Elizabeth Yeoman

Indigenous Writing in Indigenous Languages: Reconfiguring Canadian Literary Studies and Beyond (Response to Christl Verduyn and Smaro Kamboureli)

Unlike all the rest of the contributors to this book, I am not a Canadian Literary Studies specialist, though perhaps I could say that the work I am currently doing, a collaborative project with Elizabeth Penashue, an Innu author who writes in Innu-aimun, falls into that category. Yet, at the same time, it is work that calls into question the whole idea of Canadian Studies or area studies and that asks questions similar to those asked by Smaro Kamboureli, but from a different place. I’ll say more about that work later but first I want to mention my own experiences in the

Understanding Canada program and the earlier DFAIT Canadian Studies program in Spain and

China and the constraints and possibilities of different research funding programs. Following that, I will respond to some of the key points made by Christl Verduyn and Smaro Kamboureli, in particular the financial impact of the funding cuts and the future of area studies in general and

Canadian Studies in particular. I was deeply disappointed when the Understanding Canada program was cancelled as my experiences with it and the preceding Canadian Studies program had all been overwhelmingly positive. However, I was not the main applicant on any of the grants I was involved in and therefore had not put a lot of thought into the orientation of the program. Until I read Christl and Smaro’s papers, I was not completely aware of the emphasis on promoting business and international trade, or of the change in policies in 2008.

Prior to the changes to the program in 2008, my Chinese colleague, Liming Yu, and I visited each other’s universities, co-wrote a book (Yu, Liming and Elizabeth Yeoman. 双语 教育

论 ——加拿大浸入式教育对 我国高校双语 教育的启 示 (Theories of Bilingual Education: The

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Implications of Canadian Immersion Education for Bilingual Instruction in Chinese

Universities). Beijing, China: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2009) and organized an international conference, the proceedings of which were also published. All of this work was funded by DFAIT’s Canadian Studies programs. Unlike the project I was involved in later with literary scholars Daniel Coleman, Ana Fraile and Maria Hernaez at the University of

Salamanca in Spain, these activities had more of a linguistic focus than a literary one. We didn’t have a prescribed theme since this was before 2008, but we did have to orient our projects to highlight Canadian research in a way that was somewhat artificial. Thus, perhaps oddly, we were more constrained before the re-orientation of the program than after. While I was in China, someone from the Canadian Embassy in Beijing told me that it was all about “branding Canada.”

I was a bit shocked by that at the time since I still thought of scholarly work as having intrinsic value and as being somehow separate from other more crassly commercial concerns. Now I am amazed to realize that only ten years ago I still believed that. However, perhaps the Embassy was also somewhat naive to think that a few scholars (or even a lot of scholars) could really have much impact on “branding Canada” in China. At one of the guest lectures I gave during my four months at Shanghai Jiaotong University, I was on the podium with former Manitoba premier,

Howard Pauley. Our topic was language policy. Following our presentations, the first question from the floor came from a young graduate student. Her question to Mr. Pauley was, “How can an advanced country like Canada permit the barbaric and primitive seal hunt to continue?” So much for our informed and earnest discussion of language policy in Canada! Mr. Pauley, being a politician, hastily pointed to me and said “Elizabeth is from Newfoundland so perhaps she can answer your question better than I can!” This in turn reminded me of a letter I had received from

2 Elizabeth Yeoman someone in France in the 1970s who wrote that all he knew about Canada was “Margaret

Trudeau and the baby seals.” We get branded in ways that seem to be entirely beyond our control. However, as Christl points out, the ultimate purpose of the branding was an economic one and the program had “a record of return not only in terms of knowledge but also of finance.

Its budget of approximately 5 million has been documented as earning revenues three times expenditures” (10).

As Christl describes, the re-oriented program from 2008 onwards, presumably still about branding Canada and bringing an economic return, outlined specific themes “directly related to the mission’s strategic priorities in the region” (DFAIT, qtd. in Verduyn 2). Christl suggests that

“the theme of ‘managing diversity’ offered a particularly productive venue for a literary focus” (6). In Spain we oriented our DFAIT application towards diversity and the environment, the latter being another priority theme, and were able to find ways of making that fit with what we wanted to do (as opposed to making what we wanted to do fit with the program - though perhaps it worked both ways). We organized a seminar for undergraduates at the University of

Salamanca on Representations of Diversity in Canadian Cultural Production (I don’t think we ever used the word “managing” which suggests there was some leeway in how the themes were interpreted) and it gave us scope for talking about the literary works we wanted to discuss.

In a third experience with DFAIT funding, this one also in the revised post-2008 program, Liming Yu and I brought students from Shanghai Jiaotong University to Memorial

University of Newfoundland under the same themes of diversity and the environment. I am quite sure that we did not use the words “managing” or “energy” (which was paired with

“environment” in the DFAIT criteria at the time). I suppose we were still branding Canada

3 Elizabeth Yeoman though, in the sense that the students - potential future leaders from one of China’s top-ranked universities - came here, got to know us, and had a good time. They went tobogganing and snowshoeing, navigated a ship using a mind-bogglingly realistic simulator, learned a lot about food security and the cod moratorium, drank Tim Horton’s hot chocolate, ate moose stew and seal sausage and stayed with local families. I believe they really did learn quite a lot about diversity and the environment as well.

At the University of Salamanca too, I think that, despite the constraints of the program, approximately 100 undergraduates were exposed through our seminar to exciting new ideas about diversity and the role of film and literature in cultural and social change. I remember being both disturbed and moved when one of them told Ana that it was the first time she really felt as though she were at a university. This from a student at one of Spain’s, and perhaps Europe’s, most famous universities! We may have been branding Canada but we were also having a sustained and challenging conversation about culture, politics, ecology and social responsibility.

The DFAIT mandated focus on diversity and the environment, along with our interdisciplinary connections (English, Education, Aboriginal Studies, Canadian Studies) brought

“a new dimension to the study of Canada” (Verduyn x) in our collaboration in Salamanca.

Quoting Jeanette Den Toonder and Bettina van Hoven, Cristl also mentioned the advantages of bilingualism and interdisciplinarity through the inclusion of “both English and French-speaking scholars” and the “richness that can be found in this multitude of perspectives and approaches to exploring Canadian space” (den Toonder and van Hoven in Verduyn 7). The idea of richness to be found despite the constraints of the funding source is intriguing and I think this insight is accurate, or at least it reflects my own experiences of Understanding Canada. However, I’m

4 Elizabeth Yeoman troubled by den Toonder and van Hoven’s phrase “both English and French-speaking scholars.”

Why, nationally or internationally, is it limited to English and French? I would have thought that translation could open the possibility of work in other languages and also that Canadian

Indigenous languages would be included as well. and are official languages in and Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, , North Slavey,

Slavey and Tłįchǫ or Dogrib are also officially recognized in the North West Territories. There are people writing in other Indigenous languages as well as these, yet they seem to be invisible here. It is as if writing, and literary production, only really exist if they are in a colonizing language.

Here are two examples of what I mean, one from cinema and one from my own work with Elizabeth Penashue, the project I referred to earlier. I think these examples may suggest one kind of answer to Smaro’s challenge to consider new kinds of networks, affiliations and research styles as well as opening up another aspect of her critique of area studies. I hope this will generate discussion of other possibilities.

Paul Apak Angilirq, of Igloolik Isuma Productions, discussed funding for the film

Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) in an interview with anthropologist Nancy Wachowich:

NW: So let me get this straight, it was written out on paper from tapes of the elders

speaking in Inuktitut, then turned into an English story, and then turned into an Inuktitut

script, and then turned into an English script?

PA: Yes, that is the system that we had to use in order to get money. Because... Canada

Council and other places where we could apply for money, they don’t read Inuktitut

(cited in Nollette, 2012).

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We had a similar experience in the work Elizabeth Penashue and I are doing. We have been working together for several years translating Elizabeth’s diaries, stories and essays from Innu- aimun (related to Cree, one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in Canada) into

English and French and editing both the originals and the translations for publication. We do have SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council - Canada) funding, but it was a challenge to get it. One problem was that to get SSHRC funding one must write in English or

French. Elizabeth writes only in Innu-aimun. Despite the fact that Aboriginal research is a

SSHRC priority area, Indigenous knowledge holders cannot apply for funding if they are not affiliated with a university and applications cannot be submitted in any Indigenous language.

This is clearly a constraint, perhaps a much more challenging one, at least for some

Indigenous writers, but really for all of us, than any imposed by DFAIT. As Nicole Nollette put it, however, “both the process and the result of translation are telling manifestations of the power dynamics at play, dynamics that not only lead to language loss but also to a certain gain” (np).

The loss of language, and of funding opportunities and recognition seems clear. Another loss, pointed out by Clare Omhovere at the workshop to develop this book, is that in France, and perhaps other countries, Canadian literature can only be taught in the original language, not in translation. This means that nothing written or produced in an Indigenous language can be taught in Canadian Studies unless, of course, (marvellous but implausible idea!) there were a whole class of European students able to read an Indigenous language. CanLit may be multicultural, but it seems it is not multilingual. Although Inuktitut, Cree and other indigenous languages are widely spoken in the north and, as I have mentioned, a number of them are officially recognized in two territories, speakers of these languages are forced to use cumbersome multi-layered

6 Elizabeth Yeoman translation processes in dealing with funding institutions. And the more dominant English is, the more likely the Indigenous language will be lost.

The gain Nolette is referring to may be less obvious. What gain might there be in translating back and forth, in endless explaining, in trying to live simultaneously in two worlds?

Perhaps doing so can help to synthesize what really matters about the work, to reconceptualize, to encounter each other in conversation about the texts, and to find spaces where, as Paul

Angilirq does in the example above, speakers of the dominant language are reminded that it is they who are deficient. After all, they are the ones who can’t read Inuktitut, or Innu-aimun, or

Cree, or Dene. In her important book, First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (2011), Sophie McCall discusses Zacharias Kunuk’s use of partial translations in Atanarjuat. Parts of the dialogue are presented in Inuktitut but not explained in the sub-titles. Thus a non-Inuktitut speaking audience might realize they are excluded, and can only follow the story on certain levels. The use of partial translation is a way of reminding the dominant group that they are missing something, something they might want to know, might even long to know.

This kind of work demands recognition that Indigenous writers may write in their own languages as well as colonizing ones. As Maria Tymoczko (undated) has suggested, the translation of works by Indigenous writers can contribute to changing what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” (1977), referring to shared perceptions and values common to an era or cultural group and circulated through aesthetic forms and conventions. Edward Said

(1993) applied the concept to postcolonial contexts, showing how such structures and the aesthetic forms that support them could uphold or counter imperialism. Translation in such

7 Elizabeth Yeoman contexts often involves collaboration, as in the two examples I’ve just given, and perhaps both translations and collaborations could be considered in the examination of future directions and the creation of new kinds of networks and affiliations proposed by Smaro.

Edith Grossman, the translator of writers ranging from Cervantes to the Chilean antipoet

Nicanor Parra, suggests that English speaking regions of the world are not exposed nearly enough to writers in other languages because of a cultural antipathy toward translated works. She argues that we lose not only the opportunity to read those works but the possibility of relationships beyond the English-speaking world (the term “English-speaking world” also highlights the impossibility of “understanding Canada” since we both are and aren’t part of the

English speaking world):

Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before.

Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable. (x-xi)

Language is an important aspect of the kinds of alliances I’m interested in, and perhaps

Smaro is thinking of as well, but so is geography. In a wonderful book called The Highway of the

Atom (2010), which draws on Dene stories as well as other records of the uranium industry in

Canada, Peter van Wyck wrote:

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[Stories from the North] are inaccessible, if we mean by that geographically remote from

the south: a pious and ironic alibi. But, more than this... many from elsewhere have not

had ears with which to hear them. It seems clear as well that voices from the North

seldom gather sufficient force to rise above the colonial din of southern settler life. (16)

Here is a possible agenda for Canadian Studies scholars looking for new kinds of networks and affiliations. How can voices from the North “gather sufficient force”? Perhaps the example I have given of Inuit film productions, some of which are based on earlier writing in Inuktitut, suggests an answer. Another possibility comes from Japan, but with a Canadian connection.

Canadian scholar, Valerie Henitiuk, recently won a prize for her research on translations of the 11th century Japanese classics, The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book. (See interview at http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/results-resultats/prizes-prix/2005/postdoctoral_henitiuk-eng.aspx .)

Students study them in high school and, until recently, tended to think of them as difficult and dry, if not completely incomprehensible. However, the stories have now taken on new life in manga comic versions and a movie. According to Henitiuk, a main reason for this new interest is the fact that, in English translation, they have become part of world literature, thus raising international interest which made its way back to Japan. I offer this as a fragment, the beginning of an idea, but one that suggests that translations and adaptations might play a role in enabling voices from the North to be heard, not only in the Canadian South but globally. Immigrants, as

Smaro argues, have played a key role in “reconstituting... our understanding of CanLit” (11), but currently Indigenous writers are doing so. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the contribution of Indigenous writers writing in English or French in the detail that would be

9 Elizabeth Yeoman necessary to do it justice, but my particular interest is in writing in Indigenous languages, translations and collaborations, and how they might challenge our understanding of CanLit (and indeed literature itself) and open up new possibilities and insights. For one thing, as Sophie

McCall has suggested, they call into question the concept of the single author and oppositions such as oral/written and teller/recorder (212). For another, original writing in Indigenous languages has often been discounted because much of it has not been seen as literary writing, yet it could be understood and explored as opening up that category and taking it in new directions.

While there are Indigenous writers producing work in Indigenous languages that is clearly literary - for example, Innu poet, Josephine Bacon - there are also numerous examples, present and past, of diary keepers, life writers, film makers and others working in Indigenous languages, particularly Inuktitut. These include the film-makers of Isuma, mentioned above, Labrador Inuk

Abraham Ulrikabe who kept a diary while he and his family were exhibited in European zoos in the 1880s, Peter Pitseolak, whose People from Our Side consists of his own manuscript and photographs along with a narrative by Dorothy Harley Eber, and autobiographers John Ayaruaq and Nuligak, the former having published his autobiography in syllabics in 1968 and the latter a book edited by Maurice Metayer around the same period and more recently made into an award winning film, I, Nuligak: An History of First Contact, produced by White Pine

Pictures in 2005. Apart from the films, these examples are not contemporary but the recent production of the film version of I, Nuligak and new versions of People From Our Side and The

Diary of Abraham Ulrikabe suggest that they still have much to offer through translation, and through the kinds of retellings Valerie Henitiuk is working with in Japanese contexts. Elizabeth

Penashue’s writing is a current example of what might be called life writing, though it transcends

10 Elizabeth Yeoman genres as it ranges from heartbreaking firsthand accounts of the devastating changes in Innu life in the past fifty years to political satire to prayers to poignant lists of people, places and items that read like found poetry.

Can translation from Indigenous languages to ones that are widely spoken internationally, and adaptation - another form of translation - into popular forms such as films or graphic novels, lead to further international interest in Indigenous writing? And, if so, what might be the effects of these forms of translation?

Smaro asks whether the Understanding Canada program has generated trans-national dialogues

“that have produced a more complex understanding of Canada” (17) - an important question. I am also interested in intra-national dialogues, complex and nuanced conversations among ourselves that might enrich the international dialogue and encourage a reconsideration of the maps of the world and of the nation. As Smaro puts it: “why do we need nation-state focused study programs at a time when the nation and the state have been radically questioned and reconfigured” (19), when we study borders, peripheries, diasporas and liminality, feminist geographies, Indigenous writing and the challenges of translation and collaboration? When many, perhaps most, of us are not very interested in a mainstream homogeneous understanding of Canada? As a Canadian who has lived much of her life as an anglophone among francophones, then as a non-Newfoundlander in Newfoundland - a place with a passionate regional identity that is often defined in opposition to the nation - and now doing collaborative work with an Innu writer in Labrador, I have never had any particular sense of Canada as a homogeneous, understandable or brandable place. And yet it may be that within the nation state

11 Elizabeth Yeoman we could have crucial discussions that would reconfigure our understanding of who we are and what we are doing here, as well as whose writing counts, and for what.

Smaro suggests that international scholars of Canadian Studies use the cancellation of

Understanding Canada as an opportunity to broaden the imaginary it fostered and critique the very concepts of Canadian Studies and area studies. This process might also promote the development of new kinds of “research styles and networks that are more relevant to our times’ disjunctive temporalities and mobility”; it could lead to exciting new kinds of work that, like The

Tale of Genji in Japan, might find their way back home.

Finally, I want to juxtapose Christl’s concluding points about the financial benefits of

“Understanding Canada” (“earning revenues three times expenditures” p. 10) and the ability of scholars to continue working despite thematic constraints with Smaro’s arguments about the limitations of a quantitative approach and the opportunities brought by the cancellation of the program. Both are right, of course. Any funding is a window of opportunity and there are ways of subverting the stated goals and the constraints of any program. It is also true that thematic and disciplinary framings limit and shape the work we do, or can even imagine doing. However, lack of funding also limits what can be done and scholars, especially in countries and regions that have been hard hit by recent as well as ongoing economic trends, need funds to be able to work.

As we consider where to go from here and how to begin to conceptualize new kinds of networks, affiliations, and research styles, we also need to think about funding sources and about the kinds of work that can be done in times of limited funding.

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Works Cited

den Toonder, Jeanette and Bettina van Hoven, Eds. Re-exploring Canadian Space/Redécouvrir

l’espace canadien. Groningen NL: Barkuis Press, 2012.

Grossman, Edith. Why Translation Matters. New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

2010.

Henitiuk, Valerie. Interview at http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/results-resultats/prizes-prix/2005/

postdoctoral_henitiuk-eng.aspx. 2014. Web.

McCall, Sophie. First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative

Authorship. Vancouver BC: UBC Press, 2011.

Nollette, Nicole. “Partial Translation, Affect and Reception: The Case of Atanarjuat: The Fast

Runner.” Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature, 2.1 (2012): n.p. Web.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf/Random House, 1993.

Tymoczko, M. (undated). Translation and Political Engagement: Activism, Social Change and

the Role of Translation in Geopolitical Shifts. Retrieved from http://isg.urv.es/library/

papers/tymoczko.rtf

Van Wyck, Peter C. The Highway of the Atom. Montreal and Kingston: McGill/Queen’s Press,

2010.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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