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Indigenous diasporic literature : representations of the Shaman in the works of Sam Watson and Alootook Ipellie

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman University of Wollongong

McMahon-Coleman, Kimberley, Indigenous diasporic literature : representations of the Shaman in the works of Sam Watson and Alootook Ipellie, PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, 2009. http://uow.ro.edu.au/theses/786

This paper is posted at Research Online. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/786

INDIGENOUS DIASPORIC LITERATURE:

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SHAMAN

IN THE WORKS OF

SAM WATSON

AND

ALOOTOOK IPELLIE

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the

requirements for the award of the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

from

UNIVERSITY OF

WOLLONGONG

By

KIMBERLEY McMAHON-COLEMAN

B.A. (Hons.), G. Dip. Ed

FACULTY OF ARTS

2009

CERTIFICATION

I, Kimberley L. McMahon-Coleman, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Award of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution.

Kimberley L McMahon-Coleman April 14, 2009

CERTIFICATION

I, Kimberley L. McMahon-Coleman, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Award of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution.

Kimberley L McMahon-Coleman April 14, 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Publications Arising from Thesis 3

List of Illustrations 4-5

List of Special Names and Abbreviations 6

Abstract 7-8

Acknowledgements 9-10

Introduction: Indigenous Diasporic Literature: 11-70 Queering Maban Reality

Chapter 1: A Place of Terror and Limitless Possibilities: 71-97 Arctic “Exploration” and Inuit History

Chapter 2: Arctic Dreams and Urban Reality: 98-116 the Personal History and Influences of Alootook Ipellie

Chapter 3: Dreaming a Shamanic Voice: the work 117-156 of Alootook Ipellie

Chapter 4: Singing the Past: Australian “Exploration” 157-198 and Aboriginal History

Chapter 5: Urban Kadaitcha: the Personal History and 199-212 Influences of Sam Watson

Chapter 6: “Caught Psychically Between Two Worlds”: 213-251 the work of Sam Watson

Conclusion: Arctic and Antipodes—Literary Shamans 252-259 at the “ends of the earth”

Works Cited 260-282

1 Appendix A: Interview with Alootook Ipellie 283-292 Ottawa, May 2004

Appendix B: Interview with Alootook Ipellie 293-305 Vancouver, October 2005

Appendix C: Interview with Sam Watson 306-321 Brisbane, July 2007

2 LIST OF PUBLICATIONS ARISING FROM THIS THESIS

“Interview with Alootook Ipellie.” Australian Canadian Studies. Sydney: University of Sydney Publishing Service. Volume 23.2. December 2005: (77-89).

“Fatal Attraction? A Non-Indigenous Feminist’s Exploration of Masculinities in Indigenous Literature.” Conference Proceedings. Women in Research, University of Central Queensland, November 2005.

“Indigenous Diaspora and Literature.” Australian Canadian Studies. Sydney: University of Sydney Publishing Service. Volume 3.2, December 2005: (91-109).

“Dreaming an Identity Between Two Cultures: The Works of Alootook Ipellie.” Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Wollongong: Kunapipi Publishing. Vol. 28.1 2006: 108-125.

“Heritage and Regional Development: An Indigenous Perspective.” With Robbie Collins. Conference Proceedings. 2006 ANSRAI Conference (Australia and New Zealand Regional Science Association International), Beechworth, September 2006.

3 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Matchbox House (annotated 88 photograph

Figure 2: On board the C. D. Howe (photograph) 101

Figure 3: The Watching Child (illustration) 102

Figure 4: The Good Lineage Continues (annotated 105 Photograph)

Figure 5: Who Teaches the Child? (cartoon) 109

Figure 6: Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments 122 (illustration)

Figure 7: Ascension of My Soul In Death (illustration) 123

Figure 8: Nanuq, the White Ghost, Repents 124 (illustration)

Figure 9: I, Crucified (illustration) 127

Figure 10: When God Sings the Blues (illustration) 130

Figure 11: The Exorcism (illustration) 133

Figure 12: The Public Execution of the Hermaphrodite 135 Shaman (illustration)

Figure 13: Summit with Sedna, the Mother of the Sea 137 Beasts (illustration)

Figure 14: Super Stud (illustration) 140

Figure 15: Shamanism is like entering an Alien 141 World (cartoon)

Figure 16: The Five Shy Wives of the Shaman 143 (illustration)

Figure 17: Walrus Ballet Stories (iIlustration) 145

4 Figure 18: The Agony and the Ecstasy (illustration) 146

Figure 19: Close Encounter (cartoon) 147

Figure 20: After Brigitte Bardot (illustration) 148

Figure 21: Nunavut Land Claim Proposal (illustration) 151

Figure 22: Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 155

Figure 23: Photograph: Gough Whitlam and Vincent 204 Lingiari at Wave Hill, 1975

5 LIST OF SPECIAL NAMES OR ABBREVIATIONS

A.B.T.N. Aboriginal Television Network

C.B.C. North Canadian Broadcasting North

C.H.O.G.M. Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

D.I.A.N.D. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Inuit lit. “the people” of the Arctic

Inuk lit. “man” or “person.” Singular of Inuit

Inuktitut the language spoken by the Inuit

I.B.C. Inuit Broadcasting Corporation

I.T.K. Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (formerly the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada) is the “Inuit Brotherhood” of Canada. It represents Inuit in four regions of Canada: Nunatsiavut (in Labrador), Nunavik (in Northern Quebec), Nunavut and Inuvialuit (Northwest territories).

Kadaitcha an Australian Indigenous term meaning shaman

Maban as above

Maban Reality a form of Indigenous magic realism, which fuses the natural with the supernatural

Murri term given to Aboriginal Australians from South- Eastern Queensland and North-eastern New South Wales

Shaman an ecstatic healer

Stolen Generations Indigenous Australians who were removed from their families and traditional lands under assimilationist Protection policies

T.F.N. Tungavik Federation of Nunavut

Tornassuk Inuktitut word for polar bear spirit

RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police

6 ABSTRACT

This thesis attempts to bring together postcolonial and diaspora theories to look at the work of two Indigenous writers. It explores how complexities of postcolonial representation may be analysed by viewing Indigenous populations in Canada and Australia as members of intra-national diasporas, with the mission sites being fashioned as diaspora spaces. The figures that populate these spaces are never quite at home in their host communities, and are also unable to return completely to the homelands of their imaginations.

This thesis argues that the defining features of Indigenous diasporic literature are the creation of maban realism and queer figures. Indigenous diasporic texts feature supernatural events and characters, are strongly political, and force mainstream readers into unfamiliar reading positions. The two texts examined here, Alootook Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares and Sam Watson’s The

Kadaitcha Sung, achieve this through the use of shamanic protagonists.

Each author’s work conforms to a mainstream readership’s expectations in terms of the type of narrative told, yet the texts queer many literary conventions.

Ipellie’s stories return to the stereotype of, in his words, the “quaint Eskimo,” whilst Watson’s is, at heart, a Stolen Generations narrative. Perhaps ironically, each writer has used an established narrative which is the antithesis of his own lived experience, suggesting that even as he sought to carve out a space and a means of telling Indigenous stories that may have otherwise remained untold, that space was still being delineated by colonial history.

7 In these works, the shaman is an Indigenous diasporic voice—a way of telling

Indigenous stories in difficult political environments. The Indigenous diasporic framework provides a means of analysing such stories, which utilise imagery from two conflicting cultures.

8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Firstly, my sincere thanks must go to Alootook Ipellie and Sam Watson. Both offered me support, candour, and hospitality which have been truly appreciated. I was always aware of my position as a white middle-class academic ‘examining’ their work, and so receiving emails and letters checking on how it was going made me feel that I was, in fact, on the right track. I am privileged to have had an unprecedented level of access to Alootook and his work. It is some comfort to know that at the time of his sudden death, the first half of the thesis was largely complete and that he had read, and approved of, my work. I hope that he would be proud of the end product.

Thank you to my supervisors, Associate Professor Paul Sharrad and also to Dr Debra Dudek, who came on board towards the end of the project, and reinforced my high regard for Canadians and their enthusiasm. A special thank you goes to Professor Gerry Turcotte of the University of Notre Dame (Sydney), who is one of the most rigorous editors the world has ever seen. And to Kellinde, Gerard and Sophie, for sharing him with the students of Wollongong and now Notre Dame.

I would also like to extend my thanks to Louise D’Arcens, Guy Davidson, Richard Harland, Debra Dudek, Paul Sharrad, Maureen Clark, Irene Lucchitti and Monique Rooney in the School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages at the University of Wollongong; Kay Kanaar and Liz Henigan from Bomaderry TAFE; the Learning Development and Batemans Bay Education Centre teaching teams, and Terry and Julie Ashby of the Kip McGrath Education Centre in Nowra, for offering me enough teaching work to keep the bills paid during my studies. To my students, past and present: it has been a privilege to study alongside you.

Enormous thanks to my colleagues at the Shoalhaven Campus—Sam Altinger, Troy Bagnall, Robbie Collins, Dan Crowley, Brad Davis, Silla Kjar, Rae Luckie, Tracey Myers, Sue Rosskelly, Jeannette Stirling and Alison Wicks—for the sanity-saving morning tea ritual. Also to my fellow PhDers, Ernie Blackmore, Jasmine Croll, Debra Evelyn, Robyn Morris, Dion Oxley, Laurie Stevenson and Roslyn Weaver, for sharing the angst along the way. To Melanie Sedge and Beth O’Reilly of Trent University in Peterborough and Kim Matthews of McMaster University in Hamilton, thank you for introducing me to Canada and Canadians, eh? And to all my ACSANZ colleagues, and the Centre for Canadian Australian Studies at the University of Wollongong, for support both academic and financial.

Thank you to Sandra Grieve from the Woodford Historical Society, for the materials on the Durundur settlement, and to Maureen Hopper, for putting me in touch with her.

To Drs Gerry Wain and Paul Hartnett, and Kim Hobbs from Westmead; Dr Ian Hoult, and nurses Tess, Bill and Kate; your care meant that my cancer diagnosis and treatment were a minor delay, rather than a major impediment to the completion of my studies.

Thanks to Alison and Barry McMahon and the extended clan for valuing education enough that I even thought about doing this in the first place. To my brother, Justin, for his ability to help me put things in perspective. And to my friends Kate Reid, Craig Olsson, Cheryl Thomson and Tim Lange; the Thorne, Abdulrahim, McGeorge, Taguchi, Kajii and Hirose families; Carmel Coad, Jo Evans, Rochelle Flaherty, Alison Llewellyn, Pippa McErvale and Phoebe Zeller; Tom Sigley; Ellyn Leighton-Hermann, Grace Bahamonde Neumann and Dany Coronel; the Colemans, Falcons and the Houlisons—you have become family. You keep me strong, and mostly sane. A special thank you to Dr Gentle Ford for offering feedback on one of the later drafts.

9 Finally, my very greatest thanks go to those nearest to me, who have put up with my vagueness and absences since I began this journey, and who have celebrated my successes with great enthusiasm. This thesis is dedicated to Tony, Jamie and Robert Coleman, without whose continued understanding it would never have come into being.

10 INTRODUCTION:

INDIGENOUS DIASPORIC LITERATURE—QUEERING

MABAN REALITY

Give us fellowship, not favours; Encouragement, not prohibitions, Homes, not settlements and missions.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal1

This thesis focusses on the use of shamans and tricksters in the works of

Alootook Ipellie and Sam Watson. Alootook Ipellie is an Inuk from Baffin Island, in what is now Nunavut, and Sam Watson is a Murri from South-Eastern

Queensland. Both are Indigenous authors in majority white invader/settler nations, and although both have also written journalism and polemic, the works examined here in closest detail are their works of fiction, because it is these that have given them their most effective outreach to national and international audiences. Both texts deal with culture clashes that result from colonialist practices, and in each work the difficult task of negotiating these, at times, conflicting cultures is left to a shamanic protagonist.

These writers’ works are examined as examples of an Indigenous diasporic fantastic, and the dissertation aims to contribute to studies of Indigenous—in particular, Inuit and Aboriginal—literature, as well as to theoretical knowledge in the fields of postcolonial and diaspora studies. Despite the reputation of both writers within their respective communities and some small scholarly attention, the works remain relatively unknown and so I have focussed on a descriptive textual analysis of Ipellie’s and Watson’s works. Both writers produce works that

1 “Aboriginal Charter of Rights” (1964) from My People, reprinted in The PEN Macquarie Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, 2008, p 42.

11 are transgressive in multiple ways. The subjects in their works are characters who resist the probability of being marginalised by mainstream societies because of their Indigeneity; rather, they are written as being gifted border crossers. The subjects are diasporic in their transgression of accepted borders between nations, countries and societies, and are also ‘queer’ subjects in that they shun normative behaviours in relation to gender and sexuality. Queer theory arises out of attacks on heteronormativity, and sexual relationships between European men and Indigenous women were a feature of many colonial power struggles. The application of queer theory in this context is to critique normative sexual and race relations, and in so doing, queer the position of the reader. It is in these interstices, as subjects who are both diasporic and queer, that the shamanic characters find both their powers and their voices.

Critical attention has found these works to be “difficult” because they transgress conventions of genre, narrative, and sexual decorum. This study attempts to illuminate the nature of these transgressions by applying theories of trickster- shaman figures, of magic realism, and of queer writing as an extension of the postcolonial discourses of subversion as “border crossing.” I have developed a framework of Indigenous diaspora within which these approaches are applied, and by which we can better appreciate the slippery nature of these two ‘problem’ writers.

The thesis aims to identify and utilise reading strategies which are useful when dealing with texts which do not fit within the common sub-genres of Indigenous literature. Stephen Muecke argued in Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural

Studies (1992) that Aboriginal culture and literature have become sites of conflict and difficulty, as Aboriginal peoples “struggle … against entrenched patterns of

12 discrimination” (Muecke 180). Sonia Kurtzer summarises Muecke’s argument as being that Aboriginal literature is a site of “multiple constraints” (Kurtzer 181).

Kurtzer has further argued that these margins are placed on and around

Indigenous texts by the white hegemonic readership. The use of the intersecting postcolonial, diasporic and Indigenous fantastic or “maban realist” reading strategies in this thesis is an attempt to liberate such texts, which deal with the political and the supernatural, from these controls.

The texts examined here, Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993) and

Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung (1990), do not conform to hegemonic readership expectations; instead they highlight traditional shamanic practices, and feature scatalogical and sexual references. Indeed, Muecke himself labelled Watson’s book “unreadable” because of Watson’s refusal to edit the book into a more conventional form.2 Consequently the texts have had relatively little critical analysis and have sold fewer numbers than less confronting books such as

Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree3 (1983) and Sally Morgan’s My

Place4 (1988). Their content is equally unpalatable, including a violent rape scene in the former and a suggestion of incest in the latter, but they use sympathetic first-person female narrators and less profane language to tell their stories.

2 It is perhaps ironic that Muecke has since ‘edited’ his own comment. See Chapter Five for further details. 3 In Search of April Raintree had been the subject of much critical study, and in 1999 a “Critical Edition” was published, including the original text of the novel, as well as essays by Margery Fee, Janice Acoose, Agnes Grant, Michael Creal, Jeanne Perrault, Helen Hoy, Jo-Ann Thom, Peter Cumming, Heather Zwicker and Culleton herself. A Twenty- Fifth Anniversary Edition has been published this year, and it was the first selection on the Manitoba Reads! Project, inaugurated in 2008. 4 For further information on the debate around the position of My Place in Australian literature, see Gillian Whitlock’s The Intimate Empire, Mudrooroo’s controversial comments in Writing from the Fringe, Adam Shoemaker’s analysis of these in Mudrooroo: A Critical Study, and Jackie Huggins in Blacklines, where she argues that the greatest weakness of My Place is how little translation is required by a mainstream white audience (61).

13

The genesis for this project was a fascination with the repeated use of shamans and magical trickster-figures in the works of non-canonical writers, particularly those of Non-English Speaking or Indigenous backgrounds. These characters appeared time and again in the works of authors of widely varying cultural and literary backgrounds, including Thomas King, Mudrooroo, Keri Hulme, Beth Yahp,

Kim Scott, Larissa Lai, and Hiromi Goto. These figures, who traditionally operate within two distinct worlds and forms of power, are often used by minority writers attempting to express the tensions as well as the bridging possibilities of contrasting worlds of colonising power and colonised culture.

Contemporary Canadian literature offers an impressive range of trickster- characters who maintain elements of their culture of origin as they negotiate life in contemporary urban society. Thomas King, for example, who is a Canadian of

“Cherokee and Greek descent,”5 uses the trickster figure of Coyote in many of his novels and short fiction. Coyote is a traditional First Nations trickster-figure who, in King’s fiction, uses his supernatural powers to alter colonial storytelling processes. In King’s acclaimed novel Green Grass, Running Water (1993),

Coyote teams up with elderly First Nations peoples named after figures from the

English literary canon and English-language popular culture—Ishmael from

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Hawkeye from James Fenimore Cooper’s

The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Robinson Crusoe from Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name (1719), and the Lone Ranger figure from Trendle’s and Striker’s early radio and television serials (1933 onwards).

Coyote also amends a John Wayne film so that Wayne’s character is killed and

5 As described on the back cover of his novel, Green Grass, Running Water.

14 his men massacred by the Indians, much to the consternation of a watching white

TV salesman (King, Green Grass 321-2). This subverts the long-held predominant notion in Western society that the “cowboys” in Western films were the heroes to be championed, a point which Watson also critiques in The

Kadaitcha Sung, and his treatment of this issue will be examined in more detail in

Chapter Six.

Larissa Lai’s novels When Fox is a Thousand (1995) and Salt Fish Girl (2002) both deal with strong shape-shifting female characters of Chinese heritage living in contemporary Canada.6 Hiromi Goto’s Kappa Child (2001), which won the

Tiptree Award for “gender-bending Science Fiction,” fuses the Kappa figure of

Japanese mythology with images from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic Little House on the Prairie (1935) in order to highlight the alienation felt by a Japanese family living on the Canadian prairies.7 More recently, Joseph Boyden, a Canadian writer who identifies as being of Scottish, Irish and Métis descent,8 has written about the role of the shaman or medicine person at the moment of first contact with colonialists. His novel Three Day Road, published in 2005, tells the story of

Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, and her last living relative, her nephew, Xavier. Xavier has been fighting in Europe during the First World War, and returns gravely wounded and addicted to morphine. It is up to Niska, a medicine woman who is skilled in the art of killing cannibalistic supernatural hybrid beings known as the Windigo, to use her inherited powers in an attempt to

6 See Robyn Morris in West Coast Line and Nicholas Birns in China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story for detailed analysis of these novels. 7 For further information on Goto’s writing, see Guy Beauregard and Mark Libin. 8 This description is used in many online Biographies, but nowhere in Three Day Road is Boyden’s cultural heritage articulated.

15 cure the illnesses Xavier has contracted in the world of the whites.9 The novel has received both popular and critical praise, and has won numerous prestigious awards, including the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year, the Rogers

Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize, and the 2006 Canadian First Novel Award.

There are fewer examples of Australian texts that foreground magic from minority cultures, but those that do include Mudrooroo’s vampire sequence—Master of the

Ghost Dreaming (1991), The Undying (1998), Underground (1994) and The

Promised Land (2000)—which focusses on Indigenous shaman figures who have the ability to shapeshift, and who use their supernatural gifts in order to cope with the disturbing influences of colonial powers.10 In The Crocodile Fury (1992),

Australian writer Beth Yahp draws on her Chinese-Malaysian heritage to create the story of three generations of women haunted by extra-sensory powers, ghosts and demons.11 The book won the 1993 NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission

Award and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for First Fiction. Nyoongar writer Kim

Scott creates in his Miles Franklin Award-winning Benang: from the Heart (1999) a first-person narrator who levitates when under stress, and creates song-cycles as a means of healing his dysfunctional family.12

In all of the aforementioned novels, the shamanic or trickster figure becomes symbolic of traditional or minority powers, and fuses his or her resources with

9 Three Day Road is one the novels examined in Herb Wyile’s Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction. 10 See Maureen Clark’s review of Clare Archer-Lean’s Cross-cultural Analysis of the Writings of Thomas King and Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo), (2006), her article “Terror as White female in Mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy” (2006), and the Annalise Oboe-edited Mongrel Signatures for further information on Mudrooroo, his writing, and his place in Australian literary criticism. 11 For further analysis of Yahp’s novel, see Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s article in Hecate (1999). See also Olivia Khoo’s The Chinese Exotic (2007). 12 For further reading, see Pablo Armellino’s “Australia Re-Mapped and Con-Texted in Kim Scott’s Benang” (2004) and Tony Birch’s “Miscegenation and Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang” (2004).

16 those of the contemporary hegemonic society in order to create a cross-cultural mythology which is relevant to the lived experiences of contemporary minority subjects in postcolonial nations. The creative works of the authors listed above often deal with attempts at reconnecting with a cultural heritage or engaging with

Indigeneity. For Ipellie and Watson, however, who are of an earlier generation, colonisation and its assimilationist practices have had a more immediate affect.

As a child, Alootook Ipellie was removed and isolated from his home, land and culture on more than one occasion. Watson, who was not directly affected by the removal policies but who knew others who were, creates a protagonist who is identifiably a victim of the assimilationist relocation of part-Aboriginal children, now commonly known in Australian as the Stolen Generations. As a result, their creative works reflect the trauma of cultural loss and silencing. Both use the trope of shamanism and conventions of the fantasy genre in their work as a means of examining and confronting the complex social movements created by colonialism. The shamanic figures central to Arctic Dreams and Nightmares and

The Kadaitcha Sung typify the complexities faced by Indigenous peoples as

European culture was introduced and offer a means by which they might cope with such experiences.

The terms “maban” and “Kadaitcha” are Australian Indigenous words meaning

“shaman.” In The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka, Australian critic Mudrooroo uses the term “maban reality” to describe the fantastic

Indigenous works that he points out could also reasonably be classified as magic realist novels (Mudrooroo, Indigenous 101).13 Maban or magic realist texts are a

specific subset of the fantasy genre. According to Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy:

13 Mudrooroo’s position within the field of Indigenous literature has been problematised in recent years. Irrespective of his actual ethnic origins, Mudrooroo has written, worked and read within the Aboriginal cultural circle for many years and thus can be credited as a valid commentator on Indigenous Literature.

17 The Literature of Subversion, the introduction of the fantastic in a place of familiarity and comfort is a means of introducing “‘dark areas, of something completely other and unseen, the spaces outside the limiting frame of the

‘human’ and ‘real’ outside the control of the ‘word’ and of the ‘look’” (Jackson

179). It is my contention that the use of the uncanny in Ipellie’s and Watson’s texts functions as a means of introducing Indigenous sensibilities to the predominantly settler-founded multicultural communities of Canada and Australia.

A feature common to critical writing in these fields is a focus on the uncanny, unhomely or das Unheimlich, as first elaborated by Freud in his 1919 essay, “The

Uncanny.”14 In Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle go so far as to argue that the uncanny is “central to any description of the literary,” since uncanniness occurs whenever “real” or everyday life takes on a “disturbingly ‘literary’ or ‘fictional’ quality” (Bennett and Royle 35).

As these critics point out, the uncanny as understood by Freud and others, is more than just a sense of mystery or eeriness: “[m]ore particularly, it concerns a sense of unfamiliarity which appears at the very heart of the familiar, or else a sense of familiarity which appears at the very heart of the unfamiliar” (Bennett and Royle 34). This is certainly the case in Ipellie’s and Watson’s works, where

Indigenous shamanic characters participate in both traditional and in contemporary non-Indigenous societies. Moreover, since this study is enacted in a comparative framework, dealing as it does with Canadian and Australian case studies, it is itself something of an uncanny exercise, for, as Gerry Turcotte argues, any comparative literary study is “both a presentation of the familiar and of the fabulous, and its purpose is often the stress on the idea of fraught simultaneity” (Turcotte 157).

14 Reprinted in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, edited by Bruce Grenville.

18 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs argue in Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and

Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, that notions of home and the uncanny are central to postcoloniality, stating that claims made about the Aboriginal sacred are “a sign of the predicament in modern Australia which we can characterise as postcolonial” (xiv). Their definition of uncanny experiences being those which happen when “one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar; one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously” (Gelder and Jacobs 23) summarises the experiences of the

Indigenous diasporic characters in Ipellie’s and Watson’s books, who appear to be functioning in postcolonial society, even as they are displaced by colonising forces. The use of the fantasy genre with its limitless and escapist possibilities, is a means of expressing the anxieties of displaced Indigeneity and effectively creates unease in complacent hegemonic readers with little or no knowledge of these alternative ways of knowing and seeing the world. Magic and maban realist texts utilise this freedom from the constraints of realism in order to convey political messages.

As Linda Hutcheon notes in “Circling the Downspout of Empire,” magic realism or the mixing of the fantastic and the realistic has been a genre commonly employed in “post-colonial and culturally marginalised contexts to signal works which encode themselves within resistance” (Hutcheon 131). Stephen Slemon notes in “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World” that the term has been used in Latin America to signify “uniqueness or difference from mainstream culture” (Slemon 407). Its repeated use in Third World literatures and more recently, its co-option by Indigenous peoples in invader/settler nations such as Canada and Australia has meant that the term is inextricably linked with resistance (Slemon 408). Australian critic Mudrooroo further distinguishes maban

19 realist texts as being a subgenre of magic realism, and one in which the

Indigenous spiritual realities which had been marginalised as “primal, pagan and savage” by early settlers, missionaries and educators (Mudrooroo, Indigenous

90) feature prominently. Mudrooroo cites Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung as being the novel which first broke the ground of this “new realm of reality” (Mudrooroo,

Indigenous 46) in Australia. He defines maban reality as being “characterised by a firm grounding in the reality of the earth or country, together with an acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality” (Mudrooroo, Indigenous 98). He also argues that it is inherently political because “it seeks to establish an

Indigenous reality which is counter to the dominant natural reality of the invaders”

(Mudrooroo, Indigenous 100).

The examination of the uncanny in “postcolonial” texts is by no means an unusual practice. Indeed, Benita Parry in her 2004 essay “The Institution of Postcolonial

Studies” has noted with some asperity that “a canon of ‘Postcolonial Literature’ is being formed, in which the ‘marvellous’ or ‘magic’ realisms … are given greater prominence than those closer to ‘realist’ modes” (73). She cites the abundance of critical material on the works of well known authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ben Okri to support her argument. Whilst I do not wish to suggest that these authors are undeserving of the attention they receive, it would seem to me that writers like Ipellie and Watson are among a number of authors from Canada and

Australia who are also working in the realm of the magical, but whose work remains relatively unexamined and thus they remain outside the secondary canon of which Parry writes.

One reason for the lack of attention to Ipellie and Watson may be their refusal to bury their politics in the fantastical entertainment of magical realism. Watson’s

20 and Ipellie’s works both share features of maban reality as defined by Mudrooroo, and their writings are counter-hegemonic and highly politicised. Indeed, both writers have also been vocal political activists for their communities. Both

Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares and Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung also use violence, graphic sex scenes, and a focus on the abject to further engender discomfort in much of their readership. They reverse the historic realities of white settlers not speaking about their sexual encounters with Indigenous people,15 by creating Indigenous protagonists who are open and vocal about their activities.

This idea that shamanic characters are easily distracted by earthly desires indicates their trickster status in the cosmos and each writer uses this character

trait to create corporeal points of contact between the spirit and mortal worlds. It

can be argued that both writers, in effect, “queer” the “approved” magic realist

mode of postcolonial fiction with their “uncanny” political maban content.

In Postcolonial Cultures, Simon Featherstone argues that fiction “is a discourse

that accepts and allows some free-play of fantasy and the irrational”

(Featherstone 165). Both Ipellie and Watson, however, seem to move beyond

acceptable limits of such free play. They fuse traditional Indigenous and intuitive

ways of knowing—which would not be considered “logical” by many non-

Indigenous readers—with easily identifiable locations, tropes and situations from

the colonising cultures. Ipellie’s shaman-narrator has the ability and contacts to

hold audiences with God in Heaven, and to follow Superman across the Arctic.

Watson’s protagonist, Tommy Gubba, is of mixed-race ancestry and frequently

shifts between fraternising with academics and lawyers in inner-city Brisbane, to

15 For a detailed analysis of how inter-racial sexual relationships were complex and how the pretence of separation between coloniser and colonised was routinely made uncanny through these, see Hannah Robert’s “Disciplining the Female Aboriginal Body: Inter-racial Sex and the Pretence of Separation.”

21 embracing more traditional Murri life on the Fingal mission, and having audiences with his Spirit guides at Uluru.

The two texts examined in detail here may be broadly defined as belonging to the genre of ‘fantasy’ or as being non-naturalistic in their nature. They invoke fictional conventions of the Gothic and magic realism to incorporate alternative

Indigenous knowledges. At the same time they inject political reality but do not conform to conventions of native activist writing or notions of Indigenous

“authenticity.” Each author, in presenting elements of traditional cultures and belief systems, suggests that the events depicted within the books are part of an alternative way of knowing or being. A mainstream reader is placed in an uncanny reading space, where supernatural events are presented as though they are commonplace.

As such, each text also raises questions about identity, and defies commonly held beliefs about time and dimensions. Rosemary Jackson argues that

the ‘value ’ of fantasy has seemed to reside in precisely this resistance to definition, in its ‘free-floating’ and escapist qualities. Literary fantasies have appeared to be ‘free’ from many of the conventions and restraints of more realistic texts: they have refused to observe unities of time, space and character, doing away with chronology, three-dimensionality and with rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death. (Jackson 1-2)

Both of the writers selected for study here use these types of techniques in their work. Ipellie’s shaman blurs distinctions between life, death and the after-life, and his adventures take place over a non-specific and presumably non-linear timeframe. Further, the character has the ability to change shape and morph into different incarnations of himself. Watson’s Tommy Gubba is another character who has the ability to occupy a space between life and death, and the timeline of this novel is one of its most distinctive features, for although the action nominally

22 takes place over four days, the use of anachronistic details compresses all of

Australia’s colonial history into that brief timeframe. Although powerful figures who are capable of using the tools of the colonising cultures and remain in touch with their own cultural traditions, however, the shamanic protagonists of the texts share an ongoing and irreconcilable sense of alienation throughout the narratives.

This thesis arises out of work in the broad field of postcolonial studies. This field covers a wide variety of cultural politics, but here the focus is on relations within colonised Indigenous cultures as well as their relationships within the dominant white invader/settler cultures of their nation spaces. Len Findlay, in his influential essay “Always Indigenize!: The Radical Humanities in the Postcolonial Canadian

University” suggests that English literatures should work “with and against” hegemonic representations of literature (Findlay 310), and seek to disprove assertions about terra nullius by always including Indigenous viewpoints in

literary analysis in search of “innovative, non-appropriative, ethical cross-cultural

research” (Findlay 313). Although Findlay’s essay has subsequently also been

critiqued by a number of scholars, including Paulomi Chakraborty, who argues

that it “imagines a universal model” (Chakraborty 17), it seems to me that since

Findlay’s essay does seek anti-hegemonic strategies which “specifically speak to

invader/settler colonies” (Chakraborty 17), his argument for positing Indigenous

stories and perspectives in contrast to the hegemonic canon is particularly

pertinent in a thesis which deals with works written by Indigenous authors in the

invader/settler nation-states of Canada and Australia.

The Comparative Framework

23 This is, firstly and most obviously, a comparative study of two examples of

Canadian and Australian Indigenous literature. This basic framework has proved useful as it is generally agreed that Canada and Australia share a similar colonial legacy: both nations are officially multicultural, yet the history of literary publication since colonisation has been predominantly one of white hegemonic narratives. As Alan Lawson has argued, invader/settler societies such as Canada and Australia, which are sometimes referred to as the Second World because of their position in resistance to Empire’s traditional representations of colonies, are sites which share a “very particular dual inscription; a place that is colonized at the same time as it is colonizing” (Lawson 155).16

The adoption of official multicultural policies in the 1970s and 1980s in some ways exacerbated tensions between minority communities and the white majorities in these nations. The kind of “Othering” that occurs when visible minorities’ differences are celebrated sometimes re-emphasises cultural divides and the privileging of white Anglo-centric culture. Augie Fleras and Jean Leonard

Elliot argue in Multiculturalism in Canada: the Challenge of Diversity that, although most people agree with multiculturalism in theory, “many in practice are insensitive to minority rights at individual or group levels, suggesting an underlying adherence to anglo-conformity as the preferred culture” (127). Luke

McNamara argues that in Australia, too, three decades after the “emergence of multiculturalism as official Australian government policy in the 1970s … the imprint of multiculturalism on Australian laws and legal institutions is decidedly faint” (McNamara 1). McNamara echoes Alastair Davidson’s assertion that “the mono-cultural Anglo-Celtic past did not disappear when multiculturalism became state policy in Australia” (A. Davidson 82).

16 See also Lawson’s 1991 article “A Cultural Paradigm for the Second World” and Stephen Slemon’s “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World.”

24

This dominance of Anglo-Celtic tradition and law has clearly constrained both migrant and Indigenous groups. The fusion of “national,” “ethnic” and

“Indigenous” in the minds of the populace, has been, however, counterproductive. As Fleras and Elliott argue, using a Canadian example,

[m]ulticulturalism is criticized for diminishing the status of aboriginal groups to the level of a minority/ethnic group. It is also criticized for denying the unique relationship—based on the principles of aboriginal land title and self- determination—between native Indians and the federal government. Like the Quebecois, in other words, aboriginal peoples prefer to negotiate from within a bicultural framework that recognizes their special status and acknowledges their collective right to differential treatment. (120)

The novels studied here must therefore be read in the particular context of inhabiting a culturally complex nation space whilst claiming the aforementioned special status for Indigenous and Indigenous diasporic peoples.

The ongoing struggles in Australia for Aboriginal land rights, Reconciliation, compensation for the Stolen Generations and the implementation of the recommendations of the 1993 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in

Custody suggest that the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the federal government remains problematic. The rise of Pauline Hanson’s white supremacist One Nation Party in Australian politics in the 1990s and the increasingly conservative and often apparently racially-based policies of the

Howard Coalition over the last fifteen years would suggest, however, that visible minority groups have increasingly been included in the category of “them” to the dominant Anglo-Celtic “us.” This obsession with identifying and categorising what it is to be “Australian” is paralleled in Canada, with W. H. New famously noting in

1975 that searching for a national identity had become a “kind of congenital art form” (New, Among Worlds 101), a comment echoed in recent years by Laura

25 Moss’ suggestion that the search for a postcolonial identity “now epitomizes such an art form" (Moss vii).

In the Introduction to her edited collection Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling

Canadian Literature, Moss builds on Frank Birbalsingh’s argument that countries like Australia and Canada who have not yet “evolved an organic sense of community or cultural homogeneity” use national identity as an “important literary theme” (Birbalsingh 57). Moss notes the divide between these “‘invader-settler’ nations” where “the process of colonization was predominantly one of immigration and settlement” (Moss 2) and those nations where the colonisation process was more one of “displacement, impoverishment, sublimation, and even annihilation” (2), but cautions against too sharp a division between these groups, noting that to do so may

obscure the terrible consequences of colonialism for the Indigenous peoples in the territories settled, as it might overlook the complexity of cultural and political reconstruction in territories exploited under the economic and political imperatives of empire. (2)

For many Indigenous groups within Australia and Canada, colonialism did indeed involve displacement, impoverishment, assimilation and even annihilation.

Certainly Alootook Ipellie was displaced from his homeland when removed from his family, first for medical treatment, and later for educational purposes. Whilst

Watson was able to remain with his biological family throughout his childhood years, the family lived not on their own ‘country,’ but within the suburbs of

Brisbane. Relationships between community and place in postcolonial nations are clearly complex, and while Ipellie and Watson maintained some connections with their home spaces, their identities were also informed, in part, by diasporic consciousness to the extent that shamans, as shapeshifting negotiators, became appropriate vehicles to tell their stories.

26 As well as legislated multicultural policies, Canada and Australia share a

“‘common ancestry’ of predominantly English settlement” (Brydon and Tiffin 56),

“deep, significant, and unresolved relationships with their Indigenous peoples”

(Shoemaker, Paper Tracks 246), and the legacies of British colonialism in terms of language, law and politics. As invader/settler colonies, both nations have

experienced a “dual colonialism [because] settler colonials perceived their

superiority over the ‘Natives’ but were seen as inferior by the imperial centre”

(Alomes 104).

This dual colonial dynamic has had a profound psychological impact on both

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the early colonial era, and indeed

Margaret Atwood has described the colonial mentality in terms of its ability to

cause “psychic disturbances” (Atwood in J. Davidson 204). Perhaps in light of

Arctic Dreams and Nightmares being set in Nunavut and The Kadaitcha Sung being set, at least in part, in rural Queensland, her comment about the impact of certain spaces on the colonial psyche is particularly pertinent:

the North is to Canada as the Outback is to Australia, and as the sea was to Melville, and as … Africa is, shall we say, to Heart of Darkness. It’s the place where you go to find something out. It’s the place of the unconscious. It’s the place of the journey or the quest. (Atwood in J. Davidson 204)

Atwood argues that the ‘North’ “is thought of as a place, but it’s a place of shifting boundaries. It’s also a state of mind. It can mean ‘wilderness’ or ‘frontier’”

(Atwood in J. Davidson 10). Like the Australian ‘Outback,’ the Canadian ‘North’ is an uncanny space, since it is at once both a place and a direction. The boundaries are mutable, relational and unfixed.

The comparative Canadian-Australian framework illuminates the similarity of the colonial struggle in a variety of spaces and nation-states, yet also allows for a

close examination of how individuals deal with similar subject matter in highly

27 individualised and culturally specific ways. Ipellie and Watson each draws on his own unique cultural heritage in order to examine the colonial processes undertaken in the modern nation-states of Canada and Australia, and its impact on Indigenous populations.

In Black Words, White Page, Adam Shoemaker notes that the term “Fourth

World” was coined by George Manuel in 1975, specifically to describe Indigenous minorities (Shoemaker, Paper Tracks 1), and that Canadian and Australian

Indigenous peoples, in particular, “share a strong and vibrant spiritual affinity for one another as oppressed ‘first citizens,’ for their traditions, and above all, for their land” (Shoemaker, Black Words 203). In the texts examined here, spiritual community leaders negotiate the uncanny experiences which result from postcolonial exile.

Peter Loveday, Bruce Hodgins and Shelagh Grant argued in 1988 that “the

Indigenous peoples of both Canada and Australia ha[d] assumed greater importance in controversies arising from demands for increased self-government”

(Loveday et al 414) in the preceding two decades, yet as recently as November

2006 these two countries voted to delay the implementation of the United

Nations’ Declaration on Indigenous Rights (Green, “Indigenous Rights;” “Australia helps block UN declaration on Indigenous rights”). Canada, a country which has

“long been considered a leader on human rights issues” (Green), was one of only two nations that had voted against the Declaration in June 2007, although it has been suggested that a change of government—to the Conservative Party of

Canada, led by Stephen Harper—had led to this objection (Calma 2). In the

Australian context, unresolved Indigenous rights issues had been a defining feature of John Howard’s Prime Ministership, and on the eve of the 2007 election

28 campaign, he announced that if re-elected, he would hold a referendum regarding changing the Australian Constitution to more accurately reflect

Indigenous occupancy prior to European settlement. This became a key issue in the election campaign after his opposite number, and now Prime Minister, Kevin

Rudd, pledging that he would apologise to Indigenous Australians of the so- called “the Stolen Generations.”17 His Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, apologised in June 2008 to children affected by the Residential Schooling system. In both countries, it would seem, relationships between the Indigenous

and subsequent citizens are still very much part of the political agenda, making a

study such as this relevant and indeed, timely.

Postcolonial Studies

One conceptual framework that supplies a broad basis for comparing cultural

politics and textual dynamics in Australia and Canada is that of postcolonial

studies. The pervasiveness of the colonial enterprise is such that Ashcroft et al

have estimated that “[t]hree-quarters of the world’s population had their

experience shaped by the process of colonialism” (Ashcroft et al 1). With the

spread of British imperialism, English became the dominant language in many

countries. The enforced replacement of Indigenous languages with English was

one of many tools used by colonialists to minimise the influence of Indigenous

inhabitants. Robbed of their language and culture, Indigenous populations also

decreased at an alarming rate, attributable largely to disease, violence and

discriminatory social policies.

17 A promise which was fulfilled as the first Order of Business during the first sitting of the new Parliament on February 13, 2008.

29 In their early work The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft et al argue that a key concern of postcolonial literature is foregrounding the tension with the imperial power and emphasising the differences from that imperial centre (Ashcroft et al

2). They argue that the “post-colonial world is one in which a destructive cultural encounter is changing to an acceptance of difference on equal terms” (Ashcroft et al 36). At this point the writing becomes truly cross-cultural, they claim, because authors are negotiating “A gap between ‘worlds,’ a gap in which simultaneous processes of abrogation and appropriation continually strive to define or determine the practice” (Ashcroft et al 39).

“Hybridity,” like the term “postcolonial,” has been critiqued in recent years because it privileges the European colonising perspective (Bromley in Hawley

275; King, Godzilla 11). It becomes critical when undertaking a study such as this to acknowledge the biased language and terminology which has commonly been used. As Simon Featherstone argues, “Few areas of study are at once so lively and so beset by doubts and dilemmas as postcolonial studies … Few other disciplines … so regularly worry about their own defining term” (Featherstone 1; see also Loomba et al 2-4). For Anne McClintock, the term is temporally loaded in that it “heralds the end of a world era […] by invoking the very same trope of linear progress which animated that era” (McClintock 10). Nivedita Menon extends the time frame from the usual meaning of “from independence” to argue that postcoloniality “begins from the very first moment of contact” (Menon 207), but also sees it as involving a discourse of opportunity which is a result of the encounter with colonialism.

Numerous critics have also articulated a problem with the assumption that the moment of contact or invasion is an appropriate marker from which to apply the

30 “post”-prefix, since it suggests that the arrival of Europeans was the raison d’être for postcolonial literature (see King, Godzilla 16; Anderson 18, 22; and Kurtzer

182). Others reject the term because it seems to imply that the colonial era has

now ended or been negated. This is particularly true for Indigenous critics. As

Thomas King suggests, the

full complement of terms—pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial—reeks of unabashed ethnocentrism and well-meaning dismissal … [and] organizes the literature progressively suggesting there is both progress and improvement. (King, Godzilla 11-12)

Yet as Robert Stam and Ella Shohat argue convincingly in “Travelling

Multiculturalism: a Trinational Debate in Translation,” no single term is unproblematic:

antiracist studies seems too negative, too locked in the same paradigm as the one being combated … Critical race theory remains too tied up with the legal discipline and excludes other axes of oppression like class and sexuality. Whiteness studies, while having the advantage of exnominating or outing whiteness, runs the risk of recentring it as well. Identity politics has come to emerge as the preferred term for the enemies of multiculturalism because it carries with it a hint of personal and cultural narcissism, of a philosophy centred on ‘my’ identity. Transnational studies, given its particular congruency with transnational corporations, is just as politically tainted as multiculturalism and risks eliding forms of oppression that are national or onfranational. In other words, each term, while problematic, also casts some light on a very complex subject. (300)

Ashcroft and his co-authors, now famous as summarising exponents of the field, have used the term not only to promote recognition “of the fact that most of the world has been affected to some degree by nineteenth century European imperialism” but also to provoke an “understanding of the continuing effects of

colonial and neo-colonial power” (Ashcroft et al, Key Concepts 1).

As Timothy Brennan argues,

[c]olonisation was carried out either for purposes of settlement or for economic exploitation; it was largely conducted in terms of a confrontation between the ‘White’ and ‘Dark’ races; it often involves direct military occupation, and the setting up of alternative cultural institutions for the purpose of creating a native caste that shared the same culture as those in the home country. (136)

31 Postcolonial studies aim to undo this process. There are obvious similarities apparent in the histories and literatures of those nation-states now considered to be ‘postcolonial.’ These may result from similar experiences of colonisations or ongoing patterns of domination by extra-national powers. The colonial enterprise involved the forced subjugation of Indigenous inhabitants (Brennan 134), usually in the name of acquiring new land for settlement or expansion (Brennan 135).

Other motivating factors included the opportunity to acquire cheap labour, create new markets, or find locations for the expulsion of unruly or dissident sectors of society. Still other colonies were established as a place to flee persecution

(Brennan 135). Whatever the primary motivation, the methods of subjugation were strikingly similar, and involved concerted attempts to change Indigenous ideas and values in favour of European Christian ones through the establishment of education systems, the banning of Indigenous languages, customs and spirituality, all in the name of transforming the “[l]ocal population into a ‘familiar’ one” (Brennan 135).

Thomas King, Michael Dodson, and Ian Anderson suggest that many of the practices associated with postcolonial studies have also been suspect.18 It is now commonplace to reflect on the dangers of producing native informants in order to justify postcolonial readings.19 There is an additional irony in postcolonial studies needing to use the recorded observations of colonialists and anthropologists, complicit in the practices of subjugating Aboriginal cultures and languages and relegating them to history. It may be that any scholarly reading of the

“experience” of the “aborigine” essentialises Indigeneity, but it may yet offer some

18 For more detail, see Michael Dodson’s and Ian Anderson’s chapters in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, edited by Michele Grossman; and Thomas King’s 1990 article “Godzilla versus Postcolonial.” 19 See Gayatri Spivak’s In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic and Outside in the Teaching Machine, and the many responses to these works.

32 insights or value, even if it is primarily as a window into the colonial mindset. The aim, here, is not to replicate the colonialist tendency to treat Indigenous literary texts in a patronising manner or as exotic anthropological studies, but rather to use postcolonial literary frameworks to analyse the texts in light of their important position in literature and history, as pieces written by people who have been directly affected by colonialism, and who are concerned with helping the next generation explore what it means to identify as Indigenous in the late twentieth century and beyond.

Common dynamics of colonialist/imperialist control of peoples and cultures have to be set against the different situations of Second, Third and Fourth World communities. King goes so far as to suggest that the term “postcolonial” may apply to Canadian literature, but not to Native literature within it, and suggests the alternative terms “tribal,” “interfusional,” “polemical” and “associational” to describe Native writing. Tribal literature is limited to a particular tribe’s place, people and context; interfusional is the term he uses to describe the blending of oral and written literature; polemical literature is that which has been written in a language of a colonising force but which “concerns itself with the clash of Native and non-Native cultures or with the championing of Native values over non-

Native values” (King, Godzilla 13). Associational literature, according to King’s definition,

is the body of literature which has been created, for the most part, by contemporary Native writers … allowing the reader to associate with that world without being encouraged to feel a part of it. It does not pander to non-Native expectations concerning the glamour and/or horror of Native life. (King, Godzilla 14).

Certainly these terms are a useful way of differentiating literary works and of limiting essentialising practices, but the work of neither Ipellie nor Watson fits neatly into these categories. Their work is polemical, with moments that seem to

33 invoke oral literatures, but would largely fall under the rubric of associational literature. Ian Anderson makes the important point that,

even though some Indigenous writers have used tools made available by postcolonial literary theory, it would be a mistake to assume that Indigenous critical writing and postcolonial analysis are one and the same thing. (Anderson, Blacklines Intro 23)

Anderson argues that “colonial ways of knowing” continue to be reproduced in contemporary discourse, and thus reproduce dynamics of colonial power

(Anderson 24). He argues that this idea had not yet “penetrated mainstream postcolonial theory” at the time of the publication of Blacklines (2003). Anderson and his fellow contributors to Blacklines further suggest that “Aboriginality” remains a “distant” concept for most Australians (Langton 91) and is a concept which cannot and should not become “fixed” (Dodson 39). Mudrooroo, in advancing his concept of “maban reality” writing, does so as an alternative to

Indigenous literature being fixed into social protest realism and life writing modes.

Dodson argues that the attempt to project a definition of Aboriginality onto an individual is a “violation of the right to self-determination and the right of peoples to establish their own identity” (Dodson 39). Arguably, layering the term

“postcolonial” over an Indigenous author’s work could also be read in this way. It would perhaps be prudent to note here, then, that both Ipellie and Watson clearly and proudly identify their own respective Native and Aboriginal identities, and to note that the application of postcolonial reading strategies to their texts, is only one of a number of intersecting readings undertaken in this thesis. The framework as formulated in The Empire Writes Back is still a useful one when used in concert with diaspora and Indigenous studies to analyse the work of

Alootook Ipellie, an Inuk writer whose 1993 collection Arctic Dreams and

Nightmares utilises the appropriated language of English, yet abrogates certain categories of Imperial culture, writing in such a way as to undermine the accepted meanings of words and symbols, and also that of Sam Watson, whose literary

34 shamans appropriate aspects of the colonising culture in an attempt to eradicate the intruders. Indeed, the greatest warrior against the white ‘migloo’ in Watson’s

1990 novel The Kadaitcha Sung has gained his powers, in part, through biological and cultural links passed on through his mother’s European Druidic ancestry (Watson 228).

Just as literature was central to the process of colonisation (Ashcroft et al, Empire

3), so too is postcolonial literature, at its core, political. As Brydon and Tiffin acknowledge, “reading and writing about reading are themselves engaged acts”

(Brydon and Tiffin 11). Each writer, and each reader of the texts created, will bring his or her own position to the text. In using some of the features listed above, and in using the trope of the shapeshifter, writers such as Ipellie and

Watson are able to make their audience question the colonising influence and raise an awareness of a plurality of cultures. A non-Indigenous reader may feel quite alienated from the events of the text in the first instance, but can become aware of powerful messages about Indigenous agency if he or she becomes engaged in the text and, by extension, the culture it represents.

One of the strengths of postcolonial studies has been its unpacking of the discursive power of colonial writing. Colonial literature did not recognise the agency of the Indigenous inhabitants, just as dictionary definitions of the term

“colonial” fail to mention their very existence (see Loomba 1). Histories of resistance were not recognised. Instead, the predominant literature was a kind of pioneer or explorer mythology, centring on the feats of the white settlers in exploring new lands, exploiting what they had to offer and “helping” and/or

“civilising” the native inhabitants (see Childs and Williams 26). But as Brydon and

Tiffin have pointed out,

35 [e]xplorers never found anything Aboriginal peoples had not already known of. Indeed most expeditions depended on Aboriginal guides (voluntary or coerced) for supplies of food and water and other eco-geological knowledges without which such ‘explorations’ would inevitably have foundered. (46)

In short, knowledge held by Indigenous people was used in the colonisation process, but the agency of those who held the knowledge was seldom recognised.

The original inhabitants of the colonised areas were deemed by colonial powers to be “Other,” an essentialising term which quickly came to be used to signify all non-European, alien, and by extension negative aspects of Indigenous culture. In colonial cultures, “Race” or “Otherness” became a useful Manichean yardstick;

Western was good, Indigenous bad, in an oft-used extension of the

binary system of thought that paints the world as split between good and evil [whose] roots go back to the religion of Mani (third century, Common Era), which viewed the creators of the world, God and the Devil, still fighting it out. (Gibson 6)

In this context, the destruction of Indigenous cultures and indeed, nations, was seen by many people as a worthwhile and moral enterprise. The Indigenous nations were viewed as inferior “races,” even though, as Gates points out, the term “race” is both a metaphor and a misnomer in common usage—for “race” should refer to a species, that is, the human race, rather than cultural groupings within that frame (Gates 4). According to JanMohamed, the dominant ideologies of the colonial period are reflected in the literature of the time; the colonies were on the borders of civilisation, a world “perceived as uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately, evil” (JanMohamed in Gates 83). He argues that it is precisely because of the arbitrary (and ultimately incorrect) use of the term that

“race” becomes the ultimate trope of difference (in Gates 4-5). In The Location of

Culture, Homi K. Bhabha points out that arguments about race continued beyond the initial stages of colonial power, eventually setting up binary oppositions between “good” natives, who conformed to Western cultural influences, and “bad” natives who did not (Bhabha Location 130-1).

36

According to Bhabha, key features of postcolonial writing include mimicry and mockery, features which are clearly present in the texts selected for this thesis.

His ideas about a “splitting … that is less than one and double” (Bhabha Signs

177) are exemplified by the cultural fusion evident in the Indigenous fictions studied here. Despite being “minority” writers, and thus being, in the eyes of the academy, “less than one” or of the margin, these writers are also drawing on knowledge gained from another type of society and culture, and thus “doubling”

the space which their works occupy.

For postcolonial writers and readers, literature engaging with decolonisation

necessarily involves the establishment of a space “between” colonial binary

oppositions of black and white, civilised and savage, pure- and mixed-blood,

good and bad. Bhabha has characterised this strategic reversal of discrimination

“hybridity” and explains its influence as a

sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities … Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. (Bhabha, Signs 173)

In recent years the problematic nature of postcolonial studies and hybridity studies has become increasingly clear. The term “hybridity” has been critiqued by a number of Indigenous critics including Michael Dodson and Ian Anderson. Both note in the 2003 collection Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by

Indigenous Australians that they find the term offensive, because it evokes a history of biological engineering and social Darwinism (Anderson 51; Dodson 28).

As Mudrooroo argues in The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli

Wangka:

37 hybridity in regard to culture is a term coined by postcolonial academics to understand or rather talk about such things as contemporary Indigenous culture. It rests on the belief that there can be such a thing as pure culture uncontested by outside sources. ‘Culture’ in this context seems to arise spontaneously in an isolated community then exists almost as an artefact until it is contaminated by outside influences and thus becomes hybridised. This is a dubious proposition (Mudrooroo, Indigenous 108).

Michael Dodson deems the term to be “offensive,” since it invokes a colonial

“obsession with the distinctions between the offensively named ‘full bloods’ and

‘hybrids,’ or ‘real’ and ‘inauthentic’ Aborigines” (Dodson Blacklines 28).

It should be noted that in examining the work of Ipellie and Watson, I am not labelling the authors as ‘hybrid,’ but rather, that when I invoke the term “hybridity”

I am referring to the bicultural influences within their work, strategically using

Bhabha’s definition and his suggestion that mimicry, mockery, and doubling are features common to a number of these bicultural texts. I accept that the term remains problematic, however, especially in light of Dodson’s persuasive argument that most so-called “hybrid” representations could be more properly characterised as contemporary Aboriginal representations:

Alongside the colonial discourses in Australia, we have always had our own Aboriginal discourses in which we have continued to create our own representations, and to re-create identities which escaped the policing of our authorised versions. They are Aboriginalities that arise from our experiences of ourselves and our communities. They draw creatively from the past, including the experiences of colonisation and false representation. But they are embedded in our entire history, a history which goes back a long time before colonisation was even an issue. Those Aboriginalities have been, and continue to be, a private source of spiritual sustenance in the face of others’ attempts to control us. (Dodson, Black Lines 38-9)

This assertion is particularly applicable to the texts discussed in this thesis, which depict Indigenous experiences and identities which have clearly been influenced by the colonising cultures. If we view Ipellie and Watson through a lens of the

“Indigenous diasporic” we can see how they fulfil many of the ideals of both

38 Indigenous and postcolonial critics while also expressing the disturbing complexities of colonised experience.

Diaspora Studies

Whilst acknowledging the problematic nature of the terms “postcolonial” and

“hybridity,” as well as a number of the strategies that have traditionally been used in its application, the texts studied here still benefit from analysis under the postcolonial rubric in that they deal with a clash of cultures and spiritualities after colonial contact. They demonstrate syncretism as new generations are raised with both white and Indigenous belief systems; and that they use mimicry, mockery, and magic realism in order to convey the difficulties of living “between” cultures.

It might be claimed that both Indigenous and postcolonial critics look for a utopian rootedness of belonging that is largely governed by the space of the nation. But as Ipellie and Watson demonstrate in and through the “border crossings” of their fiction, this quest operates always with unsettled movements in time and space.

To better appreciate the dynamics of “Fourth World” shamanic writing, then, it would seem appropriate to combine postcolonial and Indigenous critical approaches with insights from diaspora studies.

Mary Louise Pratt, in her 1992 text Imperial Eyes, argued for renaming the area of colonial contact as ‘the contact zone,’ emphasising the need to treat the relationships between,

colonizers and colonized, or travellers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness and apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. (Pratt 7)

39

Pratt defines the contact zone as social spaces where “disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (Pratt 4). Perhaps the answer to the now apparent limitations of postcolonial studies, then, lies not in an semiotic argument over terminology, but in looking at the ways in which this field overlaps with others.

Diana Brydon in her article “The Politics of Postcoloniality” argues for the need to continue to challenge our ways of thinking, and argues for “critics, from all sides of the political spectrum, [to work to] create the conditions under which genuine dialogue might begin” (12). The works of the two chosen authors, like the characters depicted within them, operate in liminal spaces. It has proven impossible to isolate one methodological framework for this study, for the texts share contact zones in fields as diverse as postcolonial studies, Indigenous literature, trauma studies, diaspora studies, queer theory and the Gothic. By creating a “dialogue” between these different methodologies one can begin to examine the complexities of works such as Ipellie’s and Watson’s, which are politically valent precisely because of the ways in which they cross generic as well as cultural borders.

Pratt’s focus on transculturation and interaction applies to Indigenous and non-

Indigenous interactions in colonial and postcolonial times, and to diasporic or migrant writing. This suggests that there is a ‘social space’ wherein the

Indigenous and the diasporic interact. Although at first glance diasporic identity may seem to be the antithesis of Indigeneity, which stresses “continuity of

40 habitation, aboriginality, and often a ‘natural’ connection to the land” (Clifford

252), the dispersal from tribal lands to unfamiliar places and the creation of networks of dispossessed peoples, is, by definition, diasporic (253). Perhaps the most disturbing assimilative tool used in invader/settler colonies was the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families and familial spaces. Both

Canada and Australia, like many other postcolonial nations, are currently dealing with the political ramifications of these histories. This process not only removed children from their own family groupings, but also forced them into artificially essentialised “Aboriginal” communities of people of divergent Indigenous nations.

In effect, colonialism produced an Indigenous diaspora. Thus applying diaspora theory to these Indigenous writers is a useful critical tactic when interpreting their work, which often deals with the clash of cultures and the difficulties of occupying spaces “between.”

As Robin Cohen argues in Global Diasporas, the postcolonial experience in

Canada and Australia emerged from the British imperial diaspora (74). Literary diaspora studies first emerged from early Commonwealth or postcolonial literatures frameworks. Postcolonial studies necessarily has contact zones with other areas of theory, including postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism and

Marxist ideological criticism (Ashcroft et al, Empire 153), and in the case of Ipellie and Watson, their shared history of transplantation, alienation and transculturation also meets the criteria for diaspora studies.

William Safran, one of the pioneers of diaspora studies, has outlined six criteria for a diasporic community: that the diasporans were displaced from their original location to two or more peripheral regions; that they retain a collective memory; that they feel partly isolated and insulated from their host community; that they

41 regard their ancestral home as their ‘true’ home or country and a place to which they, or their descendants would like to return; that they are committed to the maintenance and restoration of their homeland; and finally, that they continue to relate personally or vicariously to their homeland (Safran 83). Whilst Safran was largely concerned with delineating the field, others such as Robin Cohen have adopted a more pluralist view (Chariandy 7).

David Chariandy argues convincingly that postcolonial diasporic discourse is

“something self-consciously ‘figurative’ or ‘metaphorical’” and is thus a “special agent for social change” (Chariandy 8). As with the term “postcolonial,” there are a number of questions which have been raised over the definition of “diaspora,” including whether certain ethnic groups are automatically diasporic; what differences generational changes make on the imagining of diaspora; whether an extant culture must have been developed independently before dispersal or whether it can develop retrospectively; whether the dispersal has to be caused by traumatic exile, or can be voluntary; and whether the desire to return to a homeland is a mandatory feature and, if so, must this be physical, or can it be symbolic? (Chariandy 8). Chariandy notes that,

[i]n the past fifteen years, ‘Diaspora’ has emerged as a highly favoured term among scholars whom we might associate with contemporary postcolonial studies; and while there exists within the nebulous field of postcolonial studies no simple agreement on what Diaspora is or does, scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Floya Anthias, Stuart Hall, Carole Boyce Davies, Rey Chow, Smaro Kamboureli, Diana Brydon, and Rinaldo Walcott all seem to share these hopes: that Diaspora studies will help foreground the cultural practices of forcefully exiled and voluntarily migrant peoples; that Diaspora studies will help challenge certain calcified assumptions about ethnic, racial, and, above all, national belonging; and that Diaspora studies will help forge new links between emergent critical methodologies and contemporary social justice movements. (Chariandy 1)

Government policies of forced removal and location were applied to Indigenous peoples in both Canada and Australia. Consequently, many Indigenous groups within these countries have problematic relationships in terms of national

42 belonging; certainly there have been concerted social justice movements in both nations with regard to their relationships with the Indigenous populations. The impacts of these policies are explored in the dislocated characters who populate

Ipellie’s and Watson’s works.

It is apparent that the features which Safran originally identified as being

‘diasporic’—in terms of a collective memory, insulation from the broader community, a desire to return to country and a commitment to that return—also apply to Indigenous people who have been forcibly removed from their traditional lands. Fred Riggs concurs that “ethno-national” or internal migration does occur:

Ethnonational Diasporas often settle within the state where their homeland is located—Indigenous Americans in the US, Chechens in Russia, Scots in the UK, aboriginals in Australia, Maories [sic] in New Zealand, etc. Being in Diaspora, therefore, does not require crossing state boundaries for many ethnonations. (Riggs 5)

This thesis builds on Riggs’ assertion, as well as on the work of Noelene

Brasche, whose unpublished doctoral thesis Leaving Country without Leaving the

Country, argues that Indigenous diasporas do exist and examines the Indigenous diaspora which was created on and around the Cherbourg mission in South

Eastern Queensland—an important site in Sam Watson’s novel—throughout the twentieth century. Brasche argues convincingly that William Safran’s key identifying features of diaspora are evident in the policies and impacts of the forced dispersal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands as a consequence of colonialist practices. This thesis focusses on two authors whose lives and works exemplify the Indigenous diasporic experience, and who both use the figure of the shaman as a trope to examine this complex cultural phenomenon.

As figures able to exist in two environments, and mediators with trickster tendencies, the shaman-characters in the texts are posited as useful symbols for

43 relaying the complexities of being Indigenous people within the invader/settler colonies of Canada and Australia.

In both nations, Indigenous peoples were removed from their traditional lands and housed in settlements away from the rest of the population. According to

Brasche, the forced displacements of Indigenous peoples clearly

infringed traditional boundaries … Territorial or national groups who previously had little or nothing in common now shared experiences of dispersal and loss of sovereignty, as well as physical displacement from traditional country. (Brasche 49)

Diaspora theory, however, has been applied to Indigenous writing only in the last few years. A common perception remains within mainstream Australia that

“Aboriginal” people have remained on “Australian soil” and therefore have not been displaced. As Sonia Kurtzer argues, however, the very term “Aboriginal” is a product of the diasporic function of colonialism:

[t]he concept of Aboriginality did not even exist before the coming of the European. Rather, Indigenous Australians identified themselves and others according to kinship groups, skin groups, or on the basis of their relationship to totems, the Dreaming or particular tracts of land … it has been the oppressor who has sought to define Aboriginality. (Kurtzer 182)

Even recent practices by Indigenous peoples to label themselves according to regions bear traces of colonial influence. The term “Murri,” for example, used to identify Indigenous people from Central and Southern Queensland and the north of New South Wales, has its roots in colonial policies of forced relocation and displacement. The term is said to have originated in the diaspora space of the

Cherbourg (formerly Barambah) Aboriginal Reserve in South-Eastern

Queensland (Brasche 8 and 37; Horton 738). From 1905,20 Indigenous

20The mission began at the “Blacks’ Flat” site in the Durundur/Woodford region of Queensland as “a philanthropic effort” of The Salvation Army (Brasche) but the Queensland Government took control in 1905, when the mission was moved to the present Barambah site. It was renamed Cherbourg in 1931. In March of 2005, ABC-TV’s

44 Australians from forty-four different language groups were incarcerated on this reserve, leading to the formation of a common, regional identity through shared circumstance. Gerard Guthrie completed fieldwork in the area in the early 1970s, and noted Cherbourg was created by “bringing together Aborigines from the remnants of a number of large tribes in Southern Queensland into a quite artificial grouping” (qtd in Brasche 197). In fact, Wiradjuri writer and academic Anita Heiss has stated that the “one thing the Murris [on Cherbourg] had in common was

poverty” (Heiss 1). The Cherbourg site plays an important role in Watson’s novel

The Kadaitcha Sung, and its history will be examined in Chapter Five.

Stuart Hall has noted that diaspora identities “are those who are constantly

producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and

difference” (S. Hall 120). The transformative nature of the Australian Indigenous

diaspora has also been explored by Indigenous elder Michael Dodson, who notes

that “Aboriginalities of today are regenerations and transformations of the spirit of

the past … we include our precolonial practices, our oppression and our political

struggles” (Dodson 40). Alterations of Indigenous cultural practices should not be

viewed as measures of ‘authenticity’ or otherwise, but as a function of

contemporary Indigenous diaspora.

Diaspora is fundamentally concerned with complex notions of home, belonging

and exile. Victor Ramraj has also argued that diasporans are “caught psychically

between two worlds” (216), a description which undoubtedly applies to the

bicultural spirituality evident in the characters created by Ipellie and Watson.

Although neither author has migrated in the traditional sense, the forced removal

Message Stick chronicled the centenary of Cherbourg, suggesting that its inhabitants continue to mark the mission’s start date as 1905.

45 of their peoples at the hands of colonial regimes can be understood in the context of diaspora theory. Within the Indigenous context, when people were forcibly removed from their familial locations they crossed traditional borders, even whilst remaining within the confines of the modern nation-state. Colonialism, in effect, created an Indigenous diaspora. It seems particularly, fitting, then, to focus on works which use shapeshifters to negotiate borders in works which themselves do not fit neatly into compartmentalised theories, since shapeshifters are known for their border-crossing abilities.

Kim Matthews suggests that all identities are negotiated and deterritorialised; for any individual, “home” may be the place of origin, the place of residence, or the place where one has lived the longest period of time (Matthews 68-9). She further argues that identity construction

is derived from the actions of social agents as they negotiate the cultures of the past with those of the present and indeed of an imagined community. Identity formation is fraught with barriers, as any given identity is constantly acting upon culture and vice versa. (71-2)

Issues surrounding home and identity are as pertinent to Indigenous people removed from their families and familial settings as they are to people who have crossed national borders. It is apparent that two conflicting cultures influence the daily lives of these people, causing issues of identity and belonging to remain contentious.

Avtar Brah investigates the interrelationship of Indigeneity and diaspora in her notion of diaspora space, which she defines as the

intersectionality of Diaspora, border and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes. It addresses the global condition of culture, economics and politics as a site of ‘migrancy’ and ‘travel’ which seriously problematizes the subject position of the ‘native’ … Diaspora space as a conceptual category is ‘inhabited’ not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as Indigenous. In other words, the concept of Diaspora space (as

46 opposed to that of Diaspora) includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put.’ (Brah 181)

Brah’s concept of a ‘diaspora space’ can usefully be applied to understanding the ways in which Ipellie and Watson interrogate notions of home and homelessness,

as well as the aforementioned political, cultural and psychic processes. I will be

examining the intersection of diaspora space and Indigenous studies, and the

close analysis of the texts in later chapters will explore how the selected texts

demonstrate the concerns and features of Indigenous diasporic literature.

Those who have “stayed put,” to use Brah’s phrase, (181) have experienced a sense of hom elessness under colonial regimes, which parallels the dislocation of those who have migrated. As Ceridwen Spark has noted, recent Indigenous publications in Australia have

employed the concept of home to great effect. Juxtaposed with displacement and loss, it stands as a site of longing, as evidenced in the Government- commissioned report on the stolen generations, Bringing Them Home. (Spark S14)

The writers whose work is examined in this thesis are concerned with these themes of displacement and loss, and their personal histories and art reflect their peoples’ shared history of entanglement and dispossession through colonialism.

Both writers explore these notions through shamans, powerful figures who have traditionally inhabited a space “in-between.”

Clearly, the colonialist practices of separation and interference had far-reaching effects on both the Inuit and Indigenous Australians. For Andrew and Nigel

Dawson, however, who argue in Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a

World of Movement, that “[h]ome is the place where one knows oneself best” (9) there is an unexpected positive outcome of such practices. Through these

47 transcultural experiences, individuals come to achieve a stronger sense of belonging, such as that reflected in Ipellie’s statement that

my mind, my psyche, is at home up in the Arctic, and it will always be that way. And I’m thinking now that I know one day I’ll go back to my real home, sometime in the future. (McMahon-Coleman, Interview 79)

Rapport and Dawson argue that exile can be a resource as it provides a vantage point from which to learn about oneself (9). For individuals such as Ipellie and

Watson whose home, culture and very identity have been under threat from an outside force, these can no longer be taken for granted. The Inuit, who have experienced unprecedented cultural upheaval as a result of their rapid and recent colonisation, have such a strong sense of cultural identity that community leaders—many of whom, including Ipellie, had been removed from their communities as children—lobbied for the formal establishment of a homeland within the borders of Canada. The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, or national Inuit organisation, was largely responsible for this political movement. Similar lobbying has also seen the establishment of Inuktitut educational materials and television broadcasts. These are used to ensure the survival of Inuktitut in the face of the all-pervasive languages of the colonisers. In these instances, Inuit who had never left the Arctic have worked together with the Indigenous diasporans in order to create a better outcome for all members of the community.

In an Australian context, disparate Indigenous groups have become involved in pan-Aboriginal political movements in order to lobby for land and civil rights. Ken

Gelder and Jane Jacobs argue that ethnicity can be seen as such a positive force that white Australians resent their own lack of ethnic identity, and in particular that

Aboriginal people put their ethnicity to use as a primary social category … Aboriginal people are a group of people who certainly have much less than others (less opportunities, worse health etc.) but who also have what those others do not: their ‘Aboriginality.’ (Gelder and Jacobs 98)

48 This sense of “Aboriginality as home” supports the argument of Rapport and

Dawson that the diasporic experience can create a stronger sense of belonging or identity. The everyday practice of Indigenous Australians using familial greetings and honorifics, regardless of their original familial location, supports this idea that dislocation and dispossession has created a commonality of experience.21

As Noelene Brasche explains, the forging of a pan-Aboriginal identity was necessita ted by colonial practices:

[l]ike the Inuit, Aboriginal Australians were displaced from their traditional lands, often onto missions, reserves or peripheral camps. These dispersals frequently forced them onto land with which they did not culturally identify and into the country of Indigenous host nations with whom negotiation of language use, custom, and authority, became essential for any form of co-existence or survival. (23)

She further suggests that the existence of such “an adaptive form of social organisation” is one of the criteria in Robin Cohen’s definition of a diaspora

(Brasche 23; see Cohen xii). Nonetheless, the adaptation to new areas or

“country” has been a key difficulty for displaced Indigenous Australians and a

significant issue in Aboriginal literature. Alexis Wright’s description of an

Aboriginal character, Maudie, in her 1997 novel Plains of Promise, articulates the

new kinds of kinship which have been established through forced displacement,

and the fraught process of identity reconstruction of which Matthews writes:

Maudie never made law status … because of her preferred affiliation with her own country, to which she had been brought as a child, not to this topsy-turvy world where, to establish harmony, everyone had adopted local kinship status … People believed that even though she lived in exile, she had never left her own country in her mind. (Wright 40)

In a similar vein, Sam Watson noted in a 1995 interview that:

21 Brasche and Wright both allude to this idea in the quotations which follow, and I have also witnessed this in practice, during my work in the Aboriginal Education and Training Unit, Illawarra Institute of TAFE (Bomaderry Campus).

49 [y]ou can take aboriginal people out of the land but you can’t take the land out of aboriginal people. So regardless of where we live and what we do, we always have that relation to our spiritual side. (in Dean 8)

Both of these examples suggest that a sense of ‘place’ is internalised as a significant part of Indigenous identity.

Notions of place and country are particularly strong in Aboriginal communities, but Indigenous nations remain largely unrecognised by mainstream Australian society. This forges an affinity between different cultural groupings, yet, as Gelder and Jacobs argue, “ethnicity may not be quite so coherent as the modern category ‘Aboriginal people’ would suggest” (Gelder and Jacobs 101). As

Brasche points out, the history of Indigenous Australians in the era after white colonisation is one of “multiple intra-national Diasporas which conforms to traditional paradigms while retaining its own uniqueness” (Brasche ix). This sense of a distinct cultural identity and shared understanding, regardless of location, are the key features which signify an Indigenous diaspora.

The key features of Indigenous diasporic Literature, then, are that they are created by and deal with Indigenous people who have been removed from their traditional lands by the forces of colonialism. Like Brah’s concept of diaspora space, Indigenous diaspora deals with areas of intersection, rather than replicating binary oppositions, and thus goes some way towards answering

Houston A. Baker Jr’s question, “how does one escape, or explode … [the] simplistic duality?” (Baker in Gates 389) of writings which deal with the concept of

“race.”

Indigenous diasporic literature typically centres around an exploration of borders and boundaries, areas which are both fundamental to diaspora studies and prevalent in the works of postcolonial scholars. In particular, the works examined

50 here deal with the traversing of the borders between dreams and reality, the natural and the supernatural, through shamanic trickster figures. Shamans are singularly uninhibited by borders, with an ability to cross corporeal boundaries by shapeshifting, to subvert the boundaries of science in their abilities to manipulate their physical bodies, and in their ability to co-exist in both the realms of the gods and of humans. Their fluidity and ability to slide between worlds sets up an opposition to the Manichean aesthetics of colonial literature, and insists on the

creation of something new and more powerful, rather than attempting to recreate

pre-colonial culture or to completely accept the imported one. It confronts colonial

amnesia regarding the existence of Indigenous inhabitants or of the history of

cultural interference in subsequent years.

By claiming this ability to harness supernatural powers as a means of negotiating

the spaces between worlds, the texts examined here deal with notions of the

“uncanny,” and the use of irony and humour as means of literary subversion.

Indeed, Linda Hutcheon has identified the use of irony as being one of the defining features of postcolonial studies, since the use of a double or split discourse offers a unique opportunity to “subvert from within” (Hutcheon 133), as exemplified by the actions and speech of the shamanic features examined here.

As Hutcheon suggests, irony becomes “a popular rhetorical strategy for working within existing discourses and contesting them at the same time” (Hutcheon 133).

The very concept of Indigenous diaspora is imbued with irony, since nationwide anti-colonial movements are based on the national borders which colonialism created (Gibson 177-8). Rupture and dislocation are also significant textual strategies in these authors’ works. Certain places—in these texts, Uluru and the

Arctic—are imbued with spiritual significance drawn from traditional Indigenous belief systems in what may, at first, be read by some as “nativism.” The powers

51 drawn from these spaces, however, are harnessed by contemporary bicultural shamanic characters with similar access to powers and belief systems from the colonising cultures.

Shamanism

The Inuit shaman figure was sometimes examined by European anthropologists seeking information about “native” cultures. Interest in shamanism was also a focus of the 1970s “New Age” counterculture, and this kind of appropriation of

Indigenous belief systems has been widely denounced by numerous Indigenous critics.22 From the early 1990s, there has been a renewed interest in Indigenous cultures, as exemplified by the United Nations’ designation of 1993 as the

International Year of Indigenous Peoples.

In recent times, however, the figure of the shaman has been reclaimed by

Indigenous peoples as a symbol of cultural strength. Celebrations of Indigenous knowledge are once again of interest to non-Indigenous audiences as evidenced by the wide-spread popularity of Zacharias Kunuk’s award-winning film,

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner in Canada in 2001, and Rolf de Heer’s and Peter

Djiggirr’s Ten Canoes in Australia in 2006. Both films were critically acclaimed at an international level and experienced unprecedented popularity despite being filmed in Indigenous languages, with English-speaking audiences only accommodated through the use of subtitles.

Atanarjuat was the first feature film ever released in Inuktitut and is a reworking of a traditional Inuit tale wherein Kunuk has invested his characters with modern

22 See, for example, Leslie Marmon Silko (1978), Geary Hobson (1978), Wendy Rose (1992).

52 psychological motivations. Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) breaks a taboo when he marries Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu), who was betrothed to Oki (Peter Henry Arnatsiaq).

Oki seeks revenge and Atanarjuat flees across the ice. He is naked when surprised by an enraged Oki, and the inclusion of nudity, scatology and frank sexuality in the film is again indicative of the features of traditional Inuit

storytelling, with no concessions allowed for the broader, non-Inuk audience.

Atanarjuat is finally saved by the intervention of a shaman to whom he is related,

and Oki and his family are banished. The film proved to have an unexpectedly

broad audience, and won the 2001 Palme D’Or at Cannes.

Perhaps more important than the film’s critical acclaim, however, was its role in

restoring traditional skills to the Inuit. The film was the result of a long

collaborative process from the members of Isuma Productions, an all-Inuit media

company. In Atanarjuat, the shaman became a figure of cultural renewal both on

and off the screen. Set at the dawn of the first millennium, forgotten skills were

rehabilitated in order to create authentic clothing, tools and so on. Since the

inception of Isuma in 1990, this sense of recovering and protecting Inuit culture

has been a key feature of the company’s modus operandi. To this end, Inuit are

involved at all levels of production of Isuma’s films. The skills and knowledge

gained are then passed on to the younger generation. As with Ipellie’s work, the

film was of critical importance in bringing knowledge of the Inuit culture, and

specifically the shaman’s role within that culture, to a broader audience.

Similarly, Ten Canoes also gave a local community an opportunity to regain lost

skills, including that of canoe building. It was the first Australian feature film to be

recorded solely in an Aboriginal language, and, as with Atanarjuat, it does

contain frank sexual and scatological references. In Ten Canoes, the shaman or

53 sorcerer is represented as being extraordinarily powerful, a healer and the person most likely to rid the area of strangers and resolve conflict. This makes him a powerful metaphorical figure in terms of the broader historical backdrop of colonisation in Australia.

Shamanic powers are key to the development of the film’s plot, and in this film, as in Atanarjuat, much of the drama comes from the lust of the central character,

Dayindi (played by Jamie Gulpilil) for his brother’s beautiful young and third wife.

Dayindi’s brother tells him the story of their ancestor, Yeeralparil—also played by

Jamie Gulpilil—and the dire consequences of his carnal desire for a sister-in-law.

Both stories are played out on screen, with the more recent tale being shot in black and white, reflecting the photographs by anthropologist Donald Thompson, whose work was an inspiration for the film, and the ancestral tale which it frames being shot in colour. This is an ironic reversal of the more common cinematic technique of showing flashbacks in black and white and contemporary events in colour. The double narrative again suggests the uncanny as viewers are moved between two culturally unfamiliar tales in noticeably different times. Ten Canoes won the 2006 Jury prize at Cannes.

In each of these films, the shaman weaves magic through a masterful command of language and traditional practices; he or she is able to use songs, poetry and bragging to teach and to express him or herself effectively. Shamans are also usually mediators, and in the postcolonial context, is a figure who is able to mediate two conflicting cultures. Ipellie defines Inuit shamans more simply as members of “certain families all over the Arctic that keep the power of their forebears” (Kennedy, Voice 162), and notes that he was in line to be one, until the family converted to Christianity (McMahon-Coleman, ACS 86. See Appendix

A 289).

54

Bragging and competitiveness are considered part of normal interaction in Inuit society, and would be best exemplified by shamans because of the unique nature of their experiences and powers. The shaman’s voice was one which, traditionally, could not be silenced. Ipellie’s fictional narrator is no exception, boasting on numerous occasions of his fame and prowess as a noted shaman, and outlining his special relationships with figures of Euro-Canadian iconography.

This is in stark contrast to Ipellie, who as a youth suffered from chronic shyness, and perhaps provides further insight into Ipellie’s decision to use the figure of the shaman in order to represent the conflicting emotions of exile and belonging that have been typical of postcolonial Inuit experiences.

Tricksters have supernatural powers but suffer from human failings. The shaman in Inuit culture fulfils this role. Owing to the frequency of song competitions between shamans, they are fiercely competitive, and ego is often the source of their downfall. The role of the polar bear spirit, or tornassuk, is also significant.

The powers attributed to the polar bear are such, in fact, that they have long baffled Christian missionaries. Daniel Merkur records in Powers Which We Do

Not Know: The Gods and Spirits of the Inuit, that Greenlandic Inuit told missionaries in 1721 that Tornassuk was the deity they felt most closely resembled the Christian God. He goes on to suggest that they are drawing a comparison between the death and resurrection of Christ, and the shaman’s experiences of death and revival under Tornassuk (Merkur 227). Danish missionaries equated Tornassuk with the devil, since he obviously had great powers, yet was not the God of Christianity (Merkur 227). The Kadaitcha men in

Watson’s novel are similarly ambiguous in their ability to use their powers for

55 good or evil. Tommy, in particular, is a flawed individual who is often sidetracked by mortal feelings of anger and desire, at the expense of supernatural quest.

Shamanism provides a means of reworking the binaries of good and evil created through the evangelical Christian colonisation process. Although in some instances the Christian religion was positively embraced by Indigenous peoples, generally, the Christian religion does not allow for co-existence of another belief system. Consequently the Manichean aesthetic of Christian as “good” and pagan or polytheistic as “bad” was accepted as an article of faith by both the colonisers and by many of the Inuit who converted to Christianity. Some younger Inuit have reversed the process, recognising that conversion was one of the key tools of the colonists. Sandra Pikujak Katsak expresses her disillusionment with Christianity in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women, noting that the more she learned about the process of colonisation,

the more I felt that I had to resist that Christianity. I wondered how my grandparents could believe so strongly when it is so different from the old Inuit spirits. I asked them about those old spirits, about shamans and stuff, but they wouldn’t talk about those things … I didn’t want to be Christian, because I wanted to get back at the Qallunaat for saying those bad things about Inuit back then (Wachowich et al 243).

Yet as Alvin Austin and Jamie Scott argue in their 2005 publication, Canadian

Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad, the transition to Christianity was not absolute in many cases:

[i]n embracing Christianity, Aboriginal people did not entirely forsake connections to their heritage, land, or Indigenous cultural expressions … This self identification is a shifting one, and not the sole reference point for the individual (Austin and Scott 101).

Jim Miller notes in Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens—A History of Indian-White

Relations in Canada, that this was a common experience among Indigenous peoples, claiming that “[m]any so-called Indian converts simply incorporated the

56 Christian god into their religion alongside many other spirits” (Miller 58). The idea of shifting boundaries and belief systems is critical to Indigenous diasporic literature and is clearly evident in the works of Ipellie and Watson.

Joseph Campbell in his early work on religion and mythologies from around the world argues that the “shamanistic crisis, when properly fostered, yields an adult not only of superior intelligence and refinement, but also of greater physical stamina and vitality of spirit than is normal to the members of his group”

(Campbell 253). This would seem to present an insight into the choice of the shaman metaphor in the works of writers such as Ipellie and Watson. The dispossessed need powerful representatives to restore pride and a sense of agency in their own communities, and to attain visibility in the dominant culture.

The “crisis” of colonisation has created a strength and resilience in those who have survived the process. The impact of this period of cultural upheaval on the young Alootook Ipellie will be more closely examined in the Chapter Two, and a similar biography of Sam Watson will be outlined in Chapter Five.

It is this notion of power through crisis which is interesting in the context of the political nature of Indigenous writing. Kali Tal explores the notion of ‘trauma,’ and how traumatic cultural events are reported in written texts. Although she examines this through case studies of African American race relations, the wider

Black Diaspora, the experiences of Holocaust survivors and Vietnam Veterans, the key features of trauma literature are equally applicable in the context of postcolonial diaspora. Alootook Ipellie and Sam Watson are both arguably writing from the perspective of trauma survivors, as a consequence of their childhood experiences and their belonging to cultural groups who have been subjected to genocidal practices. Perhaps more obviously, the narrators of their stories—

57 Ipellie’s unnamed shaman and Watson’s hybrid Kadaitcha character, Tommy— are survivors of periods of extreme cultural upheaval and even genocide.

Tal asserts that the key goal of trauma literature is change, and that the act of writing as a means of “bearing witness” is an aggressive one, representing a

“refusal to bow to outside pressure to revise or to repress experience, a decision to embrace conflict rather than conformity”(4). Certainly both authors’ works demonstrate a refusal to conform or promote accepted views of history, and instead, bear witness for those whose voices were silenced in colonial history and literature.

Tal’s argument that the “battle over the meaning of a traumatic experience is fought in the arena of popular discourse, popular culture, and scholarly debate”

(4) perhaps offers an insight into the choices made by the authors to include readily recognisable contemporary figures in their works, including the Christian

God, Superman and Brigitte Bardot in Ipellie’s stories, and thinly-disguised caricatures of prominent 1970s Queensland politicians in Watson’s The

Kadaitcha Sung. Tal asserts the importance of this kind of interaction in terms of a broader sociological perspective, arguing that the “outcome of this battle shapes the rhetoric of the dominant culture and influences further political action”

(4). It may also serve to explain why Ipellie creates a narrator-character who has remained in the Arctic and been allowed to practise his religion without interference, and why Watson’s tale is essentially a Stolen Generations’ narrative. Each author is attempting to find an acceptable—or at least, accessible—discourse in which to tell their otherwise unconventional stories.

Traditionally, the colonised voice has been characterised as stripped of power, minimalised or silenced altogether, as argued by Gayatri Spivak in her influential

58 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In these texts, the warriors battling for political action and social justice in the era of post-colonisation are shamans who have the power to negotiate the space between cultures. In the creation of his shaman-narrator, Ipellie presents an Indigenous voice who has not only retained the power of his native culture, but has also held onto the iconography of the colonising Christian Europeans. Furthermore, he has access to the supernatural powers of the spirit world. Watson’s Tommy also has unmitigated access to the realm of the spiritual, and is guided by dingo and kookaburra spirits, among others. A shaman has, by definition, the ability to negotiate a path between worlds—traditionally, the world of humans and the world of nature. Within the postcolonial context, this ability to live between two worlds is applied to the experiences of Indigenous peoples living in postcolonial nations.

Shamanic characters are inherently destabilising influences. Tim Fulford notes that the figure of the tribal “ ‘conjuror’ was astonishing because it defied the limits of the physical,” and suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the

Ancient Mariner” was influenced by a knowledge of shamanism learned from friends who had sailed in the West Indies and the Arctic (Fulford 159-63; Johnson

84).

Stephen O. Glosecki argues in Shamanism and Old English Poetry that the

shaman is a figure with a long history in Anglophone literature, and hence in

utilising these figures in their works, Ipellie and Watson are engaging in the

uncanny process of utilising traditional figures who are still somehow eerily

familiar to many readers. There is a long-held European fascination with

shamanistic beliefs, and key texts from the twentieth century dealt with

shamanism from an anthropological perspective, including the works of John Lee

59 Maddox, Mircea Eliade and Ioan Lewis. Writing in 1923, Maddox defined the shaman as a “mediator between gods and humans” (Maddox 25). Despite the patronising and essentialist tone one might expect from a text of this era, Maddox does at least recognise the psychological impetus behind a belief in shamanism, noting that

[i]f it is within the range of possibility for the soul not only to absent itself from the body but also to re-enter it, as, for example, in dreams, likewise it must be possible for another spirit to enter the body, make it sick, and do it even to death. (Maddox 9)

Glosecki suggests that the boar on Beowulf’s helmet in the early epic poem is symbolic of an ancient interest in animism, which underlies all shamanism

(Glosecki 53-6). He articulates the key defining features of shamanism as animism, ecstasy, therapy, initiation and assistance from spirit guides (Glosecki

11).

Eliade argues that the pre-eminent shamanic technique is an ability to create a passage “from one cosmic region to another—from earth to sky or from earth to underworld” (259). These kinds of cosmic journeys are evident in the works of

Ipellie and Watson, and are clearly a useful literary tool for interrogating ways of crossing imposed social boundaries in Indigenous diaspora. These critics seem to be in agreement that shamans practise ecstatic trances in order to heal their community (Eliade 289; Glosecki 11, 15; Kottler and Carson xiii; Lewis,

Arguments 92; Lewis, Ecstatic 49-53), and Lewis goes so far as to state that “[n]o clan is secure without its shaman” (Lewis, Ecstatic 53).

In a paper presented at the Fourth Conference of the International Society for

Shamanic Research, Ioan Lewis defines a shaman as an ecstatic healer and ritual expert (Lewis, Ecstatic 106). He cites Shirokogoroff’s presentation of the

60 shaman as a “master of spirits” and his assertion that a key characteristic of a shaman is a demonstrable ability to experience ecstasy “and a half-delirious hysterical condition ‘abnormal’ in European terms” (Lewis, Ecstatic 107-8). This

‘abnormality’ and ability to operate in a fluid and unfixed environment can not only be read as “queer,” but also may suggest a reason for the fascination of minority writers with the trope of shamanism. Shamans are able to confidently traverse the spaces between their inherited traditions and a culture which is significantly different from their own.

Mabans or shamans are thus naturally “queer” or unstable figures who undermine norms. Theorists such as Alexander Doty and David Buchbinder argue that whilst the term ‘queer’ has often been used as a signifier of “non- heterosexual, non-traditionally gendered individuals and groups” (Buchbinder

149), ‘queerness’ as a theoretical concept is rather more elusive (Buchbinder

149). Doty argues that

[h]omosexuals as well as heterosexuals can operate or mediate from within straight cultural spaces and positions—after all, most of us grew up learning the riles of straight culture—[but] we have paid less attention to the proposition that basically heterocentrist texts can contain queer elements, and basically heterosexual, straight-identifying people can experience queer moments. And these people should be encouraged to examine and express these moments as queer … the cultural ‘queer space’ recognizes the possibility that various and fluctuating queer positions might be occupied whenever anyone produces or responds to culture. (Doty 3)

In other words, as Buchbinder asserts, readers experience queer moments when

“reading texts or understanding situations from a reading position which one would not normally occupy” (Buchbinder 166). Buchbinder asserts that

‘queerness’ “seeks to defy and thence to destabilise” (152), and that queer readings undermine ideological boundaries and blur the boundaries between them; they also advocate a spectrum of subject positions in relation to performances of sex, gender and sexuality. Each of these texts introduces a

61 protagonist who is culturally “Othered” through his Indigeneity; who is able to seek the familiar in unfamiliar environments, and who has atypical relationships with the people around him. These characters continually undermine often- accepted binaries about black and white, straight and queer, thereby forcing non- marginalised members of the reading audience into a more marginalised reading position.

In his study Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Michael Taussig suggests that part of the ‘hysteria’ of the shaman is the experience of moving into the dangerous territory of the dead (Taussig 7). This sense of reincarnation into a more powerful, more spiritual being, confused early missionaries in the Arctic, who struggled in vain to translate traditional Inuit beliefs into Christian terminology. The conferring of supernatural powers through an experience with death is indicated in anthropological studies of the Inuit (Merkur 240), and is directly reflected in the writings of Ipellie (17-25) and Watson (The Kadaitcha

Sung, 17-22; 162-7; 311-2). Death, like postcolonial loss or social exile, produces possibilities for resistance and access to powers not previously available. One of the consolations of the victims of history is the belief that the dead have not departed in vain. In many cases this gives rise to testimony and recovery of silenced histories as a basis for protest and claims for reparation. In some instances, as with shamanism, it rests on a conviction that the dead are not gone altogether, but can return or be contacted in uncanny encounters that destabilise the uniform ‘reality’ of dominant history and present regimes of power.

The choice of shamanism and shape shifting, then, as tropes for Indigenous writers, seems obvious; the special powers and attributes of their characters are a metaphor for both the cultures that have resisted an attempted cultural

62 genocide, and the authors whose voices have not been silenced by the colonial process. The shaman functions both literally and as a metaphor in the text, albeit one with different meanings in each author’s interpretation. For Ipellie, the traumas of his childhood experiences with his stepfather’s alcoholism, medical treatment and schooling in the South, and his lack of a stable childhood home, manifested in a form of selective mutism which he could only really counteract through his artworks, cartoons and writing. Watson, on the other hand, uses his youthful shamanic protagonist as a voice for young Indigenous Australians, and

Tommy’s bicultural identity and urban lifestyle counteract widely-accepted stereotypes within Australia about what a ‘real’ Aboriginal person is or should be.

The shaman, then, becomes a metaphor for strength and community, reflecting

Watson’s political beliefs which remain largely unaltered since the days when he helped establish the Australian arm of the Black Panthers in the 1970s. Ipellie and Watson, like the characters to whom they give voice, are wordsmiths. They have harnessed the discursive power of the hybrid, using the English-language literary industry to produce figures who are able to split and syncretise power from two sources: animal and human, natural and supernatural. Symbolically, they are rewriting the colonial practice of viewing the Indigene as sub-human or as doomed to death.

Taussig further argues that the presence of powerful, non-Christian religious leaders in the form of shamans provided colonisers the world over with an “Other” against which to set up their binary codes—wildness versus order, and shamanism versus Christianity. He writes,

[i]n place of order in God and steadfastness in his signifiers’ signatures where the divine and the natural fuse, the domain of chance foregrounds the epistemic murk of sorcery where contradiction and ambiguity in social relations undermine his steadfastness in a weltering of signs cracking the divine and the natural apart

63 from one another and into images from which what Barthes called the third or obtuse meaning erupts into play. (Taussig 465-6)

The third meaning to which he refers is an “obtuse meaning [that] appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information …” (Barthes 54-5). Here it must be noted that the obtuse meaning refers to culture, knowledge and information outside the dominant culture. For those writers outside this culture, then, harnessing the powers of the shaman and the third meaning is a political choice as well as a literary one, since it is drawing attention to a culture which colonial history has marginalised and attempted to erase.

Ipellie and Watson also seek to blur ideological boundaries and to allow multiple ways of identifying as Inuit or Aboriginal, rather than these terms being constructed as binary opposites to Euro-Canadian or Anglo-Australian settlers.

Moreover, the characters they have created in the texts studied here demonstrate at times quite radical performances of masculinity. In each case, the main protagonist is a hyper-masculine figure, not bound by hegemonic Christian mores of monogamy. In Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung, he has also constructed a character whose sexuality is never clearly defined; although Tommy’s cousin

Boonger has a steady girlfriend to whom he is committed, and he speaks in disparaging terms about men who identify as homosexual, he seeks homosexual sex both inside and outside of prison. “Queer theory” has been defined by Wendy

Pearson as the

various attempts to interrogate and bring into visibility an understanding of the world … that takes on as its basis the assumption that queer subjects can be represented in culture and, further, that it is possible to recuperate a history of representation of sexual dissidence in culture that has been rendered invisible … by societal insistence on the primacy of heteronormativity. (Pearson 80)

In both texts, the dominant beliefs of the colonising societies in terms of sexuality and race are often marginalised, placing readers from the mainstream into an

64 unfamiliar or ‘queer’ reading space where heteronormativity is questioned through the presentation of alternative expressions of human sexuality.

The shamanic figures in these texts share some qualities with the archetype of the trickster, another ‘queer’ figure of unfixed identity. Penny Petrone defines the trickster as being anti-social, a hero and a fool; at once an everyman and no-one

(Petrone, Native 16). In some ways he23 is the antithesis of the shaman, in that

he mocks the gods. Although superior to humans by virtue of the ability to shape-

shift, the trickster figure is a flawed character in that he is self-centred, impulsive,

and able to be outsmarted by humans (A. Grant 25). Despite his prankster status, however, the majority of his actions are not malevolent, but rather, often prove to be beneficial to humanity.

The similarities between tricksters and shamans, then, lie in the super-human qualities available to them, namely knowledge, power and the ability to change form. It is for these reasons that they are powerful figures for marginalised writers, including those examined here.

Negotiating Borders

The texts focussed on in this project deal largely with issues of border crossing and liminality. The protagonist in each work is able to move between different worlds, just as their creators—Indigenous men in colonised nations—function within and identify with two quite different cultural paradigms. The authors and their characters share a diasporic sensibility, in that they are not quite “at home”

in either of their two cultures.

23 It should be noted that the trickster is traditionally without gender, but the usual English translation uses the pronoun “he.” See Highway, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, 12.

65

Ideas about border slippage function at all levels of this thesis. On a structural level, the project is necessarily interdisciplinary in nature. Literature does not exist in isolation, and the creative output of these two writers, forged in the crucible of colonialism, is heavily influenced by the history and politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The textual analysis draws on a number of intersecting methodologies including postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, diaspora studies, shamanism, and queer theory. Indeed, both authors cross genre borders within their works and also their boundaries between artist and political activist.

Finally, on a philosophical level, there is an intellectual border transgression of sorts, in that a non-Indigenous person is applying these kinds of critical theories to the works of Indigenous authors, and that I seek to gain academic standing from doing so. I am the first to admit that this is a problematic subject position. I also believe, however, that non-Indigenous critics opting not to analyse works by

Indigenous authors replicates colonialist silencing practices. In an attempt to at least partially mitigate the politics of this situation, I have interviewed and maintained correspondence with both authors, in an attempt to ensure that their messages are not overwhelmed by the voice of the academy, and that their views are not culturally misread. I am placing a certain amount of faith in Gayatri

Chakraborty Spivak’s assertion that those who “criticise, having earned the right to do so … are indeed taking a risk and … will probably be made welcome, and can hope to be judged with respect” (Spivak in Harasym 63).

In this thesis I have endeavoured to follow the advice of those scholars before me who exhorted that one must always “historicise” and “indigenise.” Prem Poddar

66 and David Johnson argue in their preface to the 2005 volume A Historical

Companion to Postcolonial Thought in English that Fredric Jameson’s injunction

“‘always historicise’ reverberates like a mantra in postcolonial literary criticism”

(Poddar and Johnson vi). Thus the two core texts in this thesis are prefaced by chapters which deal, in detail, with the colonial histories, biographies and works of the two authors chosen for study. The perspectives of the writers and extra- textual political issues at the time of their writing have shaped the production of their fiction.

I will initially focus on the Canadian work, with the first part of the thesis offering an analysis of Alootook Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares and some of his poetry, art, cartoons and short prose, précised with contain contextual information about the colonisation of the Canadian Arctic and its people, the Inuit in Chapter

One. It follows the impact of early visits by whalers, traders and European

‘explorers’ on the lives of the locals, but more particularly looks at the influence of

Christian missionaries and the accretion of Christian symbolism into Inuit belief systems; the impact on traditional life that resulted from mainstream schooling and the removal of children from the Arctic for purposes of the same; and medical interventions which also necessitated mass and often repeated removals of Inuit to the South.

All of these processes effectively created an Inuit diaspora within Canada’s national borders, and Chapter Two highlights how these colonialist practices impacted on Alootook Ipellie personally. Chapter Three contains detailed analysis of Ipellie’s writings and other art, examining how the shamanic figure he favoured in his creative works negotiated this diasporic condition between two cultures, and how his own lived experiences informed his work. Throughout his career he

67 continued to challenge notions of containment in his life, artwork, and writing and used the diaspora space to contest accepted images of what he often termed the

“humble Eskimo.” Accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings that fused images from

Euro-Canadian ‘pop’ culture, traditional Inuit folklore, and Ipellie’s own dreams in a thought-provoking way, a deeper appreciation of the stories is available to those readers with knowledge of Inuit traditions. Thus the non-Inuit reader, supplied only with information from the texts of the dominant print-literary culture, is ‘marginalised’ through the interaction with the text, thus creating a reversal of the culturally-alien (and largely Christian religious), texts first proffered to Inuit by the colonisers and missionaries who introduced their literacy to the Arctic.

The second half of the thesis follows a similar process with the second author,

Murri writer and activist Sam Watson, from South-Eastern Queensland in

Australia. Chapter Four outlines colonialist practices within Australia, touching on universalised processes, especially in the original colony of Port Jackson

(Sydney) and in Tasmania, where a great deal of historical evidence of genocidal colonialist practices has been uncovered, but focussing more specifically on the

Durundur and Cherbourg reserves of South-Eastern Queensland, from whence the identifying term “Murri” originated, and where The Kadaitcha Sung is partially set.

In many ways, Queensland provides an ideal setting for a novel about frontier conflict in Australia, for it has been described as “Australia’s Deep North” by Eva

Rask Knudsen (283). The state was also unusual in that in the Southern regions, frontier brutality continued late into the nineteenth century, even as those in the far north were able to continue living according to traditional practices for “the tropics were too discouraging for pastoralists or agriculturalists” (Breward 167).

68

The Kadaitcha Sung focusses on shamanism and traditional magic, allowing for an exploration of spirituality and power from two cultural sources—that of the colonised and of the coloniser. The hybridised character of Tommy Gubba grapples with complex issues of identity and cultural belonging. Set in and around contemporary Brisbane, the novel is simultaneously located within the realms of traditional Murri culture and spirituality. Like his Kadaitcha enemies,

Tommy appropriates aspects of the colonising culture in an attempt to eradicate the intruders. This appropriation is portrayed as a survival strategy in a violent world where Indigenous peoples are either ignored or are targets of racially- motivated violence. As with Ipellie, Watson utilises focalising techniques such as free indirect discourse and extensive use of dialogue so that the reader can empathise with the Indigenous characters’ viewpoints.

Again, the influences of church and educational institutions on relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples are examined. Chapter Five outlines Sam

Watson’s personal history and his political activities as an Aboriginal rights activist in Queensland, and how his familial relationships have impacted on his subsequent writing. Chapter Six is a detailed analysis of his writings, primarily his novel The Kadaitcha Sung, but also noting the thematic similarities which permeate his other works and his plans for the novels which will complete the

Kadaitcha trilogy. Throughout his creative works, Watson utilises shamanic figures who negotiate the interstices between Indigenous and mainstream

Australia, and also examines the responses of different generations to contemporary race relations.

69 My aim in this thesis is to introduce into the postcolonial arena two writers who have been overlooked or been considered problematic, and to suggest the idea of Indigenous diaspora as an appropriate tool for understanding their texts, mediated by the figure of the shaman. This is done with an attention to specificity, and by acknowledging that neither represents “the” postcolonial voice, but that each is an example of myriad possible postcolonialities.

70

CHAPTER 1:

A PLACE OF TERROR AND LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES—

ARCTIC “EXPLORATION” AND INUIT HISTORY

Just because we live in wooden houses does not mean that we have stopped being Inuit. Maybe because we live in wooden houses, we have become stronger as Inuit.

Inuit elder24

Colonialism and the Inuit

This chapter will outline how the traditional Inuit culture of ancient times and more recent colonial history combined to influence the life and works of Alootook

Ipellie. The process of colonisation in the Arctic created a culture clash between shamanic practises and romantic Victorian notions of the far North which have permeated Inuit material culture over the past several decades. Colonial practices of enforced removal and separation from family and traditional lands

(often known as “country,” in the Australian context) have created the diasporic condition which informs Ipellie’s work and which is deftly negotiated by the shamanic characters which he creates.

The Inuit of the Arctic have a commonality of language and traditional stories, despite being spread across some six thousand kilometres of frozen coastline and divided broadly into eight cultural groups. Their traditional domains span the modern nation-states of Canada, the United States, Russian Siberia and

24 Unnamed in Original. Bennett and Rowley, Uqalaruit, xxii

71 Greenland. Radiocarbon dating of sites near Pond Inlet and Igloolik attest to some four thousand years of continuous human occupation (Wachowich in

Robinson 131). Today’s Inuit are believed to be descended from the Thule people, right-whale hunters who migrated across the Bering Strait over a thousand years ago, and who replaced the pre-Dorset culture remembered in

Inuit mythology as the Tuniit (Wachowich in Robinson 131). Anthropologists such as Bernard Saladin d’Anglure believe that the Thule had episodic contact with the

Vikings between late tenth and early fifteenth centuries.

The Arctic has long held a fascination for other cultures, with European attempts to explore the Arctic and discover the fabled “North West Passage” to Cathay

(modern-China) beginning as early as 1497, when Venetian Giovanni Caboto— recorded in Anglo histories as John Cabot—convinced King Henry VII of England that by sailing west at high latitudes he could uncover a short route to the Orient.

Caboto’s letters from the King afforded him licence to “subdue, occupy and possess …any village, town, castle, isle or mainland newly found” (Armstrong

148). He claimed Newfoundland for the British Crown, but his quest to find the fabled passage failed. Many who followed believed in his theory, and, according to Hugh Brody, “little enough was known about Arctic geography that each expedition could claim [that earlier ones had] been looking in the wrong place and express the certainty that they would succeed” (Brody in Robinson 128).

As exploration of the Arctic continued, European interest in its inhabitants grew.

By 1567 the first “display Eskimos” had been taken as live curios, and were presented at Antwerp and the Augsburg Fair (d’Anglure 205). An Inuit woman and her young daughter were captured by French sailors after they killed the woman’s husband in a confrontation on the Labrador coast. “Portrait of savages,”

72 a woodcut completed in Augsburg at the time, is the earliest known European artistic representation of Inuit, and marks the beginning of almost three centuries of interest in the “Arctic pygmies,” as they were then commonly known (205).

These displays of Inuit only fuelled European interest in the Arctic and its inhabitants. Exploratory parties led by Martin Frobisher (1576), John Davis (1585-

7) and Henry Hudson (1610) followed, and significant geographical features were named after them, including Davis Inlet, Hudson’s Bay, and Frobisher Bay, where

Ipellie was born. As Armstrong notes, these early expeditions were generally peaceful, as the explorers did not seek lands, resources (Armstrong 152) or indeed, permanent residence.

By the late eighteenth century, European missionaries were making concerted efforts to both colonise and Christianise the Inuit. Lutheran Danes and German

Moravian missionaries entered western Greenland at this time, and Orthodox

Russian missionaries entered Eastern Siberia and Alaska soon after (d’Anglure

207). The first missionaries in Canada’s Arctic were Moravians, who arrived in

Nain, Labrador in 1771. In Canada’s central Arctic, the evangelical process did not truly begin, however, until the late nineteenth century, although some Inuit had been converted to Christianity through their contact with whalers and explorers in the intervening years.

The display of Inuit in Europe would be an ongoing practice for several hundred years. Their use as live curios in zoos and other exhibitions, and their conversion to Christianity, would notably converge in the journey of the Inuk whose tale is recounted as The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab (2005), illustrated by Alootook Ipellie.

73 The text has long been regarded as the first example of Inuit autobiography,25 but has only recently been translated from German and published in Canada. It tells the story of a group of display Inuit who were exhibited at Hagenbeck’s Zoo in

Hamburg in 1880, and later in Prague, Frankfurt, Darstadt and Paris (Lutz xxiii- xxiv). In the summer of that year, Adrian Jacobsen had arrived in Labrador, seeking Inuit willing to participate in “Volkerschauen”—people’s shows—in

Europe. Three years earlier, he had led a group of Inuit to Hamburg. The tour had been a success and the Inuit had returned to the Arctic in good health, and having earned a considerable amount of money. The second voyage would not enjoy similar successes, however. Danish authorities banned any Greenlandic

Inuit from participating, and Jacobsen moved north to Hebron, where he was met with further resistance from the Moravian missionaries, who protested against

Christian people being exhibited in zoos (Lutz xvii). Jacobsen complained that undertaking a journey to Europe was seen by the missionaries as synonymous with “doom” (Lutz xviii). He hired a guide and translator, Abraham Ulrikab, to accompany him further North in search of unconverted Inuit. They hired Terrianik and his wife Paingo, who were both shamans, and were to be accompanied by their teenage daughter Noggasake (Lutz xviii). After considerable lobbying by the

Hudson’s Bay Company trader, Mr Ford, Abraham and his family were finally persuaded to disobey the missionaries and join the expedition. Abraham, his wife

Ulrike, their young daughters Sara and Maria, and Ulrike’s nephew, Tobias, set sail for Hamburg on August 26.

Although Jacobson’s co-opting of Abraham could hardly be described as a kidnap, the Inuk’s financial circumstances meant that he had only limited choices available to him. In correspondence included in the volume, a Moravian

25 See Robin McGrath’s doctoral study and Penny Petrone’s Northern Voices.

74 missionary, Brother Kretschmer, noted that Abraham and his family had “suffered great poverty” the previous year, yet he had been too proud to accept assistance from the alms box (Lutz 10). The opportunity for both himself and other members of his family to earn regular money must have seemed an answer to the neophyte Christian’s prayers. Abraham and his family joined the family of the shaman Terrianik on the Eisbar. Jacobsen made the fatal decision to wait until their arrival in Germany before vaccinating the Inuit, but was himself hospitalised and the vaccinations were never organised. All eight Inuit died of smallpox within weeks of arriving in Europe (Lutz xix-xx).

By this time some Inuit in other parts of the Arctic had had ongoing contact with

Europeans. Between 1719 and 1778, more than three thousand Dutch ships carried out whaling activity in Davis Strait. As many as thirty-five ships would arrive as the ice broke, and leave when the new ice began to form (Edwards

239). Inuit were employed as seasonal workers by the whalers, who supported their haul of whale products by trading Southern goods such as,

rifles, ammunition, knives, sewing needles, flour, sugar, tea, tobacco, and metal pots for caribou meat, furs, skin clothing, artefacts, and ivory. Wood brought from the South began to permanently replace bone and antler, changing the style of qamatiks, tents and sod-houses. (Wachowich in Robinson 133)

As these items came to be used, traditional Inuit diet, clothing and ways of doing things were steadily modified. Even more devastating than these cultural changes was the impact of the whalers on the health of the Inuit community.

Diseases to which the Inuit had no immunity, including tuberculosis, venereal diseases and acute infections severely reduced the population. In one recorded incident, a “virulent gastric or enteric infection” which originated on the Dundee whaler Active, eradicated a distinctive Inuit group known as the Sallimurt. In 1902 all fifty-eight members of the group inhabiting Shugliak, or Southampton Island,

75 as the Europeans called it, came into contact with the disease. All bar one adult woman and four children died. Within four years the woman had also passed away, and the children were adopted by another local group (Vaughan 142).

Whaling crews also continued the practice of taking Inuit to their homelands and presenting them to curious Europeans. There are records of a number of Inuit travelling to Scotland and New England with whaling crews, and in some instances, children attended school in these places. In these circumstances, too, a number of travellers succumbed to disease and failed to return (Eber 95-6).

By 1850 year-round shore stations in places like Cumberland Sound meant that there was an ongoing European presence in the Arctic (J. Edwards 239) which was generally accepted as being permanent. This was to be short-lived, however, as by the end of the nineteenth century bowhead whales had become almost extinct from overhunting, and the Northern whaling industry collapsed. After some sixty-five years in the area, the sudden absence of the whalers was puzzling to the Inuit, who had adapted their lifestyles during the prolonged contact with

Europeans. As Leah Arnaujaq recalls,

[e]very time the whalers went they would leave food behind for the Inuit … They would give a lot of sweets and candies to the children and put biscuits … orange marmalade and butter too, all in huge containers …We were kind of regretful because we remembered how good their food had tasted and we remembered everybody getting together like a big family. When the whalers left, the big family feeling was gone. (qtd. in Eber 98)

Some whaling crews started trapping Arctic fox, however, and supplied various

Inuit communities with the resources and skills which would lead to the fur- trapping industry (J. Edwards 239).

Members of the British Royal Navy began to arrive in the Arctic in the early 1800s and continued to have a presence throughout the nineteenth century. The long

76 sea voyages were emblematic of the Victorian fascination with imperialism, exploration, and romantic notions of the Arctic North. Between 1818 and 1828, the Admiralty undertook twelve Arctic expeditions with varying degrees of success. Two aimed to reach the North Pole, another four sought to discover the

North West Passage, and yet another four were sent to survey the northern mainland coast of North America. Of these expeditions, the only two which

enjoyed any measure of success were Franklin’s first (1819) and Richardson’s

overland attempts (1822) to map the North Coast (Vaughan 137-8).

Despite the large number of failed expeditions, the publication of explorers’

diaries was greeted with “romantic enthusiasm” by the Victorian readers in

Britain. Indeed, Admiral William Parry, despite leading four expeditions which

failed to meet their goals, was treated as a conquering hero in Europe, and was

knighted in 1827 (Parry in Robinson 50). He and George Lyon were the first white

people to “overwinter” in the Igloolik region. In 1824 both men published books

about their voyages, which were illustrated with Lyon’s pen-and-ink drawings.

Consequently the Inuit of the Central Canadian Arctic became the “Eskimo of our

imagination” (Brody 128). The reported good humour and stoicism of the Inuit

were seen as desirable traits to which factory workers in the newly industrial

world should aspire (Brody 129). Ironically, these drawings would be used by

Inuit some one hundred and seventy-five years later in order to recreate details of

Inuit life pre-European contact for the first Inuktitut feature film, Atanarjuat

(d’Anglure 205-7).

Given European interest in the Arctic at the time, it is perhaps no surprise that

writers began to use it in literature as the ultimate uncharted space. Indeed, the

first description of Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s famous 1818 Gothic

77 novel Frankenstein is described as though glimpsed from a ship in Arctic waters.

As Hugh Brody has argued in The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the

Shaping of the World:

Mary Shelley needed a place of mythic dimensions for the launch of her terrifying tale. She herself had been to northern Canada—along with many English readers who shared in the armchair search for a Northwest Passage and an abundance of bowhead whales—only in her imagination. (Brody 127)

Indeed, Shelley’s work is also a “wry metafictional nod to Samuel Taylor

Coleridge” because of her

entangling Coleridge’s tale of a nightmare journey to the South pole within the imaginative geography of specifically northern gothic tradition. The allusion could hardly be more apt. As John Livingston Lowes points out, Coleridge’s extensive reading of northern exploration narratives meant that even though [t]he Mariner’s ice- fields swim in Antarctic seas […] the ice itself is good Arctic ice, seen, heard and felt in the ‘infernal bitter cold’ of Barents’s Sea, and in the ‘stinking fogge’ of Hudson’s Bay, and off the ‘snowy Clifts’ of Greenland and Spitzbergen’ (Lowes 1927, 139). For this reason, Mary Shelley’s tongue-in-cheek reinvention of the Ancient Mariner as native northern explorer Robert Warton is less an instance of cartographic alchemy, than a ‘South is North, where the albatross is shot’ (Lowes 1927, 139) and an explicit reappropriation of Coleridge’s poem for the psychic geography of an Arctic sublime in which ice-choked landscapes provide the backdrop for daemonic encounters between the Romantic self and its monstrous doubles. (Johnson 84)

The Canadian Arctic, then, becomes a space literally at the end of the earth, and on the edges of maps and presumably, therefore, of civilisation—a space which was terrifying but which simultaneously offered limitless possibilities. It was a space of doubling and one which could conceivably be inhabited by supernaturally ‘queer’ or uncanny creatures.

European attempts to find the fabled North West Passage continued until John

Franklin’s 1845 expedition, from which no one returned. Franklin’s infamous second expedition had captured the imagination of British society and was largely representative of that society’s imperialist mindset. The expedition has been described as the ‘climax of Victorian Britain’s passion for conquest; as arrogant and heroic as any expedition in history” (Osmond). England had already

“conquered” half the globe. Franklin, a former governor of the Australian colony of

78 Tasmania, was “hoping for one last shot at glory before retirement” (Osmond).

This would be the best funded and best equipped expedition ever undertaken, and the latest technology would be applied to all aspects of the quest, from keeping meat supplies fresh and heating cabins, to cladding the hulls in iron and using fifteen tonne locomotive engines in an attempt to combat the ice. As Arctic explorer Benedict Allen explained, “[t]his would be their fortress” (Osmond); the ship would remain a cocoon of civilisation, a barrier against the primitive world of the Arctic. The leaders of the expedition had no intention of utilising the knowledge of the local inhabitants; rather, they saw the ice as an enemy to be conquered. Ironically, Indigenous knowledge could not only have saved members of the original expedition, but could also have provided useful insights to prevent

a repetition of its failure.

The fate of this expedition is, of course, now legendary. Only three hundred miles

into the ice, on Beechy Island, they lost the first three of their sailors. Beside the

men’s graves was left a pile of tin cans which had contained meat. In 1984, the

preserved bodies were exhumed and autopsied by forensic scientists. Test

conducted on the sailors’ soft tissue at Trent University in the 1990s confirmed

that lead used in the solder of the tins had killed the men. Ironically, the best of

European technology, rather than ensuring the success of the expedition,

contributed to its ultimate failure (Osmond).

Contemporary scientists monitor the ice in the Arctic using satellite technology,

but Franklin and his crew had no knowledge of the area. Further, tests of the ice

core from the time showed that the expedition had coincided with a season of

permanent winter, leaving the ships trapped in the ice year round. In 1847

Franklin himself succumbed to illness and died, and the following year, the

79 remaining crew decided to abandon ship and walk to safety. They were six hundred miles from civilisation and the Admiralty had not envisaged that the men would need equipment to traverse one of the harshest environments on earth. In

1859 a search party found a boat and a heavy oak sled, containing what Arctic historian Russell Potter has described as

strange relics of Victorian culture; The Vicar of Wakefield, prayer books, New Testaments in French, carpet slippers, chocolate, tea, button polishers, buttons, a silver plate and utensils—all the detritus of this inner culture of the ships that they’d tried to take with them. (Osmond)

Their last desperate attempt to carry their world with them also contributed to their demise since the men, weakened by lead poisoning and scurvy, were in no state to cope with the weight of this additional burden. When the boat was discovered, it was pointing in the wrong direction—the men had been heading back to the ships (Osmond; see also Beattie and Geiger; and Atwood Strange).

The failure of the Franklin expedition created a spate of more than thirty expeditions in search of the journals and remains of Franklin’s crew members, some of which were sponsored by his widow, Lady Jane Franklin (Beattie 47;

Armstrong 152). Charles Hall undertook three voyages, the last of which proved to be fatal (C. Hall 52). Hall’s papers were incomplete, but his journal alerted

Europeans to the possibility of using dogsleds as a mode of transportation in the

North (Robinson 207). Hall’s journey was also noteworthy in that Inuit led him to the campsites of Martin Frobisher, who had made three voyages to the area between 1576 and 1578. The stories of Frobisher’s arguments with the Inuit had passed from father to son for over three hundred years, and their information was still accurate—their account of where Frobisher had picked up rocks which he thought may contain gold corresponded exactly with Frobisher’s log (Inuttitut 16).

80 26 Hall reported that there had been a second attempt to walk off the ice, in 1850.

Two elderly Inuit, Tikiita and Oruwam, recounted that they had been sealing when they discovered some white men, led by an officer, on the ice. The men had asked for food, and signalled that two ships were in the ice to the North. He mimed to the Inuit that a ship had been crushed in the ice. The sailors were starving, because they did not know how to hunt seal or caribou, but could only shoot small birds for meat. Historians have long been aware of the irony that the expeditions would have been far more successful had the European explorers been prepared to accept local knowledge from the Indigenous people that their societies were so keen to civilise and save.

That same year, an Inuk had an encounter with a group of men still living on the ship in the ice. He said that the men on board were all black, and that they would not let him get away until the Captain intervened. The Captain warned the Inuk that he and his people must avoid the camp on the island nearby. It was not until

1994, when Anne Keenleyside of Trent University examined some bone fragments from the site, that any explanation for this warning could be found.

According to Keenleyside, the bones contained:

very distinct cut marks … [often] in the vicinity of the joints. Some of the bones would have been covered by a lot of flesh or soft tissue. We also found cuts, interestingly, in the bones of the hands and feet. And the hands and the feet are probably the most human parts of the body, apart from the face … I think this evidence is strongly suggestive of cannibalism among these Franklin crewmembers. I don’t see any other possible explanation for those cutmarks. (in Osmond)

Clearly, this action did not coincide with the views of the public at home as to the valour and integrity of the Royal British Admiralty. The nature of their testimony may well have been one of the reasons why early reports from whalers that the

26 Inuttitut magazine was published under the authority of the then-Minister for Indian Affairs and Northern Development (and later, Prime Minister) Mr Jean Chretien. Neither the Editor’s nor the contributors’ names are listed, reflecting the prevailing attitude of the time that Indigenous people were not recognised on an individual basis, but rather, were collectively the responsibility of a government department.

81 Inuit had knowledge of the fate of the Franklin crew were ignored by the expeditions which came afterwards (Gilder). The other likely reason is that their oral testimony was believed to be inherently flawed because literature was privileged over orature in British society.

In the 1870s Captain Barry would report that, whilst his whaling ship the “Glacier” was frozen in on Repulse Bay, he had contact with local Inuit who reported that a

“stranger in uniform,” accompanied by a number of other white men, had visited them some years before. They said that although all the men had died, the “chief” had stored a great quantity of papers in a cairn, where other articles, including silverware had since been found. Another group of Inuit had visited in 1876, and noted that they had seen a book like Barry’s logbook previously, “and having told him this, one of them gave him a spoon engraved with the word ‘Franklin’”

(Gilder).

Based on this evidence, Frederick Schwatka led an expedition to the Arctic which departed England on June 19, 1878. On board was Joseph Ebierburg, better known as “Eskimaux Joe,” who had worked with Captain Hall and was an Inuk from the area of the Arctic where Franklin’s crew were believed to have perished.

In contrast to previous expeditions, Schwatka capitalised on local Inuit knowledge, choosing a summer exploration, so that there would be plentiful game to hunt, and allowing Inuit guides to choose the dogs and prepare the sleds. It was the first expedition where the white explorers voluntarily adopted the local diet and wore kamiks. In 1879 Schwatka interviewed an elderly Inuk and her son, who recalled seeing qallunaat27 dragging two lifeboats—one containing human remains, the other books—some years earlier. Schwatka’s team brought

27 “Qallunaat,” which literally means “hairy eyebrows,” is the Inuktitut name given to the white colonisers upon first contact.

82 back a number of relics from the failed expedition, and mapped many of the crew’s graves, after asking locals where the white men were buried. An English newspaper report from September 25, 1888 noted that the expedition was a great success because it provided a “safeguard against desecration by wandering wild beasts and heedless Eskimaux” (Gilder). It was not until 1982 that another expedition sought to capitalise on local Inuit knowledge. As a result of this approach, Owen Beattie recorded the location of more graves of the crew

(Beattie, 69-70).

It has been argued that Franklin ultimately failed because of his colonialist attitudes, for he was

of a breed of imperial officers who believed in the subjugation of natives by civilisation, carrying silver plates and crystal decanters … [at the expense of] essentials, as well as an unwillingness or inability to learn survival techniques from the natives. (John Franklin)

It is now apparent that the repeated refusal to consider local knowledge or information was central to the failure of many of these early attempts by

Europeans to navigate the Arctic. The survival of the Inuit, in contrast, has largely been predicated on a willingness to consider useful knowledge from colonising cultures and the accretion of some aspects of these cultures with more traditional systems of knowledge.

Despite this prolonged history of contact with whalers and explorers from Britain,

France, Norway, Denmark and the United States, all of whom employed Inuit as sledge-drivers, harpooners and seamstresses, during the first four hundred years or so of Arctic exploration the transition from a culture of orature towards one based on literacy was slow. Moravian missionaries began to teach the fundamentals of Christianity and writing to the Labrador people of the East coast

83 of Canada in the late 1700s, but it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the widely used syllabic system was introduced. This occurred when the Wesleyan missionary Edmund James Peck, known to the Inuit as Okhamuk, established a permanent mission on Baffin Island, and modified the system of syllabics previously developed by his colleague James Evans for use with the

Cree people (Petrone, Northern Voices xii-xiii). The syllabic system was so well adopted, however, that Kublu, Laugrad and Oosten argue that the “Inuit may have been even more literate than the average European country at the turn of the century” (Kublu et al 122). Most literacy was linked specifically to

Christianity—the reading of Bibles and hymn books, for example—or for practical uses such as letter writing and accounting. D’Anglure argues that syllabic writing acted as a

Trojan horse. Surreptiously, it let in an invisible cohort of Christian values and concepts, hidden among the little esoteric characters … As Inuit began to read the Bible in their own tongue, they were struck by its unyielding constancy and authority—in stark contrast to the variable, adaptable forms of the shaman’s teachings and messages. (d’Anglure 225)

The apparently absolute truths of Christianity must have held some appeal in the harsh and uncertain Arctic climate, for early twentieth century “explorers” found rapidly diminishing evidence of shamanic practices. In 1901 Franz Boas published The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson’s Bay, based on the notes and artefacts collected by former whaler George Comer, and by Boas himself on a later excursion into the Arctic. While this work dealt extensively with shamanistic practices, by the time Knud Rasmussen undertook the Fifth Thule Expedition of

1921-24, only eighty shamans remained in the greater Igloolik area (d’Anglure

207). Rasmussen noted with enthusiasm the number of houses which had posted a white flag above their doors as a sign of the occupants’ conversion to

Christianity, and remarked upon a group of Inuit greeting him with a hymn, which

84 they “bungled … a little, but there was no mistaking the earnestness and pious feeling which inspired it” (Rasmussen in Robinson 119).

By the 1940s, the Pentecostal missionaries had made their way to the central

Arctic, and with their openness to trances, had been singularly successful in their evangelical mission. Their brand of fundamentalism was such that the Manichean concept of everything outside of Christianity being the Devil’s work was embraced, and all the remaining shamans were converted to Christianity.

According to d’Anglure, about thirty of these converts were still living in the area in the 1970s, but “virtually none are alive today” (d’Anglure 209-11). D’Anglure argues that some shamanic beliefs remain. One example of this is that most Inuit still believe in a symbiotic relationship between the receiver of a name and the person from whom it was inherited. Past shamans, of course, are also remembered through this naming process. He further contends that many Inuit still believe in ijirait (spirits), but that in the absence of shamans as intermediaries, their mediatory function has

increasingly been taken by psychiatric therapists or evangelical exorcists … Currently, no room is left for traditional Inuit spirituality and shamanism in the Canadian Arctic, except as an object of scorn in the hospitals of the Whites and the hell of the Christians. (211)

Modern-day artists such as Ipellie, the sculptor David-Ruben Piqtoukun and film- makers including Elisapie Isaac and the Isuma team, all seek to reclaim a space wherein there is room for these traditional notions of spirituality.

Canadian law and order were the last bastions of colonisation to reach the Arctic.

A few outposts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were established throughout the 1920s, and in 1922 the first murder trial was held in Pond Inlet.

Robert Janes, a white trader and former gold hunter, was shot by his interpreter

85 Nuqallaq after threatening to kill the dogs of the Inuk and his extended family (S.

Grant 76-77). Under Inuit law it was acceptable to end the life of anyone whose behaviour was deviant, threatening, or unbalanced, and who thus posed a threat to the community (S. Grant 19-20). This was at odds, of course, with Canadian law, which viewed the incident as an example of premeditated murder, and which to this day views insanity as a criminal defence, rather than as a justification for the termination of the life of another (S. Grant 19-20). Historian Shelagh Grant convincingly argues that the unprecedented decision to try Nuqallaq and two accomplices with murder, was more about exercising control over what had previously been a “lawless frontier” (S. Grant 128) than it was about justice.

The prime motivation of the Canadian Government in finally moving to colonise the area was somewhat atypical, in that it was to maintain border controls. As

Grant notes, there was

no official Inuit policy … until after the Second World War. Although recognized as ‘Natives,’ the Inuit were not included in the Indian Act, nor was legislation passed making them wards of the federal government. As a consequence, they were technically fully-fledged Canadian citizens without any privileges—no access to health or educational services, and no vote. As residents of the Northwest Territories, they fell under the general authority of the Department of the Interior until 1924, when the responsibility for Inuit policy was temporarily transferred to the Department of Indian Affairs by an amendment to a sub-section of the Indian Act. The RCMP was mandated to supervise their health and welfare in the field. (S. Grant 16)

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Canadian Government took decisive action to protect their claim on the Arctic North as a number of foreign exploratory parties from Denmark and the United States were deployed. These were seen as potential threats to continued Canadian sovereignty of the area were the impetus for the establishment of the RCMP posts. Land which had previously been considered “uninhabited” could be subject to a claim by explorers or military personnel from other countries, so it became important to mobilise the existing inhabitants of the Arctic (S. Grant 24-31). The relocation of Inuit to more

86 remote areas as a means of preventing the expansion of the United States’ military presence in the Arctic Circle began in the early 1950s, but remained a policy of the Canadian Government until as recently as the 1970s.

The first major relocation program began in 1953, when eight families left Port

Harrison in Quebec for Craig Harbour and Resolute Bay in the Far North. They had been promised jobs with wages, and the opportunity to come home within two years if they were not happy. The result was an unmitigated disaster.

Families were divided, and left in an environment far different from that which they were used to. They had no knowledge of local hunting or survival techniques, and were quite literally left on the beach. They were not allowed to mix with the RCMP, nor were they paid for the work they did. Passages home were not provided either; by the early 1970s, some of those who had been relocated were travelling home at their own expense. Many others felt isolated from their original community by that time, and so chose to stay in what remained an inhospitable environment. Policies of forced exiles such as these have created a diasporic condition amongst the Inuit. Whilst ultimately the Craig Harbour detachment was ineffective in its stated purpose of stopping Greenlanders from hunting on Ellesmere Island, it did meet the critieria for ‘effective occupation,’ meaning that Canadian sovereignty over the area had been established (S. Grant

214-5).

These events coincided with what would become five or six decades of sustained government intervention into Inuit life. With these concerted attempts at colonisation from the South came the attempted banning of the Indigenous language and forced acquisition of Western culture. As John Bennett and Susan

Rowley have noted,

87 [i]n the past, Inuit history was transmitted orally from generation to generation. The fundamental changes in Inuit life since the 1950s—schools, wage employment, and the move to permanent communities—badly damaged this chain of transmission. (Bennett and Rowley xxvii)

In this climate, Ipellie, like many of his generation, fought to maintain a strong connection with his land and his forebears. Throughout the twentieth century, policies aimed at protecting Canadian interests in the Arctic continued to show a remarkable lack of empathy for the Inuit involved. After World War II and epidemics of tuberculosis, measles and smallpox decimating camps throughout the Arctic, the government enacted a policy of mass relocation of Inuit families into permanent settlements. Small low-rent “matchbox houses” were constructed by the government. The houses were poorly insulated, difficult to maintain, and often overcrowded. Ipellie has noted that when he was invited to live with his grandparents in their house, pictured below, there were already ten members of the family living there.

Figure 1: This image from John and Irma Honigmann’s 1965 book Eskimo Townsmen depicts Inutsiaq’s and Timotee’s ‘matchbox’ house where Ipellie lived with numerous other members of his family. It is annotated in Alootook Ipellie’s own hand.

As part of the resettlement process in the 1950s, each person was designated a number, according to their district of birth. This numeration, in the eyes of

88 government officials, took the place of a name, since the Inuit method of naming children after relatives, regardless of gender, was deemed “too confusing”

(Wachowich 130). Inuit who died in hospitals in the South were buried with their number on the coffin (Wachowich 129). The numbering system still remains in numerous graveyards. The system was far from infallible—the numbers were allocated to children according to their place of birth, and could not be changed.

In at least one documented case this led to a tubercular child being “returned” to a district after her family had moved. Her sister, Martha Flaherty, wrote of the devastating effect this had on her family in Northern Voices: “After a year she finally arrived home as a complete stranger with a new language—English”

(Petrone 277). Ipellie’s childhood, too, would be adversely affected by the illness, as will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. The identification disk system would remain in place until Project Surname was implemented in the late

1960s, at the suggestion of the Inuit themselves (Wachowich 132; Petrone,

Northern Voices 140; Olsen 185).

Children were a major focus of the relocation process, as educating the young in

“civilised” ways was believed to be integral to promoting mass cultural change.

After the Second World War, Inuit-only residential schools were established in

Chesterfield Inlet and Churchill (Wachowich in Robinson 135). Previously, Inuit children had been removed from their homes and housed in residential or industrial schools in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and

Quebec with other Indigenous children from various First Nations (Milloy 239).

Milloy also records that schools primarily for the education of children from the

Northwest Territories, as Nunavut was then known, were established in

Fort Providence (Catholic, 1867), at Akavik (a Catholic school was opened in 1925 and an Anglican school in 1936), at Hay River (Anglican, 1894) and at Fort Resolution (Catholic, 1903). There were, as well, federal and missionary full-time and part time day schools (Milloy, 239).

89

Residential schools were funded by the government and administered by churches, and endeavoured to “reprogram” Indigenous children, teaching them the English language and “Christian values” with trademark missionary zeal. This program was still in place as recently as the 1970s. By any indicator, the schools were an unmitigated failure. Education had been seen as the most powerful tool in assimiliationist policies, and the continued operation of schools specifically for the education of Indigenous children was viewed in Canada as a national duty

(Milloy, 3-6). Yet when the joint committee of the House of Commons and the

Senate met in 1956 to examine the Indian Act, it was revealed that Indigenous

Canadians “were still separate and second class citizens” (Milloy, 9) in terms of health, employment, education, and housing.

More worrying still, neglect, disease and abuse within the residential school system contributed to the startling statistic offered by the former Minister of Indian

Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott in an essay entitled “Indian Affairs 1867-1912” that approximately “fifty percent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein”

(in A. Sortt, Ed. Qtd in Milloy 51). As Jim Miller argues, these consequences were not intentional, but were exacerbated by the ideologies of the time and the

Department of Indian Affairs’ need to economise. He notes that disease was rife in the overcrowded dormitories, “most of which were tightly sealed to conserve energy” (Miller 212), and that “[t]he fondness of school administrators for brass bands also contributed to the efficiency with which these schools disseminated diseases of the pulmonary system” (Miller 212). It was not until June of 2008 that the full extent of the failure of the system was officially recognised, with Canadian

Prime Minister Stephen Harper saying that

90 it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this. We now recognize that it was wrong to separate children from rich and vibrant cultures and traditions, that it created a void in many lives and communities … that, in separating children from their families, we undermined the ability of many to adequately parent their own children and sowed the seeds for generations to follow, and we apologize for having done this. We now recognize that, far too often, these institutions gave rise to abuse or neglect. (Harper 2)

In addition to the apology on behalf of the federal government, reparations from the $125 million Aboriginal Healing Fund will be paid to former students under the

Residential Schools Agreement (Thomas et al).

Milloy has noted the irony behind the stated protective and evangelical missions of the residential schools. The children

came, or, more accurately, were taken, from their parents and communities, and they suffered; the system did not provide … the education … that was the promise of Christ’s call, ‘Come unto me.’ Instead, the system’s history is marked by the persistent neglect and abuse of children and through them of Aboriginal communities in general. (Milloy xiii)

Evangelism was a key feature of both the schooling system and the wider colonialist project. Early evangelists required the cooperation of the locals, as guides, and for trade. The Jesuits, in particular, sought to accommodate

Indigenous belief systems, in order to make Christianity more palatable to the intended converts (Miller 34). As Miller has noted, however, the early days of colonialism soon involved competition among shamans and priests for the souls of Indigenous peoples (Miller 53), a conflict which Ipellie explores in a number of his short stories, including “The Exorcism,” and “I, Crucified,” which were both published in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares in 1993. The stories make clear the deeply-held suspicion of Christianity which permeates Ipellie’s work, yet draw on the iconography of the imported religion, and will be examined in more detail in

Chapter Three, the Case Study of Ipellie’s work.

91 The decision was made in the mid-1950s to dismantle the residential schooling system, but it would take the better part of four decades to complete this process.28 Day schools opened in Arctic Bay in 1959, and in Igloolik and Pond

Inlet in 1960. Students whose families remained on the land were housed in student hostels (Miller 53). The proximity of the aforementioned housing to the schools meant that by the early 1970s, almost all Canadian Inuit were living in year-round settlements (Wachowich in Robinson 135). Families who declined to enroll their children were denied family allowance (Wachowich 108-09;

Wachowich in Robinson 135; Kunuk 13). Students were collected by the RCMP if they failed to return to school after summer holidays (Wachowich in Robinson

135).

The former residential schools were often converted to “hostels,” and some became part of the child welfare services system. Some students were recommended for admission because of social factors or “neglect,” which as

Milloy notes, is a term which carries a strong class bias. These social factors often included alcoholism, illegitimacy, unemployment, poverty and “excessive procreation” within the family. In the 1950s there was a move towards foster placement over institutionalisation as a means of “breaking through the welfare bottleneck and … closing schools” (Milloy, 15). This may, in part, explain why some older students, including Ipellie, were flown to the South for their high school education, despite a secondary school “entirely for Eskimos” having been built in Frobisher Bay in the mid-1960s.

Although the high schools built in the North purported to be bi-cultural and sensitive to Inuit traditions and language, in practice this was far from the case.

28 See Chapter 9 of John Milloy’s A National Crime—the Canadian Government and the Residential School System 1879-1986 for more details of this process.

92 Curriculum materials were modified for primary school students, but those in secondary school were expected to sit the provincial Grade 12 exams, suggesting that the older students would have been socialised towards a standardised Canadian education (Milloy 251-52). From the earliest days of the residential schooling system, the Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches had all promoted reading and writing in a European language as being “essential to conversion and living as practising Christians” (Miller 102). The schools in the

North built for the education of young Inuit were supposed to address this issue.

The Deputy Minister for Indian Affairs, E.A. Cote, insisted that the Department was doing great work to preserve Inuktitut and to introduce syllabics in his 1965 report to the Minister, but he “failed to underline the fact that the schools were not bilingual and the language of instruction was certainly not Aboriginal” (Milloy 251-

53). The children were expected to function in a foreign tongue and the resultant poor literacy skills in the second language and low secondary school completion rates were touted by some as evidence of the innate difference between the colonisers and the colonised. These familiar assimilationist strategies—which were also inflicted on other First Nations’ Peoples in Canada and the Aboriginal population in Australia, among others—fit the United Nations’ 1948 definition of genocide, which states that:

genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Armitage 6)

The works of Ipellie demonstrate the results of these genocidal practices on the everyday lives of his people. Of these factors, education in particular was a key concern in his journalism and political cartoons.

93 Through the health and education systems, Ipellie personally experienced the cultural upheaval caused by colonialism and government intervention, and this had a significant effect on the work he produced over the last thirty-five years of his life. In his formative years he underwent prolonged periods of separation from his family which later influenced his art and writing, and are also symptomatic of the wider diasporic Inuit experience during the 1950s and beyond. Despite his physical dislocation from his homeland, however, his sense of connection to his land and his people remained constant in his work. The parallels between the development of Ipellie’s art and writing and the political and cultural resurgence of the Inuit make Ipellie a figure of significant interest for this study.

In the latter part of the twentieth century Inuit lobby groups became vocal in their calls for land rights and compensation from the Canadian Government. In mid-

1973 Prime Minster Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Minister for Indian Affairs and

Northern Development, Jean Chrétien, announced that the government would deal with Indigenous land claims in areas that had not been subject to treaties.

Two types of claims would be considered:

comprehensive claims that were based on aboriginal title, and specific claims that were allegations that the government had not lived up to promises it had made, usually in treaties. Ottawa would also fund research by native bodies to support their claim cases, and the next year it set up an Office of Native Claims (ONC) with responsibility to assess the validity of native claims and to advise the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) on how to settle them. (Miller 256)

As a result of this legislation, the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut (TFN) filed a claim against the Canadian Government which led to an in-principle agreement in

1976 to allow lands in the Eastern Arctic their own state and government. In April

1990 these negotiations were concluded, and in the same month the Métis and

Dene of the Western Arctic settled their comprehensive claim, and the Council of

94 Yukon Indians signed a definitive umbrella agreement based on their negotiated compensation claim against Ottawa in 1988 (Miller 295).

The creation of Nunavut Territory has been significant to the Inuit population of

Canada, as it

marked the beginning of a new era that gave Inuit control over their resources and government … the present generation is benefiting from computer and wireless technologies that allow full access to knowledge of the outside world without even leaving home. Health services, education, business, wildlife conservation, and even government derive immeasurable benefits. For elders who were born in a tent or igloo, the changes they have witnessed in their lifetimes are phenomenal. (S. Grant 254-55)

Ipellie was a member of the generation who experienced this rapid upheaval and he was actively involved in the Nunavut Land Claim which was ultimately ratified as the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement in November 1992. The Agreement was signed by the Prime Minister on May 23, 1993, and finally passed by the

Canadian Parliament in June of that year (“Nunavut Land Claim Overview”).

Significantly, 1993 was also the International Year of Indigenous Peoples, and the year in which Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares was published. His stories, cartoons and artwork often depicted figures from Euro-Canadian mainstream culture alongside those from the Inuit tradition, and this clash of syncretic images with measurable ‘authenticity’ was first rejected by the editor at

Theytus Press in 1990. As the cultural resurgence continued and the establishment of Nunavut edged closer to becoming a reality, Theytus contacted

Ipellie again:

[t]wo years pass, and nothing. I hear nothing. One day I get a phone call. “Remember those drawings? That book idea you mentioned two years ago? We would like to publish it.” So I had like a three-month deadline (McMahon- Coleman, Interview 85. See Appendix A 287).

During the 1980s the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami had been active in promoting comprehensive land claims in the Arctic, and had organised Circumpolar

95 conferences which sought to put forward the concerns of Inuit from Alaska,

Siberia and Greenland, as well as Northern Canada. Publications such as The

Nunatsiaq News and Inuktitut magazine are bilingual, although as Ipellie points out, both are currently edited by white Canadians. In the last twenty years, the

Aboriginal Television Network (ABTN), Inuit Broadcasting Corporation and CBC

North have all been established, all of which broadcast in Inuktitut. Ipellie’s role in these movements and opinion on their successes or otherwise will be discussed in the chapter which follows.

There is currently a movement within Nunavut to rectify past educational mistakes by translating teaching texts into Inuktitut. Every year interns are trained in Ottawa before returning to the Arctic to teach young people in their own language. This is itself, of course, ironic; in order to gain teaching qualifications, many young Inuit are required to head South, because there is still insufficient educational access in Nunavut. Recent attempts to redress this problem, however, have included innovative curriculum development through the Baffin

Island Division of the Board of Education, and again, Ipellie has been involved in the production of educational materials in Inuktitut. The relative isolation of the

Arctic and the resultant short period of colonisation, have meant that Inuktitut is one of the few Indigenous languages in Canada to be rated as having a chance of enduring. This was the impetus of the 1988 Baffin Writers’ Project, which twice a year sent writers to communities on Baffin Island, where they encouraged locals to write and offered advice on publication. Alootook Ipellie administered the project from 1989 until 1993. It has since been suspended owing to a lack of funding.

96 The Inuit have been a subject of fascination in some European cultures for centuries. In the twentieth century, the Inuit were subjected to a rapid and concerted attempt to colonise their lands and minds in line with mainstream

Canadian culture. Rather than replacing traditional beliefs and values, however, the ideologies of the two cultures have been syncretised. Ipellie’s own personal experiences as a child—in particular, the movement into a township and his family’s conversion from shamanism to Christianity, and later, his removal to the

South through health and education policies—reflect the widespread cultural changes which were rapidly taking place in the 1950s and 1960s. His attempts to make sense of these changes were prevalent throughout his art, cartoons, editorial writing and fiction.

97 CHAPTER 2: ARCTIC DREAMS AND URBAN REALITY:

THE PERSONAL HISTORY AND INFLUENCES OF ALOOTOOK IPELLIE

And the thing is, whenever I go to Iqaluit and visit the cemetery in Iqaluit, my ancestors, my family, they know I’m there. They’re pulling me towards them, pulling me. I can’t breathe. So I have to get out of there. And they know I know.

Alootook Ipellie29

Alootook Ipellie’s life circumstances in many ways reflected the rapid and diasporic cultural change experienced by Inuit of his generation. Ipellie likened this period of rapid change to the Arctic weather phenomena known as

“whiteouts” which Inuit families regularly experienced when living on the land. He argued that many felt,

trapped and unable to go forward. Our society had to rely on your society to be the guide dog. A few made some progress, one step at a time, and some lost themselves. There was no evidence that things would get better. The cultural whiteout would not lift for many more years. (A. Ipellie, People of the Good Land II 24)

In the same article Ipellie argued that it was important for any member of a cultural group to be able to “interpret what is happening to his or her people” (A.

Ipellie, People of the Good Land II 24). This belief was the impetus for many of his drawings, cartoons and reflective pieces. Ipellie’s work reflects the Indigenous diasporic realities for Inuit living in Canada today, and attempts to expose these unfamiliar realities to his predominantly non-Inuit audience.

Ipellie was born in a hunting camp called Nuvuqquq on Baffin Island, then known as Frobisher Bay, in 1951. He was born prematurely, and those relatives who were present believed that he was too small to survive (A. Ipellie People of the

29 In interview, May 2004, Appendix A, p290

98 Good Land II 25). In the absence of medical attention and in the harsh Arctic conditions, he remained a frail infant, and the small family’s troubles were further compounded by his father’s death in a hunting accident later that year (A. Ipellie,

1992b: 25). His mother Napatchie remarried a few years later and would have two more children, a daughter, Elisapie, who died soon after birth, and a son,

Joanassie, who was almost ten years younger than his half-brother (in Interview; see Appendix B 293). This infant was named after Napatchie’s late first husband,

Alootook’s father.

When Ipellie was around four years of age the family abandoned their semi- nomadic lifestyle and moved into the township of Iqaluit. He has noted that his earliest memories were of moving from living in a hut in the Wintertime, to a tent which was home from early Spring until early Fall (A. Ipellie, People of the Good

Land II 25), commenting that many families were similarly resistant to the permanent settlements because they “simply could not stand living inside a dark hut when we could enjoy so much light inside the white canvas tents” (A. Ipellie,

People of the Good Land 25). These huts were systematically replaced, however, by pre-fabricated homes supplied by the federal government. This was part of an initiative to create permanent Inuit settlements in the North, as a means of both educating children and stopping the spread of introduced diseases.30

Transplantation as a result of colonial practices, as we have seen in the previous

chapter, has been a key feature of Inuit life over the past sixty years, and a

significant influence in Ipellie’s life.

Shortly after his fifth birthday, Ipellie again experienced governmental intervention

when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In 1950 the government had launched

30 See Ipellie 1992: 19, and Wachowich et al: 128-9, 270.

99 an X-ray program, sending the C.D. Howe to the Arctic each year, carrying a team of medical experts and a portable X-ray machine to communities within the region. Those suffering from the illness were then removed to hospitals and sanitoria in the South. Separated from his family for the duration of his illness, he was expected to learn—and use—English as his primary mode of communication whilst staying at the Mountain Sanitorium in Hamilton. The C.D. Howe would not return until the following Spring due to the Arctic conditions, leaving patients who had completed their treatment no option but to wait for the next long journey

North (Petrone, Northern Voices 233). Diary entries written by infected children show the cruelty of such a policy; removed from their families, and in an alien environment, they suffered from mental stress as well as the debilitating illness.

As Shelagh Grant notes, the Inuit often did not understand the nature of the illness, and for some,

the cure seemed worse than the disease. With only hours of notice, Inuit of all ages were removed from the community and taken South … [A] report in 1956 claimed that one out of every six Inuit was in a sanatorium somewhere in Southern Canada [Grygier, A Long Way from Home, xxi]. In time the program brought the disease under control, but not without major disruption in Inuit lives. (S. Grant 249)

Ipellie noted that he was “one of the lucky ones” because he returned home

“when many of [his] fellow Inuit ended up buried in Hamilton.” The experience was also culturally isolating in that he had forgotten most of his Inuktitut by the time he returned to Iqaluit.31 In a cruel irony, his mother was diagnosed with the disease after Ipellie’s return, and “was gone for several years, but not more than three” (A. Ipellie, Those were the Days II 48).32 His stepfather would also succumb to the illness during Ipellie’s childhood years. Thus began a pattern of familial separation and movements between the North and South.

31 Personal correspondence, 21/10/04. 32 Further references to this serial will be noted as “Days,” and the instalment number.

100

Figure 2: Alootook Ipellie, second from right, aboard the C.D. Howe, en route to the Mountain Sanitorium in Hamilton.

Two figures from his childhood in Iqaluit would have enormous influence over

Alootook’s life and the concerns which would later dominate his work. The first was his alcoholic and abusive stepfather, Alivuktak. The other was his beloved grandfather, Inutsiaq.

One of the major concerns of Alootook Ipellie’s work, particularly his cartoons and journalism, has been the negative impact of alcohol on the lives of Inuit. As a child, he experienced first-hand the consequences of alcoholism. His stepfather also spent a period of time at the Mountain Sanitorium, leaving the boy in the care of relatives. After both adults returned, the family would again experience tragedy when a daughter was born, but died soon after birth. Alootook, who approximated his age as eight, was asked to help bury his baby sister (Days

101 XVII, 70). Alivuktak sought solace in alcohol, and was prone to violence when under its influence. As Ipellie explains,

[m]y stepfather was someone who could be good and treat me like a son when he was sober, but he was a drunkard. When he got drunk he physically abused me. And very often I don’t think he realised what he was doing when he was drunk. When he was sober he was one of the nicest men around. And for that reason, I had to run away from home, my real home, with my Mum and my half- brother, his real son. And my stepfather used to say, “Why is this boy, who’s not my real son, staying with us?” when he was drunk (McMahon-Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 292).

Ipellie has described his stepfather’s drunkenness as leaving “a big scar on my mind” (Days VII 84). When the family abode ceased to be a place of solace, he felt displaced and started to seek alternative accommodation, noting that

with him around the house, it was no home for me, but a place of unhappiness where love and peace of mind were not to be found … [I] slept elsewhere if some other family was willing to welcome me with a spare bed. At times when I didn’t have a place to sleep, I stayed up all night walking around town (Days II 51).

Figure 3: The Watching Child

The issue of a stable home remained a constant and largely unattainable desire throughout Ipellie’s childhood, and arguably, into his adult life as well. He spent a lot of time with a family who were originally from Pangnirtung, and was impressed

102 by the way family members worked together. He notes his gratitude to this family, who cared for him and made him feel wanted.33 Later, his uncle asked him to move in with their family. That winter, he moved out of Frobisher to go hunting with his uncle and cousins. This was the first time that Ipellie was able to learn about traditional Inuit culture and hunting practices. Culturally, this was significant, because historically boys were relied on to grow up to be hunters and help sustain the family. Children were encouraged to replicate adult work in their play, and children as young as five would be included in hunting parties (Bennett and Rowley 13-14). Martha Angugatiaq Ungallaq notes in the same work that the age of ten was important for young male Inuit, for this was when they became attached to their fathers and were given wider responsibilities within the camp

(Bennett and Rowley 29), and it was at around this age that the young Ipellie began to live with his uncle.

Ipellie noted in a 1996 interview with Canadian academic Michael Kennedy that his time spent on the land with his uncle’s family instilled in him a sense of the land as sacred. He argued that this knowledge of the land as “Home” is the defining characteristic of the Inuit: “[y]ou have to have that spiritual connection with it, otherwise you’re gone, you’re not a people anymore” (Kennedy, Voice

158). Here Ipellie identifies the moment when the relationship with traditional land is lost as being the moment of dislocation; the moment when, according to

Zhang,

the knowledge of an imagined, and at the same time, immanent community is essentially important for diasporans suffering the hardship of separation, dislocation and dismembering [when] diasporans strive to establish a new sense of belonging that is multi-local and con-temporal. (Zhang 135)

33 Personal Conversation, Ottawa, May 2004.

103 This time on the land would become the Arctic of Ipellie’s imagination; the space to which he wanted to return. In the short term, however, his desire to find a

“home” was met; when the group returned to Frobisher for supplies, Ipellie was offered a permanent abode with his grandparents. He notes that he “felt peace” when he had the security of a place to sleep, regular meals, and “people who cared enough about me to accept me to their home and look after me” (Days VII

82).

Ipellie often referred to his maternal grandfather Inutsiaq as “his anchor,” and noted that his grandparents’ house was the first place where he felt as though he truly belonged (McMahon-Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 292). The elderly man was a shaman who became a devout Christian, but retained the traditional

Inuit skill of carving. He and his wife Timotee also maintained the traditional practice of adopting children who were not receiving adequate care at home. As

Ipellie explained,

my grandparents took in a lot of people who weren’t being taken care of in the community—kids, children—and they adopted their own children’s children because they weren’t being looked after. And anyone who was an orphan or otherwise not looked after, they took them in. I grew up with those kids, in their house. And I looked up to him for that reason. (McMahon-Coleman Interview. See Appendix B 292)

As John Bennett and Susan Rowley have indicated in their edited oral history of

Nunavut, Uqalurait, adoption was a common practice in the Inuit tradition:

Children who had lost their parents were adopted, and when starvation or epidemic struck, whoever was able to look after the orphaned children adopted them … Adopted children always knew they were adopted and who their blood relatives were. This reduced the risk of marriage between natural siblings adopted into different families. (42)

Inutsiaq provided a conduit to a family and culture which appeared to be eroding before the young boy’s eyes.

104

Figure 4: Another of the annotated photos from the Honigmann’s anthropological study. Ipellie’s grandfather, Inutsiaq (Anglicised to ‘Eenutsia’ in the study, to match the Eskimo Identification List which was compiled by the RCMP in 1963).

Ipellie also cited the influence of his grandfather’s storytelling capabilities as a motivating force in his work:

he would tell stories at night after he had stopped carving … I have always been fascinated by stories, ever since I used to hear my grandfather. I had the feeling that I wanted to do it for a lifetime, but I had no idea that I was going to get to do it. (Kennedy, Voice 158)

105 He noted in the same interview that shamanism was “a very large passion for me and I tried to keep that passion when I was writing the book34 to keep that spirit alive” (Kennedy, Voice 162). According to Ipellie, his was:

a family of shamans from way back, until change happened to us and we moved to Iqaluit. And a lot of people have known that our family were a family of shamans through the generations. And they say that I was supposed to be in the line to be one, until we moved to Iqaluit and our parents became Christians … there were good shamans and bad shamans … Shamanic power, you can use it in good ways or bad ways. Our family, most of them were the positive type of shaman (McMahon-Coleman, ACS 87. See Appendix A 289).

In Masks of God, his early work on religion and mythologies from around the world, Joseph Campbell notes that a family history is an inherent feature of the shamanistic experience (Campbell 251). Typically, the development of shamanistic power in such children was developed by the elders of the community (Bennett and Rowley 2004), but Inutsiaq converted to Christianity when his grandson was still a small child. The loss of Ipellie’s traditional religion—and arguably his vocation—through the influence of colonial evangelism would seem to be a contributing factor in the choice of a shamanic alter-ego as narrator in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. This may also explain the deep suspicion of Christianity which pervades his work.

The stability he found in his grandparents’ home was to be short-lived. When he was fifteen, he was once again removed from Iqaluit, this time under the auspices of a billeted secondary schooling system. Ipellie was one of two students from

Iqaluit sent South to further his education in 1967 (A. Ipellie, People II 25). He was enrolled in a public school at Carleton Heights in Ottawa, and required to board with an English-speaking Canadian family for ten months of the year (A.

Ipellie, People II 25; Ashley, 32). He described himself as “no longer an

34 Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, which will be discussed at length in Chapter Three.

106 Innumarik”—a real Inuk (A. Ipellie, Arctic vii)—as a result of this experience. The culture shock he experienced was acute and he recalled that his

adolescence was spent in great loneliness and I needed very much to occupy myself with activities … I was quiet, extremely shy and a terribly boring young man. I spent a lot of time ‘lost’ in my mind thinking about a thousand and one things (A. Ipellie, Arctic 58).

His guidance counsellor became concerned about the teenager’s quietness, which was exacerbated by nervousness at being forced to communicate in

English. He was seen by a psychiatrist at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, where, according to Ipellie—“common criminals [we]re often sent for assessment” (A.

Ipellie, Ipellie’s Shadow 1; A. Ipellie, People II 26). When he refused to speak to her during the counselling session, he was warned that he may not be allowed to continue his education in the South. By the end of his first year in Ottawa, however, he had achieved excellent results in all his subjects for Grades 7 and 8, so this consequence did not eventuate in the short term (A. Ipellie, People II 26).

Selective mutism represented a space of relative safety for the anxious adolescent. The shaman-narrator he created in the Arctic Dreams stories, however, is anything but silent. Brash and confident, his is not a voice which would be easily suppressed. Inuit shamans, in the traditional context, would be natural storytellers who would often boast of their achievements. This alter-ego, then, can be read as the voice which the teenaged Ipellie was unable to access during his first stay in Ottawa.

Ipellie used his artistic creativity as an outlet to combat his shyness and feelings of dislocation, and following the academic success of his first year in Ottawa, he asked to be enrolled in a Vocational Arts course. His state-appointed counsellor did not view art as an appropriate career choice, and attempted to dissuade

Ipellie from pursuing it. Despite genuinely enjoying these studies, however, after

107 eighteen months, Ipellie’s homesickness became overpowering and he insisted on returning to Iqaluit (A. Ipellie, People II 26). Unfortunately Iqaluit did not have a buoyant economy in the early seventies, and Ipellie was unable to find employment (A. Ipellie, Arctic viii). He enrolled in upgrading classes at the Adult

Education Centre with a view to returning to Ottawa and Art School. Instead, he was relocated to Yellowknife to continue his secondary studies. He recalled that he “hated living in the student hostel there and asked to go back to Ottawa.

Miraculously, they listened to me” (A. Ipellie, People II 27).

This time, his guidance counsellor was adamant that Art was an impractical means of making a living in the Arctic. Ipellie was enrolled in an academic high school program, which he quickly abandoned, and he returned once more to

Iqaluit.

The usual adolescent search for identity was compounded in Ipellie’s case by social anxiety and culture shock as a result of the repeated pattern of separation from family and relocation from his own land. As well as feeling culturally isolated,

Ipellie was frustrated that he was unable to direct his education and future career in any meaningful way. This was not an uncommon problem in colonial societies.

As was argued in Chapter One, the systematic relocation of Indigenous children closely parallels the racial persecution that often precedes diasporic movement in more traditional definitions of the concept. These separations in the name of education were a widespread colonial practice, but as Ulf Hannerz, author of

Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places points out, beneath the guise of philanthropy this practice had a far more sinister outcome, that of teaching

Indigenous children their “role” in society:

[e]ducation creates difference, as it sorts and prepares people for that division of knowledge which matches a contemporary division of labor ... the state comes in

108 at an early point in the overall formation of the cultural continuum … In supplying people with different amounts of educational assets, in promoting an organization of the division of labor to no small extent around this distribution, and in thereby giving its support to one principle of cultural as well as social hierarchy, the state opens up that space to transnational influences at one end, and indicates a direction for internal processes. (71-73)

Ipellie’s place in the “cultural continuum” was clearly marked, and as he wryly noted, as a “failure in academics, [he] was a perfect candidate to also be a failure in the job market” (A. Ipellie, People II 27). He remained critical of an education system which failed to teach students in their native tongue. As he noted during our interview of October 2005,

when I was a little kid in Iqaluit, we started going to school, we weren’t taught anything. I mean in Inuktitut. We had English teachers. No one taught us anything about our own culture, our own language, our heritage. The only reason why I learnt anything about us, about Inuit, was by being with my family on the land. And also, I learned how to read and write Inuktitut syllabics in Sunday school. In those days, the school wasn’t involved (McMahon-Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 300).

Figure 5: Who Teaches the Child?

109 Towards the end of his life, Ipellie was cautiously optimistic about programs which have been put in place in the years since his own schooling. As he noted, there are now Inuktitut-based teacher training programs which attempt to address the vexed question of “Who teaches the child?,” as well as a series of provincially- and federally-funded programs to support the creation of learning materials in Inuktitut (McMahon-Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 301). Yet he noted that periodicals like Nunatsiaq News and Inuktitut were still not

being run by Inuit …We’re not there yet, but we’re beginning to take over these things. Education is a process of taking over, perhaps, things like magazines, periodicals, TV programs, things like that. (McMahon-Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 301)

This is one of a number of social issues which Ipellie identified as requiring rectification. When Ipellie returned to Iqaluit in the early 1970s, alcoholism was rife and youth depression and suicide rates then, as now, were higher in the

Arctic than elsewhere in Canada. Ipellie himself battled depression, and was unable to find employment, other than an abortive three-month stint for CBC radio. He did, however, manage to sell three pen-and-ink drawings (A. Ipellie,

Arctic ix), and had some poetry, stories and drawings accepted in North/Nord and Inuktitut, before moving south to Ottawa once more in 1972. His goal was to secure more reliable work.

Ipellie’s pen-and-ink drawings were not, however, considered to be “typical” Inuit art, which made earning a living somewhat challenging. Although prints and soapstone carvings by Inuit are well-known throughout the world, this material culture has been largely regulated and as such, artists who use different media, including Ipellie, have been marginalised even within that context. In the

Australian context, Howard Morphy argues that “just as art can play a significant role in the transformation of Aboriginal society, the production of art for sale can

110 simultaneously play a significant role in maintaining cultural continuity” (Morphy

26). The sale provides economic and symbolic value which impacts on mainstream and Indigenous perception of the Indigenous heritage and its value.

The sale of art, however, can also be problematic when administered by agencies of the mainstream government, as the Inuit example attests. As Ipellie argued, the process of selecting the art for sale quickly became another tool of colonial power:

… in the beginning it was all about experimenting with the art that came out from the peoples, from the community. And they would do prints and stone-cuts from those drawings. And they would line up the pieces along the wall and they had so-called Eskimo Arts Council, who would every year, after the prints came out, judge the best-looking prints that they could see, that they thought could sell in the South. And they selected those, kept them; others, they ripped them up. They were gone. They weren’t going to be sold to anyone. And that’s how it began, and it’s been that way ever since. These days, it still happens. I mean, for me, as an artist [mimes ripping something up], I can understand that. I could do it myself if a piece didn’t look good enough to sell… But to have a whole council behind my work, and deciding which is good and which is bad? Why is it still happening? And the artists themselves don’t really have any control over how the final product ends, because the Co-operative select all the colouring. (McMahon- Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 298-99)

Despite these problems of authority, however, the sale of Inuit art did lead to a greater understanding and presence of Inuit culture in Southern Canada. As

Ipellie noted, “select—Inuit printmakers …have become very famous for that reason” (McMahon-Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 299).

Inuit intellectual culture has, until recently, been largely unrecognised, despite a strong history of orature and song. In the past decade there has been a resurgence of Inuit intellectual culture, and works written about the Inuit over this time period are finally beginning to reflect the Inuit viewpoint, rather than being written “through Southern eyes” (New 266).

111 During this time in Ottawa, Ipellie began to spend time in the offices of the Inuit

Tapirisat.35 He found comfort in the familiarity of being around other Inuit in the office. The editor of Inuit Monthly,36 Peter Itinnuar—who would later become the first Inuk Member of Parliament—commissioned Ipellie to complete some drawings for the magazine, and the Christmas 1973 edition bears one of Ipellie’s early drawings on its cover. His role at the magazine gradually expanded, with a regular carton strip, “Ice Box,” beginning in 1974. He worked for the magazine for some six years, as a writer, designer, photographer, translator and cartoonist. He served as editor from 1979 to 1983.

In the late 1970s he married Deborah. The marriage was initially a productive one, with Debbie being credited as an Editorial Assistant in copies of Inuit Today from this time (A. Ipellie, Inuit Today Oct. 1980, 2). In 1978 a daughter, Taina

Lee, was born. The marriage faltered, largely because of cultural difference and

Ipellie’s commitments with the magazine and ITC. As he explained to me in 2005,

because I was living in Ottawa, I married this girl from Ottawa, and it’s very different in a city like that, a big city, as opposed to a small town like Iqaluit, a village, because you would have that extended family to support you when you have a kid. Or kids. I always had a dream that I wanted like, ten children, ey? And if I had stayed in Iqaluit I would have had many more, but otherwise, it was difficult to have that support in Ottawa. When we had her, it was difficult to get babysitting support from family, because you always had to make appointments to get that. In Iqaluit, a little village, they’re right there in town, just across, a few minutes away, or otherwise next door when you want to do something by yourself or as a couple. In Ottawa there was no such thing. (McMahon-Coleman, Interview. See Appendix B 293)

Just as Ipellie had been separated from his parents at the age of five, Taina moved to New Brunswick with her mother at this age. Ipellie returned from an ITC conference in Labrador to an empty house. The following day, Sunday,

September 26, 1983, Ipellie received a phone call to tell him that his mother had

35 Now known as the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, this is the national Inuit organisation. 36 Later known as Inuit Today.

112 died. In my first meeting with Ipellie, he told me that he had his first alcoholic drink that weekend. In what has been described by Joyce MacPhee as “[t]he greatest irony of Alootook’s life” (MacPhee 1), he struggled with alcoholism throughout his adulthood, despite maintaining in his work overt criticism of alcohol and its impact on Inuit lives.

Taina returned to Ottawa the following year to spend the summer with her father, but communication between the pair in subsequent years was scarce (Appendix

B: 280). She was apparently never far from his thoughts, however, as he dedicated Arctic Dreams and Nightmares to her and to his deceased parents, and he twice sent me copies of a poem he had written about her in 2002. She has spent much of her adult life in Ottawa, but she and her father remained estranged at the time of his death in September 2007. Five months after his death, she posted a message to him on his Internet blog, noting that she felt sad that he had missed out on being a “dad” to her, and acknowledging her own anger at not “having said the things that I needed to say to you” (T.L Ipellie, 29

February, 2008).

In spite of the disruption in his personal life, Ipellie continued to produce quality work throughout the 1980s. Early in that decade he collaborated with Robin

Gedalof on an anthology of Inuit writing, Paper Stays Put, contributing illustrations, poetry and stories. From 1984 to 1986, he edited Inuit magazine, published by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. From 1987 to 1989 he administered the Baffin Writers’ Project, an initiative of Toronto playwright David

Young. Each year four isolated communities and Iqaluit would receive visits from authors who would present workshops to locals interested in writing. When Ipellie took over from Young, the decision was made to invite only Inuit and First

113 Nations writers, and the work produced as a result of the workshops was collated in a new magazine, Kivioq. Two issues were published before funding ran out.

The project was turned over to the Baffin Regional Inuit Association, but further funding difficulties caused the ultimate demise of the project.

Between 1991 and 1993 Ipellie was the Managing Editor of Nunavut Newsletter, published by the Tugavik Federation of Nunavut, the organisation responsible for the creation of the Nunavut territory and government on April 1, 1999. He later authored a column called “Ipellie’s Shadow” for Nunatsiaq News, a weekly newspaper of Nunavut published from Iqaluit, which is also available online.

Perhaps his most significant achievement, however, was his first book, which is also a major focus of this thesis. In 1993 Arctic Dreams and Nightmares was published to critical acclaim. The collection of stories and pen-and-ink drawings fused images from Euro-Canadian ‘pop’ culture, traditional Inuit folklore, and

Ipellie’s own dreams. The stories are cleverly crafted and thought-provoking, and a deeper appreciation of the stories is available to those readers with knowledge of Inuit traditions. As the first single-authored collection by an Inuk, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares was groundbreaking. It was one of the few works by Inuit writers to be included in undergraduate Indigenous Literature courses within Canada, and remained in print until 2006.

Within two years of its publication, however, the author fell on hard times and was evicted from his apartment, remaining homeless for a period of about two years.

Over the next decade he supported himself largely through freelance work. His drawings and cartoons were exhibited in Canada, the United States, Norway,

Croatia, Greenland, and Germany, and he gave numerous readings of his work in

114 Canada, the United States and Australia. In 2006 he was asked to be involved in the establishment of an Inuit Writers’ Association. The last year of his life was one of the most productive periods of his artistic career. His resistance to email and other forms of electronic communication was finally overcome, and he established a blog to coincide with an exhibition of his work at Gallery 7A in April and May. His work received excellent reviews (MacPhee 1; personal correspondence April 26, 2007), with critic Paul Gessell noting that “[h]is technical skills [were] unbeatable …His content ranges from playfully innocent to devilishly searing”(qtd in Thompson; also on blog). This was his first show in

Ottawa since the publication of Arctic Dreams and Nightmares in 1993.

Ipellie announced plans to return to Iqaluit the following summer because, according to his cousin, Koomook McLister, he was “tired of southern living” (in

Thompson). A children’s book, The Inuit Thought of It: Exciting Arctic Innovations was published by Annick Press in the Northern Fall, and he was working on a one-man play under a Canada Council grant, an epic poem tentatively entitled

“Contemplating Life as a Nomad Wearing Civilised Clothes.” Akavik, the

Manchurian David Bowie, Book One of a planned trilogy, was also under consideration. A contribution to Isuma’s latest anthology, The Journals of Knud

Rasmussen: A Sense of Memory and High-definition Inuit storytelling had been accepted and was published online in December 2007 and in print the following month. He had also undertaken to illustrate a children’s book for an Ottawa author, entitled, “Rab Roy, the Arctic Hare” (Personal correspondence, April 26,

2007). He was working on converting his series of reflective articles, Those Were the Days, into a book for McGill-Queen’s University Press and continued to contribute to Inuktitut magazine on a freelance basis, providing illustrations and, occasionally, poetry and essays. On September 8, 2007, he died suddenly

115 outside his Ottawa apartment of a heart attack. At his family’s request, he was buried in Iqaluit, his “spiritual home.”

The Inuit cultural fragmentation and subsequent resurgence which took place during Ipellie’s lifetime informed his works across all genres. His experiences of removal and forced assimilation into Euro-Canadian ways, familial breakdown, alcoholism, and underemployment were continuing themes throughout his work.

Similarly, his belief in the need for young Inuit to know their own land and language was a common topic in his writings and cartoons, and led indirectly to his editorial career.

Ipellie’s shamanic first-person narrator in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares offers an alternative cultural and biographical history, as do his “Nuna and Vut” cartoon characters; they construct the history of Inuit who have been able to stay in their land, use their own tongue, and maintain their culture. Clearly Ipellie drew comfort from this depiction of Inuit life. Yet the characters he created are also profoundly, irrevocably and uncannily part of contemporary Canadian life, with the shaman in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares maintaining close personal relationships with Shakespeare, Superman, and the God of Judeo-Christian beliefs, among others. The chapter which follows will examine the ways in which maban reality, postcolonial studies, diaspora space and hypermasculinity are used to create an anti/hero who is at once at home and displaced within the space of the Arctic.

116 CHAPTER 3: DREAMING A SHAMANIC VOICE

—THE WORK OF ALOOTOOK IPELLIE

I think a lot of it was written because of the way I had seen change coming from the land in the Arctic. Having grown up going to school in Ottawa and looking at all the changes that were happening to our people. And how history has treated us in many ways.

Alootook Ipellie37

Alootook Ipellie argued that the harsh reality of life in the Arctic landscape has been a deciding factor in the development of Inuit literature, for Inuit “live in the remote Arctic, relatively isolated from the rest of the world” (A. Ipellie, 1993: xiv), and have therefore been able to retain much of their language and culture. He further suggested that the resilience of the Inuit and a pride in their tradition have helped the Inuit to retain their traditional mythology and adapt it creatively in order to preserve it for future generations. As we have seen in the previous chapter,

Ipellie also demonstrated resilience in his own life.

Alootook Ipellie’s literature is a literature of cultural pride and of resistance to dispossession and to artistic regulation. Ipellie’s unconventional writing and drawing styles, as well as a refusal to be neatly categorised or limited by genre, can be read in this light. In the context of a half-century of European intervention and dispossession, it is little wonder that Ipellie chose to focus his work on figures that mediate complex and conflicting worlds.

The shaman-figure who is the first-person narrator of the stories in the collection is a powerful entity who reverses stereotypes about colonial subjugation of

37 In interview, May 2004. See Appendix A 287.

117 Indigenous peoples in postcolonial countries. Ipellie’s work deals with the conflicts and confluences between traditional spirituality and Christianity. His work typically fuses figures from the traditional belief system with those from the mainstream literature, culture and religion. Ipellie primarily negotiated this space between worlds through the use of shamanistic trickster figures. Ipellie, as a writer and activist, was concerned with presenting his culture as a living, developing entity, not a quaint and archaic culture which needs to be partially preserved or relegated to anthropology museums. He was effectively writing himself as a modern-day shaman; he became, like his grandfather, a wordsmith and composer of powerful messages. The characters he created had access to, and power from, the body of wisdom necessary for survival in the Arctic, as well as the archive of the dominant culture.

In this sense, the shaman in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, like his creator, is an

Indigenous diasporic character. Ipellie spent his childhood moving between his northern homeland and cities in the South, as was common for many Inuit. As a child, he was exposed to two contrasting cultures, languages, education systems, and methods of healing. His narrator is a figure who remains firmly “at home” in the Arctic, yet who clearly understands and has contact with iconic figures from

Euro-Canadian culture. He represents a figure who has successfully negotiated the complexities of colonial contact.

The shaman, as we have seen in Chapter One, is a figure of superior intellect with an extraordinary ability to negotiate complex power struggles, who gains his or her supernatural powers through the crucible of extreme initiation. Joseph

Campbell has noted that the shamanistic crisis “yields an adult of greater physical stamina and vitality of spirit than is normal to the members of his group”

118 (Campbell 253). This is true of the narrator of Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, who, as we shall see, gains his powers through extraordinary means. This particular shaman, however, draws still more power from a second crisis—that of colonisation.

Ipellie’s stories were based around a series of pen-and-ink drawings inspired by his dreams and nightmares. He had a collection of approximately forty drawings at the time, twenty of which were selected to be included in this collection. He was prolific in his output for Inuit Today and Inuktitut for over three decades, but not all of his work remains in circulation, meaning that an in-depth analysis of his complete body of work is beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead, I have selected fourteen stories from Arctic Dreams and Nightmares and a small selection of related cartoons, and grouped them according to thematic concerns.

The first set of stories, “Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments,” “Ascension of My Soul in Death,” “Nanuq, the White Ghost, Repents,” “I, Crucified” and

“When God Sings the Blues” all appear at the beginning of the book and establish Ipellie’s narrator as a shaman of much strength and power. Along with the final story in the collection, “The Exorcism,” they showcase Ipellie’s deep suspicion of Christianity and evangelism. Each story demonstrates the syncretism of the two belief systems within the Inuit diaspora space.

“Public Execution of the Hermaphrodite Shaman,” “Summit with Sedna, Mother of the Sea Beasts,” and “Super Stud” are treated alongside the 1992 cartoon

“Shamanism is a lot like visiting an alien world” for they share an attempt to explain shamanism and present it as an alternative religion to Christianity. In

119 these stories there is little or no discernible Christian influence, but icons and symbols of European culture are relocated to the Arctic.

“The Five Shy Wives of the Shaman,” “Walrus Ballet Stories,” “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” “After Brigitte Bardot” and the 1981 cartoon “Encounters of the

Third Kind” are examined in terms of their criticism of the colonising European cultures. Finally, “Arctic Dreams and Nightmares,” the story after which the collection is named, examines Ipellie’s personal struggles with his Indigenous diasporic lifestyle and its manifestation in alcoholism.

Christianity and Evangelism

Like residential education and the banning of Indigenous language, Christianity has traditionally been one of the key tools of Western colonisation, and the experiences of the Inuit in the Arctic are no exception. As was discussed in

Chapter Two, literacy through the use of syllabics was introduced to the Inuit by

Christian missionaries. Consequently almost all reading material available to the

Inuit in the early years of colonisation was religious in nature, and many of the earliest written accounts by Inuit authors were testimonials of their conversions to

Christianity (Petrone, Northern 61-77). Christianity has remained an enormous influence on the writings of Inuit, and as we have seen, the conversion of his family to Christianity had an incalculable influence on the course of Ipellie’s life.

The Christian missionary influence is explicitly critiqued in three of the first four stories of the collection, “Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments,” “Ascension of My Soul in Death,” and “I, Crucified.” The other story, “Nanuq, the White

Ghost, Repents” explains the circumstances which led to the narrator’s death and

120 rebirth as a shaman, and provided a counterpoint to the Christian trinity of tales in which it is embedded. Seen as “an essential element in the production of citizens” by colonial powers (Armitage 4), conversion to Christianity was encouraged among Inuit and required the complete renunciation of traditional religion. In placing these stories together, Ipellie reverses the doctrine that the two religions cannot co-exist. Given that polar animism has its “basis in dreams, visions and other experiences” (Merkur 1), Ipellie’s stories, based on dreams and written from the point of view of a shaman, are a rehabilitation of traditional religious beliefs.

The inclusion of Christian tropes in the collection emphasises the possibility of co-existence between the two belief systems within diaspora space, and consigns Christianity to a minor role.

The opening story, “Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments” tells of the narrator’s vision of himself in a devilish guise, as he approaches Hell’s Garden of

Nede.38 An anagram of Eden, Nede is a kind of anti-paradise. It is also an

anagram of Need, suggesting a want or lack, thereby evoking diasporic loss. The

narrator recounts his feelings of betrayal when he realises that his local minister’s

promises that he will be assured a place in God’s Heaven if he maintains his

“good-humoured personality toward all mankind” have not saved him. Instead, he

finds himself “literally shrivelling” in front of an image of himself as “Satan

Incarnate” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 6). This vignette allows for the possibility that the

promises made by missionaries may not be the “Truth” that they are purported to

be. Ipellie continues to use strategies of accretion and doubling throughout the

stories in order to further upset commonly-accepted binary oppositions,

especially with regard to religion.

38 Bold type face in original. This appears to be an inversion of the tendency to italicise Indigenous words in English-language texts, and is used throughout the collection.

121 The theme of salvation is further questioned when the narrator is saved by a gesture which reflects the uncensored nature of traditional Inuit stories: he knees the Satanic image in the groin. At this point the vision ends abruptly. On reflection, the narrator decides that his soul has travelled through time and space to discover a “safe passage through the cosmos. The only way any soul is freed is for it to get rid of its Satan incarnate at the doorstep of Hell’s Garden of Nede”

(A. Ipellie, Arctic 8). He has saved himself, without the agency of the Church or its ministry. Ipellie resists the Western demand for neat resolutions, however, since this proves to be a revelation that the narrator does not know how to deal with (A. Ipellie, Arctic 9). According to Agnes Grant, an ending without resolution is a common feature of Inuit stories (A Grant 2). As the part-Inuk Knud

Rasmussen explains, in Intellectual Culture of the Copper Eskimo “It is not always that we want a point to our stories … It’s only the white men that want a reason and an explanation of everything” (qtd in Petrone, Northern 2).

Figure 6: “Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 2.

122 “The Ascension of My Soul in Death” is the next story in the sequence, and continues to examine spirituality, this time recounting the journey of a soul through the cosmos in search of its final resting place. The story begins with the narrator recounting his death (A. Ipellie, Arctic 11). Drawing on popular Western beliefs, he experiences his life flashing before his eyes (A. Ipellie, Arctic 13). The use of another common trope provides the ending to the story, with the narrator expressing his joy at finally becoming “a free spirit” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 15),

unfettered by the constraints of human life, and in particular, free of the conflicted

space between Inuit and Western culture.

The illustration which accompanies the story shows the two bodies on the ice,

with their rapidly ascending faces bleeding tears. Smoke surrounding the figures

represents the speed of their journey through the cosmos, which is alluded to in

the next story of the sequence, “Nanuq, the White Ghost, Repents.” This image

of the woman and her baby mourning the hunters seems to evoke Ipellie’s own

familial history, since his mother was widowed when he was still an infant.

Figure 7: “Ascension of My Soul in Death,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 11.

123 The shamanistic crisis which initiates the narrator into his new incarnation is recounted in “Nanuq, the White Ghost, Repents.” The narrator and his father are killed by a polar bear whilst on a hunting trip. The horrific nature of their deaths reflects the difficulty of becoming a hybrid figure, and the incident is described in graphic detail:

[m]y father and I spent our last few moments in the physical world engulfed in the violence of the tyrannical beast. Memorable were the gratified eyes of the King, in contrast to our hysterical shrieks and terrified, bulging eyeballs! (A. Ipellie, Arctic 18-19)

Figure 8: “Nanuq, the White Ghost, Repents,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 16.

Here diasporic notions of “home” and “exile” are explored in a unique way, as the two hunters are exiled from the physical realm. The transformation of the mortal into a shaman is representative of the diasporic experience, for, as Stuart Hall argues, “Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (S. Hall

120), and the mortal narrator is here transformed through the death-space into a shaman with supernatural abilities.

124 Despite the Christian implications associated with the word “repentance,” this is very much a story about traditional Inuit beliefs. Nanuq’s “repentance” is forced when he is killed by the narrator’s brother Nuna (A. Ipellie Arctic 19). The shaman and his father are able to witness this act of familial revenge as they travel through the cosmos. The journey only takes twelve seconds, which, according to

Ipellie, is a tribute to the purity of the shaman-narrator, for a “bad spirit will linger around longer than usual. And a good spirit will go away pretty much straight away and not bother the living population” (McMahon-Coleman, ACS. See

Appendix B 289).

The story is also significant in that Ipellie mobilises many of the features of traditional Inuit stories. Traditional tales, possibly because of the harsh nature of life in the Arctic, frequently included numerous references to violence.

Scatological references were also included in the tales. In the years immediately following colonisation, a number of anthologies of Inuit stories were edited for mainstream publication. In these, such references were usually excised, as

Lawrence Millman, editor of the anthology A Kayaq Full of Ghosts, has noted

(Millman 13). By choosing to reintroduce these features, Ipellie is arguably

contesting the cultural dispossession effected by the editorial processes of the

dominant culture.

Ipellie’s decision to include violent incidents also has cultural and spiritual

implications. As comparative theologian Daniel Merkur asserts, polar bears are

greatly feared by the Inuit for their size and ferocity, and for the distinguishing

feature of being the only carnivore that will hunt humans for food. Merkur has

noted that shamans traditionally gained their power after being killed and eaten

by Tornassuk, the polar bear spirit (Merkur 240). Hence the shaman-narrator, in

125 recounting the circumstance in which he and his father are killed by a bear, is verifying his legitimacy as a shaman. Of further significance is the unique ability of the polar bear to survive in two environments—on land and in the sea. The polar bear, like the shaman, is able to negotiate fluid and disparate environments.

Throughout the collection of short stories the non-Inuk reader remains in an unfamiliar cultural space, and in a position of ignorance, replicating the alienation experienced by the Inuit in the years immediately following colonisation. It is only through further research that a non-Inuk reader can fully understand and interpret the spiritual symbolism attached to certain characters and their actions. The polar bear attack represented in “Nanuq, the White Ghost, Repents” is a case in point; an Inuk reader would immediately recognise the spiritual importance of the shaman-narrator dying in the jaws of the polar bear. To the non-Inuk reader, however, it is an account of a horrific way to die, perhaps only of literary interest in that the voice tells the story from beyond the grave. This “marginalisation” of the non-Inuk reader is clearly a political strategy on Ipellie’s part; it is a means of ensuring the Inuk shaman-narrator’s ongoing authority.

Two Belief Systems: Shamanism and Christianity

In the last of this sequence of stories, the narrator, now a shaman as a result of the encounter with Nanuq/Tornassuk, discovers the ability to travel through time.

He finds himself in the past, “hanging on a cross, crucified” surrounded by tundra wolves (A. Ipellie, Arctic 21). The symbols of the original crucifixion have been replaced with tools of everyday life in an Inuit camp: he is fixed to a whalebone cross and held in position by arrows and a harpoon. It transpires that the crucifixion is the result of the jealousy of other shamans. Unable to compete with

126 him, they set a trap, using his own ego and the quest for additional power as bait.

The shaman then has to wait a thousand years to be reborn as the contemporary narrator of Ipellie’s stories.

Figure 9: “I, Crucified,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 20.

This story is a prime example of Ipellie’s mixing of Christian stories and symbols with traditional Inuit practices in order to create an original tale. The text implies that Christ was one of many shamans the world has seen, and that the article of belief central to Christianity—that of Christ’s resurrection—can be explained through the traditional Inuit belief in reincarnation. Here Ipellie is criticising the efforts of Christian missionaries to eradicate traditional beliefs in favour of their own, a tendency which led to his own grandfather rejecting his shamanistic powers and converting to Christianity. By indigenising Christianity and refuting it through reassessing Indigenous ideas, Ipellie is reworking the binaries of religion created through the evangelical Christian colonisation process.

127 Ipellie’s response to the question of these two conflicting belief systems is to draw upon the defining features of the shaman in order to create a narrator of great power, who is able to negotiate relationships with key figures of Christianity.

Here Ipellie sets up a complex relationship for readers of the dominant culture to negotiate: his shaman represents an ideology counter to that of the Euro-

Canadian hegemony, yet his relationships with figures from within that ideology simultaneously authorise the shaman’s viewpoint.

The shaman’s psychic or spiritual powers allow him to survive in unfamiliar environments. Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanran argue that “Literature and art are reflections of a culture and can serve …to test limits of colonial influences”

(2), and in Ipellie’s stories the shaman represents the outer limits of colonial influence; in his transformations, he does not forego any of his traditional power, but rather adds to it through his contact with the dominant culture.

For example, in one of the stories in the collection, “When God Sings the Blues,” the shaman-narrator enters a trance and begins his annual pilgrimage to meet with God. The narrator finds these visits “intellectually stimulating” because of the

“opportunity to try [his] hand at outwitting this particular God” (A. Ipellie, Arctic

45). We learn that God has a sense of humour, for he likes to call himself

“Sattaanassee,” the Inuktitut word for Satan. The narrator is unsure whether this is God’s real name since He has a “way of convincing you that He [is] always telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 46). In this story

Ipellie subverts generally accepted notions about Christianity, truth, and the

Western legal system through his use of satire. The narrator is the only person in the history of humanity to have these intimate audiences with God, creating “one

128 of the most private relationships that two spirits could hope for” (A. Ipellie, Arctic

46).

The suggestion of intimacy and privacy in the relationship between the two spiritual figures is a queer moment in the text, for although shamans may be male or female, the narrator throughout these stories clearly identifies as male.

Throughout the text the narrator appears to be celibate, providing commentary on the sexuality of others, but never his own; he meets a hyper-masculine shaman

(in “Super Stud”), a polygamist shaman (in “The Five Shy Wives of the Shaman”) and a hermaphrodite shaman (in “Public Execution of the Hermaphrodite

Shaman”) during his travels, but uses a proxy when Sedna attempts to seduce him (in “Summit with Sedna, the Mother of the Sea Beasts”). Indeed, the comment about the “private” friendship with God is the only moment throughout the stories when the narrator appears to show any real affection for another character, and there are no other clues as to whether this should be interpreted as homosocial or something more. It does, however, clearly suggest that the binary between the human and the divine is being “queered” or represented as non-normative.

129

Figure 10: “When God Sings the Blues,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 44.

Upon reaching the “Magic Kingdom,” as he refers to heaven, a paradise that apparently smells like “underarm deodorant” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 47), the shaman discovers that God is depressed. Here the heavenly sublime is reduced to the physically intimate and commercially material, as the divine space of Heaven is equated with the commercialised realm of Walt Disney. Ironically, far from being the “Happiest Place on Earth,” the inhabitant of this Kingdom is anything but.

Surrounded by an endless array of fax machines, God laments that all the messages he receives from humanity are negative. This also has an impact on

His financial empire, for not only does God receive ten percent of all donations made to churches and its associated institutions, but He also has exclusive publication rights to the Bible ... and both donations and sales are down (A.

Ipellie, Arctic 51).

130 At the shaman-narrator’s suggestion, the pair dresses as the Blues Brothers and visits a Night Club, in order to improve God’s mood. The Blues session is an effective tonic, and God even takes to the stage and belts out a rendition of the ironically-titled “The Heavenly Blues.” The accompanying illustration depicts the fusion of cultures as the invisible God sings into a modern microphone, his presence lifting the hair of the musicians who accompany him. The musicians, all

Inuit, also mark the Indigenous diasporic space through their choice of instruments. One is playing a guitar and using a modern amplification system; another is using a quilaut (a traditional Inuit drum); and the third plays an accordion, one of the earliest European instruments to be carried to the Arctic

(Hiscott 16).

Like the illustration, the story displays the intertwined genealogies of the colonised and coloniser, as Ipellie uses humour and irony to comment on aspects of modern life in Canada. The stories are brief and appear deceptively simple, but in fact they use reflections on Christianity, the legal system and the

“Disneyfication” of morality, in order to convey the message that his shaman- narrator is stronger than these hegemonic icons. Yet part of the reason for his strength is that he has engaged with these icons, and effectively combined their power with that of the traditional culture. This also increased the opportunity for

Ipellie to connect with a contemporary mainstream readership.

“The Exorcism” is a stark contrast to the light-hearted playfulness of “When God

Sings the Blues.” The final story in the collection, it also deals with the conflict between traditional and imported religions, this time depicted as a battle between two powerful shamans, named Kappia—meaning “Sacred”—and Guti, the

Inuktitut word for “God.” Guti is an evil shaman with whom Kappia has long

131 battled for control of the camp. The concerns with Guti stem from his abuse of power “to gain material things for himself” (A. Ipellie 177). Kappia accuses Guti of abusing women and adolescent girls in return for substandard shamanic services, and this kind of abuse is also explored in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha

Sung. After a long struggle and much bloodletting, Kappia is finally able to mortally wound Guti (A. Ipellie 177-78). With his dying breath, Guti curses

Kappia’s family with “eternal punishment” (A. Ipellie 178). As Guti dies, “the colour of his brown eyes turn[s] white” (A. Ipellie178). Here, “whiteness” is associated with both physical and spiritual death.

Kappia’s relief that the lies and abuse will die with Guti is shortlived, however, as the curse comes to fruition. The shaman-narrator is called on to exorcise Kappia and his family. The trauma experienced by those involved in the ten-day long process is clearly evident, and their nightmares, screaming and vomiting are recorded. This seems reminiscent of a detoxification process, which both invokes one of Ipellie’s main concerns, that of alcoholism among the Inuit, and also implies that Christianity has been an addictive toxin for some.

Kappia’s wife and the mother of his ten children is the last member of the family to be exorcised. She is divested of her clothes, and the horned Guti appears in her birth canal, as though he is an infant being born—or in this case, reborn. The shaman-narrator cuts off Guti’s hands so that the being cannot hang on to

Kappia’s wife (A. Ipellie 180). The demon hisses like a snake when he appears.

Both the hands and the hissing are reminiscent of the first story in the collection,

“Self-Portrait: the Inverse Ten Commandments,” where the shaman-narrator’s fingertips are transformed into small beings which hissed out the anti- commandments, “Thou shalt” (A. Ipellie 6). The ten-day time period involved and

132 ten offspring also relate to the opening story, suggesting the completion of a cycle. The role of the mother and the apparent immaculate conception involved in

Guti finding his way into her womb are also references to Christian beliefs, as is the incongruously-placed crucifix around the demon’s neck.

Figure 11: “The Exorcism,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 177

The presence of horns on the being not only invokes traditional representations of the devil, but also of the horned seal in the illustration which accompanies the story “After Brigitte Bardot.” Moreover, the irony of a shaman named “God” being evil is foreshadowed in the humorous “When God Sings the Blues,” wherein the

Christian God called himself “Satanassee.” “The Exorcism,” as the final story in the collection, ties together many of the images and concerns outlined throughout the book. It makes clear the deeply-held suspicion of Christianity which permeates Ipellie’s work, and both the violently descriptive language contained within the story, and the artwork which accompanies it, conform to traditional Inuit representations rather than the conventions of mainstream publishing.

133 Inuit Spirituality and Shamanism

The traditional spiritual functions of Inuit shamans are explored in a number of the stories, including “The Public Execution of the Hermaphrodite Shaman,”

“Sedna, the Mother of the Sea Beasts” and “SuperStud.” In the first, a shaman named Ukjuarluk (meaning “big, bearded seal”) goes into a spiritual trance and travels to the sea-bottom to negotiate with Sedna an end to the famine. In return, the hunter who has requested the séance offers the shaman a night with his beautiful, virginal daughter. Piu, whose name means “pretty,” overwhelms the hermaphrodite shaman and “during the height of their expression of mutual passion,” Ukjuarluk loses “all care for his top garment” (A. Ipellie 29). The following morning, Ukjuarluk finds the camp deserted. He returns to his own camp, only to be accosted by his friends and family, and publicly disrobed.

Interestingly, it is the women of the camp who are given the “honour of executing the shamed hermaphrodite shaman” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 31).

The concept of a hermaphrodite is a valuable one in that it suggests two kinds of being in one, another kind of queer and hybrid figure. Whilst shamans are permitted certain transgressions, the idea of a male being imbued with female features and hence, potentially, female power, is, in this instance, presented as unacceptable within the context of traditional Inuit camp life. Justice is swift, harsh and meted out by those whose power has been appropriated. It also invokes once more the power of trickster figures, who shift genders; they are depicted as having foolish tendencies (as when Ukjuarluk forgoes caution for a night with a pretty woman) and being at once an everyman and a hero.

134 Located between “I, Crucified” and “Summit with Sedna, the Mother of the Sea

Beasts,” the story highlights that shamanic powers are, to some degree, moderated by the power of the common Inuk. The shaman is not an infallible figure, but one prone to human distractions.

Figure 12: “Public Execution of the Hermaphrodite Shaman," Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 26

The details of traditional beliefs about séances with Sedna are further explored in

“Sedna, the Mother of the Sea Beasts.” The Sea Mother is, in the words of

Taivitialuk Alaasuaq, the “most powerful and dangerous of the ancient Inuit spirits. All the animals of the land and sea originate with her, and if she is angered, starvation will surely follow” (in Gedalof 94). The name Sedna, meaning

“the one down there” (Merkur 104), is attributed to the Baffin Island band of Inuit known as Ooqomiut. According to legend, the young Sedna was travelling in a kayaq with her family when a storm started. Her parents blamed her for the storm

135 and threw her overboard. In most versions of the story, Sedna clung to the edge of the kayaq as her father severed her fingers, knuckle by knuckle. These pieces of her fingers “emanated” into the sea creatures which the Inuit would hunt in order to survive (Merkur 133). Ultimately, she is the most powerful figure in Inuit mythology, because a slight against her leads to famine. When traditional observances are not kept, Sedna’s hair becomes dirty with the sins of mankind and she withholds the sea animals, necessitating a séance or a visit from a shaman.

The shaman-narrator recounts his negotiations with Sedna to release the sea beasts during one of the worst famines in Inuit history. In Inuit culture, shamans play the role of priest, physician and prophet. They possess their own language, a special power over words and are expected to have a large repertoire of magic songs and prayers and words. Here Ipellie draws a correlation between the continuing role of the shaman and that of the writer as contemporary wordsmith.

In this way, he becomes a voice for his community. Sedna appears in the stories of all Inuit tribes, but it is interesting to note that the biggest variations—largely because of Christian influences—appear amongst the Baffin Island people,

Ipellie’s cultural grouping. Ipellie further adapts the figure, altering both her appearance and her motivations in his version of the story. For example, Ipellie’s illustration which accompanies the story clearly shows that she has an extra eye in the palm of each hand, in contrast with the Baffin Island version of the story in which she has only one eye, perhaps suggesting that such a powerful figure sees more than ordinary humans. Ipellie further changes the common trait of her being disabled and unable to walk, transforming the handicap which prevents movement on land into a mermaid’s tail. Ipellie is not interested in reproducing the European-influenced narratives, but neither does he feel bound to excavate

136 and reconstruct the pre-contact stories. Instead, he specifically resists any sense of Inuit culture as ‘fixed’ or in the past tense. Ipellie continuously challenges the accepted versions of the tales, transforming features of each. Clearly, Ipellie is not relying solely on traditional folklore, but continues the practice of adapting stories by adding features from Western classical mythology such as the mermaid.

Figure 13: “Summit with Sedna, the Mother of the Sea Beasts,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 34.

Ipellie continues to rupture the conventions of the story, explaining the problematic relationship between Sedna and her father in terms of incest: “Her father had sexually abused her many times … she became emotionally, mentally and physically doomed to sexual impotency” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 39). In adapting features of the original story, Ipellie is not only continuing the practice of incorporating Western beliefs, but also proving that the Inuit culture is a contemporary, living one, and not static, as anthropologists have typically suggested. This contemporising strategy has been used by a number of Inuit

137 writers in an attempt to reconcile old beliefs with the new belief structures and technologies which have accompanied white settlement.39

The account of the shaman’s visit to the Sea Bottom closely follows the traditional sequence of events as described in Merkur’s Powers Which We Do Not Know: the Gods and Spirits of the Inuit (Merkur 113-14). The successful song composition and the ease with which the shaman passes the sea dogs indicate that he is extremely powerful and skilled in his practices. Similarly, his attempts to placate Sedna by combing and braiding her hair closely follow the traditional patterns of observance. In this instance, however, she does not withhold the sea animals because of Inuit transgressions, but because of her own sexual frustration. She agrees to release the sea animals on the condition that the shaman help her achieve orgasm, a task at which all others have failed.

Forewarned of this possibility by his discussions with other shamans, the narrator joins with them to create “our version of Frankenstein” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 41). This creature begins a chant which transports Sedna into a “forced-sensual-dream- trance” where she “finally met her match … her male equivalent, Andes, a god of the sea, who presided over all the sea beasts on the other side of the universe”

(A. Ipellie, Arctic 41). Their coupling releases her frustrations and the sea beasts simultaneously. For the narrator, it is the ultimate happy ending, since “his reputation as a powerful shaman remain[s] perfectly intact” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 42), reflecting the competitive nature of shamans, who traditionally engage in song duels to prove their worth as spiritual leaders.

In some Iglulik, Baffin Island and Polar versions, a final dimension is added to the story when Sedna’s father, Anguta, feels remorse and joins her at the bottom of

39 Taivitialuk Alaasuaq’s story “The Half-Fish,” in Gedalof’s Paper Stays Put, is a further example of this.

138 the sea. These three groups are also the only ones whose shamans are believed to enter a light trance through a séance, allowing them to travel to the Sea

Mother’s dwelling, comb her hair and appease her. Shamans encounter her father, who is the active ruler of the dead. His role is to carry souls to the Sea

Bottom, and then torment the unworthy by pinching them. The door is guarded by a dog, believed to be Sedna’s husband, which steps aside only long enough for

Anguta to pass. This idea of Sedna living in her father’s house, where he has the role of tormenting sinners, seems to have parallels with Christian stories about

Jesus protecting his “Father’s house” and beliefs about the existence of

Purgatory and Hell. Indeed, Merkur argues that the accretion of Christian iconography is so extensive that it is impossible to recover the pre-contact role of the father (Merkur 138).

In “SuperStud,” Ipellie again draws on the trademark powers of the shaman, but in this case they are fused with those of a figure from popular culture, in the form of Superman. Ipellie is interested in creating an identity within diaspora space—a common space where Brah’s entangled genealogies of dispersion and stasis coexist. One of the strategies he uses to do this is to transform canonical figures from the colonising culture, assigning them attributes of traditional shamans or spirits. This is one of the more light-hearted stories in the collection, and it begins with familiar words from popular culture, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Super

Stud!” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 97), which are immediately contested. When the shaman

asks a bystander the identity of the person zooming back and forth above their

heads, the stranger is further identified as being, “[f]aster than a speeding arrow,

more powerful than a dog team, and able to leap tall igloos in a single bound” (A.

Ipellie, Arctic 97). Super Stud, also known as Cupid and Eros, is from the planet

“Krypton,” and is described as a “Strange fella” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 98). The shaman’s curiosity is piqued, and he enters a trance in order to follow Super Stud

139 on his journeys. The recognition of Superman as a kind of shaman—albeit an inferior one—suggests that the shaman-narrator, like his creator, is open to influences from the colonising culture.

The “Super Stud” story differs from many depictions of Cupid, however, in that the arrows are not sent on someone else’s behalf, but rather, he is “one of the best-known servicemen to womankind in the Arctic” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 102).

References to sexual intercourse and to non-monogamous relationships were typically removed from early Inuit anthologies by white, Christian editors (Millman

13), so by reintroducing these elements, Ipellie draws attention to colonial editorial practices. Here the strategy is to startle his non-Inuk reader by changing a “super-” icon from the mild-mannered Clark Kent to a much more worldly figure.

Indeed, the accompanying illustration verges on the pornographic, depicting an ecstatic woman and featuring a large phallic symbol in the centre of the drawing

(A. Ipellie, Arctic 96).

Figure 14: “Super Stud,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 96

140

One of the key points of cultural significance in this story is the use of the trance.

Shamanistic trances were often entered in order to commune with spirits and were used to request that animals be sent to the Arctic during the annual hunting season. Ipellie’s shaman-narrator, however, also uses the trance-state to communicate with significant figures from the colonising culture. The idea of the trance as a means of cross-cultural communication is one that Ipellie has been developing for some time. In the cartoon reprinted below, a shaman enters a trance and shifts shape in the process. The accompanying text is a first-person narration explaining the shaman’s activity: “Shamanism is a lot like visiting an alien world. You change according to whom you visit. This is not easy … but [is] essential for our people’s survival” (A. Ipellie Shamanism).

Figure 15: “Shamanism is a lot like visiting an Alien World”

141 Clearly this commentary retells traditional beliefs about the role of the shaman, but equally, it can be examined in terms of the survival of Inuit in the postcolonial environment. The shaman represents the adaptations and compromises made by the Inuit in order to survive in a climate of change. In the interview we recorded in

May 2004, Ipellie noted that the time of first contact was one of enormous upheaval, but that “because our people are very, very adaptable to change, we were able to survive so many changes that happened to us over a very short period of time” (McMahon-Coleman, ACS 82. See Appendix A 285). The final frame of the cartoon shows the shaman exiting the North West Territories via a door marked “Nunavut,” suggesting that the idea of a homeland was considered important in terms of cultural survival long before it became a reality. As Ipellie has explained, “The door is a symbolic door. I was referring to the fact that we

Inuit living in the N.W.T. were fighting to enter a territory of our own called

Nunavut.”40

Critiquing European Colonising Cultures

Ipellie’s shaman does not draw authority solely from spiritual iconography, however. The shaman’s role, while spiritual, is also that of the wordsmith; a shaman would be expected to excel in song contests, and to know a number of stories about his or her community. Hence Ipellie further draws on the authority of

William Shakespeare, often hailed as the greatest storyteller in the English literary canon. In “The Five Shy Wives of the Shaman,” Ipellie’s shaman-narrator meets with an Inuk, who somewhat improbably shares his name with

Shakespeare, and whose family includes five masked wives. Taken into the confidence of his fellow-shaman, the narrator is told that the five are gorgons.

40 Personal correspondence, 21/10/04.

142 The travelling shaman is, as a writer, a sympathetic soul who pities the families, and feels obliged to marry gorgon daughters wherever he finds them. The masks they wear replicate the dramatic iconic masks of tragedy and comedy.

Figure 16: “The Five Shy Wives of the Shaman,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 58

Again, there is a double impact to this literary choice; the narrator is once more imbued with a seemingly unquestionable authority, and yet by representing this in an altered way, Ipellie is interrogating the hallowed position occupied by certain writers within the Western literary canon. As Brydon and Tiffin have explained,

“postcolonial writers write ‘decolonising fictions,’ texts that write back against imperial fictions and texts that incorporate alternative ways of seeing and living in the world” (11). Shakespeare, as the hallmark of “good” English language literature, is both cited as a literary authority, and undermined by being

(dis)placed in the Arctic, and represented as one among many shamans, and perhaps as one more fallible than most because of his sensitive and “artistic” nature.

143

The theme of colonising cultures is further explored in “Walrus Ballet Stories.” In this instance, the camp is experiencing a dearth of walruses. Deprived of meat, tusks for harpoon heads, blubber for lamps and skins for making rope, the camp asks the shaman to intervene. His spirit helper shapeshifts into the form of a walrus, and is thus able to visit with the other walruses, who have migrated to

Siberia to avoid rampant capitalism (A. Ipellie, Arctic 120). The spirit helper/bull walrus challenges the incumbent alpha walrus, and is able to better him by using a “tactical move … learned in the Leningrad Ballet School” (117). His graceful pirouette draws the attention of a female walrus, who reveals herself to be an incarnation of Margot Fonteyn. The male walrus then identifies himself as Rudolf

Nureyev (119). The pair reminisces about their 1962 performance of Giselle, and

Nureyev ruminates on the nature of the English aristocracy, marvelling at their

“pomp and circumstance” (119), especially when members of the Royal Family attended a performance. He also makes mention of Big Ben, an allusion to the idea that time and its measurement are European concepts.

The accompanying illustration, which features the walruses in tutus, and in which phalluses are evident on the bulls, accentuates the incongruity of the story.

Themes of “Western” culture and capitalism, defection and ideas about what is considered culturally valuable are all explored in this short story. In a final irony,

Margot convinces the bulk of the herd to defect to the West to “freedom”—to the hunting grounds of Baffin Island, according to the shaman’s original plan (122).

144

Figure 17: “Walrus Ballet Stories,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 114.

The British monarchy is again critiqued in “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” another

illustrated short story published in the collection. Ipellie has cited it as an example

of how his stories contain

elements of the two cultures, clashing together … For instance, The Agony and the Ecstasy, the story about Pilipoosie and the Queen. You know Prince Edward? At one time there was a rumour that, uh… That he was gay, eh? So I came up with that idea, in the story about the gay son, but instead of calling him Prince Edward [he is called Prince Char41] … Pilipoosie is Prince Phillip, and Queen Elisapee is the mother. I had great fun with that one (McMahon-Coleman, ACS 85-86. See Appendix A 288).

The story chronicles the tribulations of the elderly Prince Pilipoosie as he tries in vain to teach his eldest son how to hunt, but is thwarted by his son’s preference

41 A char is a fish, Native to the Arctic, and a staple part of the traditional Inuit diet.

145 for dressing up in his mother’s clothes. When Char finally kills his first seal, his parents are ecstatic that their son is now a man, despite Char’s agonised protests that he was “born to be a homebody” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 167). The story critiques the privileging of imported British colonial heritage, particularly through questioning notions of leadership based on heredity, rather than skill, and also depicting traditional Inuit hunting methods in detail.

Figure 18: “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 160

Ipellie has long been overtly critical of the influx of British culture, as shown in the following political cartoon from 1981. In it, Ipellie depicts the moment of first contact between the Inuit and the colonisers. In a postmodern twist, the Inuk character uses the terminology of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in order to describe the “aliens.” The Inuk is baffled by the greed demonstrated by the colonisers on behalf of their monarch. Ultimately the only

146 benefit he can see from this contact is that he has been given a Union Jack, which he plans to put to practical use as a bedspread.

Figure 19: “Close Encounters” 1981

Ipellie is overtly critical of European colonial practices elsewhere in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. “After Brigitte Bardot” examines the impact of the outside world

on traditional practices. It was written after Bardot’s impassioned protest in

Newfoundland against the seal pelt trade, and features Ipellie’s trademark use of

dark humour and irony. One of the unintended consequences of Bardot’s famous

1976 protest was a devastating financial impact on the Inuit involved in the fur

147 trade in the 1980s.42 The story questions the validity of international lobby groups and celebrities making decisions which impact on the lives of Inuit families.43 As

Ipellie explains,

when they killed the seal pelt trade, they killed off our traditional way … of making part of our living, from the fur trade. And they killed the seal fur trade in the Arctic, and one year … I visited this tannery in Qaqortoq, South Greenland, and they were saying they used to have 125 employees, and now they have 14. (McMahon-Coleman, ACS 84. See Appendix A 287)

Retold as a conversation between two Inuit men witnessing the photo shoot, they note that the seal pup appears to be a stuffed animal, and cite several examples that prove Bardot had little or no understanding of life in the Arctic. They also suggest that Bardot’s major motivation may have been one of self-promotion.

Figure 20: “After Brigitte Bardot,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 105

42 The Fur Institute of Canada notes that some 60 000 people are currently employed as trappers, of whom more than 25 000 are Indigenous. The financial impact of the closure of the seal fur trade between 1984 and 1995 was therefore significant.

43 In 2004 Paris Hilton added her voice to the protest, being photographed at the Sundance Film Festival wearing a T-shirt sporting the logo: “Club Sandwiches—Not Seals.” In 2006 Bardot returned to Ottawa to again protest against the annual seal hunt. The following year, she announced her “retirement” from travelling to Canada for the cause, designating Canadian actress Pamela Anderson her successor after Anderson visited the Brigitte Bardot Foundation. Given the identities of these famous and vocal proponents, it is perhaps no surprise that Chantal Nadeau has further problematised the ways in which gender, sexuality, whiteness, colonialism and national identity have become intertwined in the debate about the Canadian fur trade in her book Fur Nation: from the Beaver to Brigitte Bardot.

148 The narrator of the story experiences a bumper season, but is dismayed to discover that he cannot sell the skins, because Bardot’s protest has led to Europe banning the importation of seal products, and the collapse of the sealskin market.

Later, the hunter experiences a psychic vision of an aging and “slightly senile” (A.

Ipellie, Arctic 112) Bardot walking down a Parisian street with a male Inuk companion. Because of her close affinity with the animals, her torso has transformed into that of a harp seal. According to the narrator, she has “willed herself to be reincarnated” into the animal (A. Ipellie, Arctic 112).

When the figure of a seal pup appears behind Bardot, then, the reader is shocked to read that the creature brutally clubs her companion to death. It transpires that it is the ghost of all the seal pups from the Arctic who were killed for their pelts. Rather than being grateful to Bardot for her part in the protest, the spectre is angry at the intervention from someone who was not directly involved, and had little understanding of the consequences of her actions. Other seal attacks occur, but only in French locations. It seems that France is being repaid for the willingness of one of its citizens to be a spokesperson for Arctic affairs.

Ipellie’s complex ending is not immediately clear to Western readers. Some aspects of “After Brigitte Bardot” are actually based on a children’s tale from Inuit tradition, Amautalik. The eponymous female is a figure feared by children of the

Netsilik, Iglulik and East Greenland people (Merkur 249-53). A large woman wearing an amaut,44 she collects naughty children and removes them from their families. One can only imagine, then, the psychological impact on young Inuit children who were systematically removed from their families by the state in the

1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. In the original tale, a young orphan girl attempts to warn

44 The back pouch in which Inuit women carry young children.

149 the other children that Amautalik and a large ground seal are approaching. The other children, who dislike her, do not heed her warning, and consequently are clubbed to death by the seal (Merkur 251).

In Ipellie’s story, the brutal clubbing of Bardot’s Inuk companion is configured as the punishment of a naughty child who refuses to listen at the appropriate time.

Bardot, for her part in the proceedings, is condemned to spend eternity in an incarnation that is totally foreign to her cultural background, inverting the

Canadian situation, where the French—like their British counterparts—colonised the Indigenous inhabitants. For Ipellie and others, including his contemporary,

Peter Enerk, Bardot remains emblematic of foreign meddling in Inuit affairs.

Enerk writes that Inuit are,

tired of the fact that people such as … Brigitte Bardot … and others … are never around to listen to the native people when we discuss our conservation management plans for the future. Perhaps they could learn something from us. (qtd in Petrone, Northern 282)

Ipellie’s politics are a matter of public record; he was a long-time supporter of

Nunavut and a passionate promoter of Inuit writing. Ipellie’s short story “N.W.T.

Separates from Canada,” inspired by the Quebec separatist movement, was originally published in Inuit Today in 1977. Included in Paper Stays Put: A

Collection of Inuit Writing, a volume which Ipellie illustrated, it is written as though it were a newspaper article published after a referendum to decide whether or not the North West Territories should separate from Canada. The story opens with a number of rhetorical questions:

What if one day this century the above headline became a reality? We all know that it will never come close to becoming true in this generation, and probably never will in the future. But what if it did become a reality? (A. Ipellie, NWT Separates 33)

These questions proved prophetic, since Nunavut was established as an Inuit-run territory within Canada on April 1, 1999. Ipellie was involved in the establishment

150 of the territory through his work for the Tugavik Federation of Nunavut, the organisation responsible for the creation of the Nunavut territory and government.

With an area spanning two million square kilometres of northern Canada

(“Government of Nunavut” 1), it represents the largest land claim settlement in

Canadian history (PolarNet 1). The official website of Nunavut boasts that the territory has been “[f]or millennia a major Inuit homeland … today is a growing society that blends the strength of its deep Inuit roots and traditions with a new spirit of diversity” (“Government of Nunavut” 1). Interestingly, a drawing by Ipellie became the cover of the Nunavut Lands Claim Proposal.

Figure 21: Nunavut Land Claims Proposal Cover

Many of the issues foreshadowed by Ipellie, including whether or not non-Inuk business people would remain in the territory, became issues of vital importance

151 during the transition period. As a contributor to Nunatsiaq News, the official publication of Iqaluit, Ipellie regularly commented on the positive outcomes of

Nunavut.

Ipellie has explored the difficulties of being an Inuk and trying to participate in two disparate worlds in his poem “Walking on Both Sides of An Invisible Border.”

Here, the voice of the poem longs to participate in both societies as easily as the polar bear or the shaman negotiate these boundaries. Ipellie evidently felt that this poem encapsulated his position “between” white society and the traditional

Inuit lifestyle, for he had published it in the Indigenous writers’ journal Gatherings, as a preface to his interview with Michael Kennedy in Studies in Canadian

Literature, and he also chose to read it at the 1988 First Peoples Arts Conference

“To See Proudly, Advancing Indigenous Arts beyond the Millenium” at the

Canadian Museum of Civilisation in Hull. This idea of a position “between” is further examined by Ipellie in the introduction to Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, when he comments that “[o]nce embedded in a southern environment, I was trained largely to cope with the white, Anglo-Saxon, Euro-Canadian culture” (A.

Ipellie, Arctic vii).

In the poem, Ipellie likens his position to that of “an illegitimate child / Forsaken by my parents.” He writes that continually negotiating the line between cultures

“Is like / having been sentenced to a torture chamber / Without having committed a crime” (A. Ipellie, Both Sides in Young-Ing and Belmore 44). In the context of the removal of children to residential or foster care to further their education, this becomes even more poignant; juveniles are “detained” elsewhere in order to receive what is considered a basic right for most families. The voice of the poem survives his predicament through a process of “fancy dancing,” inventing new

152 dance steps when the border “is so wide / that I am unable to take another step.”

This becomes a metaphor for his writing, which is Ipellie’s means of “Trying … to make sense / Of two opposing cultures” (in Young-Ing and Belmore, 45).

Just as Ipellie’s political convictions coloured his work, so too did his personal demons of chronic shyness and alcoholism. Ipellie referred to himself in self- deprecating terms as having a “PhD in Silentology.”45 In sharp contrast to Ipellie,

the shaman negotiates life between two worlds with a casual arrogance that is

considered to be a common feature of Inuit shamanism. Bragging and

competitiveness, which were valued forms of interaction in Inuit society, would be

best exemplified by shamans because of the unique nature of their experiences

and powers. The shaman-narrator, then, can be read as Ipellie’s alter-ego, a

projection of the person he may have been had he been able to continue life as

previous generations of Inuit had, unimpeded by government intervention.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the eponymous story “Arctic Dreams and Nightmares” summarises a number of Ipellie’s key concerns and influences, including the conflicts between cultures and religions, the interdependence between man and beast in the Arctic, and the effect of alcohol—and potentially alcoholism—on the life of an individual Inuk. The alter ego shares with the author a desire for solitude, and is keen to explore the alternate realities of the dreaming state.

“Arctic Dreams and Nightmares” depicts the harsh realities of life in the Arctic, which Ipellie describes as “a world unto itself” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 133). It explores the differences and similarities between humanity and the animal kingdom, and the threat of death which was omnipresent in the camps. The shaman-narrator

45 Personal Correspondence, April 26, 2007

153 describes his ability to dream—and have nightmares—as a means of creating an alternate reality. Specifically, he seeks to create his own version of paradise, which he dreams is “[j]ust around the next mountain” (A. Ipellie, Arctic 126). In the dead of winter, however, life is at its most tenuous and dreams give way to nightmares (A. Ipellie Arctic 127). In the dream he recounts, he becomes the

“incredible shrinking man” after “inadvertently [drinking] water from a small lake”

(A. Ipellie Arctic 129). Here Ipellie fuses popular culture and the literature of

Lewis Carroll. Even though he argues elsewhere in this story that different cultures breed different types of dreams (A. Ipellie, Arctic 128), the narrator mysteriously shrinking is clearly reminiscent of the Alice in Wonderland story, a story which, according to Rosemary Jackson, draws

attention to problems of signification, presenting a confused, topsy-turvy world which lays no claim to re-present absolute meaning or ‘reality.’ When Alice falls down the rabbit hole and walks through the mirror in Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), she enters a realm of non-signification, a non-sense. She is faced with semiotic chaos, and her acquired language systems cease to be of any help … For Carroll, as for Wittgenstein, language is the means of constructing meaning—outside a language world, there lies only non-meaning. (141-42)

This situation has obvious parallels with the rapid encroachment of Western culture and the pervasive introduction of English language to the Inuit through institutions such as education and the media, in particular. The usefulness of the

“Alice” metaphor in a postcolonial story such as this is further illuminated when

Jackson argues that Alice “fears losing herself by becoming another. She is obsessed with physical changes effected by eating, drinking, laughing, crying, dancing, entering, leaving” (Jackson 143). This echoes the pervasive substitution of Anglo-cultural processes in place of ritual shamanistic practices, cultural activities, traditional foods and drink. The physical changes effected by drinking are particularly poignant given the high rate of alcohol abuse in contemporary

Inuit society, and Ipellie’s own issues with the same.

154 Forced to live a solitary and vegetarian existence as a result of this act of shape- shifting, the shaman-narrator claims to be able to relate to other figures from

Euro-Canadian culture as diverse as k.d. lang and God in His Heaven (A. Ipellie,

Arctic 130). In this state, the shaman-narrator has a nightmare wherein a huge eagle emerges from his chest. The pain and damage of this experience are described in detail, culminating in the eagle breaking free and flying away (A.

Ipellie, Arctic 131). After some weeks of reflection, the shaman is able to decode the meaning of the dream. The eagle, he decides, is representative of his unconscious mind, and had begun as a blood cell which became disenchanted with the amount of alcohol consumed by the shaman-narrator; suggesting that the narrator, like Alice in the story, has succumbed to the enticement of the bottle which bears the message ‘Drink Me.’ After twenty years of planning, the cell had mutated and organised its spectacular escape. Thus the eagle embodies ideals of freedom, intelligence and strength.

Figure 22: “Arctic Dreams and Nightmares,” Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 124.

155 The writings and illustrations of Alootook Ipellie deal with a number of issues which are fundamental to Inuit life, including resistance to colonisation, evangelism and alcohol-induced social problems. He writes of an Inuit lifestyle where the culture is developing and changing according to circumstances. The shaman in his tales is depicted as a figure capable of negotiating these difficult circumstances; as one who is potent, adaptable and ever-resilient to the excesses of colonising cultures and capitalism. The “world unto itself” of Arctic

Dreams and Nightmares is a negotiated space wherein powerful iconography from both cultures co-exists and the voice of the Inuk has not been silenced.

156 CHAPTER 4

SINGING THE PAST: AUSTRALIAN “EXPLORATION” AND

ABORIGINAL HISTORY

The evil one caused the mists to lift from the land and other mortals saw its wealth and abundance … [t]he fair-skinned ones laid waste to the garden and the chosen people.

Sam Watson46

Published in 1990, The Kadaitcha Sung is a novel which reflects the controversial nature of race relations in Australia throughout that decade. Recognition of and reconciliation with Indigenous Australia were contentious goals throughout the second half of the twentieth century. These continue to be significant issues on the Australian political and cultural landscape in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At the time the novel was published, Sam Watson was—and remains—a staunch and vocal critic of the former Liberal Party Leader, John Howard, who was the Prime Minister from 1996 until 2007. Watson has been similarly dismissive of the comments made by disgraced former Liberal and conservative independent Pauline Hanson. Both Howard and Hanson attracted a groundswell of political support in the 1990s, and given that their ideologies were less than inclusive of Indigenous Australians, this is an indicator of contemporary race relations which is well worth exploring in terms of situating The Kadaitcha Sung within its historical context.

Since European colonisation in 1788, relations between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous Australians have been the subject of national debate. For many years a separatist agenda was followed, with the establishment and maintenance of

46 Watson, The Kadaitcha Sung 3.

157 Aboriginal missions or reserves. The mission space was a diaspora space; a place where identity was constantly reassessed and reconstructed, where cultural norms were adapted, and where, as per Brah’s definition of the term, the genealogies of dispersion were entangled with those of the locals (Brah, 181).

Indeed, as was mentioned in the introduction, the term “Aboriginal” did not exist until after European colonisation, and the term “Murri,” used to identify

Indigenous Australians from Northern New South Wales and Southern

Queensland, was coined on the Barambah/Cherbourg mission. The mission also seems to be the model for Fingal Mission in The Kadaitcha Sung, home to Sam

Watson’s diasporic subject Tommy Gubba. Tommy and his friends and relatives resist European domination vehemently, and at times violently, throughout the text. Similarly, historian Thom Blake notes in A Dumping Ground: A History of the

Cherbourg Settlement that inmates “were able to create a domain or enclave from which they could insulate themselves from white control” (Blake 200-01), and that

[r]ather than being hopeless victims of the reserve system, the inmates responded to their changed circumstances by not only maintaining some previous practices and rejecting others, but also by developing new forms and expressions. (235)

The mission system had far-reaching consequences, and the Stolen Generations who populated them have become symbolic of Australia’s troubled history of race relations. Affirmative Action and welfare policies, which aim to redress some past injustices, continue to engender strong emotions and extremes of public opinion.

The decade between 1997 and 2007 saw the rise (and subsequent fall) of

Pauline Hanson’s populist anti-Indigenous welfare policies, even as there were numerous public marches in the name of Reconciliation around the country. The ongoing question as to whether or not there should be a national apology to the

Stolen Generations became a debate which would haunt the conservative

158 Howard Coalition Government and ultimately be a key factor in its election defeat of November 2007.

History has also been a contested field of scholarship in recent years. As theologian Ian Breward explained in his 2001 History of the Churches in

Australia, there is “still a strong current of opinion that history should be celebratory, not divisive, or focussed on unpleasant episodes of the past”

(Breward xiii). The so-called “history wars” have become part of contemporary

Australian parlance in recent times. In October 1996 Howard told the Parliament that he “profoundly reject[ed] the back armband view of history” (Howard in

Hansard). This view of history which was denounced by conservative Howard and his government had already been a site of some debate, and the term was coined by Geoffrey Blainey in his Latham Lecture of 1993, when he argued that the “pendulum [had swung] from a position that had been too favourable to an opposite extreme that is decidedly jaundiced and gloomy.”47 As Mark McKenna

argued in his 1997 Research paper, Blainey’s interpretation of historical events

came to have as much influence on the Howard government’s position on

Australian history as the late Professor Manning Clark’s had had on the Keating

Government which preceded it (McKenna, Perspectives np). McKenna notes that

Howard was the most important figure in the public debate on Australian history,

and that he placed the issue of the “representation of Australia’s history at the

core of his government’s position on national identity and Australia’s self image”

(McKenna, Perspectives np). Howard’s fear that an emphasis on the

dispossession and decimation of Indigenous populations “threatened the moral

legitimacy of the nation state” (McKenna, Perspectives np) was based on the

47 There has been a great deal of discussion about this Lecture. For a sample, see Graeme Davison’s The Use and Abuse of Australian History; Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clarke’s The History Wars; and Mark McKenna’s 1997 Parliamentary Research Paper as well as his 1998 article “Metaphors of Light and Darkness.”

159 controversial research of Keith Windschuttle (who refuted the use of the term

“genocide”) and Blainey. It was vociferously critiqued by others, including Lyndall

Ryan, Henry Reynolds, Bain Attwood, and Robert Manne. The latter edited a response to Windschuttle’s views, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s

Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which was published in 2003.48

Key to the debate is the question of the size of the Indigenous population at the time of invasion, since this figure determines the degree of decimation in the decades that followed. The percentage of the population who were killed or who died owing to introduced diseases and their complications, is also crucial in terms of determining the level of resistance shown by the Indigenous populations.

These estimates vary widely and are necessarily based on guesswork, adding to the inconclusiveness and controversy. Breward notes the variance in the population figures, but settles on a number between a quarter and half a million across the continent (Breward 4). Economist Noel Butlin has argued that the first two hundred years of Australian history was “told largely as the ‘success’ story of white settlement” (Butlin xi), and that the “the official figure of 150 000 living aborigines in Australia in 1788 was a figment of the imagination as was Governor

Phillip’s guess at one million in 1788” (Butlin 5), and instead hypothesises about the population based on economic models. More recently, Henry Reynolds has assessed the various Tasmanian population estimates and come to the conclusion that “[Lyndall] Ryan’s estimate of 700 is the most serious one to date.

But it is probably too high” (Reynolds, Fate 81).

48 For further background to this debate, see Henry Reynolds’ Why Weren’t We Told? A Personal Search for the Truth About Our History (1999), An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australian History (2001); Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1996); Colin Tatz’s With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (2003); Keith Windschuttle’s A Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), Geoffrey Blainey’s “Balance Sheet on our History” (1993), Robert Manne’s “Bicentennial Guilt” (1989) and Patrick Brantlinger’s “‘Black Armband’ versus ‘White Blindfold’” (2004).

160 Reynolds is wary of the figures put forward by historians who are sympathetic to

Indigenous populations, arguing that whilst they may “emphasise the brutality of the colonial encounter,” it also “greatly inflates the capacity of the Europeans [to conquer the land and its inhabitants] and greatly underestimates the ability of the

Aborigines” (Reynolds, Fate 77). Whilst the actual population figure at the time of

invasion may be impossible to prove, it is clear that Indigenous populations

dropped alarmingly in the early colonial years. Butlin has suggested that within

sixty years the combined effects of disease and resource competition reduced

the Indigenous population to as little as ten percent of the 1788 figure (Butlin

175). Of course, this debate over statistics, which has been central to the so-

called “History Wars,” draws attention away from the violence and discrimination

which were inherent in colonial conquest.

It is worth mentioning here that terms like “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous

Australians” are not intended to suggest homogeneity of cultures or of

experience. There are some five hundred distinct Aboriginal cultural groupings,

yet these have been largely homogenised in the view of mainstream Australia. As

Max Charlesworth notes,

[t]here were, and are, profound differences between the various Aboriginal groups of peoples. The Australian Aborigines are not a unitary people with a unitary way of life. As a term, ‘Australian Aboriginal’ is rather like ‘British’ in that it is a general umbrella term. (1-2)

Just as there was not one “Australian Aboriginal” population in Australia in 1788, but rather, some five hundred distinct national groupings, the first century or so of

European settlement involved disparate and distinct colonies. Indeed, it was not until 1901 that the land mass was federated and the nation of “Australia” officially brought into being. This necessitates looking at specific cases from particular areas of the nation, rather than making claims about “Aboriginal people.” Early

161 relations with the Indigenous peoples of Australia varied significantly according to the preferences of local administrators. As Henry Reynolds has argued,

British policy towards the Aborigines was confused and contradictory. The Early governors were instructed to treat them with amity and kindness, but no provision was made for purchasing Aboriginal land. Their status as British subjects was ill- defined and uncertain. Policy shifted uneasily between protection and punishment. (Reynolds, Fate 87)

Breward notes that the British Government and George III suggested to the administrators of New South Wales that they should “promote Christian religion and education of the natives” in order to hasten the “advancement in civilization” of these peoples, but that these guidelines were somewhat impractical in that they “did not take into account the brutality of the military government, and the convicts starved of sexual outlets” (Breward 6).

In this chapter I will briefly examine race relations in early Australia through three case studies: firstly, the original colonial settlement in Port Jackson, which established long-standing patterns of behaviour in Australian race relations; secondly, the (in)famous Wybalenna Mission in Tasmania in the 1830s, as an example of the genocidal impact of apparently well-intentioned missions; and finally, the more recent Durundur and Cherbourg missions of South-Eastern

Queensland, which clearly inform the setting of Sam Watson’s novel The

Kadaitcha Sung.

Although Dutch, French and English sailors had stopped on what would become the Australian coastline as early as 1682, and English and American sealers were habitually stopping off the coasts of Tasmania by the late 18th century (van

Toorn 93), the earliest European attempt at settlement occurred at Sydney Cove in 1788. Governor Arthur Phillip’s party first anchored in Botany Bay on January

20 of that year, but were greeted by warriors brandishing spears. They opted

162 instead to land at Sydney Cove on Port Jackson, a location which featured fresh water and “Natives” who were apparently “friendlier” (van Toorn 53). As Historian

Inga Clendinnen has noted in her history of these first encounters, the British tended to refer to the Indigenous population as “‘natives,’ or ‘indians,’ or sometimes, not always pejoratively, ‘savages,’ which at least captures their strangeness and the intruders’ unease” (Clendinnen 4). Clendinnen notes that even in this first year, there were spear attacks on the British, although none were fatal (95-96). This was an early indication of the difficulties which would face governors and the military in their early encounters with the locals.

According to Bruce Elder, in his history Blood on the Wattle, Captain James

Cook’s initial orders when he set sail from England in July 1768 were to, “with the consent of the Natives, take possession of convenient situations in the name of the King … or if you find the country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty”

(245). His possession of the land without consultation with the Indigenous population gave rise to the popular misconception that the land was unpopulated or “terra nullius.” Governor Phillip’s instructions in April 1787 as he left to establish a colony on the Eastern seaboard of Australia were similarly vague:

[y]ou are to endeavour by every possible means to open up an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections; enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them or give them unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence. (qtd. in Elder 247)

Not only were these administrators given no practical strategies on how to deal with the locals, beyond the broad outline recounted above, but as Elder has argued, implicit in the instruction was not only a recognition that the Aboriginal people existed, but also a belief that they would become subjects, instantly negating issues about “treaties, land rights, and dispossession. How could any of

163 these things occur to people who were already subjects?” (Elder 247). As

Reynolds points out, there was another difficulty in that “[p]olicy enunciated in

London was one thing; what happened half a world away was another”

(Reynolds, Fate 88).

The experiences of the first decade of the Port Jackson settlement established a pattern of race relations in Australia whose legacy is still being felt. In her 2003 book Dancing with Strangers, Clendinnen cites the argument of anthropologist

W.E.H. Stanner, who suggested that the

grossly unequal relationship that developed in the earliest days of the colony—he says within the first five years—continued to inflict injustice and injury on generations of Aboriginal Australians ... that those serial injustices found their root in the British failure to comprehend, much less to tolerate, legitimate difference: an intolerance which then sustained itself in the face of a long history of practical intimacy; of long- term work and sexual relationships, even childhoods spent in one another’s company. (Clendinnen 58)

It is unlikely that the Eora people of the area understood the impact that the arrival of the white men on their ships would have. As Henry Reynolds argues, there was no precedent in Aboriginal cultures for a group of people moving to an area and laying claim to it. As he points out,

[t]hroughout Aboriginal Australia the appearance of strange blacks carried the threat of revenge killing, abduction of women or the exercise of potent magic. But it did not portend forced dispossession or exile from homeland. Alienation of land was not only unthinkable it was literally impossible. If blacks often did not react to the initial invasion of their country it was because they were not aware that their land had suddenly ceased to belong to them and they to their land. (Reynolds, Other 65)

It is also well-documented that many Indigenous Australians did not view white people as people at all, but rather as ghosts of ancestors returned to them.

Government officials around Australia noted this belief, with Dr Matthew

Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia writing in 1842 that this

164 appeared to be a “universal impression” within his colony49; Edward John Eyre thought that the “general belief” was that Europeans were “resuscitated natives”50

while Stokes considered the view “universally diffused”51 among tribes

(Reynolds, Other 30). According to Reynolds, all over the continent the terms applied by Indigenous Australians to describe the white invaders could be translated as meaning ghost, spirit, departed, or deceased (Reynolds, Other 31).

Butlin also noted that early isolated encounters between Aboriginal people

sometimes ‘recognised’ white invaders as “former black friends or relatives

returning from the dead” (Butlin 3). Robert Lawlor argued that this was because

the pale skin of newborns was associated with the “smoke realm,” from which all

life had come (159). Reynolds explains this phenomenon in terms of the

Indigenous Australians’ lived experiences at the time; given that the Aboriginal

experience was geographically limited and most people within that “world” were

known, but the “realm of spirits was wide and vibrant with life” (31) and those who

entered it were transported to a land of spirits in the sky or beyond the sea, the

rationalisation that these pale-skinned humans were returned spirits must have

seemed the only plausible explanation for the sudden arrival of these strangers

over the horizon. Politically, the belief that Europeans were ghostly ancestors

“had important consequences for the Aboriginal response to the invasion of their

territory … [since r]ecognition meant acceptance and security, lack of it ensured

death” (Reynolds, Other 37).

The two cultures also held widely divergent ideas about issues of law, agriculture

and social status. As Bruce Elder argues, the “two cultures were so different. The

value systems were so polarised. There was no possibility of compromise” (2).

49 Report of Protector of Aborigines 3/6/1842, Colonial Secretary Letter Received 1842, South Australian archives GRG/24/6/483. 50 E. J. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery 2, 366. Edited by Steve Thomas. 51 J. L. Stokes, Discoveries in Australia 1, 60.

165 The Europeans saw the locals as being “savage” and “primitive”; they did not recognise social and political structures so different from their own, nor recognise that “farming by fire” was a valid and well-honed land management practice

(Rolls 61).

Indeed, the Europeans were unable to comprehend Indigenous social hierarchies to the point that in 1817 Governor Macquarie initiated his own system of “King

Plates” to formalise the tradition of governors bestowing power and chieftainship on certain individuals (van Toorn 28). This process began with Governor Arthur

Phillip’s interactions with Arabanoo, Bennelong52 and Colbee. Arabanoo was wrestled into a boat at Marine Cove and taken to the Botany Bay settlement on

December 20, 1788 (Clendinnen 97). Bennelong and Colbee were captured in

November of 1789, as part of Phillip’s plan to interact with and learn about the locals. These men were offered European clothes, lessons in the English language, and some protection during their time in the settlement. In return,

Phillip hoped to learn some of the language and customs of these people. In reality, very few of the First Fleet learned the Indigenous languages, and as

Edward Curr observed in 1880, “most blacks were accustomed from childhood to hear and often spoke languages other than their own and consequently learnt new ones more readily than the average colonist” (qtd. in Reynolds, Other 40; see also Breward 5).

Bennelong is arguably the first example of an Indigenous diasporan in Australia.

He negotiated complex and competing demands for his loyalty and identity, and despite his efforts to fit into both colonising and Indigenous societies, he died as an exile from both. In 1792 Bennelong and a member of his family, a teenager

52 Also referred to as Baneelon. Bennelong Point, where the Sydney Opera House stands, was so named because it was in this location that Bennelong’s brick hut stood.

166 named Yemmerrawanie, accompanied Governor Arthur Phillip, whom he had claimed as a kinsman,53 to England, where they were presented to King George

III. Although he appears to have travelled voluntarily to England with Phillip, it is

doubtful whether Bennelong had any real understanding of how he would be

treated; he could not have foreseen that he would be displayed as a politically

impotent anthropological curiosity, before being lodged in “the wet, cold obscurity

of Eltham” (van Toorn 69). Yemmerrawanie died in England as a result of

exposure to illness, and Bennelong’s health also suffered (Elder 10; van Toorn

69). On his return journey to New South Wales, Bennelong befriended George

Bass and taught him a few words of his own language. When he landed in the

colony, however, Bennelong found that he belonged neither with his people, nor

with the Europeans. He died alone at Kissing Point in Sydney,54 completely alienated from both cultures, “comfortable neither with his own people nor with the white settlers” (Elder 10).

The Port Jackson settlement would be the site of the first outbreak of an introduced infectious disease which proved fatal to the local peoples. The first smallpox epidemic occurred in only the second year of settlement. Medical staff from the First Fleet identified the disease from numerous bodies found in camps near the colony. Arabanoo died in mid-May 1789. John Hunter, second-in- command on the Sirius and Phillip’s successor as Governor of New South Wales, would lament Arabanoo’s death, which he believed “signalled the death of reconciliation” at this early and delicate stage in the colony’s development

(Clendinnen 102). Hunter noted in his journal, published in 1793, that there was no evidence of healed smallpox scars on the locals, and therefore came to the

53 See Clendinnen (103), and van Toorn (5, 57-61) for more detail on the relationship between Bennelong and Phillip. 54 The present-day suburb of Ryde.

167 conclusion that the disease had been introduced by the Europeans on the First

Fleet (Butlin 19-20). Butlin more recently estimated that approximately half of the

Indigenous population between Botany Bay and the Hawkesbury River did not survive this initial outbreak (Butlin 24). Bennelong told Arthur Phillip that up to half of his nation had been killed by the disease, and Colbee claimed that all but he and one other of his group had died, causing them to unite with another group in the area (Clendinnen 101).

Cultural differences in the fledgling colony often manifested themselves in sexual relationships. According to Breward,

[s]exuality in Georgian and Victorian England was both indulged and closely restricted. Such ambivalent attitudes left deep imprints on Australian society at every level. The brutality of many sexual encounters in the convict period reflected life in the cities and prisons of England, as well as the exploitation of women, which was common in all classes. (Breward 14)

In contrast, in Indigenous cultures, women were “a major focus of Indigenous politics and control of their bestowal was perhaps the principal source of secular power in traditional society” (Reynolds, Fate 70). It is unlikely that the Europeans understood that conjugal relations with Indigenous women implied certain reciprocal economic or diplomatic benefits in Aboriginal societies, leading to

“misunderstanding, bitterness and conflict” (Reynolds, Fate 71) between the two cultures.

Changes in land use were another area which led to cultural conflict. As the colonists cleared the land for agriculture, they permanently altered traditional patterns of hunting. As a result, a number of ‘thefts’ of sheep and cattle were recorded in the early years of the settlement. As Clendinnen has argued, “we

168 cannot know whether the Australians’55 abduction of the animals was in retaliation for the disruption of their own hunting, or simply the taking of desirable meat from hopelessly incompetent [colonial] hunters” (Clendinnen 96). Phillip resorted to firearms to discourage the locals from approaching the livestock. As

Reynolds reports, the rapid alteration of the natural environment must have been quite difficult for the Indigenous population to comprehend:

[i]ncreasingly the newcomers impinged on accustomed patterns of life, occupying the flat, open land and monopolising surface water. Indigenous animals were driven away, plant life eaten or trampled and Aborigines pushed into the marginal country—mountains, swamps, waterless neighbourhoods. Patterns of seasonal migration broke down, areas remaining free of Europeans were over utilized and eventually depleted of both flora and fauna. Food became scarcer and available in less and less variety and even access to water was often difficult. Attacks on sheep and cattle, made frequently in desperation, provoked violent retaliation: reprisal and revenge spiralled viciously. (Reynolds, Fate 66)

As new frontiers opened up, so too did opportunities to resist the intruders.

Reynolds asserts that it took some time for the full impact of the invasion to be understood by the Indigenous population, who “reacted less to the original trespass than to ruthless assertion by Europeans of exclusive proprietal rights”

(Reynolds, Fate 66). As van Toorn has argued, Indigenous peoples’ lives have been changed in remote, rural and urban Australia, through initial contact, governmental policies, and more recently, as a result of increased access to telecommunications, television and the internet. As she explains, frontiers are now “everywhere and nowhere” (van Toorn 224).

From early in the history of settlement, Aboriginal Australia adapted quickly to some of the new technologies and practices to which they were introduced. For example, they soon learned the

limitations of the muskets used in the first half of the nineteenth century which were inaccurate at any appreciable distance, frequently misfired and took some minutes to reload in any but experienced hands. There are numerous reports of confrontations between Aboriginal clans and lone shepherds during which the

55 Clendinnen uses the term ‘Australians’ for all Indigenous Australians.

169 blacks taunted the European to try and incite him to fire his single charge; the shepherd for his part stood for hours with his loaded musket knowing that his only safety lay in preserving it. (Reynolds, Other 99)

During early skirmishes between the Aboriginal population and the invaders, the locals often attacked during the “moment of total vulnerability” when the

Europeans were reloading their weapons (Reynolds, Other 99). Aboriginal resistance often “fell naturally into the archetypal pattern of guerrilla warfare,” according to Reynolds, because of their “loosely articulated clan organisation and dispersed population, their hunting and foraging economy and highly developed bush skills” (Reynolds, Other 103). Their knowledge of the local landscapes clearly gave them advantages over the more recent arrivals, and an understanding of the dependence of the Europeans on their horses and livestock soon presented another useful strategy. As Reynolds reports,

[i]n one or two districts there appear to have been systematic attempts to kill all the horses in order to immobilize the Europeans. This seems to have been the case on the Palmer River where several massive raids were made on miners’ horses. The Brisbane Courier established in 1883 that in the previous ten years over two hundred horses had been speared, though not all fatally. (Reynolds, Other 107).

He notes that fire was another weapon used tactically in some areas (108).

Despite such spirited resistance, it has been estimated that these politically- motivated altercations were responsible for the deaths of an estimated twenty thousand Aboriginal Australians before Federation in 1901 (Reynolds, Fate 202).

The level of resistance encountered by the Europeans varied greatly according to the circumstances of local groups.

There were occasions—as in Tasmania in the late 1820s, New South Wales in the late 1830s and early 1840s and Queensland in the early 1860s—when Aboriginal resistance emerged as one of the major problems of colonial society (Reynolds, Other 111).

There was no organised or definitive end to conflict between Aborigines and settlers. As Reynolds notes, “[b]lack resistance did not conclude when the last

170 stockman was speared although methods were modified and objectives altered.”

He suggests that “[s]orcery was probably increasingly favoured over physical confrontation as a means of challenging white domination,” (Reynolds, Other

117) and had been a widely used resistance tactic between groups in conflict even before colonisation. It is also the key element of resistance in Sam

Watson’s novel The Kadaitcha Sung.

Sorcery was another historically recorded resistance tactic in the early years of

European settlement. Reynolds records the arrest of a “clever man” in Port

Phillip, and another in Adelaide in 1849, both of which saw local Aboriginal people lobbying the administrators to release the shamans before they sought revenge and unleashed supernatural havoc on the towns. In the Adelaide instance, many locals apparently “fled into the bush” and suggested that the whites “[s]hould leave for Sydney or Van Diemen’s Land” (Reynolds, Fate 89).

The influential South Australian colonist Edward J. Eyre noted in his Journals of

Expeditions that the appearance of a comet was “the harbinger of all kinds of calamities, and more especially for white people. It was to overthrow Adelaide, destroy all Europeans and their houses,” apparently as a consequence of the imprisonment of a senior man of the tribe in a local gaol (Eyre in Thomas 135).

Elsewhere, anti-European magic began to merge into songs and ceremonies, with people such as ethnographer W. E. Roth—who shares his distinctive surname with the evil Kadaitcha character in Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung—

noting the details of the five-day Molonga corroborees danced in south-western

Queensland in the 1890s. These apparently had as their source of origin a

“desire for revenge against Europeans after the shooting of blacks” (Reynolds,

Fate 91). As Reynolds notes, “faith in magic and in the power of ‘clever men’ to

171 drive the Europeans away” was an enduring motif which could be readily explained and was well rehearsed within traditional society. Even their apparent inability to achieve the stated outcome of repelling the invaders could be explained in terms of the Europeans having or accessing counter-magic from other or distant ‘clever men.’ Indeed, this is an idea which is examined in the literature of Mudrooroo, whose vampire series of novels features shamanic characters from Aboriginal, African and European backgrounds, and also in

Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung, where the central character is of mixed-blood descent and inherits his supernatural powers from both of his parents.

Some sections of society were more interested in bringing Indigenous societies into their own, as opposed to using violence to eradicate them. The “twin systems of literacy and missions” (Sharrad 719) were cornerstones of the colonising enterprise across the globe. Australia’s history of “educating the natives” by removing Aboriginal children from their families is long and infamous. The first recorded removal of an Aboriginal child from its family was in 1789, less than sixteen months after the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney (van Toorn 24). Within thirty years of settlement this practice had been formalised to the point where a special school was established for Indigenous children. Early in the history of the colony, children whose parents died were taken into households to work as servants. As van Toorn argues,

[t]he colonists viewed these children as orphans, despite being partially aware of the extended family networks within which parentless children would normally have been raised. The discourse justifying the removal of Aboriginal children ‘for their own good’ was in fact self-contradictory. On the one hand, it was claimed that Aboriginal children had to be taken into the colonists’ households because there was no one to look after them in their own society; on the other, the colonists insisted that Aboriginal children had to be kept away from their families to avoid being dragged back into savagery by the primitive strength of their kinship ties. (van Toorn 25)

172 She further suggests that promoting literacy was a means by which the colonising

Europeans could justify their presence and actions towards the Indigenes; that there was a moral justification implicit in the gift of literacy and ‘civilisation’ (van

Toorn 25). Many colonists, including Samuel Marsden, believed that Aboriginal children were capable of being ‘improved’ by learning to read and write, but that

deep-seated racial instincts surfaced at puberty, pulling them irresistibly back to their people. The real reason these adolescents were absconding, however, was not because of mysterious ‘native instincts,’ but because they were approaching adulthood, and reasoned that they would not find a spouse in white society. (van Toorn 26)

Because of this perceived cultural problem, William Shelley proposed the establishment of a special school for the “education, Christianisation and vocational training of Aboriginal children” (van Toorn 26). Governor Macquarie approved of this plan and on January 18, 1815, the Native Institution was opened

(van Toorn 27). Six months later Shelley passed away, but his work was continued by his widow, Elizabeth. As with many institutions aimed at ‘educating’

Indigenous Australians, the school was largely unsuccessful. Enrolment numbers remained low as many children either died or absconded (van Toorn 27). In a frightening forecast of governmental assimiliationist policies which would be enacted at the end of the eighteenth century and continue, in one form or another until 1972:

the Native Institution exacted its own exorbitant costs upon Aboriginal children and their families … Aboriginal parents far and wide remained afraid of the ‘men dressed in black’ who tried to take their offspring away to the institution. Literacy was no compensation for losing their children. (van Toorn 27)

The Shelleys’ Native Institution was formally closed in 1823 and the survivors removed to the Black Town settlement, and later to segregated male and female

Orphan Schools, where they received training in menial work, alongside orphaned working class white children (van Toorn 30). In 1826 the Black Town school would be briefly resurrected but by 1833 the remaining three children—all

173 girls—were sent to the Wellington Valley Mission in the Wiradjuri country of

Western New South Wales.

In Australia, as in Canada, the “twin systems” were closely linked, as many of the educational institutions to which these children were sent were either run or funded by church groups in a practice which has a history as long as that of colonisation itself. One of the most prolific of these was the Church Missionary

Society, established in April 1799 at the Castle and Falcon Inn in London by a group of Evangelicals (Nemer 17). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

[p]rimal religions seemed especially primitive to Christians. Not only did some peoples, like Aborigines, appear to have no religion, but the native of their religious knowledge was inaccessible to those who were neither initiated nor deeply conversant to the local language. At a time when European religion was moving to an emphasis on the private, intellectual, and moral significance of worship, it was hard for observers to appreciate the communal nature of primal religion. (Breward viii)

The evangelists’ optimism and their belief that the term “Christian” equated with the term “cultured,” meant that they had little perception of how difficult it would be to convert peoples whose lives were based in completely unfamiliar languages and cultures (Breward 2). The missionaries also believed unreservedly in a moral obligation to convert the “heathen” in order to save their souls from eternal damnation. They were ill-prepared to understand alternative systems of spirituality, and thus many concluded that “the Aborigines were so primitive that they did not even have a religion” (Breward 5).

In contrast to the North American experience, Aboriginal people in all Australian colonies with the exception of South Australia were,

rarely given access to the Bible in their own languages … Every effort was made to monologise the Bible, or render it as a single-voiced text, and to preserve the colonists’ monopoly over the power of biblical knowledge … Every effort was made to prevent Aboriginal peoples from exploring what the Bible might say in the light of their own knowledge, culture and social values. These efforts, however, did not prevent non-literate Aboriginal people from appropriating and

174 transforming the Bible as ritual object, nor from challenging biblically-based colonial viewpoints. (van Toorn 99)

As with the Inuit experience, there is some evidence of the accretion of Christian symbolism into traditional spiritual life. Significantly, this appeared to be more likely to happen in those rare areas where there were some attempts to teach locals in their own language. One such example is the Milbrodale Biamee painting, located in the Upper Hunter Valley of Western New South Wales.

Lancelot Threlkeld had intitiated a literacy scheme for the Awabakal in the area in

1824, funded by the London Missionary Society. Threlkeld worked closely with a local named Biraban, who was a “visionary and spiritual leader in his own right” whose “importance as a visionary who mediated between Indigenous and

Christian ideologies … perhaps grew out of a vivid dream he related to Threlkeld in 1836” (van Toorn 47). The dream involved an image of Jehovah as a man-god with the face and wings of an eagle—an image which can be found in the Book of

Ezekiel.

Whilst it is possible that some of the Biblical images instilled by the missionaries provided the basis for his vision, it also shares a number of features with the ochre-on-rock depiction of Biamee located at Milbrodale nearby, which features a hybrid figure with large red flame-like eyes, eagle-shaped wings and a humanoid body. As van Toorn suggests, “this extraordinary and arresting painting can be taken as evidence of the complex entanglement of traditional Aboriginal religion and book-based Christianity” (51).

A few years later Reverend James Gunther took detailed notes of the traditional beliefs in the same being in Wiradjuri country outside of Wellington, New South

Wales. Whilst he acknowledged that the Wiradjuri tradition of the Sky God,

175 Biamee may have existed from “ancient times,” he also noted that Biamee was a

Supreme Being who shared a crucial three attributes of the “Christian God: eternity, omniscience and goodness” (Gunther qtd in van Toorn 38). The figure of

Biamee features in the works of many Indigenous Australian authors, including

Sam Watson, and more recently in the novel Not Meeting Mr Right by Anita

Heiss.

Definitive answers on points of origin of beliefs and the influences imported with the settlers will remain elusive, but what is clear is that traditional spiritual life was disrupted as the settlers moved into particular spaces and began to make their mark upon the environment. As Reynolds notes, throughout Australia,

[i]mportant sacred sites were desecrated, albeit unwittingly in many cases, access to them denied and large ceremonial gatherings often dispersed by anxious frontiersmen or officious police detachments. (Reynolds, Fate 67)

Just as “clever men” or Kadaitcha were important figures in traditional societies, church leaders were important and influential community leaders in the settlements (Breward 67). Church initiatives to remove locals to missions and reserves were met with both government and community support.

Missions and reserves were sometimes punitive in their practices. As van Toorn notes,

[l]etters from missions and reserves in the colonial era describe hard, constrictive, dehumanising conditions similar to those in the late twentieth century prison writings of Kevin Gilbert, Robert Walker and Jack Davis, and in the autobiographies of writers such as Glenyse Ward and Ruth Hegarty, who were removed from their families as children and raised in institutions. (van Toorn 228)

In The Oxford History of the Prison: the Practice of Punishment in Western

Society, Norval Morris and David Rothman devote whole chapters to reform schools and political prisons as institutions of punishment; they are effectively

“punitive in nature since they restrict the free movement of body and mind”

176 (Carnochan in Morris and Rothman 427). Missions and residential schools also limited the ability of Indigenous Australians to freely choose where they would live or the kinds of information they would learn. As Thom Blake has argued, the missions and schools offered white society a means of masking the inherently

“violent nature of the settlement regime” which sought to destroy the inmates’ culture. He argues that the

placement of young children in dormitories, the suppression of languages, the condemnation of customs, the imposition of European methods of learning and knowledge, the inculcating of capitalist values of time and work, were all part of a process of cultural genocide. (Blake 239-40)

As van Toorn notes, “[s]chools—and empty promises of schooling—were part and parcel of the long history of separating Indigenous children from their families” (van Toorn 15). These policies were enforced in all States in Australia at various times, and have had far-reaching ramifications not only for individuals and their families, but have damaged the ability of Indigenous Australians to claim for native title, since claimants must be able to prove continuous use of the land by their peoples. The impact of this history cannot be underestimated, for, as Edwards and Read argue,

[i]n Australia today there may be one hundred thousand people of Aboriginal descent who do not know their families or communities. They are the people, or the descendants of the people, who were recovered from their families by a variety of white people for a variety of reasons. They do not know where they came from; some do not even know they are of Aboriginal descent … the origin of the practice of separating black children from their parents lay in the desire to turn them into ‘useful’ citizens. The earliest Aboriginal institutions in Australia, where parents were at first allowed to live nearby, were set up to teach the Anglican virtues of obedience, punctuality, thriftiness and hard work. (ix-x)

Policies of removal and education with their underlying suggestions of eugenics were by no means limited to specific locations or time periods, but remained part of government policies throughout the nation up until the 1970s. Real life examples of the impacts of these practices on families such as Pauline McLeod’s are now well known, and many are recounted in the Bringing Them Home

177 Report, a seven hundred page document which relays the findings of the 1997

Royal Commission into the Stolen Generations and elsewhere, as in Coral

Edwards’ and Peter Read’s 1989 collection The Lost Children: Australians taken from their Aboriginal families tell of the struggle to find their natural parents.

As Read noted in the introduction to this book, the philosophy of “saving” people from their own circumstances was popular in the first half of the twentieth century.

In addition to the numbers of Aboriginal children affected, London-based children were evacuated to the country during the World War II Blitz and Barnado’s children were often sent overseas in search of a better lifestyle (Read, xiii). In

New South Wales, the Aborigines’ Protection Board,

reasoned that if the Aboriginal population, characterized in some quarters as a ‘wild race of half-castes,’ was growing, then it would somehow have to be diminished. If the children were to be desocialised as Aborigines and resocialised as whites, they would have to be removed from their parents. (Read xii)

On the missions, paler-skinned children were often sent to “ordinary child welfare

Homes … presumably in the hope that they would never know that they were

Aboriginal” (Read xv). Similarly, in foster care, Indigenous children would be placed with white families in order to assist the assimilation process (Read xv).

The feelings of alienation and exile which resulted from these social and educational policies are explored in numerous texts by Indigenous authors. As

Pauline McLeod relates in Edwards’ and Read’s collection, she was a light- skinned child who had been raised by white foster-parents, but who later worked as an Aboriginal community worker for a government department in the Hunter region. As such, she often had to defend her Aboriginality to her clients, saying

I found that I was fighting for my own identity, to be accepted by Aboriginal people. And that was almost the last crunch. There were times when I really thought I was going to suicide. Because I wasn’t fitting in anywhere. I just wasn’t fitting into any community whatsoever. (McLeod in Edwards and Read 20-21)

178 The Indigenous diasporic sensibilities expressed here—a confusion about feeling not quite at home in either community and related issues of self-loathing—are also articulated by Watson’s fictional character Tommy Gubba, who is never quite sure which “camp” is his, and whether his home is the urban apartment he sometimes shares with his (white) birth mother, or if it is in Aunty Darpil’s house on Fingal mission. Pauline McLeod’s thoughts about suicide are echoed in

Tommy’s self-destructive behaviour and his unshakeable belief that he only has a short time to live.

The separation of what Read defines as the “teaching generation” from the

“learning generation” (Edwards and Read xii—xiii), or what van Toorn delineates as the “speaking generation” from the “writing generation” (van Toorn 150) had an incalculable effect on the dissemination of information, as well as negotiations with the settlers and government. Van Toorn notes that one of the impacts of these policies was that younger people with adequate literacy skills were called upon to participate in written negotiations with government departments and so on, which was in direct contradiction with the practices of gerontocratic

Indigenous societies. In other words, younger people were being given a social status by the Europeans that they would not have achieved under traditional circumstances (van Toorn 129). This was a significant cultural disruption. The idea of a young, literate warrior being used to interact with the institutions of white society is utilised in The Kadaitcha Sung, where the youthful protagonist Tommy mediates between the elders and spirits and white society, but is treated with suspicion by both.

Frontier conflict was widespread throughout colonial Australia, often triggered by

“tension and misunderstanding, by the possessiveness of Europeans towards the

179 land and water, by competition over women and by diametrically opposed concepts of personal property” (Reynolds, Fate 94) and spirituality. Greater bush knowledge was an obvious advantage held by the Indigenous peoples, and as a result they “usually knew exactly where European (hunting or revenge) parties were while remaining hidden themselves” (Reynolds, Fate 34). There are many records of Indigenous groups demonstrating remarkable abilities to observe, understand and circumvent the tactics and technologies used by the invaders. As

Reynolds points out, as well as “picking up the language, the Aborigines had learnt how to use and counter the effectiveness of firearms, how to train and deploy domestic dogs and how best to lay siege to European farms and stock huts” (Reynolds, Fate 38). They also continued to use some traditional resistance tactics, including the use of sorcery, in their conflicts with Europeans (Reynolds,

Other 95).

One of the most well-known sites of conflict between settlers and Indigenes was

Tasmania. The Tasmanian experience is examined here for two reasons: the first being that George Augustus Robinson’s prolific journal entries provide an unparalleled insight into the pride and arrogance which were intermingled with colonial evangelism as he attempted to ‘save’ the local population (Reynolds,

Fate 177). These journals contain remarkably detached accounts of diseases, deaths and autopsies which were frequent occurrences at the mission. The second is that the Tasmanian experience is unique in that, being the smallest state and the only one which is an island, its geography created a kind of ‘control study’ in terms of missions and their impacts on Australian Indigenous peoples.

Although Dutch, French and English sailors had visited the area since 1682, and sealers from the United States and Britain had had extended contact from the

180 late eighteenth century, there was no formal attempt to colonise Tasmania until

1803. The colony was founded by David Collins, who had previously been a First

Fleeter and senior officer in New South Wales. It would have been a very difficult task for even the most devoted ideologue to maintain the myth of terra nullius within the comparatively small borders of Tasmania (see Reynolds, Fate 24).

Here the Indigenous were not ignored or denied but rather, treated as a pest which required eradication. As Breward notes,

[a]ppalling and inhuman behaviour, which can only be called genocide, characterized settlement in Tasmania. The numbers of Aborigines steadily diminished, and the attempt, by the Evangelical Governor Arthur to sweep the island in late 1830 and eliminate any threat to settlers yielded little, despite the expense. (Breward 8)

Conflict between white settlers and the Indigenous population increased from

1824 (Reynolds, 1995: 4), and the hostilities had important economic implications, since the cost of security reduced farming profits (Reynolds, 1995:

59).

The official response of Governor George Arthur to the defensive guerilla tactics employed by the Pallawa people of Tasmania was to invoke martial law on

November 1, 1828 (Elder 39). “Roving parties” (Reynolds, Fate 4) were deployed to move people on. These had limited success, leading to the implementation of

“the Black Line,” a program which was designed to mobilise the entire colony into driving the tribespeople into the Tasman and Forestier peninsulas on the south- eastern corner of the island. The exercise was an expensive failure (Reynolds,

Fate 4; 118). Two thousand, two hundred men were involved, including 550 troopers, and the manoeuvre lasted six weeks over October and November of

1830 (Ryan 110-13). Waged almost entirely on foot because horses were scarce on the island, every move of every day was planned in great detail, with camping, patrol and sentry duties outlined in advance (Reynolds, Fate 71; 118).

181 According to Reynolds, the direct cost of the exercise to the government was £30

000, or almost half of the annual colonial budget, although, as he points out, with the inclusion of indirect cost including lost wages and production, it must have been much higher (Reynolds, Fate 118). It was obvious from the outset that this was not money well spent. Even during the movement of the Line across the island, four settlers were killed, eleven wounded and thirty dwellings ransacked.

Very few Indigenous Australians were captured under the plan, but the initiative did appear to have the unintended impact of making the locals more amenable to the mediation and ministrations offered by George Augustus Robinson.

In 1830 Robinson, a building contractor and “religious enthusiast” (Reynolds,

Fate 4) set out to traverse the remote regions of the west and north-west coasts in what he named a “Friendly Mission.” Accompanied by a number of locals, he was effectively negotiating a settlement to the war between locals and white settlers (Reynolds, Fate 5). Indeed, according to Reynolds, on each of the six expeditions there were more Aboriginal guides than Europeans, who in all probability guided, fed, sheltered and managed their ‘leader,’ since Robinson was very inexperienced in bushcraft (Reynolds, Fate 136). Robinson was unusual, however, in that he studied and understood some of the Tasmanian dialects and thus was able to converse with the people in their own languages.

In 1833 he began a mission with one hundred and sixty Tasmanian Aboriginals at

Settlement Point on Flinders Island, which was soon renamed Wybalenna

(meaning Black Men’s Houses) by the inmates (Breward 8; Reynolds, Fate 5). As was typical of these kinds of reserves, the so-called “Friendly” Mission was a diaspora space in that it became ‘home’ to Indigenous Australians who belonged to different nations and language-groupings.

182 One hundred and thirty-two deaths were recorded before the Friendly Mission was finally closed in October 1847 (Reynolds, Fate 184). As Reynolds notes, the extraordinary loss of life at Wybalenna was not atypical of Aboriginal reserves at the time, but on mainland Australia the population was larger and more mobile

(Reynolds, Fate 186), and thus, ultimately, had a better chance of avoiding the intervention of colonists by retreating to increasingly remote areas. In Tasmania a high percentage of the land was suitable for agriculture and was thus settled, meaning that clashes between the two cultures were unavoidable.

In late 1846 a number of Aboriginal Tasmanians wrote to Governor Denison demanding their civil rights. They realised that even though convicts might be

“ruthlessly disciplined and ha[ve] very little freedom” whilst on Flinders Island and under sentence, that they “were free to go and could not be legally detained” on completion of their sentences (Reynolds, Fate 179). The Indigenous inmates, in contrast, were to remain on the Mission indefinitely.

In 1847 the 44 survivors of the Wybalenna were returned to mainland Tasmania.

Numbers continued to decline relentlessly at the Oyster Cove settlement. By

1855 there were only 16 remaining (Reynolds Other 5; Elder 47). By the late

1860s Truganini and William Lanne were widely believed to be the last of the tribe.56 Lanne died on March 3, 1869, but his body was removed from the grave for the purpose of scientific analysis. Truganini publicly recorded her horror at this treatment and pleaded to be buried “behind the mountains,” but following her

56 There are, in fact, some three thousand people in Tasmania today who assert their Aboriginality. Truganini’s status as “the last Tasmanian Aboriginal,” however, was considered to be a historical fact and this author can attest that it was taught in primary schools at least as recently as the 1980s. For further information on this debate, see Vivienne Rae-Ellis’ Trucanini: Queen or Traitor? (1981), Joseph Henry Vogel’s Genes for Sale (1994), Madhuseree Mukerjee’s The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders (2003), and Patrick Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings: discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Race (2003), among others.

183 death in 1876 her skeleton was displayed in the Tasmanian Museum (Elder 47-8;

Perrault 56). It was not until 1976 that her bones were finally cremated and scattered in Adventure Bay, near her birthplace (Elder 48).

Like Tasmania, sections of Queensland are infamous for their mistreatment of the local populations. The south-eastern corner of Queensland has been another significant site in Australian colonial history, and is the setting for the action of

The Kadaitcha Sung. Indeed, as previously stated, Queensland has been dubbed the “Deep North” of Australia by critic Eva Rask Knudsen (Rask Knudsen 283).

Present-day Queensland was not settled until the 1820s, following the instructions of the then-New South Wales Governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, for exploratory parties to evaluate the viability of Moreton Bay, Port Curtis and Port

Bowen as future penal colonies (Elder 114; Woodford Historical Society 10). In

November of 1823 John Oxley reached Moreton Bay, where he was shown the

Brisbane River by two escaped convicts. He returned to Sydney Town to report on the location, and came back to the area to form a settlement at Redcliffe on

Moreton Bay the following year, accompanied by twenty-nine convicts, fourteen soldiers, a botanist and a military commandant (Elder 114). The initial settlement was moved to North Quay on the river only three months later. In December 1824

Chief Justice Forbes arrived and called the colony Edinglassie, but this was soon changed to Brisbane in acknowledgement of the Governor’s support for the colony (Elder 114). Although the area was a closed colony for a number of years, meaning that there was no free settlement allowed in the immediate area, historical records show that on at least two occasions convicts escaped and were taken in by local Aboriginal Australians (Elder 114).

184 The Kilcoy massacre which occurred in the South-East in 1842 has been described by Elder as “the start of a reign of wholesale terror in Queensland, which, though poorly documented, indicates that probably thousands of

Aboriginal people were killed by poisoning between 1842 and 1900” (Elder 120).

News of this event first came to light following the 1842 Bunya Festival, which was a gathering of the local Aboriginal nations. The Kilcoy Creek group were noticeably absent, and the Inwoorah and Tombarah people acted out an explanatory tale, mimicking people holding

their heads as though they were swelling to a point where the eyeballs rolled and it seemed as though their skulls were about to explode. They coughed and mimicked foam and spittle coming from their mouths. Their bodies convulsed with agony and they mimed violent vomiting. They cried out for water and twisted with pain. Then their bodies started trembling uncontrollably, they jumped around like fish taken out of water until, exhausted from their agony, they fell prostrate and feigned death (Elder 119).

From this evidence it would appear that the Bumgar nation of Kilcoy Creek had fallen victim to poisoned damper, colloquially known as “death pudding.” As

Reynolds attests, news of the deaths of the group of around fifty people spread quickly among the Aboriginal groups of Northern New South Wales and Southern

Queensland (Reynolds, Other 84). By the time Charles Archer attempted to cross

the Fitzroy River and claim land for in 1854, the local people were openly militant,

and “assembled in great numbers on the opposite bank” to display their

opposition (Reynolds, Fate 85; Woodford Historical Society 12).

In 1839 David Archer and his cousin, Edward Walker, left the Walker family

property of Wallerawang, one hundred miles west of Sydney, with five thousand

head of sheep, aiming to begin a station in the Darling Downs. An eight-month

delay at Dubbo whilst they treated the flock for ‘scab’ meant that they believed

that all the good land would have been taken, and began to look for alternatives.

David went ahead and selected a thirty-five thousand hectare area on a ridge on

185 the right bank of the Stanley River, out of reach of floods. The station was named

Durundur, the local name for a Moreton Bay Ash. It became the northernmost settlement in what was then New South Wales (Woodford Historical Society 14), and was inhabited by brothers David, Charles, Tom and John Archer at various times. Aboriginal labour played a significant part in the building on the station, and the workers were paid in rice, flour, meat and clothing. According to the local

Historical Society, David “believed that they were the hereditary owners of the land and that they would be friendly if treated with kindness and justice”

(Woodford Historical Society 15). Whilst it is difficult from a twenty-first century perspective to reconcile the apparent contradiction here—that the traditional owners of the land might behave well if treated nicely, even as their land was being irrevocably altered—the Archer brothers’ attempts to maintain friendly relations with the locals were a marked improvement on the prevalent attitudes on the frontier at the time, which gave rise to a number of massacres in

Queensland in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

During the 1870s an Aboriginal reserve, Binambi (meaning ‘water hole’ in the local dialect), was established at Durundur under the management of three trustees, including Wood, and overseen by the district’s first priest, a missionary from Glasgow by the name of Father Duncan McNab. Three thousand acres on

Monkey Bong Creek were set aside for this purpose, and Indigenous peoples

“from far and wide” (Woodford Historical Society 28) were offered food, clothing and shelter, funded by the government. Father McNab lived among the people, because he had “never heard of a people converted where the priest did not live with them so that they might observe the whole tenor of his life as well as hear his doctrine” (McNab qtd in Woodford Historical Society 31). He learned their language and expressed “deep concern at the ‘dispersal of blacks’ occurring

186 when Native Police arrived to investigate any complaint” (Woodford Historical

Society 28). When government assistance ceased, however, only the Durundur people remained on the property. Father McNab left Queensland after an altercation with the Minister for Lands, who bowed to public pressure from neighbouring selectors who were petitioning against the reserve (Woodford

Historical Society 31). By 1898, there were only twenty inhabitants, and the mission was closed, with the remaining people moved to Fraser Island (Blake

15).

In June 1900 the mission was re-opened with the removal of sixty Aboriginal

Australians from Western Queensland (Blake 9; 16). This again prompted a hostile reaction from local white residents, who petitioned for the closure of the reserve (Blake 9). The Chief Protector of Aborigines in Southern Queensland,

Archibald Meston, was in charge (Woodford Historical Society 32; Blake, 9).

In September of 1901 Albert Tronson was named supervisor of Binambi

(Woodford Historical Society 32). He had forty-two “inmates” under his care in the first year. By 1903, the number had risen to three hundred (Woodford Historical

Society 32). The population of the mission came from as far away as Cape York and the South Australian border (Woodford Historical Society 32). In February of

1905 the entire settlement was moved to Barambah, now known as Cherbourg.

Sixty-one inmates walked overland from Woodford, and another 115 walked to

Caboolture, where they caught a train to Wondai, and then walked the remainder of the distance (Woodford Historical Society 30; Blake 16). Tronson remained in charge during the move. All that remains of the Binambi site today is a sign naming the property “Black Flat” (Woodford Historical Society 31).

187 In May of 1903 a school was finally erected, and some forty pupils were

‘educated’ in what was essentially a bark humpy (Blake 13). This school would become an integral part of the dormitory segregation system, whose impacts are detailed in Jeannie Mok’s history Cherbourg Dorm Girls and Ruth Hegarty’s autobiography Is that you, Ruthie? Within the settlement, children would be separated from their families and required to live in single sex dormitory accommodation. They were discouraged from having contact with families in the camps on the same site (Hegarty 20; 95; 123).

The Murgon Progress Association began a campaign which voiced concerns about the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases into the white community. As

Thom Blake notes, implicit in these concerns was an acknowledgement that “the inmates were being exploited for sexual purposes” (Blake 24).

Despite continued resistance to the location of the mission from locals, Barambah was one of the few missions which was profitable and thus was considered to be an archetype on which future missions could be based. Barambah/Cherbourg demonstrated a successful financial model based on hiring out Aboriginal labour cheaply to locals. Its “apparent success … dispelled any doubts or misapprehensions about the viability of the reserve system” (Blake 237). In 1913 the South Australian Royal Commission on Aborigines held sittings in

Queensland, including a day on Barambah spent questioning the staff” (Blake

32), with a view to borrowing strategies and applying them to missions in that state.

Between 1908 and 1911 three successive Home Secretaries visited the area to inspect the settlement and presumably, to consider its relocation (Blake 25).

188 Richard Howard, Chief Protector of Aborigines between 1906 and 1913 remained adamant that the mission remain open and in the same location (Blake 25). This was in part a reflection on the investment the government had already made in the site (Blake 26). Howard also argued that Barambah was a ‘grant’ to

Aboriginal people, and that the government has effectively entered into a contract with them when they undertook their ‘protection’ (Blake 25-27). As Blake notes,

[i]n an era when Aborigines were regarded as having no rights whatsoever, the suggestion that the creation of the reserve was not just a benevolent act but a contractual arrangement where both the government and the inmates had certain obligations, was both a novel and bold proposition. The forcefulness of Howard’s argument left the government with little option but to retain Barambah. (Blake 27)

Blake further argues that the attachment of the Indigenous population to

Barambah was not so much about the quality of their lives there, as it was about stability. Given that the settlement itself had been moved from the Binambi site at

Woodford, and that most of the inmates’ lives had been those of “successive displacement, from station camp to town fringe, to one reserve and then another”

(Blake 29), the attachment was not so much to the mission as to the idea of not being moved yet again, at the discretion of others (Blake 29). Blake also notes that Barambah57 was initially managed with minimal control (Blake 29). The level

of control over inmates’ lives would steadily increase, however, throughout the

1930s, 1940s and 1950s.58

Removal was a serious threat on the Barambah/Cherbourg mission, used by the authorities as a means of controlling the inmates’ behaviour (Blake 39). As he notes, even being suspected of a crime could lead to deportation, with the Palm

57 Barambah would become known as Cherbourg in 1932, allegedly because of ‘postal confusion’ caused by the Mission sharing its name with that of the nearby township. 58 See Jeannie Mok’s Cherbourg Dorm Girls and Ruth Hegarty’s Is that you Ruthie? for more detailed examples. From the time of the Great Depression until Cherbourg became a community-run Mission, the level of intervention in the inhabitants’ lives was remarkably high. Schooling, work placements, wages, relationships and marriages were all determined by the administrators.

189 Island settlement being used as a penal mission (Blake 40; 44). Blake further argues that Barambah became a de facto gaol and a “convenient means by which the courts could extend the sentence of an Aborigine beyond the statutory limits” (46)—much the same kind of injustice that the Tasmanian survivors of the

Friendly Mission had successfully lobbied against in the previous century.

Removal to another mission space was also used when a conviction could not be obtained via the legal process. Indigenous peoples were often separated from their country and kin, even when their guilt had not been proven according to the laws of the day. Blake argues that reserves like Barambah/Cherbourg were not maintained by altruistic motives but rather that their principal aim was to exclude

Aboriginal people from mainstream society. As he notes, removal ensured that

Aborigines were not free to retain their previous lifestyle and belief system. They became inmates of an institution that attempted to control, regulate and inform every facet of their lives. (Blake 237-8)

Indeed, the inhabitants developed what Michel Foucault has referred to as

‘disciplinary careers’ (Foucault 300); a “lifetime spent moving from one institution to another” (Blake 73).

As Butlin notes, the missions set up to ‘protect’ Indigenous Australians “were often death-inducing resettlement devices” where the “dominant expense on official charity for blacks went in wages and salaries for whites” (Butlin 3). Most administrators still believed that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia were doomed to extinction, and the missions “were run on minimal budgets by staff with little or no professional training, who often solved problems by punishment” (Breward

266). The education of children was seen to be a means of ‘saving’ children from their culture, and children with fairer skin, in particular, were believed to have the potential to be “civilised” and taught to operate within the norms of mainstream

Australia. Indeed, Western Australia’s long-serving Protector of Aborigines, A. O.

190 Neville, theorised that skin pigmentation could be bred out in two or three generations, and in 1947 he lobbied the government and other benefactors for the “money and legislative power to start a selective breeding program” so that he could “in a matter of sixty to seventy years, solve the ‘Aboriginal problem’ by breeding a race of white Aboriginal people” (Elder 231). According to Thom

Blake, popular opinion regarded “settlement inmates … as stranded between two cultures, neither black nor white” (Blake 198). This kind of ideology informs the character of Tommy in The Kadaitcha Sung, who also inhabits a kind of “third space,” being neither wholly black nor white; neither mortal nor godlike.

Tommy’s “home” of Fingal mission appears to be closely based on Barambah, which was an uncanny space; a place where inmates felt solidarity among themselves, despite being a “potpourri of language or ‘tribal’ groups with almost every linguistic group in the state represented” (Blake 36). As Marcia Langton notes, “[t]he removal process took people from their lands and fractured kinship networks” (Langton, Urbanising 17). This process, combined with the use of the dormitory system, meant the decline of traditional customs, which was sometimes interpreted as an inauthentic culture (Blake 199). Langton is adamant, however, that it is overly simplistic to regard the inmates as being “culturally impoverished” as a result of the mission experience. Rather, complicated kinship groups were created within those environs and on Barambah, as on other missions, the inmates were able to create spaces wherein they were insulated from white control; their cultures evolved and were expressed in new ways.59 As Blake

concludes,

[d]espite the fragmentation of kinship networks, dislocation, and suppression of cultural traditions, Barambah inmates retained a distinctive identity … The resurgence of development of a Barambah identity, particularly during the 1930s mirrored changes elsewhere in Australia. The place that was ‘a dumping ground for

59 See Blake, 200-01, 235, 236; Simons 8; and Sider 22.

191 the lame, the halt and the incorrigible’ also became a place of resistance and survival. (244-5)

In many ways the “frontier” remained in Queensland later than in other states, in part due to the political climate. Indeed, in the 1970s when Indigenous

Australians were protesting for Land Rights, Queensland was under the premiership of conservative National Party state leader Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Bjelke-Petersen retained power for a record nineteen years, partly because of what has been dubbed the “Bjelke-mander.” The party system in the state at the time was stable with each of three major parties—the left-wing Labor party, and the conservative coalition of the Liberal and National parties—having consistent and relatively predictable voter support, with an over-representation of parliamentarians in the North and West because of its rural areas. As Malcolm

Alexander notes,

[t[he peculiarity of this ‘Bjelke-mander’ is that it disadvantages both the Labor and Liberal parties. The National Party has used its control of Parliament to create an electoral geography that allows the ideology of the rural heartland to determine the values of the state’s political life. (Alexander qtd in Hodgins et al 98)

As Alexander notes, it is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Bjelke-Petersen’s

‘rural heartland’ was opposed to Aboriginal Land Rights claims (Alexander 98; see also Elder 239).60 Sam Watson, who is a left-wing political activist and a member of the Socialist Alliance Party, was a vocal opponent of Bjelke-Petersen and of his legacy in Queensland politics. This opposition is a key element of The

Kadaitcha Sung, which is critical of Bjelke-Petersen through its caricatures of self-serving politicians, all of whom are strategising to secure the electorate which the late Premier called home.

60 Bjelke-Petersen’s widow, Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen, denies these suggestions and states that some Aboriginal people in Queensland viewed the Premier as a ‘saviour’ (Attard).

192 Watson has been highly critical of Federal conservative politicians Pauline

Hanson and John Howard in more recent times. In 1996 the endorsement of

Liberal candidate Pauline Hanson in the Queensland seat of Oxley was rescinded after she made comments to the Queensland Times which called for the abolition of Government welfare for Aboriginal Australians. The then-Liberal

Party and Opposition Leader John Howard did not publicly agree with her comments, but did assert that he believed in “her right” to make them (qtd in

Murphy 2002). In many ways, however, her remarks echoed the immigration and ethnic affairs policy which Howard had released in August of 1988, entitled One

Australia. This controversial policy—which opposed multiculturalism and

Aboriginal Land Rights—had been the source of much dissent in the Liberal

Party, and was later cited as contributing to Andrew Peacock’s challenge for the

Liberal Party leadership, ending one of Howard’s three stints as Opposition

Leader in May 1989.

By the mid-1990s the Australian public seemed to be more inclined to listen to these far-right views. A return to extreme conservatism and a nostalgia for the stability of the 1950s dominated Australian politics in the 1990s. Implicit in this nostalgia was a return to the so-called White Australia Policy,61 reflected in

Hanson’s criticism of what she termed the “Aboriginal industry” and her insistent calls for the modification of Australia’s immigration policy,62 and some of her

ideas were later adopted by the Howard Coalition in its second term. As media

commentator Christopher Scanlon explains,

61 The correct title of this policy is the “Immigration Restriction Act.” Enacted at the time of Federation in 1901, it was not formally amended until 1973 and was finally replaced by the Whitlam Government with the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act. 62 See Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech of September 10, 1996. Her remark, “if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have a say in who comes into my country” bears a striking similarity to the 2001 Liberal Party slogan: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

193 [w]hile Hanson pushed the boundaries of what could be considered normal politics, Howard could capitalise on the sound and fury directed at her, moving further to the right while she drew their fire. Voters who wouldn’t be seen dead supporting Hanson could quite comfortably vote for Howard, content to allow him to implement a more sophisticated version of the same. (Scanlon 2)

In May 1997 Howard further alienated Indigenous Australia during his address at the Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne, during which he shouted at the audience and pounded on the lectern.63 Indigenous Australians in the audience responded by turning their backs on him and refusing to listen. Howard’s hardline stance did appeal, however, to some conservative voters, and by the time of the

1998 election Hanson’s percentage of the vote had dropped significantly, which some commentators attributed to the Liberal Party’s adoption of a “[m]ore refined and developed version of Hansonism” (Scanlon 2). The cornerstone of this seemed to be paranoia about Aboriginal Australians having “special privileges,” and in particular, what the push for Land Rights might mean for the mortgage belt—could the Australian dream of a quarter-acre backyard be subject to land rights claims?

As Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs point out in their 1998 book Uncanny Australia:

Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, accusations about Indigenous

Australians having “too much” were,

a novel and contemporary political ploy to align them, as [Conservative MP Bob] Katter did, with ‘the rich.’ It ha[d], of course, been usual to think about Aboriginal people as not having enough, as lacking in, for example, health and housing and so on. (Gelder and Jacobs 15) The realities of comparative disadvantage in terms of health, education, living conditions and the ability to earn an income had somehow been reinterpreted, in the Australian political climate of the mid- to late-nineties, into a perception of special privilege and “reverse discrimination.”

63 For a critical discussion of this event, see Martha Augustinos, Amanda Lecouteur and John Soyland; John Frow; Elspeth Probyn.

194 In August of 1999 Howard offered a “statement of sincere and deep regret” to

Aboriginal Australians but refused to entertain the possibility of a formal Apology.

By May 2000 there was significant evidence that public opinion had swung towards Reconciliation and an Apology, with the public Reconciliation Walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on May 28 attracting some 250 000 participants. Howard declined an invitation to participate. Significantly, a signwriter wrote “Sorry” in the sky on behalf of the people of New South Wales.

The march was replicated in other states around Australia the same week, but

Howard maintained his stance on both the Apology and broader issues around

Reconciliation for his remaining seven years in office.

The neo-conservative trend was further reinforced in Howard’s later terms of office, with suspicion of the visible “Other” peaking after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001.64 Around the same time, the Howard Government altered national borders in order to make it more difficult for refugees to enter Australia, and also became involved in the infamous

‘Children Overboard’ and ‘Tampa’ affairs. Sam Watson argues that this coincidence of policy can be interpreted as showing that, “[r]acism is endemic within Australian society and it will not just fade away. It must be confronted and it must be exposed and those things will not happen naturally” (in Dean 11-12).

Watson further argues that,

white Australians will not walk unassisted to the Treaty table, we have to drag and force them to acknowledge us as equals. I would encourage aboriginal people from every community to become more forceful and more active. We must achieve real change now. (Dean, 11-12)

The final controversial act of the Howard Coalition with regard to Australian race relations was the Northern Territory Intervention announced on 21 June 2007.

64 See Ian McAllister, Keith Suter, Katharine Betts, Don McMaster and Graeme Turner, for discussions of the impact of these events on the Australian political landscape.

195 The “Intervention” involved deploying police and military to remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, restricting entry passes to these communities, quarantining welfare payments, and banning alcohol and other drugs. These measures were supposed to lower the alarming incidence of childhood sexual assault, and children under the age of 16 were to be subjected to genital examination for evidence of sexual assault.65 The Intervention was widely criticised for being extremist, paternalistic and invasive. Within a matter of months, reports were appearing which suggested that the policy was “damaging the very people it [was] meant to protect” (Smith 1), and arguing that no actual cases of child sexual assault had been referred to the child sex abuse taskforce as a result of the Intervention (Smith 1; Allan and Baptist 1). The Intervention did, however, become a key political issue and as Jon Altman from the Centre for

Aboriginal Economic Policy Research has argued, it created an unexpected and

“unprecedented national focus on Indigenous affairs” (Altman 4).

The issue of an Apology to Aboriginal Australia was again raised in the October

2007 Election campaign with Howard defending both the Intervention and his refusal to apologise in the Leaders’ Debate in October, claiming that millions of

Australians were “sorry for past mistreatment but that is different from assuming responsibility for it” (The West 12/10/07), and that these millions would be offended if he apologised on their behalf. Within days, some six thousand

Australians had joined a Facebook group entitled “I won’t be offended if the government says SORRY to Aboriginal Australians” (Brown, personal correspondence), suggesting that Howard had misread the populace. In the face of a groundswell of public opinion, Howard pledged to hold a referendum on altering the Preamble of the Constitution so that it might more accurately reflect

65 See Paul Toohey’s essay “Last Drinks” for further analysis of the Intervention and its outcomes.

196 the special status of Indigenous Australians. In contrast, the Opposition Leader made an election promise to make a full Apology on behalf of the Australian people. On February 13, 2008, this would become his first action in Parliament as

Australia’s twenty-sixth Prime Minister.

Australia’s colonial history—and in particular, the relationships between “white” or hegemonic Australia and Indigenous communities—was the subject of much public, media and academic scrutiny during the years of Howard’s Opposition and Prime Ministership. It is also to be expected that Aboriginal literature, in light of these long-term battles over Aboriginal Land Rights, Deaths in Custody and the Stolen Generations, is often a literature of resistance. Indeed, some authors such as Sally Morgan have been criticised by other Indigenous critics, including

Marcia Langton, for taking an overly conciliatory approach to accommodating a white readership. This is clearly not a criticism which could be levelled at

Watson’s fiction, however, as it is overtly critical of contemporary white

Australians and of the institutions which uphold their values.

Watson’s fiction engages in history, contemporary Australian politics, and social justice. Critic Mudrooroo has argued that all maban realist texts are political, and cites his own Master of the Ghost Dreaming series and Watson’s The Kadaitcha

Sung as exemplars:

[b]oth Sam Watson and I agree that Indigenous texts should intervene politically and socially in the dominant ideology and that texts should not only be political but also enjoyable and interesting. Maban reality is how this can be done for, unlike high cultural or message constructs, maban reality can not only pass on a message, but also find a popular audience who will read the work because it is, at least on the surface, enjoyable. An important point is that there is not an attempt to rehabilitate traditional culture as such, which, after all, might be an impossible project, but it is in the using of our traditional storytelling content and structures in an effort to gain a wider readership. (Mudrooroo, Indigenous 97)

197 Watson produces works which are politically charged and which seek to find a voice for contemporary urban Murris. Particularly, he seeks a voice which acknowledges tradition without attempting the “impossible project” of recreating it.

His shamanic or Kadaitcha characters are Indigenous diasporans; belonging in two spaces simultaneously without being fully comfortable in either. The identities they perform are influenced by their experiences in being moved from traditional lands to other spaces, and will be analysed in more detail in the Case Study which follows.

198 CHAPTER 5:

URBAN KADAITCHA: THE PERSONAL HISTORY AND INFLUENCES OF SAM WATSON

We all have to draw strength and positives and lessons and knowledge from different Dreaming pathways.

Sam Watson66

Samuel William Watson was born in Brisbane on November 16, 1952. His mother was of the Mullenjarli nation and his father of the Biri Gubba. He has said that he was,

very fortunate in that I was born into a family that was very close, hard working and absolutely committed to each other. Our elders raised us to honour our parents and respect and support each other. Throughout our lives we have striven to succeed as people and to be proud of our culture and our heritage. We have been very fortunate in that family closeness and it has shaped us all. (Watson, Personal Correspondence 10).

Although Sam Watson was one of the fortunate few Indigenous Australians during this era to be raised within a nuclear family unit, this is not to suggest that his family was untouched by the racist policies of removal and dislocation which were a feature of the first two centuries of white settlement, and which is a central concern of The Kadaitcha Sung and Black Man Down. Indeed, his grandfather and namesake, the first Sam Watson, a senior man of the Birri Gubba tribe in the

Bowen Basin, was sold into bondage at the age of five (Fletcher np). According to

Watson, “[a]fter his day’s work, he was chained up like a dog under the station house and fed on a tin plate” (in Fletcher np). The elder Watson fled this treatment and worked in ring-barking camps until he could afford to employ a lawyer “who had him freed from the Aboriginal Protection Act, one of the first

Aboriginal people to do so” (Fletcher np).

66 In Interview, Appendix C 317

199 Other members of the extended family had first-hand experience of the punitive nature of the mission space. Palm Island has long been known in Queensland as

“Punishment Island,” and was largely populated by dissident Murris who had

“questioned the white managers on the reserves or missions, or who played up in white towns” (in Fletcher np). In 1957, two of Watson’s uncles were among the residents of Palm Island who went on strike for equal wages and conditions. In

June of that year, one man had spoken back to the reserve superintendent, Roy

Bartlam. When he was punished, the community declared a strike in an early example of “organised resistance against the protectionist system” (N. Watson,

History 2).67 The strike was ultimately broken only with police intervention and the dispersal of the protestors to other reserves (Fletcher np). At this time, dispersal was a strategy often employed in the management of Indigenous populations.

Watson’s father petitioned the courts for his emancipation, arguing that he “didn’t need to be brought up in a reserve as he was quite capable of working and running his life” (in Stewart 2). As such, the younger Sam Watson grew up exempt from the protectionist acts which generally dictated how Aboriginal

Australians lived. Watson notes that “protected” Murris were not permitted to walk the street, own a house, or enter hire-purchase contracts without a signed contract from the Minister for Native Affairs, and so considers that he was “very fortunate” (in Stewart 2). The Watson family remained involved in Aboriginal community politics, however, and Watson notes that his parents were “leaders in the broader community and took up causes” (in Dean 3). As an Aboriginal activist and political leader, Watson is very aware of the issues faced by Indigenous diasporans, particularly the Stolen Generations and those whose lives have been directly impacted by mission programs. Consequently, his major work of fiction to

67 Academic and Aboriginal Legal Worker Nicole Watson is also Sam Watson’s daughter.

200 date, The Kadaitcha Sung, uses as its protagonist an Indigenous diasporan,

Tommy Gubba, in order to explore the impact of these policies in the lives of

contemporary Indigenous Australians.

Watson considers himself to have been privileged to be a child in the 1950s and

1960s, which was a time of social change, both domestically and internationally,

noting that they were

exciting times to be growing up. When I was a child we went through the tail end of ban the bomb debate, the era of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the time of the Kennedys, a lot of exciting things, the hippies—make love not war. All that sort of thing. A very vibrant time where people concentrated on getting along with each other—all very good value. (Dean 3)

Watson was educated at Mount Gravatt Primary and High Schools, which he describes as “very working-class” schools (Appendix C 305). He notes that the staff of these schools, and the High School in particular, encouraged the students to be politically aware, and allowed the students opportunities to use the Public

Address system in order to practise their public speaking skills and discuss contemporary issues including the White Australia Policy (Appendix C 305;

Stewart 1). As he notes, in

Grade 8, Grade 9, Grade 10, through all those early years my mates and I were talking up the business about the White Australia Policy, certainly about Vietnam, and we were very, very interested in the direction of the African American movement in the States with the great speakers like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others (Appendix C 305).

He clearly recalls the Freedom Rides of 1965 when he was in Grade 10.

Organised by the late Charles Perkins as a means of raising awareness of racist attitudes towards Aboriginal Australians (Socialist Alliance Website), this protest involved 29 Sydney University students travelling by bus through Western New

South Wales for a fortnight. They aimed to challenge the ingrained discrimination

201 exhibited towards Aboriginal people in country towns.68 Whilst in secondary school, Watson also completed assignments on the lives and work of prominent figures from the American Civil Rights movement including Malcolm X and Martin

Luther King (Stewart 1). Watson’s left-wing politics were also informed by listening to the “soapbox” speakers in Lang Park on Saturday afternoons, and visits to the Communist Party headquarters in Barry Parade (Stewart 1).

During the 1960s, there were a number of other high-profile protests for

Aboriginal rights, including the removal of discriminatory policy from

Commonwealth statutes in 1961 (Curthoys 14), the motion put before Parliament by Labor politician Kim Beazley Snr in 1964 that Northern Territory cattle workers should be paid equal wages to their white colleagues (Curthoys 15) and repeated calls from 1964 for the Referendum for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal peoples, which would ultimately be held in 1967. Watson was aware of these national issues, and whilst still at school, he became a member of the underground group Students in Dissent (Stewart 1). They were involved in the

1967 Referendum movement. Watson spent the day of the Referendum in a polling booth campaigning for the resounding “Yes” vote which ultimately resulted in Indigenous Australians being considered full citizens for the first time since white colonisation:

[t]hat was my first experience of electioneering. Everyone that came past thanked me for the how-to-vote card and spoke kindly to me — these were white people that I didn't even know! The next morning the Sunday Truth had this huge banner headline saying that 92.5% of the Australian population had voted yes. That was just an incredible experience for us all and it showed what could be achieved through a political campaign. (in Fletcher np)

The Vietnam War was another significant event in Watson’s early political life. In a 2001 interview with Karen Fletcher, Watson recalled that he and his father used

68 For further detail, see Anne Curthoys’ Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers and Peter Read’s Charles Perkins: A Biography.

202 to pick up African-American soldiers who were trying to hitchhike from Brisbane to the Gold Coast. He said that white drivers “would stop for the white soldiers but they wouldn’t take black troops” (Fletcher np), and that he learned about the civil rights movement in the United States from these men.

In 1970 Watson enrolled in Arts and Law at the University of Queensland, and was the only Indigenous student at the time. Watson recalls being called into a meeting with the state director of Native Affairs and being warned away from the

“radicals and ratbags of the anti-war movement” (Fletcher np). Watson notes with some humour that it only took him about six months to link up with these same radicals, and that the next time he saw the Native Affairs officials, he was participating in a protest march against their policies (Fletcher np).

Watson recalls the time, and the relationships he developed during this period, with great fondness:

I was travelling with a terrific bunch of people, absolutely committed activists and radicals, men and women, who were the core of all the left-wing activity on- campus at the University of Queensland. So, right the way through I was always going to be a political activist. (Appendix C 305)

Watson’s student activism incorporated domestic and global issues. He supported the Gurindji strike which began in 1966, and lasted some seven years, and which was precipitated by the refusal of British consortium Vesteys to pay

Indigenous workers on the cattle station $25 a week in wages. At the time,

Indigenous workers were excluded from the Cattle Station Award (Northern

Territory). As Nicole Watson explains, although “the strike was sparked by an industrial dispute, its primary goal was repatriation of traditional lands” (N.

Watson, Howard’s np). The Gurindji people maintained a vision of their own land and planned bilingual education for their children on a cattle station which they

203 ran themselves. In 1975 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam granted a 1250 square kilometre lease at Wattle Creek. The area is known as Daguragu, which means

“a place for us” in the Gurindji language (Aboriginal Law Bulletin).69

Figure 23: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam symbolically returns Gurindji land to Vincent Lingiari, August 197570

His growing awareness of international social justice issues such as the aforementioned Vietnam War and the now-infamous 1971 Springboks’ tour led to his identification as a Socialist, as he "realised that the struggle of my people was not a race struggle, but one facet of a broader class struggle" (Socialist Alliance

Website).

In 1971, a tour by South Africa’s national Rugby Union team, the Springboks, provoked anti-apartheid protests around the country. The then-Premier of

Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, declared a state of emergency in Brisbane in order to protect the all-white South African team. Murri activists including

69 Vincent Lingiari’s account of the conflict is recorded in Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians, and was more recently analysed by Minoru Hokari in “From Wattle Creek to Wattle Creek: An Oral Historical Approach to the Gurindji Walk-Off.” 70 Image from the National Archives of Australia Website.

204 Oodgeroo Noonucal, her son Dennis Walker, and Pastor Don Brady attempted to highlight their anti-apartheid message through provocative but peaceful protests, including dining with poet Judith Wright in the Springboks’ Brisbane Hotel (Foley

12), whilst Gary Foley, Paul Coe, Billy Craigie, Tony Coorey and Garry Williams wore official Springboks’ jerseys outside the team’s Sydney motel, only to be threatened with arrest (Foley 11). At each of the Springboks’ exhibition matches there was an Indigenous presence, highlighting the “parallels between South

African and Australian racial policies” (Foley 12).

During the so-called State of Emergency in Brisbane, Watson and his colleagues declared the University of Queensland to be “a peoples’ university,” cancelled formal lectures and invited Aboriginal people into the lecture rooms to discuss racism (Fletcher np).

On January 19, 1972 Watson, Dennis Walker and others co-founded the

Brisbane Chapter of the Black Panther Party of Australia (Foley 13). As Gary

Foley notes, there were convergent Black Power movements established in

South Brisbane, Redfern and Fitzroy in the period succeeding Charles Perkins’

Freedom Rides in the mid- to late-1960s (Foley 1) and the Referendum Vote of

May 1967. As Foley notes, the

high expectations created by the 1967 referendum were dashed by government inaction [and] the younger activists felt a strong sense of betrayal and cynicism at the more non-confrontational methods and tactics of the older generation … To the impatient young firebrands … the apparent lack of progress meant more effective methods had to be considered. (Foley 7)

Based in Red Hill, the Brisbane group read works written by the likes of Huey P.

Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis and George Jackson, the leaders of the

American organisation. The group also adopted the policy of “pig patrol,” or the

205 monitoring of police harassment of the black community, a strategy which had been used effectively by the Black Panther Party for Self Defence in the United

States (Foley 8). Similar strategies were also employed in Redfern in Sydney and

Fitzroy in Melbourne (Foley 9). The Brisbane group encouraged Indigenous

Australians arrested on charges such as resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and assaulting police—colloquially known as “the trifecta”—to enter “not guilty” pleas

(Stewart 3). The party forged links within the legal fraternity, which eventually led to the establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal service in

1972.

As Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus explain in the Introduction to The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: a Documentary History,

[o]rganisations like the Black Panthers and those responsible for the Tent Embassy, for example, had little patience with the legalistic methods long used by their predecessors, preferring more direct protest (emulating the radical political movements in the United States and Europe), such as vigils and sit-ins. The new leaders were much younger and more aggressive, [and] rejected white leadership … Their language was more militant, filled with demands rather than requests, and, like the symbols they adopted, was expressive of their difference—their identity as Aboriginal people. (Attwood and Markus 21)

In January of 1972, the Black Panthers sponsored a conference on racism at the

University of Queensland. Meanwhile, Prime Minister William McMahon finally responded to the preceding six months’ political pressure and with an astonishing lack of foresight, chose January 25, the day before the anniversary of Australia’s official “settlement—usually referred to as “Invasion Day” by Indigenous

Australians,—to make a policy statement about Aboriginal Affairs and Land

Rights (Foley 13). The response to his meagre concessions was swift—a group of four young Aboriginal activists was immediately dispatched to the Federal capital of Canberra, where they established a Tent Embassy on the grounds of

Parliament House (Foley 14). They argued that the Prime Minister’s statement

206 had made them aliens in their own land, so they were entitled to their own embassy.

A loophole in Australian Capital Territory legislation which permits camping as long as there are fewer than twelve tents meant that the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was one of the longest-running and most successful political protests (Foley 14) in Australian history. Watson was appointed by the Brisbane anti-racist conference as a representative of Murri interests and travelled to Canberra where he stayed with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy from its establishment on January 27 until July of that year (Stewart 3). The Federal Opposition leader, Gough

Whitlam, met with the Embassy protestors and vowed to reverse the McMahon

Government’s Land Rights policies if elected. In December of that year Whitlam was elected in a landslide victory, ending twenty-two years of conservative rule in

Australia. His government injected a great deal of funding into Aboriginal Affairs and the provision of Medical, Legal and Educational Services which resulted from this, as well as his more progressive stance on the Land Rights question, eventually made the Panther movement less relevant (Stewart 3).

Watson did not return to University in the 1972 academic year, leaving with incomplete degrees but enough Credit points for majors in English Literature and

Journalism. He notes that these areas have always been his strengths:

[m]aths and science are quite abstract and quite alien to aboriginal thought. Aboriginal people don’t have straight lines in their culture—science and maths are very linear and aboriginal culture is very much a circular culture … So as an aboriginal, english and communication are my strong points and I always imagined I’d end up as either a journalist or a writer. At the University of Queensland when I was doing an Arts degree, I chose english and journalism as my majors. (Dean 1)

In 1971 he had married his childhood sweetheart, Catherine, an Australian of

European descent. For the next few years, he “concentrated on being a

207 successful member of my family unit and my community, a good husband and father” (in Dean 2). Their son, Samuel Wagan Watson was born in Brisbane in

1972.71 (Booked Out website). The Watsons also have a daughter, Nicole.72

During the 1970s Watson worked in a series of jobs, both as a labourer and later, as a field worker, law officer, researcher and youth worker for a number of

Aboriginal organisations. In 1979 he briefly returned to University, where his tutors encouraged him to write a book. In the 1980s when the Watson family moved to the Sunshine Coast Sam undertook a number of labouring jobs, and began work on his first novel, The Kadaitcha Sung. He notes that this was in itself a kind of ‘homecoming,’ in that

I’d already turned my hand to a large range of jobs; I’d been involved with black community organisations, community aid programs, that sort of thing. I became a truck driver, a fork lift operator, a fencing contractor. I thought I’d find that nebulous character, the true Australian. I didn’t find him in the pubs and pool halls or on the job sites. I found him in the computer when I started to write. (Dean 2-3)

He discovered that writing could be a “very lonely experience,” but credits the support of his family with much of his success:

[m]y mentor is my wife Catherine who reads and re-reads everything I do. I’ve got two children who do their bit and give me different insights. So my family and a small group of people who support me give me lots of different perceptions. (Dean 10)

As Watson notes, the process was quite drawn out, and he soon discovered that a book

isn’t born in the first draft, maybe not even the tenth or the twentieth but somewhere between the fiftieth and sixtieth before it can be worthy of a publisher…till I thought I had something that could attract a sale and I sent it off

71 Like his father, Samuel held a number of jobs before turning to writing. In 1999 he won the David Unaipon Award for his volume of poetry Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight. On the Booked Out website, Samuel Wagan Watson cites his novelist father and his mother among his influences. 72 Nicole Watson shares her father’s passion for the Law and holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Law. She is currently completing a Ph. D. at the University of New South Wales, writing a comparative analysis of the privatisation of Indigenous lands in Australia, the United States and New Zealand. She works in the Jumbunna Centre for Indigenous Learning at the University of Techology, Sydney.

208 to Penguin who wrote back with a few suggestions which I incorporated into the next draft. Then boom—I had a contract. (Dean 2) It is perhaps ironic, then, that the strongest criticisms of his novel have been about its lack of editing. While it is clear that Watson resisted the imposition of white editorial practices on his work, it seems too simplistic to suggest that this means that no editing was completed at all, as Stephen Muecke (in)famously did when he declared the book “virtually unreadable” (Muecke Textual Spaces 137).

At the time of the publication of The Kadaitcha Sung, Watson believed that

Indigenous writing was “still very much in its infant state” and paid tribute to

writers like the late Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert and Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who had

stood on their two feet and done good things by creating an awareness in white Australia and in an overseas readership to accept the legitimacy of black writing and that is very important … Publishing is very expensive so when a publisher takes on a black writer, they have to be good, have to be able to compete in a dynamic market and to be able to do it with a minimum of fuss. (in Dean 5)

He believed that in the early 1990s Indigenous writing was still predominantly for

“a white readership,” and he keenly felt that his audience was the broader

Australian community. Watson’s message was an overtly political one, as he explained in the Elizabeth Dean interview:

[i]n much the same way that Jimmy Cook and his minions invaded the land of the Murri tribes, I wanted to get out there into those brick houses, those living rooms and explode into those people’s minds. I wanted to put a black boy into a white neighbourhood and point a black finger of accusation. I wanted to say this is what has happened in Australia and this is who is responsible. So be aware of it because somewhere down the track, answers will have to be given. (Dean 5)

In the early 1990s Watson returned to Brisbane, where he was employed by the

Aboriginal and Islanders Legal Service in Brisbane. In the first half of that decade

The Kadaitcha Sung was published and he wrote and co-produced the short film,

Black Man Down. In 1998 he accepted a lecturing position at the University of

Queensland in Black Australian Literature and Politics. He is currently Deputy

Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Study Centre at the

University.

209

Watson’s socialist politics are a matter of public record, and inform his fiction. He helped to organise protests against the Commonwealth Heads Of Government

Meeting (CHOGM) in Brisbane in 2001, and campaigned for a Senate seat in the

2004 and 2007 elections as a Socialist Alliance candidate. As he sees it, his political role is one of promoting a Treaty between Black and White Australia, and he also serves as

a link with the white left. For a long time, the Murri leadership was very suspicious of the white political movement and always insisted that Aboriginal politics should play a predominant role in joint activities. But over the years, Aboriginal leaders have become far more accepting of our white comrades. (Fletcher np)

His campaign statement in 2007 outlined his belief that the two traditional parties were becoming irrelevant in contemporary politics. He argued that issues like the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and closer to home, remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory were too important to ignore, and campaigned for the establishment of an Australian Bill of Rights, with environmental concerns and justice for Aboriginal Australia at its core (Socialist

Alliance website).

Watson has played a significant role as a community worker and legal aide in the

Deaths in Custody movement. He has been a leader in the Aboriginal Deaths in

Custody campaign, notably in the cases of Daniel Yock in November 1993 and more recently, Mulrunji Doomadgee in November 2004. In June of 2007 Senior

Sergeant Chris Hurley was acquitted of assault and manslaughter by a

Townsville jury, despite having admitted that his actions led to the death of Mr

Doomadgee (Giles, np). The riots which occurred when the Palm Island community learned of Mr Doomadgee’s death, however, received more media coverage than the trial itself, and led to a number of arrests for damaging public

210 property. Watson was an outspoken critic of the legal cases mounted in regard to the incident, arguing that the

white colonial legal system ha[d] demonstrably failed the family of Mulrunji and the community of Palm Island; and has in fact failed the family and community of every single victim of a police death in custody across Australia ... Five Palm Islanders charged over the riot had their cases heard in Brisbane, after their lawyers conducted a survey of the white Townsville population and found that they were prejudiced against Aboriginal people. It was quite a significant survey and they returned that they could not return a verdict about an Aboriginal criminal matter without feeling biased against that Aboriginal person. (Giles np)

Watson has argued that the Queensland police union had “interfered” in the proceedings by mobilising meetings and threatening to march on the Queensland parliament (Giles np). In mid-2007, the victim’s family announced their intention to sue the Queensland government and the Queensland police for their part in their affair, and for the failure to implement recommendations from the 1991

Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which may have prevented this death (Giles np and Appendix C 308). Indeed, according to Watson’s research, the rate of black deaths in custody has actually risen since the Royal

Commission (Giles np).

Watson remains a vocal opponent of police brutality in Queensland, a theme which is explored in The Kadaitcha Sung and in the short film Black Man Down, and has argued that his initiation happened on the streets of Brisbane, but was no less violent for its apparent lack of “traditional” authenticity:

it’s the rite of passage, the coming of age. That’s always quite critical in the Aboriginal process of going from a child to an adult, of becoming a warrior. And I was brought up in a political way, so that my bora rings are always on the street. And our rites of passage were very much centred around punching around with coppers, and going in the paddy wagons and going to the watch-houses, copping your serves, because we used to get flogged to the shithouse in those places. And that was what made us into men. The elders would tell you, you’re a man now. (Appendix C 319).

Watson remains politically engaged in Murri affairs in Queensland, as a spokesperson for young Indigenous peoples and as a legal advocate. His

211 strongly held political beliefs and quest for justice are constant themes not only in his regular paid work, but also in his creative endeavours. He is currently working for the Non-Government Organisation Murri Watch, which brings together his paralegal background and the aforementioned “bora rings of the street,” as the organisation seeks to protect Indigenous Australians in custody. Issues surrounding violence and deaths in custody are also prevalent in Watson’s writing, featuring prominently in both The Kadaitcha Sung and Black Man Down.

In recent times Watson has been an outspoken critic of the Federal Government

Intervention into remote Aboriginal communities in mid-2007, saying that

Indigenous Australians “feel absolutely affronted and insulted by what is happening” (Giles np) and accusing then-Prime Minister John Howard of “working incredibly hard to demonise and marginalise Aboriginal people” (Giles np).

According to Watson, the suspension of the Northern Territory Land Rights’ Act has left Aboriginal people in these areas “vulnerable to developers and the lowest form of entrepreneurs” (Appendix C 312), but he questioned whether it actually increased the safety of the children who were supposedly its focus, noting that a more productive way to help these communities may have been to provide better infrastructure in terms of health, housing, medicine, education and employment

(Giles np).

In his 1990 interview with Elizabeth Dean, Watson stated that he believed that the great theme of 1988, for Aboriginal Australians, was one of survival; and he predicted that the theme of the 1990s would be one of “resurgence and repopulation.” When asked in 2007 what he saw as the pressing issue of the current decade, Watson named “hardening the resolve to bring about Treaty, and ultimately begin the history of this new nation” (McMahon-Coleman. See

Appendix 309).

212 CHAPTER 6:

“CAUGHT PSYCHICALLY BETWEEN TWO WORLDS”—THE WORKS OF

SAM WATSON

I’m a two world one I walk down two roads One time I must have walked down one.

Richard Frankland73

The shamanic Kadaitcha men central to the narrative of Sam Watson’s 1990 novel The Kadaitcha Sung are counterhegemonic, anti-heteronormative and

Indigenous diasporans. They are militant, at times, in their resistance of contemporary Australian culture, and yet also use the Anglo-established political and legal systems in an attempt to fulfil their own agendas. These figures are queer, uncanny, subversive and maban; they are true border crossers who open up the possibility of multiple literary realities to a mainstream audience.

Author and literary critic Mudrooroo has been a controversial figure in Australian literature, following allegations made in the press in the mid-1990s that he was not an Indigenous Australian, as had previously been claimed. Despite this controversy, his analysis of Australian Indigenous literature, first in Writing from the Fringe, later revised and repackaged as The Indigenous Literature of

Australia: Milli Milli Wangka, is arguably the most comprehensive of its kind. His work is distinguished in its insistence that the use of supernatural tropes in

Indigenous writing is not so much a common literary technique used in fantastic works, as a culturally-specific acknowledgement of an Indigenous belief system.

73 Reproduced in Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, eds. Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, 2008, p 206. Originally published in Josie Douglas (Ed.) Untreated: Poems by Black Writers, 2001.

213 Regardless of any questions over his own cultural identity, his work on maban realism is of fundamental importance to this thesis.

Mudrooroo has defined maban reality as being,

characterised by a firm grounding in the reality of the earth or country, together with an acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality … Fantasy, ghost stories, vampires and a whole range of entities, including worlds, are now presented in European narratives, not from a position of non-belief, or of superstitious belief, but from an acceptance that there are many realities and the writer is merely describing one such (Mudrooroo, Indigenous 98).

Mudrooroo cited Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung as being the first Australian novel to take Aboriginal writing into this “new realm of reality … akin to magic realism”

(Mudrooroo, Indigenous 46).

He argues that maban reality is a useful strategy for incorporating political messages into works without them becoming unenjoyable or uninteresting.

Certainly The Kadaitcha Sung attracted some critical attention and perhaps some notoriety for its confronting scenes of sex and violence. Watson himself claims that the book generated “huge interest, right across the print media and radio”

(Appendix C 314), and it remained in print until 2006.

Watson has noted in interviews that he is concerned by the attitudes of some non-Indigenous Australians, who feel that because they have not personally disenfranchised any Aboriginal Australians, they are not complicit in any guilt or obliged to apologise for past atrocities against Indigenous Australians (Meanjin,

591. See also Appendix C 306-7, for similar comments). It is no coincidence that this was the argument advanced by former Prime Minister John Howard to justify his long-term refusal to apologise to Aboriginal Australians for past atrocities inflicted by successive parliaments since Australia was federated in 1901.

214 Maban reality, with its abstract timelines and supernatural concerns, provides a means of compressing colonial histories in such a way that these kinds of arguments are countermanded. In The Kadaitcha Sung, for example, historical and contemporary events are placed together, negating any sense of history as something long forgotten and unchangeable.

Mudrooroo argues that maban reality is inherently political in that it establishes an alternative reality,

a so-called natural reality which permeates just about every genre of endeavour and constructs narratives such as history which serve to establish and maintain nothing but the dominant position of those in power, a natural realist history. (Mudrooroo 100).

The creation of a Kadaitcha protagonist who is an Indigenous diasporan and who inherits power from both the colonised and the colonising cultures reverses numerous historical narratives which depicted Indigenous Australians as downtrodden victims without agency. The Kadaitcha is a figure who is able to move, unconstrained, between spaces and times.

The novel foregrounds Indigenous ideological beliefs about spirituality, shamanism, and the non-linear nature of time, and aspects of Australian colonial history (such as the Native Police and their role in the Native Wars) which have long been overlooked in mainstream historical accounts. It presents the reader with an alternative Australian history, and the final image of the novel offers a promise of redemption which is the antithesis of the notion of Aboriginal

Australians as a doomed or dying race, a commonly held belief in the first century and a half of European settlement.

215 From the outset, the novel features an uneasy alliance between traditional

Aboriginal and contemporary mainstream colonising cultures. The action of the novel is compressed into what Watson has described as “an energy-charged four days” (in Dean 6). Watson argues that this reflects the shorter life span of

Indigenous Australians relative to the rest of Australia; that “black people feel incredible urgency and threat at growing further and further removed from the land and culture” (in Dean 6). The timeframe is also non-linear, featuring anachronisms and establishing the maban reality of the novel. Although the setting is identifiably contemporary Brisbane, the late twentieth-century powers- that-be are the same people who worked to ‘clear the land’ of Indigenous populations in the late nineteenth century, and the Native Police anachronistically wear digital watches and drive cars.

As Watson explains, this idea of time as being unfixed or non-linear is common in

Aboriginal beliefs:

[w]here Brisbane City Hall is now, there used to be a beautiful swamp there. Our old uncles can tell us where they used to camp, where they used to hunt ducks, where they used to get their waterlily. So we don’t look at City Hall and see City Hall, we look at City Hall and see the swamp. Time is nothing and things happen so quickly. (Meanjin 594)

Sam Watson begins The Kadaitcha Sung with an italicised Dreaming-style tale which explains the main character’s pedigree as a Kadaitcha or clever man, immediately introducing the reader into an Indigenous—and therefore, presumably, for most, an unfamiliar—reading space. The title invokes traditional

Indigenous beliefs about “singing” people to harm or even death. The act of singing, like that of pointing the bone, is usually done by the shaman, so the title is somewhat ironic, and signals a grave power imbalance within the novel. This echoes the events in one of Ipellie’s stories, “The Public Execution of the

216 Hermaphrodite Shaman,” where an individual shaman—usually the dispenser of justice—is punished for his transgressions.

Kadaitcha, or shamans, are “people whose special skills and techniques allow them to move from the practical realm to the spiritual, from the everyday to the metaphysical” (Brody 133), making the Kadaitcha an important figure in transcultural writing. Watson himself defines Kadaitcha men and women as

[c]lever people. The public presentation of clever people is varied. You’ve got the clever man in Ten Canoes, who’s a healer and a revenger. I think that about says it all … right across the communities, there are clever people …because white medicine and white healing can only go so far. They all reach a point, at a certain time, where they need to call in one of these clever people to do the business. Murri way. It’s all very much a part of who we are and what we are. (Appendix C 318)

Although at first glance the opening pages appear to be a fictional replication of a traditional Dreaming story, they contain a number of paradoxes. Firstly, the “fair” child is the one chosen for his wisdom and leadership abilities, which would seem, at least on a superficial level, to uphold the Victorian beliefs that colonisation was a just cause, because white Europeans were bringing light,

Christianity and ‘civilisation’ to the ‘savages’ at the furthest corners of the world.

Secondly, it is noteworthy that it is the hasty actions of an Indigenous man which lead to invasion by the “fair-skinned ones [who] laid waste to the garden and the chosen people” (Watson 3). Finally, the antagonist, Booka Roth, now denied his birthright by his tribe, joins with the new settlers and attempts to secure wealth and position by siding with them against his own people, most notably as a member of the Native Police. Roth’s name also seems to evoke images of

Biblically-proportioned revenge and destruction, foreshadowing the events of the novel.

217 Part of Watson’s agenda in casting the main evil character as a Native Police officer is to highlight a “part of Australia’s colonial history that’s largely been ignored or written over” (Appendix C 312). As many have pointed out, the Native

Police were deployed in areas well outside their own country (see Reynolds;

Stretton; Beatson in Enoch and Mailman 23). As Watson asserts:

[t]he white invaders were very clever in using inter-tribal rivalries and hatreds against each other, because the Mounted Police in Queensland, certainly, were chosen from particular tribal groups that had reasons to attack and hate, and destroy and kill, other tribal nations … they weren’t their own mob; they were people of another culture, another language (Appendix C 313).

The Native Police Force comprised Aboriginal members as well as “ex-convicts

… stockmen, shepherds and itinerant whites seeking regular pay, food and lodgings,” according to Bruce Elder (124). Elder also notes that Aboriginal

Australians in prison were often offered the opportunity to serve their sentence in the Native Police Force (Elder 131). Both the New South Wales and Queensland

Governments gave the Native Police forces the authority to disperse “any large tribal gathering” (Reynolds, Other 98), which effectively stopped traditional rituals and corroborees in some areas. Presumably the Indigenous men who engaged in such activities did so under the mistaken belief that they would, through embracing European ways, also “participate in their obvious material abundance”

(Reynolds, Other 129).

The reality for many, however, was that upon leaving the Native Police force “the artificial platform was removed … many ex-trackers and ex-troopers ended up as renegades alienated from both white and Aboriginal society” (Reynolds, Other

150). A number of historians have suggested that race relations in colonial

Queensland were particularly savage, with Elder noting that by the time

Queensland seceded from New South Wales in 1865, the Native Police force

218 [w]as really little more than a brutal collection of killers led by sadists. Violence breeds violence. It is impossible to say whether the brutish officers bred brutal policemen or whether the vicious environment which was the Queensland frontier acted like a magnet and attracted the very worst people to its lands. (Elder 131-2)

By the same token, according to Henry Reynolds, Queensland “seemed to have the largest contingent” of

Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal bandits or bushrangers … in the generation after settlement. Typically they were young men who had grown up in fringe camps and worked in varying capacities for the Europeans. They were often competent horsemen and handy with guns while still proficient in the ancient bush skills. (Reynolds, Other 118)

Watson’s use of these historical contexts serves both to create a backdrop to the characters but also to introduce readers to these lesser-known aspects of

Australian history. The Booka Roth character occupies a conflicted space; he is uncannily Aboriginal—an Indigenous spirit inhabiting a non-Indigenous mortal body; feared by the men who follow him, disrespected by those with whom he works, and isolated from both communities because of his past violent actions.

He is never fully accepted—nor fully ostracised—by black or by white Australia.

Watson has stated that he wanted to

base the book on a foundation of black strength and black power, and the most powerful figure within traditional Australian society was the tribal Kadaitcha. The Kadaitcha man is the tribal executioner, tribal sheriff, tribal bounty hunter, who would take up your cause for you and pay back, visit revenge upon your enemies. So it had to be a Kadaitcha man. (in Meanjin 590)

The image of a figure who is able to move between realities is a useful one in the postcolonial context. The Kadaitcha figures in Watson’s novel—Tommy Gubba and Booka Roth—are able to operate in both traditional Indigenous Australia and within powerful institutions of mainstream law and order; they shift easily from participating in the everyday, banal and corporeal, to employing their supernatural powers, whether it be for personal gain or the greater good. Both are “wounded healers”—a trope which is explored in a number of Indigenous

219 novels including, notably, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road and Leslie Marmon

Silko’s Ceremony—in that they are themselves “diseased” or alienated by colonialism. In Tommy’s case, the colonialism is internalised by virtue of his hybridised white identity and this is the key to his success—to borrow Aldama’s explanation of Marmon Silko’s Tayo in Ceremony, “he can fool the sickness to centre on him—the sickness is in him; he can transform it through a type of shamanistic deception, and then purge it” (Aldama 174).

The novel begins with the introduction of the Biamee figure, discussed in Chapter

Five, a “greater god” who “loved all life,” (Watson 1) and who was sometimes considered to be the equivalent of the Christian God by early missionaries (van

Toorn 38). Watson defines the Kadaitcha as “an ancient clan of sorcerers”

(Watson 1) who were close to Biamee. The chief or turrwan of the Kadaitcha clan, Kobbina, sired twin sons, Koobara and Booka. Twins were regarded with suspicion by some Indigenous nations, as is depicted in Alexis Wright’s 1997 novel Plains of Promise, wherein a family abandons a Murri mother who has twins, believing that one must be a devil spirit who allowed the other to exist

(Wright 142). In this instance, the birth of twins complicates matters in the clan of

Kadaitcha immeasurably, for the title of chief should be passed on to the first- born son. Consequently Kobbina had to choose which of his two sons would be deemed the successor. He chose Koobara, who was “tall and fair, and even though he was only a novice his wisdom was great and his patience legend”

(Watson 2).

The remaining twin, Booka, who is described as “squat,” “ugly” and “violent,” was enraged by this decision, murdering his parents and eventually his brother

(Watson 2; 4). He then removed the sacred Kundri stone, the heart of the life-

220 giving Rainbow Serpent and the key which allowed Biamee access to the mortal realm. His actions had dire consequences for the ancient land mass which would become Australia. The sudden removal of Biamee’s protection “caused the mists to lift from the land and other mortals saw its wealth and abundance; they came in their hordes … [to] slaughter [ ] … the helpless tribes with a monstrous lust”

(Watson 3).

Biamee is able to confine Booka to “a thin strip of coastal land that housed a new village called Brisbane” (Watson 3). Biamee also promises the Indigenous

Australians of Queensland a saviour in the form of an infant son of Koobara,

“born of a white woman,” who would “deliver them” from the invading hordes

(Watson 4). This child, named Tommy Gubba, is the protagonist of the novel, and the main narrative begins with his initiation into manhood and his being given the mission of bringing order into the world once more.

Initiation is an important milestone in Aboriginal societies, and is a recurrent motif in the writings and films of Sam Watson. He describes it as a “rite of passage”

(Appendix C 319). Traditionally,

[t]he process of ‘making men,’ which begins with the circumcision initiation, absorbs a great deal of the attention and energy of the entire society … Initiated men understand that life can be fully appreciated only when seen in relation to the other forms of existence, those of death and the unborn … In the circumcision initiation, boys are introduced to the methods of trancelike states of consciousness, because trance ceremonies will play a primary role in the future as hunters and initiatic mystics. (Lawlor 184).

In this novel it marks the moment when the protagonist, Tommy Gubba, attains his full supernatural powers. Lawlor argues that initiation and death are closely linked in many tribal cultures, for not only does the ceremony mark the beginning of adulthood, but also the “death” of childhood. As in shamanic rituals, the initiate believes that he will be destroyed by a supernatural power, “and that after dying

221 he will be restored to life” (Lawlor 185). There are very close links between death and initiation for Tommy—his character notes several times throughout the novel that he knows he will die in battle, and has only a matter of days left. Indeed, this may go some way towards offering an explanation for the character’s sexual promiscuity during the course of the novel.

Initiation also marks the time when the male adolescent must leave his biological or earthly mother and be “introduced to the power of the Universal Feminine—the dark, invisible, and unconscious forces” (Lawlor 189). Tommy’s initiation takes place at a site which is significant and symbolic to all Australians, black and white. As Gelder and Jacobs argue, Uluru is configured in the novel as

a kind of meta-sacred site which reaches out across the nation … Uluru stands at the centre of all this, drawing characters into its frame no matter how far away they may be … The unboundable potential of Uluru is taken as empowering in the novel, producing a specific set of special effects which are mobilised to underwrite the nation’s modern condition. (Gelder and Jacobs 112)

Uluru performs the function of Tommy’s bora ring. Indeed, he descends into the spiritual realm into the “belly of the Rainbow Serpent” where he is led by the “four sisters of the winds” into a central dark space surrounded by nine bora rings, made up of five hundred stones, representing the different tribes or nations of

Aboriginal Australia (Watson 26-28). This central, empty spot, is where the sacred Kundri stone, the heart of the Rainbow Serpent, should reside, and it is from here that the Rainbow Serpent had “been transformed into his true form as a deity in a blaze of light” (Watson 28).

Significantly, although Uluru is the space wherein Tommy reaches manhood, it is also constructed specifically as a female space. It is guarded by the four sisters of the wind, beautiful young spirit women who were raped and blinded by Booka

222 when he stole the stone (Watson 3). The women familiarise themselves with

Tommy’s body as they telepathically test his identity and suitability for the quest ahead (Watson 26; 29). In one of many examples throughout the novel of a juxtaposition between the sacred and what Gelder and Jacobs have dubbed “the profane: the ordinariness, and extraordinariness, of sexual activity” (Gelder and

Jacobs 111), Tommy must resist his physical arousal as the spirit women lead him into the “shield-shaped depression … the vagina of the land of Uluru—which was the only female manifestation of the deity” (Watson 29). It is here that he sees the full horror of his uncle’s role in the colonisation of Aboriginal Australia and it is here that he receives his initiation scar and blood-red moogi stone, “the basic tool of the Kadaitcha and the focus for enormous energy drawn from the universe and the ages” (Watson 36). Lawlor notes that it is a common belief in

Aboriginal initiation ceremonies that “inserting crystals into the body symbolizes that the obduracy of matter can be transformed into an all-seeing, all-perceiving conduit of cosmic energy” (Lawlor 375), and that the “procedure symbolizes the transformation of consciousness from physical to psychic levels” (Lawlor 374).74

Anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt have noted that traditionally,

initiation was “quite often a long-drawn out affair” as,

a new world is gradually revealed … They learn more about their place in the local scheme of things, man in relation to man; man in relation to his gods … knowledge which is transmitted through the initiation rituals is the inherited and accumulated store of knowledge handed down from the past—reinterpreted, it is true, to conform with current conditions, but kept as far as possible in the mould of the past. (Berndt and Berndt 212)

When the reader is first introduced to Tommy, he is accompanied by Purnung, his spirit Dingo companion. Ningi, the kookaburra spirit and Tommy’s earliest mentor, is soon introduced, as is a small death spirit named Jonjurrie (Watson

74 The insertion of crystals as a means of unlocking spiritual or shamanic powers is also used to great effect by Mudrooroo in his Vampire series—Master of the Ghost Dreaming, Underground, the Undying and The Promised Land.

223 24). It is immediately apparent to the reader that the actual initiation ceremony is but one high point in an ongoing process, such as that described by the Berndts above.

As Gelder and Jacobs note, Watson has no direct connection with the

Pitjantjatjara who are the traditional custodians of Uluru, and the novel “has no interest in the particularity of site claims on Uluru itself”, but rather, Watson justifies the use of “the Rock” as a symbol of Aboriginal power through the notion that fiction—and arguably magic realist fiction in particular—“is not bound to place” (Gelder and Jacobs 115). Watson himself has further defended his decision, saying that Uluru has taken on a symbolism across multiple Aboriginal cultures as the home of the Rainbow Serpent and the

centreplace of our Dreamings. We were brought up to believe, some of the old people told us, that this was the point where the Garden of Eden was. Other Dreaming stories were that this was where the Rainbow Serpent first touched earth, and it’s where the Rainbow Serpent ascended from. It’s very similar to particular sacred sites in both the Islamic religion and the Christian religion. So Uluru, in many ways, has a universal symbolism, so that was what I tapped into for a small part of the book, the opening. And that was done with all due respect and sensitivity, but again, I do not believe that the people out there would have any objection to that because they use Uluru in a very clever and commercial way these days. They still retain their sacred and ceremonial sites, and lock those off to the general tourist trade. (Appendix C 319).

In many ways Tommy is the quintessential trickster figure. As Rask Knudsen argues, “in traditional mythic narratives, the figure of the trickster is closely associated with the recurring theme of rite of passage” (Rask Knudsen 60), and the novel opens with Tommy’s initiation into adulthood and chronicles his quest to avenge his father’s death, as well as the atrocities committed by white Australia in the name of colonisation. He is a flawed hero, who creates “turmoil of a kind that momentarily threatens the sanity of his community” (Rask Knudsen 60), and is not always inclined to follow the orders of his spiritual advisers, Ningi and

Jonjurrie, ultimately inciting the wrath of the gods.

224 He does, however, “bring about renewal … because his ‘tricks’ eventually turn out to be beneficial to the community” (Rask Knudsen 61). The trickster is, as

Mark Thompson argues,

one of the most enduring of all archetypes. Often cross-dressed or adorned with both masculine and feminine symbols, these merry pranksters chase through history, holding up a looking glass to human folly. Confidants to kings and commoners, tellers of truths, and cloaked in many disguises, these queer figures seem to spring from the shadow realm that lies between world of above and below. (Thompson in Creekmur and Doty 449-450)

In other words, tricksters are inherently queer or uncanny figures. According to

Bradshaw, the “most familiar account of the Trickster’s significance … is that he embodies ambivalence” (Bradshaw 91). Tommy is an ambivalent character in that he hates the white migloo and his Kadaitcha nemesis equally, even though he is related to each through strong blood ties. He is also often distracted by mundane events and earthly pleasures, even as he is on a quest to change the dominant culture in Australia. The trickster is capable of transforming the world, though not of creating or destroying it, for he is not a deity (Bradshaw 93). Unlike representations of “hero” figures, the trickster is not prone to “inner development”

(Davidson 17).

Tommy remains an angry young man who does not take direction well, and whilst he meets his goal of returning the Kundri stone, his refusal to follow orders from the gods on other matters leads to his eventual downfall and the removal of his immortal status. Kimberly Christensen argues that

[a]s with magical realism, it is not so much that there are two irreconcilable or resolvable entities within the trickster—rather, that duality itself is the key: obscene and powerful, jester and culture hero; their roles are never easily defined. They personify the ability to be both respected and condemned by society. (Christenson xii, qtd in Archer-Lean 209)

Tommy’s duality is apparent in his bicultural parentage. Gubba is raised to be a great warrior and to save the Indigenous people of Queensland from Booka.

225 Although he and Booka are enemies, they are in agreement over their hatred of the ‘migloo,’ or white invaders. Historian Henry Reynolds believes that the term

‘migloo’ and its variants originated from central Queensland, “where it meant both ghost and white man” (Reynolds, Other 36), and that its usage spread southwards and gradually lost its original meaning. According to Reynolds, the term is “derisory, [and] even contemptuous” (Watson 36), and this is clearly the case in The Kadaitcha Sung. It is ironic, then, that Tommy is himself the son of a white woman.

Indeed, Tommy’s abhorrence of white people is the cause of much of his internal conflict:

Tommy was committed to ensuring that the English blood paid dearly for their crimes against his people.

But who are my people? The thought leapt uninvited to his mind. Fleur Peters is white. She has descended from an Aryan race that had walked through the distant plains and forests of greater Europe. But she is my mother, he admitted to himself. I carry her blood in my veins, so these white maniacs here are my tribe as well. Do I have two camps? (Watson 182)

The hybridised central character allows Watson to explore complex issues of identity and cultural belonging. Although he identifies as Indigenous, Tommy is forced to recognise that he is, in fact, an Indigenous diasporan. He is both of

Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent, and is culturally linked with both the colonised and the coloniser. This passage, in particular, uses free indirect discourse to question the character’s cultural identity and place in the world. The repetition of the term “blood” recalls the colonial preoccupation with purity of race and the threat of miscegenation.

Because of his position ‘between’ races and as a Kadaitcha, able to move between the physical and supernatural realms, Tommy lives in the interstices. His

226 professional role is as a translator and mediator for the British-based Australian legal system, of which he remains suspicious. Even his name designates his hybrid status, for his surname, Gubba, is a common colloquial insult for white people, derived from the Aboriginal-English ‘gubba-ment’ (Gelder and Jacobs

110). It also invokes Watson’s own cultural background, for he identifies as belonging to the Munnenjarl nation through his maternal lineage, and as a Birri

Gubba on his father’s side. Although Tommy clearly identifies as a “Biri Gubba” in the novel, his green eyes and unusual height, presumably inherited from his non-

Indigenous mother, are noted and are identified as being symbolic of his physical strength and allegiance to the snake totem (Watson 28).

Like his Kadaitcha enemy, Tommy appropriates the tools of the colonising culture in an attempt to eradicate the intruders. This is portrayed as a survival strategy in a world where Indigenous peoples are either ignored, or are targets for racially- motivated violence. Tommy is a figure who is uncannily a part of and—apart from—two disparate cultures. Tommy’s childhood experience as depicted in the novel also reflects the lived experiences of members of the Stolen Generations, in that he is raised on Fingal Mission, away from the influences of his biological family. The reader learns that the Fingal mission is located near Brisbane

(Watson 34), and in many ways it seems to function as a pseudonym for the

(in)famous Cherbourg mission, where the Murri identity was forged. As was the case in Cherbourg, the inhabitants of the fictional Fingal mission are mostly from the Northern lands.

Like that of many mission inhabitants, Tommy’s “Aboriginal” culture is an artificial

construct in that it is mediated by white influences, and that members of the

227 mission community forge a communal identity, regardless of their nations or cultures of origin. When Tommy muses:

‘I suppose every black person in Australia is somehow related to the entire tribe. I could go to any black camp in the country and I’d be taken in. Our religion gives us a kinship system that’s survived everything … I’d only have to tell them my name and a few details about my family’ (Watson 147)

he is, in effect, exploring the Indigenous diasporic identity, and acknowledging the colonial processes which brought previously culturally-distinct “mobs” together.

Tommy is luckier than most mission-raised children, however, in that he knows the identity and location of his birth-mother, and is eventually able to have contact with her and access to her inner-city Brisbane home. This sometimes problematic relationship is contrasted with the wholly destructive relationship between Tommy and his only other living relative, his mother’s lover and his late father’s twin,

Booka Roth. The relationship between mother and son is used by Watson to demonstrate his belief that the younger generations need to acknowledge all parts of their family tree, both Indigenous and otherwise.

Tommy’s birth-mother Fleur Peters is the daughter of Jack Peters, a prominent

Queensland politician who gained power and influence through an “unholy alliance” (Watson 3) with Bill Parkes, Justice Jones and Booka Roth. Both Peters and Parkes had been active during the so-called native wars, but are now both respectable and wealthy. References in the novel to the electorate of Barambah

(232), inland from the Sunshine Coast, also tie together late twentieth century state politics with the Cherbourg mission’s history. The character of Parkes holds a seat in the State Parliament, whilst Peters is vying for one: the “safe party seat” of Barambah, “based on Kingaroy,” which they had “shot … out very early on”

228 (232). The seat of Barambah is where the Cherbourg mission is situated, and

Kingaroy is the base of the late Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was the Premier of

Queensland for many years, and about whom Sam Watson has been openly critical. In fact, Watson has said that

I wrote the book to really target someone like Joh. But after I showed the first draft to Jacaranda and they felt that it would spend more time in the courts than on the bookstands, I realized that you really can’t write as an act of revenge, that writing is a pure art and should be respected as such. …So I changed it and the white political figures only play very minor roles. (Watson, Meanjin 593).

Even Jack Peters’ own daughter Fleur is openly critical of his past beliefs and actions with regard to the Aboriginal people of south-eastern Queensland. With her mother Anna, she had “fled Jack’s part in the Native Wars” (Watson 241), eventually being appointed as a teacher of “natives” on the Fingal Mission,

“working for those fortunate few who had survived her father’s bloody campaigns”

(Watson 243). Fleur’s relationship with Koobara is depicted as one of the few loving and nurturing relationships in the novel.

Although Tommy was initially raised on the Mission by his foster mother, Aunty

Darpil, gradually Tommy began to spend more time in Brisbane and it was eventually considered that it would be ”safe” for Fleur to

‘foster’ the boy from Fingal Mission. Not even her own father would have thought her capable of bearing a black child and it was fashionable, then, for upper-class whites to take on such human pets. (153)

Fleur is devoted to Tommy, and even endures an ongoing demeaning sexual relationship with Booka in order to protect her son. The relationship distracts

Booka from realising the threat that Tommy poses, and one of Tommy’s spirit guides, Ningi, routinely removes “scrapings of hair and sperm from Fleur’s groin

… [to be] used as the base ingredients for the continuing spell” which keeps

229 Booka confined in Brisbane (Watson 243) and ignorant of Tommy’s true identity.

Tommy, however, is

very aware of this woman called Fleur Peters, sensitive to her as a woman but not as the woman who had birthed him, and the strange feelings had not troubled him. After all, they had been forced by circumstance to carry out a ridiculous charade. For so long he had been indoctrinated to think of her only as a white stranger who had just happened to adopt him. He had never been able to develop any true love for her; the plot had succeeded only too well. (Watson 159)

Tommy’s disaffection from his mother and his self-loathing is shown with finality in a scene where he notes his “amazement [as] he caught himself fantasising about the secret parts of his own mother” (Watson 160). This is a scene with

Oedipal overtones, sharing as it does with the Grecian tale the incestuous desires of a son who has been raised separately from his mother. The key difference here is that Tommy is well aware of the nature of their relationship and therefore of the transgressive nature of his desires. It perhaps echoes the arguments of anthropologist Robert Lawlor that the mother-son relationship is irrevocably changed at the point of initiation (Lawlor 193), but also functions to show an unusual variation on the common colonial practice of using Aboriginal women as “go-betweens for mediating between menfolk and the settlers” (Berndt and Berndt 522) as in this case, it is a white woman who is acting as the mediator between the conflicting parties.

These conflicted feelings in Tommy are also representative of his confused identity. His sworn enemy, Booka, is a close blood relation, but one who has sexually abused Tommy and is also his mother’s sexual partner. At one time

Watson was quoted as saying that white blood was “a mark of Cain” (Watson,

Meanjin 596) which showed that

[o]ur only real tribal duty was to protect this land from invasion and we failed. And so we wear this white blood and we will wear it forever because we failed those who came before us and those that will come after us. (Watson, Meanjin 596)

230 This idea is revisited in the early pages of the novel when Watson asserts that

Booka’s argument with Biamee is what caused the mists to leave the land open and cause Europeans to seek it.

Over time, however, his stance on this seems to have softened. In 2007 he noted that he felt that the protagonist of the novel

had to be a mixed-blood … The majority of Aboriginal people I’ve known and worked with, all have non-Indigenous relatives in their family networks. I myself am married; my life-time partner is a non-Indigenous person who’s got blood ties to Germany and France and we’ve been together since we were fifteen years old. Our kids and grandchildren, their Dreaming Paths come from different parts of the globe. So it’s just to reflect that there’s no black and white; there’s no pure race and impure race. We all have to draw strength and positives and lessons and knowledge from different Dreaming pathways. And never retreat from that. I mean, our kids always want to be Aboriginal first, but we box them around the ears and tell them they’ve got grandparents and great-grandparents from places like Ireland and Scotland, and Germany, France, Portugal (Appendix C 317).

Ningi finally reveals to Tommy that Fleur’s family also held great powers, which he has inherited and which will be key to the success of his mission. It is revealed that she is decended from European druids, who

worshipped stones, great standing stones, and their powers are equal to those of the Kadaitcha … The simple, loving white woman had almost royal blood. Indeed, it was her blood that was going to unlock the sacred heart of the Rainbow Serpent from Booka’s prison. (Watson 228-9)

Fleur was chosen to carry the hopes of the Kadaitcha because she had “the qualities and wisdom that would deliver the Kadaitcha child into this world,” for the “blood of the Kadaitcha clan alone could not conquer the cunning and evil of the beast” (Watson 227). Tommy’s hybrid status is not, as he has believed for so long, a deficit. Rather, the white blood he has so long resented holds the key to his success in defeating his Kadaitcha enemy, Booka Roth.

Like Fleur, Tommy’s girlfriend Mary is a white female character of pivotal importance to the development of the novel. Mary is described as “Aryan” in

231 appearance (Watson 143), South African and the daughter of amateur anthropologists who had “made their fortune by exploiting the black workers of the South African Homelands” (Watson 145). Mary is as consumed with self- loathing as Tommy; despite her pathological fear of Aboriginal men after being pack-raped, she maintains a dependent sexual relationship with Tommy. Her guilt over her parents’ involvement in anthropological endeavours echoes that felt by

Fleur and her mother, Anna, over Jack Peters’ inhumane actions. This and the trauma of her rape lead to Mary’s extreme mental disturbance, but Tommy is ordered by his spiritual guides to maintain the relationship. Despite her fragile grip on reality, Mary has moments of great insight, as when she tells a dismissive

Tommy that Fleur “couldn’t love [him] more” if he was her own (Watson 155).

Ultimately it is Mary who leads him to retrieve the sacred Kundri stone which will ensure Booka’s downfall.

Tommy is not privy to the knowledge held by his guides that Mary holds the secret to the location of the missing sacred Kundri stone. This again suggests his

‘trickster’ status as a being who cannot be trusted with the same amount of information as some other spiritual beings. When Mary suggests a trip to visit her mother, Tommy reads this as simply another symptom of her mental illness, for her mother had died two years previously (Watson 160). Tommy feels “quite comfortable in the cemetery” (Watson 161) and is given safe passage by the spirits, who recognise his Kadaitcha blood (Watson 161). He notes with pleasure

the symbolism of the graveyard … whites who had been given back to the land in this place had probably spent much of their earthly time desecrating the same soil within which they were now entombed. (Watson 161)

On this visit, however, he pays attention to the shade of Mary’s mother, who smells like “black blood and suffering” (Watson 162). He uses his moogi stone to entrap the spirit and question her. Mary’s mother is enraged by this, sensing that

232 his “blood is impure” (Watson 165) and thus, ironically, questioning his authority to access the information she holds. Mary’s parents had stolen the stone from a tomb in Africa, causing an earthquake, and later, the death of Mary’s father at the hands of Booka Roth.

Watson has noted that the figure of Mary was an important inclusion in the novel because

I was trying to provide white readers with a link back to their own past because I have always argued that white Australians, every single white Australian, does have a history dating back to a land-based culture. So I wanted to highlight that and I used characters such as Mary to try to show the white reader that they do in fact have a strong and viable link with an earth-based culture. (Watson, Meanjin 591)

The cemetery remains a central location to the action of the novel. It is the cemetery to which Tommy returns later that evening, in order to consummate his relationship with Jelda. Their lovemaking takes place on funereal shrouds, thus evoking and contradicting the commonly-held colonialist suggestion that the

Aboriginal race was doomed and that the role of white society was therefore, to provide a “pillow for the dying race”. Jelda is of the “black possum people” who have been “marked for death” (Watson, 71), but Tommy disobeys the orders of his spirit guides not to interfere in this matter and impregnates her so that a new life could be “born to the tradition of the vendetta. The new life was of the

Kaditcha blood and at the moment of conception, the pact of revenge was sent safely into the next generation” (Watson, 206). Tommy indicates his awareness that this act was both reckless and selfish (Watson 207); he knows that the spirits will not condemn to death a woman carrying the Kadaitcha bloodline.

This scene is immediately juxtaposed with another carnal act, this time between

Fleur’s friend and colleague, an Oxford-educated and -accented University

233 lecturer, Stephen, and Tommy’s kinsman, Boonger, who has recently been released from prison. These moments of rupture continue throughout the text, as

Tommy finds the Moogi stone and seeks vengeance on behalf of his people.

Tommy returns to the party, where he learns that a lover of Stephen’s has uncovered an unusual stone on an archaeological dig, one which is much older than its location would suggest. Stephen has the stone in his bedroom. When

Tommy finds the Moogi stone, he is momentarily distracted from the import of the moment by the actions of a bearded man nearby, who is having sex with his comatose and vomit-soaked sister-in-law. The man then generously offers

Tommy “a go,” saying that she “always wanted to try one of you blokes” (Watson

214-5). Only the racist slur awakens Tommy to what he is supposed to be doing.

After first punishing the rapist, he stores the stone in his scrotal sac, joking that he would have “three balls for a couple of days.” As Gelder and Jacobs suggest, here the sacred and the profane are placed quite violently together (Gelder and

Jacobs 111-2) in what must surely be one of the most corporeal examples of the uncanny juxtaposition of the mythic and the everyday in contemporary

Indigenous literature.

Depictions of violence within the novel are also graphic and frequently disturbing, but Watson was steadfast in his refusal to edit the content. The kind of criticism which it drew as a result of this decision can be read in itself as upholding a particular kind of patriarchal heteronormativity which is more palatable for a predominantly mainstream readership and their sensibilities. Indeed, Murri critic

Jackie Huggins argues that “white control, white editors and white interference in our stories” is something which “Black writers fight against all the time” (Huggins,

61).

234 Much of the violence in the novel centres around Booka Roth’s compound in inner Brisbane. Here, Booka ‘entertains’ numerous influential politicians and judges for his own political purposes. It is here that the bodies of two Murri women who had been missing for most of the novel are eventually found. One of them, Florence, dies under particularly gruesome circumstances:

lying belly down across a narrow bed. Sambo’s fingers were still buried in her throat. He had strangled her while holding her head between his thighs. Now he let her go, watching her head flop down at a crazy angle. Mr Justice Jones was naked, lying on her back, his penis buried in her anus and his arms wrapped around her. ‘She dead now, boss master!’ Sambo said, completely unaffected by his crime. With a series of short, angry thrusts, the white man climaxed. (Watson 222)

The reader learns that all the “basement rooms in Booka’s lair” (Watson 222) are set up as dungeons where Booka’s influential friends can satisfy their sado- masochistic urges. In this instance, however, Justice Jones’ desires are not fully sated and, after learning that a second “gin” is not immediately available, he turns his attentions to Booka’s servant, Sambo (Watson 223).

This scene seems to be included as a means of justifying the devastation caused by Tommy when he visits the compound and searches for the Kundri stones.

Booka and Sambo are lured away with news of a disturbance at the prison involving Bully Macow. The disturbance is dealt with by Booka, who beats the prisoner, apparently to death. The body begins to glow before turning to ash and then morphing into a giant black goanna which promptly attacks Sambo. As

Booka grabs the “beast by the tail,” the apparition changes once more into the body of Trooper Edwards, missing since the early pages of the novel. Edwards’ body “was naked and he had been gelded” (Watson 239). Yet rather than dealing with the import of this supernatural warning, Booka instead opts to visit Fleur immediately after this incident (Watson 240).

235 During Booka’s absence, Tommy enters the compound, discovers the body of

Florence, travels through a tunnel with walls of blood, defeats a Bunyatt and recovers the Kundri stones. He also wreaks revenge by destroying Booka’s safe haven. Booka Roth returns to scenes of utter devastation, with numerous bodies lying anonymously under sheets, the carpet soaked with blood, urine and faeces

(Watson 244), and a number of his men unaccounted for. Tommy’s grandfather,

Jack Peters, has had both arms removed and Justice Jones’ head has been severed from his body (Watson 245). The other noteworthy event of the evening is the apparent mass migration of the entire Indigenous population of Brisbane that night, prompting one of the officers to remark to Booka that “we’ve finally succeeded. We’ve now got a coon-free town!” (Watson 246)

Tommy had warned all the Brisbane Murris to leave for fear of reprisals. He seeks solace and renewal by spending time in his Aunty Darpil’s home on Fingal mission, where he had been raised. Here he renews his relationship with his country:

Tommy took off his shorts and dove cleanly into the deep water off the boat ramp … Still deeper he went, heading out to the middle to seek out the pockets of warmer water. On the way, he closed his lungs down, he did not need them. He could swim with his water brothers for as long as he wanted to. (Watson 295)

Whilst visiting Fingal he spends time with a young boy, Poddy. Poddy spends most of his days at the general store, begging for coins to use in the pinball machines or for money to go to the movies. Tommy is uneasy with how readily this boy accepts the realities presented to him by white culture. Poddy loves cowboy films, in particular, deeming cowboys to be “real deadly” in the way they

“belt the piss out of them Indian buggers” (Watson 260). Tommy scoffs at this version of events and tries to explain to Poddy that a more natural affinity would be with the colonised peoples, the “Indians:”

236 ‘You … backing the wrong mob there. Those same Indians now, well they our countrymen and we the same blood as that mob. Them cowboy fullahs the same breed as the night riders up north. They bad news, mate. You want to back those red fulluhs up, boy. They the same blood as you and me.’ ‘Since when? Poddy’s face screwed up with confusion. ‘They always the baddies and they all the time kill all the good mob. You talk arse about, Tommy.’ (Watson 260-1)

Tommy despairs of what will happen to Indigenous people if the younger generations, like Poddy, continue to accept the colonising culture without question:

[t]he tribes had always measured their wealth in the health and abundance of the next generation, who were the guardians and warriors of tomorrow. Yet children like Poddy had never walked upon their own land and they spoke English too fluently. Their own language was beginning to fade and they knew nothing of their own Dreaming. (Watson 261)

In this section of the novel, Tommy represents what Watson has termed the

“middle” generation of Aboriginal Australia; he is both someone in need of mentoring and someone who has begun to mentor those still younger than he.

He expresses deep concern over Poddy’s confused cultural identity. In many ways this reflects Tommy’s own bicultural identity, which he struggles to come to terms with throughout the novel.

The focus on three generations of Aboriginality, with a particular emphasis on the trials and tribulations of the “middle” generation of younger men, is a hallmark of

Watson’s work. As he explains,

the young emerging warriors coming through … are the most vulnerable and exposed characters in the Aboriginal community. These are the people who have the passion and the energy, and they’re the loose cannons, wanting to explode and kill and murder and maim. So these are the people we have to keep close, or else they’ll hurt themselves and hurt other people. (Appendix C 314)

Within broader Australian culture, however, this group has been more “Othered” than the older generation. Katherine Biber has argued that Australian cinema has routinely equated Aboriginal manhood with death, but that some elders

237 who conform to some rustic fantasy of enduring wisdom are allowed to survive ... For young black men living in the troubled region between cultures, however, the outcomes tend to be bleak, dangerous and, more often than not, deadly (Biber 31).

This seems to be the case in Watson’s novel, too, for although Tommy is successful in his quest, a number of transgressions against his father and the other Kadaitcha—including his decision to pass on the Kadaitcha blood against their wishes—mean that he is ultimately killed. Ironically, the justice is not

Aboriginal justice for the crimes he did commit, but rather, the Kadaitcha strip him of his supernatural powers and arrange for him to be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for something he did not do. Here Watson seems to critique both the fictional elders’ insistence on patriarchal traditions, and their complicity in the Western legal system, which is presented in the novel as being controlled by privileged white men of power and social standing. Throughout the novel, in their search for an identity and a role in society, the characters question what is

“natural” and “right.” The legal system is a case in point; Tommy works as an advocate in a legal system which, by his own admission, he does not “fully understand” (Watson 61). The man he is asked to support has complied with tribal law and killed a white policeman who had raped and killed his sister. Not only does Tommy question why there needed to be a trial in the first place, but it also transpires that he was actively involved in luring the policeman to his death.

This was in direct violation of the orders of Biamee, who had decreed that

Tommy was not to interfere. Tommy, after a lifetime of subjugation, is prepared to cross many borders dictated by patriarchal societies, both Indigenous and

Western.

Ultimately, Tommy is forced to embrace his matrilineal heritage, and also to learn to trust matriarchal power and maternal love when he chooses to conceive a child

238 with Jelda, knowing that his time on the earth is limited. Once again the sacred

Kadaitcha bloodline is being entrusted to the care of a mother; once again it is a mother of whom the spirits may not approve. This storyline subverts commonplace colonial binaries such as good/evil, black/white, and even life/death, for Tommy seeks to do the bidding of the Kadaitcha men, yet ultimately flaunts some of their decrees; Tommy is both black and white, and struggles to inhabit this space in-between. He is rendered immortal for a time, before being stripped of his powers, yet still manages to beat death in the sense that he has left a child who will now wear his mantle of the “last Kadaitcha.” The symbolism of a pregnant Jelda, on horseback, leading the Aboriginal people into their promised land, is clearly Christian in nature. His white lover, Mary, has been replaced by a black Madonna figure, carrying the hopes of her people. The irony in Tommy being hanged on Christmas Day is also unmistakeable.

It seems appropriate to use elements of queer theory when analysing a novel which seeks to question notions of lineage and identity, and which is populated with characters such as these who are homosexual or bisexual. One of the scenes which is particularly unexpected and “queer” is the sex scene involving

Boonger and Stephen. Complete with the revelation of the couple in flagrante delicto as Tommy flings open the door to the panel van, the incident certainly disrupts the progression of the narrative (Watson 207). Tommy has consummated his relationship with Jelda and conceived a child who will carry his legacy. He is now searching the van for enemies, since he can feel that the time of final conflict is near. The high indignation of the interrupted couple is unanticipated, confronting and comic. The reader already knows that Boonger rejects homosexuality as an identity, but rather, self-identifies as straight and has recently moved in with his long-term girlfriend, Saucer. Boonger’s changeable

239 sexual preferences undermine the heteronormative binaries of hetero- and homosexuality. In this way, his fluid identity acts as a foil to Tommy, who symbolically undermines racial binaries of black/white through his mixed-race parentage. In this novel, colonial politics and sexual politics are clearly intertwined. In developing literary alternatives to colonialist discourse that sexuality, like race, was something which was fixed, private and the domain of married heterosexual couples, Watson is exposing the fallacy of such beliefs, and the hypocrisy of those who profess to believe in them. The increasing numbers of half-castes and fears of miscegenation over the first century of Australian colonisation made it apparent that this discourse was not something which was adhered to in practice.

Jeffrey Weeks has argued that sexuality is something which is produced socially, within cultural frameworks. He argues that sexuality “is not a given, it is a product of negotiation, struggle and human agency” (Weeks 19). When Tommy is anally and orally raped by Booka and his minion early in the novel, he notes that this is socially taboo (51-2); yet, his cousin, Boonger, later indulges in consensual penetrative anal sex with another man. There are two key differences between these scenes, however; firstly, that the power relations are reversed, and secondly, that Boonger’s sexual identity has been formed, in part, by stints in prison. It suggests that the judicial system has had a profound and ongoing impact on Boonger’s cultural identification, a point which Watson often makes in his works, albeit usually through less explicit scenes.

David Buchbinder argues in his 1998 book Performance Anxieties: Re-producing

Masculinity that the phallus can be read as a sign or symbol of domination over females or less powerful males (Buchbinder 49). He differentiates the phallus

240 from the penis in the sense that the first is a social or cultural construct, and the second a biological or anatomical definition (Buchbinder 49), and argues that it is a “potent symbol on the ways in which the culture constructs masculinity”

(Buchbinder 49). He further asserts that

social and cultural discourses … privilege certain types of subjectivity—for instance, white, male, Christian, heterosexual—while depriving others, so that people in the subordinated category are pressed to acquiesce in their own disempowerment … dominant discourses of a culture seek to present themselves as inevitable, normal, natural, even universal. (Buchbinder 25)

It is significant, then, that Watson nominates that “the big black man had his penis buried in the hilt of the Englishman’s rectum” (Watson, 207). Clearly, in this instance the model of the privileged subject—white, male, Christian and heterosexual, reflecting the typical image of the evangelical coloniser from

Australian history—is the less dominant figure. The Indigenous figure is being empowered through this sexual activity. This is a reversal of the kind of sexual slavery which was common among powerful white men and Indigenous women throughout Australia’s early history, and which is represented in the opening pages of The Kadaitcha Sung in the plight of Worimi, the sole survivor of a massacre conducted by the Native Police. It also reverses the cultural constructs which often depict land as female and as having been ‘penetrated’ by colonisation. Watson is illuminating the restrictive nature of this history of privilege, and of hegemonic representations of patriarchal heteronormativity.

Sex and sexuality feature heavily throughout the novel. Tommy is often distracted from his quest by his relationships with a series of women. A Poorie princess, or keeper of women’s magic, Pinni, is sent to Brisbane by one of Tommy’s spirit helpers, to “be at Tommy’s command” in his search. As Tommy reflects on his impending death, he becomes aware of the “women’s smell that Pinni was giving off for him. His mind flamed and his groin tightened” (Watson 84). Tommy

241 maintains concurrent relationships with Mary and Jelda, and also receives oral sex from a white barmaid, Sugar, in return for using his shamanic powers to cure her from a curse placed on her by a jilted Indigenous lover (Watson 109). Only days after impregnating Jelda, he agrees to some casual sex with an attractive white neighbour, despite his cousin Boonger’s (perhaps ironically) sage advice that he is “shitting in [his] own nest” (Watson 278).

Central to the myriad representations of sexuality in the novel are issues of consent. The supernatural sisters of the wind who guard the stolen Kundri stone,

Mary, Tommy, Worimi, the comatose woman at the party, and a number of girls imprisoned in Booka’s compound are all victims of rape. There are also consent issues around the relationship between Booka and Fleur, who has to be supernaturally subdued into a trance before every sexual act, and who is then further violated by the spirits, who use the products of the sex act to create protective spells around Tommy (Watson 243).

These representations of power and penetration operate as both an anti-colonial metaphor and also evoke a long and violent history of Indigenous sexual slavery.

Many of the characters display clearly misogynistic attitudes, beginning with the

Native Police whose coarse conversations about the captive native woman,

Worimi, display a colonialist attitude that Indigenous women were treated as subhuman slaves. The conversations between these characters are designed to confront and shock the reader:

‘Reckon we got time to drain the bag? I haven’t had a jump today,’ Hinds said, his throat going dry and his groin tightening. ‘Fuckin’ hell, mate! I’ve got to have a root. That rum sends a man every time.’ (Watson 19)

These misogynistic attitudes are not limited to binaries about the attitudes of black men towards white woman. Rather, they are prevalent throughout the text.

242 Worimi is only able to escape enslavement and avenge the deaths of her family after non-consensual sexual intercourse with Jonjurrie, one of Tommy Gubba’s spiritual advisors. Tommy is an unlikely choice for a hero or Messiah figure, not least because of pragmatic and often uncaring attitude towards his sexual partners. His nonchalance and human desires, however, are more in keeping with trickster representations—and arguably also invoke the state of dis/ease or cultural ill health which is the result of some two hundred years of the imposition of colonialist patriarchal Christian cultural practices. Social and cultural critic bell hooks argues that males who grow up in patriarchal cultures “learn a role that restricts and confines. When race and class enter the picture … then black males endure the worst impositions of gendered masculine patriarchal identity” (hooks,

We Real xii). Although hooks’ work deals specifically with the African-American context, the premise on which she bases her work is equally applicable to

Indigenous men in other colonised nations. Watson’s writing seeks to resist hegemonic definitions of how men should behave. In this sense, the novel’s attempt to critique and interrogate the framework of the patriarchy runs parallel to feminism.

The misogyny in the text is disturbing, but the attempts to redress patriarchal colonialist discourses, whilst by no means feminist, are nonetheless worthy of analysis. Ignoring or invalidating the text’s strengths would ultimately replicate the silencing strategies of colonial regimes. As David Buchbinder asserts, patriarchy is inextricably linked with notions of power and maleness (Buchbinder 45).

Watson challenges and subverts certain dominant ideological “truths” about the nature of Indigenous men in Australian society by seeking to make visible the subject positions of those who, since colonialism, have inhabited the margins.

243 Within the text, Tommy’s racial identity is also queered. He is unable to sharply delineate or create a binary in terms of his identity, and is repeatedly placed in an unfamiliar space when confronted with his white heritage. This is, in itself, a reversal of common historical practices of Indigenous Australians trying to “pass” or assimilate into white society.75 The idea of an Indigenous Australian rejecting or being uncomfortable with his own whiteness is another potential queer moment for white readers, in that it is an unusual representation.

The Kadaitcha Sung is the first book in a planned trilogy which focusses on

Indigenous sorcery and power. According to Watson,

Book two opens on the day after the hanging of Tommy Gubba and carries on from there. Again it happens in a very short space of time because I found that effective in The Kadaitcha Sung, where the whole story only took four days. That’s a reflection of how black people live. Time doesn’t mean anything to us. (Watson, Meanjin 594)

In the same article he outlined that it was his intention for the trilogy to deal with members from the same family, but to follow different ‘streams’ or threads of

Indigenous power, with the first being the Kadaitcha stream, the second book dealing with the Moogi spirit, which is the

death spirit who only comes in the mortal place to take a spirit from a person who is dying. He’s a bad seed the moogi. And book three will deal with the Porrie stream, which is the lightest of these three families of magic. It will still be a fairly heavy piece of work though, because I have to tie everything up and come out on a reasonable conclusion. (Watson Meanjin 595)

Watson is still working on the trilogy, with the next book nearing completion.

75 There are many examples of this practice in Aboriginal literature, but perhaps the most famous example comes from Sally Morgan’s My Place, in which her mother told Sally and her siblings to explain their olive complexions to their schoolmate with the line “Tell ’em you’re Indian” (Morgan 45). This was later used as the title of an article by Mudrooroo which critiqued works like Morgan’s which he argued worked too hard to make the story accessible—or not queer—to a white Australian audience.

244 Henry Reynolds has noted that the use of magic and sorcery as a weapon and means of resistance to the colonisation of Australia had a strong historical basis.

He notes that magic was “widely used against enemies in traditional society, supplementing or supplanting physical attack” (Reynolds, Other 86-87), and that

to Indigenous Australians, this form of resistance was likely to have been “at least

as significant as physical confrontation” (Reynolds, Other 87). He notes a number

of historical incidents in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland wherein “clever

men” were captured and the local Indigenous populations pleaded with white

authorities to release them before retribution could be enacted (Reynolds, Other

89-90). Even the apparent failure of the Kadaitcha to drive the Europeans off the

land could be explained in traditional terms; clearly the “strange blacks” who

usually accompanied exploratory parties had stronger magic (Reynolds, Other

92). As Reynolds notes, “faith in magic and in the powers of the ‘clever men’ has

been one of the most enduring features of traditional culture surviving longer than

anything else, even language itself” (Reynolds, Other 92), and thus the use of sorcery and shamanism as a symbol of political resistance in the works of Sam

Watson performs a valuable function within these texts.

Since the publication of this novel in 1990, Sam Watson has mainly focussed on his political and advocacy work, as well as venturing into different creative media, notably film, television and theatre. In 1996 he was a production assistant and script consultant on the Lindy Chamberlain biopic Through My Eyes, an experience which he has since described as “really uninspiring.”76 The same year

his short film, Black Man Down, was screened on SBS television as part of the

“Sand to Celluloid” Series. As co-producer and writer, he was closely involved in

all aspects of production. As with The Kadaitcha Sung, it focusses on ideas about

76 Personal Email, August 14, 2007

245 initiation, adulthood, and the intersection of tribal and urban Aboriginal culture.

The film is prefaced by an on-screen message attributed to Sam Watson, explaining that the bora ceremony shown is a kind of essentialised version, for he

“did not intend to show the ceremonies or special business of any tribe or clan”

(Watson in McCrow, Dir.).

Essential to the film are cityscapes and images of protest. The protagonist, Waxy

(David Hudson), is assaulted by police at an urban political rally for Land Rights and against Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, before the opening credits even roll.

Thus the salient opening image is indeed of a “black man down.” In flashback, the viewer is shown a younger Waxy being led by his parents across the sand, following a kangaroo. Waxy is led away from his family by a woman of Euro-

Australian appearance, dressed from head to toe in white. A Kadaitcha man watches in the background. A noisy background is overlaid, which could be read as either ‘white noise,’ or as the crowd noise from the present day, an idea which is supported by the change in scenes from Waxy attempting to escape and trying to climb a wire fence, to that of the now-adult Waxy in his prison cell, similarly seeking escape from wired confines. He falls to the floor and the Kadaitcha man reappears to him whilst he is unconscious. His spirit is released, and the director cuts away to two symbols of institutional authority, a priest and a police officer, discussing Waxy’s bruises. The policeman protests that “We never touched him,

Father.” A female spirit is visible as a reflection in the background, whose presence is explained when the priest says that Waxy “lost his grandmother last week. She was the only real family he had left,” and insists that hospitalisation is required. Compassion may yet be sidelined by bureaucracy, however, for the police officer insists that only the sergeant can authorise such a move.

246 The camera pans down, through the artificially constructed concrete floor of the prison, to the earth. Fires of the bora ring and a bull roarer are shown, with the city in the background. The juxtaposition of images from traditional Indigenous cultures and contemporary urban living continue, as Waxy catches a stick thrown towards him by a shamanic figure, only for it to immediately morph into his belt, as the scene changes back to the interior of the prison cell. Waxy is stringing the belt up, ready to hang himself, all the while justifying this decision to his spirit grandmother in the background, asserting “What’ve I got to lose? I don’t have a job, family, house. Shit. I don’t even have a smoke.”

The grandmother-spirit urges him to consider his responsibility to his people, but he denies this “Friggin’ drunks, bludgers. They’re not my mob.” She insists that they are: “We’re all one tribe now … History has convicted us of a crime we didn’t commit.” Here, as in The Kadaitcha Sung, there is a statement that colonial practices have forged an Indigenous diasporic identity. Through the forced dispersal from traditional lands, the Indigenous populations were coerced into creating a joint identity as “one mob” in order to retain some sense of the familiar in the unfamiliar postcolonial environment.

Waxy argues that he will not “blame the white man” for everything, and states his intention to take “the easy way out …A man’s got that right,” only to be told that if he suicides he will have failed the bora ring and thus not be truly a man. He claims that he has a right to make decisions about his own life and death, but the spirit figure disagrees: “You got a life, do you Waxy? You been livin’ like a proud black man? No way. A proud black man has a duty to his people, his land and his

Dreaming.” Waxy falls and she, now in corporeal form, catches him, causing him to ask who and what she is, to which she explains that she is Maweena, Spirit of

247 the Great Kangaroo Dreaming, and that he used to know her. When he faints again, she nurses him and sings him strength, before addressing him as Kamu, a name which he has not heard since he as a boy, and which, she tells him, is his

“proper name. Kamu the warrior.” This scene brings together two prescient social justice issues for contemporary Indigenous Australians; those of the Stolen

Generations and of Black Deaths in Custody, both subjects of Royal

Commissions in the last decade and a half.

The pair hears the sound of a bird calling, and Maweena tells him that it is the death spirit calling him. The point of view changes to an overhead shot of the two of them on the bench, with the belt in the foreground. He approaches it and places his head in the noose before tearing the belt down and throwing it against the cell bars. Again, the flames of the Kadaitcha appear and the belt changes back into a snake. The Kadaitcha man catches it and places it in the sand, before walking out of shot. Waxy walks into the flaming Bora Ring, apparently choosing to be initiated as a “proud black man.” The viewer sees Waxy in the Spirit’s arms once more, before the scene cuts away to that of the opening, and shows Waxy unconscious at the protest. In front of the Koori flag he momentarily sees his parents and the spirit, in full traditional dress, beckoning him. A modern day child leads Waxy past a group of elders, representing the three generations which

Watson has identified as being central to his work:

the elders, the senior people; then you’ve got the young emerging warriors coming through … And the children, of course, because they’re tomorrow, they’re going to carry the struggle on tomorrow. That’s what it’s all about (Appendix C 314).

The final lines of the film are a call to Aboriginal Australia to resist:

The land screams out ‘live my children, live! For death is the darkest estate.’

248 In recent years, Watson has also been working on play scripts. In March of 2007 his play The Mack debuted at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in

Brisbane. Performed by the Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts group, the play was described in media releases as being “a compelling story of strength, struggle and spirit” (Judith Wright Centre press release). Here, as in

The Kadaitcha Sung, issues of succession are central to the narrative as the

Mack family wait to see who will take the mantle of family and community leader from Bullocky. As Watson has noted in interview,

[m]ost of us might entrust that responsibility to our first born but what if for some reason they can’t and it’s left to a younger sibling who doesn’t feel comfortable about taking over the reigns? (Message Stick)

In this instance, the protagonist Peacey is confined to a wheelchair as a result of a car accident which also killed his older brother, the rightful leader. Peacey doubts his ability to lead, both because of his disability, and because he is being haunted by a spirit. As Hamish Chitts noted in his review of the play for Green

Left Weekly, the car accident happened after Peacey, his brother and his

brother’s girlfriend Birdie visited a sacred site. As a result, a spirit man is now

hunting the survivors—Peacey and Birdie, who has been institutionalised as a

result. Her son, Corowa, has been placed in Peacey’s care.

Once again, three generations are represented, and again there are questions

about what it means to become a man and take responsibility. In particular, it

questions ways of becoming an Indigenous man in contemporary urban Australia.

Underlying issues about how a family or ‘mob’ can be formed even when there is no direct biological link, as demonstrated by the relationship between Corowa and Peacey, reflect the diasporic nature of contemporary Indigenous life.

Altercations with the police also feature in this work, as in Black Man Down and

The Kadaitcha Sung. Sergeant Davis is determined to “bring the Mack family

249 down” (Chitts) and Corowa, as a young man, is identified as the primary target through which to achieve this. The director of the play, Ian Brown, noted that watching the play is an inherently political act, because

Watson’s writing is rich with conflict; between traditions and contemporary urban existence; between Indigenous law and a subjugating European law; between tolerance and respect. (qtd in Chittick)

The play has since also been performed at the Woodford Dreaming Festival in

June of 2007. Watson’s second play, The Shed, was workshopped at the

Brisbane Writers’ Festival in mid-September, 2007.

Mudrooroo has argued that Sam Watson believes that “Indigenous texts should intervene politically and socially in the dominant ideology and that texts should not only be political but also enjoyable and interesting” (Mudrooroo, Indigenous

97). In his novel, films and plays, Watson achieves this outcome by utilising shamanic Kadaitcha figures to negotiate spaces where issues fundamental to

Murri identity—including political resistance, cultural resurgence, and regeneration—may be presented to mainstream contemporary Australian society.

Only the Kadaitcha figure is powerful enough to negotiate the uncanny, the queer, and the Indigenous diasporic identity that has been forged by colonialism.

Watson’s writing attempts to blur the boundaries between black and white, queer and straight, history and contemporary times. His use of Kadaitcha men as the active characters in this tale highlights the distinctive role of the shaman or

Kadaitcha in Aboriginal cultures. Their unique abilities to negotiate between realms—and by extension, cultures—are also fundamental to the genre of maban realism, which blends the natural and the mysterious in order to convey political messages. The Kadaitcha Sung is, however, a very complex novel, and on a textual level the sense of chaos throughout can be read in terms of Tommy’s

250 immaturity causing his individual downfall, as he has neither the maturity nor the skills to cope. It can equally be argued that the sense of general confusion and turmoil which are hallmarks of the narrative and which caused disquiet in this reader, at least, are part of a queering process.

251 CONCLUSION:

ARCTIC AND ANTIPODES—SHAMANS IN INDIGENOUS DIASPORIC

LITERATURE AT THE “ENDS OF THE EARTH”

An Indigenous writer simply presents a world which is different from what natural scientific reality once presented as the only reality … this world, this reality, may be familiar as well as strange and it allows for the opening of the doors of perception through language and imagination.

Mudrooroo77

As was argued in the Introduction, Canada and Australia share many similarities in their colonial histories, and each land mass became the focus of European interest in areas outside the Metropolis, particularly in Britain during the Victorian era. These spaces were imagined to be fantastic by outsiders who had no experience of them, and were sometimes characterised by European society as being at the “ends of the earth.” The quest to discover a Northwest Passage across the Arctic took on mythic qualities, and the Australian colonies were figured as the “Antipodes” of legend. These were locations which were, in the words of Ian Henderson, at the “extremity of the British reader’s mind’s eye” (297-

98), a dangerous realm which they were happy to believe was populated by monsters, demons, or sorcerors (Henderson 298).

Shamanism was, in many ways, aligned with the preconceived ideas which colonisers brought with them from Europe; that the colonies at the ends of the earth were populated by uncivilised, pagan and primitive beings that had access to supernatural powers. The use of maban reality in modern Indigenous diasporic

77 Mudrooroo, The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka, p 98

252 literature is an ironic reworking of that colonial conviction, as well as a means of interrogating artificial binaries constructed between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous cultures. For contemporary Indigenous peoples, who cannot divorce themselves from a history of diasporic movement and who have been influenced in incalculable ways by the colonising cultures, these binaries are indeed a construct, for they live in the “third space” articulated by Barthes and Bhabha.

Bhabha argues the need to acknowledge that the site of enunciation is indeterminate and unrepresentable (Bhabha 37). Shamanic characters, with the ability to cross time and space, are figures capable of negotiating the complex and unfixed ways of being Indigenous in mainstream Canada and Australia. They are characters with the rare capacity to negotiate the Indigenous diasporic mission space with confidence.

Both Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993) and Watson’s The Kadaitcha

Sung (1990) use Indigenous diasporic figures with supernatural powers and sorcery in order to tell their stories. These works are transgressive and negotiate cultural borders. They both offer alternatives to normative binaries in literature, especially with regard to cultural and sexual identity, and in the process, carve out locations on the literary landscape wherein their stories can be told. The characters they create are shamanic, and are able to negotiate the difficulties of being Indigenous diasporans in the contemporary world through their shamanic powers. They inhabit and mediate a contact zone between colonialist assimilation and nativist separation.

Ipellie and Watson create shamanic characters who are both at home and destabilising figures on both sides of the cultural divides which they inhabit. They are participants in both the colonising and colonised cultures, even as they

253 remain outsiders. Both the shaman-narrator of Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and

Nightmares and Watson’s Tommy Gubba express their loneliness and sense of being apart, lonely or doomed at numerous points in the narratives.78

The Indigenous diasporic space and maban reality are complex sites of value and identity. In each instance, the figure created to tell the stories adheres to what is in many ways a prescribed narrative; in Ipellie’s case, the narrator is the archetypal quaint Inuit shaman, whilst Watson’s tale operates, on one level, as a

Stolen Generations narrative. The reading of Indigenous subjects as diasporic is somewhat unusual, but it is worth noting that exile from traditional lands had significant spiritual impacts and forged new or hybridised cultural identities.

Although Indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia were not sent out of their nation spaces, they moved around within those spaces, away from birthplace and family. This displacement had negative psychic and spiritual effects on the peoples concerned, as it did for other forms of diaspora.

Shamanic characters add to an understanding of postcolonial cultures because they are figures of enormous strength. Ipellie’s narrator in his collection Arctic

Dreams and Nightmares is still most at “home” in the Arctic, where his powers are at their strongest. He is hyper-masculine, brashly confident, engaged with significant figures from mainstream cultural iconography, and inarguably at home in the Arctic. In short, the characters Ipellie created were everything he was not.

The author, who endured the doubly diasporic circumstance of first being forcibly removed into a permanent settlement with his family, and later being removed

78 In Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, this is most noticeable in “When God Sings the Blues.” In The Kadaitcha Sung there are many references to Tommy having no tribe or family, and to his knowledge of impending doom. See, for example, pages 80, 159, 178, 311.

254 from his family and homeland altogether, suffered from chronic shyness and found it difficult to express himself verbally in many situations. His experiences as an adult living in the Arctic were limited to a short stint in the early 1970s, and a few subsequent visits. For him, Iqaluit had become a romanticised image of a home to which he would ultimately never return, and his writings and drawings were a means of dealing with the extraordinary homesickness he experienced whilst living in Ottawa.

Watson has created in The Kadaitcha Sung a character who is bicultural, promiscuous, and angry at authority figures from both cultures. Tommy Gubba is an Indigenous diasporan whose anger at the white colonists is a form of self- hatred, for his mother’s family had been involved in massacres of Aboriginal people in Queensland. He has lived the mission experience, and has been raised away from his biological family, later being “fostered” by his birth-mother, Fleur.

Watson, in contrast, did not experience first-hand the diasporic mission lifestyle familiar to so many Indigenous Australians, including members of his own family.

He has created in Tommy Gubba, however, a figure who is a voice for the

Indigenous diasporan.

Both works utilise common beliefs about cultural subjectivity—in particular, using the stereotype of the “quaint Eskimo” in Ipellie’s case, and using a Stolen

Generations narrative in Watson’s—as the frameworks for their stories. Yet they have also been subversive in creating works which cross genre boundaries and which use the interstices between Indigenous diaspora, postcolonial literary theory, queer theory and maban reality in order to find a way of locating cultural subjectivity in relation to their own narratives.

255 Throughout Arctic Dreams and Nightmares there are various references to sex and sexuality, but curiously, whilst the shaman-narrator provides commentary, he is never actively involved. The performative nature of gender and sexuality is observed by the shaman-narrator. Through his celibacy he becomes the ultimate queer figure or outsider. Indeed, the absence of sexuality becomes a metaphor for the absence of traditional cultural practices; activities previously perceived as normal and natural have been made queer and are now conspicuous by their absence, and are in stark contrast to the activities of other shamans he meets in his travels. The narrator comes into contact with the hyper-masculine “Super

Stud,” who “services” frustrated women across the Arctic; a benevolent bigamist shaman in the “The Five Shy Wives of the Shaman,” who marries gorgon Inuit females across the Arctic as he finds them, and a hermaphrodite shaman. It would seem that in order to mediate with the colonial world, the shaman-narrator must forego the sexual aspect of his own identity.

The Kadaitcha Sung is graphic in its depictions of sexual activity, and the book opens with the young initiate being physically examined by the Four Sisters of the

Wind, guardians of the sacred Kundri stone, who had previously been raped and defaced by Tommy’s uncle, nemesis and fellow Kadaitcha, Booka Roth. The story then switches to the main narrative, with a harrowing recount of the repeated rape of an Aboriginal woman by police officers. She is again molested by one of Tommy’s guides, a spirit named Jonjurrie, who then uses his powers to help her seek revenge on her captors.

Tommy himself is anally and orally raped by Booka early in the novel, and notes that anal sex, in particular, is socially taboo (Watson 51-2). Elsewhere, however, consensual homosexual sex is used to create a moment of narrative disruption

256 which destabilises heteronormativity (Sullivan 191). Boonger’s changeable sexual preferences not only undermine accepted power relations which depict the

Indigenous as being inferior or powerless in comparison with Europeans, but also undermine heteronormative binaries of hetero- and homosexuality. In this way, his fluid identity acts as a foil to Tommy, who symbolically undermines racial binaries of black/white through his mixed race heritage.

Both Arctic Dreams and Nightmares and The Kadaitcha Sung share a rejection of the simplistic view that sexuality is fixed and binary. This echoes the rejection of race as a binary, and highlights the myriad possibilities for identification in a diasporic environment after colonisation.

If we accept Mudrooroo’s assertion that maban realism is, at its core, political, then it comes as no surprise that each of the writers selected for study here has been embraced as an elder statesman or spokesperson for his people. I had the privilege of accompanying Alootook Ipellie to the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May of 2006, and witnessing a powerful (and funny) moment when one of his fellow panellists, Sherman Alexie, commented, “Hey, I’m in awe of this guy. And I’m a bit scared of him. I mean, he’s actually killed stuff.” Authenticity remains a key question for Indigenous writers, even among themselves, and the younger generations recognise that conditions were more difficult for those who went before.

Perhaps ironically, the two years immediately prior to his sudden death were among Ipellie’s most productive. In October of 2005, he told me,

[n]ext is—it’s taken me a while to uncover my inspiration, my ability to interpret the imagination. Five or six, seven years now. I never thought about giving up. Jesus Christ, I still have a lot to do. Things that I want to finish before everything goes, like me. And this (indicates brain). I’m not going to give up, I’m going to

257 continue doing my books. A children’s book that I’ll be working on soon. I’ve started doing some of the stories. Inuit Inventions. And a trilogy. I’m publishing a book of cartoons. I’m still working on my epic poem. Who knows? (Appendix A 282)

The children’s book, eventually entitled The Inuit Thought of it, was published shortly before his death. Earlier that year, he had held a successful gallery exhibition, his first in Ottawa since 1993. He had accepted a commission to illustrate another children’s book, and his serialisation “Those Were The Days” was being considered for publication in book form.

Watson has also long been considered an elder and worked as an advocate for his people. He is still working on completing the trilogy of which The Kadaitcha

Sung is the first part, and has also written two plays and a short film since the book’s publication. Watson’s political career has been a higher priority over the last decade or so, as he opposed many of the policies implemented by the

Howard administration, and twice campaigned for a seat in the Queensland

Senate as a representative of the Socialist Alliance.

This project began with an interest in pursuing the use of shamanic characters in

Indigenous literature. As it gathered momentum, however, it became apparent that the shamanic narrators were more representative of the maban reality present in Indigenous diasporic cultures, rather than being delineating features.

The two core texts studied here, among others, such as Kim Scott’s Benang: from the Heart, do feature shamanic characters, but there are others which would also benefit from analysis using the Indigenous diasporic framework. Tara June

Winch’s outstanding 2006 novel Swallow the Air, for example, does not feature a shamanic protagonist per se, but arguably still uses maban realist moments as the mortal first-person narrator, May, gains some of her insights about herself, her identity and her culture, through the use of hallucinogenic drugs, dreams, and

258 fragments of memory. It would seem that there is further scope for the study of

Indigenous writing through the use of this kind of framework.

Indigenous diasporic literature, as represented in Alootook Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares and Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung, provides a powerful and effective means of establishing voices to which mainstream society had not previously listened. It offers the scope to tell stories that may not have otherwise been told, and a means of reintroducing culturally significant tropes and traditions. By combining these with more familiar motifs, Indigenous diasporic writers have created space to tell stories which may not otherwise have been accessible in colonial or postcolonial Canada and Australia.

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282 APPENDIX A: Interview with Alootook Ipellie,

Ottawa, May 2004

283