes for the hybridization of narrative strategies which reflect the long and complex tradition of predominantly oral techniques of storytelling among Indigenous cultures. This notion is aptly recorded by Hertha D. Wong who characterizes the writings by Native American authors N. Scott Momaday and Leslie

Marmon Silko as the texts which

combine past and present genres, themes, and stories, consciously striving to

synthesize native forms of personal narrative and contemporary Euro-

American modes of autobiography, the spoken voice and the written word.

Such contemporary autobiographies reclaim and revivify indigenous forms

of personal narrative; at the same time, they enrich and extend Western

traditions of autobiography. ( Sending My Heart Back 9)

Coincidentally, Wong’s characteristics depict perfectly the sense of the formal hybridity which, I would argue, is one of the strongest and most typical features of recent Indigenous women’s life writing. On the epistemological level, hybridity plays an equally important part: both Indigenous women writers and their characters/narrators synthesize Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge, articulating a kind of hybrid knowledge which foregrounds the interplay between subjugated (Indigenous oral) knowledges and officially promoted (Western textual) knowledges. Of course, this concept of cultural hybridity is not new and has often been disguised under different terms. Some scholars prefer “cultural synthesis” to indicate the tendency of Indigenous women writers to adapt and refine

Western literary forms in order to accommodate orality (Rasporich 39). Others invent new concepts to theorize the same issues, which is the case of Françoise Lionnet and her notion

18 of “métissage,” or braiding, of “cultural forms through the simultaneous revalorization of oral traditions and reevaluation of Western concepts” (4).

The principle of the dynamic between resistance and accommodation, or resistance and complicity, originates in the post-colonial theory. Particularly the notion of writing resistance permeates both chapters of this dissertation: within the feminist discourse

Indigenous women’s texts resist the totalizing tendencies of ; within the realm of traditional Western literary genres and the politics of writing auto/biography these texts resist generic and monologic limitations; and within the field of identity formation they resist stereotypical constructions of Indigenous women’s subjectivities. At the same time, however, the idea of cultural hybridity suggests the simultaneous incorporation of that which is resisted, 10 resulting in ongoing negotiations and creative tensions between the dominant discourse and marginalized/subjugated knowledges. Be it in the feminist discourse where Indigenous women writers resist the mainstream feminist agenda and at the same struggle to be engaged in a dialogue with it, or in the mission, residential or boarding schools where the characters/narrators both resist and accommodate the system of surveillance, the relationship between the two tendencies is always shifting and fluid.

The same ambiguity is echoed in the dialectic of oppression and activism, which is a perspective voiced by Patricia Hill Collins in her exploration of African American feminist thought: “In spite of [the] suppression, African-American women have managed to do intellectual work, to have our ideas matter. … This dialectic of oppression and activism, the

10 In “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,” the post-colonial critic Stephen

Slemon draws attention to the way in which Michel Foucault has significantly problematized the relationship between power and resistance. Foucault’s theory of power maintains that the power itself inscribes its resistances and so, in the process, seeks to contain them. This leads Slemon to argue that resistance itself is therefore never purely resistance, never simply there in the text or the interpretive community, but is always necessarily complicit in the apparatus it seeks to transgress” (108, original emphasis).

19 tension between the suppression of Black women’s ideas and our intellectual activism in the face of that suppression, comprises the politics of Black feminist thought” (5-6). I believe that such notion of positive interaction between oppression and activism which fosters resistance circulates in the Indigenous life writing narratives that are explored in the two following chapters. Particularly, it is the feminist Indigenous texts by Jackie Huggins, Lee

Maracle and Paula Gunn Allen that demonstrate how this dialectic of oppression and activism can, and does, generate the empowerment of Indigenous women’s voices.

As I have outlined, this dissertation is based on comparative textual analyses, drawing on the inherent relationship between socio-historical realities and textual representations. My method of interconnecting the specific texts with their cultural and social contexts echoes Gillian Whitlock’s approach in what she names “ethico-formalist” reading which again links post-colonial and feminist thought:

How does a comparative reading connect these texts to contexts and to each

other? Ethico-formalist readings, the mode of much postcolonial and feminist

criticism, use discourse analysis to create a relationship between text, culture,

and society and – in the instance of postcolonial criticism – colonialism’s

culture. In this way, the aesthetics of the text are linked to social context.

(167)

One of the main dangers in a comparative analysis of various texts from different cultural and historical contexts is effacing their differences. On the other hand, the means of comparative analysis can potentially expand the theoretical boundaries through revealing certain parallels, features, and tendencies that would otherwise remain hidden. In my own analytical approach, I have attempted to keep a balance between looking for textual parallels of cultural representations and avoiding homogenization, or, in the words of Sneja

Gunew, “ethnic absolutism” – the assumption that the community “is in some sort of way

20 homogenous, and that one can actually have access to these diverse cultural groups via communities which maintain a kind of discrete cultural tradition” (Gunew 207-08).

Therefore I cannot emphasize enough that it is not my intention to give the impression that

Indigenous life writing in Australia and North America, or its cultural and historical contexts for that matter, form a homogenous group.

On the contrary, within the life writing domain, the diversity (both formal and thematic) in the narratives published in Australia and North America is enormous.

Indigenous women’s life writing has witnessed an increased popularity since the 1970s and it is impossible to approach methodologically these life narratives as a unified body of texts.

Therefore scholars have attempted to establish several categories based on thematic criteria as well as on the modes of textual production. Of course, there will always be exceptions that defy categorization; it is therefore necessary to take into account diverse localities and histories that the life narratives stem from. Kay Schaffer, for example, makes a useful delineation of thematic varieties in Indigenous life writing in general, distinguishing three groups which are applicable to both Australia and North America. The first group encompasses what Schaffer calls “cultural maintenance narratives” but is also known as

“cultural autoethnographies” (Lionnet 99) or “cultural autobiographies” (Reagon qtd. in

Friedman 43) which typically consist of the accounts of clan/tribe/nation/community and family histories and are primarily addressed to family and community. Written by one or more members of the community, or told to inside or outside collaborators, these narratives aim at preserving traditional ways of life, including cultural differences, languages, customs, and ceremonies. The second group Schaffer specifies involves the so called stories of separation which tell of various kinds of separating of Indigenous families and communities by European colonizers. Most frequently, these include mission, residential, or boarding schools narratives that trace the traumatic impact on children and parents who

21 have been separated. Finally, the third group encompasses the life stories of more individually anchored, urban-based, sometimes Western-educated, sometimes uneducated

Indigenous people and their experiences of the complexities of “braided lives,” being caught between two cultures (Schaffer, “Narrative Lives and Human Rights” 13). Often these life experiences incorporate the authors’ sense of alienation from the traditional ways of life and describe their engagement in political and activist streams fighting poverty and social injustice. It is, however, essential to reiterate that this categorization is general and only one of many possibilities, drawn here mainly to point out the diversity of life writing narratives. My own classification partially reflects Schaffer’s groups, as is suggested by the grouping of the texts in the two main chapters: while a combination of cultural autoethnographies and family separation stories is analysed in the second chapter, the first chapter deals primarily with narratives by urban-based activist Indigenous women writers.

*****

In the first chapter I compare Sister Girl by Jackie Huggins, I Am Woman by Lee

Maracle and The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen. These texts have been chosen for their significant engagement in critical responses to Western mainstream feminism and for their re-writing of the representations of Indigenous womanhood, motherhood and sisterhood.

Although each of them reflects a particular Indigenous woman’s experience in her time and space, together the narratives offer an insight into the ways Indigenous women writers creatively inscribe their difference. In Sister Girl , Jackie Huggins draws attention to the complicity of white Australian women in the labour exploitation of Aboriginal women, in the system of separating Aboriginal children from their families, and in the denial of

Indigenous motherhood. Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman represents a stream in Native North

American feminist thought which points to the issue of within Native communities and challenges the often proclaimed view that sexism is not a primary issue in Indigenous

22 women’s struggles. Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop in turn calls for a re-construction of strong tribal womanhood, making a connection between the colonization and disempowerment of Indigenous women. As I argue later in the chapter, through their alternative narrative techniques and thematic innovations the three texts re-write the stereotypical images of Indigenous female agency and subjectivity, initiating the empowerment of Indigenous women’s voices.

In the second chapter, I read Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence ,

Shirley Sterling’s My Name Is Seepeetza and Anna Lee Walters’ Talking Indian:

Reflections on Survival and Writing as counter-histories that disrupt the homogeneity of mainstream Australian and North American historiography and that recover previously subjugated Indigenous knowledges. In her account, Pilkington celebrates an act of active resistance in the form of a seemingly impossible escape from the Moore River Native

Settlement and records the symbolic journey home. Her alternative (hi)story consists in interweaving the pre-contact/early-contact Indigenous history and the nationally accepted history of European settlement in Australia, as well as in appropriating official archival materials and creating a counter-archive of traditional Aboriginal knowledge. Similarly,

Sterling’s narrator asserts her cultural identity through a series of juxtaposed contrasts between the abusive residential school regime and the harmonious, functional family environment at home. These contrasts bring to the foreground the memories of times spent with the extended family, the daily activities ensuring the survival of the community, and generally the happy moments outside the range of state intervention. Walters, through restoring her tribal background in the form of recollecting local histories of her peoples counterbalances in her narrative the invisibility of Indigenous people in the USA constructed by the mainstream imaginary. Together, the three narratives, by incorporating multiple voices and constructing collective and dialogic selves, defy the conventional

23 notion of monologic representation of the individual self in Western auto/biographies. Thus in this chapter I argue that the analysed Indigenous women’s life narratives problematize mainstream histories by highlighting the authors’ own and their relatives’ traumatic experiences following the forced separation from their families, and by revealing the often

“unspeakable” repressed memories in a form that I call “scriptotherapy.”

*****

Finally, it remains to suggest what the potential impact of this dissertation is. My hope was to bring together Indigenous women’s texts that would attract further critical attention to the genre that, even if having gained certain popularity in the last twenty years, is still at the margins of literary educational curricula. Additionally, in my opinion these narratives defy quite a widespread view that the settler colonies of Australia, Canada and the United States have managed to overcome the colonial period and entered a “post- colonial” age in which historical injustices and violence towards Indigenous peoples have been reconciled. Indigenous women’s life writing shows that it is neocolonialism rather than post-colonialism that continues to operate in relation to Indigenous people and that the process of reconciliation in the three nation-states has yet to be fulfilled. While this dissertation cannot pretend to contribute significantly to changing the current social conditions under which Indigenous people in Australia and North America live, it does want to contribute to altering the critical and methodological approaches to Indigenous literatures in the academia. The ways in which Indigenous literary forms are born out of interaction between local, traditional, tribal literary modes and the dominant literary modes are, I believe, illuminating for our general understanding of the interpretative processes involved in cross-cultural analysis. Thus I close this introduction with a quote by Arnold

Krupat who summarizes the most important aspect of Indigenous literatures: “Indigenous literature is that type of writing produced when an author of subaltern cultural identification

24 manages successfully to merge forms internal to his cultural formation with forms external to it, but pressing upon, even seeking to delegitimate it” ( Voice in the Margin 214). In my opinion it is this metaphor of merging the internal with the external and the displacement of what we take for granted that gives importance to reading Indigenous women’s life writing narratives in the twenty-first century.

25 Chapter 1

Inscribing Indigenous Women’s Difference:

Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle, Paula Gunn Allen

Writing in the feminine. And in a colored sky. How do you inscribe difference without

bursting into a series of euphoric narcissistic accounts of yourself and your own kind?

Without indulging in a marketable romanticism or in a naive whining about your

condition? In other words, how do you forget without annihilating?

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (28)

*****

The opening quote by Trinh T. Minh-ha aptly summarizes the key concepts that inform this section which deals with the intersections of gender, race, writing, and difference in contemporary Indigenous women’s life writing. Perhaps unexpectedly, I start with three texts of Indigenous women writers from Australia and North America that actually are not typical examples of the genre of life writing. Jackie Huggins’ Sister Girl ,

Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman and Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop transgress several boundaries and it is not easy to categorize them. They inhabit the space between critical writing, life writing and fiction. They are academic and intellectual, yet very personal, drawing on lived experience and integrating strong autobiographical elements. Huggins,

Maracle and Allen are contemporaries and although they are separated by geographical distance and cultural differences, reading their writings in succession invokes a sense of a trialogue – a conversation of three unique voices calling for and responding to each other.

All three women are professional writers, have received prestigious Western university education and are mostly urban based, which makes it possible to categorize their texts as urban Indigenous narratives, outside the tradition of cultural ethnographic life writings. Yet,

26 the authors keep holding on to their identities as Indigenous women, to their voices speaking for and representing their families, to their ancestry and history, and to their largely oral cultures. They are all politically engaged, either directly through helping address the social injustice and racism facing contemporary Indigenous communities, or indirectly through their writing. Their work is never detached from who they are in time and space, in history and today’s world. All of them are empowered by the writing process and are very self-reflective about the role and motives of their writing. Ultimately, Huggins,

Maracle and Allen share what Trinh T. Minh-ha has emphasized: they inscribe their differences, be it on a textual level, where their texts transgress generic boundaries; in a feminist discourse, where the authors respond, critique and engage with mainstream women’s movement; in their way of theorizing, where they employ a different set of knowledges drawing on their Indigenous heritage and oral traditions; and in the sphere of self-representation, where the writers resist and re-write constructed mainstream images of female Indigeneity.

I have chosen Huggins’ Sister Girl , Maracle’s I Am Woman and Allen’s The Sacred

Hoop because in my understanding these texts represent voices of Indigenous feminist urban intellectuals and activists whose work in the late 1980s and 1990s has significantly contributed to establishing a powerful alternative to mainstream expectations of what contemporary Indigenous women’s writing should look like, to conventional academic criticism, and also to Western feminist approaches to literature. In addition, Huggins’,

Maracle’s and Allen’s narratives reveal similar structure, choice of themes and impact on

Indigenous feminist discourse. Particularly they share the ambivalent relationship of the authors to mainstream feminism: although the three writers are involved in feminist, anti- racist and anti-colonial debates, they also openly distance themselves from and engage in critiquing mainstream feminism. Thus their work helps shed light on the role that

27 Indigenous women’s life writing plays in the contested space of Indigenous representations, subjectivities and cultural differences. It also points in a new direction that Indigenous personal and critical writing takes. As the three texts cross the limitations of the audience- commodified Indigenous life stories, they also transcend the conventional genres of autobiography and personal non-fiction by integrating poetry, storytelling, collective auto/biography and critical writing. This hybrid and experimental character of Sister Girl , I

Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop leads me to argue that these are examples of a newer generation of Indigenous women’s personal narratives.

I explore the narratives of Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn Allen on three basic levels: firstly as scholarly critiques that inscribe the authors’ difference within the mainstream feminist discourse; secondly as personal narratives that incorporate the

“writing life” techniques and at the same time as political acts that allow the writers to empower themselves and their people through writing down both their lived experience and theory; and thirdly as self-representations of Indigenous womanhood, motherhood and sisterhood. In this chapter I argue that a comparative analysis of these texts helps to deconstruct the universalist and homogeneous category of “woman” developed by mainstream feminism. Moreover, such analysis undermines the conventional imaginary of the genre of Indigenous women’s life writing. This deconstruction is possible through the multi-generic, experiential and self-reflective writing, and through the alternative perspectives on Indigenous women’s identities, representations, and their common struggles in the twentieth century. Interestingly enough, the nature of these texts makes it possible to analyse them both as primary (on the level of a personal and creative narrative) and secondary sources (in terms of the academic research input), which strengthens their potential to re-define the binary between personal writing based on lived experience and

28 theoretical writing based on “objective” critical research. These aspects are precisely the kinds of categories that the writings of Huggins, Maracle and Allen, defy.

29 1.1. Voicing

Debates within the concerning the politics of difference and the

relationship between gender and race have formed an indispensable part of the feminist

discourse. The period since the 1980s has witnessed an important shift in the focus on this

intricate relationship as diverse voices of women with different cultural and life experiences

have challenged what has been called “white” or mainstream feminism. This term has been

increasingly employed to refer to the second wave of “first-world”, Western, or Euro-

American feminist discourse 11 to which the so called “third-world” women, or “women of

colour” 12 respond with a critique that points to its racist practices and its tendency to

universalize women’s experience as that of an oppressed gender under the patriarchal

system. In this way, mainstream feminism has eliminated intersections such as gender and

race, gender and class, or gender and sexuality. The notion of white feminism has also

emerged in accord with the developing critical whiteness theory which maintains that

11 Unexpectedly, it has proved to be problematic to come across an actual definition of Western, or

mainstream, feminism. This has only confirmed the term’s complex use and various meanings, leading to the

impossibility of offering a simple definition. Julia Emberly’s characteristic of contemporary Anglo-American

feminism comes close to what I understand under the notion of Western, mainstream feminism identified predominantly with white middle-class women: “Anglo-American feminism refers to an institutional

configuration, the practices and activities of which engage women in the project of furthering their access to

‘higher’ education, their empowerment through knowledge, and their entry into a professional managerial

class” (81).

12 Although I use the terms “third-world” women and “women of color” interchangeably to refer to “non-

white” women, mainly for lack of any other term that would encompass all the cultural differences and the

diversity of life experiences, I am aware that both “third-world” and “first-world” have become increasingly problematic terms and therefore I use them in inverted commas in my original text. The same terms are used

without inverted commas where the sources I work with employ them in that manner.

30 whiteness, as a privileged and invisible category, has become a norm against which other non-white experience and epistemology is judged in the construction of identity, representation, subjectivity, nationalism, law, and culture (Moreton-Robinson, Whitening

Race vii). 13 In this interpretation, whiteness remains uninterrogated and unnamed as a

“difference” or “the other.” This theoretical framework gives rise to what Moreton-

Robinson calls “subject position white middle-class woman” ( Talkin’ Up xxii), a category constructed in order to make whiteness visible so that it can be theorized.

The responses of “women of colour” to mainstream feminism have been numerous.

The theoretical works of bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins sprung from

African American studies; Gloria Anzaldúa’s appeared within Latin American studies; and the work of theorists of Indian ancestry, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra

Talpade Mohanty, has proved useful for researching . Indigenous women have also contributed to the body of knowledge within this area through participating in the debates exploring the politics of difference and identity, intersections of gender and race, and the role Indigenous women play in the neo-colonial settler societies.

Both in Australia and North America they participate in dialogues with other “women of colour” as academics, public speakers, and intellectuals. In Australia, works on Indigenous perception of feminism and the intersection of gender and race were published in the 1990s and 2000s by, among others, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Jackie Huggins, Catrina Felton,

Liz Flanagan, Wendy Brady, and Anita Heiss. Other Aboriginal women, such as the artists

Destiny Deacon, Tracey Moffatt or might sympathize with the feminist

13 It is in this sense that I use the term “white feminism” throughout this work, although I am aware that it is reductive and very much constructed for the purposes of theoretical discourse. By no means do I intend to imply an excessive homogeneity of the Western feminist discourse. I use the term explicitly where my sources use it too (e.g. Moreton-Robinson, Jackie Huggins), elsewhere I use it interchangeably with “mainstream”,

“Western”, or “first-world” feminism.

31 movement on their own terms and/or reflect feminist approaches in their work. In North

America, Indigenous women’s voices supporting and participating (albeit critically) in the feminist discourse emerge from Native , which is the case of Beth Brant and Paula Gunn Allen. Other feminist voices belong to academic scholars, writers and activists such as Devon A. Mihesuah, Andrea Smith, M. Annette Jaimes Guerrero, Anna

Lee Walters, Patricia Monture Angus, Jeannette Armstrong, and Lee Maracle who incorporate questions of gender, representations of female Indigeneity and Indigenous responses to mainstream feminism into their fiction and non-fiction. All these Indigenous women, along with others, have taken positions from which they challenge the mainstream feminists’ abstraction of gender into a universal category that accommodates only a few privileged women. This has lead to constituting a specific stream in feminism that Julia

Emberly, drawing on Theresa de Lauretis, calls “feminism as an epistemology of difference” (83, original emphasis). The struggle to address the diversity of women’s political and personal experience becomes the driving force in many Indigenous women’s life writing and it is also a significant aspect of Jackie Huggins’, Lee Maracle’s and Paula

Gunn Allen’s narratives.

In the introduction to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , Chandra

Talpade Mohanty offers a study of the challenges that “third-world” women 14 pose to mainstream feminism. They include a reconceptualization of the ideas of resistance, community and agency in daily life, and an integration of the categories of race and postcolonial discourse (“Cartographies of Struggle” 3). Mohanty effectively shows how

14 Mohanty uses the term to include women of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as minority women, or people of color, in Europe and settler colonies such as the USA, Canada and Australia

(“Cartographies of Struggle” 2). Although she does not mention Indigenous women explicitly as being part of

“third-world” women, it is implied that they are included in this category as they often face similar marginalization and political and cultural struggles within the dominant Western societies.

32 mainstream feminism has historically focused on gender as the only basis of struggle and ignored the racial, class, and sexual axis of oppression. Therefore she calls for Western white feminists to explore the construction of whiteness and its relation to power, and to engage more in anti-racism and anti-colonialism. In her essay “Under Western Eyes”,

Mohanty provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which mainstream feminism constructs a coherent and homogeneous category of Woman, based on the same gender and therefore shared oppression. Subsequently it appropriates and colonizes the pluralities and differences of “third-world” women’s experience, thereby relegating the latter to the position of an object. This latent ethnocentrism that Mohanty uncovers in her analyses of several white feminists’ texts on the issues of “third-world” women is also responsible for projecting the stereotypes of the Other onto the category of the “third-world” Woman. Thus the “third-world” women tend to be represented as poor, uneducated, dependent, traditional, domestic, sexually restrained, family-oriented, victimized, and, importantly, as politically ignorant women who need training and education in Western feminism (“Under Western

Eyes” 56-57). This process of “othering,” not dissimilar from Edward Said’s analysis of the ways the West has constructed the Orient, may result in what Moreton-Robinson calls

“white feminists’ maternalism” ( Talkin’ Up 25, 180). To be able to establish the category of

“third-world” Woman as an analytical and political entity, Mohanty draws on Benedict

Anderson’s concept of an “imagined community” of “third-world” women where the oppositional struggles invite “potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries” (“Cartographies of Struggle” 4). However, she insists that relation to and focus on particular struggles must depend on different, sometimes conflicting, locations and histories, and argues that third world feminists have engaged in the “rewriting of history based on the specific locations and histories of struggle of people of colour and postcolonial peoples, and on the day-to-day strategies of survival utilized by such peoples” (10, original

33 emphasis). Moreover, Mohanty makes a useful connection between the diverse contexts of

“third-world” feminist struggles--such as history of colonization, economic exploitation and race/gender oppression--and the construction of consciousness and identity in writing. In her words, “writing often becomes the context through which new political identities are forged. It becomes a space for struggle and contestation about reality itself” (“Cartographies of Struggle” 34). 15 It will be seen in the analyses of the feminist texts by Jackie Huggins,

Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn Allen how the three Indigenous women writers negotiate the ambivalences between their specific cultural backgrounds, their involvement in feminist movement and the construction of their selves during the writing process.

*****

indigenous women speak out

The basic premise of the Indigenous critique of white feminism is expressed in

Moreton-Robinson’s influential study Talkin’ Up To the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism : “An Indigenous woman’s point of view is informed by social worlds imbued with meaning grounded in knowledges of different realities from those of white women” (xvi). Moreton-Robinson further argues that her personal experience as an

Indigenous feminist academic led her to challenge white feminism’s subject position of dominance and seek alternative discourses among African American, Latin American and lesbian feminists. It is precisely these discourses, according to Moreton-Robinson, that contest the representation of the universal “woman” as a white middle-class woman and

15 Besides Mohanty, there are, of course, other “women of colour” who have theorized similar issues. Two theorists in particular, bell hooks and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, are examples of feminist scholars “of colour” whose work has significantly contributed to and has been incorporated into mainstream feminism. It is especially hooks’ Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) and Spivak’s Can the Subaltern

Speak? (1988) that have significantly influenced mainstream feminist thinking about writing difference and the intersections of gender and race.

34 propose models of diversity and heterogeneity, stressing cultural differences and specific particularities (xvii). In other words, Moreton-Robinson’s statement concerning the inherent difference of Indigenous women’s experience explicitly challenges the assumption invoked by white feminist discourse that because of the same gender, no matter what cultural background, women can be characterized as a singular group sharing “the same” oppression. In this claim Moreton-Robinson actually echoes a position held by Mohanty

(“Under Western Eyes” 56). Moreton-Robinson’s study is most useful in her argument that

Indigenous women’s life writing, which foregrounds the Indigenous women’s self- presentation, actually reveals to what extent their realities and life experiences are grounded in different histories from those experienced by white women ( Talkin’ Up xxiii). These experiences include, for example, government-imposed, sometimes unpaid, work as domestic servants, which more often than not went hand in hand with sexual abuse from the white “masters” and work exploitation from the white “mistresses.” Other suppressed experiences concern state-controlled family life policies, such as separating children from their families and forced sterilizations. In this way, Moreton-Robinson argues, Indigenous women’s life writing “unmasks the complicity of white women in gendered racial oppression” ( Talkin’ Up xxiii). Like Mohanty, Moreton-Robinson points out that the history of white feminists’ relations with Indigenous women in Australia actually demonstrates the way the Western feminists normalized themselves and positioned themselves as the knowing subjects, constructing Indigenous women as the Other (xxiv).

Mohanty’s and Moreton-Robinson’s arguments offer a comprehensive theoretical overview of some of the issues that are important in Indigenous feminist debates, particularly the politics of difference. Indigenous women have frequently resisted, or ignored, both the Western women’s movement and feminist discourse, not because their identities are not anchored in a strong sense of womanhood, sisterhood and women’s

35 alliances, which they mostly are, but because they have found much of the Western feminist theory irrelevant to their existence and experience. From the perspective of Indigenous women, the core of their lives consists in everyday survival and grassroots political work rather than in theoretical concepts (Little; Felton and Flanagan 53; Tsolidis 37; A. Smith,

“”; Jaimes and Halsey 330-31).16 The reasons for this careful response of Indigenous women to mainstream feminism range from the latent racism within the feminist movement, the negligence of the issue of the complicity of white colonial women in the colonization process, to the overly abstract theoretical debates that fail to address everyday social injustices. Until recently, mainstream feminism has been viewed by some Indigenous women activists as a continuing imperialist project (A. Smith, “Native

American Feminism”). In addition, some Indigenous women have to face considerable dilemmas about what is often an either/or choice: their alliance with mainstream feminism may sometimes collide with their anti-racist struggles but their involvement in movement sometimes means suppressing their anti-sexist and anti-feminist struggles

(Tsolidis 33; A. Smith, “Native American Feminism”). As a result, those Indigenous

16 Although the critique and rejection of most of the mainstream feminist agenda by Indigenous women has been subject to many discussions, it is nevertheless important to stress that there are many Indigenous women who, if not straightforwardly identifying with mainstream feminism, support its ideas. It is therefore impossible to come to the conclusion that minority women or “women of colour” cannot be at the same time advocates of mainstream feminism. On the other hand, many Indigenous feminists emphasize that struggles for land and survival continue to take equal weight with feminist issues, sometimes preceding them in importance. A more profound discussion of this ambivalence is offered by Native American activist Andrea

Smith, especially in her articles “Indigenous Feminism Without Apology” and “Native American Feminism,

Sovereignty, and Social Change,” where she argues that “Native women’s activists’ theories about feminism, about the struggle against sexism both within Native communities and the society at large, and about the importance of working in coalition with non-Native women are complex and varied … and cannot simply be reduced to the dichotomy of feminist versus nonfeminist” (“Native American Feminism”).

36 women who do want to engage with feminism of some sort often distance themselves from mainstream feminism by creating their own feminist discourse and/or making allies with other non-mainstream feminist thinkers, such as African American or Latin American women.

An illustrative example of a specific project that promotes a complex theoretical

Indigenous feminist approach to Aboriginal women’s cultural production in Australia is the concept of the so called “tiddaism” 17 developed by Catrina Felton and Liz Flanagan in what they call “tidda’s manifesto” (53, 57). 18 Tiddaism has been designed to redress the need for an Indigenous field of analysis working towards “articulating our [Koori women’s] experiences and analys[ing] the factors that shape our [Koori women’s] reality” (53). 19 It addresses a variety of issues such as eliminating oppressive impositions of white feminist domination, establishing Koori women’s own political and cultural agenda, and developing appropriate methodologies for cultural analyses (53). Tiddaism also demands recognition of the fact that mainstream feminists often speak from the position of power which excludes

Aboriginal women. According to Janine Little, tiddaism is situated not as a counter- discourse, but as informing discourse: “To posit tiddaism as counter-discourse would leave the existing critical arena intact as an intellectual field that acknowledges an alternative voice through approaches that apparently work. As an informing discourse, tiddaism

17 “Tidda” refers informally to “sister” in Aboriginal English. Aboriginal feminist activists use this term to invoke a sense of sisterhood among themselves and their common political and social struggles.

18 In addition to Felton and Flanagan’s article, there are other writings addressing the relationship between

Aboriginal and mainstream in Australia: Jackie Huggins’ “A Contemporary View of Aboriginal

Women's Relationship to the White Feminist Movement,” Melissa Lucashenko’s “No Other Truth?

Aboriginal Women and Australian Feminism,” or Georgina Tsolidis’ “Theorizing Ethnicity in Australian

Feminism.”

19 “Koori” refers to Aboriginal women of New South Wales.

37 challenges the field to go to the informants and ask for whom the approaches work”

(“Tiddas in Struggle”). Although such work is still marginal outside the Koori and Murri women’s community 20 that stimulated it, it nevertheless demonstrates the need for critical attention to similar initiatives.

North American Indigenous feminism has been shaped by parallel debates about the intersections of gender and race, as well as about the ambivalence surrounding the potential alliances with mainstream and the USA. Devon A. Mihesuah, for example, warns that even though the agendas of feminist discourse and Indigenous research have recently grown and the integration of Indigenous women’s studies and feminist theory would seem a logical step, it is not desirable unless mainstream feminist scholars become involved in practical, reciprocal dialogue with Indigenous women (“A Few Cautions”). The obstacles often mentioned by Native North American feminist scholars, preventing their deeper integration into mainstream feminism, concern the speaking position of non-

Indigenous scholars and researchers who often speak for Indigenous women, and the subsequent implication that there is an authoritative voice among Native North American women (frequently identified with traditionalist positions). This assumption, however, has a rather damaging effect for Indigenous women as it creates a superficial clash between the so called “traditionalist” and “assimilated”/ “progressive” women (Mihesuah, “A Few

Cautions”). Thus the caution that applies to dealing with mainstream feminism as far as acknowledging heterogeneity of women’s experience is concerned applies also to

Indigenous women in North America themselves. As Mihesuah contends, “there isn’t a single one [voice] among Native women, and no one feminist theory totalizes Native women’s thought. Rather, there is a spectrum of multiheritage women, in between

‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’, who possess a multitude of opinions on what it means to be

20 “Murri” refers to Aboriginal women in .

38 a Native female” (“A Few Cautions”). The involvement of Indigenous women with mainstream feminism is therefore a significant issue, the complexity of which stems not only from the history of colonization and the imposition of the European patriarchal system onto Native communities, but also from the diversity and heterogeneity of voices among

Indigenous women themselves.

My analysis of the three texts by Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn

Allen therefore examines three different perspectives from which these Indigenous women writers critically respond to mainstream feminism. In Sister Girl , Jackie Huggins’ critique of white is primarily based on the historical development of the racial tensions between white and Aboriginal women. She thus argues for opening a dialogue with

Australian mainstream feminists which would be based on the recognition of this historical imperative. Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman focuses particularly on condemning any form of sexism and violence towards women, within or outside Indigenous communities, employing a rather radical feminist Marxist ideology. Finally, Paula Gunn Allen has been involved in one of the “sub-groups” of the (Indigenous) women’s movement, and as such she engages in critiquing mainstream feminism from the position of an Indigenous lesbian feminist. Her main challenge in The Sacred Hoop is then centred on advocating the gynocratic nature of some Indigenous communities in pre-contact North America, which was forcibly erased under the Western patriarchal system. Although it is possible to suggest that Huggins,

Maracle and Allen generally reproach mainstream feminism for ethnocentrism and lack of commitment to anti-racist and anti-colonialist struggles, it is obvious that their specific localities, histories, and cultures account for variations in the intensity and focus of these critiques. The following textual comparison, however, illuminates parallels and common strategies, and provides an insight into particular Indigenous women’s perspectives on the women’s movement and feminist discourse. It is notable, for example, that none of the

39 authors chooses to simply ignore white feminist discourse. Instead, they all decide to engage intellectually in constructive criticism and form alliances with white women, with the hope of bringing an end to the injustices within the movement that has based its existence primarily on fighting oppression. By drawing attention to the clashes and contradictions between Indigenous women’s experience and mainstream feminist theory, the three authors actually promote the “feminism of decolonization” (Emberly 80).

*****

Welcome to my journey. For some time I have wanted to put my thoughts down

on what it is that spurs me on as a Murri, woman, activist, historian, mother and,

of course,“Sister Girl.”

Jackie Huggins, Sister Girl (ix)

An Aboriginal woman from Queensland, Jackie Huggins (/Birri-Gubba Juru) speaks with pride of her multiple identities. To those quoted above, I add that of a writer whose writing career includes a critically acclaimed collaboration on her mother’s life story, Auntie Rita (1994), a multigenre collection of essays, personal narratives, interviews and articles, Sister Girl (1998), and a number of academic articles on topics that parallel those discussed in the Native North American context: the history of Aboriginal people in

Australia, the reconciliation process, the representation of Aboriginal women in literature, and the critique of Australian mainstream feminism. Huggins is also a frequent public speaker on Aboriginal issues and has held several significant posts, such as Co-

Commissioner for Queensland for the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander Children from Their Families, the result of which was the notorious Bringing

Them Home report released in 1997, and co-chair of Reconcilation Australia. Huggins earned her degree in history, women’s studies and education at the University of

Queensland where she is now the Deputy Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

40 Unit. 21 In one of the personal essays in Sister Girl titled “But You Couldn’t Possibly…,”

Huggins, in reaction to the offensive remarks on her intelligence and learning abilities by her childhood non-Aboriginal teachers, gives an account of her journey to prove the opposite:

I see myself as a multi-faceted and multi-talented person and an advocate for

Aboriginal people. … They see that I have done much along the way:

establishing community-based organizations, organizing the first

International Indigenous Women’s Conference, completing tertiary studies,

achieving a high position in the public service, writing articles in journals

and chapters in history books, and being a member of national and state

Aboriginal advisory boards. (56)

Similarly to Maracle and Allen, Jackie Huggins’ identity as an Aboriginal woman has never been contested and is firmly anchored in her people and their cultural heritage.

Sister Girl proves useful as a source for theorizing Indigenous women’s life writing since it offers an analysis of some contemporary life stories, particularly in relation to

Huggins’ research on Aboriginal women’s exploitation as domestic workers during the

1920s and 1930s. It is also illuminating in terms of its critique of mainstream Australian feminism and historiography. As I have already suggested, Sister Girl , like Maracle’s and

Allen’s work, transgresses generic boundaries in its inclusion of an academic article on the history of Aboriginal domestic labour, a reflection on the writing of Huggins’ mother’s biography, a piece of journalism, autobiographical and biographical essays, a transcription of a radio interview with the African American feminist bell hooks, a piece of creative non-

21 Jackie Huggins’ biographical details are available at

and a list of her publications at

.

41 fiction about presenting a paper at a conference, a confessional account of her relationship with her mother, and a political pamphlet. Throughout the book, even in the most academic and scholarly pieces, Huggins never abandons her personal voice and always includes her own lived experience, which is another feature her writing shares with that of Maracle and

Allen.

Of the three texts examined, Sister Girl is perhaps most explicitly critical of white feminism. 22 Huggins dedicates an entire essay to exposing the core of her critique. In a generically rich piece which encompasses a confessional mini-preface, historical analysis, polemical essay, and political writing, Huggins engages in a profound response to white women in Australia. The title of this particular essay, “Wedmedi [white woman] – If Only

You Knew,” already sets the tone of her writing. Firstly, she directly addresses white women, suggesting a desire for a missing dialogue. Secondly, the title touches upon the discrepancy between the two systems of knowledges and the power, or the lack of it, assigned to each of them. While the dominant white feminist discourse is empowered to create its own subjectivities, from the point of view of Indigenous women its epistemology lacks validity as long as it denies Indigenous and other “women of colour” equal access to employ their own agency (Felton and Flanagan 54-55; Little). Huggins understands white feminism and women’s studies as Western cultural products that are complicit in silencing and controlling Indigenous women, and this will be so until the white women’s movement understands and recognizes the political and cultural differences of Aboriginal women, one of which is the fact that, according to Huggins, racial discrimination remains a reality far more severe for Indigenous women in Australia than gender oppression ( Sister Girl 25-26).

22 In Australia, the term “white feminism” is commonly used among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminists, and the two major texts I rely on in this analysis, Huggins’ and Moreton-Robinson’s, work with the term explicitly. In Canada and the U.S., I am not aware of a parallel use of the term, even though Maracle and

Allen do refer to white women’s movement.

42 In her analysis of the relationships between Indigenous women and white feminism of the

1950s and 1960s, Huggins comes to the conclusion that the two are rather distinct political groups with different, sometimes even opposing, political agendas. As examples she contrasts white women’s demands for equal opportunities in education and jobs with

Aboriginal women having generally better education and, if employed, performing in higher status jobs than Aboriginal men. A similar contrast permeates the issue of women’s control of their sexuality: while white women demanded at that time to be sexually free and to control their fertility via contraception and abortion, Aboriginal women, quite to the contrary, fought the overly sexually charged stereotypes, demanding the right to say ‘no’, to be sexually restrained, but also to put an end to forced sterilization and to have as many children as they wanted (27).

Huggins uses her analysis of the history of Aboriginal women’s domestic work in

Australia in the 1920s and 1930s to identify the factors that have significantly shaped the relationships between Aboriginal and white women. The first concerns the women’s position in the family and their ability to raise children. While white women called for freedom from the confinement of the households and families in order to participate in the public sphere, Aboriginal women had to struggle to keep their children and families together, wishing for the right to run their own households without state intervention. The traumatic experience of Aboriginal women in Australia of having been denied their motherhood and the complicity of white Australian women in this experience remains a painful memento in the contemporary relationships between Aboriginal and white women in Australia ( Sister Girl 28; Moreton-Robinson 10). Young Aboriginal women, often having given birth to children fathered by white men, were frequently forced to give up their first-born children so that they could continue their work as domestics in order to keep

“mothering” white children ( Sister Girl 7). With the question “What happened to the first-

43 born children of these women who were recruited to domestic service?” (11), Jackie

Huggins breaks through the silence surrounding this issue, demanding an answer not only on behalf of her own mother, but of many Aboriginal women of the time.

Another factor that has negatively shaped the relationship between Aboriginal and white women, especially during the first half of the twentieth century, is the sexual relations between Aboriginal women and their white “employers.” Instead of attempting to establish women’s alliances in order to defy sexual exploitation and rape, white wives frequently refused to believe their “servants” or intervene in any way, sometimes even blaming

Aboriginal women for initiating such relations ( Sister Girl 15). Although certainly not all

Aboriginal women working as domestic servants were sexually abused and some of them might have consented to sexual relationships with white men, the life writings of Aboriginal women in Australia tend to confirm the sexual advances and abuse on the part of the white

“employers.” The miscegenation led to the infamous policy of separating children of mixed parentage from their . Life narratives that deal either explicitly or implicitly with of Aboriginal domestic workers and/or separation of their children during their “service” include, for example, those by Sally Morgan and Marnie Kennedy.

Furthermore, Jackie Huggins admits in her analysis that the issue of the relationships between white female “employers” and their Aboriginal “servants” has been a taboo in

Australian feminist discourse and she reiterates the need to engage in a critical approach to white women’s complicity in colonization: “The focus has been on ‘women’ as an entity as constituting the oppressed. Yet this [mainstream feminist] literature has never raised the question of whether women themselves are oppressors” ( Sister Girl 28). 23 Again, a number

23 At this point it is necessary to keep in mind that Huggins’ text was written in 1998 and since then a number of articles, among them Viktoria Haskins’ “Beyond Complicity: Questions and Issues for White Women in

Aboriginal History” (2006), and a book-length study Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal

44 of life writings by Aboriginal women in Australia expose the inequalities in female relationships by depicting the harsh treatment of these domestic workers by white women

(e.g. Glenyse Ward, Margaret Tucker, , Marnie Kennedy, Alice Nannup).

According to Moreton-Robinson, while white women and men assumed the roles of the

“knowing subject,” Aboriginal women were relegated into the “subject position servant”

(Talkin’ Up 22). This is, however, not to suggest that there were no positive or close bonds between Aboriginal and white women in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, some life writings reveal more or less temporary alliances or even friendships with white women (for examples see Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up 22; Huggins, Sister Girl 29). It seems, nevertheless, that even these relationships were defined predominantly by white women only. Similarly, this argument does not pretend to show that Indigenous women were only victims in these relationships. On the contrary, they exercised a number of resistant strategies, as will be demonstrated in the analysis of Indigenous women’s resistance strategies and subjugated knowledges.

At present, some changes have certainly occurred in the sphere of the relationships between Aboriginal and white feminists in Australia, but many tensions remain. For example, Jackie Huggins, writing in the 1990s, points to the still prevailing superior positioning of white women in educational institutions and welfare programs: “White women were and are still a major force in the implementation of government policies of assimilation and cultural genocide. As welfare workers, institution staff, school teachers and adoptive/foster mothers, white women continue to play major oppressive roles in the lives of Aboriginal women and children” ( Sister Girl 30). And so the notion of maternalism in

History , edited by Anna Cole et al. (2005), exploring the issue of resistance and complicity of white women in colonial racism, have been published in Australia.

45 the form of a white feminist need to “educate” Indigenous women and “raise” their feminist consciousness sustains the colonial conditions of disempowerment.

In spite of her fierce critique of contemporary white feminism in Australia, Jackie

Huggins does remain interested in a cross-racial and cross-cultural dialogue within the mainstream feminist discourse, albeit under the condition that the politics of difference and

Indigenous women’s demands be respected and understood. The suggestions made by

Huggins in order to transcend the cultural and racial barrier include moves on the part of white feminists towards racial equality within the movement, construction of a comprehensible anti-racial and anti-colonial discourse that is not torn away from reality, and meaningful representation of Aboriginal women when collaborations between them and white women take place ( Sister Girl 35-36). Until these measures are visibly in operation,

Huggins maintains resolutely, many Aboriginal women will not to enter discussions with white women. Although she admits at times that there are certain alliances possible between

Aboriginal, immigrant, and Anglo-Australian women, Huggins nevertheless reiterates that

Indigenous women in Australia prefer “to be separate in our struggles” (116).

On the other hand, Huggins herself sets an example and proves that collaboration between Aboriginal and white women in Australia is possible and can be a positive experience. In a collaborative and dialogic article presented together with Kay Saunders, a white historian, at a conference in 1993, Huggins voices in the epilogue her belief in the possibilities of forming alliances between white and Aboriginal feminist historians,

“particularly if the historians happen to have some grounding in race relations” (“Defying the Ethnographic Ventriloquists” 68). This common “grounding,” frequently emphasized by

Huggins in her writing, means that before any attempts to establish a meaningful dialogue, white people must educate themselves in the history of racism in their countries. In the end,

Huggins does point out the importance of cross-cultural learning and reconciliation when

46 she says: “It is imperative that we learn from each other; incorporating our different skills and expertise in redressing the imbalance of what remains the long-awaited beginning of

Aboriginal documented history” (“Defying the Ethnographic Ventriloquists” 68-69).

Interestingly, this piece of collaborative writing demonstrates the possibilities of cross- racial collaboration in research and writing without losing one’s grounding in specific locations and histories. Jackie Huggins notes that “it is clear that Kay’s [Saunders’] style and mine are quite distinct. … [W]e represent the two faces and products of colonization.

… The difference is that we have joined forces as a white woman and a Black woman to refute claims by feminists that all women are the same” (69). In other words, Saunders and

Huggins, each approaching the topic from her own perspective based on her particular background, show on a practical level that maintaining a distinctive voice anchored in culturally incommensurate identities can actually successfully defy the universalist notions of womanhood within mainstream feminist discourse in Australia.24 The result of this approach invites not only better collaboration and consultation when researching Aboriginal women’s issues but also formulation of a new kind of feminist discourse, as the following quote from Sister Girl suggests: “A must be constructed which is global and international – to embrace all issues of oppression and not just one of its manifestations. It must have open and egalitarian lines of communication and respect for the cultural diversity

24 The collaborative article mentioned is not the only case of Huggins’ interest in this type of writing; other collaborations include, for example, a chapter titled “Reconciling Our Mothers’ Lives: Indigenous and Non-

Indigenous Women Coming Together” (2001) written together with Kay Saunders and Isabel Tarrago; a collaborative response of several Indigenous women in “Letter to the Editors” (1991) to Diane Bell’s controversial article “Speaking About Rape Is Everyone’s Business” (1989); and collaborative editorial work on Placebound: Australian Feminist Geographies (Johnson, Huggins and Jacobs, 2000). These examples show that Jackie Huggins is a writer interested in sharing knowledge and creating spaces open to dialogues, which is also supported by her position in the Reconciliation Committee.

47 of oral and written forms of expression” (119). So Jackie Huggins has demonstrated that the collaboration with white feminists in Australia does not have to take place at the expense of losing the radical charge of Indigenous women’s critique of mainstream feminism. In fact, such collaboration can actually become part of the mainstream feminist discourse given its respect and recognition for the social, historical and cultural differences among Australian women.

*****

There is nothing worse than being a woman who is dark, brilliant and déclasée.

Lee Maracle, I Am Woman (102)

The First Nations writer Lee Maracle (Métis, Stoh:lo)25 has been acknowledged for a number of critically acclaimed works that challenge the Canadian textual landscape.

Crossing various genres, her writings include, among others, the autobiography Bobbi Lee:

Indian Rebel (1990), the collection of poetry Bent Box (2000), the novels Ravensong (1993) and Daughters Are Forever (2002), and the collection of academic writing, personal essays, autobiographical sketches and poetry I Am Woman (1996). 26 Maracle has also edited several anthologies and written numerous articles. Like Allen and Huggins, Maracle is politically active in promoting Indigenous voices, often speaking on issues related to the history of

25 Maracle’s identities are multiple: sometimes she identifies herself, or is identified, as a Métis writer according to her mother’s ancestry. Increasingly she stresses her father’s ancestry, which is Stoh:lo or Coast

Salish (Hoy 223).

26 Some of Maracle’s works had been written and published somewhat unofficially, much earlier than the presently published works indicate. This is the case of Bobbi Lee , which was written as early as the 1970s in collaboration with Donald Barnett, originally as an as-told-to autobiography. It is not clearly stated in the prologue to the book how the writing process happened and whether Maracle rewrote some of it for the 1990 publication. Similarly, I Am Woman was written and published in a typewriter copy in 1988 in the Write-On

Press owned by Maracle’s husband, and then republished with a different publisher in 1996.

48 colonization as well as institutionalized racism and sexism, both outside and within First

Nations communities in Canada. She has been directly involved in political organizations such as the Red Power Movement and the Liberation Support Movement, and in important protests like the Oka Peace Camp in 1990. She gained university education at Simon Fraser

University in Vancouver, became a teacher and mentor at the University of Toronto, and in

2001 she was appointed the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Canadian Culture at

Western Washington University. 27

From Lee Maracle’s writings, I focus on I Am Woman , which provides, as its subtitle suggests, a “native perspective on sociology and feminism.” Through its interconnection of personal voice and autobiographical elements with more analytical observations on the issues that Indigenous communities in Canada face at present, I Am

Woman forms the second part in the conversation among the analysed Indigenous feminist writers. In the preface to the text, Maracle reveals her personal and political motives that inform the contents of her book: “ I Am Woman represents my personal struggle with womanhood, culture, traditional spiritual beliefs and political sovereignty, written during a time when this struggle was not over” (vii). By combining poetry, short stories, memoirs and personal essays, Maracle creates a generically rich text that presents a specific voice within Indigenous women’s writing. In the self-referential passages, Maracle offers an insight into the construction of this book’s particular textuality: for example, she admits that the text is informed by events in her own life and at the same time by life stories collected from the people she knows. Instead of promoting the realistic turn of her writing, Maracle is inclined to incorporate imaginative elements: “I, too, have taken the stories of my life and others’ lives and added some pure fabrications of my imagination, rewriting them as my

27 A biography of Lee Maracle is available at and from

Native American Authors Project at .

49 own. Rather than distorting the facts, I have altered their presentation” (5). What remains the essential motivation for the text, however, is Maracle’s personal and political struggle against racism and sexism in Canadian society.

I Am Woman can be compared to Huggins’ Sister Girl in her call for a strong alliance among Native women 28 in what Maracle calls CanAmerica in order to fight sexism and racism. Maracle does insist on the separation of Native women’s struggles from those of mainstream feminists’ to a certain extent, her motivation stems, however, from different anxieties than Huggins’ critique. Maracle is more ambivalent in her priorities than Huggins, but generally in I Am Woman she puts racism and sexism on the same level, seeing both as the greatest obstacles to liberation. In contrast to both Allen and Huggins, Maracle is strongly political in the Western sense of a commitment to a political ideology: she became acquainted with Marxism when young and has been since involved in promoting Marxist ideas of revolutionary struggle against oppression and poverty under capitalism. 29 In I Am

Woman , however, Maracle’s major trigger for critical discussion is the mainstream women’s movement: as the title appropriately suggests, the issues of gender and feminism are central to her analysis of racism.

In the chapter “The Woman’s Movement,” Maracle maintains that generally

“women of colour” position themselves outside white feminism and that it should not be surprising to find white women of North America racist, defining the feminist movement

28 I respect Maracle’s preference to use the term “Native women,” “Native feminism” etc., rather than

Indigenous. As for the geographical limitations, Maracle, as most Indigenous people in North America, ignores the Canadian-U.S. border as it was superficially imposed on Indigenous communities of that area, dividing many in an absurd way. Her term “Native,” therefore, includes Indigenous people of both Canada and the U.S.

29 Maracle’s commitment to Marxism is elaborated in some of her writings, most prominently in her autobiographical text Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel .

50 through their own narrow-minded perspectives (137). She is not, however, specific about which “women of colour” she talks about and falls into the trap of homogenizing their view of mainstream feminism. Rather than assigning a major role to white feminism, Maracle points out that globally, women world-wide, who are in majority “non-white,” should begin to define the feminist movement and its struggle for emancipation, instead of preoccupying themselves too much with the white women’s movement. As Maracle comments: “The women of the world are re-writing history with their bodies. White women of CanAmerica are a footnote to it all. I am not in the habit of concerning myself with footnotes. … White women figure too largely in our minds. Let us stop chasing them and challenging their humanity at every turn. Let us begin by talking to each other about ourselves” (139). It is precisely this emphasis on “talking in,” in the words of Patricia Monture Angus, rather than on “talking out” (Monture Angus 41) that permeates Maracle’s writing in I Am Woman and links her to Jackie Huggins. Like her Australian colleague, Maracle is not opposed to establishing alliances with mainstream feminists but sets certain conditions to the collaboration, suggesting it must be rather white feminists who should initiate the process:

“Until white women can come to us on our own terms, we ought to leave the door closed.

Do we really want to be a part of a movement that sees the majority as the periphery and the minority as the centre?” (137-38). In this statement, Maracle actually comes near Jackie

Huggins’ call for keeping a distance from white feminism until respect for difference and effort to engage in anti-racism are visible on the part of the mainstream feminists. In her interview with Janice Williamson, Maracle also comments on the extremely difficult position of a “woman of colour” within the wider feminist movement and at events such as feminist conferences, where the critical discussions between white and non-white feminists are falsely perceived as necessarily antagonistic and confrontational, or seen as “pain and rage” (“An Infinite Number” 169). This perception is in Maracle’s view rather simplistic

51 and she keeps promoting the need to engage critically with mainstream feminism as a way to reach closer cooperation and understanding.

While Jackie Huggins reiterates that the priority of Aboriginal women in Australia is to fight against racism alongside Aboriginal men, Maracle stresses the need to eliminate both racism and sexism, regardless of skin colour. The plight of sexism, indeed, takes up most of her book, and is put forward as the main evil of contemporary society in North

America in general. Sexism, in Maracle’s terms, does not refer only to power relations between women and men, but in the first place it denotes physical violence on women and children such as rape between partners and beatings. Maracle is very open and straightforward about the issue of domestic violence both in Native communities and the entire North American society. Incorporated into her essayistic writing, there are short stories and poems depicting domestic violence (e.g. “Rusty”, 43-61), or examples from her women friends’ lives (24). In her argument about rape between partners and domestic violence as being a common practice in North America, Maracle does not exclude white women, even though she notes it might be a more common experience for “women of colour” (25). Importantly, Maracle sees as something “imported” to Native communities (139), and her assertion that “[r]acism is recent; patriarchy is old” (20) posits her rather at the mainstream feminists’ side. This statement also invokes Paula Gunn

Allen’s call for the restoration of the “feminine” in Indigenous communities. Indeed,

Maracle proposes a concept of “re-feminization” of the original Native social existence as a possible solution to sexism and racism. At the same time, however, she warns that this process is not simply a matter of gaining equality with men, as is often voiced in the demands of second-wave, “first-world” feminism within the spheres of house work, child care, jobs and education ( I Am Woman xi). Maracle, unlike Allen this time, does not understand re-feminization as the return to “spiritual foremothers,” since she perceives this

52 kind of spirituality, embedded in “traditionalism” as false and fetishized by the mainstream culture (39). Instead, Maracle advocates re-gaining the lost power of Indigenous women to speak on their own behalf and maintaining that power. Although Maracle does acknowledge the importance of Native women elders in helping decolonize Native society and develop self-respect in the next generation, this is by no means to be achieved through insistence on traditionalism and mysticism – values that Maracle ascribes to the dominant society’s “parasitic” taste (Godard, “The Politics of Representation” 208; Maracle, “An

Infinite Number” 169). Maracle then suggests that in order to gain liberation, Native women in North America must critically examine the conditions of their lives and the internalization of racism and sexism. One of the ways to initiate this process, according to

Maracle, is to approach it from a deeply personal point of view and lived experience, retreating to “memories of childhood that are fogged in time” (xi). Thus the empowerment can be accomplished through a connection with one’s own (fore)mothers who are anchored in reality, not a mystical spirituality.

In spite of her objections to mainstream feminism, Maracle responds equally in a positive and supporting way to mainstream feminist movement in North America. She even evokes some of its main agenda, especially when it comes to the “traditional” women’s roles and their invisibility. One of such cases is her general critique of the objectification of the female body and sexuality by social norms, to which she points out:

Sexuality is promoted as the end-all and be-all of womanhood, yet perversely

it is often a form of voluntary rape: self-deprecation and the transformation

of women into vessels of biological release for men. Our bodies become

vessels for male gratification, not the means by which we experience our

own sexual wonderment. ( I Am Woman 24)

53 Here Maracle clearly identifies with other feminists, regardless of their social status or skin colour, and their struggle to de-mystify and de-sexualize the female body. Like Huggins, she also draws attention to the controversy between the negation of Indigenous women’s sexuality brought about by colonization and the overly charged “imaginary” sexuality ascribed to Indigenous women, which leads to their desire for celibacy ( I Am Woman 20-

21). Other alliances with the women’s movement that Maracle acknowledges include her appreciation of its role in creating an alternative to the patriarchal discourse which privileges absolute knowledge based on objective, scientific and verifiable facts (“An

Infinite Number” 173). On this point Maracle echoes another feminist theoretician “of colour,” Trinh Minh-ha, who sees the reason for considering “third world” women’s writing as “inferior” in its incompatibility with the system of male control over the discourse, the male stress on veracity which is achieved through scientism, professionalism, and scholarism (Minh-ha 49). Ultimately, Maracle advocates the women’s movement most fervently when considering the plight of women under patriarchal system from a global point of view, as if responding to Jackie Huggins’ conviction about the incommensurability of cultural differences: “The systemic breakdown Indigenous women suffer from was predicated on the same fundamental lies which plague all women in the world today.

Women are not deserving power because we are emotional beings, beings who are incapable of ‘objective, rational’ thinking” ( I Am Woman xi). In this declaration, the title of

Maracle’s text resonates most strongly: I Am Woman stands for her personal journey from a denial of her womanhood to the recognition of it as a source of strength and empowerment.

It is also this personal development that is responsible for the occasional contradictions in

Maracle’s view of the questions of feminism and (Native) womanhood.

Of the three texts which I compare in this chapter, Maracle’s is most biased in her sweeping generalisations about mainstream culture, most “anti-white” in seeing only the

54 worst in the settler society, and her style is painfully frank, disturbing and haunting. 30 On the other hand, one of the most honest and perhaps most difficult decisions is her uncompromising critique of the Native community itself, particularly of Native men whom she accuses of “anti-woman” attitudes that are only “reserved for Native women” (22).

Native men, according to Maracle, are complicit in the denial of Native womanhood and the invisibility of their contributions to the community’s well-being, complicit in their adoption of the system of patriarchy. This is an argument that is never voiced by Jackie Huggins who in Sister Girl mostly excludes Aboriginal men from her discussions of Aboriginal women’s positions in the mainstream society, seeing the complicity of the white Australian women in the racial oppression but never pointing to the gender oppression within Indigenous community. Analogically with the second-wave mainstream feminism, Maracle complains that Native women form the majority in the grassroots organizations, but are the least heard and never the leaders. This emphasis on the Indigenous women’s lack of power within their own communities goes against the current trends in anthropological and ethnographical studies that have attempted in the last decades to do justice to Native womanhood by stressing the “traditional” strong Native women’s roles as community leaders, healers, bearers of cultural continuance.

Apart from putting forward her views on feminism, sexism and racism in contemporary North American society, Maracle is also explicitly writing down her own life story. The daily life and everyday experience are intrinsically interwoven in the text and play as important a part as the more analytical passages. The personal in I Am Woman is anchored in Maracle’s own struggles as a Native woman, daughter, granddaughter, mother,

30 Interestingly, one of the reasons the first version of I Am Woman in 1988 was self-published was that

Maracle, after having experienced negative responses from mainstream publishers, decided to avoid them from fear of having to compromise the text (Maracle, “An Infinite Number” 170).

55 wife and a writer. In this sense Maracle most precisely embodies what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls the “triple bind” – a position that results from the intersection of being a woman, being

“of colour,” and being a writer (Minh-ha 6). Although Maracle’s writing style is highly individual and subjective in its passion, anger and force, she does speak for the community of Native women in North America to a certain extent, especially when consciously representing “voices of the unheard” and linking the quotidian and private with the political and public: “For us racism is not an ideology in the abstract, but a very real and practical part of our lives” ( I Am Woman 4). The autobiographical “I” thus allows Maracle to position herself as a political representative both for women and for Indigenous people. The biggest contribution of I Am Woman to the debates on Indigenous feminism is, in my opinion, its strategy of deconstructing previously held claims that sexism in Native communities is secondary because it was alien to pre-contact social structures and that it will be erased once the Indigenous society is successfully decolonized (Churchill qtd. A.

Smith, “Native American Feminism”). But Maracle explains that in fact it can be the other way round: because the European settlers were able to colonize Indigenous peoples through the imposition of European gender relations, it follows that unless the patriarchal gender system is replaced, successful decolonization and full self-determination for Indigenous people, women in particular, will not be possible.

56 *****

In the beginning was thought, and her name was Woman…She is the Old Woman who tends the fires of life. She is the Old Woman Spider who weaves us together in a fabric

of interconnection. She is the Eldest God, the one who Remembers and Re-members.

Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (11)

The Native American writer and scholar Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo) is a well-known fiction writer, author of the acclaimed autobiographical novel The Woman Who

Owned the Shadows (1983) and of several collections of poetry. She also edited an influential anthology, Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and

Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989), and a textbook of course designs for Native American studies programs, Studies in American Indian Literature:

Critical Essays and Course Designs (1983). But most of all she is recognized for her ground-breaking collection of critical essays The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in

American Indian Traditions (1986). Apart from these pieces Allen’s writing includes many anthologized short stories and poems, as well as articles, essays and editing. Her academic career, which has involved positions at various prestigious U.S. universities, focuses on

Native American literature, its oral aspects and on Native feminist approaches to literary texts. Generally, Allen’s writing and academic career exemplify a life journey of an urban public intellectual with a Western university education who is at the same time strongly attached to her people and land, familiar with the culture of the Laguna Pueblo, and aware of her identity as an Indigenous woman.31

In my analysis of Allen’s response to mainstream feminism I rely primarily on The

Sacred Hoop which has now become a classic of its own kind, judging from numerous

31 A biography and bibliography of Paula Gunn Allen are available at and from Native American Authors Project at .

57 references to it in more recent works on Native American women, their writing, and

Indigenous feminism. In this pioneering critical work, Allen introduced a new theoretical framework for reading Native American literature and several concepts of hers, such as the

“feminine principle” and “gynocracy,” are still frequently used. Her emphasis on harmony and balance as concepts common both to Native American and feminist discourses is echoed in contemporary debates that compare the common bases of Indigenous epistemology, environmental studies and feminism, particularly eco-feminism. Although

Alen’s early work has been criticized by other Indigenous women for its sweeping generalizations about the category of a “Native Woman,” for its insistence on the essentially gynocratic nature of Native American societies and for its overestimation of the role gays and lesbians play in “traditional” Indigneous societies (Donovan 9-10; Babb, “Paula Gunn

Allen’s Grandmothers;” Jaimes and Halsey 333), it might be argued that the impact of

Allen’s critical work remains unsurpassed. Apart from the critical and literary contributions,

The Sacred Hoop also offers an insight into Allen’s personal memories of her childhood spent at Laguna, into the beginning of her academic career, and her personal views on being a Native woman in contemporary U.S. society. It is this aspect of her text that allows me to include The Sacred Hoop in the work on Indigenous women’s life writing.

Paula Gunn Allen’s engagement with the feminist movement is expressed throughout The Sacred Hoop , mingling with her literary criticism and personal attitudes. I have already suggested that Allen re-introduces some concepts related to the female-centred worldview of some traditional Indigenous communities. It is especially the concept of gynocracy which Allen defines as “woman-centered tribal societies in which matrilocality, matrifocality, matrilinearity, maternal control of household goods and resources, and female deities of the magnitude of the Christian God were and are present and active features of

58 traditional tribal life” (3-4). 32 In The Sacred Hoop , the importance is assigned particularly to the role played by Native female deities, female-oriented rituals and myths, creation- figures such as Spider Woman and Thought Woman. In this perspective, woman is in the centre of all creation, life and continuance. There is also a strong sense of spirituality and the emphasis is on continuance and survival, which Allen identifies, among others, as major issues in Native American existence ( The Sacred Hoop 2). Another term of Allen’s that is closely related to gynocracy is “gynocritics” which calls for a strictly gynocritical (feminist) approach to Indigenous texts in literary criticism (4). Finally, one of the strongest themes permeating The Sacred Hoop , and Allen’s entire work in general, is the imposition of the

European patriarchal values on Indigenous peoples in North America, which destabilized

Native North American tribes and led to their physical and cultural genocide (3).

The chapter in The Sacred Hoop titled “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White

Feminism” echoes the stream in Native American thought that maintains that feminist principles as such have always formed an inseparable part of the Indigenous worldview and social structures and that feminism as a concept has actually been borrowed from

Indigenous women (A. Smith, “Native American Feminism”). Allen reflects here on both the overlaps and clashes between mainstream feminist agenda and Native American practices. For example, she underscores the importance of the mother-figure, arguing that in the ancient Keres societies of which her people are part, one’s mother’s identity is the key to a one’s identity, enabling “people to place you precisely within the universal web of your life” and failure to know one’s mother is “failure to remember [one’s] significance, [one’s] reality, [one’s] right relationship to earth and society” (209). This claim offers itself for

32 The notion of gynocracy is extended in Allen’s later book, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boudary-

Busting Border-Crossing Loose Canons (1998) where Allen introduces her idea of “gynosophy,” loosely defined as feminine wisdom and focused on the “ecological, spiritual, and political” notions characterizing gynarchy ( Off the Reservation 8, 10).

59 comparison with the second-wave mainstream feminists’ efforts to re-invent the “lost” mother-figure and recover the mother-daughter relationship. Such “re-invention” took place both in psychoanalysis where a number of feminist theoretical studies reacted against the male-centred Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theories (e.g. Nancy Chodorow) and in literary studies where feminist maternal scholars such as Marianne Hirsch began to promote the so called literature of matrilineage and the “ongoing feminist pursuit of retrieving maternal subjectivity (Yi-Lin Yu). 33 Allen’s stress on the feminine principle might also correspond with the mainstream feminist current that has re-invented and worshiped the mother/goddess figure. Allen contends: “there are many female gods recognized and honored by the tribes and Nations. Femaleness was highly valued, both respected and feared, and all social institutions reflected this attitude” (212). Moreover,

Allen strictly rejects the reduction of female power to mere biological reproduction: instead, she underscores that the Keres theological foundations rest on the Creatrix who is “She

Who Thinks rather than She Who Bears,” a woman thinker who creates all material and nonmaterial reality (15). In this respect, Allen’s demand to recognize the female power without confining it to the sphere of maternity is a feature shared with mainstream feminism and in particular.

33 Works dealing with recovering the mother-figure in literary studies include The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (1980) edited by Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, Mother/Daughter Plot:

Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989) by Marianne Hirsch, Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in

Contemporary American Literature (1989) edited by Mickey Perlman, followed by more recent works such as

“Feminism, Matrilinealism, and the ‘House of Women’ in Contemporary Women’s Fiction” (1996) by Tess

Cosslett, The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth-Century Women’s

Autobiographies (2000) by Jo Malin, Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western

European Narratives by Women (2002) by Adalgisa Giorgio and Women of Color: Mother-Daughter

Relationships in 20 th -Century Literature (1996) edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory.

60 Allen’s call for the return to lost female power precedes Maracle’s text, even though, as was explained in the section analysing I Am Woman , Maracle’s sense of re- feminization does not underscore the return to traditional spirituality. Allen’s insistence on tribalism leads her sometimes to promote utopian visions of pre-contact Native American societies:

During the ages when tribal societies existed in the Americas largely

untouched by patriarchal oppression, they developed elaborate systems of

thought that included science, philosophy, and government based on a belief

in the central importance of female energies, autonomy of individuals,

cooperation, human dignity, human freedom, and egalitarian distribution of

status, goods, and services. ( The Sacred Hoop 211)

Such vision, evoking nostalgic and romantic ideals of pre-contact tribalism, may, however, risk the danger of excluding contemporary Indigenous urban dwellers, those who have involuntarily lost touch with traditional cultural heritage, or those who have consciously chosen to assimilate into the mainstream society.

On the other hand, Allen posits mainstream feminist practice along with the

American line of thought which, according to her, promotes the rejection of tradition, resulting in the loss of memory, which Allen sees as complicit in the loss of female power

(210, 213). Allen provides historical cases of the codification of women’s power in decision-making, political and economic spheres. 34 Based on these instances, Allen believes that mainstream feminism, demanding universal empowerment of women, simply refuses to see the historical experience of many Indigenous tribes which did empower their women in

34 For example, in the Iroquois Confederation of the 1600’s, the “tribal feminists” demanded concession of power from the Iroquois men to take an active part in the tribal decision-making (Steiner qtd. in Allen, The

Sacred Hoop 213).

61 certain domains. This drives Allen to conclude that “the price the [mainstream] feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchical societies on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time” (213-214). In

Allen’s view mainstream feminism therefore endorses the popular images of Native North

American women as “beasts of burden, , traitors, or, at best, vanished denizens of a long-lost wilderness” (213-14). As a result, Allen demands, similarly to Huggins and

Maracle, that mainstream feminists be aware of the diverse Indigenous women’s history in the settler societies.

Allen’s feminism is best characterized by the notion of hybrid knowledge. Hybridity is interwoven in both Allen’s identity and her knowledge. Allen’s multiple identities are notorious: she is a “mixed-blood” of Laguna Pueblo and Lebanese origins, inviting a constructive ambivalence in the process that Allen herself calls “crossing borders.” In addition, Allen does identify as a feminist and academic but at the same time she often promotes traditionalist views based on her Laguna Pueblo upbringing and stresses the fact she can move in between the various Indigenous groups: “For although I am a somewhat non-traditional Indian, I grew up in the homes of Indians and have spent my adult life in the company of traditionals, urbanites, and all the shades of Indian in between” ( The Sacred

Hoop 6). As for inscribing hybrid knowledge into her writing, Allen openly admits that she draws on both epistemologies – Indigenous and Western – in order to make the most of her traditional upbringing at Laguna and her Western academic training: “So you see, my method is somewhat western and somewhat Indian. I draw from each, and in the end I often wind up with a reasonably accurate picture of truth” (7). Such synthesis of the two epistemologies, as will be argued in the second chapter, is an aspect common to the narratives analysed in this dissertation.

62 Similarly to Jackie Huggins and Lee Maracle, besides her critical writing, Paula

Gunn Allen also inscribes her own memories and personal experience into her text.

Interconnecting the theoretical/political and the personal, Allen draws heavily on her traditional Laguna Pueblo upbringing, particularly in the passages where she elaborates on the oral aspects of Indigenous cultures, the storytelling tradition, creation stories and the representations of Native womanhood. In such passages she may incorporate, for example, a creation story told by her great-grandmother, and a memory of her mother’s storytelling with seemingly simple but deeply educational content about cooking, childbearing, medicine, etc. that informed her identity as an Indigenous woman But at the same time

Allen draws attention to the stereotypes promoting negative images of Native Americans that she gets acquainted with at mainstream educational institutions. In the interview with

John Purdy, Allen comments on the impossibility of separating one’s immediate social background and everyday experience from general abstractions of the ways Indigeneity is constructed. As Allen says:

It's not that we sit around and think ‘Well, let's see, the woman's tradition

is…’; you just grow up being informed of these things, and nobody says

that's ‘the Indian way.’ It's just part of what you learn from your folks. They

seldom identify it in any way, so you just think that's how reality is--at least

that is how your reality is” (“And Then, Twenty Years Later …”).

Thus I suggest that inscribing their personal experiences with both positive role models, in particular of female family members, and negative projections of modern female

Indigeneity serves all three authors in this chapter to support and validate their analytical conclusions.

In comparison to Huggins and Maracle, Paula Gunn Allen is much less fierce in her critique of North American mainstream feminism which is rather latent in her text. She does

63 not openly join mainstream feminist agenda but her own feminist goals and methodology often overlap with those of mainstream American feminists. Allen occasionally comments on the cooperation and similar aims of the two feminist currents: “Modern American Indian women, like their non-Indian sisters, are deeply engaged in the struggle to redefine themselves. In their struggle they must reconcile traditional tribal definitions of women with industrial and post-industrial non-Indian definitions” (43). Interestingly, Allen addresses the mainstream feminists as “sisters”, which is in Huggins’ and Maracle’s texts reserved exclusively for Indigenous women or at most for other “women of colour.” I take this difference as Allen’s explicit expression of her belief in the benefits of working together. In the end, it may be read as a call for reconciliation between Indigenous and mainstream feminism – something that Jackie Huggins voices in her Sister Girl as well. It is without doubt, however, that Allen’s most significant contribution to verbalizing

Indigenous feminist thought is making a direct connection between colonialism and the disempowerment of Native American women ( The Sacred Hoop 30-31). In spite of later criticisms, Allen has opened up important space for re-thinking the ways in which masculinist and colonialist discourses have erased the significance of Indigenous women.

To conclude this section, I have shown in the comparative analysis of the three narratives by Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn Allen how reading these texts against mainstream feminism as well as against each other may be useful for future feminist discourse. Inscribing difference is one of the recurring themes in contemporary feminist theory and certainly mainstream feminists must take into account the diversity of women’s experiences around the world. In particular, the themes stemming from the Indigenous women’s feminist texts that may enrich the future mainstream feminist agenda are the following: opening up space for a meaningful dialogue with Indigenous women, a dialogue based on the recognition of Indigenous women’s cultural differences and their “double

64 disempowerment” and on a sensitive approach to studying and writing about individuals outside one’s racial and cultural group; critical examination of local histories of relationships between Indigenous and white women, especially the latter’s complicity in the colonial disempowerment of Indigenous women; incorporating Indigenous feminist goals, in particular the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, within the mainstream feminist agenda. Only this kind of collaboration, together with recognition of the heterogeneity and diversity of minority women’s voices, can lead to mutual reconciliation and alleviating the debilitating tension between the two groups.

65 1.2. (Self-)Representation of Indigenous Womanhood and (Grand)Motherhood

Closely connected to the ways in which Indigenous feminism is voiced in Sister Girl by Jackie Huggins, I Am Woman by Lee Maracle and The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn

Allen is the recurring theme of the (self-)representation of Indigenous women. As with other issues, this theme permeates the analysed texts on two levels: on the personal level,

Huggins, Maracle and Allen present their identities and personal experiences of what it means to be an Indigenous woman in contemporary Australia and North America; within the larger framework, the writers also theorize representations of Indigenous womanhood, motherhood, and sisterhood, examining the roles that grandmothers and female elders play in the extended families and in the communities. As was suggested in the previous section dealing with Indigenous feminism, womanhood and especially motherhood becomes an important site of difference for Indigenous women. It is necessary to take into account that one of the governing principles of Indigenous women’s life writing in general is, on the one hand, the grief over the lost, forcibly separated children and the denial of motherhood resulting in the break-up of traditional family structure, and, on the other hand, the reassertion of female nurturing, maternity and sexuality leading to writing the female body and celebrating female ancestors. I suggest that Indigenous women’s life writing in particular performs this dialectic of expressing maternal grief, loss and sorrow, and simultaneously of celebrating survival, continuance and revival of strong, functioning motherhood. This section thus examines the ways in which Indigenous womanhood, motherhood and sisterhood are re-defined and re-constructed in Jackie Huggins’, Lee

Maracle’s and Paula Gunn Allen’s texts, and how these three writers carry out the key strategies of Indigenous women writers, which encompass restoring the power of

Indigenous womanhood, re-writing stereotypical images of female Indigeneity constructed

66 by the dominant society, and re-establishing female genealogies in the form of re- connecting with female ancestors.

Sister Girl , I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop all engage in some way in the historical development of Indigenous women’s social status in the pre- and post-contact periods, pointing out what Anne Brewster, drawing on Jane M. Jacobs, calls “historicity of gender.” Brewster defines this notion as a “way gender relations have been transformed through colonization” (Literary Formations 42). The change in the social status of

Indigenous women during the colonial domination, particularly in terms of power relations, and how this change compares to the change in Indigenous men’s status and roles in the communities, has been the subject of numerous discussions. 35 Some of these debates, however, might comply with an established dichotomy in which the European settlement is the cutting edge in the transition from favourable power relations to loss of Indigenous women’s influence: this argument advocates the strong sense of womanhood of the pre- contact Indigenous societies, resulting in the homogenizing imaginary of what Allen calls

Indigenous “gynocracies.” The colonization of Australia and North America then relegated

Indigenous women to hidden, invisible and strategic social positions. According to this line of argumentation, post-contact Indigenous women are depicted as dependant, weak, alienated, disempowered by both Indigenous men and the dominant culture and in need of being educated how to liberate themselves from this (Grant, “Reclaiming the

Lineage House” 50). The role of the texts by Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn

Allen consists precisely in that they re-articulate this dichotomy by showing the spaces “in

35 See, for example, studies by Rayna Green, Karen Kilcup, Devon A. Mihesuah, Kathleen Mullen Sands,

Kathleen M. Donovan and Annette Hamilton. Allen’s The Sacred Hoop provides a detailed overview of the ways the centrality and power of Indigenous womanhood in pre-contact North America, based on the high status of female deities, women healers, and (grand)mothers as family leaders, shifted under the influence of the imported patriarchal system (30-40).

67 between” the two positions (e.i. either a “mother-goddess” figure, or a “slave/ beast of burden” image). Their (self-)portraits of Indigenous womanhood reveal both strength and powerlessness in the face of racial oppression in Australia and North America. In addition, these texts also displace conventional representations of Indigenous women, challenging, for example, the stereotypical binary of “princess/.” 36

Although it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to generalize about the post- contact Indigenous women’s status, I think that the political, cultural and historical invisibility of Indigenous women in the mainstream discourse, imposed by the colonial society, is undeniable. Indeed, the suppression of Indigenous women’s voices through the colonization process and the stereotypical representations of Indigenous women in the colonial cultural production, which became very deeply rooted and survive until today, reveal striking parallels in Australia and North America. Moreton-Robinson reiterates how

Aboriginal women in Australia were denied all kinds of agency and subjectivity as they only became “known” through the gaze of others, usually white men (explorers, philanthropists, state officials, bravado drovers, adventurers, anthropologists), but also of white women who exploited Aboriginal and women as domestic servants ( Talkin’ Up

1). Devon A. Mihesuah adds that what most historical works have omitted are not only the

36 In Iskwewak. Kah’ Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws , Janice Acoose explains the impact of the negative imagery of “either a Pocahontas or a squaw,” which somewhat corresponds to a more universal stereotypical dichotomy of the Noble Savage/Brutal Beast, on Canadian literature as such and asserts that “such representations create very powerful images that perpetuate stereotypes and perhaps more importantly, foster dangerous cultural attitudes that affect human relationships and inform institutional ideology” (39). In Australia, Jackie Huggins comments on the construction of the binary referring to Aboriginal women either with derogatory names such as “lubra” and “gin,” or, on the other hand, as a “black velvet,” suggesting the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men (Sister Girl

15).

68 social roles and positions of Indigenous women in North America, but also “the feelings and emotions of Indian women, the relationships between them, and their observations about non-Indians” (“Commonality of Difference” 21). Thus through self-representation and demystification of conventional images of themselves, Indigenous women writers show readers in their life writing narratives the diverse character of their existence and the complexity of their subjectivities as well as their opinions on the mainstream society. Often the narratives depict Indigenous women as strong personalities, as battlers through poverty and social injustice, as mother-figures located in the centre of their extended families and communities, always there for their own children, even taking in abandoned children and relatives, and struggling for control over their lives in the face of assimilation. By writing down their own lives, Indigenous women create their own space and self-identity to be able to “establish their history and their subjectivity through an exploration of their unique and often overlooked cultural legacy” (Turner 109). Moreover, like Huggins, Maracle and Allen in the first chapter, and Pilkington, Sterling and Walters in the second chapter, Indigenous women writers interrogate mainstream policies of intervening in Indigenous peoples’ lives in unacceptable ways.

Although not restricted to presenting gender-based issues only, most of Indigenous women’s life stories present experiences unique to their existence as Indigenous women. In the words of Moreton-Robinson, “Indigenous women’s life writings are based on the collective memories of inter-generational relationships between predominantly Indigenous women, extended families and communities” ( Talkin’ Up 1). The range of themes covered in Indigenous women’s life narratives is wide: besides the issues concerning relationships among Indigenous women themselves and within their respective families and communities, the texts also interpret interactions with the dominant society. Anne Brewster mentions “corporeal histories of the gendered and racialised body that has been placed

69 under surveillance, disciplined, silenced and condemned to poverty,” the histories of “rape and abuse, childbearing and motherhood, extended family networks, the absence of male partners, arduous physical labour and political activism” as shaping many Aboriginal women’s narratives (Literary Formations 5). These histories then embody an alternative version to the history of making of modern Australia and a testimony to the survival of

Aboriginal culture into the twenty-first century. On the Native North American side,

Beverly Rasporich also summarizes the key strategies of Indigenous women writers:

In feminist fashion, Native female authors are writing woman-centered texts;

they write to and for other women in their acknowledgements, often aligning

themselves with other writers ‘of colour’. They seek to re-establish

matrilineal genealogy and maternal order and have power of creation and

regeneration, both mythically and poetically. (42)

In spite of the thematic diversity, it is possible to draw a more general conclusion that most contemporary Indigenous women’s life writings in Australia and North America symbolize, in one way or another, a return to the centrality of Indigenous womanhood which has become a key issue in the process of empowerment and decolonization.

*****

mothers, daughters, sisters

The site of Indigenous motherhood has, as was already pointed out, been significantly shaped by the denial of functional mothering. In Australia, young girls of mixed parentage were taken away from their Aboriginal mothers, often under the disguise of their “education,” and trained for the domestic service where their frequent task was to take care of the white children. From her conversations with elder Aboriginal women in the so called “yarning circle,” Boni Robertson draws this conclusion: “Whereas Aboriginal women were seen as fit to care for and rear the children of white women, ironically they

70 were not seen as fit to mother their own. Whereas all white women had the inherent capacity and right to be(come) mothers, this privilege was denied to Aboriginal women”

(Robertson et al. 41). This fact is repeatedly pointed to in Indigenous women’s life writings, among others in Jackie Huggins’ Sister Girl . The sense of loss, in terms of Indigenous motherhood and familial bonds, is also intensified by the fact that the imposition of a

Western model of a nuclear family on Indigenous families led to destruction of traditional extended-family structures. The functionality of Indigenous families was disrupted mainly by the government officials who had the power to intervene in the private sphere of

Indigenous families, and also by white men who destroyed virtually any possibility of functional Indigenous familial ties by engaging in sexual relationships with Indigenous women, exploiting their bodies and “leaving behind” numbers of fatherless part-Indigenous children who did not belong in either society.

Another point of difference in representing motherhood is constituted by the fact that historically Indigenous people in general had to face physical extermination, either in the colonial violence or through various epidemics and changes in their economic structures. Thus Indigenous women’s life writing often celebrates the sheer physical survival of Indigenous foremothers. In addition, in the Indigenous discourse the term

“mother” itself denotes different meanings from those in the mainstream Western discourse.

Generally, it may be argued that rather than the notion of the “mother” in the limiting sense of her biological reproduction, Indigenous discourse might prefer the term “mother-figure,” emphasizing multiple roles and functions of the social status. Aboriginal women in

Australia describe the mother-figure as follows: “The mother is not necessarily the biological mother, but grandmothers, aunties, sisters, cousins, nieces, all women assume the role and responsibilities of mothering a child of their community. All mothers are the carers of children, regardless of whether or not they have been the bearers of children” (Robertson

71 et al. 37). Jackie Huggins, in a very similar tone, also puts forward the complexity of positions of (grand)mothers within Indigenous communities:

Grandmothers, sisters and aunts are the most frequently used persons in

Aboriginal communities – the extended family plays a very important role in

child care arrangements. It is very common for a member of a child’s

extended family, particularly the grandmother, to look after a child or

children for short periods of time because the parents are unable to do so for

one reason or another … Sometimes these arrangements will extend for

longer periods of time, to the point where the child might be identified as

belonging to the person looking after him or her and be regarded as having

been “fostered,” in a way. ( Sister Girl 11)

Indigenous mothers have mostly occupied a significant position in the family unit as holders of certain privileges, power and knowledge that is to be passed on. The “women’s business” encompassed a “cultural, social and spiritual haven for women, one that embraces and valorizes women as mothers” (Robertson et al. 37). The kind of knowledge that the mothers pass down is traditional Indigenous knowledge that includes teaching the younger generation to read the landscape, survive in the bush, or identify one’s kinship, as well as to integrate in the spiritual systems. Importantly, Indigenous women often articulate these subjugated knowledges from the position of strength: in terms of extended family and the site of (grand)motherhood, many Indigenous women’s life writing narratives reveal, for example, the prestige and high status of women stemming from having many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, ensuring the family’s survival and continuation.

Similar status is ascribed to the sphere of domesticity where the valorization of everyday life is a source of women’s empowerment. Interestingly, bringing forward the issues of domesticity and everyday life represents a curious overlap with recent mainstream feminist

72 interest in women’s autobiographies, memoirs and diaries which render visible women’s spheres of the domestic and the private. Nevertheless, as was pointed out, the articulation of these spheres originates in different histories: while in the past mainstream feminist analyses often perceived domesticity and family as an oppressive site for women in general,

Indigenous women’s commitment to domesticity and family was, due to a long-term subjection to outside intervention, articulated as unattainable space. This situation led to the fact that Indigenous women were denied, besides their motherhood, a productive and self- affirming participation in the domains of domesticity and everyday life.

It has been suggested by some scholars that Indigenous women writers’ focus on extended family life, wider community relations and domesticity forms a distinguishable feature in Indigenous women’s life narratives. This focus then becomes an important strategy of resistance to forced separations, assimilation and the pressure to adopt the forms of social structures imposed on Indigenous people by the dominant settler society. Anne

Brewster argues that the extended family, a basic unit and a woman-centered arena in traditional Indigenous societies, is a place of women’s knowledges and practices, and therefore women writers use it as a means of resistance against the dominant society’s assimilationist practices ( Reading Aboriginal Women's Autobiography 40-47). While this argument is certainly valid for many Indigenous women’s texts, there have also been recent voices that problematize the position of Indigenous women within their families and underline its complex and shifting character. In her article “Out of the Salon,” Michele

Grossman, for example, claims that very recent Indigenous women’s writings in Australia show that Aboriginal family, apart from the “site of resistance” in Brewster’s words, can also be a “site of ambivalence, conflict, confusion and at times oppression for some

Australian Indigenous women” (179). This ambivalence is partially revealed in the texts by

Huggins, Maracle and Allen: although it is only Lee Maracle who explicitly addresses the

73 problematic positions of Native North American women within their families that can sometimes be perceived as a threatening space, the issues of conventional women’s arenas such as domesticity, childbirths, motherhood, etc. are, in fact, overshadowed in all three texts in favour of other Indigenous women’s activities – writing, political activism and teaching among them.

Following what was said above, the image of strong motherhood by no means predetermines Indigenous women to be confined to the domestic sphere and family welfare.

This may be one of the subtle differences between Indigenous and mainstream discourses of motherhood: the position of mothers in the Western society has been in the past depicted as space where the mother is often silenced, powerless and pushed aside, and where it has been believed that if there was a powerful mother-figure, her sphere of power was strictly determined by the family and domestic spaces, her main role was to nurture and nourish.

The mother-figures in Indigenous communities, it has been shown, seem to perform multiple roles within their communities, some of which are public, performed outside the domestic domain. The emphasis on motherhood and mother-figures in Indigenous women’s life writing does not imply that there are no women’s life stories that focus primarily on other social and cultural roles of Indigenous women. So while this ambivalence allows

Anne Brewster to argue that “because many of the narrators of Aboriginal women’s autobiographical narratives construct themselves primarily as mothers, … their narratives are gendered” (Literary Formations 35), it is also necessary to point out that other narratives, for example Wondering Girl by Glenyse Ward or MumShirl by MumShirl and

Bobbi Sykes in Australia and Enough is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out edited by

Janet Silman in North America, may marginalize events such as giving birth, marriage life and raising children in favour of other thematic goals, such as working life and political

74 activism. Incorporating other themes than those primarily related to motherhood is again fully manifested in Huggins’, Maracle’s and Allen’s texts.

While it has been argued that the site of motherhood has only recently been “re- discovered” as an important part of white women’s auto/biographical accounts, Indigenous women writers have a rather long tradition of portraying familial and kinship relationships.

As early as 1980, Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner even clamed in The Lost Tradition:

Mothers and Daughters in Literature that it is precisely Indigenous women, together with other “women of colour,” that “have shown us the way back to our mothers” (254).

Commenting on the essays in their collection, which draw on texts by African American women writers such as Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton and Gayle Jones, but also on contemporary Native American writers from the American Southwest, Davidson and

Broner point to the reconnection of mother and daughter within the framework that they call

“new matrilineage:” “One important theme running throughout all these writings is the sense that the daughter is no longer alone. The lost mother is found. One consequence of the women’s movement is a new emphasis on sisterhood and daughterhood” (254). This view is supported by Marianne Hirsch who also asserts that it is precisely in the texts of women of colour that she finds a discourse of “identity and subject-formation which goes beyond oedipal patterns and the terms of psychoanalytic discourse” (16). In the new matrilineage domain, both mother and daughter speak for themselves, as well as to one another, rather than allowing the daughter take authorial control over the mother’s voice (Hirsch 16). In the sphere of Indigenous women’s life writing, however, the various forms of dialogues between mothers and daughters are embedded in the maternal tradition of the past – a tradition where female bonds are prominent. The dynamic of a mother-daughter relationship, especially regarding the power over the narrative voice, is dealt with in more detail when examining Auntie Rita in the conclusion.

75 “The literature of matrilineage,” as Nan Bauer Maglin called the new and growing subgenre, presents texts written by women about their female relationships and heritage.

Although Bauer Maglin reminds us that this is not a new discovery but rather a “new passion” for contemporary women writers based on the feminist movement (257), she nevertheless makes it clear that the mother-daughter relationship and the notion of motherhood itself was somehow suppressed in mainstream feminist writings: “The sudden new sense the daughter has of the mother; the realization that she, her mother, is a strong woman; and that her voice reverberates with her mother’s” (265). While this might be true for white women’s writing, it is debatable whether Indigenous women’s life writing also copies this “new” development or whether it rather re-establishes the broken ties between

(grand)mothers and (grand)daughters that were disrupted by colonization. I suggest that both in Australia and North America, Indigenous women rather re-connect with the principles of strong, multifunctional motherhood, and matrilineality. The (grand)mother- figure, in particular, is then re-constructed not only in the published narratives but also in oral and unpublished records, in stories, myths, songs, and legends, often having a mythical and spiritual character. Considering these potential overlaps between Indigenous and mainstream feminist discourses in respect to the re-invention of the lost mother-figure and the return to, or re-construction of, female ancestors, it is unfortunate that Indigenous women writers and feminist scholars are still being excluded from the mainstream feminist movement, while they could enrich the debates on the mother-daughter relationship, particularly in auto/biographical narratives.

76 *****

In Sister Girl , Jackie Huggins’ re-articulation of Aboriginal womanhood consists, first and foremost, in pointing out various dominant society’s techniques of disempowering

Aboriginal women, especially during the time of their forced domestic work. Huggins’ input involves bringing forward several issues that might have been considered taboos until recently: apart from outlining the complexities of the relationships between Aboriginal and white women, Huggins also refers openly to sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men, stressing the large-scale occurrence of such relationships in the north Australian frontier where European adventurers arrived without their wives: “Indulging in sex with

Aboriginal women was a major pastime of Territory men from all ranks, including the policemen who were appointed as ‘Protectors of Aborigines’” (15). Huggins repeatedly relates the exploitation of Aboriginal women by white settlers with the colonizers’ conquest of the land (16), referring to the Western tendency to objectify female body and to project it into the landscape. As a result, Aboriginal women were completely disempowered, having nowhere to turn to for protection. On the other hand, Huggins also recognizes the ambivalent position of Aboriginal women in these relationships and complains about little critical attention that the notion of Aboriginal women’s power in regard to sexual exploitation has received (16). This analysis of the relationships between Aboriginal women and white men, leading to the collective historical experience of sexual abuse, is one of the examples in which Huggins demonstrates the necessity to pay careful attention to differences in the construction of Aboriginal womanhood.

Another issue that is highlighted throughout Sister Girl is the sense of sisterhood as a concept essential to understanding Aboriginal women’s realities: “Women’s position in

Aboriginal culture, both traditional and contemporary, situates them within a powerful network of female support,” Huggins suggests (32). Equally to Aboriginal womanhood,

77 Huggins constructs Aboriginal sisterhood as a site of difference, excluding white women’s participation in this relational structure and supporting Chandra Talpalde Mohanty’s claim that “sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis” (“Under Western Eyes” 58). Again, Huggins’ foundation for drawing a line between Aboriginal and white women in Australia in this sphere stems from the historical experience: although Aboriginal sisterhood has been, according to Huggins, a well-known concept since the pre-contact times, it has been significantly reshaped in the face of the attempted genocide in order to unite Aboriginal women against any form of racism. The sense of this historical injustice is then responsible for establishing Indigenous women’s solidarity among themselves and with other “women of colour” rather than with white women.

In I Am Woman , Lee Maracle, more than anything else, re-writes the status of urban

Métis women in contemporary CanAmerica: because the Métis 37 became historically excluded from both mainstream Canadian and Native societies, consequently having to face a confusion over their identity (Donovan 41), contemporary urban Métis women writers such as Maracle herself significantly contribute to restoring a sense of assertion of and pride in their Indigenous identity. Maracle’s tone in I Am Woman , similarly to other urban Métis women writers such as Beatrice Culleton or Maria Campbell, is often angry and militant; as

Kathleen Donovan shows, urban Métis women must face some distinctively female- gendered problems, among them the loss of power in formerly matrilineal cultures, the trauma from sexual abuse by both Native and non-Native men, from prostitution, and from

37 Kathleen Donovan clarifies the position of the Métis in Canada: “Originally consisting of those people with

French and Indian (usually Cree) blood, but now consisting of anyone with some Indian blood, the Metis were a legally recognized group until 1940. After 1940 and until the passage of the Canada Act, the Metis were not a legal entity…. Historically, Metis regarded themselves as the people in-between, a part of Euro-Canadian and Native culture, yet belonging to neither” (20).

78 the loss of their children to social-welfare institutions (18). All these physical and psychological wounds must be healed and healing Indigenous womanhood means, according to Maracle in I Am Woman , to accept and privilege Indigenous identity. Thus

Maracle asserts that it is Native women who hold the true power to change the conflicts in

Native/white and Native/Native relationships.

In I Am Woman , Maracle has obviously resolved the identity problem; she does not question her Indigeneity, nor does she question her womanhood. Indeed, I Am Woman attests to the evolution in her thinking about the role of womanhood: from her claim that “it was irrelevant that [she] was a woman” (15), Maracle undergoes an intellectual journey to her later awareness that gender actually matters. I Am Woman thus reflects Maracle’s awakening to the feminism of the 1980s when the words “I am woman” acquired a liberating touch for her. Throughout her text, there is a sense of pride in being an

Indigenous woman, but Maracle importantly proclaims herself a woman , not primarily a

Native woman. This is also true of some characters in Marale’s fiction; in her analysis of

Maracle’s novel Ravensong , Helen Hoy shows that Maracle typically uses female characters whose feminist analysis “refuses to subsume ‘woman’ under ‘Native’ in the constituting of identity” (143). The characteristics that Maracle associates with the assertion of being a woman refer to beauty, sensuousness, strength, passion and brilliancy. Therefore

I Am Woman stands for a true testimony to the previously outlined demand that Indigenous women begin the process restoring strong Indigenous womanhood.

In The Sacred Hoop , Paula Gunn Allen sets on a journey to rewrite the constructed image of Indigenous mothers as that of “slaves, drudges, drones who are required to live only for others rather than for themselves” (27). Allen quickly corrects this type of depiction by naming various social functions and distinct powers that Native American women had held before patriarchy was imposed on them. Since a Native American woman,

79 according to Allen, is primarily defined by her tribal identity, her sense of the self is

“primarily prescribed by her tribe” (43). Being a tribal woman – a phrase echoed later by

Anna Lee Walters in her Talking Indian – is a concept that Allen considers the only acceptable possibility of reconnecting with Indigenous foremothers. It is debatable to what extent this view might exclude participation of “non-traditionalist” Indigenous women in this process of reconnection, nevertheless Allen’s reassurance is obviously embedded in her own life experience: her growing up among strong and powerful Laguna Pueblo women whose “practicality, strength, reasonableness, intelligence, wit, and competence” were passed on to Allen herself certainly represents a very different life experience from Lee

Maracle’s. In contrast to Huggins, Allen is also more responsive in terms of expanding the concept of Indigenous sisterhood to non-Indigenous women; as was already mentioned,

Allen even names a common goal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women, which is to struggle to redefine themselves (43). Allen’s perhaps most important tool for empowering

Indigenous womanhood is her insistence on re-connection with mythological and spiritual female figures: through retelling of creation myths of Spider Woman and Thought Woman she recreates the female principle of creativity. Since this strategy implies responding to

Native American foremothers, it is dealt with in more detail in the next section.

*****

writing back to foremothers

Sister Girl , I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop are narratives that, together with some other Indigenous women’s life writing, reveal a significant aspect which could be characterized as re-connecting with the female ancestors. Indeed, many Indigenous women’s (life) writing is dominated by images and voices of the grandmothers, or foremothers: “Grandmothers, mythological and real, are being remembered as the first figures or metaphorical figure of female and tribal community”, Beverly Rasporich claims

80 when analysing the parallels in Native North American women’s writing (46). Since this reconnection happens on a textual level, I call this tendency, alluding to the notorious post- colonial motto, “writing back to foremothers.” The process of “putting the Mother back into the language” (Rasporich 46) can be interpreted as an attempt to compensate for the loss of the mother-figure – one of the previously mentioned parallels with the mainstream feminist agenda. The re-invention of foremothers in Indigenous women’s life writing may take various forms: on a personal level, it may be the effort to acknowledge a strong family role model(s) such as mother-figure(s), or a community elder(s), as is the case of Jackie

Huggins. On a political level, the narratives sometimes draw attention to previously unacknowledged Indigenous women activists, public speakers and educators engaged in political and/or social work. Spiritually, a reconnection to female deity, creators and mythical figures is also common. And last but not least, Indigenous women writers also re- discover their literary foremothers: for example, First Nations writers Joan Crate and Beth

Brant either creatively or critically re-invent the Indigenous poet Pauline Johnson (1861-

1913). 38

In a way, Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn Allen all engage in writing back to their foremothers. For Huggins, her role models are obviously real-life Aboriginal women of her time who are struggling for survival in difficult life conditions. Most of all,

Huggins acknowledges her own mother: apart from paying homage to in the collaborative auto/biography Auntie Rita , Jackie Huggins reflects on her mother’s life story and on their mutual relationship in Sister Girl which is also dedicated to Jackie’s mother –

38 Joan Crate, Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson (1989) and Beth Brant, “The Good Red Road:

Journeys of Homecoming in Native Women’s Writing” in Writing As Witness: Essay and Talk (1994).

81 the “inspiration of [her] life.” 39 In the introduction to Sister Girl , Huggins talks about the process of continuance and of passing on the legacy of carrying on the struggle to her children. By this legacy she means not only the memory of a strong female role model within her family, but also the political struggle for recognition of Aboriginal peoples’ rights (xi). The strength of the mother-daughter bond is best shown in Jackie’s confessional passages: “I remember all of my mother’s stories, probably much better than she than she realises. Not only have I heard them a hundred times over, but she is a fine storyteller, recalling every event of her life with the vividness of the present. … Yes, I too lived through every one of those feelings as she related them to me” (45-46). Similar reflections reveal the strong identification of Jackie with her mother: Jackie clearly wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps and be like her, although she admits the relationship is not of blind adoration only but also an expression of two independent minds with differing views on

Aboriginal issues. Having such a strong role model, Jackie Huggins, in contrast to Maracle and Allen, does not reconnect with spiritual foremothers but instead writes about, to and back to her own mother.

Lee Maracle’s role in the process of restoring Indigenous foremothers by writing back to them is more ambivalent: she does put emphasis on female ancestors but rejects what, according to her, is false insistence on traditional spirituality. Maracle rather stresses the importance of the “real-life” grandmothers “in giving love and discipline to help develop self-respect in Native children and interrupt the cycle of self-hatred and self- destruction that is the legacy of colonialism and magic of the Grandmother in the semiotic field of the indigene” (Godard, “Politics of Representation” 208). In this sense, the symbol

39 Another Huggins’ piece that writes back to foremother(s) is a collaborative article “Reconciling Our

Mothers’ Lives: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Women Coming Together” in which Jackie Huggins, Kay

Saunders and Isabel Tarrago inscribe memories of their mothers.

82 of a grandmother represents for Maracle security and comfort. Thus she remembers her great-grandmother “whose eyes spoke love, discipline and wisdom when words failed” (ix) and translates her grandmother’s and mother’s wisdom (7, 15). Importantly, Maracle is unique among the three Indigenous writers in that she constructs herself as a mother and occasionally “writes back” to her daughters too (7-8). 40 The extension of the “long chain of people” to the foremothers on the hand and female descendants on the other is best expressed in Maracle’s short poem “Creation” that she inserts into her writing and that I quote at length: “I know nothing/ of great mysteries/ know less of creation/ I do know/ that the farther backward/ in time that I travel/ the more grandmothers/ and the farther forward/ the more grandchildren/ I am obligated to both” (8). Generally, in I Am Woman Maracle does engage in re-connecting with her foremothers, but this process, in comparison to

Huggins and Allen, is mostly latent in her writing: rather than invoking female deity or her own female relatives, she writes back to contemporary Native women anchored at their own time and space, women who need to cherish their strength and power to alter their existence.

I have already pointed out that in The Sacred Hoop Paula Gunn Allen calls for the return to the spiritual foremothers as a way of restoring empowered Indigenous womanhood. Thus Allen writes back to her female spiritual ancestors, in particular to the key figure that she calls “Grandmother” and that occasionally appears in the titles of Allen’s writing. 41 Allen opens the chapter “The Ways of Our Grandmothers” with the following

40 Maracle has recently published a novel Daughters Are Forever (2002) which can be interpreted as homage to her own daughters.

41 This Grandmother-figure symbolizes the female spirit - Creatrix - in the Keres spiritual world. Allen gives detailed overview of this figure’s functions and representations in creation myths. As Allen says, this Creatrix has many names and many emblems, among them (Old) Spider Woman or Thought Woman, and also has individual aspects that are named, for example, Corn Woman, Sky Woman, etc. (13). While Spider Woman

83 characteristic of the (grand)mother-figure: “The Mother, the Grandmother, recognized from earliest times into the present among those peoples of Americas who kept to the eldest traditions, is celebrated in social structures, architecture, law, custom, and the oral tradition”

(11). Allen’s privileging of her spiritual foremothers does not, however, imply that she neglects her own, “real” female ancestors. Throughout her search for spiritual female figures, the reader also gets acquainted with Allen’s personal story: she contends, for example, that starting to teach Native American studies “returned [her] to [her] mother’s side, to the sacred hoop of [her] grandmothers’ ways” (1), or she acknowledges her mother’s art of storytelling. In the autobiographical passages, her “personal chronicle” as she calls these intimate parts, Allen offers an insight into the contemporary Indigenous woman’s life which puts emphasis on both change and endurance, symbols of modernity and traditionality (12).

Re-connection with the figure of (grand)mother, wise storyteller and “creatrix” of life, is, together with re-articulation of Indigenous womanhood and (grand)motherhood, one of the most powerful instruments of Indigenous women writers in asserting control over the representations of their and their family relatives’ life experiences. Interestingly, the process of writing back to foremothers, besides helping Indigenous women integrate back into a broken chain of Indigenous female bonding, also invokes a sense of recovering orality since it requires going back to teaching and wisdom of the elders, therefore to the tradition of storytelling. From the textual comparison of Sister Girl , I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop in this respect, it follows that although Huggins, Maracle and Allen all examine the techniques through which the dominant society’s apparatus have oppressed Indigenous women, each of them opts for a different strategy: Huggins, who mainly explores the

has been restored in Allen’s writing, another mythological figure of the Southwest – Yellow Woman – has appeared, among others, in the works of Leslie Marmon Silko, especially in her Storyteller (1981).

84 disempowerment of Aboriginal women in Australia, highlights in her analysis the maternal grief, loss and sorrow stemming from the denial of both Indigenous motherhood and its construction within the sites of domesticity and everyday life; Maracle seems to negotiate between the sorrow from the loss of Native women’s power in contemporary CanAmerica and a more optimistic future in case Native women manage to re-define their positions within their communities; finally, Allen’s main goal is to celebrate the return to traditional, tribal, strong, functioning motherhood. Thus the three texts demonstrate various approaches to voicing the dialectic of acknowledging female and maternal grief and of celebrating the revival of strong, functioning womanhood and motherhood.

85 1.3. Writing Life and Theory as an Act of Personal and Political Empowerment

There is no doubt that the process of writing can be empowering for any writer, regardless the cultural background, social position or local histories. It is nevertheless inevitable that writers who identify themselves as members of a marginalized group experience the process of writing as space where personal empowerment overlaps with political empowerment. If the notion of a text/discourse as a site where knowledge and power are exercised is taken as a starting point, it is obvious that for minority authors writing turns into a means of recognition not only of themselves as individuals, but also of their political struggles resulting from their colonized histories. It is no surprise then that these authors use textual space as a powerful weapon with which they can effectively inscribe social injustices, becoming, in the words of Paula Gunn Allen, “word warriors”

(The Sacred Hoop 51). In this context, Indigenous life writing becomes a site dominated by both personal and political resistance to the official colonizers’ policies, i.e. policies of defining and controlling Indigenous peoples’ lives, their histories, their family politics, etc.

Such resistance embedded in the narratives often leads to perceiving the political nature of

Indigenous life writing, and Indigenous literature in general, as a primary and inherent characteristic (Hulan, Introduction 10; Ruffo 118; LaRoque xviii). In other words, because minority literatures reflect the marginalization of oppressed communities, they invite the reading of the writer's experience as representative of a social group, proposing collective values, rather than as something personal and unique (Deleuze and Guattari 16-18).

The concept of the politics of empowerment is developed in the work of the African

American feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins, especially in her Black Feminist Thought:

Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1991). In this study, Collins gives a detailed overview of the development of Black feminist thought from its

86 construction, definition and subjugation by mainstream epistemology to its self-definition and empowerment. Collins’ book is instructive in tracing the way towards Afrocentric that stems from African American existence anchored in the everyday experience of Black women in North America. Collins argues that Afrocentric feminist thought has contributed to the understanding of important connections among knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment on two levels: first, by treating the paradigm of race, gender and class as interlocking systems of oppression, it

“reconceptualizes the social relations of domination and resistance;” second, it offers subordinate groups new ways of knowing their own experience, which allows them to define their own reality, therefore empowers them (222). I want to suggest that Indigenous women’s life writing that voices Indigenous feminist thought is a kind of textual space that empowers both the authors and other Indigenous women through placing their experience in the centre of the analysis and through providing appropriate (self-)definitions, (self-) representations and epistemological tools in order to theorize their existence.

Since Indigenous cultures are mostly based on oral traditions of storytelling, writing has a very special meaning for them. It has become an act of empowerment, a means of having one’s voice heard, one’s story read. As was suggested earlier, this process operates on both personal and political levels. In the sphere of one’s own individual self, Indigenous women establish, through inscribing their own lives into their texts, their subject positions as self-constructed subjectivities that are outside hegemonic definitions of them as

Indigenous women. From this point of view, Indigenous women’s life writing is often a narrative of coming to power through writing and the authors frequently comment on the important role that being able to write and be published plays in their lives. In her analysis of Celia from The Color Purple , Patricia Hill Collins comments that “some women write themselves free,” underlining the fact that the act of acquiring a voice through writing, “of

87 breaking silence with language,” can actually lead to taking action and liberating oneself

(112). The idea that writing makes Indigenous women writers free, gives them power and allows them to construct their own selves and to communicate with a wider community of

Indigenous women permeates many of their reflections on the writing process.

In the sphere of political empowerment, writing provides Indigenous women an access into public discourse and an opportunity to become actively engaged in political struggles leading to decolonization. What Janice Acoose wrote about Maria Campbell, the author of Halfbreed (1973), is still valid for most contemporary writers: “the act of writing is a political act that can encourage de-colonization. In this context, Campbell is one of the first few Indigenous women who appropriated the colonizer’s language to name her oppressors [...], and subsequently [to] work towards de-colonization” (“A Revisiting of

Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed ” 140). By publishing their life stories so that they are accessible to a wider readership, Indigenous women writers participate in exercising a certain power, although this power cannot undermine totally the mechanism sustaining the dominant settler society. It is rather the power to “counter-act,” as the definition by Carolyn

Heilbrun suggests: “Power is the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter” (18). Writing, in most Indigenous cultures, has become one such ability. similarly relates writing and power when she reminds us that “written texts are also the basis of the exercise of power and domination” (“Cartographies of Struggle” 35). Indigenous women’s life narratives therefore help to “intervene in the public sphere, contest social norms, expose the fictions of official history, prompt resistance beyond the provenance of the story” (Schaffer and Smith 4). It is precisely this intervention in and the contestation of the public sphere, be it historical discourse, cultural representations or political ideologies, that is perhaps the most powerful characteristic of Indigenous women’s life writing.

88 Typically, Indigenous women writers such as Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and

Paula Gunn Allen do not distinguish between personal and political empowerment in their writings. For them, the two are interconnected, one is a condition of the other, resulting in the concept embodied in “the personal is political.”42 As Lee Maracle says in an interview,

“[e]verything you do and every word you speak, either empowers you or disempowers”

(Maracle, “An Infinite Number” 168). The emphasis on the power of words is characteristic for Indigenous women writers as they use it for the purposes of resisting the unequal distribution of power in the settler societies. The power obtained through writing serves as a

“corrective” device: to counteract the cultural representations of Indigenous peoples, to rewrite their histories, to redress the oppressive hierarchies. “Through the power of words we can counteract the negative images of Indigenous peoples,” says Kateri Damm, a Native

Canadian writer, in order to confirm the ability of Indigenous women’s writing to intervene in the ways Indigenous peoples are portrayed (24).

As many scholars have shown, Indigenous women have gone through a very complex process of change in their social status since the arrival of European settlers to

Australia and North America (Allen 27, 32-40; Kilcup 2; Hamilton 169; Mihesuah

“Commonality of Difference” 20). Although the causes of this disempowerment are many and often overlap, the inescapable result is that Indigenous women no longer enjoy the power that once ensured some of them an equal status in their communities, and for the dominant settler society they have mostly become invisible. Therefore I want to suggest that after having lost their voices both within their own communities and the dominant settler culture due to the imposition of the Euro-American patriarchal system, after having been

42 This notorious slogan, the exact origin of which is somewhat difficult to trace (see

) but which nevertheless refers back to the 1960s women’s movement, can be perceived as another link between mainstream and non-mainstream feminisms.

89 disempowered in the public as well as in the private spheres, Indigenous women are today re-installing their voices through their personal narratives in order to seize some of the power back. I see the concept of writing one’s life as an act of empowerment and as embedded in Indigenous women’s life writing: it is related, on the one hand, to the development of critical, feminist reading of women’s personal narratives which proclaimed personal experience as a valid source of knowledge, and, on the other hand, to the notion of the politicized nature of “minority” or “ethnic” literatures, which put forward personal experience as a testimony to institutional racism.

Huggins’, Maracle’s and Allen’s comments on the writing process are obviously representative of professional writers who have already published several works of their own and are committed to public intellectual work. They demonstrate how much the idea of coming to voice in the process of writing is connected with their sense of power and freedom. Of course, many Indigenous writers object that Indigenous literatures are still very marginalized in the global literary market and publishing industry, and that they are still subject to often essentialist and prescriptive tendencies concealed in the marketing strategies of big publishers (La Roque xvi). Nevertheless, there are many Indigenous writers who point with pride to the amount, richness and diversity of Indigenous writing today, suggesting that the Indigenous literary voice has seized some of the power that it had been long denied (Monture Angus 21-22; LaRoque xviii). Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and

Paula Gunn Allen certainly do exercise certain power on the pages of their texts. As was already emphasized, the three texts include deeply personal experiences and observations; however, all the auto/biographical stories, anecdotes, and poems are narratives of struggles which cross the boundaries of the personal to enter the sphere of the political. Therefore, by publicizing their personal struggles Huggins, Maracle and Allen actually displace the privilege and power relations between Indigenous women and mainstream feminists, as

90 well as between themselves as marginalized writers and mainstream authors. Through writing, these Indigenous women writers are not a “site of mastering gaze,” as Moreton-

Robinson argues, but voices that are “reclaiming Indigenous experience as the locus of relationships” in their work ( Talkin’ Up 2). Let us explore what each of the writers has to say about the meaning of writing in her life and the way it empowers herself and her community.

*****

Jackie Huggins expresses her relationship to writing explicitly right in the opening pages of her book Sister Girl : “Writing is my greatest joy. It frees the mind, heart and soul in a manner that only a writer can understand. For me, it is a process in which expression flows from the very core of the spirit and enables others to take a glimpse inside the writer’s world view” (ix-x). This passage already suggests the connection of joy, freedom, and liberation. Much later on in her book, Huggins reiterates the relation between writing, freedom and also clarity of ideas: “Thinking back, I believe writing was so important to me because it was a liberating experience. Issues of race, class and gender began to appear much clearer” (108). Here Huggins suggests it was actually writing that helped her formulate her ideas and political awareness, as if the process of writing could illuminate the dark corners of one’s personal and collective history, and act as a kind of enlightening experience.

On a more personal level, Huggins admits that writing is deeply personalized for her. In her reflections on the writing process, she constantly faces a dilemma between writing an “objective” study as a result of her scholarly research and writing a personal story as a result of her experience of being an Indigenous women. This dilemma is echoed strongly in her experimental text of her mother’s auto/biography, which poses several questions dealing with authorship, negotiating of two narrative voices, and balancing

91 between the subjective and the objective: how does one write about “something so personal while striving for some objectivity at the same time?” Huggins asks in the chapter of Sister

Girl entitled “Writing My Mother’s Life” (46). Her answer actually suggests the direction which makes it possible for a writer to engage in both personal and scholarly writing. On the one hand, Huggins says that because she is her mother’s daughter, having a close relationship with her mother and clearly adoring her as a role model, she can write her life story as no one else would have done. The relationship makes it easier for her to enter her mother’s life and response to it adequately. On the other hand, she, as a professional writer, sometimes distances herself from the object of her study, i.e. her mother, and keeps the narrative voices separate. In a comment expressing her self-doubt, Jackie Huggins says:

“[Y]es, it is her story, not mine. I have to constantly remind myself of that fact. How much is “I” the writer?” (47). Finally, writing her mother’s biography represents for Jackie

Huggins the effort to return in some way her mother’s “love, strength, wisdom and inspiration” (47).

Nevertheless, Huggins’ writing is restricted neither to transcribing her family’s lives, nor to reflecting on a writer’s role in this process. First and foremost, Huggins’ task is to write down Aboriginal women’s history in Australia and to voice her political activism

(57). Interestingly, the keyword that permeates Huggins’ discourse on the purpose of the writing process is “reclaiming:” Huggins hopes that writing down her mother’s biography,

“reclaiming her stories and putting them in print,” will “enhance Aboriginal history and, also, the writing being done by Aboriginal women” ( Sister Girl 97). In Auntie Rita ,

Huggins reiterates that “the writing of this book was an attempt to reclaim the history of our people” ( Auntie Rita 4). Reclaiming and empowerment, in this context, become synonyms: both are the Aboriginal voices expressed in writing.

92 *****

In her interview with Hartmut Lutz, Lee Maracle makes an observation on the importance of writing for Indigenous women in North America. She underscores the sense of the collective task by the choice of the personal pronoun “we” which speaks for the community of Indigenous women, rather than the ‘I’:

When we write, I believe that what we are doing is reclaiming our house, our

lineage house, our selves … That’s how we see each other’s work, and we

want to read each other, and see each other, and to experience each other,

because the more pathways we trace to the centre of the circle, the more rich

our circle is going to be, the fuller, the rounder, the more magnificent. (“Lee

Maracle” 176)

Maracle addresses here two major issues that also appear in Huggins’ approach: the first is the “reclaiming” of the Indigenous women’s selves, which means empowering Indigenous voices through writing, and the second is the importance of a wider community of

Indigenous women writers, which represents the diversity of narratives.

Maracle is clearly aware of her privilege in being a leader, encouraging other

Indigenous women to follow her example. In the preface to I Am Woman she speaks about her “original intention … to empower Native women to take to heart their own personal struggles for Native feminist being” (vii). Although Maracle never denies the liberating impact that the writing process has on her as a person, she frequently points out that her task as a writer is to empower her people, especially Native women, rather than herself. The first chapter of I Am Woman entitled “I Want to Write” describes her efforts to collect stories from other Native people in order to have the Indigenous voices recognized: she scribbles them down on paper napkins and paper bags in restaurants, buses, meetings (3). This method acknowledges the fact that her text is on the one hand conceived as incorporating

93 her own life experience and therefore bearing strong autobiographical elements, and on the other it is a compilation of other people’s stories that Maracle decides to present as the voices of Native North American women. Where her own experiences end and the stories collected from others begin is not, however, clear. But it may be argued that blurring of the boundaries of many kinds is one of the conscious strategies Maracle decides to employ in her text.

Maracle acknowledges that writing is a ceremony for her, adding a spiritual element to her relationship to words on a page (Maracle, “An Infinite Number” 177). This is also something she shares with Jackie Huggins who sees writing as an “expression [which] flows from the very core of the spirit” ( Sister Girl ix-x) and Paula Gunn Allen who advocates a return to the tribal-centered writing and criticism with strong spiritual connections, drawing on oral traditions ( The Sacred Hoop 53, 55, 61). In the same breath, however, Maracle adds that writing means also a kind of privilege for her and thus articulates the dilemma of some Indigenous women writers who seem to be torn between the need to write and speak for themselves and their communities, and seeing writing as a kind of luxurious activity in which the others, being busy with everyday survival, simply cannot afford to get involved. In the self-reflective passages on the writing process they then reveal a sense of guilt at having been “privileged” in this way: “‘You have your writing to keep you alive. What have ordinary Native women got?’ my friend asked,” Lee

Maracle re-tells in I Am Woman (142). Maracle thus uncovers a potential difficulty that

Indigenous writers who are successful in terms of being published, read by a wider readership and possibly included in higher education curricula, must cope with: although writing from a position of a marginalized author, they might be also perceived as having privileges (education, prestigious jobs, “luxury” of writing) many Indigenous people still lack.

94 *****

For Paula Gunn Allen, the empowerment of Indigenous people arises from re- creating a tribal vision of existence anchored in spirituality, gynarchic social structure and oral tradition. The relation between the notions of tribal spirituality and female-centred society is foregrounded in Allen’s The Sacred Hoop repeatedly: indeed, Allen puts “women at the centre of the tribal universe” (264). In the concluding chapter where Allen makes a prophecy on the future prospects of Indigenous women and Indigenous literature in North

America, she argues that by shifting the focus from the male-centred to the female-centred in the sphere of literary narratives, i.e. in her understanding from extinction to survival and continuance, the future of Indigenous communities also shifts from pessimism to optimism

(262), to which I add – from disempowerment to empowerment. As for Indigenous women writers, Allen predicts that their empowerment will stem from greater access to “female traditions” which might serve as sources of inspiration and symbolism. I also suggest that the process of empowerment, for Indigenous women writers, is a matter of gaining further access to public discourse. In this respect Allen can, similarly to Huggins and Maracle, serve as a role model: just as Huggins who as a trained historian familiar with the archive and historical research writes from a position of authority and just as Maracle who speaks from the position of an activist drawing on her personal experience of political engagement,

Allen also speaks from a position of a respected academic well-versed in literary criticism.

But in my view, the main drive of the three narratives that may offer a sense of personal and political empowerment to other Indigenous women is the strategy of writing life – personal memories, experiences, everyday events, family connections with which many Indigenous women might identify – into their texts.

As a literary critic and a fiction writer, Allen dedicates a lot of space in The Sacred

Hoop to analysing Native American literature and exploring how both traditional and

95 modern Native American literature may empower Indigenous cultures. First and foremost,

Allen emphasizes the importance of the oral tradition which she perceives as a source of literary empowerment and writers’ inspiration. Allen contends:

The oral tradition, from which the contemporary poetry and fiction take their

significance and authenticity, has, since contact with white people, been a

major force in Indian resistance. It has kept the people conscious of their

tribal identity, their spiritual traditions, and their connection to the land and

her creatures. Contemporary poets and writers take their cue from the oral

tradition, to which they return continuously for theme, symbol, structure, ad

motivating impulse as well as for the philosophic bias that animates our

work. (53)

Allen identifies ceremony and myth as two basic forms in Native American literature (61) and she continues that one of the functions of storytelling is giving people the possibility to enter into the “more obscure ritual tradition” (100). By this she means entry into the narrative tradition which enables people to be aware of the fact that their lives are part of a larger entity which, according to Allen, is linked by “a particular psychospiritual tradition”

(100). It follows from this perspective that literature can actually make other Indigenous people realize that their individual experience of marginalization, oppression, alienation, etc. is not isolated but interconnected with the lives of those who share similar historical, political and cultural background in the form, for example, of violent large-scale colonization. This may certainly become a source of personal empowerment for many

Indigenous people.

96 *****

textual oratory, or writing theory through story

The writing process is not always an easy and straightforward activity for

Indigenous women. I have already outlined the dilemma some Indigenous writers may have to deal with when speaking/writing from the position of the privileged educated elite (which does not imply that they cease to be marginalized authors). In Woman Native Other , Trinh

T. Minh-ha points to the commitment of the minority writers, or “Third World” writers as she calls them, as one of the main driving forces behind the writing process:

Commitment as an ideal is particularly dear to Third World writers. It helps

to alleviate the Guilt: that of being privileged (Inequality), of “going over the

hill” to join the clan of literates (Assimilation), and of indulging in a

“useless” activity while most community members “stoop over the tomato

fields, bending under the hot sun” (a perpetuation of the same privilege). In a

sense, committed writers are the ones who write both to awaken to the

consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience. (10-

11)

While Minh-ha evokes rather negative connotations of the writing process for “third-world” women, I have suggested that the dilemma concerning the “guilt” arising from joining the

“privileged” elite may be counterbalanced by the proliferation of a writing style that successfully interweaves writing theory with writing everyday life. Obviously, access to education and intellectual resources gives authors such as Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and

Paula Gunn Allen the power to enter into theoretical discourse alongside mainstream academics. But as will be shown later, they inscribe their difference also through a writing style that attempts to combine their own cultural backgrounds with their academic research, promoting close relation of the theory to the racial and gender intersection that informs

97 most Indigenous women’s lives. Thus Huggins, Maracle and Allen become in a way the mediators between academia and Indigenous women without access to educational resources and theoretical discourse.

Discussions regarding the greater or lesser incommensurability of Western and

Indigenous epistemologies are numerous and complex. The male-gendered nature of the

Western discourse of theory that, “in itself, becomes a form of violent domination,” has been underscored by mainstream feminists such as Teresa de Lauretis (qtd. in Kossew 4).

However, as de Lauretis has also shown, mainstream feminism, similarly to white women in the settler colonies, can be situated at the same time as the oppressed and the oppressor:

“[F]eminist theory sometimes resembles the very thing it hates and suppresses difference of class, age, and ethnicity, among others” (qtd. in Kossew 4). This approach often encounters critical responses from Indigenous and other minority women who accuse such mainstream feminist theory of keeping a distance from everyday life and of being too abstract to matter to underprivileged and multiply-disadvantaged minority women.43 This is evident, for example, in Jackie Huggins’ response to a conference question about Aboriginal women’s reasons for not participating in the more theoretical debates within feminism in Australia:

“The theoretical issues and writings seem far too abstract at this stage to form some kind of bridge that we can get together to cross to overcome and start talking as women” ( Sister

43 The concept of “writing theory from experience” is not found exclusively in minority women’s narratives, even though it might be argued that personalized narratives have a long tradition in writing by “women of colour.” Anne Brewster characterizes “the personal turn” as drawing on personal narratives and first-person accounts, in some of the writings on whiteness. The personal turn is employed, according to Brewster, “in effort to deconstruct the binaries between public and private memory, between ‘objective’ and subjective modes of discourse and between specialized knowledges and everyday life” (“Writing Whiteness”). The discrepancy between the notions of specialized knowledges and everyday experience has also been explored earlier by mainstream feminists.

98 Girl 59). 44 In spite of such subtle criticisms which rather than creating new tensions aim at stimulating mainstream feminist theorists to include the minority women’s feminist thought in their discourse, the recent voices promoting restoration of Indigenous knowledge and heritage demonstrate a tendency to synthesize the two epistemological approaches. As the

First Nations scholar Marie Battiste (Mi'kmaq) points out, this synthesis of the two systems of knowledge is not only a matter of choice but it is vital for further survival and development of Indigenous thought: “By harmonizing Indigenous knowledge with

Eurocentric knowledge, they [Indigenous peoples] are attempting to heal their people, restore their inherent dignity, and apply fundamental human rights to their communities”

(209). I would like to suggest that writing life together with theory is one of the ways that may “harmonize” the epistemological differences or, using another metaphor, build a bridge to cross the epistemological abyss. Minority women writers and scholars have shown that exploring the complexity of ideas presented in both scholarly thought and everyday life can be done in a way that does not make these ideas less powerful because they are less theoretical. On the contrary, these ideas become more accessible to groups they speaks for, to and about. This style of writing theory and life has, as Patricia Hill Collins shows in her work, contributed to articulating the challenge it poses for “both the ideas of educated elites and the role of theory in sustaining hierarchies of privilege” (xii). A number of studies by

Indigenous or other minority scholars have formulated the frameworks of methodologies and theoretical backgrounds distinct from mainstream research methods. This has been done most prominently by Linda Tuhiwai Smith in her Decolonizing Methodologies:

Research and Indigenous Peoples . Here Smith proposes the notion of “researching back,”

44 On the other hand, some Indigenous feminist critics, particularly Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, do engage in highly theoretical arguments, combining the Western and Indigenous epistemologies, and challenging the notion of the essentially political and pragmatic level of Indigenous women’s involvement in feminism.

99 which in my view mirrors the well-known notion of “writing back” or “talking back” to the

“centre.” 45 In the case of Huggins, Maracle and Allen, this concept implies talking/writing back to mainstream feminist theory. Researching back involves, according to Smith, “a knowingness of the colonizer and a recovery of ourselves, and analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for self-determination” (7). In my view, this concept of researching back, or the

“knowingness” of the tradition of the Western critical thought no matter how alien its concepts might be for the Indigenous existence, is particularly applicable not only to the writings of Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn Allen, but also to the life narratives by Doris Pilkington, Shirley Sterling and Anna Lee Walters analysed in the second chapter.

Indeed, writing theory and life at the same time is one of the most enriching strategies of Indigenous women writers and feminist scholars. 46 While mainstream feminism, arising from the Western critical tradition, frequently engages in more abstractly theorized concepts, Indigenous feminism often prefers to keep the practical goals in mind, promoting social justice and human rights, drawing attention to histories of oppression and underrepresentation of Indigenous women in welfare and social services, to recurrent stereotypes of Indigenous women in the mainstream media, and to the continued denial of access to resources. This is not to imply, however, that Indigenous women, or minority women in general, cannot theorize in the Western tradition of critical thought. Rather, what

45 The notion of “writing back to the centre”, a premise of post-colonial theory, is explored in more detailed in, for example, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures by Ashcroft,

Griffiths and Tiffin (1989).

46 I am aware that this characteristic is not confined to Indigenous women’s writing only. A similar premise can be made about other minority women writers, such as Chicana (e.g. Gloria Anzaldúa) or African

American theorists/writers (e.g. Patricia Hill Collins), who in their academic writings combine theory with personal experience and often refer to other women’s experience or directly include other voices.

100 they come to implement in their writing style is a kind of alternative way of theorizing which reflects a different cultural background and different knowledges. The African

American theorist and writer Barbara Christian says in her 1987 principle essay “The Race for Theory:”

People of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the

Western forms of abstract logic. … I am inclined to say our theorizing … is

often in narrative form, in the stories we create, in riddles, and proverbs, in

the play with language, since dynamics rather than fixed ideas seem more to

our liking. (349)

The concept of “writing theory through story,” or through a personal narrative, autobiography, life writing, etc., is most elaborately voiced by Lee Maracle who in her

Oratory: Coming to Theory (1990) introduces the concept of “oratory” – a combination of theory as a Western notion and orality as a traditional Indigenous notion. Maracle insists that “there is a story in every line of theory. The difference between us and European

(predominantly white male) scholars is that we admit this, and present theory through story.

We differ in the presentation of theory, not in our capacity to theorize” (7).

The presentation of theory through story and through personal experience – oratory

– is the golden thread running through Sister Girl , I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop .

Jackie Huggins interweaves into her writing her own experiences of an Indigenous woman in the Australian academia (e.g. her observations from a mainstream feminist conference), her own life story of growing up in urban racist city in the 1950s, and also the life story of her mother. All these personal insertions serve her for drawing more general conclusions. In her research on Aboriginal women domestics in the 1920s and 1930s which includes interviews with six Aboriginal women, Rita Huggins – Jackie’s mother – is one of the interviewees. What in Western methodology would perhaps seem biased is in Indigenous

101 discourse an asset, a source of credibility. Huggins’ personal memories, life experience and her family background directly inform Huggins’ research methods. Although this personalized supporting “evidence” is important for Huggins’ argument, it is not privileged over the archival materials stemming from the mainstream historical discourse. This leads to passages where Huggins juxtaposes Aboriginal women’s first-person accounts with quotes from the Aboriginal Acts or with studies by mainstream historians and feminist scholars ( Sister Girl 6-20, 23). In the essay titled “Writing My Mother’s Life,” Huggins uses her mother’s biography to reflect on the difficulties of transcribing one’s life, in particular the life of a close person, 47 as well as on the importance of the oral tradition when written evidence of the colonial oppression of Aboriginal people is scarce. In addition, Rita

Huggins’ life account also serves Jackie Huggins to explore the history and everyday activities of a mission school called Cherbourg where Rita was placed after having been separated from her family (41-44). In this specific essay in Sister Girl , her mother’s life story serves Jackie Huggins as an illustrative example of one particular Indigenous woman’s experience in a particular period of Australian history and is a source of her further theoretical observations on the position of Aboriginal women in this period, on the construction of female Indigeneity, on the common stereotypes at that time and mainly on the forms of racial oppression.

In I Am Woman , Lee Maracle uses a very similar strategy of telling theory through story. She incorporates, apart from autobiographical elements, some fictional stories and poetry based on her own and her female friends’ experiences. Maracle, more than any of the three women writers, gathers her inspiration from the “kitchen table stories” as she calls the

47 This essay in Sister Girl was written shortly after Jackie Huggins finished writing a book about her mother –

Auntie Rita .

102 life stories of Indigenous women who have shared their wisdom, experience and ideas with her. As Maracle says:

From around the kitchen tables of the people I have known have come stories

of the heart. Great trust and love were required to enable the bearer to part

with the tale. If I wrote for a lifetime I could never re-tell all the stories that

people have given me. I am not sure what to do with that, except that I shall

try to grasp the essence of our lives and to help weave a new story. (6)

Maracle is the only one who does not include historical archival material or the body of the mainstream critical work, which in my view is her consciously implemented strategy.

Conventional academic discourse would probably condemn her writing style for lack of evidence, citations and support for her claims. But it appears that for Maracle, inscribing her own and other Indigenous women’s lives as a foundation for more general sociological observation takes priority over complying with conventional Western research methodologies. This is echoed in Maracle’s assertion that “their [Native women’s] lives, likewise, are a composite of the reality of our history and present existence. Their feelings about life are my own. Their teachings are ancient and as closely accounted for as I can remember” (6). In my view, this strategic style of writing, again alluding to Maracle’s concept of oratory, is one of the ways of defying the notion of a privileged Indigenous author who is out of touch with the everyday reality of her community.

Finally, Paula Gunn Allen, as a scholar deeply embedded in the tribal history of

Laguna Pueblo, presents in The Sacred Hoop stories mainly related to this cultural background. These include various myths and creation stories stemming from Native

American spirituality, stories told to her by relatives, as well as her own memories of growing up at Laguna. The notion of oratory, it seems, has for Allen strong spiritual and tribal connotations drawing on orality. Presenting theory through story is particularly

103 traceable in passages in which Allen offers her analytical observations on the character of

Native American literature and tribal societies. For example, in order to support her claim about the social construction of Indigenous view of oneself and one’s tradition, Allen presents an old Keres song with a fitting metaphor of intermingling breaths (56). Allen is particularly strong in applying Indigenous interpretative perspective in literary analysis of

Native American literary texts, such as when analyzing a Keres tale – one of the Yellow

Woman, or Kochinnenako, stories typical for the communities living in the area 48 – and offering various literary interpretations, from a traditional Keres interpretation to a modern feminist perspective to a feminist-tribal interpretation, which is, according to Allen, the best approach (227-40). I take this fusion of various overlapping perspectives as an original strategy of approaching a Native American story from a theoretical, literary point of view.

Allen comments on her subjective methodology in the following statement in her introduction to The Sacred Hoop : “[M]y method of choice is my own understanding of

American Indian life and thought. … Because I am thus personally involved in my discipline, because I study and write out of a Laguna Indian woman’s perspective, these essays present a picture of American Indian life and literature unfiltered through the minds of western patriarchal colonizers” (6). Interestingly enough, all three texts discussed here,

Sister Girl , I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop , are primarily constructed within the theoretical academic discourse corresponding to each author’s educational training: Jackie

Huggins’s main discourse is historical, Lee Maracle’s sociological and Allen’s literary critical. I want to suggest, however, that even if Huggins’, Maracle’s and Allen’s texts are situated as scholarly contributions, they never lose regard for the everyday, personal- or immediate environment-oriented experience. By this I mean the strategy of incorporating

48 Allen identifies the Keres people as inhabiting Laguna and Acoma Pueblos in New Mexico of the United

States.

104 the knowledge/wisdom of family and friends, stories of the community members, mythological tales, as well as autobiographical elements. In my reading this is precisely what is most rewarding and exciting about the texts of Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and

Paula Gunn Allen.

105 Chapter 2

Recording Stories of Separation and Resistance to Assimilation:

Doris Pilkington, Shirley Sterling, Anna Lee Walters

As an interpretation of the past, trauma is a kind of history. Like other histories, it attempts

to square the present with its origins. The past can be personal or collective, recent or

remote: an artefact of psychoanalysis or an act of witness; a primordial myth or a use of

ancestral spirits to account for misfortune or violation .

Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (14)

*****

This chapter deals primarily with a subgroup of Indigenous women’s life writing that differs in content and form from the texts of urban-based political and public intellectuals such as Huggins, Maracle and Allen, analysed in the first part. The narratives of Doris Pilkington, Shirley Sterling and Anna Lee Walters turn more to history and the impact of the colonization trauma on Indigenous population, and although they do transgress generic boundaries, they are seemingly less experimental and introspective. The title of the chapter reflects the thematic parallels these stories share: they present accounts most traumatic to Indigenous families and communities, telling of separating Indigenous children of mostly mixed parentage from their families and sending them to boarding/residential/mission schools 49 with the single purpose of assimilating them into the

49 The terminology differs to some extent in Australia, Canada, and the U.S.: while Native Americans in the

U.S. talk of their children being removed to boarding schools, and First Nations in Canada refer to them rather as residential schools, Aboriginal people in Australia were removed to missions, sometimes called Native settlements, that were originally disguised as schools but mostly served as training places for future

Aboriginal domestic servants and farm workers. In Australia, Aboriginal people who were systematically removed as children between 1910 and 1970 are referred to as the Stolen Generation, sometimes also Stolen

106 dominant settler society and of gradual “breeding out” 50 of the Indigenous population. The

separation of Indigenous children was especially brutal and so was their treatment in the

institutions, all of which resulted in traumatic experience with an impact on entire

generations of Indigenous peoples.

Therefore it can be argued that this type of life stories, the Stolen Generation

narratives in Australia and residential/boarding school narratives in North America, aims to

Generations, to suggest that more than one generation of up to 100,000 children was affected by this

government policy. In 1997, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released the Bringing Them

Home report which amassed over 500 oral accounts of Aboriginal people affected by forced removals

(Schaffer and Smith 95). A similar report was published in Canada in 1996 by the Royal Commission on

Aboriginal Peoples under the name Report of the Royal Commision on Aboriginal Peoples, which provides an

overview of the development of the residential school system in Canada and points out to its devastating

impact on Native Canadian population. The residential school system in Canada started officially in 1879 and

was usually administered jointly by the state and various churches. Most residential schools ceased to operate by the mid-1970s, the last one closed in 1985 (Kuokkanen 702). It is estimated that there are about 80,000 people alive today who have attended residential schools in Canada (see the Indian Residential School

Resolution’s website http://www.irsr-rqpi.gc.ca/english/history.html ). An allusion to the Australian

terminology of Stolen Generation(s) is indicated in the title of a collection of 21 oral accounts of First Nations peoples in Canada who were affected by the residential school system, Residential Schools: The Stolen Years

(1993), edited by Linda Jaine. In the USA, Native American tribes, their land as well as “education,” have been administered by the (BIA) since 1824 until now. The system of boarding

schools in the USA, which started in 1869 and continued well into the twentieth century, affected more than

100,000 Native Americans who were forced by the U.S. government to attend Christian schools (A. Smith,

“Soul Wound”). Although there exist projects to remind and acknowledge the experiences of Native American boarding schools survivors (e.g. the Boarding School Healing Project), I was not able to detect an official report similar

in scope and importance to the Australian and Canadian documents.

50 The term “breed out” was officially used in Australia during the politics of eugenics in the first half of the

20 th century, as is evidenced, for example, in the documents by the Chief Protector of Aborigines A. O.

Neville in Western Australia (qtd. in Scott 26, 157).

107 creatively re-work the suppressed histories of separation and assimilation and bear witness to the subsequent trauma. This is done not only through actual writing down of historical events and individual life stories from the Indigenous point of view but also through employing resistance strategies in the narratives. Life writing narratives such as

Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996), Sterling’s My Name Is Seepeetza

(1992) and Lee Walters’ Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing (1992) perform resistance to the forced separation and absolute government control over the lives of the children and their relationships to their families by inscribing the memories of times spent with the family in the community, by recording daily activities, and by bringing happy everyday moments back to life. This process becomes an effective way of coming to terms with and healing the trauma from the separation.

In the following four sections, this chapter examines the most distinguishing thematic and formal characteristics of each of the three narratives. The first part concerns re-writing history, pointing out the techniques of working with and re-working the official, nationally accepted histories of settlement in Australia and North America, and of challenging the policies of separation and assimilation of Indigenous children. The second section analyzes the strategies which make it possible to define these narratives as sites of resistance and introduces the concept of subjugated knowledges. The third part engages with the testimonial nature of the analysed texts and looks at the ways the traumatic experience of separation and assimilation is inscribed in what I call “scriptotherapy”. The last part focuses on the collective subjectivities of the texts and the relevance of the often discussed dichotomy between conventional Western auto/biographies with supposedly individual subjects and Indigenous life writing that is often characterized as typically promoting collective, rather than individual, identities.

108 2.1. Alternative (Hi)Stories

It has been long acknowledged that history plays a fundamental role in Indigenous writing worldwide, both fictional and non-fictional. Although “telling history” was a common practice in pre-contact Indigenous storytelling, it is primarily the history of colonization and long-term oppression that permeates, implicitly or explicitly, most

Indigenous life writing narratives today. From the very beginning of colonization of

Australia and North America, Indigenous peoples of the two continents have attempted to tell their experiences of history. As Bain Attwood, an Australian historian working on issues related to Aboriginal history, notes in his introduction to Telling Stories: Indigenous

History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand , “Indigenous people have often worked up histories – historical interpretations – in order to explain their plight to themselves, and so helped themselves to survive” (xii). Indeed, the notions of history, memory and survival are key issues that have shaped Indigenous writing in general. Until recently, however, mainstream population in the settler colonies has refused to recognize Indigenous versions of history and only the last few decades have witnessed progress in providing the other, rather unfavourable, side of the history of settlement in Australia and North America. In reaction to the invisibility and silenced voices of Indigenous peoples, contemporary

Indigenous life writing is driven by the desire to have the hidden histories written down on paper – histories that in spite of being part of colonial history have never been acknowledged (Attwood xii). As a result, these narratives frequently communicate perspectives that displace official histories of white settlement and re-write history in the sense that they fill in the gaps with previously repressed (hi)stories and/or they provide alternative versions of what happened. Some of the well-known examples include publishing histories of the “discovery” of the two continents which portray Christopher

109 Columbus and Captain Cook as anti-heroes, challenging the terra nullius concept in

Australia 51 , and researching resistance to and/or collaborations of Indigenous communities with the first European settlers (Hodge and Mishra 24). In this way, such narratives formulate a kind of historical counter-narratives that significantly problematize the nationally accepted stories of European settlement and the myths of nation-building.

For many Indigenous writers/storytellers telling history and telling peoples’ lives seems to be intrinsically related. Both these activities originate in the tradition of storytelling which has been a primary mode of “passing knowledge, maintaining community, resisting government control, and sharing the burden of hardship” for

Indigenous people in Australia and North America (Schaffer and Smith 101). The interconnection between historiography and life writing has therefore become an important vehicle for remembering the past and was crucial in the storytelling tradition, the main function of which was in most traditional communities to educate the next generation.

One of the means through which Indigenous women’s life stories contribute to re- writing the history of the coexistence between Indigenous and settler populations in

Australia and North America is their frequent challenge of the official policies of cultural genocide, assimilation, and total governmental control over Indigenous lives. Narratives such as Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepetza and Talking Indian significantly reframe these policies designed to break up Indigenous kinship and communal bonds by mapping individual stories of Indigenous children of mixed parentage having been taken away – their traumatic experiences, resistance and survival strategies, their successful

51 The concept of terra nullius is largely applied in Australia where it became part of historical and legal discourse especially in the so called Native Title land claims, but the notion can be easily extended to include settlement practices in North America. Terra Nullius (from lat.) means empty, unoccupied land, open to claims of European imperial powers, “without negotiation or compensation to its indigenous occupants”

(Schaffer and Smith 86).

110 or unsuccessful reunions with the relatives. Often these stories are based on oral accounts, therefore struggling to be recognized by the dominant historiography preserved in written documents. Yet, as Hodge and Mishra observe, “their cumulative weight has carried a particular grand narrative into general circulation, as a theme that the dominant history for many years ignored but now acknowledges as valid” (102). So these accounts, even though telling individual life stories, actually reveal a collective portrait of the Stolen Generation(s) in Australia and residential/boarding school victims in North America. Most importantly, these stories are empowering because they tell of Indigenous people who in spite of having been separated from their families, of having gone through the institutions, and having been forced to accept the dominant society’s values, managed to resist the pressure and instead of assimilating stuck even more to their tribal origins. As a result, these narratives show the cases in which the system of control failed. Therefore, I suggest that these life stories join together to voice a collective resistance to the forced separation and assimilation policies towards Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America.

*****

counter-(hi)story

Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence helped bring about a second wave of interest in Aboriginal women’s life writing published in the 1990s and proved that the popularity of this specific genre has not come to its end yet. 52 Together with Sally Morgan’s

My Place , it is perhaps the most internationally recognized Aboriginal life story, also thanks to a widely discussed transposition of the written narrative onto the screen under the title

52 For an exhaustive overview of Aboriginal women’s life writing published in Australia since the 1970s and the suggested reasons for the popularity of the genre, see Anne Brewster’s Reading Aboriginal Women’s

Autobiography (1996).

111 Rabbit-Proof Fence (2001). 53 Pilkington’s narrative is a boundary-crosser in the sense that it draws on several genres: first and foremost, the author writes down the history of her people and re-writes the history of Aboriginal-settler relationships from the earliest period until the 1930s in Western Australia, and in these terms it is a resistance story – resistance to white control, to physical and psychological limitations – and a story of survival. It is also a biography of her mother and two aunts, as well as of her ancestors. Further, the story can be read as an adventure story, a story of an escape or a quest. Lastly, it draws heavily on oral traditions and storytelling techniques – after all, Pilkington transcribed oral histories that her mother Molly and one of her aunts, Daisy, had told her. This fact made Pilkington negotiate Aboriginal oral traditions and European literary conventions. In addition, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence forms a kind of a preview memoir to Pilkington’s next book, Under the Wintamarra Tree (2002), which gives a third-person autobiographical account of

Pilkington’s own separation from her family and of how she was taken to the very same

Moore River Native settlement that her female family members had managed to escape from decades earlier. In this way, Pilkington’s own story is already inscribed in Follow the

Rabbit-Proof Fence , lending it an autobiographical air.

53 Directed by Philip Noyce, an Australian filmmaker who worked his way to filming in Hollywood, and backed by Doris Pilkington herself as a consultant on the film script, the film was positively accepted and reviewed worldwide. However, in Australia it triggered a debate among scholars about the film’s commodification of the Stolen Generation(s) narrative, which was adapted and marketed for an international audience. For a detailed discussion see especially three crucial articles published in Australian Humanities

Review: Tony Hughes D'aeth’s “Which Rabbit-Proof Fence: Empathy, Assimilation, Hollywood” (2002),

Emily Potter and Kay Schaffer’s “ Rabbit-Proof Fence: Relational Ecologies and the Commodification of

Indigenous Experience” (2004), and Anne Brewster’s “Aboriginal Life Writing and Globalisation: Doris

Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Prof Fence ” (2002).

112 Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is primarily a historical account of Aboriginal lives, both collective and individual. As such it redresses the long-term invisibility of local

Indigenous groups and supplies a formerly missing perspective. Pilkington contributes to the re-creation of Aboriginal history in Western Australia as she starts her narrative with a mytho-fictional account of the pre-contact and early-contact history of the Nyungar people, portrayed as idyllic, imagined and decolonized space. Interestingly enough, this part is not re-told as an “objective” historical account in the Western tradition but rather offers a dramatized history including fictional dialogues, referring to stories told by Aboriginal people over the generations. The result is a picture of Aboriginal history “as it might have been.” The larger portion of the narrative, however, follows the lives of Pilkington’s mother, Molly, and her two cousins/sisters, Daisy and Gracie, who were together removed from their home in Jigalong in north-eastern Western Australia to the infamous Moore

River Native settlement at the other end of the state. This part shows the full impact of the

Department of Native Affairs’ policies of removing “half-caste” children in the 1930s, led by the notorious A. O. Neville, then the Chief Protector of Aborigines. The last third of the account tells of the three girls’ escape, their setting out on the journey home and walking along the rabbit-proof fence that runs north-south across the state, celebrating the that helps the girls survive in the bush and at the same time condemning the monstrous apparatus that is mobilized by the authorities in the girls’ persecution.

The technique that Pilkington draws on when re-writing the history of colonization in Western Australia is mainly the principle of synthesis which allows her to combine effectively both Aboriginal and European historical sources and to echo what Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, analysing a play of the Aboriginal playwright Jack Davis, call “dual principle”: “By using this dual principle of organization, Davis was able to fuse what have been seen as the two opposing kinds of history – linear European and circular Aboriginal –

113 to represent both the continuities across time and the different possibilities offered by different circumstances” (103). In my view Pilkington’s text gets close to this principle in the sense that it “fuses” two historical perspectives and two means of recording history: one is based on archival, written materials, such as documents describing the first landings on the Western Australian coast, the early expeditions, the founding of military bases and government depots, and later also the correspondence and records related to the girls’ escape. The other perspective is based on Aboriginal (hi)stories of the first contact, partly recorded via oral tradition, partly fictionalized by Pilkington. One of the examples of such historical synthesis appears early in the book, when Pilkington juxtaposes the two means of recording one event – the establishment of the first military base on the Western coast in the first half of the 19 th century. The first description obviously relies on a European historiographical source, reminding readers of typical early colonial narratives, such as navy officers’ journals:

Major Edmund Lockyer with a detachment of eighteen soldiers from the 93 rd

Regiment and fifty convicts were sent to King George Sound (where Albany

is now situated) by Governor Darling in New South Wales, to establish a

military base. Their aim was to deter renegade convicts, whalers and sealers.

They sailed in the brig Amity and had been anchored offshore in King George

Sound for over a month. On a hot summer day in 1826, Major Lockyer and

two of his officers went ashore and climbed the cliffs and explored the

harbour. They were delighted with the beauty of the coastal region but were

not impressed with the soil. (5)

Several paragraphs later, however, readers are confronted with the Aboriginal perspective of the same event, voiced through a group of Aborigines living in the area:

114 Suddenly they heard voices of men shouting loudly and yelling back and

forth. Kundilla and his sons became alarmed. They clambered up the cliffs

and hid behind the thick bushes on the rocky ledge. Lying on their stomachs

they peered over the edge. They were not prepared for the sight that greeted

them. They were confronted not with shouting, cruel men, but different men

wearing strange scarlet jackets and others in white, coarse cotton suits. All

these men were very pale. ‘Surely they must be gengas,’ whispered Kundilla,

as he moved closer to the edge of the cliff. (5-6)

These “doubled” passages abound in Pilkington’s narrative, suggesting that such a device may offer a true synthesis of the two histories. By placing these two segments side by side, the author draws attention to two different modes of recording history – the Western source supplying exact names and dates, establishing “objective,” linear depiction, while the

Aboriginal perspective is fictionalized and told as a story. Pilkington alludes here to the common Western practice of privileging the former as a more credible account taken for granted and of excluding the latter version as lacking historical “evidence.”

Another example of the many ways of interweaving the explorers’ and Aboriginal histories is the main theme of the entire narrative – the journey across the desert, through a difficult terrain that was often described by the first explorers as inhospitable, barren and unwelcoming. The trek the three little girls have to walk is presented as a heroic deed and alludes to the journeys of the first Australian explorers, such as the famous 1860 Burke and

Wills expedition determined to cross the continent from the south to the north, in which the two main protagonists died from starvation in the territory where Aboriginal people had lived for centuries. The fact that the Aboriginal girls, aged 8, 11 and 14, made a successful journey of about 1,600 km towards their home escaping a government institution therefore counterbalances the celebrated expeditions of Australian heroes and the subsequent

115 colonization of the area. The girls’ journey home, in spite of the distance, also challenges the Department’s effort to deterritoralize Aboriginal people with the aim of destructing their bonds to land and kinship.

A specific strategy that Pilkington employs when presenting the two historical perspectives is her use and appropriation 54 of the official archival materials. In her article on

Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence and the effects of globalization, Anne Brewster characterizes the notion of the archive and Pilkington’s use of it in the following quote:

The inclusion of these excerpts points to an awareness of the apparatus of the

archive, not so much as a specific institution as an entire epistemological

complex for producing a comprehensive knowledge within the domain of the

British empire, and its subsequent legacy in the governance of the recently

federated states of Australia. The archive was a prototype for global and

national systems of dominance, an operational field for controlling territory

by the production and distribution of information about it in the forms of

files, dossiers, censuses, statistics, maps, reports, letters, telegrams and

memoranda. These technologies of surveillance were derived from the

demographic and ethnographical practices devised by various disciplines of

learning (geography, medicine, sociology, linguistics etc). (“Aboriginal Life

Writing”)

In Pilkington’s narrative the archive is depicted as an important means through which the colonizers exercised power in the form of controlling Aboriginal people’s lives by monitoring their movements, employments, family connections, relationships and

54 By the term “appropriation” I understand seizing the power and rejecting the privilege of the official, nationally established archive and at the same time re-working such material for new usages. In the case of

Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , Pilkington appropriates archival materials for her own purpose to nullify their credibility and foreground the victims of the system of surveillance based on the archive.

116 marriages. This information was recorded in the files of the Department of Native Affairs in

Perth and in the correspondence of the authorities. Throughout Follow the Rabbit-Proof

Fence , Pilkington uses documents that are clearly a result of archival research and incorporates them either directly or indirectly into her narrative. 55 These include newspaper reports (17, 102), early settlers’ diaries (16), station reports addressed to the Department of

Native Affairs (39, 41), police records (46, 105, 112, 124), original photocopies of telegrams sent back and forth by the authorities (51, 53), transcripts of correspondence between A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, and his informants (124-26, 128,

129) and the map of the girls’ journey from Jigalong to the Moore River Native Settlement and the trek back home (x). The motivation for such incorporation of the archival materials is at least two-fold: First, Pilkington uses the archive to do what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls

“researching back” (7), which in this case means employing the archival knowledge for her own purposes, in particular to expose the monstrosity of the system of state intervention encoded in the policy of eugenics and to reveal the inhuman treatment of the “half-caste” people by the government. Second, by showing histories and life experiences which inhabit the space “outside” of this archival material, for example the life at the Moore River Native

Settlement from an Aboriginal point of view or the traditional knowledge that helps the three girls to “read” the landscape around them and to survive in the outback, Pilkington provides readers with the blind spots that the system of surveillance could not have encompassed.

55 Many Aboriginal writers writing life stories present information researched in the archive, which was, however, for a long time inaccessible for them. Archival documents and records are frequently the only means for Aboriginal people in Australia to trace their ancestors and look up information about their relatives, since sometimes their removal to the farthest possible area from their own land meant severe rupture of family ties and led to traumatic experience. Jackie Huggins comments on the difficulties of gaining access to the archival documents in Sister Girl , particularly in the chapter “Auntie Rita’s File” (131-134).

117 Pilkington’s usage of the archive leads to establishing what Brewster calls a

“counter-archive” that consists of “(formerly largely oral) Aboriginal knowledges and practices, such as hunting, birthing and mourning practices, food, drinks and medicines, marriage and skin customs and spiritual beliefs” (“Aboriginal Life Writing”). Brewster continues that “it is not, however, an archive that confines a total knowledge under the purview of the state, but one that enables that knowledge to be mobilised in everyday life in the service of a resistant identity formation” (“Aboriginal Life Writing”). Thus the appropriation of the archival material and formation of the counter-archive in Pilkington’s, as well as Sterling’s and Lee Walters’ narratives, emphasizes the fact that this type of

Indigenous women’s life writing combats the assumption that the archive completely defines Indigenous people. After all, in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence the Aboriginal girls manage to escape against all odds, in spite of the entire official apparatus that is mobilised in their search. From an Aboriginal point of view, the story of the three girls’ escape can be read as a story of outwitting the dominant power and as a celebration of Aboriginal abilities to survive in the face of policies of extermination.

*****

alterNative (hi)story

Shirley Sterling’s My Name Is Seepeetza can be compared to Rabbit-Proof Fence in its effort to confront Indigenous with Canadian history and to provide what Kateri Damm calls “an alterNative perspective of the history of Canada,” which means to “affirm and preserve Native views, Native realities, and Native forms of telling, while actively challenging and redefing dominant concepts of history, truth and fact” (95). Using a genre that is not typical in Indigenous life writing – a diary form – and a child narrator, Sterling communicates one of the many accounts of the residential school system in Canada in the late 1950s. Although the narrative is strongly autobiographical, based on the author’s own

118 experience in the Kamloops Residential School in interior British Columbia, Sterling also incorporates her sisters’ and friends’ experiences from the same institution and she fictionalizes the whole account. The persona of a twelve-year old N'laka'pamux girl named

Seepeetza by her family but later renamed Martha Stone by the school staff also gives

Sterling a tool to present the story through the child’s “innocent eyes.” Thus this technique of having a child narrator allows Sterling to reveal and criticize the abusive practices of the system. The heroine is separated from her family at the age of six to spend each year, with the exception of the two summer months, at the fictional Kalamak Indian Residential

School. In her diary entries, Seepeetza records the events and details of residential school life, including the memory of her first day of grade one marked by the trauma of unwanted parting with her family and having to succumb to the strict regime of the school.

From the very beginning, Sterling’s narrative is told in a series of contrasts that can be summarized under the heading “school versus home.” The diary structure reveals a pattern in the organization of the individual entries which frequently begin with recording an event or a detail from the school’s life that is immediately followed by a memory of a similar event or activity that is done in the family circle, or vice versa. In addition, these contrasts are not only implicitly encoded in the text but they are consciously placed side by side by the narrator herself, as in the following quote: “When we’re at home we can ride horses, go swimming at the river, run in the hills, climb trees and laugh out loud and holler yahoo anytime we like and we won’t get in trouble. At school we get punished for talking, looking at boys in church, even stepping out of line. I wish I could live at home instead of here” (13-14). Similar passages show the depth of the narrator’s trauma from the separation and the impossibility to justify in any way the officially established assimilationist system, especially since the story foregrounds a picture of a functional Native family which is loving, caring, and self-sufficient, void of stereotypical images of domestic violence,

119 alcoholism and neglected children. Seepeetza’s family is provided for by the father who, apart from having a job as a court interpreter due to his knowledge of six Indian languages, is also a hunter and rancher working on his own farm (67, 65) and it is implied that he is also involved in activism promoting social justice for Indigenous people (67). Seepeetza’s life at the Joyaska ranch is characterized by a circle of extended family members, by joy, freedom and various little incidents and humorous episodes. This portrayal of an Indigenous family is very important as it resists the most common representations of dysfunctional

Indigenous families that have become a target of state welfare policies as well as a subject of many realistic literary accounts. In My Name is Seepeetza , however, the passages depicting the harmonious family environment make it all the more difficult for the readers to comprehend the rationale behind the forced separations.

The images of home are placed against the strict, almost military regime at the residential school as the narrator moves back and forth in time and space. The contrasts between the two environments ca be found on all kinds of levels, from differences in food to physical violence. The descriptions of home-made food which is abundant, healthy, rich in taste and always shared (66), are juxtaposed with the lack of food at the residential school: it is repeatedly suggested that the school provides insufficient, miserable and unhealthy meals and the children frequently suffer from hunger (87). While the work at home is meaningful, done for the benefit of all the family and in accordance with seasonal cycles, the work assigned to the children at the school is hard and sometimes inadequate, consisting mainly of useless cleaning, polishing, scrubbing, waxing and washing. A contrast is also made between the mostly outdoor activities and labour tasks at the ranch (e.g.

Seepeetza helps her father with haying, rides horses, takes care of domestic animals, and generally spends most of her free time outdoors) and the strictly indoor, domestic labour at the school. In this respect it is necessary to take into account that one of the aims of

120 residential schools in Canada, similarly to the mission schools in Australia and the Boarding schools in the U.S., was to train Indigenous girls in domestic service so that they could be later employed in white families or various institutions.

Another stark contrast concerns the emotional development of the children and the methods of “educating” them. While Seepeetza’s family encourages emotional expression and provides free space for the children to run around and play together, the school’s environment explicitly demonstrates its lack of affection and care, any signs of which are suppressed or punished. Physical violence and corporal punishment has become a tool in maintaining control and the status quo in the power relations at school. Against Seepeetza’s firm statement that “My mum and dad never hit us” (83) stand repeated incidents of being pushed, beaten and “getting the strap” which are reported as so common that children even

“get used to it” (18). It is precisely this record of physical and psychological abuse that contributes to creating a powerful counter-narrative that not only disturbs the national account of the treatment of Indigenous people in Canada in the form of, for example, official reports from residential school principals, but also undermines the image of the

“beneficiary” impact of churches and missions which frequently ran the residential schools.

In Seepeetza’s narrative, four hundred Indian students are under supervision of the school’s principal Father Sloane, six other priests and the nuns who are responsible for teaching and managing the children’s free time. Seepeetza repeatedly illustrates the power relations in the school where the nuns and priests use shame and force to destroy the children's connection to their culture. The children are forbidden to speak their own languages, denied the right to be called by their traditional names, and prevented from maintaining emotional ties with their siblings.

When discussing Sterling’s critique of the residential school system and the complicity of the missionaries, it is interesting to note her use of the child narrator, which

121 helps her to seemingly mask Seepeetza’s brutal reality. One of the reasons for using this device may be the young readership to which the book is addressed 56 , another that

Sterling’s aim is to avoid a strictly historicizing mode of writing and present a more fictionalized account. So while the narrative does reveal the trauma of separation and the sense of alienation and loneliness at the residential school, it never actually describes openly the physical and sexual abuse the children suffered. Instead, the descriptions of the systematic oppression and abuse through the child narrator who has a limited knowledge of what is happening around her take form of subtle hints. In fact, this subtlety of the descriptions even intensifies their impact. Nobody from the school staff is spared the author’s critique and latent accusations. Examples include Father Sloane who is said to be

“interested” in girls, which is manifested by the frequency of his visits in the girls’ gym and by his teasing them (93), and other priests who are accused of “doing something bad” to several boys who subsequently decide to run away (12-13). The viciousness and hypocrisy of the nuns is also evident: for example, Sister Superior is known for carrying a strap in her sleeve all the time and hitting the children’s hands whenever “someone is bad” (18); or, when Seepeetza’s wets her bed, she is humiliated by one of the sisters in front of others

(19). One of the supervising nuns, Sister Theo, is in Seepeetza’s diary entry described as a

“wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz,” which is underscored by the detailed description of her black robe and veil, big nose and small shiny eyes, and by the sinister clicking of her rosary beads hanging from her waist which makes all the children run away at her approach (51).

This fearful image of the nun, however, suddenly dissolves in the next image depicting

Seepeetza’s mother, both in her physical appearance (her beauty, long black hair and big

56 My Name Is Seepeetza was originally published for the juvenile market; it won the 1993 Sheila A. Egoff

Children's Book Prize and was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Children's Literature, although the work has since then found an adult readership as well (Reder, “Shirley Sterling”).

122 brown eyes) and her kindness (she speaks softly, smiles a lot, shows affection) (51-52).

This contrast yet another time places side by side the atrocious reality and the happy memories, asserting Seepeetza’s ability to “see through” what had been imposed on her.

The use of the child narrator also allows Sterling to undermine occasionally the grave tone of the whole narrative. Sometimes Seepeetza records in her diary various little humorous episodes and family jokes that she recalls mostly from the periods spent at home playing with her siblings and cousins. Other times Seepeetza, in her childhood naivety, unconsciously subverts the imposition of Christianity on Native people by fusing the sublime of the Church and the everyday, such as when she comments on the obligatory attendance at Sunday Masses: “On Sunday morning we go to High Mass. The girls have to wear navy blue tams. At home the women wear kerchiefs. Father Sloane wears gold and white vestments. I like Sunday mornings because we get cornflakes for breakfast” (26). As in many Indigenous narratives, Christianity and missionary activities are treated with suspicion, but also with a sense of humour. But in spite of the narrator’s honest and naive tone, the themes of the text are earnest. Even though the narrative ends with a nostalgic and quite idyllic picture of Seepeetza’s family’s happy times together during summer, it is acknowledged that the narrator will be returning to school to face yet another year. This makes it difficult for the reader to make an optimistic conclusion – a fact that alludes to

Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence which in a similar way subverts a seemingly “happy ending” in the form of the separated family’s reunion by acknowledging Molly’s and even her daughter’s forced return to the Moore River Native Settlement.

123 *****

tribal (hi)stories

Although Anna Lee Walters’ text Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and

Writing can be categorized as a life writing narrative, it is also a piece of non-fiction with fictional elements in the form of short stories incorporated into the narrative. Moreover, this narrative links the texts analysed in the two chapters: its essayistic and self-reflective nature and personal observations on various aspects of Native American life relate Walters’ text to

Huggins’, Maracle’s and Allen’s narratives, but on the other hand, the issues of re-writing history, resisting assimilation and depicting the traumatic experience from the separation allows for its analysis together with Pilkington’s and Sterling’s narratives. Walters’ account, however, is concerned less with the boarding school experience and more with the history of Otoe and Pawnee, the author’s two inherited cultures. In addition, while

Pilkington’s and Sterling’s texts reveal the strategies of re-writing history and resisting mainstream historiography through actual, partly fictionalized life stories, Walters frequently offers self-explanatory interpretations of her own writing about the notions of history, survival and memory, as well as of her short stories that are either included in

Talking Indian or have been published before.

Like Pilkington and Sterling, Walters is concerned about the contrasts and discrepancies between Western historiography and what she calls “tribal” history (75).

Above all, she is disturbed by the misleading representations of Native Americans in the

U.S. literature and history, which she sees as negative and often uninformed. At the beginning of the third part of her book called “History,” she asserts:

Eventually I saw the literary treatment of tribal peoples by non-tribal writers

as a way of maintaining the status quo of mainstream society. And the

absence of individual Native voices interpreting their own identities and

124 histories, appeared as a form of censure, as a form of suppression that was

deeply rooted in American society. I began to evaluate tribal histories versus

American history, and to study what history means to tribal societies, as

compared to what history is to American (mainstream) society. How do tribal

histories vary from American history in their perspectives, structure, and

content? And how do tribal people relate to their own respective histories?

(75)

This quote suggests what Walters’ main strategies in Talking Indian are: she fills in the gap of the missing Native American voices by adding them to the historical discourse; she interprets her tribes’ history and her tribal identity in particular; and evaluates the meaning of the notion of history in Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies. In fact, her overview of the conceptual differences between Indigenous and mainstream American historiography, such as the emphasis of tribal histories on family lineage, “pre-human” existence, shared responsibility for recording history and its preservation in other than written documents

(ceremonies, storytelling, prayers, songs), points to an alternative approach not only to history but to the entire tribal culture. Most importantly, it provides a methodology for interpreting Indigenous tribal histories which have often been distorted through Western optic.

While Pilkington’s tactic of re-writing mainstream history is a synthesis of the two sources of history and an appropriation of the official archive and Sterling’s approach stresses more the contrasts between the two social environments, Walters foregrounds oral tradition and the techniques of storytelling. Following a specific pattern, in the first half of the book Walters offers non-fictional, explanatory and educational passages about various aspects of tribal life (her first four parts include “Oral Tradition,” “World View,” “History” and “Identity”) and then complements each of them with a fictional short story. This

125 structure makes it possible for her to make implicit as well as explicit references to traditional storytelling. The purpose of the fictional stories responds to both the author’s respect for tribal traditions, especially storytelling, and her creative potential. Therefore the short stories themselves are partly fictional works but at the same time they are modelled on the collective imaginary of oral stories handed down by the community members. This is the case, for example, of the John Stink story from Walters’ earlier collection of short stories The Sun Is Not Merciful (1985), of which Walters admits that it was inspired by many informal versions of the same tale but entirely fictitious in its written form: “I thought of my tale as simply another in the tradition of John Stink storytellers – except that mine was written as fiction. In other words, I made most of it up!” ( Talking Indian 22). This self- interpretation suggests what role Walters, and the tribal society for that matter, ascribes to the notion of authorship and the discrepancy in the credibility in the Indigenous and

Western tradition of recording sources. This view then implies that Walters takes on the role of a modern scriptor, storyteller or recorder, using contemporary mainstream methodology (i.e. writing fiction in various genres) but relying on the old, traditional sources.

In contrast to Pilkington who incorporates mainstream historical sources into her view of Australian history, including citations with proper acknowledgement, Walters’ strategy is to present a genuine counter-history, relying heavily, for most part, on the tribal histories of the Otoe, the Pawnee (her parental tribal cultures) and the Navajo (Walters’ husband’s culture) and the Indigenous worldview in general. Although she is obviously aware of the mainstream historiography and mentions the misinterpretations and distortions, it is by no means the central focus of the narrative. On the contrary, Walters introduces the mainstream historical accounts in vague phrases such as “We have read that …,” “Indian people today … have often been told that …,” “They said that …,” “This is what we were

126 taught repeatedly” (134), or “We have all heard it said that …” (135). This is both a subtle, yet powerful accusation of the mainstream historical and educational attitude towards the situation of Indigenous people in the U.S. Then, as if to prove the suggested statements wrong, especially those linked to the disappearance and extermination of “real Indians,” the

“inevitable” destruction of tribal life style and the deliberate absence of Indigenous inhabitants from formal educational curricula (134-35), Walters sets out on a journey to expose what has been hidden underneath, i.e. the physical and of her people, as it is reflected in the counter-histories of her people and her own family.

Writing and history are for Walters, similarly to many other Indigenous writers including Pilkington and Sterling, inseparable. She admits that because the histories of her tribes inform her entire worldview, naturally they must enter into her writing too. The following quote expresses what writing history means for her and at the same time foregrounds the interconnectedness between the history of a tribe and the history of a family:

Today, my occupation as a writer is related to what my grandfather and

grandmother did when they repeated family history in the manner of their

elders, leading the family all over this sacred land, this continent most

recently called America in the last five hundred years … In the same way, I

repeat their words to my children and grandchildren. In tribal society, this is

who history is for, after all, in a very personalized version of time. (86)

Again, the stress on repetition, on passing on the (hi)stories onto the next generation, refers to Walters’ strong sense of storytelling techniques. This knowledge serves her when, especially in the second part of the book, she reconstructs the tribal histories of the three

Indigenous cultural groups, which becomes her most significant strategy for re-writing history.

127 In the chapter dedicated to the Pawnees, Walters’ maternal tribe, for example, the author starts off with a brief overview of the pre-contact history of the Pawnees and goes on to present a Pawnee perspective on the subsequent historical events. They include the making of formal treaties with the U.S government, the recognition of the tribe as a whole and its placement under the guidance of the U.S in 1825, the constant relocations and compensations paid for the land taken, but also the wars with other neighbouring tribes and the smallpox epidemics (137-40). In this section, Walters is obviously relying on the archival documents to provide historical data in the Western sense. Also, her voice, in contrast to the first part where she includes autobiographical and fictional elements, has become very detached and objective, as if modelled on the mainstream historian’s mode of writing history: her sentences are short, in a matter-of-fact tone, the account is strictly linear. Further on, however, with the more recent history, Walters’ voice becomes more engaged: she starts incorporating tribal sources and introductory phrases such as “it is told,” or “in the words of an old man” now referring to Indigenous voices (143). There are also informal stories, including humorous ones relating, for example, the animosities between the neighbouring tribes, which seem to circulate through the oral tradition. Similarly, another example from the history of the Otoes illustrates how Walters carefully places against a sober statement that the Otoes were relocated from Nebraska to the Indian

Territory in 1881 the transcribed story of the removal as told by her grandfather, who was born in 1873. The passage, written in italics and as a direct speech, evokes not history textbooks or documents but a very personal, emotional and deeply human account of the difficult journey (25-26), not dissimilar from Pilkington’s narrative of her people’s journey from the desert region. Another aspect that connects Walters with Pilkington’s account of the Nyungar and Mardudjara histories is the gradual progress in telling the tribal histories, moving from the general, more distant and collective accounts to the histories of a specific

128 clan and kinship, to the life stories or biographies of family ancestors, ending with an autobiographical and highly personal touch.

It was suggested in the introduction that the strategies of re-writing history are frequently intertwined with the didactic purpose of the life writings, and the three narratives of this section are no exception. In the same way that writing is inseparable from telling history, telling history is inseparable from teaching Indigenous history. Doris Pilkington’s account is directed mainly at the non-Indigenous readership as it attempts to translate the experience of the Stolen Generation(s) as well as the early history of her people in Western

Australia. Shirley Sterling’s autobiographical portrait is also very educational as it is addressed to a juvenile market. Through the accessible form, young people get an idea of what is happening in Seepeetza’s head, get to know her sadness, alienation, her internal conflicts, and through her desire to go back home to her family they see the injustice of the residential school system. Finally, Anna Lee Walters educates her readership by foregrounding the tribal histories of specific Indigenous groups largely based on oral forms of recording historical events in order to counterbalance the common misrepresentations of

Native Americans in the popular media. In other words, all three narratives essentially draw upon traditional Indigenous strategies of recording history while at the same time they use

Western genres in order to gain power to tell their versions in the contemporary political arenas.

129 2.2. Resistance and Subjugated Knowledges

strategies of writing resistance

The notion of resistance is a complex term and as such has been employed in a number of ways, in various discourses not always in agreement with each other, and with increasingly ambivalent definitions. Essentially, resistance is linked to domains of power and operates on several levels. For the purposes of dealing with textual, literary resistance,

Bill Ashcroft’s general characteristic proves helpful: he describes resistance as a discursive practice which “appropriat[es] forms of representation, and forc[es] entry into the discursive networks of cultural dominance” (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation 19). However, this opens up a number of questions: How does a piece of writing appropriate forms of representation and whose representation is it? How does one resist effectively in literature?

What are the strategies of writing resistance? Does resistance happen only on the level of content or also on the level of form? If we take into account Ashcroft’s observation that

“the concept of resistance literature arises from the central role of cultural expression of political struggle” (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation 28), it is clear that Indigenous literary production, including life writing, exemplifies this characteristic. A number of

Indigenous writers, scholars and intellectuals as well as their non-Indigenous counterparts have commented on the resistant and political nature of Indigenous writing (Monture Angus

31; L. Tuhiwai Smith 4; Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up xxiii;). Indigenous life writing then plays the role of “tactical histories”, in the words of Penny van Toorn, who comments on the resistant nature of Aboriginal life stories being produced and disseminated through non-

Indigenous institutions, invoking de Certeau’s terms of tactical and strategic writing:

Whether called forth in colonial institutions such as missions, reserves,

courtrooms and prisons, or edited, mass produced and packaged by today’s

130 commercial publishers, indigenous testimonies remain for the most part

‘tactical’ in Michel de Certeau’s sense of being made and deployed in

cultural territories predominantly or officially under someone else’s control.

(2-3)

So Indigenous women’s life writings which are discussed in this dissertation, i.e. published texts aimed both at Indigenous and non-Indigenous readership, 57 must necessarily take part in the institutional production of texts, conforming to its laws of power. At the same time, however, they perform resistances to this power in the form of subversion, “blindspots, interstices and fleeting, opportune moments,” exploiting the “play within and between the institutions through which the dominant group routinely asserts and perpetuates its power”

(van Toorn 3). As for the nature of resistance strategies in Indigenous women’s life writing, it is imperative to take into account their multifaceted nature. On the diversity of strategies and their characteristics, Moreton-Robinson notes: “Our resistances can be visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, explicit and covert, partial and incomplete and intentional and unintentional. They are profoundly political acts that are neither one dimensional or fixed and they do not always lead to conflict or self-destruction” ( Talkin’ Up xxiii). This suggests that the various kinds of resistances inscribed into life stories are not, due to their tactical, strategic and shifting character, easily detectable, which relates them to the wider framework of postcolonial texts.

In the predominantly oral Indigenous cultures, writing itself becomes an act of resistance in the sense that in order to gain voice and be heard it appropriates the colonizer’s means of expression to “write back to the centre” (Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back

57 There are many life narratives by Indigenous writers and storytellers that are aimed entirely at family, relatives, and friends in the larger Indigenous community, often produced locally, outside the domain of non-

Indigenous publishing institutions. As products of Aboriginal agency, these narratives do not need to conform to criteria imposed by a “foreign power,” for example in language, content and form choices (van Toorn 3).

131 6). By writing and publishing their stories, originally meant to be told, Indigenous writers resist the official state policies of silencing or distorting Indigenous voices, histories, subjectivities, and representations. Also, by writing in English – a language imposed on them by the colonizers – Indigenous writers and storytellers try to seize some of the power from the dominant society and gain entrance into its discourse. On another level,

Indigenous writers have often appropriated conventional European literary genres and at the same time resisted them by incorporating non-European techniques characteristic for the

Indigenous practice of storytelling. In Indigenous life writing, the genre of autobiography, conventional in European tradition but considered foreign in Indigenous cultures (Krupat,

Voice in the Margin 55; Wong, Sending My Heart Back 12), is used to tell the story of a colonized people as a collective entity, rather than the story of an individual, unique self; it is often a collaborative project with ambivalent authorship, incorporating other voices and other genres and therefore resisting generic conventions. On the thematic level, by deliberately choosing to depict extended familial relationships and foregrounding domesticity, Indigenous women’s life writing significantly resists government policies of breaking up Indigenous families. In addition, the depiction of traditional cultural practices and of “sticking” to Indigenous identities resists assimilationist policies. Finally, on a stylistic level, life narratives often integrate elements (words, phrases or entire sentences) from Indigenous languages, sometimes without translation, as well as the narrative techniques of fragmentation and repetition, adopted from storytelling traditions.

In Australia, Aboriginal life writing has been fundamental to the process of resistance to colonialism. Gillian Whitlock, for example, emphasizes the importance of organized resistance work against assimilation by Aboriginal intelligentsia between the

1960s and 1980s, the result of which was a new concept of Aboriginality with a “strategic sense of united identity” that became “fundamental to the development of an effective

132 counter-discourse, which could challenge the principles of white nationalism” (155). This concept of Aborignality arises from two bases: first, it is formulated in relation to the dominant white society and second, it is increasingly “tactical and contingent” (Whitlock

156). It is these tactics and contingencies, Whitlock argues, that characterize Australian

Aboriginal life writing, together with two opposing processes that are crucial to resistance and are articulated in the narratives: it is a process of articulation in the form of identity formation, and a process of disarticulation, i.e. a critique of it (156). In other words,

Aboriginal women’s life writing is significant because it gives importance to tribal, regional, familial and generational affiliations while disrupting the single, fixed and singular idea of Aboriginality and turning to more mobile, diversified and plural notion of

Aboriginality (Whitlock 156). As is shown both in the feminist texts by Huggins, Lee and

Allen, and the historical narratives by Pilkington, Sterling and Walters, these textual products explicitly resist genre boundaries, language codes, as well as conventional representations of Aboriginal women and their histories.

Native North American life writing certainly shares these resistance elements with

Australian Aboriginal literature. Patricia Monture Angus, for example, finds resistance a common denominator in Native American writing: “What is common among many Native

American writers is our desire to write our resistance. This desire might sometimes be described as ‘decolonization’” (31). While she characterizes the first wave of Native

American literature, quoting Greg Young-Ing, as “protest literature, political in content and angry in tone,” Monture Angus asserts that more recent writing by both Native American and First Nations women is rather resistance writing (31). In her influential study of Native women’s writing in Canada from feminist and postcolonial perspectives, Julia Emberly also argues for reading Indigenous women’s writing as resistance literature, drawing on Barbara

Harlow’s theoretical work Resistance Literature and emphasizing that literary texts

133 produced by “third-world” women are not “supplement[s] to political events but a constitutive element[s] in the political process” (Emberly 21). Resistance in various forms is a crucial element of Indigenous life stories and counteracts their marginalization in the sense that it is shared across diverse Indigenous communities (L. Tuhiwai Smith 2).

If in the first chapter, relating urban activist feminist autobiographical narratives and inscribing difference, it was mainly the resistance to the totalizing tendencies of the mainstream (feminist) theory, the Stolen Generation(s) and residential/boarding schools narratives analysed in this chapter resist the mainstream historiography. Follow the Rabbit-

Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepeetza and Talking Indian stress their protagonists’ resistance to the policy of state intervention imposed on them. They manifest the uselessness and absurdity of the mission/residential/boarding school system where the children were supposed to gradually forget about their Indigenous background and assimilate into the dominant society. Instead, the children in these life stories are individuals who, although torn from their original environment, develop an even stronger connection to their communities, represented by the family, Native languages, and traditional life-style. This resistance is not insignificant when considered in the context of the other experiences among the majority of separated Indigenous children affected by the system. Most of the children’s lives were, in fact, crushed by the system: predominantly, the result was trauma, internal conflicts, loss of identity, and a sense of alienation, leading to establishing dysfunctional relationships and generally unhappy lives. The majority of the children simply could not resist openly and there were few possibilities to slip away from the determined fate and break up the circle. Cases of children’s escapes from the institutions were scarce and mostly unsuccessful; many were not able, or not allowed, to link up with their relatives in their adulthood, many were assimilated into the mainstream society and

134 denied their origins in the hope of protecting themselves and their own children. 58 In this context, life narratives such as those of Pilkington, Sterling and Walters gain a special importance because they tell stories of resistance, of the survival of the few who managed to escape, both literally and metaphorically, the colonizing power.

Basically, writing resistance in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , My Name Is

Seepeetza and Talking Indian proceeds on two levels: first, there is the author’s resistance itself, i.e. the resistance which the author inscribes into her text. These resistance techniques permeate the language (subverting standard English and incorporating Indigenous words and phrases), the narrative strategies (combining and/or in some way reflecting oral traditions and storytelling), and the content (challenging official narratives by publicizing their alternatives). But resistance also happens within the life stories; it is the protagonists’ resistance to the state policies of separation and assimilation, especially in the mission/residential/boarding schools. Some protagonists run away, such as in Pilkington’s account, some succumb to the system but are determined to return to their communities and affirm their Indigenous identities, as it happens in Sterling’s and Walters’ case. All these strategies of resistance are intertwined, sometimes in a more, sometimes less traceable way.

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producing subjugated knowledges

One of the most important contributions of Indigenous women’s life writing is its demonstration of the ways in which Indigenous women construct their own subjectivities and become the subject of their own gaze rather than the object of the scientific scrutiny of

Western epistemology. Their life experiences foreground a different account from the

58 More detailed accounts are available in the Bringing Them Hope report, Carmel Bird’s The Stolen Children:

Their Stories , Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal People , and Linda Jaine’s Residential Schools: The

Stolen Years .

135 uncritically celebrated colonizers’ history and offer insights into the incommensurabilities between Indigenous and settler cultures. Aileen Moreton-Robinson asserts that in

Indigenous women’s life writing, “women speak of the practical, political and personal effects of being ‘other’” ( Talkin’ Up 3). She further suggests that the way Indigenous women express their difference is through “accumulating and producing subjugated knowledges which reflect their world view and inform their social practice in Indigenous and white domains” (3). In this section I want to argue that the notion of subjugated knowledges, as introduced by Michel Foucault, is particularly useful for exploring

Indigenous women’s life writing in the critical framework of strategic resistance, and that these subjugated knowledges create a counter-archive of knowledge through which the life stories help the writers resist the pressure of non-Indigenous cultural practices and allow for their different positioning from that of dominant discourses.

In Power/Knowledge , Michel Foucault defines subjugated knowledges as “those blocs of historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematising theory and which criticism … has been able to reveal” (82).

In this concept, the adjectives historical and disguised , referring to knowledge, are substantial as they already suggest a link to Indigenous discourse, i.e. its commitment to suppressed histories and tactical resistances. Foucault further elaborates on his definition when he characterizes subjugated knowledges as “disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity,” and also as “particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity … which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it” (82). In this characterization, it is the scientific, systematic, homogeneous white male Eurocentric epistemology which has been placed at the top of the hierarchy as a foundation of

136 Australian and North American cultures and which, at the same time, has marginalized and

“disqualified” Indigenous knowledges of history, land, social structures, and cultural practices. I suggest that Indigenous literature, life writing in particular, with its

“narrativisation” of history (Trees), is one of the means that can significantly disrupt the linearity and homogeneity of mainstream historiography by foregrounding the previously subjugated Indigenous knowledges. In this way, subjugated knowledges can foster the group’s self-definition and self-determination (Collins 299).

Drawing on Foucault, Anne Brewster applies his notion of “genealogy of knowledge”, which may arise out of the decolonization process as a “historical knowledge of struggles that might be used tactically,” to Aboriginal discourse in Australia (Literary

Formations 47). Brewster asserts that such genealogy of subjugated knowledges is embedded in Aboriginal women’s autobiographical narratives, 59 and that these narratives articulate “knowledges that have been repressed and denied by the dominant group”

(Reading 34). Among the various thematic levels of subjugated knowledges, she identifies the notions of family, spirituality, survival skills (allowing for survival both in the remote bush and within the urban poverty trap), Aboriginal languages, and the practice of storytelling which together create an oppositional discourse ( Literary Formations 48-52;

Reading 34-36). Therefore, as an example of subjugated knowledge within the site of

Aboriginal family, Brewster mentions the representations of extended family, kinship ties, and domesticity shown in the practices of home-making, cooking traditional meals and health remedies. In the realm of spirituality, it is the communication with dead people’s spirits, spiritual practices, and frequent reading of “signs” such as bird calls as an indication

59 The term “autobiographical narratives” is designed by Brewster to theorize Aboriginal women’s life writing. In Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography she explains that the reasons for choosing this term is the oral and collaborative nature of the narratives, as opposed to the written and individualistic

“autobiography” of the Western literary tradition (9).

137 of a misfortune or tragedy, which is considered incommensurate with the Western rational belief system ( Reading 35). Aboriginal subjugated knowledges are also embodied in the traditional knowledge of the bush and living off the land. Together with the use of

Aboriginal language, these knowledges were perhaps most severely suppressed by government policies.

In accord with Brewster, Moreton-Robinson foregrounds relationality and spirituality as the primary sites of subjugated knowledges in Aboriginal life writing in

Australia, which she defines as “disguised and hidden but … present in inter-subjective relations” ( Talkin’ Up 20). In this perspective, Indigenous women are identified as the bearers of these knowledges (20). It is interesting to note that Moreton-Robinson shifts the original concept of Foucault’s which emphasized that subjugated knowledges were revealed mainly through the work of criticism and academic scholarship. Moreton-Robinson asserts that subjugated knowledges are revealed in the “inter-subjective relations,” suggesting that it is rather up to the “bearers” of the “hidden” and “disguised” knowledge, that is

Indigenous women in this case, to reveal the oppositional knowledges. At the same time,

Moreton-Robinson is aware that the concept of subjugated knowledges is not meant to simply complement the Indigenous/Western binary in terms of epistemology and subsequently problematizes the argument in a series of questions which are, in her opinion, raised precisely in Indigenous women’s life narratives: “How does one know when subjugated knowledges are operating in a particular cultural context where two subjects may speak the same language but position the world in distinctively different ways? How can one be reflexive about knowledge that one does not know? And what is the extent of the indeterminancy?” (20). Although Moreton-Robinson suggests in answer to these questions that there will always be communicative incommensurabilities and only partial dialogues, she adds that while Indigenous women have no choice than to be conscious of

138 the colonizing systems of knowledge and to carefully negotiate their subjectivities in the process of cross-racial dialogues, there has never been such an imperative for reflexivity for the dominant white society (21). The solution called for by many Indigenous scholars is to develop gradually an Indigenous system of knowledge which would allow for an alternative critical framework for research methodologies (L. Tuhiwai Smith 4).

Although the theoretical concept of subjugated knowledges, developed by Foucault, has been mostly applied in the Australian context (Brewster, Moreton-Robinson), 60 it can be extended to the Native North American context. The suggested examples of subjugated knowledges in Australian Aboriginal women’s life writing find many counterparts in the life writings of Indigenous women in North America. The extended family, domesticity, negotiation of traditional religious systems with introduced Christianity, and the use of

Native languages in spite of their prohibition at residential/boarding schools have been certainly important sites of resistance for Indigenous people in the US and Canada.

Traditional knowledge of the land, medicines, hunting, gathering food and cooking are depicted predominantly in the cultural maintenance narratives as well as in the residential/boarding school narratives where they reveal oppositional knowledges to the

Western epistemology enforced by the official assimilationist policies of the “schools.”

Often the traditional tribal knowledge in these narratives is presented with a kind of nostalgia and awareness that it is gradually disappearing due to the encroachment mainstream society. This is seen, for example, in Honour the Sun (1987) – an autobiographical novel by the First Nations writer Ruby Slipperjack – which recounts a diary-structured life story of the main protagonist’s childhood and teenage years spent in a small Native community. The urban life stories of North American Indigenous women,

60 In Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography , Anne Brewster applies the notion of subjugated knowledges to life narrative Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988) by Ruby Langford Ginibi (34-37).

139 such as Maria Campbell’s Half-breed or Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel reveal, in turn, a modified version of the archive of subjugated knowledges which takes form of urban survival skills in an alienated city environment, showing the ways of battling the racism, poverty, unemployment, high incarceration rates, alcoholism and drug addiction.

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Doris Pilkington’s strategies of resistance and of revealing subjugated knowledges in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence are highlighted, most importantly, in three areas: first, it is Pilkington’s use of Mardudjara words within her English narrative; second, her appropriation of the official archive through the process of re-naming the vocabulary of the period documents; and third, the ability of both the author and the main protagonist, Molly, to combine their traditional Aboriginal knowledge with the Western knowledge of the colonizers, forming a kind of hybrid knowledge.

The problematic role of language has been identified as one of the key issues in the postcolonial discourse which specifically focuses on English as the language of the centre.

In the former colonies of the British Empire, such as Australia, Canada and the U.S., the process of using English as a source of creative subversion of the dominant power by marginalized groups has become emblematic of the cultural practices of postcolonialism

(Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back 37). Indigenous people, it might be argued, exemplify one of the richest developments of what Hodge and Mishra call “antilanguage strategies” (206), stemming from the people’s strong attachment to their traditional languages and their enormous efforts to keep the languages alive. Therefore Indigenous life writing often incorporates particular traditional languages into the English text, ranging from individual words and phrases to entire passages such as poems or stories. In addition to bonding the community and reviving the lost language fragments, this strategy also encodes the text and to a certain extent excludes the outsiders, which is the fundamental

140 characteristic of antilanguages (Hodge and Mishra 206). The exclusion of a non-Indigenous readership is, in the case of Indigenous life narratives, by no means complete: Indigenous writers frequently provide a translation either within the text or in a glossary at the end.

Therefore it is possible to say that while partially encoding parts of the texts, the writers also provide decoding clues. If the reader is a cultural outsider, however, the translations are often not enough: rarely do they offer cultural translations of social concepts linked to kinship, religion, economies or various communal policies. So the linguistic translation creates rather an illusion for the cultural outsiders that they can fully understand what they can in reality understand only partially.

To give and example from Pilkington’s text, she often uses the Mardudjara word dgudu , by which Daisy and Gracie, the younger girls, address the oldest Molly. Dgudu is translated in the glossary as an “older sister” and throughout the text there are ambivalent references to the kinship relationships among the three girls. Strictly speaking, according to the Western social structures, Molly, Daisy and Gracie are cousins, not sisters. However, in the kinship structures of the Mardudjara people, the three girls would be considered sisters due to their close relationships and their growing up together. Similarly, words linked to a different system of beliefs, such as gengas (translated as “spirit of the ancestors”) or marbarn (“object of magical powers for healing or finding lost items”) may be intelligible but conceptually challenging or even misleading for mainstream readers. It is interesting to note what kind of Mardudjara words Pilkington actually uses in her narrative. From a simple analysis it is clear that the words and phrases in the traditional language relate to several areas: the first one includes kinship-related words and words describing relationships between people, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal; the second area covers traditional words related to the belief system, and the third area depicts practical, everyday objects such as the names of parts of clothing, body parts, food, and animals, but also things

141 important for survival in the desert, for example cardinal points and seasons of the year.

This overview shows that Pilkington’s strategy is to encode concepts important for the traditional community and to record the counter-archive consisting of subjugated knowledges.

It was shown that Pilkington incorporates the official archive into her text and subsequently she appropriates this archive while at the same time revealing a counter- archive. The resistance to the official archive is also demonstrated through the vocabulary

Pilkington employs, which exposes the discrepancy between the Aboriginal and the settlers’ political systems. For example, a paradoxical ambiguity appears in the word “protection:” on the one hand, it is used by the authorities in the correspondence and newspaper reports to justify the mobilization of the police apparatus in the search of the three runaways through a rhetoric such as “we are very anxious that no harm may come to them in the bush” (102) or

“I fear for their safety” (113). On the other hand, there is the reality in which the girls, quite capable of not only surviving in the outback but also of turning the knowledge of the environment to their advantage, know they must escape this “protection,” which in their own vocabulary equals persecution. In other instances, Pilkington contrasts the official euphemisms for oppressive treatment of Indigenous children such as “native settlement,”

“school” and “students” with her own vocabulary, where the Native settlement is a

“concentration camp” and the children are “inmates” (72). Also, an image of jail is deliberately invoked by the writer’s description of the girls’ dormitory at the settlement, stressing the bars on the windows and padlocks on the doors (63), and Pilkington, without any reservation, names the separation of the three girls from their families as “abduction”

(45). She also refers to the sexual relationships between white men and Aboriginal women.

At the beginning of her account she describes the practices of the whalers and sealers:

“Those cruel and murderous men came ashore and stole Aboriginal women and kept them

142 on board their ships as sexual slaves, then murdered them and tossed their bodies into the ocean” (4). Later, referring to the settlements and pastoralists’ stations, Pilkington exposes the names of Molly and Gracie’s white fathers (48), which has become an important strategy in Indigenous women’s life writing through which authors confront the often prominent descendants of the Australian “founding fathers,” which is an example of Sally

Morgan’s My Place .

The concept of subjugated knowledge is, in Pilkington’s narrative, related mainly to the counter-archive of traditional Aboriginal knowledge which pops up on the surface particularly at the beginning in the pre-contact and early-contact history of the Nyungar and

Mardu people as well as during the girls’ journey where the knowledge helps them to survive. Revealing this knowledge has a didactic function as the readers learn about various aspects of Aboriginal life, from everyday practices such as hunting and cooking to beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, kinship system, etc. Pilkington for example gives a complex account of

Aboriginal codes related to covering their naked bodies. In a passage describing Aboriginal people’s adoption, voluntary or involuntary, of certain products and everyday practices of the settlers, she also mentions how Aboriginal people who came to live nearby white settlements were made to cover their naked bodies. First she depicts the puzzlement of the

Aboriginal families coming from the desert at the incomprehensible embarrassment of the white people because of their nakedness but she immediately goes on to explicate a set of

Aboriginal practices connected to the body and skin, such as covering bodies with a mixture of red ochre and animal fat to protect them from evil spirits during the ceremonies or to disguise human odour when hunting (25). In this way, the subjugated knowledge, i.e. both ceremonial and everyday practice, is exposed with the help of a custom that the white settlers imposed on the Aboriginal population.

143 I suggested earlier that Pilkington integrates Western historical sources, going as far as quoting directly from major Australian historians such as Robert Hughes and his The

Fatal Shore (12), with textualized oral accounts of her relatives. Pilkington combines not only the public and the political with the private and the personal, but also the systems of knowledge: “I have though worked to synthesise these different forms of knowledge to give readers the fullest insight into this historic journey,” Pilkington says in the introduction to her text (xiv). Indeed, she manages to both confront and combine the two in a kind of hybrid knowledge, drawing on both Indigenous and Western epistemologies. This hybrid knowledge is vital for the protagonists too. Therefore Molly can, for example, successfully find her way home both through her traditional Aboriginal knowledge of the bush and with the help of Western technology – the rabbit-proof fence, which, paradoxically, becomes a symbol of homecoming. Another example of cultural hybridity is echoed in the passage when the three girls are taken south on a boat and, approaching Fremantle, the sight of the wheat flour producer’s logo – a dingo – immediately brings back memories of home and family gatherings:

As the red dingo became more visible, Molly, Daisy and Gracie felt an acute

pang of homesickness. How many ration bags had their mothers,

grandmothers and aunts used with that red dingo – midgi-midgi dgundu – on

them? Scores and scores when you think of all the dampers they cooked.

When the bags were empty the women made them into bags for carrying

food and other items or filled them with old rags and used them as pillows.

Bloomers and shifts were also cut out of the flour bags. Yes, they had grown

up with the red dingo. Tears welled in their eyes as they remembered their

families. (56)

144 This scene is worth quoting at length because it reveals resistances and subjugated knowledges in a complex way: first it shows hybrid knowledge in the combination of the

Western concept (producing flour) symbolized, interestingly, by a native Australian animal

(dingo) which is an important part of Aboriginal life. But as a paradox it is not the dingo itself that symbolizes home for the girls but rather the home is symbolized by what the dingo represents in the white world – dozens and dozens of flour bags, through which the girls relate to their Aboriginal community and identity. Secondly, the passage uncovers an important set of knowledges concerned with appropriating the Western product to other uses. Thus the used flour bags cover the basic needs of an Aboriginal family who was made dependant on the rations provided and gradually succumbed to the mainstream way of life.

Thirdly, the passage shows resistance to the assimilation to which the girls are heading in their spontaneous memories of the community of women cooking meals at home, which is something that again links Pilkington to Sterling’s strategies of resistance.

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Sterling’s narrative is most instrumental in combining the strategies of resistance and adaptation to the residential school system in what Rauna Kuokkanen, drawing on the

Native American writer and critic Gerald Vizenor, calls “survivance.” In this context,

“survivance” weaves together the concepts of resistance and survival in an effort to challenge “dualistic notions of dominance and victimhood” (Kuokkanen 700). Compared to

Pilkington’s account of open and active resistance in the form of the protagonists’ escape,

Seepeetza’s resistances are more strategic, subtle and hidden. But they also relate to language and naming. It is a well-known fact that children in mission and residential schools were strictly forbidden to use Indigenous languages. Both Pilkington and Sterling depict this policy as a traumatic experience for the children, and a severe cultural loss.

However, both narratives also provide many instances of strategic uses of Indigenous

145 languages, either in situations when the children do not want to be understood by others or when they want to deliberately reminisce about their homes and families. The symbolic title of My Name Is Seepeetza alludes to one of the first internal conflicts Seepeetza encounters at school:

After that Sister Maura asked me what my name was. I said, ‘my name is

Seepeetza.’ Then she got really mad like I did something terrible. She said

never to say that word again. She told me if I had a sister go and ask what my

name was. I went to the intermediate rec and found Dorothy lying on a bench

reading comics. I asked her what my name was. She said it was Martha

Stone. I said it over and over. (18)

Seepeetza is therefore deprived of her traditional name, given to her by her father after a community elder, a name which reflects her Indigenous identity and anchors her existence in the community. At the same time, however, the fact that Sterling titled her narrative with this assertive statement of a little girl rather confirms Seepeetza’s connection to the culture that the residential school system tried to deny her. In addition, Seepeetza remembers not only her own traditional name, but also the names of her siblings and occasionally uses

Indigenous words to name important concepts, such as shamah for a “white person” (100), rituals such as potlatch for a big gathering (121), or favourite pastime activities such as lahal for a stick game (123). Similarly, writing the journal is itself an act of resistance for

Seepeetza as she can put down her memories of the happier times, and at the same time spell out the names and wilful acts of the school staff. In this way she actually manages to provide a written “report” of the ideology within which the residential school operates.

Seepeetza’s resistances to the residential school regime and its pervasive control over her every movement are, as it has been mentioned, subtle and hidden, mostly kept secret from the nuns. The variety of her resistances ranges from individual acts such as

146 holding hands with her sisters when walking outside (12) or writing one diary for the class and another one in secret (12) to collective resistance of all the school children who were supposed to laugh at the run-away boys after the boys had been caught and brought back to be severely humiliated, but nobody, as if in support of the boys, made of fun of them (13).

Occasionally, however, Seepeetza resists openly when one of the Sisters crosses the imaginary line and Seepeetza is driven to threaten suicide should the Sister insist (83). But examples like these are not many; resistance rather happens in the sphere of Seepeetza’s fantasies of home while she accommodates herself to the regime.

One of the many examples of revealing subjugated, i.e. traditional tribal knowledge in Sterling’s narrative concerns bringing aspects of Indigenous cultural practices to school, which helps the children remain anchored in their own traditional culture. When the girls have to peel corn after classes, this simple domestic task immediately evokes the memory of Native women doing similar work at home and the joking, laughing, and storytelling it is related to, while it also strengthens the solidarity among the residential school attendees:

“Then we all started to get happy, even the big girls. We started joking and laughing like

Mum and Aunt Mamie and Yah-yah do when they’re cleaning berries or fish together at home. They tell stories and laugh all day while they’re working” (14). In this case, instead of complying with the school rules, the girls spontaneously imitate what they were exposed to at home and saw as natural, and in this way they manage to slip away, if only for a moment, from the school’s pervasive control.

Through Seepeetza’s memories of home, Sterling’s account also reveals traditional

Indigenous knowledge that has been suppressed in the children attending residential schools. This is most evident in passages where Seepeetza unconsciously compares the two educational systems, describing the Indigenous ways of transmitting knowledge such as storytelling and generational learning from family elders. For example, Seepeetza

147 reminisces about her mother making a fish trap in the way that her grandmother had taught her, just as she had taught her about “Indian medicine” (89). Indeed, skills like weaving, making clothes, gathering food or collecting herbal medicines are presented as typically women’s set of knowledges “inherited,” so to speak, from the elder family members. In this context it is a great paradox that this traditional knowledge, including speaking Native languages, is kept hidden from Seepeetza and her siblings by the parents as a result of their own traumatic experience in school or the clash with the mainstream culture. In spite of this the children cannot be totally kept away from traditional knowledge as it is a part of everyday life and naturally they come into contact with it. This concerns seemingly only practical activities such as seasonal extended family camping trips filled with berry picking and hunting, through which, however, Seepeetza learns important concepts such as sharing both food and knowledge, labour division, and naming things in Indian language. In the following quote she summarizes everything that the Indigenous system of teaching and learning provides:

The old people like Yah-Yah smile at you and tell you something about the

trail you’re following or show you how to cover your berries with leaves so

they stay fresh. They know where to find the biggest berries and how to cook

delicious food over the campfire. They notice how many berries you pick,

who sneaks off to go fishing, and what everybody likes to eat. They tease

you around the campfire if you don’t pick many berries. Next day you pick

lots. (91)

This passage also shows, except the methods of educating the young, the system of control by the elders watching over the younger members and of punishment in the form of teasing those who do not comply with the rules. Obviously, the scene invites a contrasting comparison with the residential school’s educational methods based on physical

148 punishment, humiliation and control of every single movement. In addition, through these activities Seepeetza can also develop a strong sense of belonging to her people and of positive exceptionality of her Indigenous identity. Seepeetza says: “There is something really special about mountain people. It’s a feeling like you know who you are, and you know each other. You belong to the mountains” (91). This assertion of her identity is certainly very different from the internal racism and negative perception of Indigenous identity among most residential schools’ victims, as well as from some urban characters in the works of Maria Campbell and Lee Maracle.

On the whole, the major contribution of Sterling’s narrative to writing Indigenous women’s resistance to assimilation is the portrait of a functional, non-stereotypical Native family and its everyday activities depicted in fragments and small details that together make up a mosaic representing the Native community in the 1950 Canada. This image is particularly strong towards the end of the book where Seepeetza is back home at the

Joyaska ranch during her two-month summer holiday and records the everyday events that make up the precious days spent with the extended family. This section is important as a source of hybrid knowledge consisting of two elements: the traditional Indigenous knowledge represented especially by the grandparents and partly by the parents who, however, wish to keep the traditional knowledge hidden from their children; the children must develop certain survival skills in order to “make it” in a modern world where the mainstream society threatens Indigenous cultural values. The result is compromises such as sending children to the residential school and not teaching them Native languages. The next generation, the children, are bearers of the hybrid knowledge, combing the two epistemologies and worldviews and trying to make the best of it. The ending of Sterling’s narrative is permeated by sad nostalgia and a sense of loss: Seepeetza’s brother Jimmy goes away to university, Seepeetza’s father predicts the destruction of the valley and the ranch in

149 the face of commercial development and his advice to his children is clearly a resigned one:

“You kids want to get yourself an education. Get a job. That way you’ll be okay” (125).

This kind of conclusion is disturbing and ambivalent when compared to Seepeetza’s assertion of her Indigenous identity as it was analysed in the previous part, since it suggests that Seepeetza’s future lies, after all, somewhere else than in the centre of the Indigenous community. Finally, Seepeetza in her last entry is clearly aware of the pressure to leave the past behind: “I think I’ll leave the journal at home in the attic inside my dad’s old violin case. If Yah-yah is in the mountains where we go to pick berries, I’ll ask her to make a buckskin cover for it. I’ll ask her to bead fireweed flowers on it” (126). These last words refer to the borderline between the past symbolized by the grandmother as the keeper of

Seepeetza’s diary and the future which, except spending more years in the residential school, may also cause the potential alienation from the traditional Indigenous background.

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Although Anna Lee Walters’ narrative Talking Indian differs in many ways from

Pilkington’s and Sterling’s texts, there are also many thematic and formal elements that they share, one of them being inscribing resistance strategies and revealing subjugated knowledge in the context of the boarding school experience. The very last chapter of

Walters’ book, titled “The Fourth World,” focuses more on Walters’ personal life, the memories of her childhood and growing up among Indigenous family before being separated and placed in the formal educational institution provided by the government. Like

Sterling, Walters in this chapter draws on the technique of showing the idyllic, harmonious childhood spent with her grandparents in the traditional Indigenous community and then contrasting this image to the sense of alienation, oppression and abuse experienced in the boarding school.

150 Walters was in her childhood very much influenced by the Otoe world of her paternal grandparents who taught her tribal culture such as songs, the meaning of ceremonies, etc. Walters describes this period of her life in a romanticized, nostalgic way, putting stress on the educational aspect and revealing tribal knowledge:

I thought the whole world was Indian, was Otoe. They opened my

eyes and formed my first words with me. No, they did not put words

into my mouth, and even if they did, I did not taste them. They filled

my mouth and belly with wild berries me and Grandpa picked from a

slow moving wagon. They filled me with old dreams they or their

ancestors had dreamed collectively hundreds of years before. They

made me see things only I could see, and hear the old stories and

songs they told with exaggerated animation and sang with such

haunting emotion. Maybe that is the same thing as putting words into

my mouth. (189)

This and the following passages in Walters’ account portray the grandparents as sources of tribal power, traditional Indigenous knowledge and confirmation of Indigenous identity. On the formal level, moreover, such passages also present a very poetic language underscored by storytelling techniques such as repetition. The harmonious childhood was not disturbed in any way by the separation from the parents shortly after Walters’ birth; it is rather taken for granted that growing up with one’s grandparents is perfectly convenient in Native communities. Walters’ dedicates a lot of space to the depiction of both her paternal and maternal grandparents, especially both the grandmothers, joining the two histories – the life stories of the two tribal families – together in a saga-like narrative.

This peaceful period in Walters’ life is suddenly disrupted by a traumatic experience at the boarding school. Here Walters’ account resonates most with Sterling’s and

151 Pilkington’s: humiliation and using shame were common in practices such as delousing, cutting the long hair, issuing uniform clothing and shoes, assigning useless work and hard domestic tasks, forbidding Native languages, imposing a military regime on the children and denying their Indigenous identity. Like the other two narratives, thus, this particular chapter in Talking Indian resists the ideology behind the policies of separation and assimilation of Indigenous people in the U.S. as Walters’ boarding school experience, although resulting in alienation from her grandparents after her return home, is a far cry from her assimilation into the mainstream society. Walters’ resistances against the boarding school system and its staff also share characteristics with those of Seepeetza and

Pilkington’s protagonists. Walters as a child keeps her cut braids in a shoe box in protest

(206), talks back to the matron when the reasoning for some action runs against her

Indigenous beliefs (206), and she also participates in collective resistance when the children manage to escape the staff’s control and immediately slip back into their suppressed selves:

“We listened to the stories of each other’s family and people that all of us told. We heard how so-and-so’s grandmother could turn herself into a snake, how someone else’s people were buried in trees, the stories of Deer Woman, and countless other tales” (207). It is clear that Walters reminisces about the subjugated cultural practices in the same way that

Seepeetza does in Sterling’s text.

One of the more complex resistance strategies to the boarding school system in

Walters’ account points to the failure of the state to recognize traditional animosities between certain tribes – something that “each child was thoroughly aware of” (206), according to Walters. As the children were “well-versed” in their tribal histories and naturally knew their traditional enemies, they transplanted this knowledge to the boarding school environment too: “[T]he children knew that the tribes had different philosophical concepts, social relationships, and organization, and that certain tribes fought each other

152 since the beginning of time” (207). As a result, the children know perfectly well where they stand when being insulted and they know equally well how to defend themselves effectively, in contrast to their helplessness at the school staff’s both physical and emotional attacks:

[T]here were children who called all the Pawnees “horse thieves” in their

own language. ... We Pawnee children knew we were being called a

derogatory name, and of course would have to make some reply which was

appropriate to the history of another child’s tribe. We knew that some tribes

practices sorcery, that others in the past had practiced cannibalism, that one

of our ancestors had fought face-to-face combat with another child’s great-

great-grandparent. (207)

This quite complex awareness of not only one’s own tribal history but also the entire network of relationships and histories can be classified as subjugated knowledge since it is

“disqualified” Indigenous knowledge; it is a knowledge of history, land, and social structures that has been, like a layer of a palimpsest, “overwritten” and concealed by the dominant society’s policies. Walters, in this case, serves as a mediator between this concealed knowledge and the mainstream reader as she helps to decode the discourse.

Therefore, while Walters’ narrative exposes her own resistances to the boarding school system, the process of “decoding” and re-writing history becomes a resistance strategy for

Walters the writer.

Walters can be compared to Doris Pilkington in her ways of subverting the rhetorics of the state assimilation policies, namely when she confronts the government promises and the reality. With irony, Walters ridicules the state’s attempt to turn a vice into a virtue when she talks of the school’s message delivered over and over to the children, the message that

“we ought to be grateful to be at the school which the government so graciously provided

153 for us. We should be glad that there was this fine old institution which would take us in and delouse us, and cut our hair, and give us shoes, and feed us, and let us sleep in its army beds” (206). Here Walters clearly interrogates the official U.S. government policy of assimilation, resisting this policy’s impact on her and her family.

154 2.3. Trauma Narratives, Testimony and Scriptotherapy

bearing witness

When looking at Indigenous women’s life writing from the point of view of trauma studies and considering its testimonial nature, drawing on psychoanalytical approaches has proved enriching especially in the contemporary era that emphasizes the issue of violating human rights and the way they are inscribed into literary texts such as life stories. The notions of collective trauma, memory, remembering, forgetting and healing have become crucial in analyses of minority literatures, combining literary theories with knowledge stemming out of disciplines such as clinical psychoanalysis. In Human Rights and Narrated

Lives , Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith explain the recent surge of interest in autobiographies and life stories of marginalized groups as a need to bear witness to the violent and painful histories that have shaped many modern nations. Primarily, they perceive bearing witness as an act of remembering which logically challenges the reluctance of many nation-states to recognize the rights (be it human rights, land rights or the right to cultural assertion in the case of Indigenous peoples) of marginalized minority groups: “These acts of remembering test the values that nations profess to live by against the actual experiences and perceptions of the storyteller as witness. They issue an ethical call to listeners both within and beyond national borders to recognize the disjunction between the values espoused by the community and the actual practices that occur” (3). Life stories such as Indigenous women’s accounts appeal strongly to mainstream readership precisely because they reveal the suppressed and hidden practices and policies. Schaffer and

Smith further discuss the power of these “narrated lives” to draw attention to the previously unspoken truths and their effects on both writers and readers:

155 Some stories, formerly locked in silence, open wounds and re-trigger

traumatic feelings once they are told. Some stories, recounted in the face of

oppression and repression, of shame and denial, reinvest the past with a new

intensity, often with pathos, as they test normative conceptions of social

reality. All stories invite an ethical response from listeners and readers. (4)

The act of bearing witness can be seen as a link between the concepts of re-writing history and inscribing some traumatic experience, as well as between revealing subjugated knowledge and unlocking memory: indeed, the issues of speaking the individual, collective and generational trauma stemming from the colonial era permeates most of Indigenous women’s life writing. To the Indigenous women writers, bearing witness also provides a sense of empowerment and is sometimes discussed as a “healing process,” something I call, drawing on Suzette Henke, “scriptotherapy,” i.e. empowering oneself through writing, through engaging with the traumatic past and through investing one’s own self and personal experience into dealing with the issues of colonization, violence, broken family ties, generational and internal conflicts.

In Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma , Kalí Tal reminds us that bearing witness is an “aggressive act” because it ultimately challenges the power of political, economic and social pressures upon affected groups, the status quo that silences the witness’ voices. Tal says:

[Bearing witness] is born out of a refusal to bow to outside pressure to revise

or to repress experience, a decision to embrace conflict rather than

conformity, to endure a lifetime of anger and pain rather than to submit to the

seductive pull of revision and repression. Its goal is change. The battle over

the meaning of a traumatic experience is fought in the arena of political

discourse, popular culture, and scholarly debate.

156 Therefore, bearing witness is highly politicized and potentially empowering as the narratives that bear witness to the colonization trauma, for example, become a tool in gaining political power. If the people impacted by colonization manage to retain control over the representations and interpretations of this particular traumatic event, including the textualized forms, then they can start a shift in the political and social structures. A problem, however, arises with the revision, appropriation and commodification of the representations of trauma by the dominant culture, in which case the structures remain unchanged. Specific examples may include the internationally recognized and enormously popular book or film versions of such representations which risk the danger of being absorbed by the dominant culture without adequately reacting to them. 61

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communal trauma

The definition of trauma has undergone many changes and modifications, from strictly medical descriptions to more inclusive sociological and historical applications. In

Unclaimed Experience , Cathy Caruth goes back to the originally Greek meaning of trauma, which is a wound upon a body, and points out its further extension in medical and psychiatric use to include a wound upon a mind, as it was later thoroughly explored in

Sigmund Freud’s work (3). Over time, however, the characterization of trauma has become more inclusive and has seen the development of a discipline of trauma studies that analyses the notions of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, memory and its implications for both tellers/writers and listeners/readers. In her recent study Trauma and Survival in

Contemporary Fiction , Laurie Vickroy has re-defined trauma as “a response to events so overwhelmingly intense that they impair normal emotional or cognitive responses and bring

61 One of the examples I have already mentioned is the often discussed discrepancy in the book and film representation of the Stolen Generation(s) experience in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.

157 lasting psychological disruption” (ix). 62 Importantly, Vickroy has transcended the exclusive focus of the trauma theory on the Holocaust survivors and their oral accounts as well as on strictly psychoanalytical interpretation, and has further incorporated racial trauma, such as slavery and colonization, into her methodology of combining literary, cultural and psychological approaches to literary narratives dealing with what she calls “socially induced trauma” (xiii).

Moreover, the concept of trauma has been related to communities where damage to social structures has been crucial. The sociologist Kai Erikson has made a significant contribution to this area in his article “Notes on Trauma and Community” where he elaborates on the notion of traumatized communities as something distinct from traumatized persons and, similarly to Vickroy, works with trauma as a social concept:

‘trauma’ becomes a concept social scientists as well as clinicians can work

with. … Sometimes the tissues of community can be damaged in much the

same way as the tissues of mind and body ... but even when that does not

happen, traumatic wounds inflicted on individuals can combine to create a

mood, an ethos – a group culture, almost – that is different from (and more

62 Recently, the definition of trauma as an event so extreme and intense that it reaches beyond normal human experience has been contested, particularly on the grounds of what constitutes the “normal” human experience. Laura S. Brown, who offers a feminist perspective on trauma, contends that such definition is insufficient as it would, for example, imply that because so many women in the world suffer from sexual abuse, incest and rape, in this logic it is not an uncommon experience, therefore not a trauma (Brown 101).

Based on this Brown insists that “human” experience often refers to “male” experience, thus trauma means that which disrupts what is normal and usual in the lives of these men, i.e. wars, genocides, natural disasters, vehicle crashes, boats sinking etc. (101).

158 than) the sum of the private wounds that make it up. Trauma, that is, has a

social dimension. (185)

In his idea of the communal trauma, Erikson puts stress on its collective nature and the damage it causes to the relationships in the community. Primarily, he describes communal trauma as an injury “to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality … [it is] a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared” (187). This characterization is certainly applicable to many Indigenous communities worldwide, and indeed many Indigenous life writings, especially those focused on the alienation of individuals from tribal cultures and histories, reflect the process of disintegration in Indigenous communities. On the other hand, Erikson also puts forward a premise that “trauma can create community” in the sense that it gives the victims the feeling of having been “set apart and made special” (185-86) – an idea that immediately evokes the Holocaust survivors and the “exceptionality” of their existence based on the shared experience of genocide. This argument allows Erikson to maintain that “trauma shared can serve as a source of communality in the same way that common languages and common backgrounds can. There is a spiritual kinship there, a sense of identity , even when feelings of affections are deadened and the ability to care numbed” (186, emphasis mine). The idea that collective trauma, such as the colonization trauma, contributes to the creation of spiritual kinship and a sense of collective identity may, in the case of Aboriginal, Native American and Native Canadian peoples, lead to a unifying sense of pan-Indigeneity, underlining the historical parallels of the colonization and settlement practices. The notion of collective identities and communal ties is also crucial to my analysis of Indigenous women’s life stories which very often foreground the kinship structures, extended family ties and relational selves, all this as a reaction to the

159 forced break-up of the communal tissues. Especially those accounts which attempt to re- construct functional tribal society, the so called cultural maintenance life writings, stress the need of Indigenous people within the communities to stick together in the face of cultural assimilation pressures. This is also underlined by the cross-generational aspect of trauma where the younger generations of Indigenous people, although having no direct experience with the outright violence such as the massacres of the earlier colonial period, nor, for example, with boarding/ residential/ mission schools, are still heavily burdened with the historical experience of their ancestry. The trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next through, among other means, the storytelling traditions, and so is always present, albeit latently, in the collective memory. This sense of perpetuation of history, of repetition, is evoked in Erikson’s metaphor of haunting: “Our memory repeats to us what we haven’t yet come to terms with, what still haunts us” (184).

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trauma as a story

An important element in trauma theory is the process of the narrativization of trauma. Scholars working in trauma studies agree on the so called “imperative to tell” which is inherently present in the survivors. In “An Event Without a Witness: Truth,

Testimony and Survival,” the psychoanalyst Dori Laub, who works with victims of massive psychic trauma and their descendents, explores the relation between survival and the urge of the survivors to tell their story: “The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their story; they also needed to tell their story in order to survive. There is, in each survivor, an imperative to tell and thus to come to know one’s story” (78, original emphasis). This urge to speak out may become a consuming life task, almost an inner compulsion. However, there is also an opposing tendency, something that Laub calls “the impossibility of telling,” which is the impossibility to articulate something that cannot be

160 fully captured in thought, memory or speech (78-79). Even though Laub in his analyses obviously refers to the oral accounts of the Holocaust survivors, in my view his theoretical approach may illuminate some aspects of Indigenous women’s life writing, such as its testimonial nature. It is noteworthy, for example, how Laub equals “telling” and “knowing” one’s story, which is a relation that really permeates all the narratives discussed in this dissertation. The accounts that Indigenous women tell reflect their struggles to come to terms with the history of their people’s physical and cultural destruction, and telling their own and their people’s traumatic experiences means consciously striving to learn and know what had actually happened. Therefore, following the Foucauldian nexus knowledge/power,

Indigenous writers are empowered through their writing.

The process of the narrativization of trauma is essential in psychoanalytical treatment of trauma victims. Drawing on the clinical perspective on the relationship between trauma and language, Cathy Caruth suggests that “the treatment of trauma requires the incorporation of trauma into a meaningful (and thus sensible) story” ( Unclaimed

Experience 117). Similarly, in “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” Dori

Laub maintains that in order to break the circle of a fate which cannot be known or told, only repeated, but in which the victims are still subject to the previously mentioned imperative to tell and know, a therapeutic process must encourage the construction of a narrative, reconstruction of a history and, above all, what he calls the re-externalization of the event (69). Laub continues: “This re-externalization of the event can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside” (69, original emphasis). Clearly, life writing accounts such as Indigenous women’s narratives, which are often disguised testimonies to historical injustices, may serve as one such medium of re-externalizing the

161 event, in this case the event of the colonization and its consequences for Indigenous populations worldwide.

The narrativization of trauma, i.e. creating a meaningful story about the trauma, results in the genre of the so called trauma narratives. A trauma narrative is described as

personalized responses to this century’s emerging awareness of the

catastrophic effects of wars, poverty, colonization, and domestic abuse on the

individual psyche. They highlight postcolonial concerns with rearticulating

the lives and voices of marginal people, rejecting Western conceptions of the

autonomous subject and describing the complex negotiations of multicultural

social relations. (Vickroy x)

This broad definition of a trauma narrative importantly stresses the global context of contemporary violent conflicts of the world and reiterates the social dimension of representing the trauma, leaving the door open for the inclusion of literary texts which themselves do not focus on the originary traumatic events but rather re-tell and depict their consequences. The definition also suggests that trauma narratives do not have to be recounted by the actual survivors but can be creatively re-worked and interpreted by their descendants. This would imply that most of Indigenous life writing, similarly to African

American life narratives, can be treated as trauma literature. In the case of the texts analysed in this chapter, however, it is not possible to treat them primarily as trauma narratives, simply because to a large extent, no matter how auto/biographical, these narratives are fictionalized, multi-generic literary texts where uncovering traumatic and testimonial elements is only one of several textual layers.

Following the psychoanalytic stream in Caruth’s and Laub’s treatment of individual trauma transformed into a “meaningful story,” it is necessary to enquire what happens when the collective and communal traumas are textualized. It was suggested that “[t]raumatic

162 events are written and rewritten until they become codified and narrative form gradually replaces content as the focus of attention” (Tal). Tal shows how this happened with the

Holocaust trauma, which was converted into a metonym, “a set of symbols that reflect the formal codification of that experience.” I suggest that something comparable might have occurred with some aspects of the colonization trauma, particularly the Stolen Generation(s) and the boarding/ residential schools experience. In the accounts of Pilkington, Sterling and

Walters, readers are confronted with a specific set of images, symbols and vocabulary to convey the experience of having been forced to stay in government institutions: so there is the image of a shabby building with window bars that evokes a prison, bad food, military regime, gender separation, harsh punishment from the staff, total confusion of the children at the beginning, description of their trauma from having been separated, homesickness, occasional resistances and so on. Although these images relate to a direct experience that the writers actually went through (even though Pilkington depicts her mother’s experience with the River Moore Native Settlement, she was placed in the same institution years later), the narratives give the impression that they also depict something larger, something reaching beyond the immediate individual experience. This process of extending traumatic impact coincides with what Kalí Tal calls “mythologization” – one of the three strategies of coping with a traumatic event that she examines. 63 Tal defines mythologization as reducing a traumatic event to a “set of standardized narratives (twice- and thrice-told tales that come to represent ‘the story’ of the trauma) turning it from a frightening and uncontrollable event

63 The other two are medicalization which “focuses our gaze upon the victims of trauma, positing that they suffer from an ‘illness’ that can be ‘cured’ within … institutionalized medicine and psychiatry,” and disappearance, which is a “refusal to admit to the existence of a particular kind of trauma … usually accomplished by undermining the credibility of the victim” (Tal). It is important to stress that Tal in her work examines the traumatic effects of the Holocaust, Vietnam War and the sexual and children. Some of her conclusions, however, are valid for Indigenous women’s life writing as well.

163 into a contained and predictable narrative” (Tal). Such “reduction” does not, of course, intend to say that mythologized trauma becomes a meaningless story repeating the same set of strategies and symbols but rather that it involves a process of extending the personal testimonies into a larger narrative of the colonization trauma where the narrators and storytellers serve as mediators and cultural translators of traumatic Indigenous pasts. Their singular personal experience speaks for the whole community, one story standing for all comparable stories of other community members, the unique accounts being drawn together to form a single “meta-experience” (Hughes D’aeth). This secondary representativeness of

Indigenous women’s life stories is confirmed by Laurie Vickroy when she underscores that

“testimony narratives do not just concern individuals but also the individual as representative of a social class or group” (5).

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testimonio and scriptotherapy

The notion of a trauma narrative may sometimes overlap with the subgenre of testimony, or, in the words of John Beverly, testimonio . The difference between the two concepts is hard to pinpoint but it seems that testimonio inherently implies an act of truth telling and testimonio’s “ethical and epistemological authority derives from the fact that we are meant to presume that its narrator is someone who has lived in his or her person, or indirectly through the experiences of friends, family, neighbours, or significant others, the events and experiences that he or she narrates” (Beverly 3). Nevertheless, this characteristic is also applicable to many trauma narratives, as is seen from Vicroy’s acknowledgement of the impact of testimony on trauma narratives. Vickroy quotes Beverly’s description of testimonios and applies it to trauma narratives which, she contends, are also “‘a literary simulacrum of oral narrative’ that seeks to create a truth effect, a feeling of lived experience, and expresses a ‘problematic collective social situation’ through a

164 representative individual” (Vickroy xii). As a result, the distinction between testimonial and trauma narratives becomes blurred. In my view, a trauma narrative must be understood as a broader term that can include any narrative dealing with any kind of trauma, be it collective trauma such as colonization or slavery, or individual trauma such as psychic and domestic violence, and is normally presented in a (semi-)fictional form, in spite of historical, sociological or psychological foundations (Morrison’s Beloved is one example of fiction dealing with historical trauma of slavery which is frequently analysed in academic research on trauma narratives). In addition, according to Vickroy there is a subtle difference between testimony and a fictional trauma narrative in the symbolic representation: while testimony attempts to tell the story as it is, a fictional trauma narrative represents trauma on a symbolic level (e.g. the choice of a narrative technique, such as the third-person narrative certainly engages readers in a different way). This, however, does not mean that fictional and symbolic representations are not appropriate or truth-telling. 64 Vickroy therefore concludes that while testimony may be more confrontational in its realistic approach and the symbolic representations of trauma may be questioned as distorting the nature of traumatic experience, it is important to take into account that “an audience needs assistance in translating unfamiliar experience in order to empathize with it” (11). Testimonies

64 The issue of the truth-telling effect in (autobiographical) testimonies is surrounded by numerous debates that underscore its ambiguity: John Beverly, for example, reacts to a historian’s opinion which questions the objectivity of the narrator/author in the famous testimonio of a Guatemalan activist and guerrilla fighter I,

Rigoberta Menchú and Argus that the crucial question is not whether the author “lies” or not bur rather who has the “authority to tell the story” (5). Similarly, Dori Laub discusses the notion of factual knowledge in the testimonies when he analyses an oral account of a Holocaust survivor whose re-told “facts” about a Nazi concentration camp are “corrected” by historians. Laub says: “Knowledge in the testimony is, in other words, not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right … The woman was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination” (“Bearing Witness” 62).

165 typically evoke a direct involvement of the author in a traumatic event and even though the author/narrator does not have to play the role of a direct witness to the traumatic experience, it is supposed that he/she is somehow affected by it. Therefore this author/narrator gives a testimony and bears witness to historical traumas which were passed on him/her by his/her ancestry. The process of “transference of traumatic responses” can therefore continue for generations, especially between parents and children where children often “inherit patterns of traumatic response” (Vickroy 19). This is rather symptomatic of Indigenous life writing where the younger generation of writers often succumbs to the imperative to negotiate the traumatic past with the post-traumatic present in their narratives.

The third term that complements and overlaps with trauma narrative and testimony is the notion of scriptotherapy, which refers to the healing properties of a narrative. In the introduction to her Shattered Subjects , Suzette Henke mentions the term “narrative recovery” which evokes both the recovery of the “past experience through narrative articulation and the psychological reintegration of a traumatically shattered subject” (xxii).

Henke’s concept of scriptotherapy, which she defines as “the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment” (xii-xiii) leading to both individual and collective closure and subsequent healing, is particularly illuminating for exploring Indigenous women’s life writings that often advocate the need to heal and empower the authors’ selves through sharing and writing about the echoing traumas, calling for ethical response from the readers. The life writings analysed in this dissertation are no exception as they all reflect a collective and communal generational trauma and a sense of healing permeates all of them, although in different ways. In other words, these narratives perform what Sidner Larson, exploring Native American literature, calls a “curing phenomenon” (60). It was already suggested in the first chapter that the urban political narratives by Jackie Huggins and Lee Maracle empower their authors

166 through engaging in political activism and public struggle for Indigenous human rights. In these texts, healing comes when Indigenous communities are allowed access to resources and privileges that the dominant society possesses yet their political sovereignty, cultural plurality and self-determination remain recognized. Twenty years ago, Paula Gunn Allen asserted that the current abyss between modern patriarchal society and traditional

Indigenous heritage can be bridged by the spiritual restoration of tribal societies, mainly the gynocracies, and the feminine principle that guided them ( The Sacred Hoop ). Finally, scriptotherapeutic elements made their way into the stories of both separation and homecoming by Pilkington, Sterling and Lee Walters, where the healing process consists in both physical and spiritual return home, ensuring survival and continuance.

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It was suggested that Indigenous women’s life writing manifests traces of testimony, trauma narrative and scriptotherapy, though it is not its primary focus. The narratives discussed in this chapter, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepeetza and

Talking Indian , are primarily fictionalized accounts of individual life stories that, nevertheless, display various testimonial elements and to a certain extent may be read as trauma narratives which inscribe both individual and collective trauma. The act of bearing witness on the part of the author/narrator/protagonist brings forward the personal trauma of the family separation and the forced assimilation at mission/ residential/ boarding schools as the authors present their own encounters with the systematic oppression and control. In addition, Pilkington’s, Sterling’s and Walters’ narratives also unmask a severe invasion of the private by the public sphere, revealing the powerlessness of Indigenous people to keep their families intact in the face of state intervention.

The separation of the children from their families has different motives though and is performed under different circumstances. In Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , Molly,

167 Daisy and Gracie are literally stolen away, or “abducted,” in Pilkington’s words, from the midst of their community. The Aboriginal family are somehow aware immediately of what is happening when the Protector of Aborigines appears all of a sudden amongst them:

“They knew without a doubt that he was the one who took their children in broad daylight – not like the evil spirits who came into their camps in the night” (44). The separation trauma affects both the children and the Aboriginal community who feel they are powerless to prevent the separation. The only action the family can take to protect their part-Aboriginal offspring is to hide them in the bush or let the Aboriginal women give birth in the bush rather than in a hospital where the child would be registered and might be taken away soon after the birth (40). The trauma from the separation that the community suffers is dangerous because it is permanent. The children could be taken away any time and very unexpectedly, with no time to prepare neither the family nor the children, so the mothers must be alert all the time. In addition, the probability of children returning to their communities was very low, which meant that when they were taken it was usually for a very long time, in some cases forever. This is in contrast to the depiction of residential/boarding schools in

Sterling’s and Walters’ narratives where the children are not so far away from home and they usually go home for Easter, Christmas and summer holidays. This does not intend to diminish the traumatic impact of the residential/boarding schools’ environment in North

America on Indigenous children, it is, however, a different, perhaps less fatal, life experience than that of the Stolen Generation(s) in Australia.

In Sterling’s My Name Is Seepeetza and Walters’ Talking Indian , the separation is guided by different motives. Rather than “stolen,” the children are “sent away” by their parents who often see this as the only option they have. By no means does this mean that the parents would send their children to boarding/residential schools voluntarily, they are rather forced to do so by various circumstances, such as poverty and inability to keep all

168 children fed and clothed, the pressure from the churches running the schools or order by law. Often the parents themselves are traumatized from their own childhood separation and the institutional experience and try to prevent their children from getting into “trouble.”

Typically, the parents refuse to teach their children Native languages as they know the children would be severely punished for using them at schools. This is repeatedly expressed in My Name Is Seepeetza , where the parents, despite speaking their language fluently, consciously forbid their children to learn Indigenous languages, in order to “prepare” them for the residential school experience (78, 89). This reluctance, however, confuses Seepeetza who sees speaking Native languages as something natural and desiring: “Dad says I have to be a nurse or a teacher but I would like to be an interpreter like him. He speaks lots of

Indian languages, but he won’t teach us. Mum won’t either. She says the nuns and priests will strap us. I wonder why it’s bad” (36). Of course, Seepeetza is to discover very soon the school rule about speaking other language than English. Another important motivation for the parents to send their children to boarding/residential school is their frequent conviction that getting an education will secure their children a job and therefore survival in the dominant society. The awareness of the parents that they are sending their children away from their Indigenous background and towards assimilation is traumatic in itself. Having no power to change this course of things is doubly traumatizing.

Similarly to the history of the Stolen Generation(s) in Australia, the residential/boarding school history in North America remains a deeply embedded trauma among Indigenous peoples today, with many survivors and eyewitnesses speaking out about the abuse and maltreatment they experienced. What the following quote suggests about residential schools in Canada, is valid for the USA and Australia too: “Residential schools were instrumental in the breakdown of the family, causing strain and mistrust as language barriers arose and children were taught to devalue their cultural traditions” (Grant,

169 “Reclaiming the Lineage House” 46). The separation of Indigenous children from the known environment and having to come to terms with the new, alien surrounding is accompanied by feelings of loss, shame, confusion, fear, internalization of one’s difference and sometimes by psychosomatic symptoms such as bedwetting. Hence Seepeetza comments: “We get stomach aches when we have to come back to school after summer. It starts when we see the first leaves turning yellow at the end of August” (36). Anna Lee

Walters’ narrator in Talking Indian goes through a boarding school experience for a shorter period compared to Seepeetza, nevertheless she admits it was the most traumatic experience in her life as she was taken away from the very traditional, tribal environment of her grandmother’s household when five years old. Walters’ text is most conventional in terms of narrative strategies in autobiography, giving a fairly straightforward autobiographical account of her experience at the boarding school, and thus the trauma is unmediated by an unreliable child narrator as in the case of My Name Is Seepeetza , or by a third-person biographical mode as in case of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence . Instead, the boarding school trauma is in Talking Indian depicted in raw, factual, as-a-matter-of-course style of writing. In addition to her own traumatic story, Walters also gives a similar account of boarding school experience of her Navajo husband who could not even speak much English when entering the boarding school, therefore experiencing many communication problems.

“Those years were painful and lonely, and my husband still has difficulty talking about his experience there” (216), says Walters. In contrast to Walters who decides to alleviate the painful memory through narrativizing it, her husband chooses to deal with his trauma in a way symptomatic for trauma victims – he blocks it out and prefers silence.

The issue of silence and preference not to speak the unspeakable is one of the major issues in trauma theory. Such reaction is, according to Dori Laub common in trauma survivors:

170 [T]he speakers about trauma on some level prefer silence so as to protect

themselves from the fear of being listened to – and of listening to themselves.

That while silence is defeat, it serves them both as a sanctuary and as a place

of bondage. Silence is for them a fated exile, yet also a home, a destination,

and a binding oath. To not return from this silence is rule rather than

exception (“Bearing Witness” 58).

Although this issue has been psychoanalysed mostly in the Holocaust survivors, it is relevant for Indigenous women’s life narratives as well since their protagonists often have to make decisions about speaking or remaining silent about their traumatic experiences. The writers themselves have managed to break the silence by textualizing and publicizing the traumatic accounts either of themselves or their relatives, yet they must negotiate the ways in which they will present the painful testimonies. Typically, the authors identify and sometimes confront silence and reluctance to speak about the trauma on the part of their parents or elders who, as it was already mentioned, often choose to remain silent in order to protect their children. But it is also common that the elder relatives finally decide to tell their stories that get fixed on paper. This is the case of Aboriginal narratives My Place by

Sally Morgan, Auntie Rita by Jackie Huggins and also Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence where Doris Pilkington writes down the testimony of her relatives who are “anxious for their story to be published before they die” (xi). Although Molly and Daisy, Pilkington’s main informants, are willing to share their memories in the end, there is no doubt they are selective about what to say. The outcome in the book is in addition mediated by

Pilkington’s imaginative and creative abilities as a writer. In Sterling’s and Walters’ narratives, it is mainly the traumatized parents (and a husband in the case of Walters) who refuse to share their experience with their children. As a result, it is mostly the recent

171 generation of Indigenous writers that open up the hidden traumas of their parents, overcome their silences and become mediators between the traumatic past and post-traumatic present.

Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepeetza and Talking Indian also show signs of scriptotherapy. The idea that testimonial and trauma writing can perform a healing effect on its author and her immediate environment actually permeates all the life narratives discussed in this dissertation. The scriptotherapeutic elements are perhaps most visible in Anna Lee Walters’ Talking Indian where there is also the strongest sense of the autobiographical “I.” Walters describes how after the traumatic experience in the boarding school which totally separated her from her tribal culture writing paradoxically helped her find her own identity through reconnection with the tribal and oral traditions of her people:

“Writing released years of oppression. It made me whole and free. [It] seemed to express my renewed self, the sense of identity that was given back to me when I stopped trying to follow the mainstream, stopped denying the tribal essence of me, as I started listening for the familiar voice of tribal oral tradition again” (53). For Walters, the process of writing down her people’s version of history, of re-writing the history, is a means of empowerment, particularly in the moments of emphasizing the survival of her community, not the defeat, which was recorded so many times before by white historians and anthropologists. This aspect of her narrative is something that runs through Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , too.

Reconstructing the trek of the three girls in a textual form is a process of healing and reconciliation, both for Molly and Daisy, and for Pilkington herself as she becomes directly involved in the continuation of the story. My Name Is Seepeetza explicitly plays upon the concept of writing as a way to deal with traumatic experience: Seepeetza the protagonist writes a diary to release her childhood frustrations and confusions in the fictional residential school, while Sterling the author writes the diary-like fictionalized autobiography to reach a closure to her own trauma from a real residential school.

172 Testimonial elements are inscribed in Pilkington’s, Sterling’s and Walters’ texts on two different levels. First, there is the sense of the testimony and bearing witness to the forced separations and assimilation pressures, to the system of the state intervention and

“educational” institutions – in other words the testimony to the cultural, economic and political destruction. On this level, the three narratives have a disturbing effect on their readers who are confronted with the previously silenced deeds. Second, there is a strong feeling of testimony to survival and continuance. The epilogue to Follow the Rabbit-Proof

Fence titled “What Happened to Them? Where Are They Now?” gives a brief overview of the further fates of the three protagonists. Although they are still filled with many sad episodes, it is interesting to note that the stress is put on the continuance – namely the three women’s descendants. So it is carefully noted that according to Aboriginal kinship, Molly has eighteen grandchildren, 29 great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren (132), similarly Daisy and Gracie have also great numbers of offspring. As this is the very last comment in the entire account, in spite of the traumatic content it leaves the reader with at least a partial sense of the continuation of Aboriginal lives. The same strategies are employed by Sterling and Walters who, apart from bearing witness to residential/boarding school trauma, emphasize the strong connections with their Indigenous background.

173 2.4. Collective Subjects, Dialogic Selves

The genre of life writing has traditionally been critically shaped by the theory of autobiography, which in the Western discourse had revolved around the issue of the construction and centrality of the self. 65 A classic, often-quoted definition by Phillippe

Lejeune maintains that autobiography is a “retrospective narrative in prose that someone makes of his own existence when he puts the principal accent upon his life, especially upon the story of his own personality” (qtd. in Smith and Watson 1). Even though this definition has been contested since the 1970s when it originated particularly by poststructuralist and feminist scholars, it nevertheless illustrates the foundations of the familiar model of recording and representing one’s life in Western autobiography. 66 Such model has come to denote “a first person narrative that purports to describe the narrator’s life or episodes in that life, customarily with some chronological reflections about individual growth and development” (Reid xvii). Indigenous life writing, however, is often perceived as presenting a different nature of the “self,” a kind of an alternative to the centrality of the individual subject in Western autobiography (Krupat, Ethnocriticism 201). This is not to say that

Indigenous life writing lacks subjectivity but rather that it favours the collective subject and multiple voices over a single voice, even if these voices are sometimes only implied. The

65 For more details on the development of debates on the construction of the self in the theory of autobiography, see, for example, Fictions in Autobigraphy: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention by John Paul

Eakin (1985), The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth

Century edited by Domna Stanton (1987), Studies in Autobiography edited by James Olney (1988),

Autobiography & Postmodernism edited by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (1994), and

Reading Autobiography by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001).

66 Smith and Watson assert that the genre of autobiography, celebrating the “autonomous individual and the universalizing life story,” emerged in the Enlightenment and has become canonical in the West (3).

174 idea of the collective subject is echoed in the work of Arnold Krupat, a cultural critic of

Native American literature, particularly Native American autobiography. In the chapter titled “Monologue and Dialogue in Native American Autobiography” in his The Voice in the Margin , Krupat explores the development of what he calls “dialogic models of the self” in both early and modern Native American autobiographies 67 either individually written or produced collaboratively with a white editor. He argues that “[i]n Native American autobiography the self most typically is not constituted by the achievement of a distinctive, special voice that separates it from others, but, rather, by the achievement of a particular placement in relation to the many voices without which it could not exist” (133). This premise, contrasting Native American life writing and Western autobiography, is not unique among scholars of Native American life writing, as is confirmed by Kathleen M. Sands who, exploring Native American women’s collaborative life writing, makes the following comment: “Dialogue emphasizes kinship and relationality in terms of placement within the community social structure. This, of course, is directly antithetical to the privileging of individuality, of uniqueness, at the core of Euro-American autobiography” (144). Hertha

Wong is another scholar committed to the notion of what she calls the “communal” self in

Native American societies, arguing that Native people generally construct their identity primarily in relation to their families, clans, and tribes, and only secondarily as individuals

(Sending My Heart Back 13). Close readings of both pre-contact and contemporary Native

American life writing allow Wong to claim that “[i]nstead of emphasis on an individual self who stands apart from the community, the focus is on a communal self who participates within the tribe” (14, original emphasis). Even though such statements may invite a

67 Krupat uses consistently the term “Native American autobiography,” even though much of the narratives he analyses, particularly the contemporary ones which blur the boundaries between the autobiographical self and other voices, would qualify as life writing.

175 potential backlash involving an oppositional binary between the notions of

Indigenous/collective/dialogic and Western/individual/monologic, it will be shown that the life writing narratives discussed in this dissertation rather confirm this argument, no matter how distant their authors might be from traditional tribal environment.

Krupat’s notion of the dialogic self 68 refers not only to the texts which literally present at least two voices (non-Indigenous writer/editor and Indigenous informant, often complemented by a translator), but also to the narratives which encompass two cultural backgrounds of an Indigenous writer (something Krupat calls “autobiographies by Indians” as opposed to “Indian autobiographies”) that engage a “cultural cross-talk,” such as being

Indigenous and a writer/academic/activist (133). This point draws attention to the issue of biculturalism and cultural hybridity which plays an important role in Indigenous writing in general. Therefore Browdy de Hernandez talks about the “hybridization of [Indigenous] ancient cultures with the Euroamerican dominant culture (40). So Krupat develops his notion of a textual self which is collective, based on the dialogic nature of the Indigenous tribal existence:

Native American autobiographies, then, are the textual results of specific

dialogues (between persons, between cultures, between persons and cultures)

which claim to represent an Indian subject who, him- or herself, is the human

result of specific dialogical or collective sociocultural practices. They are

particularly interesting … as providing images of a collective self and a

collective society. (134)

Although Krupat, somewhat problematically, makes this statement applicable to those subjects who “have been formed in relation to tribal-traditional cultures” (134) and

68 The same concept, though approached from a slightly different perspective, is also designed by Rocío G.

Davis, as will be shown in the analysis of Auntie Rita in the conclusion.

176 potentially excludes urban-based writers who have lost touch with the tribal-oriented traditional communities, it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the sense of the community and the collective self that informs the Indigenous worldview. After providing analysis of several earlier, seemingly “monologic” Native American life writings and demonstrating their writers’ conscious suppression of the dialogic or collective constitution,

Krupat finally arrives at a conclusion that multiple voices and the collective subject simply cannot be erased from the Indigenous text:

What is worth remarking, however, is how extremely difficult it seems to be

to write as an Indian … without some measure of polyphony entering one’s

text. For all that the Indian author of an autobiography may wish to privilege

a single perspective and a single stylistic practice, it usually turns out that

there are, nonetheless, traces of other voices, even, it may be, other voices of

the author herself, if not actually in the text then in the margins. (170)

Certainly, such characteristic generalizes perhaps too much, especially when taking into account contemporary criticism which points to Indigenous writers adopting conventional mainstream genres and narrative techniques such as postmodernist novels or love poetry.

When Krupat in another essay on Native American autobiography contends that “Native

American self … seem[s] to be less attracted to introspection, expansion, or fulfilment that the Western self appears to be” and that it seems “relatively uninterested in such things as the ‘I-am-me’ experience, and a sense of uniqueness or individuality” ( Ethnocentrism 209), his observations give the impression of essentialist categorization of Native American life writing that excludes the texts that would consciously foreground “individuality” in the

Western sense. In spite of this polemic, however, I want to use Krupat’s argument in order to extend it and include the three life writing narratives of this chapter, Follow the Rabbit-

Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepeetza and Talking Indian .

177 In a chapter titled “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self,”

Krupat further elaborates on his concept of the collective self and develops an original theory of the conception of the self in the genre of autobiography based on the theory of linguistic tropes, specifically the figures of metonymy and synecdoche. Krupat argues that if we understand metonymy as a relation of a part-to-part and synecdoche as a relation of part-to-whole, then personal accounts with the individual’s strong sense of the self as an entity different and separate from other individuals engage a metonymic sense of self, while life stories where the individual’s sense of the self is expressed “in relation to collective social units or groupings” construct a synecdochic sense of self ( Ethnocriticism 212). In other words, the synecdochic sense of the self means personal representation of a collective entity. Because early Indigenous life stories were communicated orally and often performed tribally in public, Krupat maintains, they were experienced through a collective effect (216-

17). Krupat then goes on to say that this process of communicating the personal life story in an oral, dramatic, performative and public way is more likely to “privilege the synecdochic relation of part-to-whole than the metonymic of part-to-part” (217). It follows from the analyses of the Indigenous women’s life writing narratives in this dissertation that the individual lives presented in them become comprehensible principally in relation to the collective experience of each of the author’s tribe or community, be it traditional or urban setting.

It is precisely the issues of collective identity and relationality in Indigenous women’s life writing where feminist approaches overlap with Indigenous writers’ strategies of inscribing the self. A number of scholars, Arnold Krupat and Hertha Wong among them, advocate the acknowledgement of the collective, “synecdochic” self in Indigenous life writing based on a different construction of the self in tribal societies. But the notions of the collective subject and relational self have also re-shaped the domain of women’s

178 autobiographies, where it was suggested that women autobiographers construct their textual selves in a different way from male writers. 69 As early as 1988, in her article “Women’s

Autobiographical Selves, Theory and Practice,” Susan Stanford Friedman pertinently observed the parallels between women’s writing and minority literatures in terms of their tendency to subdue what she names “individualistic models” of constructing the self in the mainstream autobiography:

The fundamental inapplicability of individualistic models of the self to

women and minorities is twofold. First, the emphasis on individuality does

not take into account the importance of a culturally imposed group identity

for women and minorities. Second, the emphasis on separateness ignores the

differences in socialization in the construction of male and female gender

identity. From both an ideological and psychological perspective, in other

words, individualistic paradigms of the self ignore the role of collective and

relational identities in the individuation process of women and minorities.

(35)

Indeed, many debates about Indigenous identity and its literary representations are analogical to contemporary feminist analyses of women’s autobiographical selves, stressing the common focus of both women’s and Indigenous autobiographical narratives on the

69 A collection of essays edited by Shari Benstock, The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s

Autobiography , provides a good overview of the development of the debates about women’s sense of collective identity and relationality. For example, Susan Friedman’s contribution on women’s autobiographical selves uses Nancy Chodorow’s notorious argument suggesting that girls define themselves in relation to others and the world while masculine self is separate (41). It is necessary to point out, however, that recently a number of texts have problematized the generalizing argument which privileges the relational self in women’s life writing narratives, questioning its essentialist nature (Wong, “First-Person Plural” 168; Stanton,

“Autogynography” 11; Hooton, 79-102)

179 communal and relational identity (Wong, Sending My Heart 7). Arnold Krupat makes the same connection, applying his concept of the synecdochic self, together with the notion of orality, to women’s narratives. According to Krupat, recent feminist criticism has solidly established that “orality … and textuality … are, indeed, perceived as gender-related in the

West, where men tend toward metonymic presentations of self, and women – in this like

Indians and tribal peoples generally – tend toward synecdochic presentations of self”

(Ethnocriticism 217).

Indigenous women’s life writing thus provides an ideal space for the intersections of the feminist and Indigenous theories of the collective self. The main reason for such an intersection is included in the way female Indigeneity has been constructed. It has been argued that women who also identify as racial and ethnic minorities are defined not only by the category of gender but also by the category of racial or ethnic difference, and are therefore in a situation of “double jeopardy” and doubly marginalized (Friedman 47;

Longley 371). This double otherness may strengthen their sense of group consciousness which is then reflected in particular women’s life narratives. The feminist and Indigenous concepts of relationality are based, however, on slightly different approaches to the self’s relation to community: while Indigenous relationality is associated with cultural grounding, particularly with extensive kinship networks and a specific relationship to land and community, feminist theorists consider female relationality as linked mainly to gender and social structures that place women in the midst of family and domestic sphere (Wong,

“First-Person Plural” 168). But even though the two notions of relationality, Indigenous and feminist, are not really equivalent, as Hertha Wong has observed, in my view it is possible to argue that the self, the “I” in Indigenous women’s life narratives, is always to a certain extent constructed in relation to the community, where “community” can nevertheless imply various meanings – family kinship, tribe/clan, urban environment or the entire earth

180 among them. The importance of community for Indigenous people is, nevertheless, undeniable. Armand Garnet Ruffo confirms this view when he presents the notion of community as being a prominent theme in Native American literature in general: “What we notice is a return to the community rather than a going away. [...] Community is necessarily linked to identity, the return to community signifying the protagonist’s recognition of himself as a Native person who has survived the colonizing and assimilating forces of the dominant society” (116). Interestingly, this quote interconnects the importance of community in Indigenous discourse with the notion of homecoming which really permeates

Indigenous women’s life writing in general.

Finally, the issue of the collective “we” in Indigenous life writing is also essentially bound with the collective trauma, memory and subsequent healing. Frequently, minority literatures and trauma narratives voice a historically imposed group consciousness based on the shared experience of the traumatic event which in the case of Indigenous people of

Australia and North America is represented by the colonization. In her introduction to a collection of essays Tracing the Autobiographical , Marlene Kadar observes that minority life writing, survivor narratives in particular, inhabit the space between the “I,” “we” and

“they:” “When the speaking presence is narrating the story of a community, … the ‘I’ blurs with the ‘we,’ and the axes of differentiation move less among differences or similarities within a collective and more in the commonality of the ‘we’ in struggle against the ‘them’”

(5). In addition, reading Indigenous women’s life writing as trauma narratives or testimonies also underlines the dialogic aspect of the texts, this time in terms of the dialogue between the teller/writer and the lister/reader. The essential role of the listener/reader in trauma and survivor narratives and testimonies makes it clear that these accounts are never monologues, cannot happen in solitude, and always interpellate the reader. In the words of

Dori Laub, “[t]he witnesses are talking to somebody ; to somebody they have been waiting

181 for a long time” (“Bearing Witness” 70-71, original emphasis). Thus it follows from the previous arguments that the notions of the collective self and dialogism are to a certain extent implicit in contemporary Indigenous women’s life writing, certainly in the narratives analysed in this chapter, even though they often negotiate the boundaries between the individual and the collective selves.

*****

Doris Pilkington, Shirley Sterling and Anna Lee Walters, it was suggested, are all writers who employ in their writing a synthesis of traditional Indigenous and mainstream narrative strategies, in particular by incorporating orality into their texts. They are writers who, on the one hand, voice their individual perspectives, reflecting the notion of the singular author as it is known in the Western literary tradition, but on the other hand their authorial individuality is decentered, pointing to a wider experience. In these Indigenous writers’ individualized accounts, there are other voices gleaming through, if not right in centre of the text, then, as Krupat says, in the margins. These other voices stem from the collective and communal environment of the writers, no matter how urban and detached from the tribal heritage they are, and are revealed through the collective memory of the

Indigenous populations of Australia and North America. More specifically, then, the voices belong to people with whom the writers may have interacted or worked, from friends and family to community elders and leaders. Therefore the voice of the writer/narrator, as that of a messenger, hands over the story and evokes the role of a traditional storyteller who shares rather than owns the story. Interestingly, many Indigenous writers, including the ones in this dissertation, acknowledge, usually in the introduction, that the text is actually not theirs alone, but is informed by other voices too. For example Lee Maracle admits in I

Am Woman that she uses stories told to her by her female friends and Jackie Huggins in

Sister Girl pays homage to her mother and all Aboriginal women having to struggle with

182 institutionalized racism. Huggins’, Maracle’s and Pilkington’s texts are primarily concerned with racism in Australia or North America: indeed, it is possible to say this is a central issue in their lives and writing. But this is so because they are a part of a group that is racially ostracized as a whole so as a result their position as bearers of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles is dependent on their self-definition as members of the Indigenous community.

This feature which privileges belonging to a certain social group corresponds to the synecdochic self of Krupat’s argument that it is “the part-to-whole relation in which the self as such is validated only in its social-collective … personhood” ( Ethnocriticism 227). The notion of the dialogic may, apart from Krupat’s interpretation, also be extended to include the dialogue between the past and the present. This is echoed again in Kathleen M. Sands’ claim that “[c]ontemporary [Indigenous] narrative speaks to and is resonant with oral tradition and historical narrative. Further, it is dialogic; voices of the past, dialogue from both past and present, and self-reflexive interpretation all share narrative space” (144). This conception of the dialogic character of Indigenous life writing is particularly pronounced in the texts by Pilkington and Walters in which the traditional, oral history interacts with personal narrations and in which the dialogue between the past and the present is one of the strongest elements.

Doris Pilkington has written a tale of the heroic quest symbolizing the struggle and resistance of the Stolen Generation(s)’ experience in Australia. Hers is formally a third- person biographical account, but her voice is present in the text very strongly, even though not through a straightforward “I.” In the introduction to Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence ,

Pilkington talks about the process of writing the book that includes the recording and transcribing the oral accounts, retracing the journey of escape, going back to the settlement, etc., suggesting that she, as an Indigenous person and a writer actually re-lives the Stolen

Generation(s) experience, including the escape from the mission. Obviously all this effort is

183 made mainly for her mother and aunt who wish to have their story put on paper but the narrative is Pilkington’s as much as theirs. It is her story and her voice too, especially in the context of her own later experience with the settlement. In addition, it is a story of her people and her community as the narrative implies the voices of all Indigenous people going through the Moore River Native Settlement, joining in a powerful choir representing the Stolen Generation(s) in Western Australia. In permitting other voices to be heard,

Pilkington provides space for recreating the oral accounts. This technique permeates especially the first half of the book where fictionalized dialogues of Pilkington’s ancestors are written into the historical account: therefore we hear the voices of Kundilla and his band from the period of the first contacts between the Nyungar and the British navy, the voices of

Yellagonga and his group from the beginning of the English settlement in the Swan River colony in the 1830s, the voices of the Mardudjara people coming from the deserts to live closer to the government depots and farms in the 1900s, and finally the voices of

Pilkington’s family ancestors from the Jigalong area. Interestingly, apart from Aboriginal multiple voices, Pilkington also allows the voices of the officials, policemen, Protectors, etc. that take part in the girls’ persecution to enter her narrative and become an integral part of it. Apart from multiple voices, Pilkington’s text is also informed by two cultural backgrounds: Australian mainstream culture and history and Indigenous heritage interact in a dialogic style. This is most noticeable in her technique of combining the archival material and counter-archival knowledge, including notes, quotations, explanations, etc. These strategies, i.e. inscribing multiple voices originating in the past, and synthesizing two cultural backgrounds into a form of biculturalism, mirror, in my opinion, both Krupat’s and

Sands’ notions of the collective self and the dialogic nature of Indigenous life writings.

The narratives of Shirley Sterling and Anna Lee Walters also demonstrate some features of the collective selfhood, though these are first-person narratives where the

184 narrator’s “I” literally guides the reader. In My Name Is Seepeetza , the voice of Seepeetza is complemented by the voices of the other children in the residential school, as well as by the voices of her family, underlining a strong communal cosmology that shapes Seepeetza’s personality. Even though other characters in the narrative are perceived only through

Seepeetza’s individual perspective and occasional dialogues, the readers are nevertheless aware of a notion of collectivity arising from their common Indigenous background, a

“part-to-whole” relation in Krupat’s view. In addition, Seepeetza’s and other children’s voices correspond to Sterling’s own voice as a writer who has based her text on her own experience in the residential school, as well as to the voices of her friends and relatives whose experiences Sterling interweaved into “her” story. Even though on the surface My

Name Is Seepeetza may give the impression of a fairly individual, first-person narration, it nevertheless embodies a polyvocal character representing the residential schools victims as a group. This is suggested, among other things, in Sterling’s dedication of her book which is

“to all those who went to the residential schools.”

The text perhaps most responsive to Krupat’s concept of the dialogic and collective self is Walters’ Talking Indian . Walters does come from a tribal-traditional culture and her worldview is strongly informed by the tribal histories of the Otoes, Pawnees, and Navajos.

Like in Sterling’s narrative, it is the individual self, a seemingly unproblematic autobiographical “I,” that emerges on the surface of the text but at the same time there are the voices of Walters’ ancestry, both distant and immediate, which push their way into the narrative. As Krupat has pointed out, these are the voices “in the margins” of the text and

Walters’ “I” is the “textual result of specific dialogues” between the writer and her family, the writer and her tribal history and the writer and the mainstream US culture. When Krupat analyses what he considers a model example of a Native American dialogic novel/life writing, Storyteller (1981) by Leslie Marmon Silko, he characterizes Silko as an author who

185 “conceives of individual identity only in functional relation to the tribe” (Ethnocriticism

230). This claim, I suggest, expresses accurately the position of Anna Lee Walters as a writer and a tribal person as it is narrated in Talking Indian . That Walters inscribes her self into her text only in relation to her tribal background is demonstrated in the way she switches between the collective “we” whenever she presents tribal worldview and her individual “I” whenever she describes her own life in an autobiographical manner. In the first chapter of Talking Indian Walters elaborates on the role that oral tradition plays in tribal Native American societies and in the opening paragraphs she quite ostensibly proceeds from the autobiographical “I” to the collective “we:”

My first memories are not so much of things as they are of words that gave

shape and substance to my being and form to the worlds around me. Born

into two tribal cultures which have existed for millennia without written

languages, the spoken word held me in the mystical and intimate way it has

touched others who come from similar societies whose literature is oral. …

[W]e are also shown that it is through the power of speech, and the larger

unified voice of oral tradition, that we exist as we do. (11, emphasis original)

This quote also shows how Walters puts forward the idea that oral, i.e. non-literate cultures are somehow bound to express themselves in a collective voice, the “unified voice of oral tradition.” In addition, she practically equals orality with tribal cultures and herself, as if her own identity was subsumed, or dissolved in the larger, collective entity of the tribe. With a fair amount of self-reflexivity, Walters further comments on her growing up in a multi- voiced, multi-tribal and multi-cultural environment, crossing the boundaries of individual

Indigenous groups, Indigenous and mainstream cultures, as well as individual voices, allowing her to become part of the collective voice:

186 There were many individual voices, male and female, old and young,

scattered about me, and these voices expressed themselves in two languages,

Otoe and English. … But more often than not, as if by some magnetic pull of

oral tradition, the individual tribal voices unconsciously blended together,

like braided strands of thread, into one voice, story, song, or prayer. (12,

emphasis original)

As a result, Walters comes up with a concept that she calls the “tribal voice,” which is responsible for the successful development of her identity as an Indigenous person and which also becomes a source of power, knowledge and healing: “The echo of that tribal voice, in Otoe and English, never disappears or fades from my ear, not even in the longest silences of the people, or in my absences from them” (12).

Walters’ multi-generic narrative creates an ideal space for allowing multiple voices and dialogic expression. The tribal histories of her ancestors, as well as those of her husband, take up most of the narrative space in Talking Indian , often taking a biographical turn. There are, for example, extensive life stories of both her maternal and paternal grandparents who played an important role in her life, but their portraits are narrated in a fragmented way, mainly through incorporating oral tradition and storytelling techniques, as if telling stories about them and calling for response, which again implies a notion of a dialogic character. Some of the examples include describing her paternal grandfather, where at one point Walters uses her own piece of prose-poetry in which she directly addresses the old man and produces a sense of having a conversation with him (23-24). Then, she directly incorporates his voice through a direct italicized speech as he is telling a (hi)story of the relocation of the Otoes from Nebraska to Indian Territory in 1881 (25-26).

Walters clearly considers her self an inseparable part of the collective identity of her tribes. This is supported by her metaphorical depiction of the way her subjectivity is

187 anchored in her Indigenous tribal background. This is not to say that she presents herself as being a part of an anonymous mass. On the contrary, the following passage suggests a sense of relational hierarchy, but this hierarchy is mobile and fluid. She describes the relationships as if in a photo or a short film:

In this picture, I always saw the entire tribe moving in the background as in a

motion picture, with other relatives and ancestors in the foreground – poised

just so in contrast to the background activity. At the centre stood my

grandparents. Sometimes my image was in the picture, standing in the

shadow of my grandparents, or sometimes at its border, like the shadow of a

photographer stretched out across the ground. (44)

Importantly, in this assessment of her selfhood, Walters does not position herself in the centre of the imaginary picture but somewhere else, in a space that is unfocused, “at its border,” in the “shadow.” I suggest that this is, in terms of writing a subjective text where the “I” is inscribed, oppositional to the tradition of the Western autobiographical writing where, the theory of autobiography maintains, the “I” stands at the centre of the narrative.

Such metaphorical location of Walters’ self is reflected in her narrative which copies the relationships in the picture: by no means is Walters’ life story in the centre of the text, though the text is fragmentally focused on her autobiography, especially her growing up.

These parts are, however, sometimes completely overshadowed, and seemingly concealed, under the life stories of Walters’ relatives and ancestors. However, this does not want to give an impression that Walters’ “I” is subdued in her text; rather the borders between her self and the collective identity of her people are blurred. Consequently, Walters asks the fundamental question: “Where did tribal genealogy end and I begin?” (44).

The short analysis of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepeetza and

Talking Indian from the point of view of the construction of the textual self has disclosed

188 the ways in which Indigenous women writers engage in revealing the collective and dialogic nature of their shared experiences. This strategy links Indigenous women writers like Pilkington, Sterling and Walters to other minority authors who “manoeuvre between autobiographical and political-cultural texts,” between their individual “I” and various forms of “we” (Goldman 290). Indeed, presenting culture and writing the self simultaneously seems to be another space reserved for creative boundary-crossing narrative strategies of Indigenous women writers. Besides, reading Indigenous women’s life narratives in the light of the traumatic experience of the separation from Indigenous families, of personal struggles and resistances within the assimilationist system of mission/ residential/ boarding schools can be particularly illuminating for our understanding of the ways in which the global phenomenon of racial assimilation crosses the nation-state borders.

189 Conclusion

The Future Directions in Indigenous Women’s Life Writing

And when I eventually came to write it up, I was still not sure why I was doing so. Was it for

my children? For me? For all of us? I had thought I was an end, and had wanted a

beginning, but that is to think of it in the wrong way. It is a continuation. It is survival.

Kim Scott, Benang (177-78)

*****

In the concluding part of this dissertation on Indigenous women’s life writing in

Australia and North America, I first summarize briefly the main points made in the previous chapters and then I offer some observations on the future directions that Indigenous women’s life writing may take. The very last section includes a close reading of Auntie Rita

– a life writing narrative by Jackie Huggins in collaboration with Rita Huggins. I use this text as a particular example that helps me point out new strategies and formal innovations that, in one way or another, strengthen, further develop and/or transgress some of the textual characteristics examined in the preceding chapters. Thus Auntie Rita serves as a bridge between the conclusions I draw from the comparative analysis of the six Indigenous women’s life writing narratives at the centre of this dissertation and my suggestions as far as the future potential of the genre of Indigenous women’s life writing is concerned.

It is exciting to see that most of the Indigenous women writers analysed in this dissertation have kept writing and developing their themes and specific writing styles. In

1998 Paula Gunn Allen published quite an experimental project, Off the Reservation , in which she draws even more on her multiple cultural backgrounds and re-introduces the

190 concept of “borderlands” 70 in the geographical as well as psychological sense. The year of

2002 saw the publishing of a new novel by Lee Maracle, Daughters Are Forever , which explores the mother-daughter relationship in more detail and again foregrounds the complex issues surrounding the diverse positions of urban, educated, middle-class Indigenous women today. In the same year, Doris Pilkington’s autobiography Under the Wintamarra

Tree appeared, which, written in the third-person, is in a way a continuation of Follow the

Rabbit-Proof Fence . After having written collections of short stories and non-fiction, Anna

Lee Walters has decided to dedicate her last two books to children. All these texts seem to keep their “transgressive” character, offering yet a fuller picture of contemporary

Indigenous women’s writing. The proliferation of these works confirms the survival and continuance of traditional forms of Indigenous orality and storytelling while at the same time creatively reworking these forms.

*****

The life writing narratives explored in the first chapter, Jackie Huggins’ Sister Girl ,

Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman and Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop , exemplify a direction in Indigenous women’s writing which may be characterized as “writing theory through life story,” or in Maracle’s term, oratory . These personalized accounts reflect on the specific roles of contemporary urban educated intellectual writers who constantly negotiate their positions as public speakers, activists, and educators in the mainstream culture and at the same time come to terms with their difference as Indigenous persons and as women. The intersection of gender and race informs all three texts, both on the theoretical and personal levels. Huggins, Maracle and Allen engage in responding to

70 I acknowledge a reference to the concept of the “borderlands” developed by Gloria Anzaldúa in La

Frontera/Borderland: The New Mestiza (1987) to which Paula Gunn Allen, in her book Off the Reservation , also alludes.

191 mainstream feminism as marginalized feminist writers positioned both within and outside the mainstream feminist movement. Above all, the texts embody the ambivalent relationship of some Indigenous feminist writers to mainstream feminism: on the one hand

Huggins, Maracle and Allen focus on a feminist analysis of the representations of female

Indigeneity, seeing it as a project crucial to decolonization. They also struggle to alter the mainstream feminist agenda so that all feminists could cooperate and work more effectively towards resolving minority women’s oppression. On the other hand, Huggins, Maracle and

Allen criticize mainstream feminism quite harshly for its tendency to homogenize women’s experience and erase Indigenous women’s cultural and historical difference, as well as for white women’s complicity in the colonization and racial oppression. In addition, the three

Indigenous women writers accuse mainstream feminists of speaking on behalf of

Indigenous women instead of participating in a meaningful dialogue. This is a domain where Indigenous feminist thought finds alliances with the writings of other “women of colour” – African American, Chicana, Indian feminist theorists among them. This cooperation leads to establishing an alternative feminist discourse with the aim of deconstructing the universalist category of Woman which has, until recently, been identified mainly with white middle-class women.

A comparative analysis of the three texts by Huggins, Maracle and Allen has revealed both parallels and differences. The parallels are mainly based on three areas: responding to mainstream feminism through voicing an alternative feminist discourse the main premise of which is the intersection of gender and race; presenting and representing complex positions of Indigenous women as women, mothers, and sisters through reconnecting with both real and spiritual foremothers; and engaging in multi-generic experimental writing which combines academic, theoretical writing style with telling stories and personal memories. The differences then are generally based on the authors’ diverse

192 localities and cultural and personal backgrounds. Jackie Huggins as an Indigenous feminist historian explores the sensitive issue of white Australian women’s complicity in the domestic exploitation of Aboriginal women in the first half of the twentieth century and criticizes mainstream Australian feminism for not acknowledging and dealing with this past. Her critique is severe but at the same time she is the one of the three Indigenous authors who makes the biggest effort to actually try to cooperate with women of various backgrounds, including mainstream feminists. Huggins’ ability to form alliances is extraordinary: for example, she has been interviewed together with the African American feminist bell hooks who is her political role model, but she has also cooperated with Kay

Saunders, a white Australian historian, on writing a couple of articles and conference papers. Huggins does not primarily focus on sexism in Sister Girl ; her main agenda is mainly anti-racist. Such strategy may stem from the specific historical and political situation in Australia: the Stolen Generation(s)’ legacy is still a living memento of

Aboriginal people disconnected from their families thanks to the systematic policy of separation. Since her mother Rita was separated from her kin, Jackie Huggins also has a direct experience with this policy. In addition, Huggins’ insistence on working towards the elimination of racism first and foremost may have roots in her work for the Reconciliation

Committee and other political bodies which struggle for the recognition of basic human rights of the Aboriginal people, regardless of gender. Lee Maracle, in contrast to Huggins, makes a contribution to Indigenous feminism by drawing attention to sexism and violence against women as a major force in today’s oppression of Native women in North America, a situation which she identifies as the effect of the colonial project. In her political and feminist analysis, Maracle, as the only one among the three writers, openly criticizes her own people: Native men for being complicit in abusing Native women, Native political leaders and Native organizations for obliterating gender as an important category in the

193 struggle for decolonization. I Am Woman also differs from the other two texts in that it depicts a self-conscious journey from the early denial of the author’s womanhood to the awareness of its centrality in her existence as an Indigenous woman. Finally, Allen has made a significant impact on Indigenous feminism through her insistence on the gynocratic nature of most Indigenous cultures in pre-colonial North America and through her argument that explains the general disempowerment of Indigenous women by the forcible application of the European patriarchal system to Native populations during the colonization process. In this line of argumentation, Allen is perhaps the most controversial of the three authors thanks to her disputable generalizations but for example her concept of re-feminization through re-connection with tribal and spiritual female ancestors can still appeal to many

Indigenous feminist scholars.

Sister Girl , I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop excel in incorporating various genres, revealing a high level of hybridization. Theoretical analysis alternates with little episodes from everyday life and personal memories; these may be in turn broken up by poems, short stories, legends or myths. The style varies from academic writing to confessional subjective passages to occasional colloquial fragments. These violations of conventional strategies may intend to disrupt the generic unity of the written pieces which is typical in the Western literary canon and to legitimize the oral traditions and techniques of storytelling that survive as remainders of traditional Indigenous cultures. This leads me to characterize the texts by Huggins, Maracle and Allen as textual “borderlands,” to allude again to Gloria Anzaldúa’s terminology, where various, complementary and/or conflicting strategies, tactics and transgressions form creative tensions.

194 *****

In Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence , Shirley Sterling’s My Name Is

Seepeetza and Anna Lee Walters’ Talking Indian , like in many other Indigenous women’s life writings, telling history and telling peoples’ lives is intrinsically related. These two activities originate in the tradition of storytelling which has been a primary mode of

“passing knowledge, maintaining community, resisting government control, and sharing the burden of hardship” for Indigenous people (Schaffer and Smith 101). The confusion of the boundaries between historiography and life writing results in a genre which has become an important vehicle for both remembering the past and maintaining the storytelling tradition.

Since this type of life stories is frequently based on oral accounts, it struggles for recognition by the mainstream historiography typically recorded in written documents. Yet, as Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra observe, “their [Indigenous life narratives’] cumulative weight has carried a particular grand narrative into general circulation, as a theme that the dominant history for many years ignored but now acknowledges as valid” (102). Therefore these accounts, even if they focus on individual life stories, actually reveal a collective portrait of the Stolen Generation(s) in Australia and residential school victims in North

America. Most significantly, these stories are empowering because they tell of those

Indigenous people who in spite of having been separated from their families, of having gone through the institutional systems, and having been constantly forced to accept the dominant society’s values, managed to resist the pressure and instead of assimilating developed an even stronger connection to their Indigenous identities. In this light, the analyzed narratives actually show the cases in which the system of state intervention failed.

As a result, these life stories join together to pronounce a collective resistance to the forced separation and assimilation policies towards Indigenous people in Australia and North

America.

195 The analysis of Pilkington’s Stolen Generation(s), Sterling’s residential school and

Walters’ boarding school narratives helps mainstream readers gain an insight into how contemporary Indigenous women’s life writing constructs counter-histories that disrupt the homogeneity of Western historiography concerning the colonization of the “new” territories and how it foregrounds previously subjugated knowledges and alternative (hi)stories. The narrativization of Indigenous women’s personal, yet collective memories, together with the historical imperative, may become an alternative site for articulating the (hi)stories of subaltern women who are still often excluded from the marginalized groups themselves.

Pilkington’s strategies of voicing alternative (hi)stories consist mainly of juxtaposing the nationally celebrated against the silenced Aboriginal versions of historical events leading to the 1930s state policy of removing the “half-caste” children from their families. The discrepancy between the language of the state apparatus and the social reality of the children is illustrated in Pilkington’s choice of a particular vocabulary register which unmasks the brutality of the state intervention into Indigenous lives. Sterling’s residential school narrative resists the policy of assimilation by showing the functional, non- stereotypical Native family, its everyday activities, little details that like a mosaic make up a picture of a Native community of the 1950s. Her series of contrasts between the images of home and residential school fully manifests the uselessness and absurdity of the system in which the children were supposed to gradually forget about their Native background and assimilate into the dominant society but instead some of them developed an even stronger connection to their Indigenous heritage represented by the family, Native languages and community-oriented life-style. Lastly, Walters’ account of her life story within the larger framework of the tribal histories of her ancestors that foregrounds the collective, multiple voices resists the Western assumptions about the autobiographical self. Walters is instrumental in blurring the sharp edges of her own self and the tribal universe, of the past

196 and the present, of history and fiction. Thus her narrative displaces the chronological, linear and individual-oriented life narrative model with a discontinuous and polyvocal chorus.

Apart from recording instances of both open and latent resistance to the assimilationist policies and in spite of being to a certain extent examples of resistance writing themselves, all three narratives by Pilkington, Sterling and Walters show a great deal of synthesis of the two systems of knowledge, Indigenous and Western, articulating a kind of hybrid knowledge. For example, Molly in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence can successfully find her way home not only thanks to her traditional Aboriginal knowledge of the bush, but also with the help of an invention of Western technology – the rabbit-proof fence, which paradoxically becomes a symbol of homecoming. Both Pilkington and Walters also skilfully synthesize the two different means of recording history by referring to official archival materials on the one hand and by textualizing oral accounts of their relatives on the other. Similarly, Sterling’s narrator as well as her family acknowledge the importance of education for her future survival in the mainstream society. In addition, Sterling’s choice of the literary form and her play on what is considered a conventional Western genre of autobiography, particularly the diary format, suggest her intention to weave together both traditions of telling a life story.

*****

inscribing double voice: auntie rita

A collaborative project by Rita and Jackie Huggins, mother and daughter, Auntie

Rita (1994) defies the long-held assumptions about the nature of collaborations in

Indigenous life writing. Many scholarly studies have been dedicated to collaborative oral history projects between Indigenous storytellers/informants and non-Indigenous writers/editors, leading to the establishment of the so called “as-told-to autobiography.”

While it is true that in the past Indigenous oral accounts were appropriated first by white

197 authorities, later by anthropologists, and recently by mainstream editors, increasingly the

Aboriginal agency has taken over (Jacklin 27; van Toorn 3). Some of the Indigenous life writing narratives that appeared in the last decade are characterized by a collaboration between members of an (extended) family, in which typically a younger member records, transcribes and writes down the orally transmitted life stories of her/his community elders and relatives or even entire family/clan histories. Apart from Auntie Rita , which to my knowledge is the first of its kind as far as its collaborative form is concerned, there are other similar collaborative projects: Beth Brant’s I’ll Sing ‘Till the Day I Die (1995) records oral accounts of the elders from Brant’s own community in the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on the Bay of Quinte in Ontario and illustrates a “braiding of resistance and accommodation” stemming from the nature of collaboration in this project (Jacklin 35).

Kim Scott’s Kayang & Me (2005), born out of the collaboration between the writer Kim

Scott and his elder, aunt Hazel Brown, offers a kind of response to Auntie Rita written ten years earlier. I want to suggest that these life narratives indicate the emergence of a new form in Indigenous life writing. More than anything else, this new form involves the dialogic approach which has to negotiate two sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting perspectives. 71

Auntie Rita , I believe, interweaves very well almost all the issues that are discussed in the previous parts of this dissertation while at the same time signalling the growing importance of the dialogic nature of more recent Indigenous life writing narratives. From the feminist point of view, Auntie Rita offers an intimate insight into a mother-daughter relationship between two Aboriginal women as well as into the shifting gender roles among

71 The notion of the dialogic is not, of course, new. Both Arnold Krupat, who uses the concept for his idea of the “collective self” and the dialogic nature in some Native American autobiographies, and Rocío G. Davis, who develops the concept of “dialogic selves” in her analysis of Auntie Rita , acknowledge their inspiration in

Mikhail Bakhtin’s work.

198 Aboriginal women in the 1950s. Moreover, the text helps promote the heterogeneity in

(re)presenting female Indigeneity. This theme relates Auntie Rita to the life stories presented in Sister Girl , I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop . As far as the narrative strategies are concerned, Auntie Rita employs multiple voices, dialogic structure and a sense of the collective existence of Indigenous people in Australia, which links it with the texts of

Rabbit-Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepeetza and Talking Indian . Generically, Jackie and

Rita Huggins’ account is a hybridized text combining an oral history project with the writing of both a biography and an autobiography. In addition, it challenges the boundaries between the public/political and the personal/everyday, between writing history and writing one’s personal memories. Using the strategies, Auntie Rita , as will be shown in the close reading, builds on the formal and thematic characteristics of the narratives I have analysed before, bringing a new impulse into the genre of Indigenous women’s life writing.

There are three main aspects of Auntie Rita that I would like to emphasize in order to highlight the continuities between this text and the life narratives analysed in the first and second chapters. These aspects are also the starting point for my suggestions of the potential developments in the genre of Indigenous women’s life writing further on. The first aspect of

Jackie and Rita Huggins’ narrative that I consider most innovative and enriching relates to

Auntie Rita ’s collaborative nature: it is the dialogic nature which consists in presenting two seemingly separate, but deeply interconnected voices, each of which tells the same story but from a different, personal perspective. This interconnection results in creating what I call

“double voice” which then threads its way through the entire text. The first part of the following analysis therefore focuses on how this dialogic structure informs the dynamics of the text and how the daughter-auto/biographer creatively weaves her own life story into that of her mother’s. It also explores the extent to which the daughter-writer controls, or supports, the voice of her mother and vice versa.

199 The second aspect that Auntie Rita shares with some of the analysed narratives is its turn to self-reflective, introspective mode of narration, which is a prominent feature not only in Auntie Rita but also in Maracle’s I Am Woman and Walters’ Talking Indian . This characteristic has a great potential for further exploration of Indigenous women’s subjectivities: indeed, showing self-consciousness about the genre that the earlier life stories did not possess may also point in a new direction in Indigenous women’s life writing. The life stories of the previous decades generally relied more on the historical turn, creating an imperative for the writers to speak out and write about the hidden histories of racial oppression and cultural genocide as realistically as possible. In contrast, life writing narratives like Auntie Rita , while addressing these issues too and still having a strong political agenda, enter into a new phase where self-reflective and self-conscious examination of textuality and the aesthetics of the genre are foregrounded. 72

The last aspect the analysis of Auntie Rita briefly explores is the depiction of the categories of womanhood and motherhood, and, since the Huggins’s relationship naturally permeates all levels of their collaborative project, the mother-daughter relationship. Auntie

Rita , similarly, for example, to I Am Woman and The Sacred Hoop , depicts a strong woman personality and a mother-figure anchored in her extended family. But it also depicts womanhood and motherhood as shifting and hybridized sites. The presentation of the mother-daughter relationship, then, consists mainly in Jackie’s strategy of “writing back” to her mother in a similar fashion to, as was suggested in the first chapter, Maracle’s and

Allen’s texts.

72 I would like to acknowledge Dr. Anne Brewster who brought to my attention the contrast between the historical imperative of earlier Aboriginal women’s life writings and the more self-conscious and introspective contemporary texts of which Auntie Rita is an example.

200 Auntie Rita is a complex collaborative project in which two Aboriginal women, a mother and a daughter, wrote the life story of Rita Huggins. Rita was born in the early

1920s, spent her early childhood in the region of the Bidjara-Pitjara people, now called

Carnavorn Gorge, Queensland, then she was forcibly removed from her land to the

Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve. Rita’s life story then continues with her work as a domestic, her brief marriage, motherhood, widowhood and single-parenthood, and also her role as a leader in Aboriginal political movement of the 1960s. Rita Huggins told her life story to her daughter, Jackie Huggins, who taped and transcribed it. Jackie’s role was not only that of a scribe, but also of an active and creative writer who expresses her comments and opinions throughout the narrative. In addition, the written story was published in collaboration with the white editor Alison Ravenscroft. Although Ravenscroft’s role in the process is undeniable, it is nevertheless minor and does not intervene in the double voice of the mother-daughter collaboration in any significant way.

It is particularly illuminating to compare the differing subjectivities that Jackie and

Rita Huggins inscribe in the narrative as they reveal a creative tension stemming from the close collaboration. In her article on the dialogic form in Auntie Rita , Rocío G. Davis argues that the text discloses “dialogic selves,” which she defines as “dual voices with separate perspectives, within the context of Bakhtinian notions of double-voiced, continuing deconstruction of narrative structure and tradition executed on the level of narration”

(Davis). Indeed, Rita’s narrative authority is complemented by an equally authoritative

Jackie’s voice which sometimes contributes to and sometimes challenges Rita’s perspectives and opinions. This relationship can be described in terms of intersubjectivity, defined as “a site of conflicting wills and intentions” (Jackson qtd. in Davis), which is a notion that very well depicts the dynamics of the relationship between the two autonomous subjects, placing the relatinship in the centre of the narrative structure. It can be argued that

201 the dialogic structure embedded in Auntie Rita somehow builds upon the various manifestations of dialogic nature in the narratives in the main body of the dissertation. In the sense of “speaking across to someone,” dialogic features are certainly traceable in the feminist texts by Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle and Paula Gunn Allen which call for and engage in a dialogue with mainstream feminism, and incorporate voices of other Indigenous women. Davis’ notion of the dialogic selves can be also applied to the narratives discussed in the second chapter where I argue that the construction of the self in Follow the Rabbit-

Proof Fence , My Name Is Seepeetza and Talking Indian is collective and dialogic in

Krupat’s sense of speaking across distinctive cultures. As I have already suggested, Auntie

Rita reveals in this respect a further development of narrative strategies used elsewhere. Let us now explore in more detail the ways in which the two Indigenous women’s voices exercise their authorial power and control over the narrative in Auntie Rita .

Rita Huggins emphasizes her agency and narrative authority in the foreword: “This book tells the story of my life. These are my own recollections. I speak only for myself and not how others would expect me to speak” (1). Knowing the extent to which Indigenous people have been misrepresented in all kinds of Western cultural media, Rita Huggins makes a claim to her own voice as a subject, not as an object of another’s gaze, as had so often been the case. She asserts control over her memories and the textual performance.

Jackie Huggins, the daughter-writer, also in the foreword, makes the following comment on her role during the writing of the book, problematizing the whole process:

After getting many of Rita’s memories on tape, I began, through naivity, to

translate my mother’s voice, trying to do it justice while knowing that this

book would have a predominantly white audience. This was my first cardinal

sin. … Although Rita speaks a standard English, her voice often got lost

202 amid my own as I attempted to ‘protect’ her from non-Aboriginal critics. (3,

original emphasis)

This quote suggests Jackie Huggins’ complex position in the collaborative process. She first assumed the role of the “translator” of an oral account that she has taped and then transcribed, implying a control over the narrative similar to that of non-Indigenous editors who by various means “adjusted” the accounts for mainstream audience. Jackie, however, admits that in the end she resisted the impulse to “translate,” i.e. adjust her mother’s voice in order to preserve her Aboriginal way of speaking. What complicates Jackie’s approach is that in contrast to her mother, Jackie makes it clear that she counts on the “predominantly white audience” ( Auntie Rita 3). Rita, in contrast, contends that the story of her life is told primarily for Aboriginal people, i.e. for her family, children and grandchildren, with the aim to pass on Rita’s memories to a younger generation. This discrepancy between Rita’s and

Jackie’s expectations of the readership makes Jackie “protect” Rita from non-Aboriginal critics when transcribing her mother’s voice speaking the “Aboriginal way” (3). Jackie

Huggins is therefore placed in a rather difficult situation where she has to face the dilemma of keeping her mother’s voice intact, transcribing it in an appropriate way and yet, at the same time, wanting to inscribe her own self in the final text. In the end, Jackie does exercise certain power over the voice of her “subject,” as she “organizes, prompts, supports, contradicts, corrects, explains, and generally constructs that narrative” (Davis). In other words, while Rita is a central subject of the narrative, Jackie becomes its dominant framing voice.

The complexity of the narrative voices in Auntie Rita is further complicated by a split in Jackie’s own voice, which is shown in the content analysis of Jackie’s italicized comments. On the one hand, Jackie Huggins’ remarks incorporate the voice of a university- educated woman, historian and a political activist in Aboriginal causes, and this voice tends,

203 in a rather detached way, to supply explanatory notes to Rita’s recollections of her life, placing them in the wider socio-historical context. For example, to Rita’s account of her community’s removal to the reserve, Jackie provides historical background to the system of surveillance of Aboriginal people in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, including archival documentation of the period legislation, such as the Aborigines

Protection Acts. In such passages, Jackie’s voice takes on the role of an Aboriginal historian taking a clear political stand against contemporary racism in Australia and actively participating in creating counter-knowledge of Australian history. Not surprisingly, this strategy of incorporating Aboriginal history into one’s life story coincides with the same techniques employed in the texts analysed in the second chapter, in particular Pilkington’s use of the archival material within the framework of her mother’s and aunts’ account and

Walters’ presentation of tribal histories.

On the other hand, Jackie’s “other” voice, in the passages where she directly addresses her mother, becomes much less formal, deprived of its academic, explanatory tone. In contrast to Jackie’s “professional” voice, this voice is much more personal, soothing and supportive, occasionally stepping out of standard English to incorporate

Aboriginal English phrases. It is these passages that expose most the self-reflective and introspective nature which complements the more explanatory and didactic insertions. The intimacy between the two women shows, for example, when Rita recollects painful memories, such as when she had to give up her second child as a young single mother working as a domestic. Here Jackie responds in an intimate, almost confessional tone, entering a quiet dialogue with her mother, revealing her own personal narrative, and weaving the two life stories together by emphasizing their mutual Aboriginality and the mother-daughter bond. Jackie says:

204 I can just imagine what it must have been like in your time to be a single

mother, not once but twice. … You were hardly more than a child yourself

when you ran away from your family to a strange town. … For me, being a

single mother has meant independence, freedom, choice, acclaim, unreserved

happiness, status and power over my own life, among other things. All of

which you were never afforded. … All I want to say to you is that it’s okay.

All your children and grandchildren love you, understand you and forgive

you because being a single, Black and penniless pregnant woman in your

time was your greatest test and punishment . (48, original emphasis)

By introducing the second “I” of Jackie’s introspective passages alongside the already established “I” of Rita’s autobiographical account, the text definitely resits the conventional notion of the auto/biographical “self” as something central, unified and individual.

Although a major portion of the book is dedicated to Rita’s first-person account, Jackie’s

“I” is by no means secondary. It is this strategy of inscribing two separate voices, each speaking for its own “self,” yet presenting them as one double voice – a confluence of the two perspectives – that I find revolutionary in Auntie Rita . In this respect, the Huggins’ narrative not only parallels but even transgresses the notion of the dialogic and collective self as it is developed in the six Indigenous women’s life writings examined earlier.

Jackie Huggins’ agency clearly shows yet on another level – in the moments when

Rita, as the subject and narrator of the story, chooses not to tell certain details of her life story that still carry painful significance and shame for her. Obviously, the silences and gaps can be interpreted, following the psychoanalytical stream, as a way of dealing with repressed memories. The reading of Indigenous life stories in the light of trauma studies posits them, as was suggested in the second chapter, mainly as testimonies that bear witness to the colonization trauma. But a different contextualization of Indigenous life writing

205 within the history of collaboration between Indigenous tellers/informants and white collectors/recorders/editors demonstrates that self-censure and deliberate keeping away of information from the outsiders, especially the information concerning sacred and religious knowledge, the geographical locations of certain sites or groups of people, or the identification of white fathers, for example, has been a powerful means of resistance

(Muecke 128; Jacklin 35). Having suffered from a long-term exposure to white authorities and anthropologists’ pressure to speak, Aboriginal people have developed what Stephen

Muecke calls a “discursive strategy [in] the form of non-disclosure ” (128, original emphasis). The significant difference between the collaboration with non-Indigenous editors and the collaboration with Indigenous community and family members in the more recent Indigenous life writing is that the Indigenous writers and editors can generally recognize and perhaps honour in a more sensitive way the silences of their elders. This is not to say that none of the white collectors/editors respected the self-censure of their

Indigenous informants, nor does this imply that all Indigenous writers recording the life stories of their relatives/elders do respect the silences. 73

In Auntie Rita the issue of dialogues and silences is a complex one: Jackie Huggins sometimes chooses not to respect her mother’s silences, desiring to provide the correct historical context for Rita’s painful memories. At other times, however, she prefers to be complicit with her mother’s self-censure, such as when it comes to providing more information on the fathers of Rita’s two eldest daughters. Those of Rita’s silences that readers learn about from Jackie’s insertions, concern, above all, the regular beatings and

73 One of the examples of such ambiguity in terms of respecting one’s silences and self-censure is provided in

Sally Morgan’s My Place where Morgan is in the process of writing her family’s life stories and describes the difficulties in persuading her grandmother, Daisy, to tell her life story to be taped and publicized. In the end

Sally does get Daisy’s story on a tape, however she has to come to terms with the fact that certain things from

Daisy’s life, such as the identities of her father and grandfather, will never be shared with her.

206 lockups as a form of punishment for “misbehaviour,” resulting in an internalized self-hatred and self-blame. In spite of the obviously close relationship between the two women, it is also possible to interpret Rita’s silences as a resistant strategy aimed not only at readers, but also at Jackie herself, simply showing that certain aspects of Rita’s memorized life cannot be accessed, even if the listener/writer is a close person. On the other hand, as resistant and selective as Rita may be about sharing some of these particular details with the reader, her authority is sometimes explicitly subdued by Jackie’s intervention. Rita herself comments on this: “There are some parts of my life that I probably didn’t want to have in the book because to me they are shame jobs. But they are part of the story and Jackie tells me, in her loving way, that I don’t need to feel ashamed” (2). All in all, it is clearly indicated that

Jackie’s insistence on incorporating some details from Rita’s life that Rita herself would exclude is not driven by a desire to violate or appropriate Rita’s voice but rather by a desire to confront the white audience with the shameful history of the treatment of Aboriginal people in the missions. Thus by offering her own perspective and by her attempt to open up some of the silences, Jackie is consciously alluding to, and resisting at the same time, the silence that generations of Aboriginal people have been forcibly confined to.

The third important sphere where Auntie Rita follows up the Indigenous women’s life narratives analysed particularly in the first chapter is the representation of Indigenous motherhood, womanhood, and of the mother-daughter relationship. The site of motherhood and womanhood in Auntie Rita is ambivalent and manifold. The motherhood acquires a new meaning, as more traditional Aboriginal notions of motherhood are combined with modern urban experiences. The result is a hybridized image of a traditionally strong mother-figure in the centre of the family clan on the one hand, and the portrait of an urban single mother foregrounding her role in the public sphere, especially in political activism, on the other.

Both these images thus blur the boundaries between the categories of mother/ private and

207 non-mother/ public by combining the two in both Rita’s and Jackie’s lives. In a way, Rita complicates the conventional Western model of a woman as a mother and a housewife: altogether she mothers five children, the first two daughters, Mutoo and Gloria, are illegitimate and Rita does not mention their father(s). She actually says very little of all her pregnancies, both outside and in the marriage to Jack Huggins. Rita says that because she was young, working as a domestic under the Aborigines Protection Act which gave her no choices as to arranging her own life, she left her first daughter to be raised by her parents who took her in as their own daughter, in accordance with Aboriginal values of extended families and care for children ( Auntie Rita 42). After five years, having obtained

“exemption papers” from the Director of Native Affairs that allowed Rita to leave her work and travel wherever she wanted, she was pregnant again with Gloria, running away because

“in those days it was a scandal to be an unmarried mother, especially now that I was considered a respectable and ‘free’ Aboriginal woman” (44-45). The stress on the disgrace the society attached to single mothers and Rita’s desire to become a “respectable woman” in the white middle-class terms resonates with the prevailing dominant culture’s values and assimilationist policies applied to “half-caste” Aboriginal women. After marrying Jack

Huggins, Rita becomes this “ideal” of a mother and housewife, only to be left a single mother again after her husband’s sudden death. Juxtaposed against the image of a single mother trying to fight the poverty in an alienated city, there is the notion of a larger

Aboriginal community and the extended family Rita is part of: significantly, after the tragic death of her daughter Gloria, Rita takes in her four young grandchildren and with her own children still living with her, she becomes a mother again in her early 50s. It is also mentioned several times in the narrative that Rita takes in some of her women relatives and friends although she herself does not have a proper place to stay. This image of Rita, embodied in the word auntie used in the title, depicts her as a matriarch taking care of

208 people around her and strengthens the notion of the traditional Aboriginal kinship system that Rita, in spite of her mostly urban life experience, represents.

The depiction of the mother-daughter relationship is as complex as the construction of the double voice running through the pages of Auntie Rita . As was suggested earlier, the life story of Rita Huggins, although being the primary concern of this collaborative auto/biography, is sometimes only subtly, sometimes more explicitly, complemented by her daughter’s personal account. Through Jackie’s comments, memories and allusions, readers learn a bit about her life, too. In the second half of the book, when Rita’s children, including

Jackie, enter the narrative, it is actually the memories of her own childhood that Jackie uses to create a fuller picture of her mother’s life. For example, she comments on her early experience of Rita’s involvement in political activism and offers a different perspective on what it was like to be dragged as a small child by her mother to political meetings in the evenings, or being neglected with her siblings due to Rita’s life style amidst the urban whirl of meetings, dances and parties, or facing extreme poverty and racism (69-71). In spite of this divergence, Jackie mostly recounts her memories of a happy childhood, being surrounded by her sisters and a brother in a family with a strong mother-figure, and exposed to the values of extended family ties, sharing and belonging to a large urban Aboriginal community in (70-77). What is enriching about the depiction of the mother- daughter relationship in Auntie Rita are the intimate and introspective passages which illuminate the strengths as well as weaknesses, the dialogues as well as silences between the two women. In this context, the text constitutes the best example of the strategy that in the first chapter I called “writing back to (fore)mothers:” indeed, Jackie, as a daughter-

(auto)biographer, reconstructs her mother’s life and hence succeeds in providing a positive role-model for future representations Indigenous womanhood and motherhood.

209 *****

The close reading of Auntie Rita has shown the possibilities which other Indigenous women’s life writing narratives may turn to if the narrative strategies discussed in this dissertation are further developed. Such texts would even more explicitly “write back” to the generic and thematic conventions of both traditional Western auto/biographies modelled on the unified, individual self, and the structuralist models of cultural (auto)ethnographies and as-told-to auto/biographies. By interweaving multiple voices into one life narrative and producing a dialogical hybrid narrative, these texts would also resist the monologic representation of conventional auto/biographies. In the words of Michele Grossman, these future texts would “self-consciously ground [themselves] in ‘talk’ and dialogue while demonstrating an assertive commitment to and control over the written word at the levels of both text-as-social-relations and text-as-cultural-artefact” (“Xen(ography)” 286). As was pointed out in the previous chapters and as Auntie Rita has demonstrated, the generic richness and structural and thematic hybridity invite Indigenous women’s life writing in

Australia and North America to adopt a new impulse that would allow this genre to step out of the category of marginalized curiosities and display its full potential within the larger framework of literary studies.

*****

From the point of view of a literary critic trained in mainstream Anglo-American literature and theory, the strength of the texts analysed in this dissertation consists in their potential to problematize conventional literary categories: for example, the narratives re- define the construction of the self in auto/biographies; they displace traditional genres and consciously hybridize them by blurring the boundaries between auto/biography, history writing, personal narrative, poetry and fiction; and they employ innovative narrative strategies through incorporating traditional techniques of storytelling into Western narrative

210 forms. The formal and thematic innovations in these narratives contradict earlier critical analyses that have seen the personal accounts of Indigenous storytellers and writers primarily as realistic documentaries and testimonies to the colonization trauma. Barbara

Godard makes a very pertinent comment when she says that Indigenous women’s life narratives “have adopted entirely different formal strategies, discontinuous tales rather than coherently plotted quests, symbolic events rather than psychologized reactions. Moreover, they write miscellanies – hybrid genres – mixtures of sermons, narratives, poetry, ethnographical treatises” (“The Politics of Representation” 190). Indeed, the word

“miscellanies,” in the most positive sense, summarizes very well the general character of

Indigenous women’s life writing in Australia and North America published in the 1990s. A detailed comparative analysis and close readings of these narratives reveal their complex structure and multi-layered character, demanding literary recognition not only for their contributions to political and resistance writing but also for their formal literary qualities.

They do inscribe difference after all, difference that does not threaten but rather enriches and creatively responds to the Western literary canon.

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