"TRICKY STORIES ARE THE CURE:" CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS WRITING IN CANADA

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

© Molly Blyth 2009

Canadian Studies PhD Program

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1*1 Canada ABSTRACT

"Tricky Stories are the Cure": Contemporary Indigenous Writing in Canada

Molly Blyth

This dissertation begins by addressing the question of which methodology is the most appropriate for reading a selection of contemporary Indigenous poetry and fiction in Canada. In my review of the most influential literary critical approaches today, I find that the postmodern and bi-cultural trickster hermeneutics of the Native American theorist, Gerald Vizenor, adequately recognizes the cultural differences of Indigenous literatures while also respecting their hybrid textuality. As a result, I engage with Vizenor's methodology in my reading of Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach and Joseph Boyden's Three Day

Road; of poetry by Maria Campbell, Louise Halfe, Armand Ruffo, Wayne Keon,

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Gregory Scofield, Annharte, Beth Cuthand and Marilyn

Dumont; and of the short fiction of Beth Brant and Thomas King. I argue in my analysis of these texts that Vizenor's 'tribal postmodernism' best foregrounds and celebrates their multi-vocal, fragmented and contradictory character while also honouring contemporary mixedblood Indigenous subjectivities. Consequently, I find that these texts act as powerful tools of decolonization and recognize the importance of Vizenor's position that "tricky stories are the cure."

ii Key words:

Trickster hermeneutics, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, First Nations and

Metis identities, Native literature in Canada, Decolonization, Kateri Akiwenzie-

Damm, Marie Annharte Baker, Joseph Boyden, Beth Brant, Beth Cuthand,

Marilyn Dumont, Louise Halfe, Wayne Keon, Thomas King, Eden Robinson,

Armand Ruffo, Gregory Scofield, Gerald Vizenor.

iii PREFACE

The format of this dissertation is an attempt to replicate, in a small way, the multi-vocal quality of small group teaching in Indigenous Studies at Trent

University which I describe in Chapters 1 and 6. Instead of paraphrasing ideas from the writers and critics on whom I focus, I have included, as far as possible within the limits of the dissertation format, their voices as quotations within the text. Not wanting biographical information to intrude and diminish this attempt at providing some sense of textual orality, I have included it in an appendix at the end of the dissertation. Information provided there, for the most part, comes from statements made by the writers and critics themselves.

I am aware, however, that while my dissertation celebrates trickster writing that interrogates and destabilizes the one, 'true,' authorial voice, mine has ended up being the loudest one of all. This trickster contradiction is one that I must live with while fully acknowledging that the last laugh is on me.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have happened without financial assistance from

Trent University and Ontario Graduate Scholarships (OGS). I am most appreciative of the help I received from the staff at Library and Archives Canada and Bata Library at Trent University, especially Sharon Bosnell of Interlibrary

Loans. I'm also grateful for the support from faculty and staff in Canadian

Studies and the Frost Centre at Trent, especially Davina Bhandar, Jeannine

Crowe, Julia Harrison, Winnie Janzen, John Milloy, Joan Sangster and Jim

Struthers. A very sincere 'thank you' goes to Bryan Palmer for the special gift of a quiet office where so much of my writing has taken place.

I am especially grateful to members of my dissertation committee, Gordon

Johnston, John Wadland and Allan Ryan, who have spent so much time reading and offering valuable comments on various drafts. My deep appreciation goes to

Allan Ryan, my supervisor, not only for his patience and support but also his continued belief in and critical engagement with my work. I would like to thank

Erin Stewart-Eves, Bridget Glassco and Clare Glassco who offered superb assistance behind the scenes. A very special note of appreciation goes to Jane

O'Brian, Clare Glassco, Jeremy Milloy, Bridget Glassco and M-J Milloy to whom this dissertation is dedicated.

A version of Chapter 1 appeared as "So, What's a White Girl Like Me

Doing in a Place Like This? Rethinking Cross-Cultural Teaching in a First Nations

Context." In Resources for Feminist Research 33, nos. 3/4 (2008): 63-78.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ii Preface iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi Chapter 1 Introduction: "So, What's a White Girl Like Me Doing in a Place Like This?" ....1 Introduction 1 Pedagogical practices ... or what my students have taught me 4 Native Studies 430: Trent University, Peterborough 11 Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, Saskatoon 13 Mushkegowuk First Nation Band Office, Moose Factory 14 Conclusion 19 Chapter 2 "Tricky Stories are the Cure." 21 Historical Contexts 25 The Crisis of Subjectivity 30 Texts in Context 37 Decolonizing Methodologies 43 Literature Review 54 Trickster Hermeneutics 60 Conclusion 66 Chapter 3 Trickster Dancing: Re-reading the First Nations Novel 69 Introduction 69 Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach 79 Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road 104 Conclusion 134 Chapter 4 "Writing Voices Speaking": Trickster at Serious Play in Indigenous Poetry... 136 Introduction 136 A Poetics of Decolonization 153 Indigenous Erotica 171 Songs From the Urban Rez 181 Conclusion 189 Chapter 5 Coyote Pedagogy: Re-reading Indigenous Short Fiction 194 Introduction 194 Beth Brant's "Coyote Learns a New Trick" and "This Is History" 195 Thomas King's A Short History of Indians in Canada 205 Conclusion 218 Chapter 6 Conclusion: "Tricky Stories are the Cure." 220

vi Notes 226 Bibliography 248 Appendix: Brief Biographies of Writer and Critics 281

vii CHAPTER 1

Introduction: "So, What's a White Girl Like Me Doing in a Place Like This?"

Native writing, publishing, performing, reviewing, teaching, and reading necessarily take place ... in contexts shaped and controlled by the discursive and institutional power of the dominant white culture in Canada. Editorial boards, granting agencies, publishing companies . . . enact policies of inclusion and exclusion, and produce meanings based on norms extrinsic to, even inimical to Native values and interests. ... So, what's a white girl like me doing in a place like this?1 Helen Hoy

Introduction

My students at Trent University are the inspiration for this dissertation.

While formulating my own ideas, I have continued to hear their voices speaking from positions around seminar tables, in circles on the floor, and in a band

council office in Northern Ontario. They have also, without knowing it, become

my teachers. In this introductory chapter, I discuss the lessons that they taught

me that have radically changed both my pedagogical practices and my readings

of the Indigenous novels, poetry and short fiction on which I focus in this study. I

begin by addressing Helen Hoy's question above - "So, what's a white girl like

me doing in a place like this?" - which acts as a framing device for her book, How

Should I Read These: Native Women Writers in Canada. By appropriating this

question as the title of my chapter, I align myself with Hoy. Like her, I am a white

academic working in the field of Indigenous Studies and, as such, complicit in the

1 unequal relationship of power between Aboriginal peoples and mainstream cultural institutions in Canada.

There are, however, no easy solutions to Hoy's question. The repeated imperative that 'non-Natives stay out of Native Studies,'2 according to Daniel

Heath Justice, is an inadequate response. As he writes:

It was never Indian against non-Indian - it was always people of good heart fighting for respect and freedom against an institutional system and its agents who would deny us any place other than as antiquated museum pieces gathering dust in the American imagination. ... It has never been as simplistic as 'only Indians should teach/write about/talk about Indian issues.' Considerate non-Indians have a place in our communities and we hold enormous respect for those who are sincere and responsible, regardless of their ethnicity. . . .3

Renee Hulan emphasizes that people like me have a role to play as white allies of Indigenous peoples. In her reading of the Report of the Royal

Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), published in 1996, she highlights the ethical imperative it places on Canadians of all ethnicities and races to become more rather than less involved in learning about the histories and cultures of

Canada's First Peoples. "The authors of [RCAP]," she writes, "repeatedly [stress] the importance of educating the 'public mind.' Drawing attention to the general lack of information about First Nations issues on curricula in particular, they 'urge

Canadians to become involved in a broad and creative campaign of public education.'"4 For Hulan, the participation of "those who teach Canadian

Literature," whether they be Native or not, is key to the success of "this public education."5 As such, she emphatically underlines the importance of RCAP's position that for non-Natives, "remaining passive and silent is not neutrality - it is

2 support for the status quo."6 As a result, non-Native academics like Hulan who retreated from Native Studies7 in the early 1990s now find themselves rethinking the issue. As she writes:

When I began studying Native literature, the critical climate crackled with charges that such an undertaking, whatever the intention, was an instance of cultural appropriation. As a non- Native person, I avoided Native literature written in English, but in the end the embarrassment of knowing that, after almost ten years at university studying Canadian Literature, I knew almost nothing about First Nations literature caused me to reconsider my initial wariness.8

RCAP's position also resonates with Indigenous cultural workers and activists such Emma LaRocque. From her perspective, it is high time that non-

Natives themselves take up the burden of teaching and learning about

Indigenous peoples in Canada. As she puts it, Native artists and writers are becoming increasingly fed-up "with the weary task of having to educate our audiences before even dialoguing with them!"9

According to scholars such as and Hulan and for RCAP's authors, then, leaving the field of Native Studies is now no longer a responsible option for non-

Aboriginal students and teachers; however, staying in it holds no guarantees that our work will be either ethically appropriate or appreciated by Aboriginal academics and communities in Canada. Hoy sums up the ambivalence of our position nicely: "Deciding not to speak . . . beyond one's own experience . . . can be a self-indulgent evasion of political effort or a principled effort at non- imperialist engagement."10

Despite accepting the political and ethical imperative to engage in this project of 'public education,' I am still left wondering how I might do so. In what

3 way can I act as a respectful and responsible white ally to Indigenous students and faculty in their fight for justice in the academy? How do I avoid the trap of complicity, finding myself working to reproduce rather than resist the university system's colonial hierarchies of power and oppression? How can I support my students' struggle to "Indigenize the academy?"11 Do I have a place alongside

Indigenous scholars in radically transforming the university from an alien "enemy territory"12 to one of liberation and freedom?

According to Justice, that transformation is not just a pipedream. The university could, he argues, become not only "a place of intellectual engagement where the world of ideas can meet action and become a lived reality" but also "a site of significant cultural recovery work . . . where all people who are disconnected from their histories can begin their journeys homeward."13 This is where I would want to be and this chapter offers a very provisional way of getting there.

Pedagogical practices ... or what my students have taught me

The academic space where I too frequently find myself, however, is far removed from Justice's vision. Here 'whiteness' is considered the norm, "the unspoken standard against which," Justice writes, "all other peoples and communities are compared."14 Troubling this issue further is the fact that too often non-Native students are in the majority in many Indigenous Studies courses; as a result, Indigenous students are often pushed to the margins, as white students seize speaking positions at the centre of the class.15 Describing such a situation, Louis Owens writes:

4 I teach Native American Literature - works written by Native . . . authors about Native people and issues .... Often, however, my classes consist of extended attempts to disrupt the ethnostalgia of Euramerican students for a lost origin called 'Indian" because, for the most part, my students in the university classroom - even in Native American studies but especially in an English department - are seldom indigenous.16

A number of my academic experiences as an instructor in Indigenous

Studies at Trent University for the last 18 years have been similar to those of

Owens' above; however, I have also found myself in profoundly different situations as one of very few or, indeed, occasionally the only white person in the room. In these cases, not only am I racialized immediately as white but I am also positioned as 'other,' a radically destabilizing space especially for a white university teacher used to a position of power and privilege within the conference hall and classroom.17 The contradictions of this position are foregrounded further by the fact that I am, on one hand, considered by the university departments that employ me as an 'expert' on the Indigenous texts that I teach, while on the other hand, situated for the most part outside the circles of cultural knowledge within these rooms. No wonder that the question uppermost in my mind in such instances is Hoy's: "So, what's a white girl like me doing in a place like this?"

A number of white academics have attempted to engage with this question, offering advice to fellow teachers and their students in similar situations. Susan Gingell, for example, argues that the minimal requirement for an appropriate reading protocol for Indigenous texts involves a deeply rooted intellectual humility:

How much more bearable we might be in First Nations, Metis, and Inuit contexts if we modified our tendency to seek mastery of

5 texts by showing humility that is all too rarely a feature of current theoretical, critical, and pedagogical discourse. Of course for cultural outsiders this means learning as much as we can - professors and students alike - about the contexts from which the work we are studying comes ... but it also involves remaining open to the idea that there are things we do not and will not know. . . . 18

Hulan and Linda Warley finetune Gingell's argument further, adding that

"before [white] teachers and students join the [Indigenous] circle . . . they need to have knowledge of the particular historical and cultural contexts represented . . . to make the 'other' comprehensible without erasing difference."19

I have attempted to follow Gingell, Warley and Hulan's pedagogical advice concerning 'humility,' often with great difficulty as it goes against the grain of both the ideology of the western academy and the many years of academic training I have had within it. In addition, while such complex ethical negotiations are vitally important for non-Natives involved in Native Studies, I am all too aware that an obsessive self-reflexivity on the issue of race privilege might also risk reinstating exactly that privilege, a form of white narcissism that occasionally haunts Hoy's text. Furthermore, in the two teaching experiences I discuss below, much to my surprise my Indigenous students seemingly paid little attention to what I understood as my white privilege or my academic knowledge other than to confidently appropriate both for their own purposes. In each case, I discovered that all were very adept at Indigenizing their university course, its texts, the

'academic' space in which we met and, indeed, their teacher. In the process they appropriated them for their own uses.

6 Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson in the introduction to their collection of essays, Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, explain their project of Indigenizing and radically transforming the academy, a vision very similar to that of Daniel Heath Justice:

Perhaps as teachers we can facilitate what bell hooks refers to as "education as the practice of freedom." Perhaps we might engage in an educational dynamic with students that is liberatory, not only for the oppressed but also for the oppressors. Perhaps as scholars we can conduct research that has a beneficial impact on humanity in general, as well as on our Indigenous peoples. Perhaps the scholarship we produce might be influential not only among our ivory tower peers, but also within the dominant society. Perhaps our activism and persistence within the academy might also redefine the institution from an agent of colonization to a centre of decolonization.20

The process of Indigenization that evolved before my eyes had very little to do with me, although it had a transformative effect on me, and much more to do with both the texts my students were reading and the spaces we were occupying. In the first instance, my small living room at home became the classroom with all of us sitting in a circle on couches and on the floor. In the second, a group of seven Cree students and I sat around the circular table in the small Mushkegowuk First Nation Band office in Moose Factory. In both cases, I watched and listened to my students' growing delight in the texts by Indigenous authors they were reading. As we sat in our circles, I wondered at the ease with which they were able to speak not only to each other but also to me. How very different this experience was from the conventional university practices taking place in lecture halls and seminar rooms. Often overcrowded, these academic spaces too frequently reproduce intellectual hierarchies of power, in the process

7 constructing professors (and even teaching assistants) as 'experts' offering knowledge as a commodity for students who, made docile and passive, are expected to consume it.

And how very different these university texts were. In the process of animated discussion, students were quick to acknowledge the teachings these texts offered them, ones with the potential to radically transform not only their sense of cultural identity and self esteem but also the dominant culture's understanding of Indigenous peoples in Canada. My Cree students talked about how the fiction and poetry they were reading could become powerful tools of decolonization and I soon realized to my amazement that the texts we were reading together could prove to be exactly the sort of resources required for

RCAP's "broad and creative campaign of public education."21 I certainly did not dream of this possibility before I began teaching the course.

These texts were revolutionary for another reason. In their readings and discussions, my students began to understand how the Indigenous authors on their course were re-working Audre Lorde's groundbreaking feminist tenet of the

1980s: the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.22 In the 1990s, these writers were making this powerful slogan speak again but differently, this time within the context of the colonization of Indigenous peoples, and in active resistance to the 'lethal legacy'23 of government and church policies directed toward the assimilation of First Nations peoples. The loss not only of ancestral lands but also of traditional cultures and identities through treaty negotiations, the

Indian Act and residential schooling, for example, has meant that generations of

8 Indigenous people in Canada, like my Native students, have few if any traditional tools or languages other than the master's language with which to speak. For

many Native peoples, indeed, this loss of their mother tongues is considered symbolic of the death of Indigenous cultures. What my students were discovering

in their reading of contemporary Indigenous texts in English, however, was a very different story. Instead of death here was rebirth. For these writers were 'writing

back' to mainstream society in Canada, deploying a 'menacing mimicry'24 of the

colonizer's language and culture. Instead of experiencing the profound silence and psychological humiliation of colonial assimilation, these writers were

speaking loudly and being heard.25 Their fiction and poetry not only involved a

rewriting of history from an Indigenous perspective and a cogent interrogation of

colonial white settler culture but also a celebration of the extraordinary survival

against all odds of Indigenous identities and cultures in a contemporary world.

And they were using the master's tools to do it. Such subversive strategies must

surely shake the very foundations of the master's house.26 Perhaps more

importantly, these writers were using the master's tools not only to 'write back'

but also to 'write home' as witnessed by the powerful impact their texts were

having on the Indigenous students in my classes.

In their Introduction to Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary

Native Women's Writing in North America, Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird insist on

'wielding the tools of their enemy' both as a necessity as well as a profoundly

effective decolonizing strategy:

Many of us . . . are using the 'enemy's language' with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember ourselves through these

9 troubled times. . . [T]o speak, at whatever the cost, is to become empowered rather than victimized by destruction. In our tribal cultures the power of language to heal, to regenerate, and to create is understood. These colonizer's languages which often usurped our own tribal languages or diminished them, now hand back emblems of our cultures, our own designs: beadwork quills, if you will. We've transformed these enemy languages. (20-21)

In the process of Indigenizing the 'enemy's tools,' many of my students began to explore the work of cultural producers and activists from their own communities. The university classroom in these instances became transformed into a site of cultural recovery where texts by Native theorists, poets and fiction writers spoke to them of their own diasporic and contradictory identities.

Negotiating speaking positions from the borderzones - the tricky territory between cultures - these writers taught my students not only to resist positions as victims, despite the unequal relationship of power between Natives and newcomers in Canada, but also to celebrate their own hybrid histories and diasporic identities, ones that have arisen, as Marcia Crosby argues, as a result of the continuing displacement of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands.27

This chapter now focuses on three stories: two describing in greater depth the teaching experiences above and the other describing my experience giving a paper at a Canadian Indigenous and Native Studies Association (CINSA) conference in Saskatoon. In each, I am the white academic believing myself to be out of place in these profoundly Aboriginal spaces. Yet despite my self, my white subjectivity and the colonial burden that I must 'bear,' I argue that all three

10 become places of hope, and spaces of decolonization and radical transformation both for my students and for me.

Native Studies 430: Trent University, Peterborough

My first experience teaching in the Native Studies Department at Trent was in a small, fourth year seminar in Critical Theory during the academic year

1992-1993. Fresh from finishing graduate courses in the PhD program in English at York University and filled with excitement about the emerging field of

Postcolonial Theory, I introduced my students to the texts of some of its key thinkers: Homi Bhabha, James Clifford, Edward Said, Trinh-T-Minh-Ha, Gayatri

Spivak and Gerald Vizenor. Of the ten students, six were Aboriginal including a young urban Haida woman from Vancouver and a young Anishinaabe woman from the nearby First Nation Reserve of Curve Lake. Of the four young men, one was the brother of the Curve Lake student, two were Mohawk, one from Six

Nations near Brantford and the other from Kanehsatake, near Oka, Quebec and one was Mi'kmaq from Nova Scotia. Of the two white men, one was a candidate in the Master's program in Canadian Studies and Native Studies at Trent who was auditing the course and the other was a young Jewish man from Montreal.

There were two white women, both from the Peterborough area. And then there was me: a not so young middle-class white woman. As noted above, the seminar took place in my small living room at home. Each week a student would bring goodies while I offered tea and coffee.

Needless to say, we spent a great deal of time getting our collective heads around some very difficult prose. But this group worked hard and as the year

11 moved on, concepts such as 'appropriation,' 'representation,' 'authenticity,'

'subjectivity,' 'hybridity,' 'diaspora' and 'mimicry' were added to our PoCo lexicon. All were 'hot topics,' all to be fought over and all generating often disorderly and always passionate discussion with most of the Indigenous students speaking from their own experiences of racism and oppression in

Canada. It seems in retrospect that in every seminar there was a defining moment when emotions rode so high I thought the group would unravel, a moment of profound vulnerability for me as an academic when I regretted ever choosing such a difficult field in which to work and teach. Yet each week at that moment one or other of the two Aboriginal women who always sat together on one of the couches would crack a joke and the others would fall about laughing.

The seminar would be saved for another week and we'd all take a break to eat and chat.

That first year, I left the work of Gerald Vizenor, for last, a mistake I corrected when I next taught the course. Perhaps I thought my students would find his ideas and prose style too difficult. I certainly had struggled and still struggle with his writing.28 Instead, as demonstrated by their passionate discussion of the decentering and irreverent spirit of Vizenor's trickster and their quick connection with their own experiences on both an emotional and an intellectual level, this was not difficult. They had come home. Vizenor's trickster discourse spoke to them of their own liminal, hybrid identities and their own border existence in-between cultures. Instead of feeling 'inauthentic' and unable to live up to the stereotype of the traditional 'Indian' that circulates not only in

12 mainstream culture but also in Indigenous communities, they talked about how

Vizenor's theories on Indigenous subjectivity gave them permission to be both complex and contradictory - and to be proud of it. The two young women sitting on the couch were perhaps the most vocal in their enthusiasm; however, in their written assignments, all the Indigenous students in the group spoke in similar fashion about the liberatory and therapeutic quality of Vizenor's writing. The spirit of Vizenor's trickster also connected with their sense of humour, that unlikely

blend of compassion and parody that had been our seminar's saving grace, one which resisted anger and refused victim-hood. These students deserved

Vizenor's highest accolade: to be named postindian warriors of survivance. And our Indigenized classroom became the site of "education as the practice of freedom"30 for both Native and white students alike.31 And for myself.

Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, Saskatoon: May 2001

"So, what's a white girl like me doing in a place like this?" This question was upper most in my mind as I sat facing an audience of Aboriginal scholars.

What had I been thinking when I decided to present this paper? For here I was,

in a room at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in Saskatoon, during the annual CINSA conference, waiting to talk about my experience teaching a

Trent University course on contemporary Native Literature in Canada to a group of Cree students in Moose Factory, James Bay. All seven students were registered in the Trent-Queen's Aboriginal Teachers Education Program and

needed this final credit for their degrees. All planned on returning home to their

13 communities to teach. My focus was on the decolonizing strategies they were developing in their readings of texts by Aboriginal women, one of whom was

Metis writer, scholar and storyteller, Maria Campbell. Central to my paper, of course, was the same question: how could I, a middle-class white teacher from the south, effectively teach a course to students whose race, class, ancestral histories and life experiences were so different from my own?

My panel was made up of two well respected Indigenous women: Metis/

Saulteaux scholar, Janice Acoose, at that time an Associate Professor at the

College and working on her PhD in Indigenous Literature at the University of

Saskatchewan and Shawna Cunningham, Metis scholar and Director of the

Native Centre at the University of Calgary. Acoose began her paper by turning to me and stating emphatically that it was now time for "non-Natives to get out of

Native Studies." Cunningham echoed Acoose's position before beginning hers.

By the time my turn came, I certainly felt in the 'hot seat,' a situation made only worse when Maria Campbell entered the room just as I was about to begin.

Somehow I got through it and, to my astonishment, lived to hear Janice Acoose suggest that I publish the paper32 and to have Maria Campbell come to the front of the room to shake my hand. So what happened? Below is the story I told the conference audience that day in Saskatoon of teaching in the Mushkegowuk

Band office In Moose Factory over three weekends in the spring and fall of 2001.

Mushkegowuk First Nation Band Office, Moose Factory: Spring 2001

Our class began inauspiciously on a Friday evening in early May. Six young women and one young man wandered in late, appearing tired after a long

14 week of work. They must all have wondered about this strange white teacher from the south, one with little connection to their lives, communities and culture.

This was a Native Studies course put on by Trent University, as much a colonial institution as most universities in Canada. The first text probably confirmed their fears: Oxford University Press' An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in

English, edited by Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie, with its dull blue and gold cover, was suitably scholarly but did not appeal to those students hoping for alternatives to mainstream academic texts. In addition, the term 'literature' in its title and in the title of the course itself must have brought back too many bad memories of high school English classes: insufferable hours spent reading texts canonized by the dominant white culture but with little relevance to theirs.

By the time class finished that evening, most must have felt the power dynamics between teacher and student and colonizer and colonized were to be reproduced, either consciously or unconsciously, in our classroom. Certainly, I was left questioning how this course, despite my best efforts to create a student- centered pedagogy, would break the tradition of English Literature as a colonial tool of assimilation. However, something wonderful happened on the Saturday and Sunday of that first weekend. Sitting together at the round table in the Band office, we put down our pens, closed our notebooks and started taking turns reading out loud from the anthology.331 watched and listened to a growing confidence among the students and I felt a change in the atmosphere in the room as they encountered, for the first time, stories and poems by Aboriginal writers in the Moses and Goldie Anthology. In the process, the Band office became a site

15 of performance where each of us, both student and teacher, underwent a transformation from isolated individuals into active participants in a community of storytellers and listeners.

Laughter greeted my clumsy attempts at getting my tongue around the

'red english' of Maria Campbell's poem, "Jacob," removing me from the circle of knowledge in the classroom.34 My students, on the other hand, read with accomplishment the language of the old people in their communities. They told me with something approaching awe that they could hear the voices of their grandparents in old Jacob's voice as it rose eloquently off the printed page:

Well Jacob him he stay in dat school all dem years an when he come home he was a man. While he was gone his Mommy and Daddy dey die so he gots nobody. An on top of dat

nobody he knowed cause he gots a new name. (131)

As each student read, many were moved to tears. I too found myself tremendously moved both by the obvious sense of confidence the students took in their readings and by the power of the poem to transform a group of individuals into a community of storytellers. 'Red english' in this context, became a tool working to valorize not only the experience and cultures of the old people like

Jacob in the poem, all of whom were survivors of residential school, but also the lived experience of the students themselves by 'breaking' the power of the mainstream academic institution and its discourses.

After reading another poem by Maria Campbell, that first weekend our group's focus turned to the poetry of Plains Cree writer and activist, Beth

16 Cuthand. We began with a group reading of her poem, "Post-Oka Kinda

Woman."35 In this case, as each student read, the voice of a contemporary

Aboriginal woman was liberated from the page. The students heard their own voices speaking of their own experiences and laughed with delight at such recognition. Accompanying this new voice in Cuthand's poem is a new sense of confidence and political strength born from the experience of Oka36, a watershed moment in Canada's relationship with First Nations peoples, one which spoke to an equal sense of assertiveness among these future teachers:

She's done with victimization, reparation, degradation, assimilation, devolution, coddled collusion, the 'plight of the Native Peoples.' (252)

"Post-Oka Kinda Woman" also refuses to fetishize 'authentic' images of

Native people, recognizing and celebrating along with my students, the contradictory identities of contemporary First Nations women in Canada, ones that resist colonial categories and 'Indian Act' constructions. Like them,

She drives a Toyota, reads bestsellers, sweats on weekends, colours her hair, sings old songs, gathers herbs.

Post-Oka woman, she's cheeky She's bold. She's cold. And she don't take no shit! No shit. (252-253)

This was exciting for us all and for many reasons. In the process of reading these texts, the power relations of the dominant white culture had been turned up side down: written texts became oral performances; students became teachers; readers became listeners and speakers; and as a result, in our class

17 room in Moose Factory, Indigenous knowledges were valorized and celebrated.

For here, the written 'academic' texts brought by the white university instructor from the south were appropriated by these students and became, paradoxically, the means of accessing not only the vibrant and dynamic quality of contemporary

Indigenous cultural production but also, by making the texts perform for them and by turning themselves into performers, they established a sense of connection and continuity with traditional Indigenous oral cultures.

By 'wielding the tools of their enemies,' in this case the university system and its white teacher, they Indigenized the course and made it their own. Playing a key role in this subversive strategy were, of course, the texts themselves. In

Campbell and Cuthand's poems, for example, the 'enemy's tools - RSE and its literary genres - are re-invented and filled with Indigenous meanings. As they took turns around the table in the Mushkegowuk Band office in Moose Factory, reading and 'performing' these texts with such ease and delight, my students also demonstrated that speaking 'red english' could also be for them as it was for these two poets an act of empowerment rather than victimization, a paradoxical act that serves to revitalize Indigenous oral traditions and cultures by means of the written text.

Just as their understanding of the written text had shifted and changed, so too did their understanding of Indigenous identities celebrated within them. Like the students from my course in Critical Theory in Peterborough, these students from small northern Cree communities around James Bay learned that their own contradictory 'Post-Oka' subjectivities were to be celebrated and not denigrated.

18 What I learned was that the dull blue and gold anthology published by Oxford

University Press held magical powers if read in the right context. I also learned that the university, at its best, could indeed live up to Justice's dream and become a space of liberation and a "site of significant cultural recovery work . . . where all people who are disconnected from their histories can begin their journey homeward."37

Conclusion

Now back to the conference, my paper, and the question: "So, what's a white girl like me doing in a place like this?" Certainly, what both Maria Campbell and Janice Acoose heard in my presentation was this: a group of Cree students from James Bay, destined to teach in Aboriginal communities in that area, were

'turned on' by contemporary Indigenous writing. They heard that it spoke to their own experiences and their own struggles as well as their growing sense of pride in their own, contradictory, First Nations identities. If these future teachers brought the same confidence and excitement to their own classrooms as they did to this course, then Aboriginal writing could, indeed, become a powerful decolonizing tool for First Nations peoples. What they did not hear much about was the teacher's pedagogical methods or reading strategies because the students, as they read the texts, developed them themselves. At the end of the day, the white academic from the south was not very important to any of these stories. She was just the 'tool of the enemy' appropriated for a new purpose. As

Beth Cuthand would say, "No Shit."

19 Thinking through Hoy's first question concerning the role of Non-Natives in

Native Studies has led me to engage with her much broader question, 'How should I read these?' which not only forms the title of her book but also is a major question for me in writing this dissertation. As I argue above I have found that a provisional answer lies both with the texts and with the voices of my students reading them. By re-imagining myself in the Mushkegowuk band office in Moose

Factory at that very moment when I start to read from the poem, "Jacob," and begin to stumble badly over Campbell's 'red english,' I'm instantly reminded that

Justice's dream of Indigenizing the academy includes academics like me. The key lesson I learned from my students in Moose Factory is to interrogate my position of authority within both the classroom and the university system in general. By doing just that, I learn how to be quiet, to stop talking so much and to actively listen to what the texts on which I focus have to say as I imagine my students reading from them.

20 CHAPTER 2

"Tricky Stories are the Cure."1

We have to understand that the new tools for our young people are writing, painting, dancing, singing in English. . .. The stories have to be written down, they have to be recorded, but not all the elders agree with me. For younger [A]boriginal people, this is the real struggle, because when you decide to do that, you really are being a warrior.2 Maria Campbell

The postindian warriors encounter their enemies with the same courage in literature as their ancestors once evinced on horses, and they create their stories with a new sense of survivance.3 Gerald Vizenor

"Writing, painting, dancing, [and] singing in [e]nglish " - these are the textual strategies of a new wave of Aboriginal4 writers, artists, scholars and activists who, since the late 1980s, have taken part in an extraordinary 'rebirth' of

Aboriginal culture in Canada, one described by Emma as "nothing short of a revolution."5 My thesis focuses on a small group of contemporary Indigenous fiction writers and poets all of whom are participants in this new wave. For the most part university educated and urban, they resist the seduction of 'authentic'

Indigenous forms of knowledge, negotiating speaking positions from the border zones - the tricky territory between cultures - appropriating dominant western tropes and genres for the reinvention and revitalization of Indigenous cultures. As such, they produce complex and contradictory dialogic texts foregrounding their own diasporic identities. Campbell and Vizenor quite rightly call them "warriors."

21 A radically destabilizing and subversive trickster spirit informs their work.

Central to most Indigenous knowledges and cosmologies in North America,6 this spirit provides both the artistic strategies and creative energy necessary to negotiate the liminal, in-between world where contemporary Indigenous peoples often now find themselves. As Janice Acoose explains, "[p]utting the Trickster back among Indigenous peoples" has become an important creative and political project for many of these artists.7 For trickster teachings, with their insistence on unsettling not only boundaries of all kinds but also, more specifically, essentialist notions of Indigenous culture and identity, offer a vision of hope for Indigenous peoples, one in which their own hybrid, often contradictory subjectivities are celebrated rather than denigrated. Comic rather than tragic,8 these teachings celebrate the often raucous, always unsettling trickster laughter, a laughter so powerful and so therapeutic that, as Daniel David Moses acknowledges, it almost

[doesn't] hurt us to be human."9

Indigenous identities such as these, to which the writers in my study pay homage in their work, bear little resemblance to the hybrid and deterritorialized subjectivities currently made fashionable by many postmodern and postcolonial theorists.10 finds these theorists deeply troubling, writing that "the recent post- colonial emphasis on 'hybridity'. . . 'crossing boundaries' or 'liminality' can serve to eclipse Aboriginal cultural knowledges [and] experiences." While she

"appreciate^] that we all want to be 'fluid,'" for that "fluidity should not mean the erasing of Native identities or Native colonial experience."11 Hybridity used in this context risks not only papering over histories of colonial oppression, as she

22 argues, but also, according to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, "sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence."12 Stuart Hall has similar concerns with the term when it signifies "the trendy nomadic voyaging of the postmodern" but not when it describes the "millions of displaced peoples [from] dislocated cultures and fractured communities [who] have had to learn other skills [and are] obliged to inhabit at least two identities."13

Picking up on this latter definition of the term hybridity, Marcia Crosby repositions it within the context of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Refusing to valorize the Utopian grand narratives of a pre-Contact Indigenous past, she deploys it as a powerful tool of analysis for post-Contact Indigenous histories and subjectivities. Foregrounding cultural hybridity rather than 'authenticity' becomes for her a way of "honouring all our histories," especially those "stratified and discontinuous histories" resulting from the unequal and often violent relationship of power between Natives and newcomers in Canada. For Crosby, this honouring "acknowledges the empirical reality of [AJboriginal peoples who have been historically displaced from traditional lands, and recognizes the importance and legitimacy of the hybrid histories that have arisen out of their displacement."14

Both Hall's and Crosby's approach to the concept of hybridity informs my reading of Indigenous cultural texts in Canada. Like Crosby's, my analysis foregrounds rather than effaces those postcolonial15 histories of exile, diaspora and displacement experienced by generations of Aboriginal peoples in Canada and is informed by Arnold Krupat's argument that "[o]ne cannot. . . attend to the

23 'meaning and function' of song or story without also attending to the situation of the singer or storyteller."16 My recognition of the legitimacy of these hybrid histories involves, in the first instance, coming to terms with the "empirical reality"17 of the 49th Parallel dividing Canada from the United States. Motivated by a powerful, post-nationalist vision of a unified Native North America, however, many Indigenous peoples on both sides of this border resist acknowledging it. As

Thomas King writes:

I guess I'm supposed to say that I believe in the line that exists between the U.S. and Canada, but for me it's an imaginary line. It's a line from somebody's imagination; it's not my imagination. It divided people like the Mohawk into Canadian Mohawks and U.S. Mohawks. They're the same people. It divided the Blackfoot who live in Browning from the Blackfoot who live at Standoff, for example. So the line is a political line, that border line. It wasn't there before the Europeans came.18

King's position resonates with other Indigenous creative and critical thinkers in both countries who, like Louis Owens, "do not write from the heart of a reservation site or community and w[ere] not raised within a traditional culture."

Instead, they come from urban centres,19 seeing themselves as part of a borderless Native American diaspora, "often far from their traditional homelands and cultural communities," their ancestors having endured similar experiences of

"displacement and orchestrated genocide."

Consequently, Owens writes from what he terms a "frontier zone," a space that is "always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized [and] characterized by heteroglossia."20 His use of the concept of hybridity to describe the urbanized and deterritorialized identities and spaces of the majority of Native North

Americans is, of course, appropriate. Used strategically, the term calls attention

24 to the impact of colonial dislocation and upheaval shared by Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border. At the same time, however, it runs the risk of homogenizing those experiences and, in the context of Canada, suppressing the impact of quite specific government, church and economic policies on generations of Indigenous peoples living here rather than in the US. As such, it threatens to paper over rather than expose those histories of colonial violence so important to Crosby's sense of contemporary Indigenous identities.21

Crosby's colonial histories are material and physical, inscribed on the minds and bodies of Aboriginal peoples in Canada and repeatedly written into their cultural texts. As such, any reading of these texts must begin with these historical contexts, the often-sorrowful tales of the relationship between

Indigenous peoples and white settler society in Canada. Coming to terms with these stories recognizes not only the brutality of that relationship but also the extraordinary political and cultural resilience of Native peoples in this country.

The work of many contemporary Indigenous cultural producers mirrors this capacity for survival. Having been forced "out of their places of origin and into . .

. a 'chaotic and transitional present,'"22 they have responded by accepting rather than mourning this fact, their resulting hybrid, spatialized histories and identities exuberantly written into their complex and heterogeneous texts.

Historical Contexts

Today, most mainstream accounts of that vital historical context focus on what J.R. Miller has aptly labeled the "lethal legacy" of government and church policy starting with the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and continuing through to the

25 mid-twentieth century. Students of Aboriginal history in Canada's high schools and universities, those few who are fortunate enough to be taking such courses, are introduced to the three key instruments responsible for this legacy: the Indian

Act of 1869 and its various amendments; the complex and, in parts of the country, still on-going process of treaty negotiations; and the residential school system, including its sorry tale of physical and sexual abuse. According to this narrative, the regulation of Indian identity through the Indian Act; the removal of

Aboriginal peoples from their ancestral lands through treaty negotiations; and, what Olive Dickason has described as "[t]he intensity and duration of the campaign to capture Indian minds and hearts"24 through the residential school system, were all failed attempts by government and church leaders to assimilate

Indigenous peoples into white culture. Despite the eventual breakdown of what

Bonita Lawrence characterizes as this "organized obliteration of Indigenous presence," however, its impact has been "profound . . . resulting in generations of loneliness, isolation, and alienation."25

Coming to terms with the "lethal legacy" of government and church policy on Aboriginal peoples in Canada prior to WWII is a necessary prelude to understanding the revolutionary transformation in the relationship between

Natives and newcomers in the period since. During this time, Aboriginal peoples in Canada, their political leaders, educators and cultural producers have had to contend with far greater forces of change within a far shorter time span affecting nearly every aspect of their daily lives. On the economic level, the tide of expansion, starting with the development of primary resources in the Canadian

26 North in the immediate pre-war period and continuing to the present day, has threatened traditional lifestyles associated with living on the land. "The isolation that had been a protective shield," Dickason writes, "had long since been broken; the final blow had come during World War II with the construction of the Alaska

Highway, completed in 1945." Consequently, "[b]y the 1950s, Amerindians were no longer free to hunt and fish as they pleased .. . ." Government and corporate interests certainly played a key role in this expansion, but so too did Aboriginal communities themselves, often supporting such development as a means of providing employment opportunities for their people. As Dickason notes, "Yukon

Indians had helped to lay out [the Alaska Highway's] routes and in doing so had opened up their territories to non-Native settlement."26 In the south, post war economic modernization marked by such factors as mega farming in the west and highly mechanized resource extraction industries such as fishing and lumbering in the east served to marginalize Aboriginal agricultural economies, both reserve and non-reserve. That development, linked with the industrialization and urbanization of the country, isolated Aboriginal peoples on reserves or brought them as unskilled workers to the cities.27 One way or the other, not only poverty and rising levels of welfare dependency but also psychological, social and cultural degradation characterized Aboriginal existence in the second half of the 20th century. Those who stayed on reserves suffered, perhaps, the greatest deprivation. For example, Anthony F. C. Wallace describes

Iroquoian reserves in both Canada and the United States as "slums in the wilderness."

27 The reservation system theoretically established small asylums where Indians who had lost their hunting grounds could remain peacefully apart from the surrounding white communities until they became civilized. It actually resulted, however, in the creation of slums in the wilderness, where no traditional culture could long survive and where only the least useful aspects of white culture could easily penetrate. . . . Facing now at close range this vast and intricate machine ["white man's civilization"], they experienced the dilemma that all underdeveloped societies suffer: how to imitate superior alien customs while reasserting the integrity of the ancient way of life.28

In addition, many First Nations communities during this period entered into new economic relationships with non-Aboriginals involving non-traditional entrepreneurial ventures such as casino and hotel operations. These in turn gave

Aboriginal workers roles and identities entirely different from those traditionally connected to the land. The James Bay Hydro Project may be the best example of the complex relationship between First Nations leaders and non-Aboriginal proponents of economic growth and expansion who have struggled to bring culturally appropriate forms of development to Native peoples living on the land; however, as Miller argues, the agreement signed in 1975 by representatives of the Cree, Inuit and the Quebec government did not prove "to be the antidote to the poisonous effect of development"29 on the lives of Indigenous peoples in this region.

The political realm has seen equally difficult cross-cultural relationships that have had a similar effect on political citizenship and Native identity, as I note below. From the late 1960s on, a new sense of confidence among First Nations peoples emerged, exacerbating further their poor relationship with the Canadian government and mainstream white settler culture. This political shift began with

28 the controversy over the White Paper of 1968-69. A new militancy among

Aboriginal leaders and communities was a hallmark not only of that fight but also of those further down the road such as the struggle for control of band membership resulting in Bill C-31 in 1985; the recognition of 'existing rights' with the Repatriation of the Constitution in 1982; as well as the on-going struggle for

'self-government.' During this period, communities and their leaders searched their histories in order to develop new, modern political structures that respected their traditional forms of governance. The report of the Royal Commission on

Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), for example, in 1996 set out a vision of a bi-cultural

(Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal) federalism complete with an Aboriginal House of

Commons.

For the last thirty years, Aboriginal peoples in Canada have demonstrated repeatedly that they are no longer willing to sit back and be silent. By the late

1980s, Indigenous artists and writers had joined the ranks of political leaders riding this new wave of confidence. Certainly, the debate over the appropriation of Native voice during the early 1990s was fueled by this self-assurance within

Indigenous communities as well as an emerging spirit of resistance to mainstream white culture. This controversy garnered both national and international media attention, pitting an elite white arts community based mainly in Toronto against Aboriginal visual artists, writers and activists across the country.30

During the last fifteen years, other political issues have served to inspire

Indigenous cultural workers, giving them a newfound sense of solidarity with

29 political leaders and activists. The proliferation of Aboriginal cultural texts in

Canada during this period is, arguably, due in part to such inspirational events as

Elijah Harper's heroic stand in the Manitoba Legislature against the Meech Lake

Accord in June of 1990 and the Mohawk struggle at Oka that same long summer.

These two events captured both the attention of the mainstream media as well as the imagination of an astonished country as did the fall-out from the scandal over the government and church controlled system of residential schools for

Aboriginal children. As a result, land claims issues such as the Kettle and Stoney

Point Band's occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1996; the subsequent

Ipperwash Inquiry into the death of Aboriginal activist Dudley George; and the on-going Six Nations standoff in Caledonia all continue to make headlines in

Canada. For the first time in Canadian history, Aboriginal issues now attract the attention of both the Canadian public and, in consequence, federal government and opposition leaders. The political and cultural work of a new generation of educated, media savvy, Indigenous activists has begun to bear fruit. Most important, perhaps, are the numerous "signs of restored pride among most

[A]boriginal groups," according to Miller. "The willingness to stand up and be counted as [A]boriginal peoples," he argues, "is the most convincing evidence of all that a spiritual, political, and cultural revival is under way in [NJative communities across the country."31

The Crisis of Subjectivity

The cultural producers who are the focus of my thesis write from a position within these histories making them and their texts, for better or for worse,

30 uniquely Canadian despite the many similarities they share with Native

Americans south of the 49th parallel. Politically and culturally, they see their role as both validating their mixedblood32 status against the imposition of authentic and essentialist Indigenous identities as well convincing others to celebrate rather than denigrate their fragmented Indigenous subjectivities. To be, in Paul

Seesequasis' words, "proud to be mixed."33

For Aboriginal peoples in Canada, achieving this pride and collective self- confidence has meant first confronting the enormous psychic and social consequences resulting from generations of colonial oppression. The impact of economic and political upheaval, especially since WWII, on the lives of

Indigenous peoples has been and continues to be huge. The vast majority have been uprooted from their ancestral cultures and territories, no longer able, as

Neal McLeod writes, "[t]o be home ... to dwell within the landscape of the familiar, a landscape of collective memories ... to be a nation, to have access to land, to be able to raise [their] own children, and to have political control."34

Instead, traditional Aboriginal cosmologies and identities based on communal relationships and tribal memories have come abruptly face-to-face with late capitalist consumer culture, "transforming] us," in Richard William Hill's words,

"from collective societies who share material goods to individually competitive participants in global capitalism."35 This clash of cultures within Aboriginal society has created a profound crisis in subjectivity and agency occurring on both sides of the 49th Parallel. For Paul Chaat Smith, the two questions, "'Where are you

31 from?' and 'How much Indian are you?'" have "paralyzed me for most of my life."36

This questioning has produced further division and uncertainty. As a result, many Native North Americans are searching for answers by evangelically embracing an 'Aboriginal world view' based on the recognition of an essential difference between the colonizer and the colonized, the traditional and the assimilated, as well as the urban and the reserve 'Indian.' Adopting the binary categories of mainstream western discourse is, however, not without its dangers, as Chaat Smith argues: "Just as the dominant society has frozen its image of

Indian people with a snapshot of Plains Indians of the last century so too have we ourselves adopted some of the same limited thinking in how we see ourselves." Such parochialism, in Hill's opinion, "has, in some parts of the Native community, been transformed into rigid essentialism, ethnic nationalism and, in extreme instances, doctrines of racial purity."37 That Chaat Smith, himself,

"longed to be a stereotype"38 is evidence of the invidious power of this discourse, as are Louis Owens' words of warning: "[W]oe to him or her who identifies as

Indian or mixed blood but does not bear a recognizably 'Indian' name or physiognomy or life-style."39

In Canada, this essentialist discourse on Aboriginal identity shows up not only in the writing of many influential First Nations leaders and authors but also in the RCAP report. In Chris Anderson's reading of these texts, "Aboriginals are said to live in a different world and on a different time-space continuum from whitestream Canadians, one filled with the mystical and the spiritual, and one

32 that holds a deep connection to the land while understanding this land to be a living, breathing, sentient being."40 This discourse on 'authenticity' and 'tradition' can be profoundly exclusionary and dangerous. As Crosby notes: "One could easily position [A]boriginal persons who do not speak their own language, who are not actively involved in traditional cultural practice, and who do not have strong links to their land and community of origin as an 'Other' to those who do."

She adds, furthermore, "the concerns of those historically displaced from their traditional lands, sometimes for generations, and who live in diverse and hybrid communities are not necessarily recognized." As a result, this essentialist ideology must be recognized as a "political strategy [that] mirrors the Indian Act, whose racially based laws and policies narrowly define what constitutes an

'Indian' through blood quantum."41 In McLeod's opinion, it has already infiltrated

"individual bands and larger tribal groups" who have "essentialized Band genealogies and tribal narratives ... to justify historical and political claims" and to 'purify' their membership lists in the vain hope of trying to determine who really belongs on a Reserve."42

Complicating the issue further, Crosby argues, is the current "reification, commodification and consumption of [A]boriginal cultural material and knowledge" by mainstream culture whereby "the signposts of a clearly defined

'difference'. . . determined by the conventions of authenticity, origins and traditions" now circulate as markers of an essential Aboriginal racial identity within the global marketplace.43 The valorization of racial and cultural difference in this instance, according to Barbara Godard, demonstrates a danger inherent in

33 contemporary postmodern culture that "makes space for marginalized voices but does nothing to alter their marginalized position" or "address/redress past injustice."44 Furthermore, the wide-scale appropriation and commodification of

'New Age' Native spirituality by non-Native consumer culture is also problematic for Native peoples who are, Hartmut Lutz writes, "outraged by the fact that, after centuries of material dispossession, relocation and genocide, the colonizers [are] finally reaching for Native spirituality, the essence of their identity."45

For many Native North American cultural producers, activists and scholars in Canada as well as the United States, especially those who now live in urban centers rather than on reserves, such organic, autochthonic identities fail to speak to their contradictory, hybrid subjectivities. Crosby argues that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples alike must come to terms with the material 'reality' of contemporary First Nations identities "created through the Department of Indian

Affairs administration policies, Indian enfranchisement, and other programs of

'assimilation.'" She refers here to "the social and legal divisions [such as] status/non-status, half-breed, enfranchised, Eskimo, Inuit, Metis, Indian, Nomad, small town/urban/reserve, First Citizens, Bill C-31, treaty/non-treaty."46 For

McLeod this 'reality' is one of "spatial and ideological diaspora" whereby indigenous peoples have not only been removed from their ancestral lands but also alienated from their ancestral stories, languages and voices.47 In addition,

Crosby maintains that the Eurocentric requirement to produce "seamless, linear

Indian histories and traditions" not only creates "an implicit erasure of the gaps, and the memory of the thousands of people who actually did die from the

34 relentless acts of colonial imperialism" but also leaves "too little room for the hybrid reality of my life,"48 one that both Aboriginal communities and mainstream society alike too often fail to acknowledge. "If you are Indian and live in the city you are basically screwed," Chaat Smith insists. "You are in the wrong place, and you know it and everyone else knows it too. . . The fact remains that you are in the city and you should be in the soil of your homeland."49

The psychic fall-out of existing 'in-between' two cultures and 'out-of-place' in both, of 'belonging and not belonging,' is especially traumatic for urban

Aboriginals whose identities and experiences are erased from the mainstream discourses on Aboriginal peoples in Canada.50 As Marilyn Dumont writes:

But what is the experience of the urban native? Indians who grew up in urban centres, one or more generations removed from the subsistence economy that characterizes predominant images of the 'Native.'. . . The urban [N]ative who is increasingly becoming the majority. Why do popular images of us lag behind our reality? . . . [T]he misrepresentation of me makes me doubt my experience, devalue my reality and tempts me to collude in an image which in the end disempowers me."51

Paul Seesequasis, whose full-blood Cree mother was forced to leave her reserve when she married his German/Ukrainian father, describes the negative impact on his identity of growing up 'off rez' as an urban mixedblood kid: "I didn't speak Cree very well. I was light-skinned and didn't dance or have visions of the great spirit.... What kind of Indian was I? And how could I write about Native themes if I didn't feel all that Native myself?"52 Bonita Lawrence tells the painful story of growing up poor and 'white' in post World War II Montreal, the child of an absentee English father and a "dark, French-speaking, Catholic" mother who denied her Mi'kmaw identity because of the "social stability that whiteness

35 represents" and the corresponding negative stereotypes associated with an indigenous identity. Lawrence, like so many urban mixedbloods "had learned to see the Native people around me as 'Other'" and, as a result, early on learned to internalize these stereotypes, the symptoms of which she frankly admits were drug and alcohol dependency as well as a proclivity for abusive relationships.53

In consequence of their shared urban, mixedblood experiences, Dumont,

Seesequasis and Lawrence, along with many other urban Aboriginal cultural producers in Canada, now take as their subject the problems and issues that arise from city living, specifically those associated with the complexities and contradictions of contemporary urban Indigenous identities. Their collective project centres on demystifying and deconstructing images of the Indian54 circulating in contemporary discourses on Aboriginal peoples. Zeroing in on what

Vizenor, has called "the sham of contemporary 'Indianness,'"55 they are calling into question and actively subverting these commodified simulations. One such example is Gerald McMaster's parodic self-positioning as the 'Indian Act' indian in which he underlines the inherent contradictions that exist in this powerful colonial construct:

Hello my name is Gerald Raymond (Christian names) McMaster (surname). My Indian name is Gerald McMaster.... For convenience of Indian Affairs Identification Program, I am Blackfoot, though I was raised on my mother's Reserve (the Red Pheasant First Nation); she and my biological father were also Plains Cree. My biological status, therefore, is 'full blood' Cree, but that could be questionable; however, my body does remain full of blood. I've been an urban Indian since the age of nine. I've attended art school in the United States, trained in the western tradition; yet I'm referred to as an 'Indian' artist. I have danced and sung in the traditional powwow style of Northern Plains, yet

36 my musical tastes are global . . . From all this introduction you may think, "Kemosabe thinks of me as a mutant 'Ninja-lnjun'"!56

In the process of debunking mainstream stereotypes of the indian produced through the state apparatuses of government and university, McMaster foregrounds and celebrates his own diasporic and contradictory subjectivity. His position, like that of many other Indigenous cultural activists, is aptly summed up by Seesequasis after an interview with Vizenor:

Being Native did not entail being stoic and spouting cliches about mother earth or reliving past atrocities and mourning the loss of the traditional lifestyle. No, through Vizenor, I came to the gleeful realization that being Native could be undefinable, unimprisonable and outrageous. In short, it could be in the spirit of the trickster.57

Texts in Context

Beginning in the late 1980s, Aboriginal cultural workers, riding a wave of confidence and pride in their 'new' Indigenous identities, began writing themselves into being as subjects rather than objects of Aboriginal discourses and, for the first time, began the process of creating an Indigenous arts community in Canada. Penny Petrone offers insight into that historic moment:

A younger generation of university-trained writers with a singular sense of purpose and commitment began producing exciting and original works. An amazing vitality emerged as all across the country writers came to the fore and often gathered together. . . all of them generating enthusiasm and encouraging [Njative writers, staging festivals to introduce new plays and playwrights, forming [Ajboriginal writing groups and conducting workshops to hone writing skills.58

For Barbara Godard, the defining moment occurred during the spring of

1989 in Toronto when "all signs would seem to herald the emergence of [Njative

37 culture as a forceful presence in the literary institution." As she writes, "[Tomson

Highway's] Dry Lips at Theatre Passe Muraille played to packed houses and critical acclaim. . . [and] won the Dora for the best Toronto play that year. Later in

May, Native Earth Performing Arts put on at Theatre Passe Muraille Daniel David

Moses' Deep Shit City and Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue

Spots. . . . "59

Three years previously, in the spring of 1986, Tomson Highway, Lenore

Keeshig-Tobias and Daniel David Moses founded the highly influential

Committee to Re-establish the Trickster.60 Despite many differences among this group, there were similarities: all three were university-educated and, at the time, urban cultural activists who had spent the better part of their childhoods on reserves. They all agreed on a number of priorities: the promotion and support of

Native writers, dramatists and storytellers; education about and the revitalization and re-invention of traditional Indigenous cultures and values; and the destabilization of stereotypes of the indian circulating in mainstream popular and scholarly discourses on Indigenous peoples. During their initial meetings, they also discovered another similarity. Daniel David Moses remembers "that we

[were] at odds often but laughing almost always. We find, yes, we find we share a sense of humour that - we remark - we have not usually been able to share with our non-Native peers." Wanting "to open up a space for the little bit of the strange but true about us," the group decided to strategically appropriate the archetype of the Trickster figure from the academic disciplines of Anthropology

38 and Ethnography, filling it full of defamiliarizing and estranging Indigenous meanings. Moses nicely describes this 'tricky' maneuver:

It also [did not] hurt that the Trickster as we know or rediscover him, as Coyote or Weesageejak or Nanabush, as Raven or Glooscap, is as shifty and shiftless, as horny and greedy, as lucky, as funny, as human as any of us. So we take that archetype up, started waving it around, the banner of our Committee to Re-Establish the Trickster. And for the next couple of years, we do lectures and workshops to explain, even put out a couple of issues of a little magazine dedicated to the idea that the Trickster is emblematic of our different worldview and the different literature connected to it.61

The success of First Nations plays written, performed, and published in

English was such that, Ric Knowles argues, Native drama by the 1990s had become part of "the national and international 'mainstream'."62 Native Earth

Performing Arts, a theatre company founded in Toronto in 1982 and focusing on the production of Indigenous plays, has been central to the success of not only

Tomson Highway, its first artistic director, but also Margot Kane, Daniel David

Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor. Two other important Native theatrical organizations have also played key roles in fostering Aboriginal theatre in

Canada: The De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig63 Theatre Group on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, founded in 1986 and the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, founded in Toronto in

1994 with a mandate to train Native theatre professionals.

Six small non-Aboriginal publishing houses64 produced the majority of

Native drama in English during this period, thereby highlighting and disseminating the work of contemporary Native playwrights in communities and schools across the country.65 In addition, other small non-Aboriginal presses66 have published relatively inexpensive editions of Native fiction and poetry,

39 thereby making Indigenous cultural production more accessible to both

Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences and readers in Canada. As well,

Canadian branch plants of American multinational publishing companies have recently begun producing high-end editions of novels by Indigenous Canadian writers Thomas King, Richard Wagamese, Tomson Highway, Eden Robinson and Joseph Boyden, thereby providing their texts with an international readership and a mainstream profile.

Aboriginal publishing companies have devoted their attention to

Indigenous fiction and poetry. This period has seen Theytus67 Books, the first

Native owned and operated publishing house in Canada, founded in 1980 and operated out of the En'owkin Centre in Penticton, BC, begin to thrive and expand under the editorship of Greg Young-lng. Two smaller presses have also fared relatively well: Pemmican Publications, also founded in 1980 by the Manitoba

Metis Federation and based in Winnipeg, specializes in Metis cultural and educational books. Kegedonce Press founded in 1993 by Kateri Akiwenzie-

Damm and based at her home reserve of Cape Croker, Ontario, focuses on publishing poetry written by Indigenous peoples from Canada, Australia, New

Zealand and the United States.

In the late 1980s, small publishing houses in Canada began producing edited collections of Aboriginal creative writing68 and, as academic interest in

Indigenous literature in Canada grew, scholarly presses followed suit.69 Many

Aboriginal writers were also seeing themselves in print for the first time in journals and magazines owned and operated by Natives.70 Recently, Aboriginal

40 online journals have begun offering Native writers an accessible, innovative and inexpensive outlet for their work.71 Emerging scholarly interest in Native literature during this period also led to a small number of anthologies devoted to its criticism.72

Two collections of Native writing in Canada have also been published. The first, An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, edited by Daniel

David Moses and Terry Goldie, was brought out by Oxford University Press in

1992 with two subsequent editions in 1998 and 2005. In 2001, Broadview Press published Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology edited by

Jeannette Armstrong and Laurie Grauer. In addition, a limited number of scholarly monographs have also been published by Canadian university presses, the earliest being Oxford University Press's Native Literature in Canada from the

Oral to the Present by Penny Petrone in 1990. In 1999, the New York branch of

Peter Lang published Dee Home's Contemporary American Indian Writing:

Unsettled Literature, a monograph that, despite its title, focuses on Indigenous literature in Canada. University of Toronto Press has published three to date:

Julia Emberley's Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women's

Writings, Postcolonial Theory in 1993; Helen Hoy's How Should I Read These?

Native Women Writers in Canada in 2001; and Arnold Davidson, Priscilla Walton and Jennifer Andrew's Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions in

2003. In addition, University of Manitoba Press brought out Renate Eigenbrod's

Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal

Literatures in Canada in 2005. At the turn of the millennium, Aboriginal writing in

41 Canada was blossoming, "so much so," according to Armand Garnet Ruffo, "that it is now becoming difficult to keep up with who is publishing what."73 More importantly, however, from Hulan's perspective, "[it is] arguably the most exciting literature being written in Canada today."74

My thesis focuses on a small selection of this literature: novels by Joseph

Boyden and Eden Robinson; poetry by Maria Campbell, Sky Dancer Louise

Bernice Halfe, Armand G. Ruffo, Wayne Keon, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Marie

Annharte Baker, Beth Brant, Beth Cuthand and Marilyn Dumont. United by their mixedblood, diasporic identities, these writers "form a communitas in the border zone,"according to McMaster, occupying "an arena for tactical creative acts" which "deploy self-parody [and] poke fun at cliches, stereotypes and conventions."75 Such acts, in Mark Shackleton's opinion, are an "effective form of resistance" as they "subvert the dominant discourse by appropriating its codes."76

Negotiating the liminal space between cultures and appropriating the literary forms of the dominant society are not without peril. As Krupat acknowledges, "without doubt, the application - one might say the imposition - of these 'Western' or foreign perspectives to Native texts can be one more instance of colonialism directed against the Native. The danger is very real." He adds, however, that "careful use of the master's tools, as it were, in conjunction with

Native tools can produce mixed-blood strategies for a powerful criticism against colonialism."77 In her study of the Native American women writers, Paula Gunn

Allen and Wendy Rose, Elisabeth Hermann positions herself with Krupat adding that while both writers "do take over certain elements from the literature of the

42 dominant culture, they are always aware of the fact that too much of this would mean surrender to the process of cultural colonization. . . ."78

The writers who are my focus, I argue, walk this fine line successfully. By

"re-inventing the enemy's language"79 and appropriating its literary genres, they

produce exciting, politically charged, hybrid texts which celebrate their own mixedblood identities, restore and revitalize tribal trickster knowledges and, in

Elvira Pulitano's words, "[bring] the liberating and extraordinary vitality of the spoken word onto the written page."80

Decolonizing Methodologies

In beginning my research, there were two questions I needed to keep in

mind: First of all, was there a literature that discussed appropriate theoretical frameworks within which to read these texts and, if so, were there analytical strategies that recognize and foreground the cultural difference of Indigenous

literatures while also respecting their hybrid textuality? For over a decade, critics

of Indigenous cultural texts have been searching for answers to this second

question. In the introduction to his 1993 anthology, New Voices in Native

American Literary Criticism, Krupat calls for a new literary criticism specific to

Native texts and rooted in an Indigenous cosmology: "In recent years some

academic researchers have wanted ... to take seriously [and] to base their

research upon not only Native experience but also Native constructions of the

category of knowledge. Still... the question remains: How to do so? It is an

urgent question."81 Pulitano outlines the dangers of responding to this question

43 by positing a methodology drawn from authentic forms of Indigenous culture and knowledge understood as separate from and in opposition to Western ones:

How could Native American theorists aim at developing a separatist form of discourse when they are heavily implicated in the discourse of the metropolitan centre? . . . While such sentiments appear legitimate to fervent representatives of nationalist approaches, they become all the more dangerous as they continue to ossify Native American literary production as well as Native Identity into a sort of museum culture.82

For Thomas King, in his 1990 introduction to All My Relations: An

Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction, another danger of separatist and nationalist theoretical discourses is their reliance on race-based definitions of Indigenous identity:

[The] definition - on the basis of race - however, makes a rather large assumption. ... It assumes that the matter of race imparts to the Native writer a tribal understanding of the universe, access to a different culture, and a literary perspective that is unattainable by non-Natives. In our discussions of Native literature, we try to imagine that there is a racial denominator which full-bloods raised in cities, half-bloods raised on farms, quarter-bloods raised on reservations, Indians adopted and raised by white families, Indians who speak their tribal language, Indians who speak only English, traditionally educated Indians, university trained Indians, Indians with little education, and the like all share. We know, of course, that there is not. We know that this is a romantic, mystical, and in many instances, self- serving notion that the sheer number of cultural groups in North America, the variety of Native languages, and the varied conditions of the various tribes should immediately belie.83

In an interview in 1991, Vizenor reiterates both Krupat and King's concern about essentialist reading strategies, arguing that once a 'new criticism' is established, controversies over Indigenous identity and the appropriation of

Indigenous voice will disappear:

44 "What we have to find is ... a new critical language to interpret what is a Native American text without depending just upon proof of an author's identity. We need something much more sophisticated and intellectually powerful as a way of interpreting a text. ... If we can do that, then we don't have to worry about who is Indian and who isn't.84

Hulan, however, warns of the dangers of relying on traditional Western critical perspectives, specifically the so-called 'New Criticism' still practiced today in many Canadian high school and university English departments. Its custom of re-inscribing 'centre-margin' and 'elite-popular' literary and cultural hierarchies remains profoundly problematic for many Native American cultural producers.85

In addition, scholars trained in New Criticism, with its modernist aesthetic, understand the literary text as "giv[ing] expression to an essentially unchanging human nature" rather than being informed by "a specific historical period," according to Godard. Just as the text is removed from its historical context, so too is the author who is celebrated instead as "an isolated genius, a heroic individual."86 A reading of a Native literary text from the perspective of this aesthetic risks colonizing it under the rubric objet d'art. Such a strategy involves uprooting it from its political and historical contexts and traditions, erasing cultural differences and judging it by 'universal' western standards of literary appreciation. As a result, Native texts are usually read as inferior. 'New

Criticism's' perpetuation of the myth that art exists outside the realm of the political also works against many Native writers who insist on 'the political' as a key characteristic of their art. In consequence, many have difficulty finding publishers and when (and if) their work is reviewed it is too often condescendingly dismissed as 'protest' writing. As Hulan writes, "[t]he labels

45 protest or political . . . signal something worldly, something that does not belong to the separate and autonomous world of art."87

Turning to contemporary 'poststructuralism'as an appropriate mode of analysis for the Indigenous cultural text is equally problematic for Kimberly

Blaeser who warns that "Western literary theory clearly violates its integrity and

performs a new act of colonization" by deploying "an external critical voice and method which seeks to penetrate, appropriate, colonize or conquer the cultural center."88 In her seminal essay, "The Race for Theory," Barbara Christian echoes

Blaeser's position. An outspoken and early critic of 'poststructuralism,' she argues that "the new emphasis on literary critical theory [in Euro-American

Humanities departments] is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks. I see the

language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition

making it possible for a few people who know a particular language to control the

critical scene. . . ."89

Instead of relying solely on Western theoretical models for inspiration, "a

new generation of [Native] scholars and writers" are, in Armand Ruffo's words,

"(re)searching their traditions and applying them to literary creation and analysis"

and are, therefore, mov[ing] closer to the notion of a culturally centred

ethnocriticism,"90 a term he borrows from Krupat.91 This strategy involves

reading the text from inside/out or, as Blaeser puts it, "from the culturally centred

text outward," recognizing that "the works themselves generally proceed from an

awareness of 'the frontier' or border existence where cultures meet." Unlike

Christian, Blaeser sees a role for contemporary 'poststructuralism' in the analysis

46 of Indigenous literary texts remaining suspicious of critical strategies informed by essentialist forms of Indigenous knowledges, those which are set in false opposition to western forms. Critical tools, she maintains, must be drawn "from the same multicultural experience which inform[s] the creation of the text." For

Blaeser, the text and its author are always "at least bi-cultural:"

Though they may come from an oral culture, they are written. Though the writer may speak a tribal language, they are usually [written]... in the [English] language. And though they proceed at least partly from an Indian culture, they are most often presented in the established literary and aesthetic forms of the dominant culture (or those forms acceptable to the publishing industry). The writers themselves have generally experienced both tribal and mainstream culture and many are in physical fact mixed-bloods.92

'Postcolonial' theory, with its focus on double-voiced, cross-cultural and hybrid textual strategies, at first glance and in light of Blaeser's comments above, would appear to be an appropriate analytical model for Native texts; however, many 'postcolonial' theorists, like their 'poststructuralist' counterparts, are charged with creating a mode of analysis and theoretical language inaccessible except to a small elite group of 'Ivory Tower' academics, the majority of whom have little experience or concern with the 'material realities' and 'lived experiences' of contemporary Indigenous peoples.93 Furthermore, Western intellectuals stand accused of participating in a new act of colonization by subsuming quite specific spatial and cultural Indigenous differences under the theoretical rubric of the 'postcolonial.'94 Perhaps the most cutting criticism of all comes from Susan Gingell who wonders whether the "radically decentring" political strategies of 'postcolonial' theory have "in practice proved to be so?"

47 "Has the current academic fashion for postcolonial theory in the Canadian academy," she asks, "[left] embedded the unearned advantage of Euro-

Canadians" and, as a result, "not most benefited those it was intended to liberate

TOT "95

Other critics of 'postcolonial' theory within the context of Indigenous literatures in Canada have found fault with the prefix 'post.'While it may be appropriately deployed for the literatures in English from formerly colonized countries in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean, in the context of Canada's

First Nations, they argue, it is entirely inappropriate. The colonial period is far from over. The Indian Act and the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern

Development (DIAND), for example, still regulate the lives of many Indigenous peoples. Treaty rights are, more often than not, broken promises and the inherent right to self-government for First Nations is yet to be realized. For

Thomas King, the term 'postcolonial' used in relation to Native literature is also problematic because "[it] assumes that the starting point for that discussion is the advent of Europeans in North America." Troubled by the linear colonial chronology - from primitive to civilized - implicit in the term, he writes that "the term organizes the literature progressively suggesting there is progress and improvement. "96 Most egregious, for King in his reading of the concept,

'postcolonial,' is "the [supposition] that contemporary Native writing is largely a construct of oppression." As such, "it cuts us off from our traditions, traditions that were in place before colonialism ever became a question, traditions that have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization.. . ,"97

48 Instead of falling into the trap of binary thinking, however, and reproducing rather than "escaping] the repressive hierarchies of colonial encounters"98 by rejecting it entirely, Diana Brydon suggests that a 'postcolonial' reading of a

Native literary text may, indeed, be appropriate as long as it is understood "as a partial, provisional, and imperfect approach that nevertheless allows pressing questions to be asked about the relations of text and the world ...."" In agreement with Brydon, Pulitano acknowledges that "Native American theorists both use and go beyond the discursive strategies of 'postcolonialism' by testing its ideas primarily against Native American problematics and predicaments

Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics, drawn from ancient tribal oral cultures, intellectual traditions and hybrid Indigenous and western epistemologies, she writes,

provides discursive strategies that speak, actually 'perform,' the same (anticolonial) lexicon as postcolonialism.. . more subversively and provocatively than the often overtly cerebral Eurocentric grid of postcolonial texts. . . reveal[ing] a radical ability to shuttle between frontiers while subverting European hegemonic systems.100

Like 'postcolonial' theory, the project of trickster hermeneutics is, in part, dedicated to deconstructing not only colonial hierarchies and cultural truths but also undermining the rigid essentialism of identity politics;101 unlike 'postcolonial' theory, however, this "literary theory according to Coyote"102 deploys an

Indigenous-centred methodology based on an understanding of the cultural, historical and sacred contexts of the text itself.103 It is the responsibility of readers of Indigenous fiction, according to Herb Wyile, to acquire this cultural literacy in order to recognize in the work "a complex set of cultural interactions,

49 negotiations, appropriations and subversions at a textual level that are a reflection of larger dynamics within . . . society."104 Such an interpretative strategy, while running parallel not only to that of 'postcolonial' theory but also

'postmodernism' is not in danger of re-colonizing the text. Unlike many

'postcolonial strategies which paper over specific cultural differences and

'postmodern' reading strategies which transcend history and culture, trickster strategies do not read the text either as an ahistorical 'postmodern' pastiche or, in Shackleton's words, as "a comfortable fusion of cultural influences." Unlike

'postmodern' theoretical readings, he adds, these strategies are not "simply . . . academic exercise[s] in allusion hunting" nor are non-Native audiences allowed to "merely congratulate ourselves on recognizing the cultural allusions and getting the jokes."105

As Owens has noted, Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics turn the table on the notion that 'postmodern' or 'postcolonial' reading strategies will inevitably colonize the Indigenous text by arguing that they "effectively subsum[e] poststructuralist and postmodern theory into a Native American paradigm and discursive strategy."106 Amy Elias carries Owens' position further:

Indeed, according to Vizenor the Native American trickster was always already postmodern. ... All of the qualities claimed by epistemological and cultural postmodernity were integral parts of the Anishinaabe trickster figure from the beginning of time. Vizenor's reconstruction of postmodernity as trickster discourse not only is a mark of resistance to assimilation, but it makes the postmodern west a reflection of ancient Native American beliefs rather than vice versa. In Vizenor's view, the postmodern west abrogates and appropriates Indian beliefs instead of the other way around.107

50 Blaeser also champions Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics as an appropriate theoretical model for the appreciation of First Nations texts arguing that it "exists within and arises from the literature itself and "proceed[s] from an awareness of the border quality of [N]ative speech, writing, and criticism."108 For

Neal McLeod, the powerful, double-voiced and diasporic quality of contemporary

Cree storytelling is understood best by deploying the notion of trickster, a theoretical approach which celebrates rather than silences the clash of cultures in these stories and the diasporic identities resulting from the dispossession and dislocation experienced by McLeod's ancestors. As a border intellectual negotiating the liminal space between cultures McLeod, like Blaeser, is also sceptical of "a trend in contemporary Indigenous discourse to create a bi-polar differentiation between colonizer and colonized knowledges."109 Consequently, he finds Vizenor's strategic appropriation of European critical theory, specifically

Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts, the 'dialogic,' 'monologic' and 'carnivalesque,'110 helpful in his analysis of the rich, subversive qualities of Cree storytelling.

Ironically, it is traditional Indigenous knowledge in the shape of the trickster which teaches the importance of destabilizing and deconstructing that very notion of authentic knowledge, Aboriginal or otherwise.111 It is also the spirit of the trickster that offers critics and theorists, Native and non-Native alike, guidance as they navigate the tricky terrain between cultures. Certainly, as scholars and teachers in this challenging cross-cultural field, we have always needed what

Marie Annharte Baker calls "trickster insurance," an indemnity policy that prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously, that allows us not only to make

51 mistakes but also to begin again having learned a necessary humility and, perhaps, a recognition that trickster laughter "is one of the greatest gifts of an

Aboriginal heritage."112

There is, however, a significant backlash against the small extant body of scholarship which engages with the concept of trickster, specifically in terms of allusion hunting. According to Drew Hayden Taylor, "it seems to be the latest fad with academics" who, as Daniel David Moses writes, "all like to play 'Spot the

Trickster.'"113 To be fair to these scholars, myself included, Shackleton quite rightly comments that "[i]t would be difficult to think of a Native North American writer who does not at least refer to the Trickster, and to many of these writers the Trickster is central to their work."114 Of greater concern is Kristina Fagan's argument that much of this fry'c/csfer-centredcriticis m focuses on an "idealized view of humour" which runs the risk of constructing "the laughing Native . . . [as] another stereotype, allowing the public to avoid listening to sad or angry Native voices."115 Brydon reiterates Fagan's position, writing that she is "deeply troubled by the ways in which [N]ative humour is currently represented by Canadian media and often received by white audiences as a de-politicising rather than a re- politicising of the ways Canadians understand oppression."116

That this focus on the Native American trickster figure in academia and mainstream popular culture can result in the appropriation, stereotyping and commodification of Indigenous knowledges and cultures whereby, as Fagan quite rightly argues, "Native religious beliefs [are] reduced to a New Age fad"117 is a legitimate concern and should seriously trouble scholarship on the trickster

52 figure. Vizenor, himself, demonstrates a certain discomfort with its contemporary mass media representation noting that "because it's been embraced in an almost

'kitschy' way now, it's become a kind of American 'kitsch,' the trickster, especially

Coyote . . . and it's spreading rapidly, like killer bees. Coyote-kitsch is almost universal."118 However, neither Taylor, Fagan nor Brydon adequately comes to terms with Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics, a very different, potentially liberatory theoretical and creative project which, I argue below, radically and often outrageously deconstructs such textual appropriations, stereotypes and commodifications produced by non-Natives and Native Americans alike. In addition, as Owens argues, Vizenor's trickster discourse not only performs this function but, as writer, critic and artist who troubles binary truth claims and essentialist ideologies, Vizenor himself plays the part of trickster:

The role of Vizenor's works is to confront the non-Indian world with its greed, lust for Indianness, fatal violence, and self- deception and to expose the falseness of the hyperreal fake. At the same time, Vizenor carefully works to strip his Indian readers of the comforts of the same cliches and stereotypes: those people who would define themselves as 'Indian' according to imposed static Euramerican definitions will probably feel quite uncomfortable reading Vizenor's prose (indeed many do). In fact all of us will feel uncomfortable, guilty, and moved toward self- awareness. This is the trickster's role.119

Fagan and Brydon, however, join the ranks of too many contemporary

Canadian and American literary critics who resist engaging with Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics, making him, in Owen's words, "one of the most demanding, challenging, and brilliant of American authors [who] continues to be admired by scholars and celebrated abroad while being almost unknown amongst readers in the United States, including American Indian readers."120

53 Literature Review

In comparison to the United States where a considerable body of criticism of American tribal literatures has been produced over the last twenty years,

Canadian literary critics have shown little interest in First Nations cultural production in their own country. In Hartmut Lutz's opinion, the elite, postsecondary education of successful Native American novelists and the comparative lack of such privilege among Canadian Indigenous writers until recently121 accounts for this disparity. In the Native American context, Lutz writes,

"the established novelists themselves are usually university professors of

English,122 who draw at least as much on their academic training and literary skills as on the traditions of their Native ancestors."123 As a result, academic literary criticism has often appeared to be 'a good fit' for the works of Native

American writers such as Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda

Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch.

Consequently, many of their texts are not only now included in the canon of contemporary American fiction but also, with the growing educational demand in the United States for multicultural124 texts, on public school and university curricula. These tribal writers have also received numerous prestigious national literary awards. Momaday's House Made of Dawn, for example, put Native

American Literature in English on the academic map when it won the Pulitzer

Prize in 1969.

In Canada, however, for the most part, "writing by Canadian Aboriginal authors still occupies the literary margins of the canon,"125 according to Jo-Ann

54 Episkenew. Only one Aboriginal writer, playwright Ian Ross, has won the

Governor General's Award, the country's highest literary honour, even though

Daniel David Moses, Thomas King, Tomson Highway, Eden Robinson and

Joseph Boyden have received nominations. The majority of Aboriginal writers in

Canada are connected to grass roots Native communities - urban or reserve - rather than postsecondary institutions and have attracted little academic attention. Significantly, however, this is not the case for these six highly successful writers. All have university training and three hold university appointments. In their writing, all six draw on their academic fields of knowledge and their Indigenous roots for inspiration and their work, like that of their Native

American counterparts in the United States, garners academic approbation and also mainstream accolades.

Apart from their educational background and the critical and popular acclaim their work has received, what separates novelists King, Boyden,

Highway and Robinson from other Indigenous writers in Canada is their readership. Like many First Nations cultural producers they have sought audiences both inside and outside Indigenous communities, positioning themselves with Owens who argues for the inclusion of non-Natives in

Indigenous literary studies: "I have little sympathy for those who would argue that

'outsiders' (i.e. non-Indians) have no business reading or studying Native

American literature. To think that poems, novels, stories, or plays written and performed by Native people are not for all audiences is essentialist and absurd."126 However, unlike that of their colleagues in Canada, King's, Boyden's,

55 Robinson's and Highway's reach extends to readers not only throughout Canada and the United States but also in Europe and South America in translated editions. Indeed, all four have had novels published by multi-national publishing houses.127

A growing body of literary scholarship accompanies the commercial success and international critical acclaim of works by Robinson, Highway and

King.128 To a much lesser extent, cultural texts by Daniel David Moses, Drew

Hayden Taylor, Marilyn Dumont, Monique Mojica and, for some time now, Maria

Campbell have also attracted the attention of literary critics. For the most part, however, critical attention to Aboriginal writing in Canada is unevenly focused on these few while the majority of Aboriginal writers in this country go unnoticed and uncelebrated. Among those critics who do work with Aboriginal literature, very few engage in text-centred, bi-cultural criticism or show any interest in working with Gerald Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics.:29 Articles do exist, too many perhaps,130 on trickster in terms of content, for example as a character in a short story or novel or as a form of humour rather than, as Vizenor would have it, as a semiotic sign or theoretical strategy.131 Most critics of Indigenous literature in

Canada, in fact, rely on external theoretical strategies such as the many forms of

'poststructuralism,' 'postmodernism' and 'postcolonialism.'

There are five critical monographs on Native literature in Canada published to date. One of the most important, Border Crossings: Tom King's

Cultural Conversions by Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton and Jennifer

Andrews, published in 2003, offers a theoretically rigorous and insightful analysis

56 of King's oeuvre. It is, however, an example of the sort of critical project mentioned above, one which draws from scholarly sources in some measure external to the texts which are its focus and, as a result, imposes a reading which

Kimberly Blaeser would consider, with some justification, "a new act of colonization."132 Despite their emphasis on the concept of trickster and their focus on the comedic, contradictory and bi-cultural nature of King's writing, too often they foreground the texts of elite 'poststructuralist,' 'postmodern' and

'postcolonial' theorists at the expense of those of important Native American and

First Nations critics and writers. As a result, the reading strategies of Mikhail

Bahktin, Judith Butler, Teresa De Lauretis and Michel Foucault, for example, become the 'good fit' for their analysis of King's texts, overshadowing the more culturally appropriate trickster strategies of Gerald Vizenor. At the same time, important Indigenous voices such as those of Kimberly Blaeser, Neal McLeod,

Paul Seesequasis and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, whose criticism celebrates hybrid, border crossing texts, are ignored. Instead of reading, as Blaeser suggests is appropriate, "from the [bijculturally-centred text outward,"133

Davidson, Walton and Andrews read too often from the outside/in rendering their analysis Eurocentric rather than bi-cultural, a result certainly at odds with their attempt to celebrate the multi-voiced texture of King's writing. Their lack of attention to Indigenous voices in their analysis has further consequences in a similar erasure of the historical contexts of Native American and First Nations writing in general and of King's texts specifically.134 As a result, despite their

'postmodern' approach, Davidson, Walton and Andrews risk repeating the

57 problems of 'New Criticism' not only by treating King's work as a unified, aesthetic 'objet d'art,' transcending history but also King himself as modernism's "isolated genius [and] heroic individual."135

Four other monographs focusing on Native writers in Canada have now been published. The earliest, Julia Emberely's Thresholds of Difference:

Feminist Critique, Native Women's Writings, Postcolonial Theory, published in

1993, ten years earlier than Border Crossings, offers a postcolonial-Marxist- feminist reading of contemporary Native women's writing in Canada. While her focus on class as well as race and gender is a welcome and necessary addition to an analysis of First Nations writing, the imported language of European 'high theory' not only repeats the problems outlined above in the Davidson, Walton and Andrews monograph but, in Emberley's case, renders her text inaccessible to readers other than a small intellectual elite. As a result, she too leaves herself wide open to Blaeser's critique that her form of analysis risks becoming another instance of the cultural colonization of First Nations people.

While Dee Home's more accessible analysis of texts by six Native writers from Canada, Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettled Literature, published in 1999, does engage with the concept trickster, it does so by imposing, yet again, an imported, 'postcolonial' framework at times dramatically at odds with its Indigenous textual material. For example, its methodology is, on one hand, heavily informed by the ideas of Mikhail Bahktin, Homi Bhabha, and

Stuart Hall while, on the other, almost entirely excluding those of Vizenor whose work should be at the very least considered in any analysis of trickster in

58 contemporary Indigenous writing. Equally problematic is the erasure of the 49 parallel in the title of Home's study and the study itself. Although her writers all live in Canada, she erases the specific material effects of that location in her analysis and, consequently, the specific history of and on-going relationship between First Nations and settler-invader cultures in this country. Consequently, her study risks universalizing Indigenous peoples and their communities in

Canada under the homogenizing rubric of'American Indian.'136

Helen Hoy's How Should I Read These: Native Women Writers in Canada

(2001) and Renate Eigenbrod's Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the

Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada (2005) both offer important and accessible insights into contemporary Native writing in Canada.

While neither critic resists the seduction of European theory nor deploys Gerald

Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics in her analysis, both respect the bi-cultural character of their textual material, reading according to Blaeser's protocol, from

'the inside/out.' Hoy achieves this goal brilliantly. She foregrounds the cultural work of the women writers with whom she engages by transforming her text into a site of 'dialogic' interplay between her voice, the voices of a number of

'postmodern' feminist critics and, most importantly, the critical/theoretical as well as literary voices of the Indigenous women writers who are her focus. Unlike

Davidson's, Walton's and Andrews' monograph on Thomas King, her purpose is to both foreground Indigenous knowledges and to uncover rather than paper over the contradictory discourses at work in her text.

59 Both Hoy and Eigenbrod also foreground the complex ethical negotiations they believe necessary as non-Natives engaging with Native cultural texts. While appropriately recognizing the history of unequal power relations involved in such a project, what Hoy terms her problematic "race privilege" and Eigenbrod her outsider "immigrant perspective," they both find themselves in the paradoxical position of essentializing both Aboriginal and western culture while at the same time celebrating the complex, hybrid character of contemporary Indigenous writing. Neither Hoy nor Eigenbrod is able to resolve this issue. Ironically, their focus on the question of "race privilege" also risks reinstating exactly that privilege, a form of scholarly 'white' narcissism which certainly haunts Hoy's somewhat obsessive attempts to come to ethical terms with her subject matter.

Although not the only reading strategy appropriate for these texts, Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics might well have provided both scholars not only with a suitable bi-cultural methodological framework for analyzing these texts but also with the necessary theoretical tools to enable them to think through this conundrum in a culturally appropriate format.

Trickster Hermeneutics

Allan J. Ryan's The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary

Native Art offers the most exciting model to date for cross-cultural research and writing in the field of First Nations cultural production. As a non-Native academic in Indigenous Studies, Ryan negotiates the slippery territory in-between Native and 'white' culture, the Trickster shift' of his title. Although painstakingly scholarly, his work both resists and transforms the monologic structures and

60 linear narratives of much Western academic writing on Indigenous peoples. His text is even more multi-voiced than Hoy's, its structure and content imaginatively

and joyfully informed by Gerald Vizenor's concept of trickster discourse. "At once open-ended, unfolding, evolving, incomplete," as Ryan notes in his Introduction,

"the discourse is imagined in numerous verbal and visual narratives and a

multiplicity of authoritative voices. ... It defies univocal representation."137

The Trickster Shift focuses on contemporary Indigenous visual culture in

Canada, specifically the work of a group of artists who, Ryan writes, "share a

sensibility, a spirit. . . grounded in a fundamental comic world view and embodied in the traditional Native American trickster." The "Trickster Shift" itself,

he adds, "is perhaps best understood as serious play, the ultimate goal of which

is a radical shift in viewer perspective and even political positioning by imagining

and imaging alternative viewpoints."138 Informed by Ryan's project, mine runs

parallel to his: I deploy the same cross-cultural and tribal-centred methodology,

one which Vizenor has termed trickster hermeneutics,™9 while focusing instead

on a small group of Indigenous fiction writers and poets in Canada.

Central to Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics are a number of concepts

offering the reader insight into contemporary mixedblood Indigenous texts. I

have found the following, all invented by Vizenor and witness to his delight in

neologisms, particularly useful as analytical tools in my study: manifest manners,

mixedblood, indian, fugitive poses, postindian warriors, survivance, word

warriors, trickster discourse and terminal creeds. The term manifest manners

cheekily appropriates and puts to new use both Jean Baudrillard's concept of the

61 simulation and the American ideological and political project of 'Manifest

Destiny'. According to Vizenor, Native American identities since European

Contact have been constructed by representations or simulations of the invented indian circulating in the dominant discourses on Native Americans in the west.

Key to Vizenor's re-working of Baudrillard's theory is the radical idea that linguistic and rhetorical strategies offer powerful forms of counter-resistance to

EuroAmerican political and cultural imperialism. As Shackleton rightly insists, simulations and stereotypes of the indian "exist in discourse and it is through discourse - through battles in language - that the dominant can be challenged."141 These battles are fierce because, Ryan notes, the dominant discourse on the indian continues to wield considerable cultural "power and authority:"

It is, after all, the sign 'Indian' that resonates down through the years in travellers' journals, dime-store novels, and Hollywood movies; in countless images of feathered braves and savage warriors, solemn chiefs and mystical shamans, lusty maidens and sombre matrons, alternately imagined as primitive, noble, fearsome, honoured, captured, conquered, vanquished and finally, vanished.™2

Such simulations are, for Vizenor, "the absence of the tribal real."143 Like the American project of 'Manifest Destiny,' the discourse on the indian which he slyly re-names manifest manners, has equal power on the cultural and political front to systemically eradicate Native American peoples. Indeed, as Seesequasis argues citing Vizenor, "[t]he invention of the Indian is so persuasive and ingrained that Native people themselves can . . . 'become the invented images.'"144 That it has not been successful is due in large part to the courage of

62 Native American writers and cultural activists who, Vizenor writes, "then and now,

uncover the absence of the real and undermine the comparative poses of tribal traditions"145 and who, according to Seesequasis, "challenge the status quo,

resist the simulation and refuse to play the exotic other."146

Neither victims of American cultural imperialism nor merely its survivors,

Vizenor's Native American writers are understood as healers, transformers and,

indeed, tricksters themselves whom he honours, bestowing upon them titles such

as word warriors or postindian warriors of survivance. They are postindian on

one hand because, in Vizenor's words, the indian is now "the [simulation] of the

other [with] no real origin, no original reference. . . . [T]here is no real place on

this continent that bears the meaning of the name."147 "No matter what we think,"

he tells Seesequasis in an interview, "we are after the invention of the Indian. . . .

I am not a victim of Columbus. Even if you want to be, it's way past that. Social

Sciences have driven it past that. Time itself has exhausted the category. So

you're post-Indian by default." On the other hand, however, he argues that many

choose to be "post-Indian by action, by resistance to categories and by imagining

a new literature and by challenging historical assumptions."148 These writers are

Vizenor's and Maria Campbell's word warriors.

These warriors foreground not simply survival but what Vizenor terms

survivance, a creative and political strategy that replaces "[t]he long suffering, the

trail of tears, the victimry" of colonial oppression with "good humour, play, and

tragic wisdom in spite of adversity."149 Inspired by such trickster strategies, these

word warriors are able, in Vizenor's words, to "imaginatively outwit, reverse and

63 overturn the wiles of domination" and "contradict the simulations of [N]atives."150

As postindian warriors of survivance and not simulation, furthermore, they re­ invent the invention of the indian, overturning its commodified mainstream significations and, in the process, filling it full of contradictory Indigenous meanings.

The small group of Indigenous writers in Canada who are the focus of my project also deserve to be honoured with the titles word warriors and postindian warriors of survivance. In spite of many differences, they share with their

American counterparts similar battles over language, a "tricky visionary resistance"151 to simulations and stereotypes and, what Owens describes as "[a] consciousness and identifiable worldview defined . . . primarily by a quest for identity." Again like that of their American colleagues, this quest involves acknowledging, in Owens' words, not only "a fragmented sense of self but also

"a radically deracinated mixedblood"152 subjectivity. Tricksters themselves, these writers practice an 'in-your-face' uncrowning of 'authentic' and 'pure' notions of

Indigenous identities, celebrating instead those that cross boundaries and play havoc with essentialist differences between Native and 'white,' metropolis and margin, self and other. Vizenor's rallying cry, "we are [all] mixedbloods now"153 is also theirs, a call to arms which is emphatically underscored not just in their hybridized and deterritorialized texts but also in the mixedblood world created by and through their stories. For Vizenor, "tribal narratives are the world rather than a representation of the world" and for Owens, they "make the world, period."

Such a world, one created through trickster storytelling, offers a place of

64 belonging and spaces of hope and compassion to contemporary diasporic

Indigenous peoples whose communities continue to be torn apart by one of the most damaging legacies of colonialism - the conflict over Native identity.

According to Seesequasis, the spirit of the trickster is still a largely untapped resource of healing and transformation and for Vizenor, "tricky stories are the cure." Through them, a "visionary sovereignty"154 is celebrated, one that has the imaginative power to re-invent vibrant and evolving tribal cultures and communities, urban or reserve. As he writes:

My grandmother conceived of the reservation in stories not in metres and bounds of land allotments or in wily timber concessions; she created a homeland in the memories of native humor, a trickster survivance, not in a nation of traitorous Indians and federal agents and never in the rites of tragic victimry.155

Vizenor's trickster is not only bi-cultural but also, as Elias reminds us,

"always already postmodern. . . from the beginning of time."156 As such, it is "not a presence or a real person," Vizenor tells us," but a semiotic sign in a language game."157 As noted above, however, Indigenous writers and artists honoured by him with the titles of postindian warriors of survivance and word warriors are the embodiment of trickster. In addition, trickster figures and characters populate the pages of Indigenous creative writing in the United States and Canada, including

Vizenor's own creative texts which, Ryan notes, "[feature] a host of compassionate tricksters."158 As he writes:

[l]t is important not to lose sight of the 'little guy' that Highway locates at the centre of the Native mythological universe. This Trickster is a definite presence. ... It is this Trickster, too, whose countless adventures and comic exploits have entertained and educated generations of Native peoples, and whose influence

65 has left a lasting impression on the work and practice of many Native artists.1

Another of Vizenor's neologisms, trickster discourse, includes all those present day mixedblood tribal narratives, rhetorical tropes, semiotic signs and visual 'imaginings and images' that bear the imprint of trickster. Reading through the lens of postmodern trickster hermeneutics, Vizenor finds that in "trickster discourse the world is deconstructed."160 As in Derridean postructuralist theory, modernist binaries, especially for Vizenor the "nasty fix of savagery and civilization,"161 are interrogated and dismantled along with terminal creeds, another neologism he creates to describe the soul destroying modernist 'truths' governing contemporary notions of Indigenous 'knowledge,' 'origins,' 'identity' and 'tradition.' As a result, according to Blaeser, "Trickster tales give our tightly patterned thinking and the status quo 'a dressing down'. . . . We realize there is no final, ultimate answer, no infallibility that we can blindly accept and follow."

Consequently, she adds, "[w]e experience a new sense of freedom ... [a] new state of liberation that engenders creativity, imagination, life energies."162 Vizenor sums up Blaeser's sentiments, arguing that in trickster discourse, "[t]he tribal trickster is a liberator and healer in narrative."163

Conclusion

Bringing trickster hermeneutics to bear on my reading of the fiction and poetry of a new wave of Indigenous writers in Canada, I too find a world deconstructed. Trickster at play in these texts troubles borders and boundaries; wreaks havoc on fixed concepts of Indigenous knowledge, identity and

66 authenticity; destabilizes normative notions of gender and sexuality; appropriates and defamiliarizes canonical literary genres; destabilizes the boundaries between time past, time present and mythic time; and, finally, mixes the oral with the written and fiction with non-fiction. No longer erased and displaced, multi-voiced and non-linear mixedblood accounts of the past interrogate the grand narratives of history's colonizers and victors with their unsettling and subversive perspectives and politics. Such Indigenous histories now give voice to what was once 'the unspeakable,' foregrounding rather than effacing the sad legacy of colonial oppression on the lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada today. Like the

'return of the repressed,' stories now emerge focusing not only on the painful struggle over Native identity; the loss of ancestral lands; the church and government-run residential school system; and the subsequent poverty and despair characteristic of many Aboriginal communities, both urban and reserve, but also on the extraordinary survival, resilience and newly formed confidence of

Aboriginal peoples and their cultures in Canada today. I find, as a result, trickster storytelling that may be dark and foreboding but never bitter nor resentful; instead, the writers on whom I focus celebrate compassion, community and hope.

I also find, as does Ryan, multiple traces of trickster humour, with its often unruly and destabilizing laughter and oxymoronic 'serious play.' Parody, irony and ambiguity are all tropes reiterated in these texts. Here commodified simulations of Native American peoples and their cultures such as the "noble warrior and the bloodthirsty savage, the child of nature and the mother earth

67 messenger to the new age . . . and the alcoholic on the street corner"164 described by Seesequasis, are destabilized in an uncanny process of defamiliarization and estrangement. Once powerful cultural stereotypes of the

Indigenous other are appropriated by the artists and writers in my study and filled with contradictory Indigenous meanings, the effect of which is sometimes bizarre, often grotesque and almost always comic. Trickster humour such as this is profoundly liberatory. Laughter in the face of oppression is more than mere survival. Instead, it conforms to Vizenor's idea of survivance, a celebration of communal values rooted in compassion and creativity instead of victimry and anger. According to Gary Farmer, trickster humour explains the astonishing endurance of Indigenous peoples in North America despite all odds:

Because Native communities have gone through probably the worst situations in North America that any peoples have gone through they had to have the ability to laugh. If they didn't, they wouldn't be existing today. So humour has been a means of survival, the only means. . . . The only thing they had was the ability to continue to laugh their way through life because if they didn't. . . they would vanish.165

68 CHAPTER 3

Trickster Dancing: Re-reading the First Nations Novel

[T]he mixedblood is not a cultural broker but a cultural breaker, break-dancing trickster-fashion through all signs, fracturing the self-reflexive mirror of the dominant centre, deconstructing rigid borders, slipping between the seams, embodying contradictions, and contradancing across every boundary.1 Louis Owens

Introduction

The rebirth of Indigenous literature in Canada beginning in the late 1980s runs parallel to the extraordinary international success of Canadian fiction during the same period. The two novels which are the focus of this chapter, Eden

Robinson's Monkey Beach and Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road were published at the turning point of the millennium.2 Both achieved bestseller status in the wake of publications decades earlier by the now iconic Canadian writers

Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Mordecai

Richler and Carol Shields who were the first to put CanLit3 'on the map' internationally. More importantly, however, from the late 1980s to the present, a new fiction by a new generation of Canadians exploded onto the national and international book scene. Rejecting the white settler ideologies4 of their literary forbearers, these writers celebrated, instead, the diverse, contradictory and fragmentary ethnicities and identities now extant in contemporary urban Canada.

Fiction not only by Robinson and Boyden but also by writers such as Dionne

Brand, Tomson Highway, Thomas King, Anne-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel,

Anne Michaels, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, Nino Ricci, and M.G.

69 Vassanji, among others, began receiving rave reviews, numerous literary awards, and international acclaim.5 Canadian literature was certainly, in Di

Brandt's judgment, "going global," the novel in particular achieving "literary stardom."6 Indeed, as Martin Levin announced in the pages of The Globe and

Mail in 2002, "Canada has one of the world's most interesting and vital literatures, a fusion cuisine of multicultural probings [and] urban inventiveness."7

The most remarkable accolade at the time came from Pico Iyer in an article for Harpers' Magazine the same year. Iyer envisions Canada as a post- national "New World sanctuary of sorts," a pluralist and tolerant "haven in the midst of war" for refugees and migrants fleeing the anachronistic and destructive nationalisms of the Old World. Iyer's Toronto is described as "the single most multicultural city in the world . . . and by the reckoning of many, the one with the richest literary culture." Many of its writers, he adds, are "mongrels laying claim to a new vision of self and identity," achieving celebrity status because of their

"meticulous and highly self-conscious attempt to chart a new kind of identity outside the categories of the Old World's order." In Iyer's opinion, "to meet

Canada on the page is to come to the conclusion that multiculturalism is far better handled by writers of fiction than by writers of laws."8

For some critics, however, the international book market within which

CanLit now stars is to be viewed with great suspicion. The 'book' as 'bestseller,' they argue, is now an aesthetic commodity in the global culture of late capitalism, a culture described as cannibalistic and characterized by an insatiable desire for and consumption of its exotic other.9 Barbara Godard contributes her voice to

70 this critique. She is, for example, much less sanguine about the function of diversity and difference within the context of CanLit than either Levin or Iyer, asserting instead that Canada's new fiction is now "prized within the global economy" because "its multicultural diversity is readily transportable in translation." As she understands the issue, "ethnicity is a signifier of marketability,"10 which is why Canadian authors specializing in 'fusion cuisine' fiction are courted by multinational publishers, their books transformed into hot commodities in the global marketplace. The negative effects of CanLit's new marketability are considerable in Brandt's opinion:

[l]f the worth of a book depends on how many copies have been sold rather than on its stylistic innovation or courageous vision then literature must, at least in a corporate-driven time like ours, become more conventional, more easily digested, less prophetic, less avant garde.11

Critics of contemporary, bestselling Indigenous fiction in Canada might very well have similar reservations about these popular novels. Both Random

House, and Penguin (Canada), Robinson's and Boyden's multinational publishers, market their novels by deploying orientalist stereotypes of Indigenous cultures and identities. On book jacket blurbs, newspaper ads and publisher's websites, these companies feed on the mainstream reader's ambivalent desire for and fear of its primitive, Indigenous and exotic other.^2 Certainly, publishers would be aware of the European fascination with the stereotype of the 'authentic'

Native American.13 Indigenous culture in the context of its marketability, then, is to be understood as a highly profitable spice to be added to Canada's literary

'fusion cuisine.'

71 Considering the above, there is no apparent reason to exclude Indigenous fiction from Stephen Henighan's powerful critique of contemporary fiction in

Canada. In his jeremiad, "Free Trade Fiction, or the Victory of Metaphor over

History,"14 Henighan positions himself with Godard and Brandt, lamenting the

"growing glamorization and commercialization of literary fiction in Canada." The

Canadian novel, in his view, underwent a massive transformation during the

1990s, "from an artistic work engaged with language and history into an objet d'art." Our novels are now "suffus[ed] . . . with a desire to transcend history," he writes. They have morphed into "a commercially congenial strand of non- engaged high art" in order "to ascend to the best-seller list while retaining the

'literary fiction' label." To "appear literary," Henighan adds, bestselling fiction in

Canada must "advertise its literariness through 'beautiful' imagery, exotic settings

[and] exquisite production." As a result, fiction writers have replaced an engagement with specific and localized Canadian histories with artfully deracinated rhetorical tropes resulting in an "abandonment of history for metaphor" and a "neutering of the past into harmless ecstatic visions." Henighan, in addition, accuses writers such as Anne Michaels of complicity with the ideological agenda of Canada's corporate elite. "One reason that Canadian conservatives experience orgasm while reading Fugitive Pieces," he writes, "is that the novel's denial and denigration of Canadian history coincide flawlessly with the 'neo-con' project of recasting Canada as a 'new land' where everything can be torn down and 'begun again.'"15

72 How then do we come to terms with the two bestselling novels, Monkey

Beach and Three Day Road, within the context of this devastating critique? In their thematic engagement with Indigenous mixedblood identities, do Robinson and Boyden collude in the marketing of a trendy diversity? Do they, in Louis

Owens words, "appeal to the metropolitan centre's desire for the exotic, the colourful fringes of itself. . . without radically disturbing the centre's sense of well-being" or, in craving international approbation and multinational publication, do they resist "tell[ing] stories that are too disturbing or too alien"?16 Are they guilty of collaborating in Henighan's 'neo-con' conspiracy? In order to achieve bestseller status, for example, do they specialize in the postmodern literary trope of the pastiche by making passing references to Indigenous histories and identities rather than engaging in their localized, messy and all too human specificities?

To respond to these questions is to engage with the oxymoronic, contradictory spirit of the trickster. For not only are these two novels outstandingly successful as commodities on the world book market, they are also exceptionally compelling examples of the vitality and integrity of Indigenous storytelling in a contemporary world. That these novels focus on Indigenous cultural difference and diversity goes without saying; however, hybrid identities as simulations papering over the painful histories of colonization that have produced contemporary Indigenous subjectivities do not make an appearance.

Instead, these histories are foregrounded as vital components in Robinson's and

Boyden's storytelling, constructing rich, complex mixedblood characters that

73 inhabit the same liminal, in-between space as do their creators. Unlike

Henighan's neo-con ideologues, then, who deny 'history' in their triumphal celebration of Canada as a 'new land,' these two writers work as creative and imaginative archival excavators bringing to the centre of the Canadian - and international - consciousness and conscience, through their bestselling books, the long buried histories of Canada's first inhabitants.

First Nations peoples have long been marginalized in the meta-narrative of Canadian history taught in Canada's schools. According to Gail Valaskakis, too often, "[t]he vanquished have been drawn in the words of the victors," a process which, she writes, "constructs Indians as historyless vagrants without an authentically written past."17 In a stunning reversal, however, both novelists refuse this position on the margins of the national narrative. Seizing the centre and appropriating its language, literary forms and modes of production, they re­ write the past, offering no trendy postmodern pastiche but instead disturbing

Indigenous counter-histories which powerfully indict colonial, white settler culture.

A relentless study, for example, of the impact on Indigenous peoples not only of

Canadian governmental and religious institutions but also of the materialist values of western capitalism lies at the heart of each novel. Such "appropriation, inversion, and abrogation of authority," Owens writes, "are always trickster strategies." Opening the pages of these novels, readers enter unaware this disturbing, alien zone of the trickster, a textual space "within which every utterance is challenged and interrogated, all referents put into question."18

74 Engaged in the risky business of 'writing back,' these writers appropriate the centre's simulation of the indian, disrupting its power and dismantling the orientalist discourse on which it is based. In particular, they resist the metropolitan centre's desire for the exotic other as the tragic victim of colonial oppression. There are no traces in Monkey Beach or Three Day Road of the dominant culture's "insidious nostalgia for tribal miseries" and "mythic stoicism" with which, Gerald Vizenor writes, "[t]ribal cultures are burdened."19 Instead, as

Vizenor has argued in his reading of similar stories, Indigenous histories which once were repressed return in these texts to haunt the complacent and the comfortable,20 their pages filled with fully-realized mixedblood characters who

"dance as tricksters" newly brought to life in a "literary ghost dance."21 Vizenor draws a comparison here between these literary dancers and those of the Ghost

Dance, "the religion of renewal from tribe to tribe on the plains at the end of the nineteenth century." A central tenet of that religion was the regeneration of Native

American culture through the ritual of the Ghost Dance in which benevolent ancestral spirits from the past would revisit the present. According to Vizenor, contemporary mixedblood characters populate the pages of a new "literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance," a literature with the potential of rejuvenating Native North American culture and reuniting "the whole Indian race, living and dead."22 Robinson and Boyden join in this dance, in Owens' words,

"not a[s] cultural broker[s] but a[s] cultural breakers], break-dancing trickster- fashion through all signs [and] contradancing across every boundary."23

75 For readers, to join in the dance is to joyously inhabit the "zone of the trickster." Such active participation, however, is not easy. As Vizenor writes, citing George Steiner, "[t]he best acts of reading are acts of incompletion, acts of fragmentary insight"24 during which, Elvira Pulitano adds, "the reader's mind explores infinite possibilities, and . . . closure is infinitely deferred."25 With full knowledge and control of these texts always out of reach, readers should expect to undergo a trickster-Wke process of defamiliarization. That experience, however, should be interpreted, Vizenor writes, again quoting Steiner, not as "a humiliating defeat but a joyous invitation to reread."26 Even so, these texts can never be those "more easily digested, less prophetic, less avant-garde" literary blockbusters which, Brandt warns, are the product of commodity capitalism. That these tricky, challenging novels are also hugely popular contradicts both her position and undermines Owens' argument that for a book to achieve 'best-seller' status in New York, it must appeal to "the primarily white Eurocentrically educated reader who will want to find him-and herself inside the covers of the text."27 Few, if any readers, Indigenous or not, will enjoy that level of comfort in these pages. In fact, as Godard notes, contemporary novels which "document the struggle of Natives today within a history of resistance . . . make great demands on the reader for different historical knowledge, one not taught in schools."28 In addition, Owens argues, Native American writers are beginning to demand such knowledge from their readers:

And just as the oppressively literate modernists felt justified in demanding that readers know a little Greek and Roman mythology as well as the entire literary history of the Western world, Native American writers have begun to expect, even

76 demand, that readers learn something about the mythology and oral histories of Indian America.29

Again, this is not easy reading. So why do consumers buy these books?

Robinson and Boyden, in a tricky, subversive move, have found success at the centre of the American book market by deploying a strategy that Owens describes as "packaging a text in sufficient imperial wrappings to get it past the palace guards. . . ."30 This 'packaging' involves 'wrapping' their subversive stories not only in appropriately seductive publicity and 'tasteful' and 'discriminating' production values but also in a superbly crafted English novel format31 and, of course, in the language of the metropolitan centre - either English or in translation. These two mixedblood writers excel in the trickster strategies of appropriating the 'master's tools'32 and 'reinventing the enemy's language.'33

Referring specifically to the transformative effects of the appropriation of the

English language by mixedblood urban writers in the United States, Vizenor writes:

English has been the language of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, and the written domination of tribal cruelties; at the same time, this mother tongue of colonialism has been a language of liberation for some people. .. . [It] has carried some of the best stories of endurance and tribal spiritual restoration, and now that same dominant language bears the creative literature of crossblood writers in cities.

Robinson and Boyden developed their writers' craft at university where both have graduate degrees in creative writing;35 as such, they share not only a deep connection with the 'Native world' but also an elite 'insider's' knowledge of the western 'ivory tower,' specifically the discipline of English Literature. Residing in the borderzone in-between cultures, they appropriate the canonical genres of

77 the short story and the novel, reinventing them in both their classic realist and postmodern forms in order to engage in and celebrate Indigenous storytelling.

This 'insider' understanding of the culture of the metropolitan centre also give both writers a sophisticated understanding of the orientalist discourses which produce simulations of the exotic Indian other. As a result, they are able to manipulate and critique the 'First World's desire not only for 'Fourth World' authenticity and difference but also for those new fusion identities that Levin and

Iyer make so much of in their celebration of CanLit's distinctive international literary voice.

'First World' consumers, however, soon become readers undergoing an uncanny experience of disorientation whereby their orientalist dreams become waking nightmares. Their stereotypical images of the Indigenous other are turned up-side-down as re-invented, vibrant and often terrifying images and histories of

First Nations peoples are presented to them. Perhaps more importantly, as a result of such trickster tactics, these readers come to understand their own complicity in the colonial project; yet, instead of being paralyzed by such knowledge they are, in Owens' words, "moved toward self-awareness,"36 toward accepting a new activist role as potential allies of First Nations peoples in their struggle for decolonization.37 Entering the zone of the trickster26 then, for readers such as these, becomes a "joyous invitation to reread"39 and to join the trickster dance.

78 Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach (2000)

Eden Robinson is of mixed Haisla/Heiltsuk ancestry and grew up on the

Haisla First Nation Reserve of Kitamaat in northern interior British Columbia.

Educated both on and off 'rez,'40 she holds a BA (University of Victoria) and an

MA (University of British Columbia) in creative writing. Her first publication, a collection of short fiction, Traplines, came out in 1998 and won the Winifred

Holtby Prize for the best first work of fiction in the Commonwealth. Monkey

Beach, published in 2000 and nominated for both the Giller and Governor

General's awards, was followed by Blood Sports, her second novel, in 2006.

While Traplines and Monkey Beach were written in Vancouver, Robinson returned home to her reserve to write Blood Sports.^ Like many Indigenous artists today, she celebrates her complex mixedblood identity writing from a liminal space, a borderzone,42 in-between the city and the reserve.

As the first fiction writer in her reserve community to be published,

Robinson deserves to be considered one of Maria Campbell's courageous word warriors. Her experience has certainly not been easy. Suzanne Methot, in an interview with the writer, quotes Robinson's parodic response to the difficult situation in which she found herself after speaking to Haisla elders about her writing project:

Eden Robinson is watching her back these days. The Haisla novelist asked village elders for advice on making the leap from oral literature to written text, and they were shocked that she wanted to write about traditional beliefs. Their unease fires her own trepidation. "I can't write about certain things," she says, "or someone will go fatwa on me."43

79 Strategically 'packaging the text in imperial wrappings, both Random

House's website and the blurb on the back cover of the Vintage Canada paperback edition, describe Monkey Beach as, in the former, "the first English- language novel to be published by a Haisla writer"45 and, in the latter, "a spellbinding voyage into the long cool shadows of B.C.'s Coast Mountains, blending teen culture, Haisla lore, nature spirits and human tenderness into a multilayered story of loss and redemption." In a number of interviews and talks since 1998, however, Robinson assumes the role of a postindian warrior of survivance, very clearly problematizing her publisher's attempts to discursively construct not only Haisla culture as the exotic and romantic Indigenous other to mainstream Canadian culture but also Robinson's own identity as a simulation of the real, in her case the wise and stoic Indian storyteller and bearer of ancient tribal myths and spiritual knowledge. In an interview with Jennifer Hunter for

Maclean's magazine, for example, Robinson outlines the ritual she 'religiously' performs prior to each writing session, obviously taking great delight in parodying the New Age simulations of tribal storytelling that readers and reviewers might bring to her books. A gullible Hunter, seemingly taken in by Robinson's trickster strategy, 'religiously' reiterates Robinson's parodic performance in her review:

When award-winning Vancouver novelist Eden Robinson sits down to write, usually at 10 p.m., there is a two-minute ritual she always performs. First she lays out some offerings in front of the computer: Coffee Crisp bars and Twizzlers licorice. Then she prepares the libations, making sure she has enough cans of caffeine-infused PepsiMax on hand. Finally she calls on her muse, Marvin, whom she describes as 'a cranky, irritable and somewhat uptight' spirit, resembling the Warner Bros, cartoon character Marvin the Martian. Marvin is the one who pushes her

80 to rewrite and restructure, and when he's in a particularly foul mood there's hell to pay.46

Cynthia Sugars links Robinson's strategy of "appropriating and reformulating the discourse on savagery," as in the example above, with

Vizenor's project to "'re-invent the invention' of 'Indianness'" and also with "[his] call for postindian 'simulations of survivance' in contemporary Native cultural expression." Such trickster strategies can be seen in Robinson's active resistance to both the terminal creed of cultural authenticity and the current fetishization and commodification of the racial identities of Indigenous writers, tactics which Sugars notes, "[frustrate] the reader's desire to interpret her characters on the basis of their ethno-cultural identity."47 An example of

Robinson's resistance to such labels can be seen in her emphatic response to

Helen Hoy's query concerning the racial identities of characters in Traplines: "I just assumed they were really young and really poor."48 Derrick Penner, in another interview with the author, writes that "[a]ny pressure [Robinson] has felt to be a representative of the Haisla [N]ation . . . has come from outside, mostly from non-[N]atives." In the same interview, Robinson explains her position further: "I didn't want to start with [N]ative stories. Once you've been put in a box of being a [N]ative writer it's hard to get out."49

Like Robinson, Lisamarie Hill, the protagonist and narrator of Monkey

Beach, is from the Haisla First Nation Reserve of Kitamaat. Also like that of her creator, Lisamarie's identity is impossible to pin down. Named after both Elvis

Presley's daughter50 and her Uncle Mick, she inhabits a liminal space, in- between ancient Haisla traditions and postmodern popular culture. She too is

81 one of Vizenor's postindian warriors of survivance, a troubled, rebellious but always strong and compelling character who is never portrayed as a victim despite experiencing the harrowing effects of colonization on her family and community. Instead, she acknowledges and, indeed, celebrates her mixedblood subjectivity.51 The reader is introduced to her at the beginning of the novel listening to crows outside her bedroom window speaking Haisla. Chain smoking and drinking cup after cup of coffee, she anxiously waits for news of her brother

Jimmy who, along with her Uncle Josh, is lost at sea. Shortly after, she sets out on a journey in an old outboard motorboat through the wilderness of northern BC to join her parents who have left for Namu,52 the salmon fishing site where Josh is believed to be heading. The tale of this traumatic trip acts as a frame for the rest of the novel, enclosing an incoherent and estranging mixture of discourses and genres within which are interwoven Lisamarie's memories of growing up.

These are provided in flashback format chronicling her life, from her childhood and teenage years, the latter part of which were spent as a high school 'drop out' in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, to her homecoming as a young woman and her decision to return to school. At the end of the novel, the mystery of Jimmy and Uncle Josh's disappearance is revealed and Lisamarie is last seen lying on

Monkey Beach:

I lie on the sand. The clamshells are hard against my back. I am no longer cold. I am so light I could just drift away. Close, very close, a b'gwus howls - not quite human, not quite wolf but something in between. The howl echoes off the mountains. In the distance I hear the sound of a speedboat.53

82 Reviewers and those writing articles on the novel who for the most part centre their attention on both the linear frame story and Lisamarie's chronological memories of growing up on and off 'rez,' often describe Monkey Beach in terms of genre fiction,54 either as 'a 'thriller,' a 'mystery,' or as a 'spiritual quest.'55 As such, the novel can also be placed firmly within the tradition of 19th century classic realism, a genre that continues to dominate fiction, film and TV today.56

The plot of a classic realist novel begins with disorder - a crisis or dilemma that the protagonist must solve. The narrative then follows the linear journey the central character undertakes, the goal of which is to solve the problem, to re­ establish order and harmony, and to achieve closure at the novel's conclusion.

Other reviewers and critics have read Monkey Beach as a coming-of-age narrative or bildungsroman.57 A canonical EuroAmerican literary genre also within the classic realist tradition, it originated in 18th century Germany.58 Its focus is on the education and development of the bourgeois subject, mapping the journey of the hero from youth to maturity.59 A key feature of the classic realist text is the celebration of the liberal humanist ideology of individualism which foregrounds the autonomy and coherence of the modernist self.60

By appropriating these traditional literary forms in Monkey Beach,

Robinson seemingly offers, at least on one level, an easily accessible and comfortable reading experience with the promise of closure compelling consumers to keep turning the page. Jillian Ridington and Karolle Wall explain this process in their reading of the novel as a 'mystery' or 'thriller':

Right from the beginning, Robinson's narrator and protagonist, Lisamarie, draws us into her world. In a voice that is clear,

83 compelling and colloquial, Lisamarie takes us on a physical and emotional journey through the inlets and forests of the BC coastal mountains, into the hotels and back alleys of Vancouver's skid row, and back again. Through a series of deeply textured, interwoven and related stories, the primary tale - the search for her brother lost at sea - unfolds.61

Offering a similar liberal humanist reading of the novel, Coral Ann Howells reads Monkey Beach not only as a coming-of-age novel or bildungsroman but also as a 'spiritual quest':

Monkey Beach is more than a 'girl's growing up novel' or even a protest novel for it is also a novel about [a] spiritual quest where the protagonist seeks to move beyond personal loss and the damage inflicted on her Native culture toward a position of creative survival and a retrieval of her inheritance. The novel's visionary ending though fraught with ambiguity manages to celebrate Native spiritual healing, asserting the magical power of storytelling.62

Although Howells recognizes that "this novel ends with deferrals of certainty," she does acknowledge some form of closure. According to her reading, the novel ends with Lisamarie alive on Monkey Beach waiting to be rescued. In the process of her difficult journey, she has achieved a more coherent and authentic Indigenous identity and has come to terms with the gift of spiritual prophecy inherited from the matriarchal side of her family:

The novel ends elegiacally with Lisa left alone on the deserted beach at evening, listening to the mingled sounds of a voice "not quite human, not quite wolf," and "in the distance, I hear the sound of a speedboat. . . ." My reading is that Lisa has survived and is now ready to face the future with a new sense of her Native identity and growing confidence in her own spiritual powers.63

On one level, both these interpretations are entirely appropriate. Indeed, as Ridington and Wall admit, the linear narrative and promise of closure that

84 Robinson offers readers are what "[draw] us in;" however, the novel in trickster fashion brilliantly subverts the expectations of readers. Despite the promises of book blurbs, scholarly articles and reviews, the novel draws readers into its narrative structure and into the compelling character of its protagonist only to push them out again. In the process, however, as Richard Lane argues, readers of Monkey Beach are changed from individual and "passive consumers] to . . . active participants] in Robinson's often alien and always disturbing storytelling."64

The following five, inter-connected trickster65 strategies66 are responsible for this disorienting yet transformative experience, constantly disrupting its frame story and undermining its comfortable, linear and classic realist logic: the emphatic resistance to narrative closure at the end of the novel; the dismantling of boundaries not only between the worlds of humans, animals and spirits but also between those of the living and the dead; the valorization of Indigenous histories that run counter to the master narratives of colonization in Canada; the disruption of chronological time with flash forwards and flashbacks and the dizzying display of alternate genres, discourses and storytelling forms;67 and, finally, the interrogation of identity based both on the terminal creed of cultural authenticity and on the modernist, western ideology of individualism specifically in terms of a unified and coherent self.

Reviewers and literary critics have expended much energy and a great deal of ink refusing to recognize the first sign of trickster at play in Monkey

Beach: its resistance to closure. Seduced into reading the novel as a linear

85 narrative promising a decisive and comfortable conclusion, readers tend to manipulate the meaning of that conclusion. Jennifer Andrews, for example, like

Howells above, also insists on a happy ending with Lisamarie surviving her traumatic journey in search of Jimmy:

Left on the beach, alone, she has a final transformative experience while lying on the sand, describing herself as 'so light I could just drift away' as she hears the howl of a nearby B'gwus. In this moment, Lisamarie finds peace with both her past and present, recognizing the need for her continued survival despite her desire to join the ghost of family members.68

The conclusion to Monkey Beach is, however, much more ambiguous than either Howells or Andrews allows. Rob Appleford admits that, on one hand

"this redemptive reading [is] attractive;" however, "my experience reading and teaching the novel suggests other, less comforting, possibilities." His explanation is convincing:

My undergraduate students . . . complain that this ending frustrates any tidy resolution of the central narrative and seriously compromises any strictly rite-of-passage interpretation. 'Is Lisamarie dead?' they ask. 'What's going on?' (Close, very close, my students howl.) Eden Robinson has admitted that the novel's open ending has perplexed even her own family, who think she should have supplied some sort of resolution to Lisamarie's story. However, she refuses to clarify Lisamarie's fate.69

Because of its resistance to narrative closure, Monkey Beach can neither be read in general as a classic realist text nor, as Appleford quite rightly points out above, more specifically as a coming-of-age novel. Despite Howells' and

Andrews arguments to the contrary, Appleford's students are correct in finding little comfort at the novel's end precisely because ambiguity rather than closure is central to its meaning. Here readers encounter the novel's second trickster

86 strategy, one equally as destabilizing as the first: the dismantling of borders not only between humans, animals and mythic beings but also between the living and the dead.

Lisamarie is last seen lying on Monkey Beach, a liminal space, in-between the spirit world of the Haisla and the 'real' world. Here, in this zoA7e of the trickster, boundaries are dismantled and borders breached. Readers should know to expect ambiguity rather than closure at the conclusion because, much earlier in the novel, Monkey Beach is also characterized as a liminal space. Here

Lisamarie encounters the legendary Sasquatch or b'gwus when she reluctantly accompanies her younger brother Jimmy in search of the mythic creature:

Suddenly, every hair on my body prickled. The trees were thick, and beneath them everything was hushed. A raven croaked somewhere above. I couldn't hear anyone calling for Jimmy. I could hear myself breathing. I could feel someone watching me. . . . I turned and saw him. Just for a moment, just a glimpse of a tall man, covered in brown fur. He gave me a wide friendly smile, but he had too many teeth and they were all pointed. He backed into the shadows, then stepped behind a cedar tree and vanished. (15-16)

Lisamarie's close encounter here with the Sasquatch in the trickster zone of Monkey Beach suggest that she too should be understood as a liminal being in another sense, not quite human, not quite animal, not quite Sasquatch but something in-between. Appleford offers a convincing argument for this reading:

While hardly a hairy hominid with too many pointed teeth, Lisamarie is described in ways that link her with the 'wild man of the woods.' Uncle Mick calls her 'Monster,' and one of her first acts of school yard self-assertion when tormented by Frank is to sink her teeth deeply into Frank's 'butt' (65). 'You are an evil little monster,' accuses Frank's mother at the hospital, while Mick enthuses that Lisamarie is 'my favourite little monster in the whole wide world."70

87 At the end of the novel, Lisamarie undergoes a similar but more substantive transformation on Monkey Beach. Once more inhabiting the zone of the trickster, she again crosses the boundary between the 'real' and the Haisla spirit worlds but now, for the first time, between the living and the dead. In another close encounter with the Sasquatch, she lies on the beach listening to "a b'gwus [howl] - not quite human, not quite wolf, but something in between" (374).

Just prior to this experience, she finds she is able to communicate with the dead.

This is a lesson we see her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, attempting to teach her on a number of occasions in the novel and one she practices herself after Mick dies.

Unsuccessful then because of her resistance to and fear of her special psychic gifts, she now accepts her spiritual power and finds she is able to talk to ghosts, especially those she has loved and lost such as Jimmy, Mick and Ma-ma-oo, who are brought back to life at the end of the novel in an ecstatic vision resembling a 'ghost dance.' They sing in Haisla, an ancient tribal language which Lisamarie was unable to understand but, with her new liminal status, now can. They engage in a ritual celebrating tribal survivance with Mick 'break- dancing' trickster fashion:

They are blurry dark figures against the firelight. For a moment the singing becomes clear. I can understand the words even though they are in Haisla and it's a farewell song, they are singing about leaving and meeting again, and they turn and lift their hands. Mick breaks out of the circle and dances, squatting low and showing off. (373-374)

Readers will never know whether Lisamarie lives or dies at the end of the novel; instead, of more profound significance is Lisamarie's rapturous

88 transformation at Monkey Beach's conclusion. Such a transformation is, of course, the effect of Vizenor's compassionate trickster whose purpose in

Lisamarie's life is, in Vizenor's words, "to balance the world between terminal creeds and humor with unusual manners and ecstatic strategies."71

Mick is engaged in another form of ghost dancing, trickster fashion, as are other characters in Monkey Beach. No longer repressed, their stories of the damaging effect of colonial white settler culture on the Haisla community of

Kitamaat return to haunt the pages of the novel. Here, then, is the third example of trickster writing in the novel: the valorization of Indigenous histories. Catching the attention of her educated middle class readers, Robinson gives voice to the unspeakable in her disturbing counter narratives to mainstream Canadian history, profoundly interrogating the myth of Canadian tolerance.72 Her story of the impact of the Alberni residential school, for example, on Lisamarie's community and on those she loves is never didactic and always compellingly and convincingly told. By the end of the novel, readers are horrified to learn that a large part of the dysfunction of Lisamarie's family, such as her beloved Uncle

Mick's emotional instability, her Aunt Trudy's alcoholism and her Uncle Josh's sexual abuse of Jimmy's girlfriend, Karaoke, is directly related to Mick, Josh and

Trudy's traumatic experience at residential school. Compelled to finish Monkey

Beach, readers find out not only that Jimmy has drowned but also that he has murdered Josh in an act of revenge for Josh's sexual abuse of Karaoke.

Lisamarie discovers a 'birth announcement' card from Karaoke in Jimmy's pocket, not intended for him but for Josh, announcing an abortion not a birth. On

89 it, Karaoke has written: "Dear, dear Joshua. It was yours so I killed it" (365).

Doctored by Karaoke, the old, black and white photograph inside the card acts as an acknowledgement, however, that she is not the only victim. For the cycle of abuse within which she and Josh are trapped was instigated by Father Archibald, the sexual predator who initially abused Josh at residential school. Below is

Lisamarie's description of the appalling document:

In the pocket of Jimmy's brown leather jacket, I found an old photograph and folded-up card. The picture was black and white. Josh's head was pasted over a priest's head and Karaoke's was pasted over a little boy's. I turned it over: Dear Joshua, it read. / remember every day we spent together. How are you? I miss you terribly. Please write. Your friend in Christ, Archibald. (365)

Racism and its traumatic effect on Aboriginal people in Canada, once repressed are also given voice in Monkey Beach and continue to resonate as a result of Robinson's powerful storytelling. As Howells writes:

There are continual reminders that the Hill family is not white and a racialized awareness forms the subtext for all the Aboriginal identities here, from her grandparents' generation to her own in these stories without happy endings. Her father's experience of racism at work where he was passed over for promotion as an accountant and before that the memory of her grandfather who failed to secure a veteran's pension after losing a limb fighting in France during World War 1, frames the social problems of Lisa's teenage friends with their failed aspirations, sexual abuse, suicides, and violent deaths.73

Jodey Castricano also notes that Lisamarie's Haisla community is haunted by many more, equally far reaching consequences of colonization:

In . . . Monkey Beach, the contemporary Haisla of Kitamaat Village on the northern coast of British Columbia are haunted by the legacy of European contact. For the Haisla, the 'unspeakable' consists of the real and material effects of the forced relocation of Aboriginal people by the government of Canada pursuant to the Indian Act; the loss of traditional land and water rights; the

90 pollution of the environment by what Robinson's protagonist, Lisamarie Hill, describes as "all the industry in town'. .. ."74

According to Vizenor, "tricky stories are the cure;"75 however, for the first time reader, Robinson's trickster stories in Monkey Beach may seem more like poison than cure. As noted above, they not only lack narrative closure, celebrating ambiguity and uncertainty instead, but also undermine the authority of the grand narratives of Canadian history, specifically with their focus on the abuse of Aboriginal peoples under colonialism. They are, therefore, deeply discomforting for the uninitiated. In addition, the novel flagrantly disobeys the rules of the classic realist text, overtly undermining structural unity, chronological time and genre coherence, the fourth characteristic of trickster writing in Monkey

Beach.

Robinson's novel begins, for example, in present time with the frame story. In this very short segment, Lisamarie is shown with her parents just before she sets out on her journey in search of Jimmy; however, almost immediately, a radical discursive shift occurs in which this form of conventional storytelling is replaced by a new one. In this textual segment, the narrative voice is didactic, sounding like that of a grade school teacher, as readers are instructed to "[fjind a map of British Columbia". . . [and] drag your finger across the map." (4). This tricky, manipulative manoeuvre seduces them into believing that the narrator is about to 'pin down' and make knowable the place - Haisla territory and the village of Kitamaat - that Lisamarie calls home; however, readers could not be further from that truth. Instead, they are given a disorienting, non-linear tutorial that is part history, part geography and part anthropology lesson. In this parody of

91 western forms of knowledge and Eurocentric mapmaking, Robinson gently ridicules Hudson's Bay traders over their inability to understand their Tsimshian guides. The confusion of these early explorers can be traced today in the instability of the place name, 'Kitamaat.' In Robinson's version of geography, western maps do not mean what they say nor say what they mean:

Early in the nineteenth century, Hudson's Bay Traders used Tsimshian guides to show them around, which is when the names began to get confusing. 'Kitamaat' is a Tsimshian word that means people of the falling snow, and that was their name for the main Haisla village. So when the Hudson's Bay traders asked their guides, "hey, what's that village called?' and the Tsimshian guides said, 'Oh, that's Kitamaat. The names got stuck on the official records and the village has been called Kitamaat ever since even though it should really be called Haisla. . . To add to the confusion, when Alcan Aluminum moved into the area in the 1950s, it built a 'city of the future' for the workers and named it Kitimat too, but spelled it differently. (4-5)

Just as suddenly, however, Robinson's pedagogical text switches back to the frame story with Lisamarie's lament, "my brother is lost" (5). Monkey Beach is filled with similar discursive switches, undermining its chronological unity and deeply challenging readers' comfort level. The framing narrative, Lisamarie's journey in search of Jimmy, is constantly interrupted by disorienting flashbacks to

Lisamarie's childhood which in turn are then disrupted by flash forwards to her present. The main storyline also frames a confusing hybrid mixture of didactic texts such as the one above, fragments from dreams and fantasies, dazzling pieces of poetry, segments from histories and legends, self-help books and medical texts as well as recipes for traditional Haisla/Heiltsuk food.

In many of these textual fragments, Robinson seems to be insisting that her readers pay attention to the spurious usefulness of much of western popular

92 and scientific culture, specifically in her parodies of self-help manuals and medical texts. In her bizarre third lesson for contacting the dead, for example, she delights in poking fun at New Age appropriations of Buddhist meditative practices:

Contacting the dead, lesson three. Seeing ghosts is a trick of concentration. You must be able to concentrate on nothing and everything at the same time. You must be both asleep and awake. It should be the only thing on your mind, but you can't want it or expect it to happen. It's very Zen. . . . Begin by becoming aware of your breathing. Then your heartbeat. ... If you have not contacted the dead after several tries, examine your willingness to speak to them. Any fear, doubt or disbelief will hinder your efforts. (212)

This passage performs a trenchant critique of western culture's desire for easy access to its spiritual and cultural other. In addition, it demonstrates at this point in the novel, Lisamarie's fear of and refusal to accept her own spiritual gift.

At the same time, however, it foreshadows her ultimate acknowledgement of that gift in her ecstatic, visionary contact with her own dead, Ma-ma-moo, Jimmy and

Mick, at the end of Monkey Beach.

Her parodies of medical texts, such as the example below, offering instructions for open heart surgery, verge on the grotesque and are profoundly disorienting for readers:

Pull your heart out of your chest. Cut away the tubes that sprout from the top. Place your heart on a table. Take a knife and divide it in half lengthwise. Your heart is hollow. Each side has two chambers. The top chambers receive blood and the bottom chambers pump it out. This requires great strength, so the bottom chambers are larger and more muscular than the top chambers. The right side takes oxygen-poor blood from your body and pumps it into your lungs. The left side takes oxygen- rich blood from your lungs and pumps it back into your body. (191-192)

93 One lesson to be learned from this estranging, didactic text is, perhaps, that western culture places too much emphasis on the truth of medical science with its focus on the human body as a physical object of knowledge while devaluing holistic healing practices which integrate knowledge of a patient's body, mind, soul and environment in the treatment of physical illness. Certainly, the 'scientific' description above of open heart surgery is not only bizarre, as it instructs readers to dissect their own hearts, but also wildly inaccurate involving basic errors in human anatomy.76 As such, mainstream, common-sense notions of truth are interrogated and readers once again are cautioned that western knowledge does not always mean what it says nor say what it means. In addition, these strange segments successfully foreground a major theme of the novel: Ma- ma-oo's heart attack and Lisamarie's subsequent heartbreak over her death and also Mick's. Significantly, Lisamarie must come to terms with the fact that medical science cannot cure Ma-ma-moo's sick heart before she is able to acknowledge, at the end of the novel, her own spiritual gift with its power to mend her broken heart.

The collection of recipes celebrates the splendid postindian mix of

Haisla/Heiltsuk and popular western culture in the novel. A prime example is the recipe for oolichan grease, a traditional food of Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples. The narrator of Monkey Beach describes oolichan grease as "a delicacy you have to grow up eating to love." She instructs the reader to

[fjill a large metal boiler with water. Light the fire pit beneath the boiler and bring the water to a boil. Then add the ripened oolichans and stir slowly until cooked. . . . Bring the water to a

94 boil again and mash the fish into small pieces to release the oil from the flesh. A layer of clear oil will form on the surface. . . [K]eep the boiler covered. Let simmer. . . . With a quick, spiralling motion, add two or three red-hot rocks from an open fire to the vat of oil, which will catch fire and boil. Once the oil has cooled, do a final straining to remover small twigs, water and scales. Pour oil in jars. Keep your fresh oolichan grease refrigerated to prevent it from going bad. (86)

This recipe participates in the mainstream western discourse on cooking but with a difference. It could be written, on one hand, for readers of Canada's

Chatelaine magazine, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who cook in contemporary kitchens, especially with its very prosaic instructions to "bring the water to a boil," "stir slowly until cooked," and "let simmer," On the other hand, with its instructions to "add two or three red-hot rocks from an open fire," it appears to be directed at an Aboriginal audience with some knowledge of living on the land. As such, it is a liminal, in-between text capable not only of disorienting those readers looking for authentic knowledge of the Indigenous other but also, perhaps more importantly, re-inventing and transmitting ancient

Haisla cultural knowledge for Indigenous peoples living in the contemporary world. Along with Marcia Crosby and so many others like her, urban or reserve,

Robinson reiterates and celebrates in Monkey Beach, "the hybrid reality of my life,"77 a balancing act in-between the 'old' and the 'new' which Lane finds wholly successful:

One of the real-world solutions offered by the novel is its rejection of a simplistic and nostalgic return to the [ajboriginal past; rather, the novel asserts the importance of releaming and re-appropriating [Ajboriginal cultural values in relation to, and as part of, the present, without this relational awareness being totally subsumed by present-day values.78

95 As such, this recipe for oolichan grease is symptomatic of the fifth and final trickster strategy in the novel: the interrogation of all terminal creeds and the parodic dismantling of simulations of a coherent and authentic Haisla identity.

Monkey Beach is replete with such tricky tactics from its very first lines where we are drawn into an alien and exotic other world, one in which Lisamarie hears birds speaking outside her bedroom window: "Six crows sit in our greengage tree. Half-awake, I hear them speak to me in Haisla. La'es, they say, La'es, la'es

(1)." Shortly after, we are pushed out again, our desire for cultural authenticity denied. For when Lisamarie tells her mother of this experience, her mother replies, "Clearly a sign, Lisa . . . that you need Prozac" (3). In another surprising and equally parodic cultural reversal, Lisamarie uses the language of contemporary pop psychology to describe her frustrated attempts to communicate with the Haisla spirit world:

God knows what the crows are trying to say. La'es - go down to the bottom of the ocean. . . . The seiner sank? Mom and Dad are in danger if they go on a boat? I should go after him? I used to think that if I could talk to the spirit world, I'd get some answers. Ha bloody ha. I wish the dead would just come out and say what they mean instead of being so passive-aggressive about the whole thing. (17).

On another occasion, after her Uncle Mick dies, Lisamarie cuts her hair in keeping with the Haisla ritual for mourning the dead; however, voyeuristic readers expecting a glimpse into an authentic Indigenous traditional experience are once again confronted with a disorienting and parodic destabilization of the simulation of the indian:

I wasn't sure if there was a ceremony that went along with the hair burning, but just the hair cutting alone made me feel better.

96 Mom said she heard we were supposed to burn it. I didn't know how to start a fire though. ... I stood on the back porch and tried to use a lighter to set handfuls of hair on fire over a metal garbage can. But my hair had been long and thick, so it took forever and burnt my fingers. In the end we fired up the hibachi and threw my hair on the coals. "I can't believe we're barbecuing your hair," Mom said.

"I like mourning," I said. (175-176)

These are three of many occasions in Monkey Beach in which Lisamarie's character is represented as the re-invention of the invention indian. In each,

Robinson firmly resists any valorization or fetishization of either authentic

Indigenous identity or Haisla culture; instead, Lisamarie's subjectivity is emphatically foregrounded as mixedblood and contradictory. She is never defined as either "this or that" but rather as "both and more," as Gerald McMaster so succinctly puts it.79

Trickster strategies such as the above are at the heart of Robinson' storytelling in Monkey Beach. Lisamarie's much loved grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, the matriarch of the family and the one who passes down to Lisamarie traditional

Haisla customs and beliefs is, for example, celebrated as an outrageously transgressive cultural border crasser and postindian warrior of survivance.

Representations of Ma-ma-oo are always grounded in the celebration rather than the mourning of her often flamboyantly mixedblood subjectivity. On one occasion,

Ma-ma-oo, Lisamarie and her Uncle Mick are described watching one of Ma-ma- oo's favourite TV soaps - The Young and the Restless - while the berries are soaking in preparation for the traditional Haisla "salmonberry stew' Ma-ma-oo

intends on making. Ma-ma-oo is represented as not only so involved with the lives of the characters on the TV soaps that she talks to them but also so astute

97 about the vulnerable position of many women in mainstream western culture that she offers wise counsel:

"Lauren," she'd shout at the TV, "leave him, he's no good for you! A/a'. What a crazy woman." "Mother," Mick would say. "It's only TV. Everyone's stupid on TV." "I know, I Know. Wah. She's taking him back." She shook her head sadly." (77)

Another representation of Ma-ma-oo as not only mixedblood but also a parodic re-invention of the invention indian, occurs at the Octopus Beds when

Lisamarie accompanies her grandmother on her yearly pilgrimage there to commemorate the birthday of her late husband, Ba-ba-oo. Ma-ma-oo builds a fire and makes her ritual offerings to him. Readers desiring an experience of authentic Haisla otherness, however, are in for a shock as she feeds the fire with a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a pack of Players cigarettes and a box of Twinkies.

She then instructs Lisamarie to speak to the dead:

Ma-ma-oo brushed her hair back and opened the bottle of Johnnie Walker. She said some words in Haisla that I didn't understand. She passed the bottle over the fire, which popped and sizzled. "This is for Sherman," she said, placing it carefully near the centre of the flames. "You'd better appreciate that. Say hi to your ba-ba-oo, Lisa. "But he's not here," I said. "Yes, he is," she said. "You just can't see him, because he's dead." (78-79)

Ma-ma-oo is Lisamarie's spiritual mentor who teaches her Haisla traditions; however, those traditions are always to be understood as mixedblood and hybrid as is Ma-ma-oo herself. As such, Lisamarie's close association with the Haisla spirit world and her gift of prophecy which Ma-ma-oo helps her

98 understand is never represented as authentic or, indeed, as uncontaminated by western culture. This position is foregrounded and celebrated by the representation of Lisamarie's 'little man,' a presence from the Haisla spirit world who haunts her. By his pattern of appearances in her life, she comes to understand him as a spirit not only prophesying the death of someone she loves

(27) but also attempting to comfort her (132). When she first encounters him he is described as "a little dark man with bright red hair.. . crouching beside [her]"

(19). Next she sees him "sitting crossed-legged" on top of her dresser wearing a

"green plaid shirt [which] jingled with tiny bells as he bowed to [her]" (21). On some occasions, "he came dressed as a leprechaun," on others "he had on his strange cedar tunic with little amulets dangling around his neck and waist. His hair was standing up like a troll doll's, a wild, electric red" (132). Later still, after

Cheese date rapes Lisamarie, the 'little man' appears one last time, once again sitting on her dresser. He has lost many of his human traits:

He dropped to the floor and stared at me. His eyes were red- brown. His eyebrows were mossy green. His face was different this time, was grey-brown and dry like cedar bark. Ants skittered between the cracks in his skin. "If you couldn't stop it," I said, "what good are you?" His eyes glittered as he watched me. "Don't bother coming again," I said. He reached out to touch my hair, just for a second, and then he was gone. (259)

With references to trolls, leprechauns, a jingle shirt, amulets and cedar bark, the description of Lisamarie's 'little man' positions him as an incoherent and hybrid mix of Norwegian folktale, Celtic fairytale, contemporary Indigenous powwow culture and Haisla myth. His refusal to help Lisamarie, however, places

99 him outside of the Judeo Christian tradition within which she has been brought

up. Lisamarie's anger comes from her unconscious desire to believe in and trust

the 'little man' as her guardian angel, a higher being offering not only a clearly

established moral understanding of 'right' and 'wrong' but also the ability to

intervene on her behalf and 'save her.' The irony, of course, is that the novel

details how the Roman Catholic Church in its administration of the Alberni

residential school claimed that moral imperative only to betray the subsequent trust placed in it by community members such as Ma-ma-oo. That betrayal

manifests itself in the suffering endured by Lisamarie's Uncle Mick and the cycle

of dysfunction that taints the lives not only of Aunt Trudy and Uncle Josh but also

all those close to them, both family and friends.

Uncle Mick, despite his status as a survivor of the residential school at

Alberni, BC, is another of the novel's contradictory, mixedblood characters and,

like Ma-ma-oo and Lisamarie herself, also a postindian warrior of survivance;

however, Lisamarie's description of him at a community feast fits the comfortable simulation of American Indian Movement (AIM) activist:

On hot days he wore his message T-shirts: Free Leonard Peltier! Or Columbus: 500 Years of Genocide and Counting. Usually he wore a Levi jacket with Trail of Broken Treaties embroidered in bright red thread on the back. For this feast he'd changed into his buckskin jacket with fringe, his A.I.M. Higher - Join the American Indian Movement! T-shirt and his least ratty pair of jeans. He spotted us and let out a moose call. . . . When I sat on his knee, he let me play with the claw that dangled from his bone choker. He wore it all the time, along with an earring of a silver feather. (56).

This image of Mick is, in Vizenor's words, a fugitive pose and "a cultural concoction of bourgeois nostalgia."80 Like other AIM radicals condemned by

100 Vizenor such as Russell Means or Dennis Banks, in the description above Mick is also trapped in the role of indian victim. Robinson's trickster storytelling, however, relentlessly undermines this portrait. Despite his close identification with AIM, for example, Mick's other great love is Elvis Presley, the icon of

American cultural imperialism. At Mick's funeral, his AIM friend and sometime brother-in-law Barry, shows Lisamarie a photograph of Mick and his wife Cookie taken at their wedding:

He reached into his front shirt pocket and pulled out a battered picture. He handed it to me. A man with a really bad Elvis hairstyle and an Indian woman with a mile-high bouffant were kissing. I squinted, bringing the picture closer. God, I thought, that's Mick. (143)

The photograph shocks not only Lisa but also readers of Monkey Beach who are now forced to recognize Mick's identity as profoundly contradictory. His fugitive pose as a radical, anti-American Native activist has been destabilized, but not for the first time. Earlier in the novel, when Barry and Mick reminisce about their days as AIM activists in Washington occupying the Bureau of Indian

Affairs offices, his friend parodies Mick's fugitive pose: "'Are you still trying to sell that load of crap about being a warrior?' Barry said, elbowing Mick in the ribs.

'Ah, tell the truth. You just joined AIM to get into my sister's pants'"(73). Mick's romantic warrior pose is also shattered for the reader in his cynical response to

Lisamarie's statement that she wants to grow up to be a warrior like him:

I don't want to stay here and be all boring." "Mmm. You might want to think that over." "I want to be a warrior." "A warrior, Huh?" "I do! I don't care what you think." His smile faded. "Fighting didn't get me anything but scars."

101 "But you did things!"

"For all the good it did," he said[.] (96)

Mick's fugitive pose and identity as the authentic indian is further destabilized in the novel by accounts of the traumatic effects he still endures as a consequence of his residential school experience. On one occasion, Lisamarie overhears him having one of his nightmares and is horrified that her stoic and fun-loving uncle is, in fact, a profoundly traumatized and vulnerable man: I heard groans. I pulled the blankets tighter. The moaning was soft at first and, then got louder. ... I poked my head out from under my blanket, worried now. I'd never heard Uncle Mick sound afraid before. I went over and shook Mom's shoulder. . . . Mom's footsteps creaked across the floor, and I heard her waking Mick up. Someone started to sob, deep, achy sounds that couldn't be Mick because nothing made him cry. (108-109)

Despite the parodic destabilization of Mick's "fugitive pose" as the AIM activist in the novel, scenes such as the one above offer a very different image of

Mick giving him great credibility as a political mentor for Lisamarie and a spokesperson for the community on issues such as the abuse of children in residential schools. At breakfast, the morning after his nightmare, he reacts in anger when Lisamarie's Aunt Edith attempts to say grace. The family considers his outburst inappropriate and attempts to silence him. Moments such as this one in the novel compellingly describe how many Indigenous peoples are complicit in their own colonial victimization.

"He's gone crazy," Uncle Geordie said. "Crazy? I'm crazy? You look at your precious church. You look at what they did. You never went to residential school. You can't tell me what I fucking went through and what I didn't." "I wasn't telling you anything!" Aunt Edith said. "I was saying grace!"

102 "You don't get it. You really don't get it. You're buying into a religion that thought the best way to make us white was to torture children -"

"Enough," Mom said, standing in front of Mick. (109-110)

In this instance above, Mick resists the fugitive pose of victimry, taking on instead the powerful identity of a postindian warrior of survivance by breaking the silence and 'speaking truth to power' about his experience at residential school.

As a political mentor to Lisamarie, he teaches her the same lesson. In a wonderful scene, Lisamarie bravely confronts her racist teacher by leading the class in a song that Mick has taught her: "Since I was going to get into trouble anyway, I started singing 'Fuck the Oppressors.' The class cheered, more because of the swearing than anything else, and I was promptly dragged, still singing, to the principal's office" (69). Both Mick and Lisamarie are represented here as postindian warriors of survivance, especially when Mick laminates and frames the subsequent teacher's note, hangs it in the living room, and calls her,

"my little warrior" (69).

Individual identity in Monkey Beach can never be understood in terms of the liberal humanist self; instead, it is culturally and historically contingent and only ever constructed in relationship with both family and community as well as with the ancestral ghosts and spiritual world of the Haisla. As such, the novel has in common with many other contemporary Native texts what Glen Willmott has characterized as "the individual self deconstructed." Contemporary Indigenous subjectivity is to be understood, he writes, as an "ongoing process of interdependencies that each person must map for themselves and share with others."81 Such a destabilized subjectivity is not only a value deeply embedded in

103 ancient Indigenous knowledges but is also the consequence of colonial policies that have uprooted First Nations peoples from their ancestral lands and traditions. As Willmott explains:

The modern heritage for a Native people is not coherent... but radically heterogeneous and conflicted. It is 'jagged'... a 'random puzzle' of 'fragmentary worldviews.' It grows out of not only pre-contact traditions but post-contact processes and products of modernization.82

Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road (2005)

In an interview with Herb Wyile shortly after the publication of Three Day

Road, Joseph Boyden claims a mixedblood identity, one that he argues is typically Canadian: "You know, I'm what I call a 'Heinz 57.' I'm a classic

Canadian in that part of my background is Irish, on one side, and the other side is

Metis, so I'm really a mix of a lot of cultures in Canada."83 His father, a

Lieutenant-Colonel and medical officer serving at the front during WWII, won the

Distinguished Service Order for valour. He died when Boyden was eight years old. Researching and writing about both World Wars is for Boyden "a way ... of keeping in touch with him" as well as his grandfather on his mother's side and an uncle and a great aunt on his father's side, all of whom served on the western front during WWI.84 The third youngest often siblings, he was raised in white suburban Willowdale85 (now part of the City of Toronto) in the 1970s and early

1980s. As such, his childhood was far removed geographically, socio- economically and psychologically from that of his writing colleague, Eden

Robinson.

104 There are, however, a number of parallels between the two authors. The inspiration for much of their fiction, for example, comes from their 'insiders" knowledge of the brutal impact on Indigenous peoples in Canada of such tools of colonialism as the 'Indian Act;' the Native reserve system; and Indian residential schooling. Both writers, however, resist telling stories of victimry, choosing rather to celebrate the continued survivance of First Nations peoples seemingly against all odds. In addition, they resist the urge to be didactic. In conversation with

Bruce Johnstone, Boyden notes, for example, that he approaches issues from the side, from above, from underneath . . . like a wolf." Deploying another metaphor, he insists that a writer must "paint the picture and let the audience come to their own decisions," instead of engaging with political topics directly, as a non-fiction writer might do.86

Although Boyden was not raised there, he shares with Robinson certain experiences of life on the Yez.' His penetrating insights into reserve communities in his fiction come from two sources: his youthful friendships with members of the

Parry Island reserve of the Wasauksing Ojibwa First Nation87 near his family cottage in Georgian Bay and his many visits as an adult to the Mushkegowuk

Cree First Nations of the James Bay region of Northern Ontario. He uses the concept of 'magic' which, like the term survivance, describes the ineffable resilience of the Cree living in the reserves of Kashechewan, Fort Albany,

Attawapiskat, Peguis and Wasauking. At a lecture given at the University of

Alberta in Edmonton in March, 2007, he speaks of that 'magic:

I've been lucky enough to spend a lot of my time on the isolated reserves of the far north of Ontario. I've taught communications

105 on the James Bay coast for Northern College, but my teaching life there ironically became a life of learning. . .. Despite astronomical unemployment and poverty, there is still a magic in Kashechewan and similar communities.

Both writers also share a mixedblood identity living in a borderzone, in- between city and reserve and Indigenous and settler cultures. Boyden travels many times each year along what he calls "the mixed blood highway"89 linking the city of New Orleans in southern USA to the bush country of northern Ontario.

There he visits not only his family at their cottage retreat on Georgian Bay90 but also his Cree friends further north. In conversation with Allan Ryan, he explains that his strong, deeply felt connections to both his large family and his ancestral lands offer him the stability and self-esteem necessary when confronted with the pivotal questions of mixedblood identity: "Who am I in this world? Where am I?"

His confidence writing with a Native voice comes not only from this fully grounded sense of self but also from his passion for storytelling:

As for the Native perspective, I feel comfortable writing that, absolutely. It might not be the Native voice of a Mohawk person or a Sioux, or some other tribe or band, but I've lived long enough to know not to worry about the idea of appropriation, although I am a Metis . . . but my heart, my world view, lies squarely in the Native world, the urban Native world, as much as the Native bush world. I'm very comfortable writing in that voice. . . . I never will say that I'm a spokesperson for a group or a clan, or a culture, but I certainly am a storyteller, and I always want to tell the story right; I want to tell that story with heart.91

Boyden and Robinson also resist the position of 'minority' writer; instead of

'speaking' from the margins, they courageously appropriate the centre, 'writing back' to settler culture in Canada as well as 'writing home' to Indigenous communities. Both entrust their books to multinational publishing companies

106 which seek national and international audiences and bestseller status for their

novels. Three Day Road, like Monkey Beach, is marketed as a commodity to appeal to mainstream readers' comfort with the linear logic of the classic realist

novel. Penguin (Canada), however, has gone to greater lengths than Random

House in packaging Three Day Road to appeal to consumers' orientalist fascination and fear of the indian other.

Boyden's collection of short fiction, Born with a Tooth,92 was published in

2001. His first novel, the brilliantly crafted Three Day Road, followed in 2005.

Many consumers, however, buy Three Day Road as they still do Monkey Beach,

believing that its bestseller status will insure a 'good read.' Reviewer Alexander

Varty airs his initial doubts about the novel for exactly that reason. His first

impression that Three Day Road is replete with recycled stereotypes comes from reading press releases and analysing the book's packaging, all the necessary apparatus that ensures marketing success for the novel. As he writes:

Who among us does not know the story of the soldier returned home from the wars, broken and bitter beyond all repair? Who does not know the First Nations child, brutalized by the religious wardens of the residential school system? Who wouldn't recognize the [N]ative healer, guardian of the forest secrets and all that is feminine and wise? And who does not look away in disgust from the army officer - policeman, or politician - who loves the law more than the men under his control? These are the walking archetypes that populate Boyden's first novel, Three Day Road.93

The novel, from this perspective, appears to contain the 'fusion' ingredients necessary for the production of another highly profitable CanLit commodity in the global market. Boyden's visionary publisher, David Davidar,94 saw in Three Day Road its oxymoronic character: the novel was not only of great

107 literary merit but also had the blockbuster potential necessary to "kick-start"

Penguin (Canada's) "languishing" book program.95 As a result, by offering the first-time novelist a six figure advance, he outbid five other multinational publishers who also saw the same qualities in Boyden's novel as did he and his senior editor, Nicole Winstanley.96 Both her success at selling foreign rights and the large marketing budget Davidar allocated for the novel certainly helped insure its international bestseller status.97 In its publicity and packaging of the novel, however, Penguin (Canada) downplays its exceptional literary quality.98 Instead, the book cover blurbs and images on both the hardback and paperback editions published in Canada to date, which focus on what Varty has called its "cliched figures" and "walking archetypes,"99 demonstrate the company's intention of marketing a profitable 'potboiler' and, therefore, attracting a national and an international mass audience of consumers.

Take, for example, the photograph on the front cover of the Canadian hardback edition, published in April 2005, which portrays a 'generic' Indigenous boy. His name, his tribal affiliation and the date of the photograph100 are unknown. He is depicted wearing western clothes and standing alone with his head down, apparently dejected, outside a white canvas tent. This image strongly suggests that the boy has returned from residential school disturbed because he no longer finds himself at home either in his family or community.

Judging from this dust jacket, then, Varty's initial belief that the novel, at least in large part, centres on the traumatic effects of the residential school system on

Indigenous children is understandable, even if it is wrong. Richard Van Camp's

108 blurb on the back cover also promises the reader similarly seductive "walking archetypes," this time focusing not only on the western epic and the male hero story but also on an orientalist perspective on Aboriginal oral storytelling and legend.

.... Three Day Road is an instant literary classic because it braids the very spirit of Aboriginal, Canadian, and World oral history to tell an epic story of brotherhood, war, and the Windigo spirit that still haunts the world today. Unforgettable and wounding . . .brilliant.

The cover of the first Canadian paperback edition published in 2005, with its pan-Indian symbol of three eagle feathers, is equally at pains to convey the novel's exotic and orientalist difference from Western culture as is the cover of the second paperback edition of May 2008. Here, two paddlers are portrayed canoeing in a primitive, exotic wilderness setting on a river between high rolling hills. This landscape, although beautiful, is very far removed from the lowland bush country of the James Bay region where the novel is, in part, set.

Isabel Allende's overwrought blurb which appears on the back cover of the

2005 Canadian paperback also reinforces Varty's notion that Boyden's text is filled with cliches. Consumers looking for melodrama will be seduced by

Allende's promise that within its pages they will find a hero narrative focusing on love, death and redemption, all within the exotic and sensational setting of WWI.

As she writes:

You will never forget these two young Cree snipers plunged in the horror of the First World War, where the enemy was so close that one could smell him. A beautifully written and haunting story of survival and innocence shattered, of friendship, death, redemption, and love of the land. The three protagonists, Xavier,

109 Elijah, and Niska, will be in my heart forever. Please, please don't miss it!

Penguin (Canada's) publisher Davidar must have been delighted but not at all surprised when a reviewer for Toronto Life magazine hailed Three Day

Road as "CanLit's newest hot property;"101 however, knowing Boyden's novel to be a literary triumph, he would also have recognized that his company's marketing strategy, highlighting its "walking archetypes" and comfortable linear narrative, would soon be seen as bogus once consumers opened its covers, turned its pages and, in trickster fashion, were transformed into active readers.

For, instead of stereotypes and cliches, Three Day Road offers them three fully drawn, compelling main characters and two brilliantly detailed geographic landscapes, one of Moosonee,102 Moose Factory and the Oji-Cree bush country of the James Bay region of Northern Ontario and the other of the trenches and craters of the bombed-out 'killing fields' of WWI France. None of this is easy reading. Having read the novel, Varty completely changes his first impressions:

In an uncanny feat of literary imagination, Joseph Boyden has taken some of the most cliched figures in Canadian fiction and wrapped them up in a tale that's pure magic. . . . [T]here's hardly a paragraph here that doesn't deliver a fresh jolt of surprise and hardly an image that doesn't flare up into a bright mental picture.103

Most importantly, however, Boyden and Robinson as writers share a trickster sensibility. Both are courageous postindian warriors of survivance, their first novels replete with trickster strategies. This section offers a reading of the most important in Three Day Road, many of which are also similar to those found in Monkey Beach.

110 One of the key results of Three Day Road's seductive marketing and subsequent trickster transformation of book-buying consumers into fully-engaged readers is that many become aware for the first time of First Nations histories, legends and perspectives.104 The convincing stories told in Three Day Road serve to forcefully destabilize mainstream Canadian cultural myths and histories and, in doing so, create a powerful thirst for more Indigenous narratives among an increasingly global community of readers. As Ryan comments:

The novel provides a compelling counter-narrative that honours the lives and historical contributions of Aboriginal peoples and offers entry into a world and worldview foreign to many readers but made accessible through the skilful interweaving of stories that resonate with universal human experience. Boyden inserts a Native presence and Native voices into the cultural and literary spaces of the global community. In the process he imagines new spaces for the creation and reception of stories of ongoing Aboriginal experience. 105

Both writers appropriate the 'master's tools' by reworking the classic realist and postmodern novel. They disrupt the realist novel's linear, chronological structure by deploying postmodern strategies which also celebrate

Indigenous perspectives and worldviews. For example, Boyden's storytelling format almost seamlessly blurs the boundaries between time present and time past. Robinson also shows the influence of postmodernism in her experimentation with chronological time; however, she foregrounds its breakdown by using flash forwards and flash backs. In each novel, the many narratives and voices also demonstrate the influence of postmodern creative writing skills learned at university; however, more importantly they honour traditional oral storytelling practices within which both novels are rooted. As a

111 means of linking the various narratives within each novel, Boyden and Robinson strategically deploy the unifying device of a frame story. As in Monkey Beach,

Three Day Road also resists the realist narrative's celebration of closure.

Readers of Three Day Road not only enter a world filled with "Native presence and Native voices" but also, in the process, have their western worldview ideologically interrogated. Boyden's novel seeks to interrogate and deconstruct such modern western binary oppositions as self/other; civilized

/savage; living/dead; human/animal. Consequently, Boyden's novel, like Monkey

Beach, offers the reader a dizzying and defamiliarizing experience of border crossing in a trickster zone where nothing is certain.

Like Monkey Beach's Lisamarie Hill, two of the protagonists in Three Day

Road, Elijah and Xavier are also tricksters, characterized in the novel as shape shifters whose actions not only destabilize the boundaries noted above but also the border between the trickster figure and that of the legendary Cree windigo.

Boyden's novel, like Robinson's, ends with a celebration of traditional trickster values by recognizing the importance of community, kinship ties and the needs of the collective rather than the excessive individualism and greed of modern western culture. In Three Day Road, the metaphor of the windigo is representative of this ideology which began penetrating Indigenous communities on contact with the early Europeans and continues to threaten many Indigenous communities both at the time of Three Day Road and today.

A large measure of the "pure magic" which Varty discovers in his reading of Three Day Road occurs because Boyden has created in the novel an

112 imaginative site whereby the long repressed history of First Nations peoples106 vibrantly resurfaces, one that celebrates the extraordinary valour of Native soldiers on the western front during WWI. Before reading the novel, few

Canadians, Aboriginal or not, knew of their contribution to a war that was a pivotal event in the transformation of Canada from dependent colony to nation state. Boyden's passion for his role as excavator of that long buried history and his sense of the unjust treatment of these forgotten warriors is evident in his conversation with Wyile:

I think it's one of the greatest overlooked parts of Canadian history that so many of us know nothing about and that shocked and amazed me, especially as I read more and more about how many Natives volunteered. . . . Often whole reserves, all of the able bodied men on reserves, went off to war. Native men volunteered at far higher rates than any other group, far higher, and I had to wonder why, because they were not being treated well by the Canadian government.107

Boyden, having researched the issue thoroughly, understands just how badly Native veterans were treated on their return from war:

Canada developed the best pension plan for soldiers, after World War I, and all the veterans who returned home got it except for the Native soldiers, who didn't get any compensation whatsoever. They were made a lot of promises, too, huge promises of land, of the vote, of freedom, and those promises all disappeared immediately on their return home. It's a very sad part of our history, and maybe it's part of our history that we choose not to try to remember because Canadians aren't known across the world as being unfair people. We like to think of ourselves as very fair-minded, and yet our treatment of Native soldiers returning home from World War I and World War II and Korea was horrendous.108

Always subtle and never didactic, Boyden only leaves traces in his novel of what the future may hold for Xavier on his return from war. In a scene at a

113 French bar, for example, the man who the two friends believe to be the famous

Ojibwa sniper, Francis Peghamagabow,109 speaks that truth to Xavier and Elijah while the three talk over a bottle of wine:

You know that the wemistikoshiw [white men] do not care to believe us when they hear about our kills in the field. . . . We do the nasty work for them and if we return home we will be treated like pieces of shit once more. But while we are here we might as well do what we are good at.110

According to Louis Owens, counter-narratives such as those in Boyden's novel which relate the story of Native engagement in WW1 are characteristic of trickster writing most notably because they challenge the authoritative history, in this case that of Canada's rise from colony to nationhood in the aftermath of

WW1.111 As Peghamagabow warns, no matter their valour on the battlefield,

Native veterans returned home to Canada to discover that they were not citizens of this emerging nation state. In another trickster move, Three Day Road dismantles the reified role of the university historian, turning it over to an oxymoronic union between a gifted storyteller and a late capitalist publishing conglomerate. This seemingly unnatural marriage is, however, exceedingly fertile, producing a massive new readership for First Nations' histories. Although

Boyden never 'preaches,' the majority of readers finish his novel with a very different understanding of the predicament of First Nations peoples in Canada, specifically the debilitating impact of colonization on their communities not only in the first decades of the last century but also now. For the story of Canada's forgotten WWI Native warriors, no longer repressed, returns to haunt our national conscience today.

114 Boyden, in conversation with Noah Richler, explains how he reworked the first draft in order to foreground an Indigenous perspective and worldview:

"When I wrote the first draft of Three Day Road, I told the story in a linear chronological way. It began with two young Cree canoeing, going through a fire, joining the army, and eventually going overseas - and it was clear to me that it wasn't working. Something was missing. Basically, I was telling a [N]ative story in a Western way. I was applying the form of one worldview onto the content of another. And so I bent the story like a hoop. I began it near the end, and made my way back, full circle. And it works far better now, in my opinion."112

Boyden's act of appropriating and reworking the genre of the classic realist novel demonstrates how, in trickster fashion, as Catherine Hall has noted,

"the tools of the oppressors [are] put to new uses."113 This nicely subversive act is applauded by Richler, who writes of Three Day Road: "The novel, making new friends, puts them to decent use. In the hands of [Aboriginals it once helped oppress, it has offered the values of the Myth World new life."114

Another key trickster strategy deployed by Boyden is to disrupt the novel's linear narrative with a circular structure; to do so, he makes use of a frame story to which are linked other stories. Ryan, in conversation with Boyden, notes that one of the author's favourite storytelling strategies is to tell stories within stories."

The writer explains this technique further:

It's like that Matchoiska doll, you open it up and there's another one in it, and you open it up, and there's another, and another. But mine's almost like the inverse of the Matchoiska doll: it's a small story; you open it up, and there's a bigger story, and you open that up, and there's an even bigger story.115

Boyden's "small story," the pivotal frame narrative, introduces readers at the beginning of the novel to two storytelling voices; the first is that of the young

115 Cree warrior, Xavier Bird, and the second that of his aunt Niska, both a shamanistic healer and one of the last of the Oji-Cree116 to live traditionally off the land. The frame story focuses on Niska's and Xavier's three-day journey home after he returns from war. It centres, in part, on mixed-up identities, the most important being the confusion over which of the two warriors returns from war. Niska expects to greet Elijah, believing Xavier to be one of the war dead.

Instead, Xavier arrives not only physically, emotionally and spiritually disabled but also addicted to morphine. Their journey home involves great suffering as

Xavier, near death, must also endure a tortured withdrawal from the drug; however, a form of redemption comes in Niska's reliance on ancestral

Indigenous spiritual practices. Boyden explains to Wyile how her gift of storytelling also becomes a source of healing:

. . . [Rjeally this is just a novel of two people telling stories. It's all it simply is, Niska realizing she has no medicine to give Xavier, who is very close to death, other than feeding him the stories of her life. She remembers her father told her that when in danger, when in trouble, when sick, remember who you are, remember where you come from. There is real strength in that. There is no question this is a war novel, but just as importantly this is a novel about the healing power and love of family and how that can save you . . . .117

Niska's and Xavier's narratives are intricately woven into the frame story, voiced as memories of their past intertwined with those from Xavier's best friend

Elijah Weesageechak. Threaded throughout them are re-imaginings of the traditional Oji-Cree legend of the windigo.118 For example, as part of her therapeutic storytelling, Niska tells Xavier of her earliest memory of the windigo, horrifying her community when her people were close to starvation. She

116 remembers watching with the other children as two of its members become infected by its cannibalistic hunger:

Micah's wife and baby were turning windigo. The children in camp stopped sleeping, cried in fear, no longer felt their hunger. We'd grown up on stories of the windigo that our parents fed us over winter fires, of people who eat other people's flesh and grow into wild beasts twenty feet tall whose hunger can be satisfied only by more human flesh and then the hunger turns worse. (41)

Through the "wife's growls and mad language," Niska also remembers hearing the whispering of the adults as they decide to call upon her father for help:

They talked of my father's reputation as a windigo killer, of how as a young man he became a hookimaw after killing a family of them who roamed near where we trapped, a family who had once been part of the caribou clan but had turned one hard winter and began preying on the camps of unsuspecting Cree. "He must kill windigos once again," the adults whispered to one another. "We are too weak already and Micah's woman's madness can surely be spread in these bad times." My father knew this too, and made preparations to act as his own father had taught him. (41)

Niska inherits her spiritual gift as shaman and windigo killer from her father. She acknowledges, however, that "I am the second to last in a long line of windigo killers. There is still one more" (44). Her nephew, Xavier, is the last and eventually must kill his best friend, Elijah, who turns windigo near the novel's end.

In Three Day Road, the legend of the cannibalistic monster appears to function as a metaphor for some of the worst excesses of modern western culture, specifically the cult of individualism accompanied by materialistic greed.

Citing the work of Jack Forbes and Deborah Root, Cynthia Sugars in her

117 discussion of Indigenous literature describes the "cannibalizing and psychotic

'wetiko [windigo] sickness' that plagues Western society [as] a condition marked by greed, excessive consumption, violence and egotism . . . which was visited on

Native peoples at the time of colonization, infecting and steadily debilitating their descendents." She adds that "the story of the [windigo] is used as a metaphor for the violence of imperialism and the sickness at the heart of the modern capitalist world." For Neal McLeod, the dark spirit of the windigo is characterized by a disproportionate concern for the individual at the expense of the community:

Wihtikow [windigo] consumes other beings. Wihtikow turns on others in its society, concerned only with its own well-being. The needs of the individual are pressed forward and the needs of the collective are suppressed. Some people believe that the wihtikow really exists. But for me, wihtikow is also a powerful metaphor for greed, the attempt to swallow the light from the sky of the world. . . . In contemporary Cree, wihtikowipayi means "to become a wihtikow," and by metaphor means "to become greedy." Old stories find new places.119

In addition, for Niska a poignant sadness and loneliness also characterize the windigo who, because of an overweening narcissism and greed, must be ostracized from kin and community. As she explains:

I realized. . . that sadness lay at the heart of the windigo, a sadness so pure that it shrivelled the human heart and let something else grow in its place. To know you have desecrated the ones you love, that you have done something so damning out of a greed for life that you have been exiled from your people forever is a hard meal to swallow, much harder to swallow than the first bite of human flesh. (242)

The dark shadow of the windigo haunts the stories in Three Day Road.

For example, Niska tells how her ancestors were infected by an insatiable

118 windigo lust in their relationship with the early European traders, the consequences of which were dire:

The Hudson Bay Company had instilled in the Cree a greed for furs that nearly wiped out the animals, and because of this the time finally came when even the most experienced of the bush men and women were faced with the decision to move to the reserve or die of hunger. (83)

The windigo also casts its shadow over stories of residential schooling in

Three Day Road. Armand Garnet Ruffo argues that the metaphor of the windigo can best "express the damage wrought on Natives through the Residential

School experience" especially because windigo cannibalism is understood as a disease that not only eats away at the bodies and souls of its victims but also causes others within the community to be infected and to turn windigo as well.120

In her community, as Niska recalls, the nuns were understood "to work their spells" on the children. Subjected to an alien white culture with many, like

Elijah,121 traumatized by physical and sexual abuse, they returned to their communities utterly changed. Niska remembers that "[wjhen the children came back, they were different, speaking in the wemistikoshiw language, talking back to their parents, fighting and hitting one another, crying in the middle of the night for reasons they could not explain" (84). Elijah spent many years there compared with Xavier's brief stay; as a result, he came away forever poisoned by the windigo spirit of his school which shaped his character in ways that were antithetical to traditional Oji-Cree teachings. Boyden explains the dangerous and far reaching impact of the residential schools on Indigenous children generally and Elijah specifically:

119 I didn't want the residential school to be a huge black cloud over this novel. I wanted to present it in the way it was, as an insidious kind of institution. Xavier ends up getting through the war- not unscathed, by any means, in fact really damaged - but still manages to get through because he has a grounding in who he is and where he comes from, whereas Elijah is raised in the residential school and that in part feeds into what ends up happening to him and what he ends up doing and, ultimately, to his fate.12?

Niska's storytelling also returns to her passionate yet doomed relationship with a white trapper, a Frenchman, who seduces and then brutally rapes her in a ghastly setting: an altar in a church in Moose Factory.123 Niska's tortured affair with the trapper stands as a metaphor for the trust and generosity of the Cree towards the wemistikoshiw who, in turn, plundered their ancestral lands and resources while alienating them from their ancient cultures and spirituality.

Significantly, in Niska's version of this colonial crime, she compares the greed of the wemistikoshiw to a form of cannibalistic hunger similar to that of the windigo:

"The Cree are a generous people. Like forest ticks the wemistikoshiw grabbed on to us, growing fatter by the season, until the day came when suddenly it was we who answered to them" (45).

Xavier's storytelling on the journey home, like Niska's, is also intricately woven into the frame story, surfacing as memories from his past through a morphine haze. They include experiences from his and Elijah's childhood. He remembers, for example, how his aunt taught him to hunt and how he in turn taught Elijah. Many of Xavier's most compelling stories, however, draw readers into the battlefields of WWI France and Belgium. Here a perverse world is drawn where the monstrous appetite for power among the European nation states

120 culminates in the willing cannibalization of their young. Both Xavier and Elijah are witness to this senseless barbarism as is Niska who had visions foreshadowing these atrocities, ones which turned ordinary men into windigos. As she tells

Xavier,

In my early visions, numbers of men, higher than any of us could count, were cut down. They lived in the mud like rats and lived only to think of new ways to kill one another. No one is safe in such times, not even the Cree of Mushkegowuk. War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth. (45)

Xavier's memories also focus heavily on the two friends' increasing prestige as Canadian army snipers and on Xavier's own very ambivalent feelings about their role. He returns again and again to memories of his friend, focusing on Elijah's bizarre behaviour, notably his obsessive appetite for both killing and scalping Germans, a practice which provides him with trophies of his kill:

Elijah's gone missing. I am the only one to notice. He slipped away to try and find the Frenchmen he met a year ago. They are the ones who told him about keeping trophies of the enemy, but his madness is all his own. He goes to meet them and show his skill as a hunter. All he carries now in his pack are trophies of the dead. He collects them like pelts. His pack is full. Elijah seems to have no more need for food. He is thin and hard like a rope. He is a shadow that slips in and out of the darkness. He is someone I no longer know. (285)

Elijah's actions here are symptomatic of the windigo sickness that first infected him in residential school and now proves fatal to him. Xavier reluctantly comes to terms with the fact that "Elijah is mad. The acts he does will bring bad luck onto all of us." (291) Consequently, Xavier takes up his role as the last of the windigo killers. He remembers how it happened:

Elijah is on his back. ... I straddle him once more and place the rifle across his throat. ... I press down harder. Elijah's eyes

121 shine with tears. His face grows a deep red. He tries to whisper words to me but I know I cannot allow Elijah to speak them. I must finish this. I have become what you are, Niska. (340)

After Elijah dies, Xavier empties his friend's pockets, taking with him among other possessions, his medicine bundle, his ID and his medal.

When Xavier finally returns home to the bush with Niska at the end of the novel, the reader knows little about his future other than that he survives, certainly physically and perhaps psychologically disabled. Boyden's reworking of the classic realist novel resists its comfortable sense of narrative closure. Instead of focusing on the individual hero typical of the genre, Three Day Road concludes by acknowledging ancient Indigenous trickster knowledges which have the power to overcome the windigo sickness brought on by excessive individualism and greed. As such, the ending gestures not only toward more stories but also to a celebration of the relationships and communities informed by the trickster spirit which make those stories possible. Such relationships are essential to the health of Indigenous cultures. They exist, as Thomas King tells us, "between humans and the animals, . . . between humans and the land, and .

. . between reality and imagination. A most important relationship in Native cultures is the relationship which humans share with each other, a relationship which is embodied within the idea of community.124 At the end of Three Day

Road, on the second last night of their voyage and during their last time in the matatosowin, Niska experiences visions of that future community:

Children. I see children. They are happy and play games by the bank. . . . They are two boys, naked, their brown backs to me as they throw little stones into the water. Their hair is long in the old way and is braided with strips of red cloth. But this isn't the past.

122 It is what's still to come. . . . The matatosowin is filled with this good vision. . . . Soon a lightness that I've not felt since I was young tells me that we're finished. We crawl out. (350)

Trickster strategies in Three Day Road play another vital part in the education of its massive readership by interrogating many of western culture's most important ideological values. While often horrifying, Niska's and Xavier's stories are always compelling, a necessary factor because Three Day Road is neither the 'easy read' nor melodrama its publisher promises. Instead of a comfortable experience with a realist novel, readers discover an estranging encounter with non-chronological concepts of time and history. As a result of its non-linear structure and the constant shifting between the present and the past, they must stay alert in order to engage fully with the two storytelling voices. For

Boyden, this blurring of boundaries is of prime importance as it represents for him an Indigenous worldview. He explains these ideas on time and history to

Wyile:"... I think history is a fluid thing. Especially with Native people, the past is always a part of the present as well as the future. What you do now is going to affect your future, but what you've done in the past is also going to affect your future.125

The concept of the 'three day road,' for example, in the title and throughout the novel, also interrogates 'commonsense' mainstream cultural norms, in this case the notion of life and death as fixed and finite. Instead, it acknowledges the importance of understanding both in terms of a liminal space in which the journey rather than the arrival is foregrounded. Xavier, for example, describes a dying soldier's moans as a "secret language," believing him to be

123 "speaking with the spirit who will take him on the three-day road" (90). The western front during WWI is often portrayed not only as a borderzone between life and death but also as one inhabited by ghosts. For example, on one occasion

Elijah excitedly describes himself to Xavier as a "ghost man" having succeeded in creeping up behind three Germans, knifing them in the throat, and scalping them (212). On another, Xavier confuses Elijah with a ghost. In despair after so many from his battalion have been killed, especially his beloved Sergeant

McCaan, he is unable to distinguish between life and death.

Late that night I am awakened by Elijah's ghost. He is so thin that I think I can almost see through him. Elijah laughs and talks but I can't make out what he's saying. I turn away from him to go back to sleep and Elijah pushes at me. I turn back and see that it really is him. (293)

As Elijah becomes more and more obsessed with killing and his body increasingly addicted to morphine, a windigo medicine that devours his body and his soul, he slowly appears to be dying from within according to Xavier's description of him: "The light of day hurts his eyes, he tells me. He eats very little.

He does not shit. He drinks water and tea with lots of sugar and whiles away his time until we are sent back into the front line." In addition, his left foot is blackened and "stinks of rot" (251).

Finally, it is Xavier who appears as a ghostly apparition to Niska when he disembarks from the train desperately ill on his return from war:

When he is off the steps I begin to back away, thinking it is not him. He looks up and I see his face, thin and pale, high cheek bones, and ears sticking out from behind his hat. I stumble a little, the blood rushing away from my head. The ghost of my nephew looks at me. (6)

124 The frame story which charts Niska's and Xavier's journey home, however, represents the 'three-day road' in reverse. The two travel the same waters as did Xavier and Elijah when the young warriors canoed toward the wemistikoshiw, the white-man's civilization, unknowingly paddling closer and closer to both physical and mental illness as well as death in the 'killing fields' of the western front. Niska and Xavier, on the other hand, travel away from that traumatic encounter. On their trip home, with Xavier close to death, broken in body and soul as a result of his war-time experiences, Niska provides him with spiritual regeneration and healing by means of storytelling and traditional Oji-

Cree medicines. Niska explains how, through the ritual of the matatosowin or sweat lodge, she shares Xavier's sickness which crosses the boundary of his body and enters hers, thus helping to alleviate it:

The pain that Nephew has carried inside of himself for so long is leaving his body and swirling around in this place. It swooshes and screams and scratches at me until I think I am bleeding. It tries to enter me, first through my mouth.... It slips down my breasts, my stomach, my thighs, a tongue of fire, searching. ... I want to be burned up by the heat. (348-349)

Niska's story of Xavier's road to regeneration also focuses on Elijah who returns as a ghost once more. Niska describes how his spirit enters the matatosowin thus allowing Xavier to seek ponenimin or forgiveness from him.

Neither living nor dead, Elijah is embraced by Niska, underlining the importance of the Oji-Cree spiritual belief in relationships.

As noted above, in Three Day Road ghosts continually haunt both the battlefields of the western front during WW1 and the bush country of northern

Ontario. In this sense, then, the novel may be read as an Indigenous ghost story;

125 however, it may also be read through the specific lens of the Ghost Dance, the religion of the Plains people in the late 1880s. A central tenet of that religion was the regeneration and renewal of Native American culture through the ritual of the

Ghost Dance in which benevolent ancestral spirits from the past would revisit the present. Such a reading would allow us to understand Three Day Road as a site where the ancestral spirits of Xavier and Elijah return from the dead and, as

Vizenor has written in a different context, "dance as tricksters" in a "literary ghost dance." Three Day Road may, as such, be included in Vizenor's celebration of

Native American novels written in English by "crossblood writers in cities" which form "a literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance."126

By focusing on the perspectives of Indigenous soldiers during WWI, as noted above, the novel offers a voice to those previously silenced by many mainstream histories of that war.127 As a result, Xavier's stories of the barbaric windigo darkness that hovers over the wemistikoshiw's western front, compared with those which focus on his life with Niska on their ancestral Oji-Cree lands prior to signing up, continually interrogate the commonsense notion of the West as the civilized 'self compared to the savage, Indigenous 'other.' Both when training in southern Ontario and at the front, Xavier and Elijah continually cross cultural boundaries occupying a mixedblood liminal space between self and other that mark them as tricksters.

Xavier, for the most part, maintains his Oji-Cree difference from other soldiers as well as from Elijah, a strategy that eventually saves him from Elijah's fate. He admits, for instance, that "I don't have the killing instinct for men" that

126 other soldiers have. In addition and unlike so many others, "I cannot grow accustomed to" the smell of "bodies rotting" (128). Significantly, when Sergeant

McCaan is killed and Corporal Thompson mortally wounded, Xavier performs an

Oji-Cree spiritual ceremony:

I grieve in my own way for my two friends, burn sprigs of dried grass that I find along the roads that lead in and out of this place. The prayers sent up on the smoke seem so small. McCaan and Thompson were the ones who anchored the company. ... I realize that I have come to think of them as my relations. (294)

A telling indication of the possibility of an existence between the two cultures for Xavier, however, occurs when he recognizes as he grieves for

McCaan and Thompson that "I have come to think of them as my relations"

(294). The number 'three' also signifies a connection rather than opposition between 'self and 'other' in certain instances; although, at first, Xavier can only understand the wemistikoshiw obsession with the number as completely foreign to him and his cultural values:

It seems that everything that the wemistikoshiw do is in threes. . . . They've even divided their army into three sections, the infantry, the artillery and the cavalry. . . . This whole love for that number has trickled down from the ones who give orders to the ones who take them. ... As soon as we are moved from the lines for rest, we follow the same pattern. Food, then rest, then women. . .. Sometimes I attend the prayers that the wemistikoshiw meet for and in these prayers they invoke three manitous, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (227)

Xavier soon acknowledges, however, that he too has begun to count in

'threes.' For example, he talks of how Elijah taught him, "when sniping at night to look for the flare of the match in the Hun's trench. He showed me how to focus in on the match and to fire after slowly counting to three." In this case, 'three'

127 applies to the number of cigarettes that can be lit by one match before a shot is

fired at an enemy target. By then, "the sniper is given enough time to fire before

the unlucky third soldier inhales the smoke" (227). In this instance, 'three' acts

both as a metaphor for the integration of Oji-Cree marksmanship skills with those

of the Canadian artillery and the crossing of borders between Cree and western

culture. Earlier in the novel, the number 'three' signifies a similar integration and

border crossing. As the Southern Ontario Rifles, Elijah's and Xavier's battalion,

begins its training with the 48th Highlanders, Elijah suggests to a British officer that he hold a competition to determine who is the best among the following three

marksmen: a member of the 48th Highlanders or two members of the Southern

Ontario Battalion, specifically either Elijah or Xavier. Many times in the northern

bush, Elijah and Xavier have vied with each other over this game, one that

involves shooting a match from a great distance so accurately that it lights up.

Neither has ever won. For this competition, there are three matches for each of

the three snipers. Each of them has three tries. For Xavier, winning this

competition is vital to his sense of himself as part of his army community: "If I can

do this I will no longer be so much the outsider. I will gain respect." He is the only

one who manages to light the match. His battalion rejoices:

Men shout once again and rush on the field. I am surrounded by arms reaching out to me and men talking into my face. The ones in my section, Gilberto and Graves and Grey Eyes and Sean Patrick and Elijah, grab me and lift me above their heads. I look down at the sea of men around me and notice the officers pointing to me and talking. ... It strikes me then. None of these who are here today can call me a useless bush Indian ever again. They may not say it out loud, but they know now that I have something special. (100)

128 His skills as an Oji-Cree hunter and trapper gain him recognition in this alien soldiers' culture. Certainly for that moment, Xavier finds comfort occupying a liminal trickster space in-between the northern Oji-Cree bush country and the

Canadian artillery. Recognizing that the wemistikoshiw, "must have some magic in their number three," Xavier begins to realize that the number three offers a connection between the two worlds, "because as Niska taught him, "we will all walk the three-day road."

Elijah, however, has a much easier time inhabiting the liminal space between Oji-Cree and wemistikoshiw cultures. His ability to live in two worlds, manipulating both to his own advantage, accords him the status of trickster.

Xavier recognizes, for example, his "trickster grin [which] he's flashed since he was a boy."(98) His experience at residential school taught him to speak the

'enemy's language' not only fluently but also as a tool of subversion. As Xavier remembers:as

Since we were boys, Elijah has always had a gift for wemistikoshiw language. Once the nuns taught him to speak English, they couldn't stop him and soon learned to regret that they ever had. In school, it got so that Elijah learned to talk his way out of everything, gave great long speeches so that his words snaked themselves like vines around the nuns until they could no longer move, just shake their heads hopelessly at the pretty little boy who could speak their tongue like one of their bishops. (54)

On joining up, Elijah uses his residential school English to full advantage, as Xavier somewhat resentfully notes:

This is all a game to him. Elijah can even out talk the officers with his nun's English and his quick thinking. The others in our section are drawn to him and his endless stories. I am forced by my poor

129 English to sit back and watch it all happen, to see how he wins them over, while I become more invisible." (60)

Elijah's trickster identity is also displayed in his extraordinary prowess at mimicking the accents not only of the ordinary soldiers but also of the officers.

Corporal Thompson, on one occasion, claims in astonishment that "[he does] a better British accent than a Brit." According to Xavier, "speaking like a lord" began as a joke but now it "[mjakes him feel respectable .... I've got my animal manitous. Elijah's got his voices." Elijah eventually loses the ability to straddle the boundaries between cultures, becoming too infected by the culture of the battlefield where the western cannibalistic windigo reigns. The last vestige of Oji-

Cree culture, most of which he lost at residential school, now disappears and

Elijah turns windigo. As his friend remarks, "He says he couldn't speak in his old voice even if he wanted to now. It's gone somewhere far away" (127).

Elijah and Xavier occupy liminal spaces not only between self and other and the living and the dead but also between the world of humans and that of animals and birds. During their training for nightly patrols with their battalion in southern Ontario, for instance, Xavier celebrates the fact that, because of his extraordinary skills as a hunter, he is able to associate himself and Elijah with night time predators from the animal world. Lieutenant Breech draws the same conclusion but in a derogatory fashion. Seen through his cultural lens, their prowess is debased because it is rooted in their savage, animal nature:

McCaan has taken notice of how good we are at this and makes me feel a little important. . . . The others can't keep up with Elijah, though. In the darkness I feel that Elijah and I are owls or wolves. We have done many night hunts over the years. McCaan reports our talent to Lieutenant Breech. Elijah tells me that Breech says it

130 is our Indian blood, that our blood is closer to that of an animal than that of a man. (92)

Xavier also straddles the boundaries between humans and birds. For

example, both their names as well as their actions are associated with those of

birds. In Elijah's case, Xavier discusses the link between Elijah's name and that

of the grey jay called Weesageechak, the Cree trickster.

His Cree name is Weesageechak. But that is something he doesn't share with the wemistikoshiw. Whiskeyjack is how they say his name, make it their own. . . . Weesageechak is the trickster, the one who takes different forms at will. Hudson Bay company traders could never pronounce it with their thick tongues. But they saw the trickster in Whiskeyjack, the grey jay that loves to hear his own voice, is bold enough to steal food from their hands when they are not watching. (142-143)

Here Xavier implicitly links Elijah with Weesageechak, the Cree trickster, however, Xavier is also associated with a bird in such a manner that he too may be understood as a shape shifting, dancing trickster. For example, in one of

Niska's stories of Xavier as a young boy learning how to hunt on his own, he stumbles upon a circle of dancing grouse, with a large male in the middle. All are involved in an elaborate mating ritual. Xavier immediately links these birds with his own people and their ceremonies. Niska recalls the extraordinary occasion:

As you watched their pattern reminded you of something else you'd seen before. . . .Your own people gathering in summer to celebrate an easy season, a tradition they carried on despite the stern words of the wemistikoshiw church. You stared at these birds dancing in the snow, the sunlight reflecting in it in thousands of tiny ice crystals. You saw in their movement, the movement of your own people as they travelled from winter to summer to winter again, dancing through the years. .. . And so, Nephew, you watched these birds dance in their circle and you realized how much we are alike. (331)

131 When Xavier returns to camp, he teaches its members how to dance in circles like the grouse; as a result, he is given the name, Little Bird Dancer:

You imitated the big grouse and everyone lifted their arms and moved around the circle and then you raised your arms and called out again and we all touched our fingertips above our heads and moved the other way, you rustling your arms like feathered wings and everyone laughing. And that is when I said, "From now on we call you Little Bird Dancer," and everyone agreed it was a very good name for you. (334)

While occupying a mixedblood space in-between cultures, Xavier manages for the most part to stay grounded in Oji-Cree traditions; however, there are suggestions throughout the novel that he too is becoming tainted by the dark spirit of the western windigo, specifically in his own desire for personal glory and his subsequent resentment over Elijah's growing prestige among his fellow soldiers. Xavier's bitterness is foregrounded, for instance, in his reaction to the following incident: during a night time raid that goes horribly wrong, Elijah actually retreats instead of participating in the attack on enemy trenches and is wounded in the process. Xavier rescues him only to witness Elijah's deception as he basks in ill-gotten glory while his own important role is overlooked:

A bullet had cut through Elijah's wool tunic and grazed his other arm, leaving a little burn mark. Elijah shows off the hole in his uniform to the others. A bullet grazed his cheek so that it still stings, he says. But again he was lucky. I escaped with nothing. There's talk of a medal for Elijah for rushing the nest. Nothing mentioned of me finishing things up for him out there. (139)

Xavier also begins to lose his anchor in Oji-Cree spirituality. As Elijah's

killing sprees continue, he increasingly feels complicit by remaining silent. He

confesses that "[t]he others watch Elijah in action, say[ing] that he is brave, a

warrior of the highest order. To me he is mad. I am the only one who knows his

132 secrets, and Elijah has turned into something invincible, something inhuman.

Sometimes, though, I feel as if I'm going mad too" (321). Hoping for spiritual cleansing as well as guidance, he builds a sweat lodge and engages in its ritual, receiving the knowledge that he must fulfill his destiny by killing his friend (298) but not the necessary purification that he craves (320).

Confusion over the identity of the two friends also suggests that Xavier has become infected by the windigo illness that has poisoned Elijah. Despite the fact that Xavier performs the sacred ritual of windigo killer and, thereby, stays grounded in Oji-Cree spiritual rituals, the first mix-up occurs because he follows the pattern of his friend's windigo killings by pocketing Elijah's possessions, including his medal and ID, as trophies of his kill. (340). To his horror, as a result,

Xavier is treated like a hero by the Canadian and British military as well as the medical staff in the English hospital where he is sent for treatment.

The second confusion over identity occurs when Niska believes Xavier to be Elijah on first seeing him at the train station in Moosonee. Such border crossing between identities may be understood as another form of trickster shape shifting, one in which the two friends' identities are not discrete but in many ways very similar. While Elijah actually turns windigo, Xavier is also tainted by the disease as a result of his experience on the western front. In addition, like

Elijah, he also suffers from a form of shell shock and, like Elijah, self-medicates with morphine, the wemistikoshiw medicine that cannibalizes the bodies and souls of those who use it. On the three day journey home, the story comes full circle and Niska performs her role as windigo killer one last time. Through her

133 storytelling and the traditional healing practice of the sweat lodge, she cures

Xavier of his windigo addiction, healing and purifying his embattled soul in the process. Despite her initial fears for Xavier's life and her own worry that her traditional medicines lack the power to cure her nephew, Niska also knows that

Xavier's journey will come full circle and that he will survive:

You saw for the first time the circle. Even though you could not yet express it in words, you understood the seasons, the tepee, the shaking tent, the wigwam, the fire circle, the matatosowin. You saw all of life is the circle, and realized that you always come back, in one way or another, to where you have begun before. (331)

Conclusion

Despite ambiguity and confusion over the identities of Elijah and Xavier in

Boyden's novel, where characteristics of one bleed into the other, both tricksters, nevertheless, demonstrate two different sides of the ancient mythic figure. As

Mark Shackleton argues, contemporary Indigenous storytelling recognizes the trickster not only as a prankster and fool but also as a cultural hero. Both aspects play an important educational role, he notes, as "an anarchic . . . rule breaker and a conventional norm reminder. . . ." Accordingly, Elijah's role as trickster turned windigo may be understood as teaching by the example: "Don't do as the

Trickster did or you'll end up in a mess."128 Xavier's role as a trickster, windigo killer and cultural hero offers an instance of teaching by example by upholding community values with extraordinary valour and despite all odds. In Monkey

Beach, Lisamarie joins Xavier in this role. All three tricksters function in these two dark novels by teaching trickster knowledges which, according to Vizenor,

134 embody both comedic and tragic visions. On the one hand, Monkey Beach and

Three Day Road celebrate the comedic regeneration of kinship ties and community and are examples of what Vizenor calls "tribal stories [which] are communal in tone." On the other hand, they are also tragic because, as he writes, 'tragic scenes are as much a source of wisdom as chance and the comic in trickster conversations."129

135 CHAPTER 4

"Writing Voices Speaking"1: Trickster at Serious Play in Indigenous Poetry

[T]he memorable world is one of play, serious play, indeed, but play, and a language game. . . . The new world, the trickster world, is struggling to find a place on the printed page.2 Gerald Vizenor

No voice arises from one person. I know that I write out of a place, a centre, that is greater than what I am alone or could be. My work is filled with the voices of other people. It crosses boundaries of time and space, of ways of knowing, of what it means to be human.3 Kimberly Blaeser

The trickster... is a communal sign, a comic discourse, and does not represent aesthetic modernism in narratives or the glorification of isolated individualism. ... In trickster narratives the listeners and readers imagine their liberation . . .4 Gerald Vizenor

Introduction

Unlike the novels discussed in the previous chapter, Native poetry in

Canada has received neither national nor international acclaim, for the most part remaining on the margins of Canadian and world literatures;5 however, very gradually Indigenous poets are now being acknowledged and their work increasingly valued by this country's mainstream cultural institutions. High school and university English Literature departments6 have begun introducing some

Indigenous poetry as well as fiction to their students7 and, although small in number, a few Native poets are, at last, winning high profile literary awards.8 At

136 the same time, a shift is taking place in the field of Native literature. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, Indigenous writers were more likely than not to be found 'writing back' often in anger to the colonial centre, interrogating and challenging those institutions, policies and grand narratives that have worked together in the past to both marginalize and silence them.9 Now, however, writers, especially poets, while continuing to address a mainstream readership are also 'writing home' to their own communities, both reserve and urban, as well as a growing pan-Indian community of writers across Canada. Daniel David

Moses, in a dialogue with Terry Goldie which forms the preface to their third edition of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, explains this shift:

Think about the number of new writers whose work we've included, add that to the number we already had, think about the number we did not have room to recognize - or those who are learning their craft and are not quite ready - and you get this impressionist picture ... a portrait of a growing community of voices, voices that tell stories from places all across the country, from different experiences of colonialism, from different traditions. More and more in the decade-and-a-half since we started this project, the tellers of these stories have begun to hear each other, thanks to this project and other projects like it, and to recognize each other and themselves and all they have in common and in difference.10

Significantly, the majority of writers who are engaged in this exciting cross­ country conversation are poets. Although Indigenous fiction writers bring storytelling strategies to their texts, poetry appears to be the literary genre that best translates the oral quality of traditional Indigenous storytelling onto the written page.11 Certainly, what is most characteristic about contemporary

Indigenous poetry in this country is its oral, performative nature. This paradoxical

137 trickster aesthetic in which the boundary between the oral and the written is deconstructed is a hybrid genre understood by Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe as the "talk" that "walk[s] on paper;"12 as "writing voices speaking" by Kimberly

Blaeser; and as "talking on the page" by Laura J. Murray and Keren Rice.13 Also helpful is Winfried Siemerling's concept of 'anti-imperial translation.' In the context of Indigenous literatures it describes the trickster strategy whereby Native writers appropriate not only the colonizer's language, Received Standard English

(RSE), but also canonical Western literary genres, re-siting them within their own mixedblood cultural contexts. Consequently, English becomes "powerfully affected by tongues that are. . . [l]ndigenous." As Siemerling explains further:

Although the . . . language of many written texts may be English - where the anti-imperialist cultural translation produces a critical perturbance and ironic doubling - the translation can simultaneously be seen to proceed in the opposite direction, as an adaptation and integration of Western forms into Native practices.14

"Serious play,"15 is understood by Vizenor to be a "tricky, visionary resistance" that "outwit[s], reverse[s], and overturn[s] the wiles of dominance . . .

."16 Word play such as the subversive rhetorical troping and genre bending in which many Indigenous poets are engaged is certainly serious play, but so too is the anti-imperialist translation of RSE into 'rez english' whereby the colonizer's language is appropriated as a means of writing resistance.

"Putting the Mother back in the language," a concept coined by Maria

Campbell, is an example of the serious play at work in 'anti-imperialist translation.' In an interview with Hartmut Lutz, Campbell tells the story of how understanding this concept allowed her to overcome years of writer's block, the

138 result of her inability to re-imagine in written format the land-based ancestral storytelling of her people. She went for advice to her mentor, an elder in her community, who suggested she reject RSE, a language which Marilyn Dumont in her poem "The Devil's Language" calls "the Great White way of writing English."17

According to Campbell's mentor, Western cultures lacked both a spiritual and physical connection to the land and, in consequence, their languages "lost [their]

Mother a long time ago." Such a radical alternative to mainstream literary practice was one with which Campbell struggled for a long time; however, after listening carefully to a story told by her father, "who was close to the land," she finally understood it. She explains this epiphany to Lutz:

I had the story in my father's voice, or somebody's voice. It was all there. I could smell the community, I could smell the old people, all those familiar things were there. And what I had been trying to say, over and over again, in rewriting and everything else, I said in this broken English. And it was eloquent, it was full of humour, it was full of love, and yet it was hard. It was all there. And that was when I understood what the old man said about the Mother in the language."18

In consequence, Campbell's subsequent publication was written in her mother tongue, Michif19-inflected 'rez' or 'broken' english,20 a trickster strategy which uncannily transforms her written texts into the oral stories of her people. By using 'rez' english she also honours her family, her community and, more generally, the Metis Nation21 itself. In addition, strategically deploying 'rez' english helps lift the burden of shame from generations of Indigenous people who were punished at residential school for speaking it. In an interview with

Susan Gingell, Campbell explains the extraordinary impact of Stories of the Road

Allowance People:

139 Whenever I go to Metis country, people tell me when they got the book they sat around the kitchen table and read [it] aloud and that the stories reminded their parents and grandparents about things they'd forgotten about. I've also been told that the way I used the language freed something in them, that it was healing to be able to laugh about something that we'd once been punished for and made to feel ashamed of. Seeing and reading the language in a book gave our stories and our use of [e]nglish a whole different meaning and was the cause of lots of discussion. Something that a story should make you do.22

Campbell's use of 'rez' english counters the mainstream discourse on the indian, named manifest manners by Vizenor. Consequently, it valorizes rather than disparages the mixedblood identity of her people and that special double- consciousness that living 'in-between' two cultures brings. Sky Dancer Louise

Bernice Halfe deploys a Cree-inflected 'rez' english for similar decolonizing reasons. Most importantly for her, it offers a space of healing from the brutal impact of residential schooling. As Gingell writes: "In a reading at the University of Saskatchewan [in] 1996 Halfe explained that she makes deliberate use of the

Cree dialect to empower herself as a Cree woman and to overcome the shame

instilled in her while at Blue Quills Residential School."23 In company with

Campbell and Halfe, Kimberly Blaeser deploys 'rez' or 'red' english as a decolonizing strategy celebrating the reality of contemporary mixedblood

identities. As she explains in an interview with Jennifer Andrews:

So there were these interesting transformations in the language, and the creation of a mixed-up language came to represent the situation of several generations who could no longer be considered fluent speakers of our [N]ative tongue. Salvaging the language, giving it a place, and reclaiming it, trying to recover it, becomes important. Decolonizing our lives has to do with reclaiming the language. That became symbolic for me. I use the multiple languages because I want to acknowledge that people are mixed; they're not isolated individuals. I want to acknowledge

140 the mixed nature of our reality, which is partly about this conglomeration of languages, which is not like a Tower of Babel.24

This trickster aesthetic, in which the border between the oral and the written is constantly crossed, plays havoc with those normative Western critical practices which focus on the writer as a gifted individual and on the individual reader's monologic interpretation of a poem. Instead, readers are drawn into a communal and dialogic relationship with the text. Much like the practice of traditional Indigenous storytelling, they are transformed into listeners who must participate actively in the imaginative re-construction of the text. A poet such as

Marilyn Dumont, for example, in Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez's words, "invite[s] her readers to step into the world of her story/poem . . . welcoming all willing to make the requisite co-creative effort to hear the story."25

Although some Indigenous writers may 'welcome' their readers as active participants in the creation of their texts, most readers from outside the tradition of Indigenous oral storytelling will find their initial encounter hard work and, to begin with, profoundly destabilizing. On first entering this trickster zone, they are met by a bewildering deconstruction of borders not only between the written/oral but also between the reader/listener and the individual/community. In consequence, Indigenous poems that bear the mark of trickster, like the two

Indigenous novels discussed in Chapter 2, are not an easy read, their oxymoronic spirit often creating intense reader resistance rather than active participation.

141 I witnessed such resistance in a group of upper year, undergraduate students at Trent University, many of whom were English Literature majors, when

I first introduced them to Indigenous poetry.26 Despite this early resistance,

however, the majority of students slowly and gratifyingly engaged in the hard work of becoming active readers/listeners and co-creators of the story/poem.27 A

key part of that work for these students involved understanding as much as

possible not only the histories and cultures of Indigenous peoples in Canada but also their own subject positions in relation to those histories. Only then, as David

Moore argues, is active participation in Indigenous literature possible:

In order to engage in a dialogue with Indian literature, the exchange becomes not merely cognitive but also participatory, not merely textual but also contextual. The knowledge of self and other, of 'white ideological investments,' may give way to participation in context [and] community.28

This journey towards an empathic and contextual understanding of

Indigenous literature works to destabilize the discourse of manifest manners that

most students, Native or not, bring to the study of Indigenous writing. Requiring an understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of Indigenous literature should be considered entirely appropriate. As Louis Owens argues, somewhat

rhetorically, many university teachers of English Literature expect a similar contextual knowledge from their students:

[J]ust as the oppressively literate modernists felt justified in demanding that readers know a little Greek and Roman mythology as well as the entire literary history of the Western world, Native American writers have begun to expect, even demand, that readers learn something about the mythology and oral histories of Indian America.29

142 A few students in my course did this necessary work, becoming both superb and imaginative participants as well as passionate advocates for

Indigenous poetry as they increasingly came to understand the subversive and, indeed, transformative potential of this aesthetic practice. Their multi-voiced, heteroglossic group readings stunningly brought the written words off the printed page and into oral performance. They were truly an inspiration to me.30

Such readings of Indigenous poetry are made possible by specific textual strategies, some or all of which are deployed by the majority of Indigenous poets in Canada today. As noted above, the use of 'rez' english rather than RSE is prevalent in many of these texts as is a dialogic 'code-switching' between various forms of english/English and Indigenous languages.31 This defamiliarizing tactic can be understood as a necessary act of resistance against those academics who have turned their scholarly gaze upon Indigenous cultures and sought to

'know' them.32 This decolonizing strategy reminds academics and students of the necessary humility they must bring to these texts and of the impossibility of ever understanding the 'truth' of Indigenous poetry and cultures. Gingell makes this point clearly and compellingly:

I know that the shoe of "broken [e]nglish" that persons of First Peoples ancestry have been forced to wear as they struggle to make their words walk in my language has pinched their feet for a long time; but now when I stumble through the Cree words and phrases or the Cree- or Mitchif-inflected [e]nglish of the texts I read aloud at conferences or in classrooms, my own speech is halting because what my voice produces is inevitably fractured Cree or an awkward attempt at varieties of [e]nglish produced in First Peoples language communities."33

143 However, interpreting Indigenous poetry solely as an act of resistance to the manifest manners of mainstream culture does it a grave injustice and, as

Bianca Schorcht points out, not only "reduces and simplifies it" but also

"reinforces the idea of Native literature . . . hinging on a colonial pivot."34 The use of 'rez' english and other forms of 'code switching' should be understood, more

importantly, as emphasizing the cross-cultural, mixedblood quality of the text in which cultural and linguistic differences are both recognized and valorized.35 For

readers and audiences outside Indigenous storytelling communities, many of these 'differences' cannot be translated, rendering a radical alterity to parts of these poems. Ironically, such impenetrable differences came to be honoured by

my students the more knowledge of Indigenous cultures and histories they

brought to the poems, a sure sign of trickster at serious play in their readings.

In his Foreword to Maria Campbell's Stories of the Road Allowance

People, Ron Marken points out the importance of understanding Campbell's

poems, in part, as visual culture: "[W]e must do more than simply read this book.

Book culture is eye culture. Most of us imagine with our eyes. . . . We should feast on these stories with our eyes. . . ."36 Those who pay attention, first of all, to

the placement of words on the pages of Indigenous poetry before reading them will discover additional trickster oral strategies embedded there, ones that break the mould of conventional Western poetic forms. They will often find, for

example, what at first glance appear to be arbitrary line breaks with little or no

punctuation. In addition, they may be surprised by the many gaps between words

and the quantity of white space on the page often accompanied by a minimal

144 number of words. These subversive poetic strategies enable the poet to connect with traditional storytelling practices. The use of free verse, blank spaces, unconventional line breaks and eccentric punctuation allow for the pauses that an oral performer takes, either to catch his37 breath, or for emphasis, or to entice the reader/listener to imaginatively enter into the poem. Citing the work of Beth

Cuthand and Marie Annharte Baker, Beverly Rasporich writes that "the poetic texts are often literally ruptured by pregnant textual spaces and the void of silence, suggesting the technique ... of taking a rest - a moment of reflection derived from traditional oratorical style . . . ."38 Brill de Ramirez stresses the importance of this minimalist aesthetic because it reinforces the communal nature of the poetic/creative act whereby the reader/listener becomes co-creator of the poem. As she argues: "The words of the story as told by the storyteller are only part of the story, the skeleton (if you will) that needs to be fleshed out through the interpersonal relationship of all involved."39 Kimberly Blaeser experiments with "line breaks and stanzas" as well as "butting words against one another on the page and eliminating commas and capital letters." In the process, she hopes to be "getting better at trying to translate the sounds I hear onto the page," adding "it's the oral or performative which dictates what gets on the page."40

As a result of such tactics, readers/listeners are also transformed into storytellers not only by allowing their own imaginations to fill in the gaps on the page but also by reading aloud and, thereby, liberating the voices and sounds

145 captured on the printed text. As Ron Marken suggests to readers of Campbell's

Stories of the Road Allowance People:

Say them aloud. Listen to them with [your] friends. Light a fire and speak them to the children and grandchildren. These stories and poems have come a long journey to be with us from Mitchif through literal translations through the Queen's Imperial English and back to the earth in village [e]nglish. Listen to their tales. The main reason for their tortuous route is Maria's need to have us hear the voices - breathing, laughing, sighing human voices.41

In addition to those discussed above,42 other oral strategies at serious play in much Indigenous poetry in Canada include energetic rhythms, eccentric rhyme schemes, the repetition of words and phrases as well as a love of the rhetorical tropes of punning, alliteration and onomatopoeia. All these characteristics, including its visceral, often politically driven themes, place the work of a number of contemporary Indigenous poets firmly within the context of

'spoken word' poetry, a movement which began in the 1990s in the cafes, community centres, ghettos, projects and downtown bars of inner-city North

America.

Jill Battson writes that "'spoken word,' is a catch-all phrase that encompasses not only page and performance poetry but also monologues, performance art, and lyric heavy music." She adds that, "[rjight now in Canada," the small pond of poetry is churning with the vibrations of dub, hip hop, choral, sound and language poetry. This exciting melange constitutes the spoken word movement; 'Poetry' will never be the same."43 The movement's key priority, like that of many Indigenous poets in Canada, is to reclaim poetry from the halls of academia, returning it to its public, oral and performative roots. In so doing, both

146 'spoken word' and Indigenous poetry destabilize the elitist academic opposition between politics and poetry as well as the privileging of Western forms of knowledge at the expense of the traditions and teachings of minority cultures, including those of Native North America. 'Spoken word' poet, Miguel Algarin could be describing contemporary Indigenous poetry in Canada in his following portrayal of the revolutionary, "fin de siecle" poetry movement of the 1990s in the

United States:

Poetry . . . has found its way back into everyday life. It is not only meaningful, it is also fun. . . . Poetry at this moment... is a growing developing, challenging force. We have, at the end of the millennium, brought it to life. . . . The driving force is to rekindle the word and the meaning of words. . . . The new poetry . . . seeks to promote a tolerance and understanding among people. The aim is to dissolve the social, cultural and political boundaries that generalize the human experience and make it meaningless. . . . ['Spoken word' poets] have gone a long way toward changing the so-called black/white dialogue that has been the breeding ground for social, cultural, and political conflict in the United States.44

Indigenous poets obviously focus on themes related to their own local experiences, for example, the catastrophic effects of Canadian government and church policies on their peoples as well as issues of identity related to living 'in- between' Indigenous and white settler cultures in Canada. Trickster discourse is also specific to Native American contexts despite the importance of the trickster trope of the 'Signifying Monkey' in much African-American 'spoken word' poetry;45 in addition, the oral, performance quality of so much Indigenous poetry, rooted as it is in storytelling traditions, indicates that Native poets were engaging in 'spoken word' performances long before 'spoken word' became fashionable in

urban coffee houses and community centres. As Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm insists:

147 My spoken word did not develop from within the spoken word genre, nor has it been much influenced by any other spoken word. For me, "spoken word" was a natural progression of my work, a way of creatively expressing myself in a way that makes sense to me and I came about it spontaneously as a result of what I was already doing, what I knew and who I am.46

As Algarin's words suggest, however, there is a strong global connection between the work of Indigenous poets in Canada and that of 'spoken word' artists in the United States, the Caribbean and in other parts of the world. In addition, like their American counterparts, Canadian Indigenous poets also emphatically resist the individual silent readings taught in mainstream educational institutions or the model of an academic poetry reading described by

Patricia Volk as "a floating head above a lectern."47 Although both groups of poets include writers as well as performers, their texts are often created specifically for oral, performative readings and are often very difficult to read silently. As Thomas King notes in relation to the oral syntax of Harry Robinson's poetry,48 these strategies "[defeat] readers' efforts to read stories silently forcing readers to read aloud."49 In agreement, Daniel David Moses states that "[t]he pieces I write look like plays or poems or short stories, but I'm interested in how they sound and how they work when they're spoken."50

This chapter focuses on trickster at serious play51 in a number of contemporary Indigenous poems. It is divided into three sections each of which focuses on the following themes: "A Poetics of Decolonization;" "Indigenous

Erotica;" and "Songs from the Urban Rez." In each section, I discuss specific trickster strategies whereby the canonical Western genre of poetry is appropriated and Indigenized in a subversive act of 'anti-imperialist translation'.

148 In the process a hybrid, mixedblood poetic genre is created, one described by

Blaeser as "writing voices speaking." The first section highlights the theme of decolonization by acknowledging the important work of two poets, Maria

Campbell and Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, who not only de-authorize canonical English literary forms and genres by writing in 'rez english' but also offer trickster narratives to counter the monologic terminal creeds of mainstream

Canadian history. In so doing, as Alan Velie writes, "they force a reconsideration of the processes and powers of historical reckoning and, thus, essentially, liberate the reader from preconceived notions and incite an imaginative re- evaluation of history."52The serious play of these poets and so many like them in

Canada is aptly depicted by Blaeser in her description of the aesthetic and political agenda in which Native North American writers are presently engaged:

In their work, they often find themselves negotiating against the authority of the very written tradition in which they are engaged: challenging the rules of writing, challenging the truth of historical accounts, challenging the privileging of the text. Their own work often rewrites, writes over, writes through, writes differently, writes itself against the Western literary tradition. Native writers often tell a different story, tell it from a different perspective, from a different worldview. They challenge the reigning literary conventions and the enshrined styles of writing both in principle and in practice.53

The second section centres on the theme of Indigenous erotica. One of the most exciting projects undertaken by Indigenous artists and writers today, such erotica profoundly interrogates the derogatory stereotypes circulating in the discourse of manifest manners. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, whose anthology's title,

Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica,54 published in 2003, is the inspiration for the name of this section, initiated her anthology in part to destabilize this

149 discourse, the power of which continues to internally colonize and victimize

Native peoples. As she writes:

Like many others, I was tired of images of Indigenous men as violent, monosyllabic studs, abusers of Indigenous women and ravishers of white women or as noble savage type shamans, warriors and chiefs. I was sickened by stereotypes of Indigenous women as promiscuous, drunken whores or sexless mother earth types. All those stereotypes and images that make us less than the whole, complex, loving, sexual, spiritual beings we are. ... I began to realize that there were few positive, affirming portrayals of relationships, especially romantic and sexual relationships, between Indigenous peoples in the arts or mass media, even by our own artists and communicators. ... I also began to wonder how stereotypes, combined with the lack of realistic images, were affecting our own self-image, especially in the minds of our young people . . .55

This discourse of manifest manners is so powerful that Drew Hayden

Taylor quite rightly draws the same conclusion:

Society and its media machines have often painted us as being stoic, tragic, alcoholic and basically oppressed, depressed and suppressed. To a lesser extent, a lot of our own literature has done the same thing. If you believed what you read we were a sad, sad people.56

Instead, Akiwenzie-Damm's project encourages Indigenous poets to write themselves into being as subjects of their own discourses on Indigeneity rather than objects of this colonial discourse. Rather than internalizing mainstream society's concept of them as a "sad, sad, people," Indigenous writers of erotica celebrate Indigenous peoples as fully human, valorizing rather than denigrating their complex sexualities and often vulnerable bodies. In the introduction to her collection of erotica, Akiwenzie-Damm offers a synopsis of exactly this spirit:

It's about the loving, 'dirty,' outrageous, ribald, intimacies of humanity and sexuality that we all crave. It shows us as we are: people who love each other, who fall in love and out of love, who

150 have lovers, who make love, have sex, break hearts, get our own hearts broken, who have beautiful bodies. It's all about the crazy, poignant, obscene, absurd things we do just to taste, touch, enjoy, and enter another.57

Such erotica deploys a wealth of trickster strategies crossing boundaries of all kinds, including the normalized boundaries of Western bourgeois 'good taste.' Trickster at play in many erotic Indigenous poems will often result in the

interruption and disruption of accepted social values. The more shocking the

poem, the more effectively the poet throws back into the face of the dominant culture the stereotypes of Indigenous identity that culture has produced. In so doing, the more effectively the poet 'writes home,' entreating Indigenous peoples

and their communities to take part in this important project, dismantling and

overturning those representations which Taylor describes so well.

The third section takes its title from a collection of poems by Gregory

Scofield: Native Canadiana: Songs from the Urban Rez.58 It focuses on the texts of those poets who both write from what Louis Owens calls a 'frontier space,'59 a

deterritorialized urban space, and foreground their own hard won mixedblood subjectivities. Their poems all bear the mark of trickster as they dismantle

normalized stereotypes of Indigenous peoples rooted in Native 'authenticity' and

'tradition.' For them, Indigenous identity based on blood quantum is, as Paul

Chaat Smith writes, "a bunch of racist nonsense." These poets courageously

challenge the powerful colonial discourse rooted in the 'Indian Act' which

constructs in binary opposition the stereotypes of the authentic, status "Indian'

living on reserve and the inauthentic urban 'Indian' living off. Interrogating and

151 destabilizing these stereotypes, however, is no small task. According to Chaat

Smith:

If you are Indian and live in the city you are basically screwed. This is because a large flashing neon asterisk floats above your head, which turns into a question mark, before again becoming an asterisk. You are in the wrong place, and you know it and everybody knows it too. Perhaps you have an explanation, but it doesn't really matter because even if you are here just for the afternoon, visiting Aunt Daisy who has been taken ill and requires the advanced services of an urban medical center, or you have to work as an architect or a dishwasher because there are no jobs back home, or maybe you are using government archives to research the history of your people's dispossession and subsequent impoverishment, the fact remains that you are in the city and you should be on the soil of your homeland. Perhaps if you hitchhiked in and went straight to the bus station on your way to the Calgary Stampede or a Sun Dance in North Dakota, maybe that is technically not a violation. But couldn't you fly there if you were a real Indian? 60

Like Chaat Smith, poets in this chapter often acknowledge the pain inherent in the construction of contemporary Indigenous identities; however, they also celebrate their mixedblood subjectivities specifically because they are hybrid and heterogeneous. As such, they honour lives that are full of risk, constantly open to change rather than closure, but so much richer as a result. Taking on this task is, indeed, formidable considering the controversies that are waged over

Indigenous identities, both on and off reserve, around kitchen tables and university seminar rooms; however, the unruly and wild laughter of trickster is never far away as these postindian warriors of survivance take up the challenge, appropriating and distorting the 'devil's language' as a means of celebrating the subversive survival and revitalization of their people.

152 A Poetics of Decolonization

Maria Campbell, Metis storyteller, writer, poet, scholar and activist, has interwoven more successfully than any other Indigenous writer in Canada her aesthetic praxis with decolonizing political strategies. Halfbreed, her autobiography published in 1973, is still considered a seminal work. As Jo Anne

Episkenew writes:

[It] is an important text in that it explains in an accessible manner how public policies have harmed Indian and Metis people in this country. The reception that Halfbreed received surprised and motivated aspiring Aboriginal writers; it revealed that mainstream Canadians would listen to their stories. To the writers that followed her, Campbell became the mother of Canadian Aboriginal Literature61

In addition to inspiring a new generation of Native writers, Campbell's compelling narrative is also aimed at a non-Aboriginal audience. As she explains in her Introduction, "I write this for all of you, to tell you what it is like to be a

Halfbreed woman in our country. I want to tell you about the joys and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and the dreams."62 As one of Vizenor's postindian warriors of survivance, Campbell bravely challenges the Canadian myth of tolerance so central to our national identity.63 In so doing, she became one of the first Indigenous activists64 to 'write back' to mainstream settler society in Canada by appropriating its language - the 'devil's language' - as an act of decolonization.65 Janice Acoose explains:

As so many previously colonized people . . . maintain, the act of writing is a political act that can encourage decolonization. In this context, Campbell is one of the first few Indigenous people who appropriated the colonizer's language to name her oppressor's unjust systems, laws, and processes, and subsequently to work towards decolonization."66

153 In "Jacob," a narrative poem in her collection, Stories of the Road

Allowance People published in 1995, Campbell courageously tells the hitherto

'unspeakable' story of the Canadian government and church run system of

residential schools for Aboriginal children. She was one of the very first to do

so.67 Not only 'writing back' to mainstream Canadians, she also 'writes home' to

an audience of Indigenous peoples across Canada, both adults and children.

This time, however, she does not appropriate the 'devil's language' to tell her

story. Instead, the old man's voice of the narrator rises eloquently off the page as

he begins to speak in Michif-inflected 'rez' english:

Mistupuch he was my granmudder. He come from Muskeg dat was before he was a reservation. My grandmudder he was about twenty-eight when he marry my granfawder. Dat was real ole for a woman to marry in dem days But he was an Indian doctor I guess why he wait so long68

In "Jacob," Campbell's refusal to write in RSE is significant on many

levels. It not only pays homage to and empowers the old people in her community, celebrating their language and culture, but also in the process of this

'anti-imperialist translation,' appropriates and de-authorizes Western forms of

knowledge. This trickster manoeuvre gently, but very effectively, mocks the critical practices of mainstream, educated readers. To gain access to Campbell's

poem with its splendid 'menacing mimicry'69 of RSE, readers must be prepared

both to jettison their own, often hard won hermeneutical practices and to risk the

profound sense of destabilization and alienation that first occurs when engaging

154 imaginatively with Campbell's mixedblood, 'in-between' text. For example, on first

scanning the poem, readers trained in RSE will find the words they encounter so

eccentrically spelled that the act of interpretation is filled with frustration;

however, these mis-spellings not only foreground the oral storytelling voices of the Metis elders but also, as stated above, destabilize the normative power

relationship between Western educated readers and the majority of Indigenous

peoples in Canada.

An additional trickster strategy deployed throughout and acting as yet

another barrier to the reader's initial engagement with the poem is Campbell's

use of the male pronoun to refer to both men and women alike. Citing Tomson

Highway,70 Gingell points out that in most traditional Native North American

cosmologies there are no gender distinctions. As a result, Campbell's continual

use of the pronoun 'he' suggests that even an 'anti-imperialist translation' of RSE

such as 'rez' english is tainted by the gender hierarchies prevalent in Western

cultures and, according to Gingell, "signal[s] the way in which gender politics

have overturned the balance of male and female principles central to First

Peoples cosmologies and healthy societies."71 Other oral strategies at work in

"Jacob" are the often eccentric and bizarre line breaks; the seemingly arbitrary

use of capital letters; and the prevalence of white spaces on the page. Gingell quite rightly argues that they function as a "way of recording the slow measured

manner of delivery that characterizes the conversational style typical of Cree speakers."72

155 As well, Campbell's refusal to use RSE acts as an effective tool of political resistance to the assimilationist policies driving government and church projects such as residential schooling. She was briefly a student at one herself.73 By using 'rez' english in "Jacob", she not only splendidly subverts the 'civilizing mission' of the schools but also positions herself again as a postindian warrior of survivance rather than a victim of that abusive and brutal system. In addition, by telling this story, we should understand her as a healer and trickster. For her story of 'Jacob,' horrifying in so many ways, is also profoundly transformative. In

'rez' english rather than RSE, the language symbolic of assimilation to Western culture and values, the old man's voice rises off the printed page telling Jacob's story and the effect of residential schooling on him, his family and community.

Like Campbell, however, Jacob refuses to be defeated by it. By the end of the narrative he too plays a profoundly therapeutic role within his family and his community.

Jacob's tale focuses on the immense suffering and traumatic loss of identity experienced by many school survivors who, after years away at residential school, have no home to return to:

Well Jacob him He stay in dat school all dem years an when he come home he was a man While he was gone hi Mommy and daddy dey die so he gots nobody An on top of dat nobody he knowed him cause he gots a new name.

Jacob he was just plain pitiful He can talk his own language he don know how to live in dah bush.74

156 To foreground the trauma of lost identity further, the poem's narrator tells how Jacob's situation gets worse. He marries and has children but on the day that they too are seized by the priest to be sent to residential school, he and his wife learn their real Indian names, the names taken from them when they first attended school. With this discovery comes the horrifying knowledge that Jacob has married his sister. On learning of his wife's subsequent suicide, Jacob experiences a complete mental breakdown. For many years he refused to talk to anyone and was "just dead inside."75 Jacob's tale, however, is comedic not tragic. Unlike so many Western narratives which focus on the individual,

Campbell's trickster narrative celebrates community, emphasising in the process, the resilience and survival of Indigenous people and their cultures rather than their victimry and oppression. For in Campbell's poem we witness both the breakdown of the power of the English language and, in addition, the breakdown of the psychological power that Jacob's experience has on him. Despite all his suffering, at the end of his life and the end of the story, he finds significant joy in the birth of his grandchild, a birth that signals both Jacob's new-found sense of self and belonging and, more importantly, the survival and renewal of his family and community.

For Jacob, the process of healing is closely associated with the courage to remember and accept his traumatic past. He can never return to that time before the priests came; he can, however, deploy in trickster fashion, the special power he has as a result of living 'in-between' two worlds. Having learned to read and write RSE, 'the devil's language,' at residential school, Jacob appropriates it for

157 his own purposes. To makes sure that his experience will never happen again to anyone in his community, he writes down everybody's names, both in Michif and in RSE:

Well you know Jacob die when he was an ole ole man An all hees life He write in a big book Dah Indian names of all dah Mommies an Daddies. An beside dem he write dah old names and

dah new names of all dere kids.76

In the hopeful ending of "Jacob," Campbell echoes a comment made in an interview published in The Book of Jessica, written in collaboration with Linda

Griffiths. The focus of the play, she states, is on "a woman struggling with two cultures, and how she got them balanced, because when she leaned into one, a part of her got lost, so she [had] to lean into the other one and try to understand and find a balance. Spirits were in both those cultures."77 Perhaps then, the focus of "Jacob" should rest on a similar struggle and outcome, not only that of Jacob but also his creator, Campbell. Perhaps, too, it should also rest on those contemporary Indigenous communities, like Jacob's in Campbell's narrative, that are now beginning to honour rather than disparage their mixedblood and diasporic identities, having learned often through appalling circumstances that to live balanced 'in-between' two worlds is a source of healing and strength.

The importance of decolonizing trickster narratives, such as Campbell's

"Jacob," which offer radical alternatives to hegemonic forms of Canadian history cannot be stressed enough. After all, as Vizenor writes, "The trickster does no less in literature than to heal and balance the world.. . ."78 Another postindian

158 warrior of survivance, Louise Bernice Halfe Sky Dancer, like Campbell, aims to break the taboo on stories of the colonial oppression of Native peoples. Her trickster narratives counter the terminal creed of 'tolerance,' the white mythology structuring the unequal relationship of power between mainstream Canadians and Indigenous peoples. Through this form of storytelling, she offers both hope and healing to her people.

A distinguished poet, journalist and prose writer, Halfe was raised on the

Cree Reserve of Saddle Lake near the Alberta/Saskatchewan border north of

Edmonton. At the age of seven, she was sent to Blue Quills Residential School at

St. Paul, Alberta, later studying at the University of Regina where she received her Bachelor's Degree in Social Work (BSW). She is the author of three collections of poetry/prose: Bear Bones and Feathers (1994); Blue Marrow

(1997) and, most recently, The Crooked Good (2008). The inspiration for many of the poems in her award-winning first collection, Bear Bones and Feathers, comes from her own experience both as a residential school student and as the child of survivors of that system which, she makes clear, "took its toll on their lives and mine."79 She was also motivated to write these poems after listening to similar stories told not only by relatives but also by clients whom she counselled during her years as a social worker. Like Campbell, she has that special kind of 'double- consciousness' that living 'in-between' two cultures brings. She understands her poetry, in Kimberly Blaeser's words, "as filled with the voices of other people"80 rather than as the work of a gifted individual. As such, her poetry celebrates

'community' and, for that reason among many others, it bears the mark of

159 Vizenor's trickster. In an interview with Esta Spalding she explains her role as storyteller and poet:

Some of the poems in Bear Bones and Feathers came out of that social-work experience. One or two people would share with me their journey - men in prisons that I'd worked with or some of my cousins who had gone to Residential schools. The pain resonated in their voices. It really touched me, really moved me. Some of the poems will have five or six people who have told me their stories and I'll use the single "I" as the storyteller.81

Many of the poems in Bear Bones are necessarily angry, the poet 'writing back' not only to mainstream Canadian society but also to her own community, reaching out to those whose stories need to be voiced. Like Campbell, Halfe was one of the first to tell the tale of the residential schools, their savage treatment of Indigenous children becoming known to the public a few years later as 'a national crime.'82 Meira Cook, referring to all the poems in Bear Bones, calls them "grief stricken;"83 As such, readers/listeners might expect the theme of colonial oppression and sorrow to be foregrounded. But Halfe resists naming herself and other survivors as victims; instead, these passionate and angry poems which break the silence on so many stories, are filled with an earthy, raucous humour and are, therefore, profoundly redemptive. The compassionate trickster is Halfe's spiritual guide in telling these stories; as a result, they offer comfort and healing for those suffering from the wounds and sorrows caused by one of Canada's most barbaric acts of colonization. As Halfe insists:

And if I'm dark and angry, so be it. Anger can be used in a powerful way to bring a person out of a helpless state and into action. After all, underneath the anger is a sense of powerlessness, helplessness, shame, fear of abandonment, rejection, ridicule. I think I will always be angry. I want to believe

160 my anger is constructive. That my anger sees with the eyes of our Trickster and shows the story.84

A number of poems in Bear Bones involve either code-switching between

RSE and Cree or Cree and Cree-inflected 'rez' english, an english which Halfe, like Campbell, also calls "my mother tongue."85 These trickster strategies both appropriate and destabilize the power of the colonizer's language and transform the written text into an oral performance. Such tricky code-switching, as Shelley

Stigter notes, crosses linguistic boundaries and, as a result, "promotes bicultural awareness." Even though Halfe provides a glossary of translated Cree words in the back of Bear Bones to help English speakers, Stigter insists that "[Halfe's] readers know the cultural context surrounding some of her choices for code switching."86 For example, as Susan Gingell notes, Cree words in Halfe's poetry are often representative of Indigenous spirituality and "work as synecdoches for the values against which the impoverished and sexist values and the hypocritical behaviours of the agents of the Roman Catholic Church and other western

institutions can be measured."87

The following five poems in Bear Bones are written in 'rez' english and form a collection of their own: "Valentine Dialogue," "Stones," "In Da Name of Da

Fadder," "Der Poop," and "Ma Ledders." Together they focus on the traumatic after-effects not only on generations of adult survivors of residential schooling but also on their descendants. Some of the symptoms of this trauma suggested in

Halfe's poems are the following: the denigration of human sexuality; the

mortification of the body; the belief that all men are sexual predators; and the abuse of Aboriginal women both sexually and physically, not only by

161 representatives of the Church but also by their own men. Consequently, these

poems point the finger of blame directly at the Roman Catholic Church,

specifically at its perverse dogma; its hierarchy of power; and its priests and nuns who engaged in pedophilia as well as other forms of abuse.

Halfe's slyly and cynically named poem, "Valentine Dialogue,"88 the first in

this 'collection,' is narrated by a young woman whose story reveals that she has

contracted gonorrhea and, as a result, is consumed by fear, anger and shame. A

certain ambiguity exists in her narrative as readers/listeners are never quite sure whether it is through a sexual liaison with a priest that she has acquired the

disease; however, Roman Catholic priests are certainly implicated in her general

condemnation of all men as sexual predators. The poem begins with a short

question and answer dialogue between the narrator and an anonymous listener,

composed of nine double spaced lines each containing no more than seven

words. Some lines have only one word, the others no more than two or three.

This strategy slows the pace of the poem; opens up a space for the

reader/listener to enter; and gives special emphasis to certain words, such as

"gone r eeah," "Wholee sheeit" and "Fuckin liar." Written in a contemporary form

of 'rez' english, the poem and especially these words, in trickster fashion, lift the

narrator's oral voice off the printed page while at the same time stressing her fear, anger and heartbreak. They are also an example of the often bawdy,

carnivalesque nature of trickster humour:

I got bit.

By What?

162 A snake bite.

Where?

In my spoon. Gone r eeah.

Wholee sheeit.

Love he dold me.

I have a pain in my heart.

Fuckin liar (1-9).

In the following single-spaced lines, the narrator's anger and shame increase as do the number of words in each single-spaced line, building up to a climax at the end of the first page of the poem where all men are judged malevolent and the narrator's grief is palpable:

Mudder says day all alike

Snake in dair mouth Snake in dair pants Guess dat's a forked dongue

Mudder says I'll never lift it down. Fadder says I'm nothing but a cheap dramp.

Shame, shame

Da pain in my heart hurts, hurts (14-21).

Vizenor's concept of serious play helps us to understand that the punning and word play in this poem make its shocking theme somewhat more palatable for readers/listeners. The pun on "snake bite" in the second line of the poem quoted above and in the poem's last line suggests not only the biblical snake in the Garden of Eden and, consequently, the narrator's lost innocence but also the venereal disease, gonorrhea. The play on 'snake' continues in the three lines,

163 "snake in dair mouth/snake in dair pants/guess that's a forked dongue" where it

refers not only to the male penis but also to male tongues both literally and in

terms of the hypocrisy of their behaviour. This sly play on words is a form of

trickster humour that has great political efficacy, opening readers'/listeners' ears

to the epidemic of sexual abuse of Aboriginal women and children without being

didactic. Having been indoctrinated in the Roman Catholic dogma which

represents the body as a site of sexual denigration and sin, her parents are

complicit in the humiliation of their daughter They too may be survivors of

residential schooling. The irony, of course, is that Roman Catholic priests, based

on the narrator's own experience, and as noted above, are included in her judgement that all men are sexually perverted:

Tired of sinning Dew ya dink confession will help? Dew ya dink prayers will clean me? Maybe I be born again. Da pain in my heart hurts, hurts.

Durty priest Jest wants da durty story Needs to shine his rocks

Fucking men (26-34).

Her humiliation arises not only from the recognition of her complicity in her

own sexual victimization but also her understanding that the priests she so

shamefully desires are more interested in her body than the state of her soul:

A dongue in dair mouth. A dongue in dair pants. No nothing 'bout the heart. No nothing 'bout my soul.

164 And my mouth wants to feel dair wet lips (38-41, 46-48).

The poem ends with two short, single spaced stanzas with, for the most part, only two words in each line. Once again, an oral voice rises off the printed page as the narrator emphatically states that she will hide the fact that she has had gonorrhea. Living this lie means that the cycle of shame is to be repeated:

Meet nice man one day. Maybe brown. Maybe white. Maybe black Maybe yellow.

Won't show my body talks. Won't tell 'bout the snake bite (55-63).

"Valentine Dialogue" has not found a place in any of the three editions of

Moses' and Goldie's, Anthology of Canadian Native Literature. Perhaps a more appropriate space for this passionate, political poem with its 'upfront' and 'in-your face' bawdy trickster language and word play is not between the covers of Oxford

University Press' elegant blue and gold academic text but rather in a coffee house, a downtown bar, or university seminar room (but not behind a lectern!).

For this performance piece bears the marks not only of trickster discourse but also of 'spoken word' poetry with its driving rhythm created by the alliteration of the letter 'd' and by the repetition of short phrases and words such as the following: "Snake in dair mouth/snake in dair pants (15-16); "Dew ya dink/dew ya dink"(27-28); "A dongue in dair mouth/A dongue in dair pants" (38-39); "Shame, shame" (20); and "hurts, hurts" (21).

165 Halfe's poem, Stones, like "Valentine Dialogue," is another superb example of the destabilization of boundaries between the oral and the written, a trickster strategy which Halfe has described as "the talk [that] walk[s] on paper."89

In Stones, however, a more raucous and perhaps more cathartic trickster laughter can be heard throughout. Although the poem places the same judgement on men as in "Valentine Dialogue," the explosive issue of residential schooling combined with the sexual abuse of Indigenous women and children is implicit rather than explicit. In consequence, the tone is less angry. As Vizenor has argued, however, trickster narratives "heal and balance the world"90 and in this witty, wonderful poem, the wounds created by the brutal treatment of children by the priests at Roman Catholic residential schools, begin to heal as the storyteller and reader/listener participate in a splendid, parodic disempowerment of the middle-class, middle-aged white male. The narrator, speaking in Cree- inflected 'rez' english, 'returns the gaze' traditionally placed on Indigenous peoples by representatives of the dominant culture, such as, for example: scholars, various levels of Canada's colonial governments, religious organizations and the tourist industry. Turning the tables on patriarchal settler culture, the white male is this time placed under surveillance by the narrator who knows a lot about men "cuz I followed dem" (18). Punning and word play run riot in Stones, with golf balls and billiard balls being compared to male testicles. From the narrator's point of view, it appears that men not only attempt to put their balls

"all over da place" (3) but also play with them constantly:

what I didn't no is day

166 whack dem fundle dem squeeze dem dalk to dem whisper to dem beg dem pray to dem g ah sh even swear at dem (4-16).

An emphatically sexual rhythm is created by the following strategies in the

above stanza: the short, two to four word lines; the action verbs that begin eight

of the twelve lines; and the repetition of the sound, 'dem.' The alliteration of the

consonant 'd' in the above stanza continues throughout the poem, buttressing its

driving rhythm. In addition, in the following stanza, it compliments its sexually

loaded meaning:

g ah sh wit all dat whacking day should of come a long dime ago nd be satisfied (47-51).

As a result of these strategies, the printed page becomes a site of oral performance and the reader/listener is invited to participate. An instance of both trickster's serious play and 'spoken word' poetry, Halfe's mixedblood poem is a celebration of the healing process possible through humour even as it is a condemnation of the predatory nature of white male sexuality. As Don Kelly argues, "[i]t's easier to get your foot in the door by wearing a silly grin instead of a scowl. Why kick the door down when you can get them to invite you in? ... . And once the door is open, then you can start hauling in the baggage."91

167 Halfe's three poems, "In Da Name of Da Fadder," "Der Poop" and "My

Ledders" are excellent examples of anti-imperialist translation, not only code switching between 'rez' english and Cree words but also, in the last two, subversively appropriating and Indigenizing the canonical epistolary poem.92 In

'rez' english, the narrator is praying to the "poop" in the poem, "In Da Name of Da

Fadder" and repeating, not only in the title but also at the beginning of each stanza, the first line of a three line sacramental prayer said by Roman Catholics as they make the sign of the cross: "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The pun on 'Pope' offers an example of the compassionate trickster at serious play. Halfe's anger at the Roman Catholic

Church is never far from the surface; however, spelling the signifier 'Pope" as

'poop' and thereby filling it with scatological meanings is an example of trickster humour and, as Kelly argues, often a more effective form of political activism than a didactic treatise on the Church's brutal policies of assimilation.93 Writing the first line of the sacramental prayer, "In the Name of the Father," in 'rez' english, powerfully undermines and parodies the authority and dogma of the

Church as it also underlines through the repetition of "Fadder" the sorrowful fact that the God of the Christian Church had not acted as a 'Father' to the

Indigenous peoples of North America. Instead of God's paternal protection and love that the Church has promised to all believers, the narrator, a victim of domestic violence, is told by a misogynistic priest that she is to blame:

In da name of da fadder, poop My husband slap, fist and kick me I hit him back. I 'pologize poop Da priest said I must of done someding

168 Wrong and I deserve it cuz woman is 'upposed to listen to man. I not a good Wife cuz my hands somedimes Want to kill him (9-16).

The last stanza of the poem foregrounds and exposes some serious contradictions in the everyday practices of Christians suggesting that, despite her

'rez' english and her lack of literacy, the narrator to some extent understands the hypocrisy of the Church and its priests. If Christian doctrine not only entreats believers to "love your neighbour as yourself94 but also proclaims, "[b]lessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,"95 why then, she asks, do moniyas96

(white people) not share their riches with her and why do they despise her? The only answer that comes to her, one that has been indoctrinated by the Church and its priests, is that she is a sinner. Again, the fault lies with her actions. In such a fashion, the poem tells us, the Church maintains its power over its people:

In da name of da fadder, poop I dought da gezzuz kind but I is no good.I can't read hen write. I don't understand how come moniyas has clean howse and lottsa feed and he don't share it with me and my children. I don't understand why geezuz say I be poor, stay on welfare cuz moniyas say I good for nuddin' cuz I don't have wisdom. Forgive me poop I is big sinner (32-42).

In the first of two epistolary poems, "Der Poop," Halfe continues her scatological punning on 'Pope.' Here the narrator is writing a letter to the 'poop' on a newspaper she is reading as she sits in an outhouse. That she is engaged in a dialogue with the 'poop' not in an ecclesiastical setting but instead in an outdoor toilet is inspired moment of bawdy trickster humour and serious play,

169 maintaining the excremental punning and, as such, upsetting both Papal power and the power embodied in the Roman Catholic Church; however, the scatological metaphors and word play do not end here. Unwilling to accept the apology from the Pope published in the newspaper,97 she tells the "poop" to

"stay out of my pissness." She resists the position of victim, wanting neither his religion nor his forgiveness, and has her own form of spirituality that empowers her:

i don't hask forgiveness not want hand mary's, or a step ladder to heaven me is happy with da sky, da bird lyiniwak, four-legged lyiniwak, i is happy sorry mean dat i don't need yous church and yous priest telling me what to do sorry mean dat i free to dalk to Manitou the spirits and plant lyiniwak (12-25).

As Susan Gingell rightly suggests, the italicized, capitalized Cree words, lyiniwak and Manitou, meaning 'People' and 'Creator,' respectively, not only

"[mark] that [the poet's] persona comes out of a predominantly oral culture" but also "mark political, cultural, and most of all here, religious difference; this last dimension specifically foregrounded thematically. . . . "98 In "My Ledders," the poet also uses the italicized Cree words, nohkom, nimosom and isistawina meaning 'grandmother,' 'grandfather' and 'rituals,' respectively, for similar reasons in a poem that, for the most part, indignantly addresses the Pope on the issue of the Western appropriation of Native forms of spirituality:

well, pope last night on dv i watched some whitemen sweat in da lodge, and at dinner dime on da radio

170 i heard dat man dell us dat some darafist was havin a retreat and to register.

i wonder if you could tell da government to make dem laws dat stop dat whitemen from dakin our isistawina cuz i dell you pope i don't dink you like it if i dook you goldcup and wine pass it 'round our circles cuz i don't have you drainin from doze schools (12-19, 25-32).

In all three poems, the emphatic rhythm provided by the alliteration on the consonant, 'd,' mark them as 'spoken word' poetry while the 'rez' english and the occasional code-switching into Cree demonstrate how deeply rooted they are in

Cree oral culture. In all of Halfe's poems discussed in this section, trickster at serious play entices readers/listeners into an uneasy but necessary participation

in these counter narratives to mainstream, monologic Canadian history. If her

reader/listeners are, for the most part, moniyas, then they are left with ethical questions concerning responsibility and accountability, their complacency shattered.

Indigenous Erotica

A poetics of decolonization foregrounds the work of those poets who, as postindian warriors of survivance, relate narratives countering mainstream forms of Canadian history. By breaking the silence and exposing the brutal colonial

regimes of church and state in this country, their tricky storytelling interrogates the hegemonic, national myth of 'tolerance' and, as such, should be understood

as a powerful act of political resistance. A poetics of Indigenous erotica, on the

171 other hand, does not appear at first to focus on 'the political;' instead, the work of poets Armand G. Ruffo, Wayne Keon, and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, discussed in this section, centres on a joyous celebration of Indigenous forms of loving, sexuality and sensuality. Yet these poets are also postindian warriors of survivance whose work is profoundly political. In their trickster writing, they not only appropriate the canonical genre of the love poem, re-siting it within an

Indigenous context, but also flout normative forms of human sexuality, rejoicing in those that destabilize borders between the human/animal or human/natural worlds. By filling this mixedblood genre with both erotic Indigenous bodies and erotic Indigenous meanings, these poets radically disrupt the simulations of the invented indian that circulate in the dominant discourse of manifest manners; in doing so, they engage in a poetics of erotica that is not only politically transformative and healing but also one freed from an aesthetics of 'victimry.'

Armand G. Ruffo's "Bear," Wayne Keon's, "if i ever heard," and Kateri

Akiwenzie-Damm's, "fish head soup," are three trickster poems which upset the simulations and terminal creeds of western romantic love with subversive stories honouring Indigenous forms of love, passion and identity. All three poets live in a culturally mixedblood world, part urban and part rural or reserve. Ruffo, an

Anishinabe poet, writer, critic and academic comes from northern Ontario and now teaches Native Literature and creative writing in the Department of English

Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa. His poem, "Bear," speaks from this mixedblood space, offering a new story that not only recreates

Anishinabe oral storytelling on paper but also classic European fairy tale.

172 In an article written after a meeting with Gerald Vizenor, Paul

Seesequasis explains the importance of the 'bear' in trickster storytelling. He

begins his conversation with Vizenor by asking him the following 'loaded'

question: "What is Native Literature?" In response, Vizenor firmly rejects any

notion that the author's race should serve as a defining criterion; instead, he

tentatively suggests a number of themes and strategies that might serve to

characterize Native American literary texts,100 one of the most important being the role that animals play in Indigenous storytelling. Seesequasis explains

Vizenor's notion:

The power of metaphor over simile lies at the heart of the difference in how animals are perceived in Native storytelling as opposed to Western literature. The metaphor opens the possibility of interpretation and transformation between animal and human and of interaction on a level where communication is possible. (160)

In his discussion of border crossing between the world of animals and that

of humans in Native storytelling, Seesequasis draws special attention to the

erotic imagery associated with the bear, specifically noting two contemporaneous

novels, Marian Engel's Bear101 and Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, the former published in 1976 and the latter in 1978. While Darkness highlights, in

part, sexual relations between humans and animals, Engel's Bear focuses

entirely on the theme of a passionate and most compassionate sexual

relationship between a bear and a young woman. In such storytelling, according to Vizenor, "[t]he animal has full characterization and intelligence, different from

but equal to a human's, and when there's a transformation it's often from human

173 to animal, almost as if the animal was superior. It's an earlier relation that humans have lost, with consequences" (161).

In 2003, a generation after Vizenor's and Engel's novels came out, Ruffo published his superb, small poem, "Bear,"102 reworking the theme of a sexual encounter between a bear and a young woman. From the beginning, Ruffo's poem suggests the destabilization of borders between the world of humans and that of animals:

A young woman crawls into his bed warms it golden in the late afternoon. He returns after a day's outing, stealing honey, munching ants, causing general ruckus.

Then, again, perhaps he's home from school. (1-6)

Is the 'he' of line 6 a boy or a bear? The double spacing between the first five lines and the sixth not only slows the pace of the poem and creates a

'breathing space' for the storyteller, but also emphatically marks the point where the reader/listener imaginatively enters this zone of the trickster. For it is here that the poem's defamiliarizing ambiguities and transformations begin to take place. The second stanza continues in the same fashion with the question: Is she about to be seduced by a boy or eaten by the bear?

He opens the door only to find her Scattered belongings Which he trails to her body She has come to be devoured Every morsel. (7-11)

In the next stanza, the double space between line 15 and 16 places the emphasis on line 16 and on the trickster pun, 'bear/bare;' as a result, a profound

174 transformation takes place. The boy becomes the bear; "to be devoured" is now loaded with sexual meaning; and the woman crosses the boundary dividing her from the animal world.

So he begins with toes, feet, moves to leg up inside of thigh. When he gets to the tenderest part, she whimpers for him to stop.

She is losing herself to his bare kiss. (12-16)

The reader/listener is now also seduced by Ruffo's splendid trickster tale into believing in a world where Western categories separating humans from animals no longer exist and where an equal and compassionate relationship between the two is indeed possible. Although hesitant at first, the reader/listener and the woman herself long for the seduction to continue:

But the moment he does, she whispers, to continue. And he does, as though together they were attempting to retell an old time story. (17-21)

The passionate sexual liaison between the two acts as a metaphor for this new consciousness. "[A]n old time story" is, perhaps, the one to which Vizenor refers, about an earlier mythic relation between the two worlds "that humans have lost, with consequences" (161). It is arguably also a reference to the classic fairy tale, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," suggesting, therefore, the bi-cultural, mixedblood roots of Ruffo's poem. Depending on which version you read,103 the little girl either runs away from the bears or is eaten by them, the 19th century moral of the story being that children should dampen their natural curiosity and fear the outside world.104 Ruffo's re-writing of "Goldilocks," if read 'literally' rather

175 than 'metaphorically,' acts as a shocking affront to this form of bourgeois storytelling, most specifically because of its engagement with the 'sins' of bestiality and pedophilia. While "Bear" may not be a moral tale for children, it is,

however, a trickster teaching tale, one that celebrates a transformation of consciousness brought about by the political dismantling of terminal creeds that categorize Indigenous peoples and their identities. As such, it is one of Vizenor's

"new stories of tribal courage" and of "survivance over domination",105 a trickster tale "that raises hope, that heals, that cures."106

Anishinaabe poet and song writer, Wayne Keon, also speaks from a mixedblood space. He grew up in what he describes as a traditional Native family;107 however, during school holidays, he worked as a miner in northern

Ontario with his father. His post-secondary education included courses in

Business Administration at the Northern Institute of Technology in Kirkland Lake.

Now living in Toronto, he is an internal auditor for the mining company, Rio

Algom. His lyric poem, "if i ever heard,"108 from his collection, Sweetgrass II

published in 1995, may on first reading appear to be a conventional, perhaps even trite, heterosexual love poem109 in which a lover fears he may lose his love and, therefore, promises 'the earth' to her:

if i ever heard your love had gone pale

i would come out of the wilderness with ojibiway majik for you (1-5)

Like Armand Ruffo's poem, "Bear," however, Keon's tricky poem

celebrates the destabilizing of borders, this time between the world of humans

176 and that of nature. According to modernist forms of knowledge, these two worlds exist in opposition. Since the early modern period, 'nature' has been posited as inferior to a superior 'culture,' a dialectical model described by Vizenor as "the nasty fix of savagery and civilization."110 In the last three decades, however, postmodern theory has troubled binary thinking, specifically in this case the positing of 'civilization' as superior to 'wilderness,' recognizing in particular the profoundly negative impact of this ideology on the natural environment. Native

American cosmologies, however, have never placed the human and natural world in distinct categories. As Elaine A. Jahner argues, Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics demonstrate that "there has always been a postmodern in the tribal imagination"111 and as Amy Elias writes, "according to Vizenor the Native

American trickster was always already postmodern. . . ."112Consequently, in trickster stories, characters often migrate not only across borders of time and space but also across the categories of animal, human and nature, all of which are understood to be animate, sentient and equally spiritual.

In Keon's exquisite poem, both the lover and the one whom he loves are to be understood metaphorically as aspects of the natural world. Like Ruffo's poem there are no similes here. Although Keon's poem is, indeed, a love poem, it is very far from being a conventional one. According to my reading, it is a love poem sung not to a woman but to 'the earth' which is in danger of dying. The lover's "ojibiway majik," or 'love medicine,' is transformative, not only allowing the lover to cross borders into the natural world, to become "this wilderness," but

177 also, in doing so, to save the earth. In the next five lines, she is the parched earth and he an "ojibiway river" come to quench her thirst:

if I ever heard your love had gone without rain

i would come out of this wilderness with my ojibiway river for you. (6-10)

In the following five lines, there is a suggestion that 'the earth' has been eroded by storms at sea, suggestive of climate change, so he will bring her

"ojibiway earth" (14) to shore up her coasts:

if I ever heard your love had gone in the sea

i would come out of this wilderness with ojibiway earth for you. (11-15)

The last five lines suggest that because cities and 'civilization' have spread and poisoned the earth, the 'nite' skies are too light for stars; however, with his "ojibiway magic," his 'love medicine,' he will transform these skies, bringing true night's darkness to fill with stars:

if I ever heard your love had gone in the nite

i would come out of my wilderness with my ojibiway stars for you. (16-20)

The following oral strategies in Keon's love poem suggest it should be

heard, performed, or even sung rather than read silently: the repetition not only of the title of the poem, "if I ever heard," in the beginning of each stanza but also

repetition of the two word line, "for you," that ends each stanza; the indentation of

178 that line and the double spacing in the middle of each of the four stanzas offer a space not only for the reader/listener to enter the poem but also for the storyteller to take a breath; and, finally, the repetition of the third line, "I would come out of this wilderness" in each stanza. All these strategies give the poem an emphatic oral rhythm.

Anishnaabe poet, writer, spoken word artist, cultural activist and publisher,113 Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, from the Chippewas of Nawash First

Nation, uses similar oral strategies in her poetry. The eccentric, white gaps such as the ones marking her deeply sensual poem, "fish head soup,"114 create, in her words, "an intimacy between a speaker and listener. A breathing out and breathing in. Words are carried on breath. That breath mingles with the breath of the listeners who breath it all in.115

mmmmmmm this delicious longing for you is a lick of seaweed stretched in the sun (1-7)

As in Ruffo's and Keon's poems, discussed above, Akiwenzie-Damm's

"fish head soup," contains no similes; instead, like them, she depends on the power of metaphor to re-imagine sites of transformation where boundaries are blurred between human and natural worlds, especially the world of Indigenous foods that come from the rivers and the sea. In the above stanza, for example, the narrator's sexual desire and longing for her partner is not compared with but is a delicious "lick/of seaweed," In the second stanza, her passion is again

179 transformative, becoming "a kettle/offish/boiling at sunrise" (10-12) In the third stanza, the power of metaphor allows, once more, an imaginative border crossing between worlds: the narrator's ravenous craving for her lover is understood as food from the natural world, specifically in this case the delectable, sardine-like fish, 'oolichan' and its luscious oil loved by Indigenous peoples on the west coast of Canada:

this coastal craving for you is an ocean of oolichan

oiling the earth (13-18)

The alliteration on the letter 'o,' along with the indentation of the last three lines, place an emphasis on "ocean," "oolichan," and "oiling," all words that, together, sound like the breathing in and out of two lovers caught in a sensual embrace. In the final stanza, her "l-l-l-l-lust" for her lover is again transformative, imagined as "a mouthful/of salmon/playing on my tongue" (21-23). The dizzying and defamiliarizing strategies at play in this poem such as the tropes of alliteration and onomatopoeia as well as the many white spaces and line indentations are characteristic of the 'spoken word' poem. The poem needs to be both witnessed on the page as well as heard out load.

The poems discussed in this section are strikingly similar in that they depend on the power of metaphor to engage in radical border crossings. In each poem, modernist, hierarchical binaries are disrupted and a liminal space created in-between human, animal and natural worlds. As such, the three poems by

Ruffo, Keon and Akiwenzie-Damm are political and transformative, inviting

180 readers/listeners into a defamiliarizing trickster zone where their preconceived and stereotypical notions of Indigenous people are turned on their head. As a result, they too must undergo trickster transformations between worlds.

Songs From the Urban Rez

Parodic humour and 'serious play'; blurring boundaries between the oral and the written; and border crossing between genres are trickster strategies characterizing the poetry in this last section. Poets Gregory Scofield, Annharte,116

Beth Cuthand and Marilyn Dumont, all postindian warriors of survivance celebrating mixedblood urban Indigenous identities, deploy these strategies in their poetry primarily as a means of political resistance to the discourse of manifest manners that constructs 'Indian' identity in terms of the binary of self/other. Often considered inadequately 'authentic' or 'traditional,' many urban

Aboriginal writers and artists, along with so many other Indigenous peoples living in cities, are 'written off' by both Native and non-Native communities. To be urban and mixedblood is especially painful. As Annharte explains in an interview:

You're always made to feel like you're somehow inadequate. You're considered inauthentic. Somehow the racial thing is supposed to give validity to who you are. From day one, if you're not one hundred percent identified with one particular group, you're inadequate.117

Much of the discursive power of manifest manners comes from representations and stereotypes of Native North Americans in popular culture and the media; however, in this country, its discursive authority is also rooted in the 'Indian Act' which categorizes Indigenous peoples in such a manner that those that are labeled 'non-Status' are 'othered' both by the Canadian

181 government and often by First Nations communities.118 Many of these communities deploy criteria from the 'Indian Act' to determine Indigenous

'authenticity;' as a result, their critics accuse them of participating in their own victimization and colonization. As Annharte bluntly states, "even ... a person who is full blood is not always 100 percent Indian because they have a colonized

mind. The racial identity doesn't always fit with the cultural identity."119 The discursive power of this piece of legislation is so great that it not only constructs

'Indian' identity but also regulates every detail of 'Indian' lives. As Bonita

Lawrence argues,

To treat the Indian Act merely as a set of policies to be repealed, or even as a genocidal scheme in which we can simply choose not to believe, belies how a classificatory system produces ways of thinking - a grammar - that embeds itself in every attempt to change it.. . . To speak of how pervasively the Indian Act. . . has permeated the ways in which Native peoples think of themselves is not to deny Native people the agency to move beyond its logic. Nor does it suggest that traditional ways of understanding self in relation to other people, and the land, have been entirely effaced. It does, however, suggest we should think carefully about the various categories of Native identity that have been legally defined under federal laws .... Understanding how colonial governments have regulated Native identity is essential for Native people, in attempting to step away from the colonizing frameworks that have enmeshed our lives . . . . 120

Not surprisingly, then, a number of Indigenous poets in Canada have taken as their object of derision the 'Indian Act,' foregrounding and denaturalizing

its essentialist and 'commonsensical' categories of 'Indian' identity as well as the

legal language it deploys. In the process, they are able to resist the 'Act's' power,

refusing positions as victims of its regulatory regime. As such, they demonstrate what Lawrence refers to above as "the agency to move beyond its logic."

182 Gregory Scofield is one of the most knowledgeable writers to speak out against the impact of the 'Act's' discriminatory policies, having lived the painful experience of the dispossessed.121 In his memoir, Thunder Through My Veins:

Memories of a Metis Childhood (1999), he recalls a childhood filled with emotional and physical abuse, lived in poverty with an alcoholic mother whom he loved122 and a brutal stepfather. At an early age, however, his writing kept his spirit alive. Although his heritage is Metis/Cree, he was raised 'white,' his parents in denial about their own Native roots. Insecure about both his racial and sexual identity, he spent his teenage years longing to be an 'authentic,' full-blooded

Cree and, as he explains in an interview, "struggling with issues of sexuality. . . about belonging and acceptance and self acceptance and being OK with those issues."123 After moving from one foster home to another, he ended up on the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Pulling his life together after a period engaged in unsafe sex, violence, and drugs, he became a streetworker and counsellor before turning to his writing fulltime. Never a victim, Scofield courageously accepts and celebrates his contradictory subjectivity while at the same time resisting the many categories and labels that reviewers, critics and readers have given him. Above all, he sees his work as cultural activism. As he explains in an interview: "I am called a poet, a political poet, an angry poet, a

Metis poet, an ex-street-involved poet, a gay poet, yet I think of myself as a community worker, a teller of stories, a singer of songs; some of them mine, some of them others,"124

183 Scofield's "Mixed Breed Act," from his collection, Native Canadiana:

Songs from the Urban Rez (1996), is a witty, 'spoken word'satire of the 'Indian

Act' highlighting the exclusionary power it holds over all those Indigenous peoples in Canada who do not fit the legislated category, 'Status Indian.' The serious play of Scofield's poem, including its penchant for punning, alliteration, and internal rhyme, provides the poem with such an energetic rhythm that it demands to be read out loud. The following rhetorical strategies give the first stanza the vitality of a 'spoken word' performance: the pun on 'act,' as a noun referring to the 'Indian Act' and as a verb referring both to 'performance' and to

'resistance;' the repetition of the word 'fact' and its internal rhyme with 'act' and

'exact;' and, finally, the gap or white space in the first line, not only emphasizing the important first four words of the line but also providing the poet's audience with the opportunity to engage in the poem by the question he asks:

How do I act I act without an Indian act Fact is I'm so exact about the facts I act up when I get told I don't count Because my acts not written (1-4).

In the tenth stanza, while continuing the trickster word play on 'act,' he also describes the impossible 'in-between' position of the Metis in Canada:

So we end up scrunched in between Suffocating ourselves to act according However we're told to act But according to their act (40-43).

Scofield and other Metis, however, refuse the positions as victims of either the Canadian Government policies or many First Nations communities. Instead,

184 they demand that their identity as Metis and 'mixed-breed'125 be recognized legally with the same rights as those of 'Status Indians' under the 'Indian Act.'

I'm not soley a First Nation act Or Canadian act But a mixed breed act Acting out for equality (44-47)

Annharte, like Scofield, is also conscious of the double, triple, and often quadruple meanings which Indigenous peoples in Canada give to the term 'act;' as a result, this satiric punning is now an important form of trickster humour countering the terminal creeds of Canadian Government policies. In an interview with Pauline Butling, Annharte offers an example:

There's compressed humour that has evolved over thirty or forty years about the name of the government agency, Indian Affairs, and about the Indian Act. A woman came up to me once when I was doing a performance and asked me when I got interested in theatre and the first thing that popped into my head was well, there's the Indian "Act." We were all forced to be actors in some strange way. The joke about Indian Affairs became a huge laugh for Indian people.126

The political purpose of the 'Indian Act' is not only to control Native identity but also in the process to assimilate Indigenous peoples into 'white' culture - to

'terminate' them as 'Indians.' Annharte's poem, "Cheeky Moon," in her volume of poetry, Being on the Moon (1990), is especially relevant to her mixedblood urban status. A poet, cultural activist, 'spoken word' performer and mixed media artist, she grew up in a poor, working class neighbourhood of Winnipeg, her mother

Anishnaabe and her father Irish. "Cheeky Moon" cheekily and in trickster fashion parodies her own marginal, mixedblood status as it is constructed by the 'Indian

Act.' Although there are no overt blood quantum identity requirements in the

185 'Act,' Annharte decides to draw attention to the concept as it, along with the

notion of 'authenticity,' circulates in the orientalist discourse on the indian.

'Writing back' to 'white' settler culture in Canada, she is also 'writing home' to

Indigenous communities, especially those who are complicit with 'Indian Act's' exclusionary policies on Native identity:

I'm left to defend One lonely drop of blood. I might terminate lflgetanosebleed.(16-19)127

"Raced Out to Write This Up," another poem in her collection, Being On

the Moon, makes the similar point about the arbitrary, constructed category of

'race.' The poem is a splendid example of the witty and disorienting quality of

trickster writing, especially in its uncanny transformation from written text to oral

performance aptly described by Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe as the "talk" that "walk[s] on paper."128 From the first stanza, not only word play such as alliteration, punning, onomatopoeia, and internal rhyme but also the gaps and white spaces emphasize the performative, oral quality of the written text, adding

both a driving rhythm to the poem and allowing the reader/listener room to

imaginatively enter in:

I often race to write I write about race who do I write About race I must erase all trace of my race I am an Eraser abrasive bracing myself embracing (1-3).129

Each stanza in "Raced Out To Write This Out" is longer than the one

before it. The poem ends with a stanza of twenty-two lines, the effect of which is to keep the momentum and rhythm of this 'spoken word' poem moving to a

climax. The final stanza blurs the distinction between poetry and prose. There is

186 no conventional punctuation, other than a comma in the second last line. Instead, words bump up against each other, a small number of white gaps on the page being the only breaks within the lines, offering both pauses for emphasis and a point of entry for the reader/listener. Like the first stanza, Annharte's last stanza revels in trickster word play, focusing on the contradictory experience of being an urban 'mixed-blood' in contemporary Canada. While insisting on, indeed celebrating, the legitimacy of her hybrid status, at the same time she recognizes, in the last nine lines of the poem, the "black hole" of pain inside her that comes with being rejected as an inauthentic "non-Indian" - not "whole:"

I'm a half a half breed a mixed bag breed bread and butter bred my whole grain bannock will taste as good to me even if I smear on red jam sink my white teeth down into it down the red hatch to the black hole that is behind it all the whole black of me the whore backing up behind me the sore holy part of me which is the blackest darkest most coloured most non-Indian, non white slice of me bred to wonder (42-50)

Plains Cree writer, poet, editor, teacher and cultural activist, Beth

Cuthand, foregrounds her mixedblood urban identity with a cheeky assuredness that is missing in the last lines of Annharte's text. Cuthand's 'spoken word' poem,

"Post Oka Kinda Woman" is an act of anti-imperialist translation written in a contemporary feminist form of 'rez english.' The printed page once again becomes the site of oral performance as the voice of a contemporary Native woman is liberated from the text. This new voice is strong, self-confident and linked to a new identity forged by a common political cause, the standoff at Oka

187 during the summer of 1990. The confrontation between Mohawk warriors and both the Surete de Quebec and the Canadian army gained national and international media attention resulting in a defining moment of political solidarity for Native North Americans across the continent. As a result, Post-Oka woman, like Vizenor's postindian warriors of survivance, refuses to internalize the colonizer's discourse of manifest manners. Her performance resists any notion of what Vizenor has named the "aesthetic traces of victimry."130 Rather than

'buying into' the binary logic of the discourse of manifest manners she interrogates it using trickster strategies, the always already of contemporary postmodernism: "Talk to her of post-modern deconstructivism/She'll say: 'What took you so long?'"(27-28)

In the first six lines of the poem, Post-Oka woman strongly resists both the dominant discourse on Native peoples and the binary logic that structures it. She appears to take great pleasure in disrupting its stereotypes, especially those of

Indigenous women who are represented dialectically, according to Janice

Acoose, as either "Indian Princess or Easy Squaw."131 In addition, both the alliteration on the letter's' in the first two lines of the poem and the list of four and five syllable words in the next four lines provide a driving rhythm that transforms the poem into an oral performance:

Here she comes strutting down your street. This Post-Oka woman don't take no shit.

She's done with victimization, reparation, Degradation, assimilation, Devolution, coddled collusion, The "plight of the Native peoples." (1-6)132

188 She delights in the 'in-between,' mixedblood world in which she lives, celebrating rather than denigrating its cultural contradictions:

She drives a Toyota, reads bestsellers, sweats on weekends, colours her hair, sings old songs, gathers herbs. Two steps Tuesdays, Round dances Wednesdays, Twelve steps when she needs it. (16-21)

Post-Oka woman subversively 'acts out' against the 'Indian Act,' each 'act' an 'in-your-face' performance, 'actively' destabilizing the mainstream, commodified representations of Indians that circulate in the discourse of manifest manners. Post-Oka woman's identity is not 'fixed' nor 'frozen in time' but is, instead, a performance and repetition of 'acts:' she not only drives, reads, sweats, sings, talks "cheeky" and "take[s] no shit"(2) but also, significantly, refuses to 'stay in her place' as she comes "strutting down your street"(1) and

"shashay[ing] into your suburbia" (8). In fact, she almost struts right off the page, her 'act' is so convincing.

Conclusion

A discussion of Marilyn Dumont's poem, "Circle the Wagons," from her

1996 collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, offers not only an important connection to Beth Cuthand's "Post-Oka Kinda Woman" but also an appropriate conclusion to this chapter, especially its final section on urban Aboriginal poetry.

Of Metis/ Cree ancestry, Dumont was born in Northeastern Alberta but moved to urban centres in British Columbia to pursue a variety of careers as a student, critic, poet, journalist and university teacher. She is an outspoken opponent of

189 the discourse of manifest manners, specifically its generation of simulations of the Indian in what Vizenor has named "the theatre of victimry;"133 however, positive simulations of a pan-indian culture which circulate in this discourse are just as dangerous, according to Dumont, because they homogenize, essentialize and ghettoize Indigenous peoples. As a postindian warrior of survivance, she understands that Indigenous cultural survival foregrounds political resistance; consequently, as a critic and poet she speaks out against these simulations, not only blaming colonial settler culture for their production but also criticizing

Indigenous peoples, themselves, who have found in them useful tools in the production of a pan-indian identity politics. As a result, Indigenous people are both constructed and regulated by a Canadian version of the discourse of manifest manners. As she writes in her essay, "Positive Images of Nativeness:"

If you are old, you are supposed to write legends, that is, stories that were passed down to you from your elders. If you are young, you are expected to relate stories about foster homes, street life and loss of culture and if you are in the middle, you are supposed to write about alcoholism or residential school. And somehow throughout this, you are to infuse everything you write with symbols of the [N]ative world view, that is: the circle, mother earth, the number four or the trickster figure. In other words, positive images of [N]ativeness.134

Like the other urban Indigenous poets discussed in this section, Dumont finds that the commodified symbols of Aboriginal identity politics have no place in her life; however, she questions whether she will be considered an "authentic'

Native writer if she does not deploy them:

But what if you are an urban Indian, have always been, or have now spent the greater part of your life living an urban lifestyle? Do you feign the significance of the circle, the number four, the trickster in your life? Do you just disregard these things? Or do

190 you reconstruct these elements of culture in your life so you can write about them in "the authentic voice," so you can be identified (read 'marketed') as a [N]ative Artist?135

Rather than 'buying into' the discourse of manifest manners and, therefore, suffering from "internalized colonialism," Dumont, like Cuthand's 'Post-

Oka woman,' decides to seek empowerment by valuing her heterogeneity as an

Indigenous urban woman. As she states, "I now see myself increasingly committed to writing out of my own urban experience and using images in my art which counter these monolithic, singular images of '[N]ativeness' that are popularly seductive but ultimately oppressive.136

"Circle the Wagons"137 is an example of Dumont's art that both engages with the power of these simulations and, at the same time, resists them. The title makes reference to Hollywood Westerns, specifically to images of Native

Americans represented on screen as savage postindian warriors of simulations, circling the wagons of white settlers, preparing to attack them. It also suggests, as Barbara Godard has noted, "the trap of 'the circle' in which colonial stereotypes have enclosed [Dumont] . . . ,"138 True to her promise to resist and disrupt "monolithic, singular images" of Nativeness, in a trickster manoeuvre

Dumont wittily and defiantly writes a rectangular- shaped poem railing against the omnipresence of the pan-indian simulation of the circle in Indigenous culture:

"There it is again, the circle, the goddamned circle, as if we thought / in circles, judged things on the merit of their circularity as if all we / ate was bologna and bannock, drank Tetley tea . . ."(1-3)

191 As in her essay, Dumont states here the concern of many mixedblood

Indigenous artists that they will not be taken seriously unless they incorporate simulations such as the 'circle' into their work and brand themselves as

'traditional' and 'authentic' Like them, Dumont resists playing the role of the exotic indian; however, she honestly acknowledges the perils of her position, one of which is that she will be considered 'white': "Yet I feel compelled to incorporate something / Circular into the text, plot, or narrative structure because if it's lin- / ear then that proves that I'm a ghost and that [N]ative culture really / has vanished "(7-10)

Unlike Cuthand's poem which gleefully celebrates urban, mixedblood

identities, Dumont's poem shares with Annharte's "Raced Out To Write This Out" an extraordinary frankness concerning the 'material' pain that necessarily comes with the experience of being mixedblood. "There are times when I feel that if I don't / have a circle or the number four or legend in my poetry, /1 am lost, just a fading urban Indian caught in all the trappings of Doc Mar- / tens, hoops, cappuccinos and foreign films. . . ." (11-14)

The great gift of "Circle the Wagons" is Dumont's courage to 'speak truth to power;' instead of simply celebrating trickster disruptions of the dominant discourse of manifest manners and her role as a postindian warrior of survivance, she engages in a dialogue with other Indigenous writers as well as

her listener/readers about the difficulties inherent in both overturning the simulations of indians and assuming the role of postindian warriors of survivance.

Like so many mixedblood, Indigenous writers and poets in Canada, Dumont finds

192 that the pressure to conform to the image of the exotic indian is such that she can never be sure it will ever leave her:". . . but there it is again orbiting, lunar, hoops encompassing your thoughts and canonizing mine, there it is again, circle the wagons. . ."(14-16).

193 CHAPTER 5

Coyote Pedagogy1: Re-reading Indigenous Short Fiction

[P]erhaps this is the major difference between Aboriginal writing and that of European-based 'literature.' We do not write as individuals communing with a muse. We write as members of an ancient, cultural consciousness. Our 'muse' is us.2 Beth Brant

Coyote moves through society with a unique outlook. He negotiates his own survival and inspires his Native American family to do likewise. Coyote transfers his self-esteem and coping strategies to others, heroically helping in the cultural survival of Native American people. Dawn Karima Pettigrew

Introduction

This chapter engages with a selection of tricky tales by Indigenous writers,

Beth Brant and Thomas King. By tricky, I mean those stories that focus not only on border-crossing textual strategies and trickster figures, as discussed in previous chapters, but also on debunking simulations of Indigenous cultures and peoples through raucous laughter and, at times, a sly, parodic Coyote trickster humour. Such stories, as Vizenor notes, are both "wild" and "lusty."4 They resist the moral imperative of rational 'civility,' preferring to outsmart the manifest manners of contemporary western culture by celebrating the rule-breakers, the chance takers and those who revel in chaos. Despite the fact that, as Shane

Phelan notes, "Coyote's constant failures and overreachings are lessons on how not to live," in stories such as these "Coyote can teach us ... to question our

194 assumptions about the virtues of virtue - the effectiveness and moral superiority of truth-telling, reliability, and stability."5 As creator, Coyote straddles the boundaries between the human, the animal and the divine, teaching us to be mindful that the myth world is embodied both in the world of nature and in our own everyday lives. Coyote stories are also marked not only by compassion6 and a generosity of spirit but also by a celebration of community and kinship ties. Our frailties and vices are met by a liberatory laughter rather than judgment and fear.

In an inversion of the Judeo-Christian creation story, Coyote tales offer, in

Phelan's opinion, "a full portrait of humanity not as fallen from grace but as bumbling and blessed."7 As students of Coyote pedagogy, we learn to be humble, to laugh at ourselves, even if we find that laughter uncomfortable, to engage in the world and, perhaps, help to transform it. Most importantly, however, in Tomson Highway's opinion, we learn to be joyful. As he argues,

"contrary to the viewpoint of that other hero figure [Christ], what [trickstet] says foremost is that we are here to have one hell of a good time."8

Beth Brant's "Coyote Learns a New Trick" (1985) and "This Is History" (1991)

Although Brant's work is well known in Aboriginal circles and Women's and Indigenous Studies departments in Canadian universities,9 her writing, like that of so many other Native short fiction writers and poets in Canada, sits on the fringe of CanLit. In "The Good Red Road: Journeys of Homecoming in Native

Women's Writing," first published in 1997, Brant offers an explanation for this position of marginality:

195 I sometimes think that one of the reasons our work is not reviewed or incorporated into literature courses, (besides the obvious racism) is that we go against what has been considered 'literature.' Our work is considered too political and we do not stay in our place - the place that white North America deems acceptable. It is no coincidence that most Native women's work that gets published is done by small presses: feminist, leftist or alternative. . . . We are told by the mainstream presses that our work doesn't sell.10

Brant does recognize, however, that "[t]here is a movement going on that is challenging formerly held beliefs of writing and who does the writing" and that

"the number of Native women who are writing and publishing is growing."11 As noted in the previous chapter, Indigenous poetry, while still marginal, has been gaining larger audiences, a result perhaps of the growing prestige and current bestseller status of the Indigenous novel in Canada. In addition, the success of

Oxford University Press's An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in Canada, edited by Terry Goldie and Daniel David Moses, now in its third edition, has meant that in the last ten years more Indigenous poetry is showing up in classrooms and on curricula across Canada. Although there are far fewer

Indigenous short fiction writers than poets who have published work, they too have benefited from this new interest in Indigenous writing. Brant's short story,

"Coyote Learns a New Trick," first published in 1985 in her collection of short fiction and poetry, Mohawk Trail, was included in the first edition of the Anthology in 1992 and has gained a greater audience as a result.

Beth Brant is a mixedblood, Bay of Quinte Mohawk from Tyendinaga

Mohawk Territory. Her father was Mohawk and her mother of Scottish and Irish ancestry. She grew up in Detroit, spending her summers at Tyendinaga. She

196 refuses, however, to define herself solely in terms of her Mohawk identity, recognizing the trap that Indigenous peoples fall into when they categorize themselves in accordance with the colonizing binary logic of the Indian Act. As a result, she also describes herself as an uneducated half-breed, a mother, a grandmother, a lesbian, a feminist, a member of the working class and a writer.12

In introducing herself, she makes the point that she did not begin writing until the age of forty, thereby encouraging other middle-aged Indigenous women to take up her art. In her poetry and prose, she foregrounds her struggles over her mixedblood identity. As Tamai Kobayashi notes: "Brant also writes about family, her family history, or her mixed blood origins, her shame of being 'light skinned' in a family of dark hair, dark eyes, and later, her shame of being Indian and her childhood 'passing' as white."13

Her role as mentor was established when Brant edited A Gathering of

Spirit: a Collection of North American Indian Women in 1988, the first anthology of writing and art by Indigenous women in Canada and the United States. It was published by Firebrand Books/Women's Press in 1988, the same press that brought out Mohawk Trail in 1985 and also, in 1991, Food and Spirits, a collection of short fiction by Brant. In 1994, Women's Press published another collection of her essays, Writing as Witness: Essays and Talk and also, in 1996, her oral history, /'// Sing 'Til the Day I Die: Conversations with Tyendinaga Elders.

For Brant, as a lesbian or 'two-spirited' writer, the personal is political.

Having spent much of her youth ostracized by family and community because of her sexual orientation, she writes, in part, not only to resist the viral homophobia

197 that infects many contemporary Native communities but also to celebrate and honour traditional 'two-spirited' people. As border crossers between male and female sexuality, they were understood to be both mediators and healers. As a result, they held both status and positions of responsibility in traditional cultures.

Recovering their role and honouring them, according to Paula Gunn Allen, is necessary to the revitalization of contemporary Native American cultures:

If you make people hate [two-spirited people], . . . they will lose their Indianness. The connection to the spirit world, and the connection between the world of women and men, is destroyed when the [two-spirited] tradition declines. . . . We must decolonize ourselves. The issue of self-determination for Indian people means acceptance of lesbians and gays is central to accepting ourselves as Indian.14

Brant is also a gifted storyteller who recognizes the important connection between the oral and the written in her artistic practice. As she insists, "I come from a long line of storytellers and feel that my written words are just another form of storytelling.15 Before first reading Brant's "Coyote Learns a New Trick," I heard her tell this re-invented trickster tale at a storytelling session at the

Peterborough Public Library in 1985. At the time, she was on a book tour promoting her collection, Mohawk Trails. A good audience had come out to hear her, made up for the most part of white, middle-aged or older people. They appeared well-intentioned, presumably at the library to hear and learn more about traditional Native stories; however, on that Saturday afternoon in March, the majority sat in stunned silence while and after Brant told her tale not sure whether to laugh uproariously or to leave in protest over the unseemly content of this tale. Clearly, no matter what position they took, Brant had turned their

198 preconceived stereotypes of Indigenous storytelling upside down, demonstrating what Vizenor has called a "tricky visionary resistance" to the orientalist discourse on the indian. Brant's risky, unsettling act places her in the company of other postindian warriors of survivance who, according to Vizenor, "outwit, reverse, and overturn the wiles of domination" and "contradict the simulations of [N]atives"16 which, as Daniel David Moses writes, "[place] Native people in a museum with all the other extinct species."17 Brant's story is no safe, sanitized Coyote tale, the sort which late capitalist windigo culture has commodified to such an extent that, according to Vizenor, "it's become a kind of American 'kitsch,' the trickster, especially Coyote."18 Instead, her Coyote is both a creator19 and survivor who teaches contemporary Native North Americans how to live imaginatively and courageously in the liminal space, in-between two cultures. As Dawn Karima

Pettigrew notes,

Coyote . . . creates a method of coping with the dominant cultural oppression that surrounds him and the Native Americans. As he survives nature and humankind, Coyote serves as a symbol of Native Americans' experience since the discovery of Columbus on their shores. Coyote embodies the ambivalence of Native Americans in North America. . . . Coyote represents the dual consciousness of individuals who, undaunted by assimilation, approach dominant institutions without awe. An innate irreverence accompanies Coyote's actions. Unimpressed with titles, rules, or systems, Coyote exhibits a gentle bewilderment coupled with a complete absence of fear or fawning. The white man fails to frighten Coyote. He refuses to be reduced to a victim by the majority's vision and values.20

Accordingly, Brant's cross-dressing, gender bending, 'two-spirited' Coyote actively interrogates mainstream stereotypes of Indigenous culture, successfully re-appropriating the Indigenous trickster tale for contemporary Native and non-

199 Native audiences. Her wild and wonderful Coyote certainly has no place in

Saturday morning kids' cartoons featuring the ubiquitous characters, 'Wile E.

Coyote' and The Road Runner.'21 For Brant, that is the point. Her story, however, pays tribute to Indigenous trickster values by creating a space where relationships and community matter rather than individuals and where borders are crossed between the rural and the urban; the male and the female; the lesbian and the heterosexual; time past and time present; and the worlds of humans, animals and the spirit. Coyote, as creator, for example, takes on the attributes of both the animal and human as she (cross) dresses in preparation for her trick:

She laughed and snorted and got out her sewing machine and made herself a wonderful outfit. Brown tweed pants with a zipper in the front.... A white shirt with pointed collar. ... A tie from a scrap of brown and black striped silk she had found in her night rummagings. . . . She bound her breasts with a diaper left over from her last litter. . . . She buttoned the white shirt. . . and wound the tie around her neck, where she knotted it with flair. . . . She stuffed more diapers into her underpants so that it looked like she had a swell inside. A big swell.22

This Coyote is neither museum Indian, all decked out in feathers and loin cloth, nor the appropriated, kitschy icon of American consumerism; instead, with anarchic glee, she disempowers those simulations, dressing up as a parodic stereotype of the 1950s travelling salesman. In the process, she causes either laughter or discomfort, or perhaps a bit of both, as she stuffs her underpants with diapers to ensure that her 'manly' trick comes off. The effect of this Coyote tale on contemporary readers and listeners, whether Native and not, is likely similar to that of ancient oral trickster tales on their audiences: preconceived ideas of the

200 world and its truths, the terminal creeds of our culture, are turned up-side-down, specifically the binary logic that not only informs spiritual, human and animal identities but also those of sexuality and gender.

Coyote travels through an estranging landscape where borders are crossed not only between conventional notions of time and space but also between the past, the present and the mythic. All dressed up in a bizarre facsimile of contemporary western urban attire, she journeys to Fox's place through a liminal space that is neither city nor bush country; however, when she meets Hawk and Turtle on her way, the contemporary western world crosses the boundary into the mythic, entering the time of ancient Indigenous oral culture.

Along with Hawk and Turtle, Coyote plays the role outlined for her in mythic storytelling. She is both trickster, shape-shifter and creator. The point of her journey is to trick Fox, "[tjhat la-di-da female who was forever grooming her pelt and telling stories about how clever and sly she was. ... To get her all worked up thinking [Coyote] was male, then reveal her true female self (149). Her plan, of course, backfires. It's Fox who gets the best of Coyote and Brant who gets the best of her listeners and readers when Coyote discovers "how much fun it was to be rolling around with a red-haired female. And man oh man she really could kiss. That tongue of hers sure knows a trick or two" (150).

Coyote's belief at the beginning of the story that "a joke is not much good if you can't trick creatures into believing one thing is true when Coyote knows that truth is only what she makes it"(148), a form of apolitical postmodern relativism, also backfires. For both Coyote and Brant's audience are tricked into

201 believing one thing is true - the heterosexual identities of Fox and Coyote - when, by the end of the story, a much more important truth is offered. This truth celebrates the joy of sexuality without moral judgment and, despite Coyote's blunder, she truly is blessed in this surprising new relationship with Fox. We also are blessed, having learned through Brant's storytelling to interrogate the terminal creeds that inform our lives. For Brant, like Coyote, is one of Vizenor's compassionate tricksters and transformers who heals the world through story, teaching her readers and listeners that "[ejven in our grief, we find laughter.

Laughter at our human failings, laughter at our Tricksters, laughter at the stereotypes presented about us."23

Brant's two-spirited 'take' on the traditional Iroquois creation story, "This Is

History" from her collection Food and Spirits, demonstrates once again that tricky subversive tales do offer important teachings. In one variation of the traditional story, according to Tara Prince-Hughes' synopsis, Sky Woman falls or is pushed through a hole in the sky:

Birds collaborate to break her fall, and animals dive below the endless expanse of water to bring up some earth to lay on Turtle's back to provide Sky Woman with ground to lie on. She becomes pregnant and bears a daughter. . . and the two women work together to create the earth. Finally the daughter becomes pregnant and bears twin sons, one of whom is evil.. . .24

Brant re-tells this creation story with a cross-cultural emphasis. Both the

Judeo-Christian and the Iroquois creation tales are, in trickster fashion, interwoven. In Brant's narrative, Sky Woman is cursed by the Sky People for her curiosity as is Eve by God in the biblical Genesis story. She is considered "a nuisance with her questions, an aberration, a queer woman who was not like

202 them." Like Eve who was expelled from the Garden of Eden, Sky Woman must also leave the Sky World. When she fell, the Sky People "were glad to see her go."25

Brant's gynocentric, feminist retelling begins by positioning the Sky People as liminal trickster beings who cross borders between the human and the divine:

"Long before there was an earth and long before there were people called human, there was a Sky World. On Sky World there were Sky People who were like us and not like us. And of the Sky People there was Sky Woman" (19). Sky

Woman and, later her daughter, First Woman, are also shown to cross borders with animals from whom they learn to live and thrive in their new world. Prior to

First Woman's birth, for example, Sky Woman learns many lessons from them on survival and the necessity of living communally:

An animal showed her how to bring fire, then threw himself in the flames that she might eat of him. . . . Sky Woman watched the creatures, learning how they lived in community with each other, learning how they hunted, how they stored food, how they prayed (22).

This connection between the human and the animal world is made stronger by the special attention paid in Brant's narrative to both Sky Woman's and her daughter's fertility, their biological rites of passage and their female power. For example, Brant's addition to the ancient tale includes a description of

Sky Woman giving birth to her daughter with animals acting as her teachers and midwives:

On a day when Sky Woman was listening to the animals, she felt a sharp pain inside of her. She pushed, and First Woman slipped out of her and onto the soft nest. First Woman gave a cry. Sky Woman touched her companion, then gave another great push

203 as her placenta fell from her. She cut the long cord with her teeth as she learned from the animals. She ate the placenta as she had learned from the animals. She brought First Woman to her breast as she had learned, and First Woman began to suckle, drawing nourishment and medicine from Sky Woman. (22-23)

Later in the story, Brant's re-telling of the creation story includes a minimalist and poignant description of the 'two-spirited' love celebrated between

Sky Woman and First Woman: "They laughed together and made language between them. They touched each other and in the touching made a new word: love. They touched each other and made a language of touching passion." At the end of the tale, Brant describes Sky Woman's aging body with compassion and equanimity, suggesting thereby that not only birth but also aging and dying are part of the natural cycle of life:

Time went by, long times went by. Sky Woman felt her body changing. Her skin was wrinkling, her hands were not as strong. She could not hunt as she used to. Her eyes were becoming dim, her sight unclear. She walked the earth in this changed body and took longer to climb mountains and swim in the waters. She still enjoyed the touch of First Woman, the laughter and language they shared between them, the dancing, the singing prayers. (25)

After her death, the moon speaks with Sky Woman's voice telling her daughter to "[k]eep well, my beloved First Woman. Eagle is watching out for you.

Honour the living things. Be kind to them. Be strong. I am always with you."

More importantly, however, she counsels her daughter on the raising of her twin sons who are about to be born: "Teach these beings what we have learned together. Teach them that if the sons do not honour the women who made them, that will be the end of the earth" (26). Although "This Is History" lacks the parodic gender bending and passionate 'two-spirited' sexuality celebrated in "Coyote

204 Learns a New Trick," nevertheless, this tale offers a radically subversive, contemporary revision of the creation story that, paradoxically, honours the values of traditional Iroquois matriarchal society.26 The title of Brant's tricky tale confirms that, in her reinvention, the world of human history must engage with the realm of the mythic, the past with the present and the future. For storytellers such as Brant, as Renate Eigenbrod writes, "there is no distinction between past and present, mythological reality and reality documented in writing, history and story. The mythological past explains the present reality. . . . "27 As such, Brant teaches her audience of readers and listeners the importance of occupying, like

Sky Woman and her daughter, that joyful, liminal space in-between nature, culture, humanity and the divine.

Thomas King's A Short History of Indians in Canada (2005)

Unlike Brant, Thomas King had no need to search out an alternative press to publish this collection of short stories. Before A Short History of Indians in

Canada was brought out by HarperCollins in 2005,28 King was already an established author and scholar. All three of his best selling and critically acclaimed novels have been published by multinational corporations: his first,

Medicine River, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Canada in 1990;29 his second,

Green Grass, Running Water, by HarperCollins in 1993;30 and his third, Truth and Bright Water, by HarperFlamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 1999.

HarperCollins also published his first short fiction collection, One Good Story,

That One in 1993.31 Green Grass, Running Water was nominated for a Governor

General's Award in 1993, as was his children's book, A Coyote Columbus Story,

205 in 1992. He has subsequently published two other books for children, Coyote

Sings to the Moon and Coyote's New Suit, all three produced by small publishing houses in Toronto.32

King has also made a significant contribution to Indigenous writing in

Canada, editing not only an anthology of Native fiction, All My Relations, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1990, but also with Cheryl Calver and

Helen Hoy, a collection of critical essays, The Native in Literature, brought out by

ECW Press in 1987. In addition, he has promoted Indigenous storytelling and issues related to Native peoples in Canada in public lectures, scriptwriting and broadcasting. For example, as the first Native to do so, he delivered the 2003

Massey Lecture, titled The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, published by

House of Anansi Press that same year. His fifteen minute show, satirically named

The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, on CBC Radio One's prestigious program,

This Morning, had a huge following for four seasons between 1997 and 2000. It became "a weekly ritual in kitchens, cars and [N]ative band offices across the country," according to John Stackhouse.33

Deserted by their Cherokee father, King and his younger brother were raised by their Greek mother and grew up poor in northern California. As

Stackhouse reports: "The family had no TV, so he and his brother became hooked on radio, and acted out episodes of Green Hornet, The Shadow and The

Lone Ranger. . . . The effect can be heard in Dead Dog Cafe, with its reliance on traditional American style humour."34 Despite childhood deprivation, King went on to higher education, earning a PhD in English from the University of Utah before

206 accepting a faculty position at the University of Lethbridge and moving to Canada in 1980. He is now Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at

Guelph University. He gained his political stripes before emigrating to Canada by joining the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the late 1960s and maintaining his membership throughout the 1970s.35 In the 2008 Canadian federal election he ran as an NDP candidate for the Guelph riding but failed to win the seat.

In his widely anthologized essay, "Godzilla vs. Postcolonial," King states emphatically that he is "not a theorist," adding that

[i]t's not an apology, but it's a fact. So I can't talk to the internal structure of. . . theory itself, how it works, or what it tells about the art of language and the art of literature. Nor can I participate in what Linda Hutcheon has called the dedoxifying project of postmodernism."36

His writing, however, tells us otherwise. The stories in A Short History of

Indians in Canada, for example, joyfully and wittily participate in one of postmodernism's most serious political projects, the discursive dismantling and debunking of modernist western truth claims and its power/knowledge systems.

Armed with an array of deconstructive strategies and parodic humour rooted in traditional, pre-Contact trickster storytelling, King also uncannily crosses borders with contemporary poststructuralism by troubling binary western logic in his writing, characterized by Vizenor as "the nasty fix of savagery and civilization."37

Trickster humour plays a vital role in King's writing, his politics and in his everyday life. In his film, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, Drew Hayden

Taylor interviews King, asking him to explain the special power and significance of such humour in his work. King responds by noting that although anger plays

207 an important role in Indigenous political activism, for him humour is a more effective tool both for political transformation and for healing the deeply felt wounds of colonization:

You can get in the door with humour. You can get in the kitchen with humour. If you're pounding on the front door they won't let you in. They may gather the kids around to watch on the front stoop, you know, making a fool of yourself sometimes. . . . Which doesn't mean that I don't believe in that sort of confrontational activism but it's just not me. It's not what I'm good at. I'm better with humour. Well it makes me laugh too. Those things that hurt in life, those things that continue to hurt about being Native American, you can handle those through humour. I can't handle those through anger because if I get angry about something, it just gets away from me. It just consumes me and so I have to keep coming back to humour as my safe position.38

Eva Gruber suggests that the defamiliarizing humour deployed by writers such as King may also have a bridging effect between Natives and newcomers.

The estranging effect of such laughter is potentially transformative:

Humour in texts by contemporary Native writers from Canada does not gloss over conflict, nor does it downplay the impact of conquest and colonization; yet the pleasure gained from humour opens up and lures readers into a space in which confrontational issues can be addressed in a manner that does not foreclose further intercultural dialogue. By laughing, non-Native readers are (often unwittingly) tricked into assuming new perspectives, into acknowledging the validity of Native viewpoints, and possibly even into questioning their own.39

The title of King's short story collection, A Short History of Indians in

Canada, acts as an apt introduction to the parodic trickster laughter and Coyote pedagogy that follows. Here, King re-appropriates and, in the process, profoundly destabilizes the indian, which Vizenor describes as "the simulation of the other" and an "instance of the absence of the real."40 With King now wresting control of the 'history' or story, the simulation takes on vastly different meanings. Most

208 Canadians still associate the Indian with the Indian Act and Indian treaties; the iconic stoic indian, a remnant of a dying culture; the drug addict and welfare bum; and the tribal princess or urban prostitute. Instead, in the eponymous first story, for example, Indians in trickster fashion, undergo a fantastic mutation, becoming birds whose migratory flight path is obstructed by the office towers of the financial district in downtown Toronto. In King's wily imagination, these nomadic feathered indians are transformed into a spectacular tourist attraction; as a result, the doorman of the 'King Eddy Hotel' directs Bob, a businessman from out of town looking for a little night life, to go catch sight of them a few blocks away on Bay

Street. Bob takes his advice and has a look:

Bay Street. Smack! Bob looks up just in time to see a flock of Indians fly into the side of the building. Smack! Smack! Bob looks up in time to get out of the way. Whup! An Indian hits the pavement in front of him Holy Cow! shouts Bob, and he leaps out of the way of the falling Indians. Whup! Whup! Whup!41

Bob watches as two city workers, Bill and Rudy, jump out of a municipal truck to clean up the mess, bagging the dead indians and tagging those still alive so they can be nursed back to health before releasing them "in the wild" (3).

These workers know the names of each Indian's tribe as they have a guide book which categorizes them according to their feathers:

Holy! Says Bill. Holy! Says Rudy. Check the book, says Bill. Just to be sure. Flip, flip, flip. Navajo!

209 Bill and Rudy put their arms around Bob. A Navajo! Don't normally see Navajos this far north. Don't normally see

Navajos this far east. (3)

When Bob returns to the hotel, he shakes the doorman's hand, excited about the sight he has witnessed; however, for the doorman, it's "not like the old days. ... In the old days, when they came through, they would black out the entire sky" (4).

In her discussion of this story, Gruber points out the "[hjaunting parallels

[that] emerge between 'wild' birds and 'savage' Indians" (233), arguing that

"King's slightly grotesque text requires readers to decode a puzzle that juxtaposes concepts and terminologies from two vastly different fields - ornithology and (stereotypical ideas about) Native cultures" (232). She also suggests that King's biting and bizarre satire acts as a "criticism of popular, political, and academic conceptualizations of the 'Indian'. . . which mocks the detached and reifying approach taken by both Western anthropologists and by the general public in their popular infatuation with the 'Indian'" (233). King's focus on 'the book' which yields the name and categorizes the tribal affiliation of each migratory 'Indian', however, suggests that his story offers a much more trenchant critique of traditional anthropology42 than Gruber suggests. His splendidly bizarre and estranging 'ornithological' conceit, with its tricky correlation between feathered 'Indians' and wild birds, is most effective in dehumanizing

Native North Americans; however, anthropologists and not ornithologists must take the blame for placing American Indians under their disciplinary gaze,

210 constructing them as not only a dying 'breed' but also the silenced objects of their scholarly knowledge and desire.

On first reading King's outrageous story, Non-Natives are really not sure whether to laugh along with the writer. If they laugh, will they be labeled racist?

Or should they feel guilty as complicit partners in a scholarly colonial project that has dehumanized Indigenous peoples such that they have become ossified simulations of the 'real,' fit only for academic texts or museum showcases?

Coyote pedagogy helps readers respond to these questions by teaching that trickster laughter is always the appropriate choice. Such defamiliarizing laughter will almost always be uncomfortable for, as Gruber points out, citing Kenneth

Lincoln, it encourages non-Natives to laugh along with Natives laughing at them,43 bringing with it lessons in humility, self-reflection and a new awareness of

Indigenous issues in Canada. According to Gruber:

[Jjust as traditional tricksters have always transgressed established rules and paradigms to make the audience laugh and have incited them to reassess these very rules, contemporary Native writers through the use of humour induce laughter among their audience. They free readers of colonial ignorance or stifling concepts of guilt - either of which prohibits seeing Native people for what they are - and shatter their familiar interpretative patterns so that they may re-evaluate their own perspectives and epistemologies.44

Active readers of "Bad Men Who Love Jesus", another in King's collection, will also respond with trickster laughter at the serious play going on in this estranging and bizarre tale. As in "A Short History of Indians in Canada," playing with the simulation of the Indian is also central; however, readers soon realize that institutional Christianity, one of the most powerful colonial tools, is also the

211 target of King's skewering, satirical pen. Those who know their New Testament, as do so many Natives brought up on Indian reserves, especially those with histories of Christian evangelism, will 'get' this tricky tale with its many biblical allusions. Ironically, Native peoples may be more likely than non-Natives to have access to the Euro-American knowledge of Christianity in this tale. Consequently, it appears that King's political project here is to write 'home' to Indigenous communities before writing back to mainstream culture.45

The tale begins with Jesus seeking sanctuary at the Garden River Indian

Reserve outside Testament, Alberta. Natives working in the band office do not recognize or acknowledge his sacred status; however, they accept him into their community for the time being if he helps them prepare for a band council meeting where they promise to put him on the agenda. The secretary gives him the lowliest job: "You know how to run a copier? . . . Either lend a hand, she tells him, or get out of the way" (90). The 'Indians' in this story are given the names of

Jesus' followers and apostles in the New Testament story. To begin with, there are "a lot of Marys around here" (91), Jesus notes. The first, presumably, is the

Virgin Mary and the mother of Jesus, who gives him the photocopying job. There is also Mary the "mother of James and John" as well as the repentant Mary

Magdalene. Among the other 'Indians' in the band office, there are the disciples,

Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Andrew and James as well as two with the same name, "Simon who is called Peter" (91) and "Simon the Canaanite who is not called Peter" (91). Others include not only "John, brother of James" and Judas

212 but also doubting Thomas who is not so sure that the band should help Jesus when he again asks for sanctuary during the council meeting:

What about me? says Jesus. I've always been a friend to the Indians. I don't know says Thomas. What about that 'civilizing the savage' business?" Yeah, says Matthew, and all those missionaries. That wasn't my fault, says Jesus. I didn't tell them to do that. They used your name, says Thomas.

Everybody uses my name, says Jesus. (91-92)

The band council members begin to realize that Jesus really is in trouble when Martha, a special friend of Jesus, calls. She tells Mary that "[t]here are a dozen guys at the PetroCan in Testament, singing and beating their swords against the side of their van." When Judas asks Jesus what He said "to get them so excited," Jesus answers by quoting from the King James version of the New

Testament: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor."46 Philip responds with, "Oh yeah . . . that would do it" (92).

Like the first story in King's collection, this one is also a puzzle that can be decoded on many levels. Most importantly, however, "Bad Men Who Love Jesus" interrogates and destabilizes the colonial binaries of self/other and civilized/savage. As in "A Short History of Indians in Canada," the simulation of the indian in this story has been emptied of its hegemonic western meanings, ones associated with 'the primitive' and 'uncivilized,' and filled with those that are equally estranging and bizarre. Here, the indians are transformed not only into ordinary First Nations band council members but also, much more subversively, into Disciples of Christ. In a tricky move, King draws parallels between the ethos of the early Church as written in the Acts of the Apostles and the band council

213 members who are poor but espouse the values of traditional Indigenous cultures by sharing what they do have with those in their community who are most in need:

The council votes to buy a new single-wide for Mary, mother of James and John, whose trailer was destroyed when the propane tank exploded, and approves a request for roof repair from Mary [Magdalene] who used to work in the sex trade in Calgary before she returned to the reserve and got her status back. (91)

These Native 'Disciples' and followers are neither in awe of this lowly

Jesus nor do they give him much respect but they do appear to care about his safety. As James suggests, [i]f you move fast. . . you can be in the mountains in a few days" (92). In addition, the Virgin Mary in this story is neither meek nor mild unlike her representation in the later institutional Christian church. A good parent, she sets Jesus to work rather than allowing him to 'freeload' off the band.

Those who are 'uncivilized' and 'savage' in the story are not only the early

Christian missionaries, to whom Matthew refers, but also many contemporary

Christians. Jesus' argument that [everybody uses my name," acts as another trenchant indictment of organized Christianity which, by believing that Christ is on side, defends its history of bloodshed and violence. The contemporary

Christians, in another tricky move, become the gathering hordes in Testament preparing to defend their 'one true faith' that is threatened by this strange Jesus and his teachings on poverty. Coyote pedagogy in this convoluted and bizarre tale teaches its readers that the Testament which contemporary Christians inhabit is little more than a terminal creed, utterly detached from either the New

Testament or Christ's teachings. It also has even less meaning for contemporary

214 Indigenous peoples who are finding their way forward by reinventing traditional stories which celebrate the community at the expense of the self and as an

alternative to the cannibalistic culture of late capitalism in the west. Being the

'true' inheritors of the Garden of Eden, the band council members from the

Garden River Reserve appear to be well on their way to establishing this Utopian

sanctuary.

"The Garden Court Motor Hotel" is another in King's collection that

parodies and de-authorizes institutional Christianity by re-inventing not only the

Sky Woman creation myth but also the New Testament Trinity of 'God the

Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.' The Sky Woman story in this

tricky tale is a very different version than Brant's. King's purpose for this re­ writing is to target mainstream Christianity and its rigid terminal creeds,

especially those which have attempted to vanquish Indigenous forms of

spirituality. King engages, once again, in serious play here by emptying the

simulation indian of its colonial significations and filling it, instead, with defamiliarizing, carnivalesque meanings. For the indian here is a very

"PREGNANT" (195-197), completely "NAKED" (197) Sky Woman who calls

"MOVE IT" (192) as she comes crashing into the pool at a motel. At the same time, the figure of Christ, personified here as the uneducated and dim-witted

Sonny, is cleaning the pool and, more generally, following orders and "going

about [his] Father's business."47 'God the Father' is represented as Sonny's formidable Dad who "knows everything" (190) and who owns The Garden Court

Motor Hotel where Sonny does most of the work. It is Sunday and his Dad is

215 resting" (198) so his son has nowhere to turn for orders on how to deal with Sky

Woman. The motel is represented as a dystopian version of the Garden of Eden.

To complete the trope of the Trinity, 'God the Holy Ghost' is represented as

Sonny's Uncle Holie, the train driver, who carries Sky Woman into exile (198)

before she "[can] fix the world" (198).

This post lapsarian world is certainly in need of fixing when Sky Woman

makes her extraordinary debut. As she boldly states, "[w]hy do you guys keep

messing up? . . . Why can't you guys ever get things straight?" (197). Earth's waters are polluted and its wildlife is dying. When Sonny cleans the pool, for

example, he notices that everything is dead: "There are three bugs on the net.

Dead. All the bugs he pulls out of the pool are dead. When DAD was a boy, there were fish in the pool. That's what Dad says ..." (190). In fact, the motor hotel is the antithesis of the biblical Garden of Eden. It is run down and falling apart:

Sonny steps on a crack. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Cracks in the concrete. Cracks in the white stucco. Cracks in the black asphalt. Cracks in the fifty-foot sign with the flashing neon-red ball that blinks "GARDEN COURT MOTOR HOTEL and "welcome." And it's new. Cracks in the windows. Cracks in the walls. Cracks hiding at the bottom of the pool where Sonny can't get at them. (191)

The motel parallels the biblical garden, however, not only

because, like God the Father, Dad is an authoritarian figure obsessed with rules and regulations but also, because Adam and Eve are once

again expelled, this time from the motel pool. As Sonny idly muses:

You can't swim in the pool unless you rent a room. Those are the rules, and Adam and Eve and all their kids come by on vacation in a brand new Winnebago pull up to the office and say, pretty

216 please, aren't going to get in the water until there's up-front money and the key deposit. That's the way things are. Like it or hike it. (191)

Like the traditional Indigenous myth, Sky Woman wants to fix the world and explains the procedure to Sonny:

"Okay," says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY. "Pay attention. Here's how it's supposed to work. I fall out of the sky into the water and am rescued by a turtle. Four animals dive to the bottom of the water and one brings up a bunch of dirt. I put the dirt on the back of turtle and the dirt expands until it forms the Earth. Are you with me so far?" (198)

Sky Woman must speak to Sonny slowly because he is portrayed not only as very stupid but also as so regulated and disciplined by his Dad that he can only follow orders. King's representation of Jesus, personified here as

Sonny, has neither any interest in Sky Woman's culture nor compassion for her situation. He is concerned only with maintaining the institutional Christian

Church's status quo and obeying the law of his Father.

With this portrait, King also appears to be drawing parallels between the stupidity of Sonny and that of the Christian missionary. Just like the city workers in the first story in this collection, Sonny has a guide book. This time it is a bizarre version of the Old Testament that explains Sky Woman to him, objectifying, exoticizing and eroticizing her and her culture in the process:

Sonny takes out his Illustrated Field Guide for Exotic Creatures, skips past Leviticus, and goes straight to the section with pictures. . . And after looking at all the pictures, some of which are pretty graphic and revealing, he guesses that the woman in the pool is an INDIAN. (194)

Sonny is unsure of what to do. He can't follow Dad's orders because it is

Saturday, the seventh day of creation48 and his day of rest. He thinks of

217 banishing Sky Woman from the motel to the "Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace," perhaps an illusion to an Evangelical Christian church where Native American spiritual rituals might be accepted; however, evangelical forms of Christianity are also associated with the neo-conservative wing of the American church that espouses the ideology of 'family values.' As a result, Sonny remembers that the

"Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace" is a family restaurant that would certainly refuse entrance to the naked Sky Woman. At the end of the story, when Uncle Holie's train finally arrives, she is forced to board; Sonny and Uncle Holie hope to pacify her by giving her "a nice window seat" (198). The Church, represented here by both the Christ figure of Sonny and the Holy Ghost as Uncle Holie, banishes her and, by implication, Indigenous spirituality forever. Uncle HOLIE assures Sonny that his Dad would approve of their solution: "Uncle Holie and Sonny stand by the side of the train and watch the sun set. "Don't worry, Uncle HOLIE tells Sonny, as he signals the engineer and steps onto the caboose. "It's what Dad would do"

(199).

Conclusion

Coyote pedagogy in Brant's "Coyote Learns a New Trick" and "This is

History," teaches listeners and readers to take risks and to make mistakes; to engage in border crossing between humanity, nature and the spiritual; to disrupt western linear thinking by understanding that time past is part of time present; and to embrace a generosity of spirit centred in the celebration of community and kinship ties. Brant's two stories also remind us of the dangers of believing in fixed

'truths,' teaching us to interrogate the commonsensical categories of gender and

218 sexuality. "Coyote Learns a New Trick" has much in common with King's sly parodic storytelling in A Short History of Indians in Canada. Both writers rely on humour as a powerful weapon of decolonization. Their storytelling outrageously disempowers simulations of the Indian circulating in mainstream orientalist discourses by filling them with bizarre, unsettling and estranging meanings.

Coyote pedagogy in King's tales, like Brant's, forces readers to question the terminal creeds that inform their lives, especially those upon which the institutional Christian Church is based. As a result, his stories also turn the tables on the powerful and the arrogant, celebrating instead the humble and the lowly.

Finally, by deploying Coyote trickster strategies in their storytelling, these two writers have taught their readers and audiences the most important lesson of all: that humankind is neither sinful nor fallen from grace but, instead, with the help of some wicked laughter, a little risk taking, and an enduring compassion we may, indeed, become the blessed.

219 CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: "Tricky Stories are the Cure."

It was never Indian against non-Indian - it was always people of good heart fighting for respect and freedom against an institutional system and its agents who would deny us any place other than as antiquated museum pieces gathering dust. . . in the American imagination. ... It has never been as simplistic as 'only Indians should teach/write about/talk about Indian issues.' Considerate non-Indians have a place in our communities and we hold enormous respect for those who are sincere and responsible, regardless of their ethnicity. . . .1 Daniel Heath Justice

Tricky stories are the cure. Listen, is there a wiser antidote to fear, fate and dominance than wit, natural wisdom, and irony? . . . Stories are the cure, not the pose of traditions or victimry. . . . [T]rickster. . . creates wild scenes, lusty situations, and outwits wicked poseurs, native reactionaries and even the manners of oral traditions.2 Gerald Vizenor

In this final chapter, I want to re-work Helen Hoy's question posed in my introduction to read as follows: 'So, what are white students like them doing in a place like this?' Instead of appropriating her original query for my own purposes,

I have re-worded it to interrogate the position of a group of ten hardworking and serious upper year Trent students who took an Indigenous Studies course in

Postcolonial Theory from me this past academic year. Unlike the two earlier teaching experiences described in Chapter 1, this time all the students were white, the majority majoring in International Development Studies. A few had taken courses in Indigenous Fiction and Poetry from me in previous years; however, most had little background in First Nations history, politics or culture.

220 They took to heart Justice's call for ethically responsible and considerate white allies to work alongside Indigenous scholars in transforming and 'Indigenizing the university.' The obstacle for them, as well as for me as their teacher, was in creating such a radical alliance. I should have known that a preliminary answer would lie in the course texts once we began to read them together.

Like the two courses I discuss in Chapter 1, this one was also held off-site.

For approximately three hours each week, we met at my house. During seminars in the fall term, there was a palpable tension around the dinner table where we sat, made much more obvious by the uncomfortable fact that I was doing most of the talking. Well versed in the normal academic hierarchies and institutional spaces, these students were thrown into an alien environment; instead of the lecture halls or large seminar rooms with which they were familiar, they found themselves in a small group seminar, in a professor's house, expected to contribute intelligently to the discussion. Their response for the most part was a painful silence, one that also arose as a result of the many difficult texts they were reading and their lack of background on Indigenous issues in Canada.

These students also had no personal experience of racism and oppression; as a result, they feared the stigma of 'political incorrectness' if they did begin to talk.

For most of them, the fact of their 'whiteness' meant that they had no right to speak. So, during the first part of the course, 'identity politics' was insidiously at work silencing them. What were they doing in a course like this? What did they have to offer? All of them, including their professor, were white and therefore representatives of the dominant, settler culture in Canada. Of course, I found

221 myself, once again, wondering what I was doing there. How could this course

ever be included in Daniel Heath Justice's project of 'Indigenizing the academy'?

A shift in perspective and an easing of tension came slowly as students worked in groups outside the allotted seminar period to acquire sufficient cultural

and political literacy to engage appropriately with the texts on our course.3 During

this time, they also worked hard coming to terms with the lexicon of postcolonial

theory including its key concepts; however, a radical change occurred when we

began to read the most difficult texts of all, chapters from Gerald Vizenor's

Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses. Here, students were introduced to

Vizenor's trickster discourse as a theoretical model for reading the "tricky stories"

on the course: the two Metis autobiographies, Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and

Gregory Scofield's Thunder Through My Veins; poems by Maria Campbell and

Louise Halfe; and short fiction by Beth Brant and Thomas King. The tension in the room began to lift and the silence was broken, finally, when Vizenor's

trickster spirit entered the room. The laughter that had been so therapeutic in those earlier teaching experiences at last became a vital part of this seminar,

even if it proved to be a destabilizing experience for them.

Stories by Brant and King, parodying white culture's simulations of

Indigenous peoples, taught them to recognize the terminal creeds in control of their lives while allowing them to laugh alongside these writers who were

laughing at them. A similar, uneasy laughter accompanied them as they

awkwardly stumbled through the 'red english' of Campbell's poem, "Jacob," and

Halfe's poem, "Der Poop." For my group of high achieving students, these

222 collective readings became a transformative experience. They accepted with humility their newfound ineptness, recognizing and respecting the effectiveness of Campbell's and Halfe's 'english' which had not only pushed them outside their comfortable circle of knowledge but also, in the process, appropriately destabilized their position of privilege within the academy. King's argument that

'humour' acted as a powerfully effective tool of decolonization got them thinking and, finally, really talking as they struggled to make sense of their feelings as they read the bizarre parodic comedy at work in stories such as "A Short History of Indians in Canada." The mixedblood memoirs by Campbell and Scofield shocked them for many reasons, one of which was their discovery that they too were imprisoned by the racial category of 'whiteness' as were these two Metis writers by the Indian Act's category of 'Status.' As a result, they became adept at interrogating essentialist notions of racial identity, including their own, while at the same time understanding that their 'whiteness' offered them a powerful position of privilege not available to the majority of contemporary First Nations peoples.

They readily turned the notion of Indigenous 'authenticity' up-side-down, recognizing that it reproduced not only the colonial logic of 'self and 'other' but also western representations of the 'authentic Indian.' Most importantly, they put aside their fear of making mistakes, knowing that if they did so the appropriate response was to laugh - at themselves.

As Vizenor argues, "tricky stories are the cure." Repeatedly, in his writing he critiques the simulation of the 'stoic Indian' and those "wicked poseurs" and

"Native reactionaries" such as activists Russell Means, Dennis Banks and Ward

223 Churchill who have made lucrative careers out of representing themselves in the ahistorical image of the Plains Indian, frozen in time.4 Vizenor's appreciation of the damaging effects of this simulation of the 'authentic Indian' on Indigenous peoples in their quest for identity and belonging in contemporary North America fuels his mission. He acknowledges that resentment, bitterness and the politics of victimry embraced by many Native Americans and First Nations peoples simply reinforces their low self-esteem. As a result, destabilizing the power of this discourse of manifest manners, within which these cliched images circulate, lies at the heart of his project. According to Vizenor, this cultural and political discourse has the equivalent power of guns and armies to wipe out Native

Americans, especially because they themselves, as Paul Seesequasis argues, in many instances have themselves become these invented images.5 For Vizenor, the ultimate act of resistance or 'cure' is to be found not only in appropriating, subverting and parodying the cultural codes and cliched simulations circulating in the discourse of manifest manners but also in the "tricky stories' created as part of this process.

Coyote pedagogy in these stories taught my students this past year, and me once more, to negate fear by taking risks and embracing the unknown; to interrogate the terminal creeds in control of our lives; to upset the essentialist categories that inform the politics of identity; to laugh at ourselves as we strive to be humble; to find meaning in communal as well as individual acts; and to have a great deal of fun in the process. By the end of the course, I believe my students had learned all this. In doing so, they became the considerate and respectful

224 white allies of First Nations peoples that Justice describes. Their next step is deciding how they now may contribute to his project of 'Indigenizing the

university.'

225 NOTES

Chapter 1

1 Hoy, How Should I Read, 14. 2Lenore Keeshig-Tobias argues that the mainstream media, particularly The Globe and Mail, and a number of high profile Toronto writers such as Timothy Findley took out of context a variation of this slogan in her position on the issue of the appropriation of Native voice in Canada first published in an article in The Globe and Mail in 1989. By accusing her of censorship, Findley simplified and made reductive a complex and important issue for Indigenous peoples. For a copy of her Globe and Mail article, see Keeshig-Tobias, "Stop Stealing Native Stories" 71-73 and for her response to the controversy the article created see Keeshig-Tobias, Forward, Walking a Tightrope, xv-xvi. 3Justice, "We're Not There Yet," 266. ^People, quoted in Hulan, "Some Thoughts," 220. 5Hulan, "Some Thoughts," 211. People quoted in Hulan "Some Thoughts," 220. Universities in Canada use the terms 'Native Studies,' 'Indigenous Studies,' 'First Nations Studies,' and 'Native American Studies' to name their interdisciplinary programs that focus on Aboriginal peoples, cultures, and histories. The Native Studies Department at Trent University recently changed its name to Indigenous Studies, a key reason for this change being that Inuit and Metis peoples are neither considered 'Native' nor regulated by the 'Indian Act' as are all First Nations communities in the country. In addition, as Lawrence writes: "Indigeneity . . . signifies] a more decolonized understanding of what could otherwise be termed Nativeness. ... It refers less to precolonial states of. . . identity than to a future, postcolonial refashioning of Indigenous identities that are truer to Indigenous histories and cultures than those shaped by the colonial realities that continue to surround Native [people] at present." See Lawrence, "Mixed-Blood Native Identity in the Americas," Introduction in 'Real' Indians and Others, 21-22. 8 Hulan, "Some Thoughts," 220. 9LaRocque, "Here are our Voices," xxii. Terry Goldie agrees with LaRocgue, arguing that the appropriate role for non-Aboriginal readers and audiences is to "educate [them]selves so [they] are ready to read, ready to watch." See Moses and Goldie. Preface to the First Edition, xxii. 10Hoy, How Should I Read, 17. 11This term is taken from the title of a collection of essays edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson: Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities. Lincoln: University of Nebraska P, 2004. l2Justice, "We're Not There Yet," 257. "justice, "Seeing (and Reading) Red," 102. 14Justice, "We're Not There Yet," 258. 15ln an Indigenous fiction course I taught in the winter of 2007 at Trent University, for example, out of 36 students only two self-identified as Aboriginal. At the beginning of the course much of our time was spent interrogating the stereotypes of Indigenous peoples that my white students brought to the course. 16Owens, "Technoshamans," 253. 17Enakshi Dua and Bonita Lawrence argue convincingly that faculty women of colour in Canadian universities do not hold similar positions of power in their classrooms and academic departments as do white female professors. See Dua and Lawrence, "Challenging White Hegemony." Gingell, "The Absence of Seaming," 107-108. 19Hulan and Warley, "Cultural Literacy," 69. 20Mihesuah and Wilson, Indigenizing the Academy, 5. 21Hulan, "Some Thoughts," 220. 22For a full discussion of her position see Lorde, Sister Outsider. 23For a further discussion of this legacy, see Miller, Lethal Legacy.

226 For a discussion of this term, coined by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, see his collection of essays, The Location of Culture. 25Moses and Goldie's Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English was first published in 1992 with two further editions published in 1998 and 2005. Even more successful are recent novels written by Indigenous writers in Canada, Tomson Highway, Eden Robinson and Joseph Boyden. They have become bestsellers not only in North American but also globally in translation. None of these novelists shy away from telling the brutal colonial histories of Indigenous peoples in Canada; however, they also celebrate the survival of Indigenous cultures and identities today. 26Highway, Robinson and Boyden take as one of their themes in their writing the sexual/physical/psychological abuse of Indigenous children in the Canadian Government and church-run residential schools. In part, because of the success of these novels, the residential school issue is now making headlines nationally and internationally, forcing a shocked Canadian settler society to begin to come to terms with its brutal treatment of Native peoples. 27Eric Robertson quoted in Crosby, "Nations in Urban Landscapes," 12. 28Vizenor's academic writing, like that of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, is often criticized both for its intellectual elitism and its disconnection from the postcolonial or Indigenous communities that it supports. See for example, Ward Churchill, Review of Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance by Gerald Vizenor, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18.3 (1994): 313-318. To Vizenor's credit, however, his theoretical writings target academic readers, on one hand, with publications such as Narrative Chance (1989), Manifest Manners (1994), and Fugitive Poses (1998). On the other hand, his novels and short stories are addressed to Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences both inside and outside the academy. See, for example, his equally theoretical but more accessible Chancers (2000); Hotline Healers (1991); Landfill Meditation (1991); Bearheart (1990); Dead Voices (1990); Griever (1987); and Earthdivers (1981). What struck me as extraordinary was that my group of Trent students was willing to put in the hard work of reading passages from his theoretical writings not just dutifully but also passionately. 29For a discussion of the psychological impact of colonial stereotypes on Indigenous peoples and the pressure to be 'Status,' 'traditional' and 'authentic' rather than mixedblood, see Lawrence, Introduction, 'Real' Indians and Others, 1-22. 30bell hooks quoted in Mihesuah and Wilson, Indigenizing the Academy 5. 31The two white women told me that on a number of occasions early in the course they would leave my house in tears because, for the first time at Trent, they were the minority voices in a classroom sitting outside the circle of cultural knowledges in the group. In their written assignments, they argued the importance of that experience wishing it had occurred in their first year at university rather than their fourth. 32The paper, "Wielding the Tools of the Enemy: Three Native Women's Texts and the Politics of Performativity," was subsequently published in CINSA: Proceedings of the Annual Conference: In Partnership. May 31-June 3, 2001. Saskatoon: U Saskatchewan Extension P, 2002. 108-122. 33 This was a practical as well as a pedagogical strategy: course textbooks did not arrive in time, so my copy had to be passed around the table as each student read from it. 34See my comments on Campbell's use of 'red' in Chapter 3 above. 35See my discussion of Cuthand's poem in Chapter three above. 36ln protest over the planned extension of a golf course in Oka, Quebec and the expropriation of a sacred burial ground, Mohawk warriors from the Six Nations reserve of Kanehsatake, Quebec confronted the Surete du Quebec and the Canadian army during the summer of 1990. This armed confrontation gained national and international media headlines and was witness to an extraordinary solidarity amongst Aboriginal peoples living in Canada and the US. 37Justice, "Seeing (and Reading) Red," 102.

227 Chapter 2

Vizenor, quoted in Vizenor and Lee, Postlndian Conversations, 88. 2Lutz, "Maria Campbell," Contemporary Challenges, 56-57. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 4. 4I use the terms 'Aboriginal,' 'Native,' and 'Indigenous' interchangeably to refer to Inuit, Metis, Status and non-Status Indians in Canada. It is now commonplace for 'Status Indians' to refer to their communities as 'First Nations' and I follow that practice. 'Native American' is the term most often used by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, writers and academics to refer to Indigenous peoples in the United States and, less often, in Canada. The term 'Amerindian' is occasionally used in this context as well. The colonial term "Indian,' has been re-appropriated by Indigenous peoples in North America and become a sign of cultural affirmation and survivance. All these terms, of course, are problematic as they paper over the profound differences existing among Aboriginal groups and communities. For a further discussion of terminology, see J.R. Miller, Introduction, Aboriginal Peoples of Canada, 7-9. 5 LaRoque, "The Colonization of the Native Woman Scholar," 238. For a discussion of an earlier wave of Native writing in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s which was for the most part political and autobiographical, see McKenzie. For an excellent essay on Native writing in Canada within an historical context see Van Troop. ^Trickster is not universal to all Indigenous Native American cultures; however, as Indigenous storytelling travels between cultures so too does trickster. Renate Eigenbrod rightly notes that "[i]n my own conversations with Mohawk people, I learned that the so-called trickster character does not exist in their culture ... but stories travel: Beth Brant wrote [a] lesbian Coyote story . . . and Daniel David Moses [,] was inspired [by the Trickster] for his play Coyote City." Eigenbrod, Travelling Knowledges, 161-162. 7Acoose, "Post Halfbreed," 37. Vizenor's discussion of the 'tragic' and 'comic' within an Indigenous context informs my understanding of these terms. As he writes: In a tragic worldview people are rising above everything. . . . [T]hey're tragic because of acts of isolation, their heroic acts of conquering something, always overcoming adversity, doing better than whatever, proving something. . . The comic spirit is not an opposite but it might as well be. You can't act in a comic way in isolation. You have to be included. . . .You're never striving at anything that is greater than life itself. There's an acceptance of chance. Sometimes things just happen and when they happen, even though they may be dangerous or even life threatening, there is some humour. . . . And it's a positive, compassionate act of survival, it's getting along (quoted in Ryan, Trickster Shift, 4). 9Moses, "The Trickster's Laugh," 111. 10See, for example, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha's discussion of hybridity in The Location of Culture and the postmodern French theorists Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussion of the concept of deterritorialization in Anti-Oedipus. 11 LaRoque, "Teaching Aboriginal Literature," 222. 12Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism 43. 13Hall, "Culture, Community, Nation," 361-362. Hall references here Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term nomadism in their Anti-Oedipus to theorize postmodern deterritorialized subjectivity. 4Crosby, "Lines, Lineage and Lies," 30. Crosby, "Nations in Urban Landscapes," 13, 12. At a conference organized by Canadian Studies students at Trent University, Wasting and Wanting: Critical Conversations on Canada's Environments, 9-11 February 2007, Neal McLeod, an Associate Professor in the Indigenous Studies Department at Trent, spoke eloquently about how First Nations' cultures and identities have always been hybrid - even pre-Contact - and that any notion of authenticity is, as Marcia Crosby would say, "bullshit."

228 15l use the term postcolonial with reservation. See my discussion, pp. 32-36 below, of the promise and pitfalls of postcolonial theory as a tool of analysis for contemporary Indigenous cultural texts in Canada. 16Krupat, New Voices, xxi. Daniel Heath Justice, an Aboriginal professor at the University of Toronto, reiterates Krupat's position: "I teach Indigenous Literatures in an English department, and it's a good home for this work. The literature comes first, but it exists in relationship to its influences; to separate the text from its context in either direction is to impoverish our understanding of both". Justice, "Renewing the Fire," 49. 17Crosby, "Lines, Lineage and Lies," 30. 18Quoted in Constance Rooke, "Interview with Tom King," 62-76. For further discussion on King's position on the 49th Parallel, see Andrews and Walton, "Rethinking Canadian and American Nationality". 19A majority of Indigenous peoples now call the city 'home'; consequently, Gerald McMaster argues that "[t]he urban and rural now make up two discursive spaces or communities that form the reservation narrative." McMaster, "Living on Reservation X," 21. 20 Owens, I Hear the Train, 208; Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 26. 21 As Lawrence argues, '[i]t is not only that identity regulation works in different ways in each country, but the means chosen to regulate Native identity in Canada and the United States arose from distinctly different histories . . . ." Lawrence, 'Real' Indians and Others, 27. 22Crosby, "Nations in Urban Landscapes," 12. 23Miller, Lethal Legacy. 24Dickason, Canada's First Nations, 318. 25Lawrence, 'Real' Indians and Others, xvi. 26Dickason, Canada's First Nations, 368. 27ln 2005, Statistics Canada reported that one-half of the 3.1 million First Nations peoples were living in cities. See "Life in the Cities for Aboriginal Canadians." Editorial. The Globe and Mail [Toronto] 27 June 2005: A12. 28Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 184. His study of the Seneca outlines both the development of the 'Handsome Lake' religion on Iroquoian reserves and the failure of the Seneca to adapt to a central tenet of the new religion, a new socio-economic order imitating western agricultural methods. For a specifically Canadian example of a similar failure among the Blackfoot of Alberta to adapt to western farming techniques, see Hanks. 29Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 252. 30See my discussion of the issue of 'appropriation' in the concluding chapter of this dissertation. 31Miller, Introduction. Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 36. 32The term mixedblood, in this context, as Pulitano writes, "functions as a metaphor for cultural hybridity and cross-cultural encounters rather than ethnic or racial mixing." See Pulitano, Towards a Native Critical Theory, 146. 33Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 144. 34McLeod, "Coming Home through Stories," 17. 35Hill, "The Problem with Killing Columbus," 9. 36Chaat Smith, "From Lake Geneva," 17. 37Hill, "The Problem with Killing Columbus," 7. 38Chaat Smith, "From Lake Geneva," 17. 39 Owens, Other Destinies, 3. 40Anderson, "The Formalization of Metis Identities." 41Crosby, "Lines, Lineage and Lies," 24. 42McLeod, "Plains Cree Identities," 477. 43Crosby, "Nations in Urban Landscapes," 18, 11. 44Godard, "Notes from the Cultural Field," 237. 45Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 5. 46Crosby, "Nations in Urban Landscapes," 12. 47McLeod, "Coming Home," 19. 48Crosby, "Lines, Lineage and Lies," 30.

229 49Chaat Smith, "From Lake Geneva," 4. 50For further discussion of the experiences of contemporary Aboriginal urban peoples in Canada and an analysis of the problems they experience with city living, see Evelyn Peters, "Aboriginal People in Urban Areas," 237-270. 51Dumont, "Positive Images of Nativeness," 48. 52Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 144. 53Lawrence, 'Real' Indians, x/'/'-xviii. 54 Vizenor uses the term Indian, in lowercase and italics, to refer to the simulation or absence of the Native: "[N]atives are the presence, and Indians are simulations, a derivative noun that means an absence. . . ." Fugitive Poses, 15. 55Vizenor quoted in Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 146. 56Abbott, "Gerald McMaster," http://www.britesites.com/native_artist_interviews/gmcmaster.htm (accessed 14 October 2007). 57Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 146. 58Petrone, Native Literature in Canada, 38. Petrone's groundbreaking books, First People, First Voices (1983); Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English (1988); and Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present (1990) initiated the scholarly study of First Nations literature in Canada. 59Godard, "The Politics of Representation," 184-183. 60For further discussion of 'The Committee to Re-Establish the Trickster,' its importance to and impact on contemporary Indigenous cultural production in Canada, see Ryan, The Trickster Shift, 4 note 2; Gundula Wilke, "Traditional Values and Modern Concerns," 135-149; Fagan, Laughing to Survive, 174-176. 61Moses, "The Trickster's Laugh," 109-110. 62Knowles, "Marlon Brando," 48. 63'De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig,' according to Drew Hayden Taylor is "an Ojibway-Cree word meaning storyteller or tattler of tales, depending on how you want to interpret it." Taylor, "Storytelling to Stage," 145. 4Fifth House (Saskatoon); Women's Press (Toronto); Talon Books (Vancouver); Scirocco Drama (Victoria); Playwrights Canada Press (Toronto); and Exile Editions Literary Press (Toronto). 65Young-lng, however, argues that Aboriginal writers face editorial discrimination when they submit their manuscripts to non-Aboriginal publishers. He advocates increased government funding not only to support existing Aboriginal presses but also to create new ones. See "Aboriginal Peoples' Estrangement," 186-187. 66Such as Douglas & Mclntyre (Toronto); Fitzhenry and Whiteside (Markham, ON); McClelland & Stewart (Toronto); Press Gang (Vancouver); Sister Vision (Toronto); Talonbooks (Vancouver); Wallace-Williams (Stratford, ON). 67"Theytus' is a Salishian word which means 'preserving for the sake of handing down," according to Young-lng. See his "Aboriginal Peoples' Estrangement," 186. 68For example, in 1988, Women's Press published Beth Brant's anthology, A Gathering of Spirit: a Collection of Native American Indian Women and, in 1989, Theytus published Seventh Generation: Contemporary Native Writing, an anthology of Indigenous poetry edited by Heather Hodgson. These were followed by three more in 1990: McClelland & Stewart's All My Relations: an Anthology of Contemporary Native Fiction, edited by Thomas King; Pemmican Press' Our Bit of Truth: an Anthology of Canadian Native Literature edited by Agnes Grant; and NeWest's Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada edited by Jeanne Perreault and Sylvia Vance. The next year, Fifth House published Hartmut Lutz's collection of interviews, Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors and in 1993; Sister Vision published The Colour of Resistance: a Contemporary Collection of Writing by Aboriginal Women edited by Connie Fife. In 1995 and 1996, Douglas & Mclntyre produced two collections edited by Joel Maki: Steal My Rage: New Native Voices and Let the Drums Be Your Heart: New Native Voices. In 2000 and 2001, Kegedonce Press published two anthologies edited by Kateri Akiwenzie Damm: Skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing and Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. In 2003, Playwrights Canada Press published Monique Mojica and Ric

230 Knowles', Staging Coyote's Dream: a Anthology of First Nations Drama in English followed in 2004 with Yvette Nolan's revised edition of plays, Beyond the Pale: Dramatic Writing from First Nations Writers and Writers of Colour. 69ln 1990, UBC Press published Native Writers and Canadian Writing, edited by W.H. New. The following year, Oxford University Press published the first of three editions of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, edited by David Daniel Moses and Terry Goldie and, in 2001, Broadview Press published Jeannette Armstrong and Lally Grauer's collection, Native Poetry in Canada: a Contemporary Anthology. 70See, for example, Gatherings: the En'Owkin Journal of First North American People, published annually since 1990 and Aboriginal Voices founded in 1994 and published quarterly. The Aboriginal Multi-Media Society, incorporated in 1983, is an umbrella organization overseeing the publication of a number of other Aboriginal magazines: Windspeaker, a national weekly founded in 1986; Alberta Sweetgrass, a monthly publication founded in 1993; Saskatchewan Sage, founded in 1996 and published monthly; the monthly publication, Ontario Birchbark, founded in 2002; and Raven's Eye, a monthly magazine founded in 2008 and focusing on issues of interest to Aboriginal people in British Columbia and the Yukon. 71See, for example, Redwire Magazine (Vancouver) and First Nations Drum: News from Canada's Native Communities (TorontoA/ancouver). 72See The Native in Literature, edited by Cheryl Claver, Helen Hoy and Thomas King in 1987; Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature edited by Jeannette Armstrong in 1993; Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives edited by Renee Hulan in 1999; (Ad)dressing Our Words: Aboriginal Perspectives on Aboriginal Literatures edited by Armand Garnet Ruffo in 2001; Creating Community: a Roundtable on Canadian Aboriginal Literature edited by Renate Eigenbrod and Jo-Ann Episkenew in 2002; Me Funny edited by Drew Hayden Taylor in 2005. 73Ruffo, "Why Native Literature," 5. 74Hulan, "Who's There?" 64. 75McMaster, "Borderzones," 74-90. 76Shackleton, "Native North American Writing," 69-84. 77Krupat, "Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism," 230, 231. 78Hermann, "'Academic Squaws," 175. 79See the title of Harjo and Bird anthology, Reinventing the Enemy's Language. 80Pulitano, Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 6. See "Rhetorical Removals," Daniel Heath Justice's review of Pulitano's book. Appropriately, he troubles the rigid binary she sets forth between the work of Nativists such as Robert Warrior, Paula Gunn Allen and Craig Womack who Pulitano characterizes, according to Justice, as "naive, intellectually limited, and borderline racist" and the work of Greg Sarris, Louis Owens and Gerald Vizenor who are understood by Pulitano as "enlightened cosmopolitan hybridists'" (146). 8 Krupat, quoted in Blaeser, "Native Literature," 57. 82Pulitano, Towards a Native American Literary Theory, 9. 83King, Introduction. All My Relations, ix-xvi. 84Vizenor, quoted in Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong, 100. 85Hulan, "Some Thoughts," 210-217. See also Justice, "Seeing (and Reading) Red," 108-117. He argues here that art for art's sake is a Eurocentric aesthetic and its methodological counterpart, New Criticism, entirely inappropriate for understanding the necessary political and historical specificity of Red literature. 86Godard, "Notes from the Cultural Field," 215, 224, 219. 87Hulan, "The Cultural Contexts," 79. 88Blaeser, "Native Literature," 53, 55. Blaeser, however, makes the point that she, like a number of Native American scholars, has made use of contemporary postructuralist theory while at the same time resisting its seductive and hegemonic authority. See "Native Literature," 55. See also Pulitano's discussion of Vizenor's deployment of Derridean poststructuralist theory in Towards a Native American Critical Theory, 59. 89Christian, quoted in Lutz, "First Nations," 60-61. 90Ruffo, Introduction, (Ad)dressing our Words, 8.

231 91 See Krupat's book, Ethnocriticism, for a full discussion of the term. 92Blaeser, "Native Literature," 53, 56, 58, 56. 93 See for example, LaRoque, "Teaching Aboriginal Literature," 222; Maracle, "The 'Post- Colonial' Imagination," 12-15; Tuhiwai Smith, quoted in Leggatt, "Native Writing," 111-126; For a critique of obscurantist literary theoretical 'jargon,' see, for example, Graff, "Scholars and Sound Bites," 1041-1051; and Krupat, Introduction, xx. 94As Gingell explains in "The Absence of Seaming," "[a] postcolonial reading methodology . . . compares texts because the authors under examination come from cultures that have been significantly shaped by colonialism and that are struggling to decolonize." What cannot be overlooked and is "[e]qually important to the methodology is remaining alive to the differences between or among the works, especially those differences related to widely divergent power, because of the specifics of the location from which the writers are working and what they represent in their work" (110). 95Gingell, "The Absence of Seaming," 98, 100. 96ln his comments on my dissertation, Canadian historian John Wadland correctly argues that King's understanding of history is informed by 19th century Whig ideology; despite the fact that it is outdated, many non-historians such as King continue to be 'believers.' 97King, "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," 242-243. King divided Indigenous literature into four categories, 'tribal,' 'polemical,' 'interfusional,' and 'associational.' As Leggatt argues convincingly, however, apart from 'tribal,' "all three of King's remaining categories . . . closely resemble post- colonial theories" ("Native Writing," 113). In addition, Turcotte suggests that King's creative writing "is frequently engaged in quite deliberate 'celebratory' debunkings of specifically 'European' master narratives . .. [and] [i]n this sense his practice aligns itself with strategies identified in some quarters as consciously post-colonial . . ." ("Re/marking on History," 210). 98Leggatt, "Native Writing," 111. 99Brydon, "Compromising Postcolonialisms," 16. Brydon also astutely notes here that "the global project of post-colonialism can also obscure (however inadvertently) the specificity of Indigenous cultural work, which puts a priority on defining and achieving sovereignty ..." (53). 1 °Pulitano, Towards a Native American Critical Theory, 11-12, 17. 101 As Shackleton has noted in "Native North American Writing and Postcolonialism," Vizenor's academic writing, like that of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, is often criticized both for its intellectual elitism and its disconnection from the postcolonial or Indigenous communities that it supports" (72). To Vizenor's credit, however, his theoretical writing targets academic readers, on one hand, with publications such as, for example, Narrative Chance (1989), Manifest Manners (1994), and Fugitive Poses (1998). On the other hand, his novels and short stories target Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences both inside and outside the academy. See, for example, his equally theoretical but more accessible Chancers (2000); Hotline Healers (1991); Landfill Meditation (1991); Bearheart (1990); Dead Voices (1990); G/7ever(1987); and Earthdivers (1981). Postindian Conversations (1999), a conversation in monograph format between Vizenor and the academic and literary critic, A. Robert Lee, offers a most accessible introduction (and supplement) to Vizenor's novels, short stories and his academic writing. 102Glancy, quoted in Elias, "Fragments that Rune Up the Shores," 191. 103The sacred sits at the centre of tribal narratives and knowledges. In Towards a Native American Critical Theory, Pulitano, citing Vizenor, states that "within Native epistemology, a sense of the sacred governs the view of language [and] participation in the sacred is essential to human experience" (155-156). 104Wyile, quoted in Shackleton, "Monique Mojica," 261. 105Shackleton, "Monique Mojica," 260. 106Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 210. 107Elias, "Fragments that Rune Up the Shores," 193. 108Blaeser, "Native Writing," 56. 109McLeod, "Coming Home Through Stories," 24. 110See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 111As Shackleton notes, Vizenor's trickster hermeneutics resists any notion of authentic, mono cultural Native American tribal knowledge:". . . Vizenor links th[e] traditional tribal figure with . . .

232 Walter J. Ong and Bakhtin [and]... the cultural theories of Baudrillard [as well as] the politically focused semiotic deconstructions of Derrida, Barthes and Foucault." See Shackleton, "Native North American Writing and Postcolonialism," 72. 112Baker, "An Old Indian Trick," 48. 113Taylor, Funny You Don't Look Like One, 88. 114Shackleton, "The Trickster Figure," 109. 115Fagan, "Laughing to Survive," 2. 116Brydon, "Compromising Postcolonialisms," 18. 117Fagan, "Laughing to Survive," 171-172. The Metis poet, Marilyn Dumont likewise resents the expectation placed on her to "infuse everything you write with symbols of the native worldview, that is: the circle, mother earth, the number four or the trickster figure" ("Positive Images," 47). 1 Vizenor, quoted in Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong, 82. 119Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 69-70. 120Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 68-69. 121A majority of the writers on whose work I focus have postsecondary education; as a result, Lutz's argument concerning the academic and institutional success of Native American novelists may soon be true for their colleagues in Canada. 22Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water is now included in the canon of CanLit. That he is also a university professor of English may be why the novel is not only such a 'good canonical fit' but also why, as a result, it has attracted a considerable body of scholarly criticism. 123Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 7. 124While First Nations peoples resist having their identities subsumed under the rubric of 'official multiculturalism,' Native Americans in the United States do not take issue with the term, in part because the US does not have a similar policy and, as a result, the threat of assimilation is not present. 125Episkenew, "Socially Responsible Criticism," 52. 1260wens, Mixedblood Messages, 11. 127See King's Medicine River (Viking 1990); Green Grass, Running Water (HarperCollins 1993); One Good Story, That One (HarperCollins 1993); Truth & Bright Water (HarperFlamingo 1999); A Short History of Indians in Canada (HarperCollins 2005); Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen (Doubleday Canada 1998); Caribou Song (HarperCollins 2W\)\Dragonfly Kites (HarperCollins 2002); Fox On Ice (HarperCollins 2003); Robinson's Monkey Beach (Alfred A. Knopf Canada 2000). Traplines (Alfred A. Knopf Canada 1996); and Boyden's Three Day Road (Viking Canada 2005). 128Based on the international critical acclaim and the overwhelmingly positive reviews that Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road received, we can expect critical articles on it shortly. 12 See Lane, "Surviving the Residential School System," 191-201; McKegney, "From Trickster Poetics to Transgressive Politics," 79-113; Shackleton, "Native North American Writing," 69-84; Siemerling, New North American, 59-113; Sugars, "Strategic Abjection," 78-91. 130See my discussion of the controversy over trickster as a focus of academic criticism above, 37-39. 131This is also true of the five MA theses on the trickster in Aboriginal writing in Canada. 132Blaeser, "Native Literature," 55. 133Blaeser, "Native Literature," 53. 134Making a somewhat similar observation, Wyile writes that "the book . . . neglects to link King's comic approaches to the use of humour by other Native writers in Canada." See his review of Border Crossings, 159. 135Godard, "Notes from the Cultural Field," 224. 136Godard is also troubled that Home "draw[s] extensively on the postcolonial theory generated in the diasporic return to the imperial centre by critics such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, rather than working through the emerging cultural theory of Amerindians, and by using the terminology of "American Indian" throughout her book" ("Notes from the Cultural Field," 234). 137Ryan, Trickster Shift, xiii. 138Ryan, Trickster Shift, xii, 5.

233 139'Hermeneutics' is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "The art and science of interpretation, esp. of scripture." See http://dictionary.oed.com. 1 °Fora full discussion of this concept, see Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. 141Shackleton, "Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas,"261. 142Ryan, Trickster Shift, 13. 143Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 4. 144Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 154. 145Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 12. 146Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 154. 147Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 85. 148Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 150, 154. 149Vizenor, quoted in Isemhagen, 131. 'Survivance,' as John Wadland points out, was a key term in the Quebec Independence movement in the 1960s, referring to the survival of the Quebecois as a people and as a culture. Vizenor uses the term in a similar fashion to speak of the survival of Native American cultures in a contemporary world. 150Vizenor, Postindian Conversations, 79. 151Vizenor, Postindian Conversations, 79. 1520wens, Other Destinies, 20, 19. 153Vizenor, quoted in Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong, 102. 154Vizenor, Postindian Conversations, 39. 155Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 54. 156Elias, "Fragments that Rune Up the Shores," 193. 157Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse," 204. 158Ryan, Trickster Shift, 5 note 4. 159Ryan, Trickster Shift, 5. 160Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse," 194. 161Vizenorand Lee, Postindian Conversations, 21. 162Blaeser, "Trickster," 57. 163Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse," 187. 164Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 154. 165Farmer, quoted in Ryan, Trickster, 72.

Chapter 3

1Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 40-41. 2Knopf Canada published Robinson's Monkey Beach in hardcover in 2000. A Vintage Canada paperback edition followed in 2001. Doubleday Canada, Anchor Canada, Knopf Canada and Vintage Canada are imprints of the American-controlled multinational publisher, Random House. Boyden's Three Day Road was published by Viking Canada in 2005 followed by a Penguin Canada paperback edition in 2006. Viking Canada and Penguin Canada are imprints of the British-owned multinational publishing company, Penguin Group. 3I use the term 'CanLit' here because of its association with bestselling fiction in Canada and its commercial success both at home and abroad. As Di Brandt writes, "Who would have guessed that literature would go the way of megamusicals and soda pop . . . ?" Brandt, "Going Global," 107. 4See discussions of this concept in, for example, Stasiulis and Jhappan, "Fractious Politics," and Mackey, House of Difference, 23-49. 5AII these writers have novels published by either British or American-controlled multinational presses. 6Brandt, "Going Global," 109. 7Levin, "Shelf Life," D12. Levin's celebration of contemporary Canadian Literature's place on the world stage is informed in part by Pico Iyer's influential article cited below. Although both Levin and Iyer implicitly include Indigenous fiction in their celebration of Canada's multicultural

234 literature, Indigenous peoples strongly resist that label, quite rightly insisting that they are members of Canada's founding First Nations and not settlers or immigrants who came after. 8lyer, "The Last Refuge," 78, 79, 78. It is widely claimed that the UN has named Toronto the most multicultural city in the world; however, according to Doucet, this is an urban legend as there is no evidence of this position in any UN document. See Doucet, "The Anatomy of an Urban Legend," http://ceris.metropolis.net/frameset_e.html (accessed 20 January 2009). For a short discussion of the cannibalistic nature of late capitalism see the section on Joseph Boyden's Three Day in this chapter below. 10Godard, "Notes From the Cultural Field," 209-247. See Abu-Laban and Gabriel, Selling Diversity, for a fascinating discussion on how neo-liberal governments in Canada have promoted multicultural diversity in order to enhance Canada's economic position in the global marketplace. "Brandt, "Going Global," 109, 111. 12See, for example, Random House's marketing of Highway and Robinson's essentialist Indigenous identities on its website, "Author Spotlight." Highway is described reductively as "a Cree from Brochet, in northern Manitoba" with no mention either of his life from the time he left Brochet for residential school to the present or his diasporic subjectivity constructed as a result of living on the borders in-between urban/reserve and north/south. In the same way, Robinson's identity is also portrayed as authentically Haisla when Monkey Beach is referred to as "the first English-language novel to be published by a Haisla writer." By denying the mixedblood urban/reserve identities of these authors, both descriptions participate in an orientalist discourse which constructs both writers as the exotic 'other.' See http://www.randomhouse.ca/author (accessed 12 June 2007). 13See for example, John Paskevich's film, If Only I Were and Indian (NFB 1995) which demonstrates the extent to which Europeans - in this film Czechoslovakians - not only fantasize about the 'authentic' indian but also play Indian on weekend retreats. 14Henighan, "Free Trade Fiction," 133-156. 15Henighan, 134, 136, 143, 139, 152. 16Owens, I Hear the Train, 212. 17Valaskakis, Indian Country, 76. Valaskakis, from the Mohawk First Nation of Kahnawake, was Dean of Arts and Science at Concordia and, prior to her death in July 2007, Director of Research for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. 18Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 26. 19Vizenor, "Native American Indian Literature," 223-227. 20For a discussion of Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology, specifically in relation to Vizenor's understanding of the Ghost Dance, see Smith, Coyote Kills John Wayne, 41. See also Edwards, Gothic Canada, i-xxxiv for a discussion on postcolonial gothic literature in Canada. Edwards argues here that the ghosts of those oppressed by Canadian government and church policies have returned to haunt the oppressors. 21Vizenor, "Native American Indian Literature," 227. 22James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion quoted in Vizenor, "Native American Indian Literature," 227. See also Smith's discussion of Vizenor's concept of the "literary ghost dance" in Coyote Kills John Wayne. As Smith writes: Gerald Vizenor addresses how ghost dancing might provide a profound metaphor for contemporary Native American writers of imaginative literature. He contends that, while English and American narratives of the West construct the traditional language of colonization, the narrative of the ghost dance provides an alternative vocabulary through which this colonial process might be subverted (41). 230wens, Mixedblood Messages, 40-41. 24Steiner, quoted in Pulitano, Towards a Native American Critical Theory, 156. 25Pulitano, Towards a Native American Critical Theory, 156. 26Steiner, quoted in Pulitano, Towards a Native American Critical Theory, 156. 270wens, I Hear the Train, 212. 28Godard, "The Politics of Representation," 203. 290wens, Mixedblood Messages, 10.

235 30Owens, / Hear the Train, 225. Owens is referring here to the 'packaging' of N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn. The novel, while "superbly subversive," appealed sufficiently to EuroAmerican readers to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, effectively putting Native American fiction on the literary map in the United States. 31As Howells notes, "[b]oth these novels open a way of access to Western readers by adopting familiar narrative genres. Kiss of the Fur Queen . . . reads like a Cree version of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. . . . Monkey Beach . . . adopts the traditional narrative form of the quest." Howells adds, however, that "at the same time as refashioning European literary genres for their own purposes . . . they are very outspoken about social inequality and the horrible legacy of colonisation. . . ." See Howells, "Towards a Recognition of Being," 145-159. 32This act of appropriation also involves the reversal of the radical feminist position of Audre Lorde who famously argued in 1984 that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. For a discussion of her position, see Lorde, Sister Outsider. 33For further discussion on this concept, see Bird and Harjo, Introduction, Reinventing the Enemy's Language, 19-31. 34Vizenor, "Native American Indian Literature," 227. 35Boyden received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans where he now teaches. 360wens, Mixedblood Messages, 70. 37Highway's Kiss tells the story of the Cree Trickster, Weesageechak, disguised as a weasel, killing the weetigo by crawling up his "bumhole" (118). Highway deploys the weetigo as a metaphor comparing it to a mall in Winnipeg and, by implication, to contemporary North American culture and its insatiable consumption of commodities. The weetigo, in this context, may also be understood as a metaphor for contemporary multinational book publishing industry that produces bestsellers as commodities that readers then consume. In this context, Highway acts as a trickster figure and may be compared to the weasel that kills the weetigo by crawling inside it. For Highway's novel offers a poignant and profoundly disturbing attack on mainstream white settler culture. He makes sure that this attack reaches its targeted audience by having his novel published by one of commodity culture's most important global institutions: the multinational publishing company. Just like the weasel, Highway metaphorically crawls up the anus and inside the belly of this particular beast, holding his nose I am sure. I would like to thank my students, Simon Wallace and John McPherson, for the above astute observations. 38For a discussion of this concept see Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 26. 39Vizenor, quoted in Pulitano, Towards a Native American Critical Theory, 156. 40My use of the term 'rez' is informed by McMaster's discussion of it in Reservation X: [T]he term 'the rez' is gaining wider usage in the arts .... Its hip-hop style abrogates our old understanding and infuses it with new, powerful, and ironic messages. . . . Contemporary authors and artists find this term resonating with a bold and tenacious spirit. It is a term of appropriation and articulation, of taking something and using it to advantage. . . . Though the rez may now mean any Indian community, urban or rural, it signifies the idea as much as the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of living on the rez (23). 41 Robinson follows the pattern of many First Nations peoples today who live both on and off 'rez.' Based on data from the 2001 census, 50% of all Indigenous peoples in Canada live in urban areas, many like Robinson, moving back and forth: They may be educated or work 'off rez' but still spend large amounts of time back 'home' on the reserve. See Simpson, "Growing Reserves," A15. 42For a discussion of this concept, see McMaster, "Borderzones," 74-90. 43Methot, "Spirits in the Material World." 44See notes 10-11 above for a discussion of this marketing strategy. 45See http://www.randomhouse.ca/author/ (accessed 12 June 2007). For further analysis of the Random House website, see note 12 above. 46Hunter, "Growing Up with Elvis and Sasquatch," 68. 47Sugars, "Strategic Abjection," 79, 82, 78. 48Hoy, How Should I Read These?, 154. For a discussion of this issue, see Hoy, 226 n5.

236 49Penner, "Author Snares Rocket to First Success," 8. In her interview with Methot (see note 43 above) Robinson states that she is "a very selfish writer. The best stuff I write comes when I'm not thinking about an audience, when I don't think about who's going to read this, what market it's going to." This position directly contradicts King's position that "Eden Robinson . . . [writes] primarily for a Native audience, making a conscious decision not so much to ignore non-Native readers as to write for the very people [she] write[s] about." See King, The Truth About Stories, 115. 50Notable too for their connection to western popular culture are the nicknames of Lisamarie's cousin, Tab, after a brand of soda pop, and Jimmy's girlfriend, Karaoke, inspired by the relatively recent invention in entertainment technology. 51Lisamarie's mixedblood identity is, in part, the material effect of colonization. Celebrating her hybridity suggests not only that she resists the position of victim of European conquest but also that she is interested in reclaiming her Haisla cultural and spiritual traditions, not as authentic or untainted by western culture but re-invented within the context of contemporary North America culture. 52Namu, on the BC coast north of Vancouver island and near the Heiltsuk community of Bella Bella, was deserted in the late 1980s when its only industry, a fish processing and canning factory, was closed. 53Robinson, Monkey Beach (Toronto: Vintage, 2001) 374. Subsequent references to this work will be from this edition and will be parenthetically cited by page number in the text. 54Genre fiction refers to certain categories of books such as 'mystery,' 'thriller,' 'romance,' 'horror' and 'science fiction' written and mass marketed as commodities appealing to specific groups of readers. 5 The Random House website publishes the following clips from reviews which highlight these formats: "Far more than a novel of psychological transformation. . . It is in the best sense a thriller, a spiritual mystery . . . breathtaking. . . The underlying plot centres on what exactly happened to Jimmy (and why), a question that is only answered in the book's breathtaking final pages." {The Washington Post); "Gloriously Northern Gothic.... A compelling story ... a deeply satisfying conclusion." (The Globe and Mail) http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display (accessed 20 June, 2008). 56For further discussion of the classic realist novel, see Belsey, Critical Practice. 57See, for example, Howells, Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, 183-197; Hunter, "Growing Up with Elvis and Sasquatch," 68; Lane, "Performing Gender," 170. 58Petra Rau, "Bildungsroman." The Literary Encyclopedia, http://www.litency.com/php/ stopics.php?rec=true&UID=119. 9See, for example, Lane who argues that Monkey Beach "[o]n one level it is a bildungsroman, a novel of education and development. Lane, "Performing Gender," 170. 60As Willmott notes, in the rise of the modern novel, "we see . . . the fullest adaptation of literary history to a new need to explore, make and remake an investment in the individual self as the necessary locus of action, event, and value - a commitment indissociable from the rise of a modern bourgeoisie and its liberal ideology." "Postmodern Tragedy: Family in Native Literature," 892-893. 61Ridington and Wall. 62Howells, Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, 185. 63Howells, Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, 196. 64Lane, "Performing Gender," 191. Lane is Professor of English at Malaspina University- College in Nanaimo. Willmott argues that the continued engagement of readers with many contemporary Indigenous novels like Monkey Beach is the result of a special bond and sense of "reciprocal responsibility" between readers and authors. Like the connection between storyteller and listener in the oral tradition, Willmott sees these novels creating a similar and "inescapable kinship relationship between writer and reader, and between readers" in which family and community are celebrated at the expense of the individual. Willmott, "Postmodern Tragedy," 896. 65 Lane notes that, within the context of the Indigenous Pacific Northwest in Canada, trickster writing "can also be thought of... as Sasquatch writing." See Lane, "Performing Gender," 165.

237 66My argument that there are five trickster strategies at work in Monkey Beach is, in so many ways, an affront to trickster teachings that warn us to be very wary of such truth claims. I suggest then that these five strategies are to be understood as very provisional. They offer an initial, strategic intervention into the text and beg readers to both deconstruct and reconstruct them. 67Like Monkey Beach, Vizenor's trickster novel, Griever, also offers the reader an unsettling mixture of genres while also playing havoc with linear chronology and normal timelines. See Rigal-Cellard's discussion of these characteristics in "Vizenor's Griever," 338-339. 68Andrews, "Native Canadian Gothic Refigured," 19-20. Andrews is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton. 69Appleford, "Close, very close," 87. Appleford is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. In a 3rd year Indigenous Fiction course I taught last winter at Trent University, my students 'howl' of frustration at the ending paralleled that of Appleford's students; however, during seminar discussions on the topic, they recognized that the ambiguous ending is much more in keeping with the themes of the novel than the form of narrative closure they earlier desired. 70Appleford, "Close, very close," 90. 71Vizenor, Earthdivers, xii. 72For a trenchant critique of Canada's myth of tolerance, see Mackey, House of Difference, 101-106. 73Howells, Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, 192. As Howells notes, however, for characters in the novel such as Lisamarie's parents, these stories are still 'unspeakable' because they "have adopted the middle-class ambitions of the white world and deliberately suppressed their cultural background" (192). 74Castricano, "Learning to Talk with Ghosts," 802. Castricano is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia. Vizenor, qtd. in Vizenor and Lee, 88. 76l'm grateful to Simon Wallace, a student in my course on Indigenous Fiction, for these important insights. 77Crosby, "Lines, Lineage and Lies," 30. 78Lane, "Reclaiming Maps and Metaphors," 193. 79McMaster, Introduction, Reservation X, 20. 80Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 145. 81Willmott, "Postmodern Tragedy," 895, 896, 897. 82Willmott, "Postmodern Tragedy," 899. 83Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 238. Boyden also refers to himself as "a card-carrying member of the Ontario Woodland Metis." See Boyden, From Mushkegowuk, 38. 84Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 221. 85According to Herb Wyile, however, Boyden is "the (self-professed) black sheep of a family of black sheep." See Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 219. In conversation with Allan Ryan, Boyden reminisces on his childhood and his father's role as a doctor after the war in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the predominantly white population of Willowdale, his father had a number of Chinese patients. See Ryan, "Writing Survivance," 302. 86Boyden qtd. in Johnstone, "A Subtle Hand, 33. 87See Penguin Three Day Road Reading Guide, http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/three_day_road.html. 88Boyden, From Mushkegowuk, 22. 89The full title of Boyden's lecture cited above is as follows: From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: a Mixed Blood Highway. 90For a description of the Boyden family's "rustic retreat" which provides "[t]he geographic bedrock of sanity for Joseph and his siblings" and Allan Ryan's account of his overnight stay there, see Ryan, "Writing Survivance," 301-302. 91Ryan, "Writing Survivance," 308, 304. 92This collection includes four stories from his graduate thesis. See Ryan, "Writing Survivance," 299. 93Varty, http://www.straight.com/article/three-day-road-by-joseph-boyden.

238 94Before moving to Penguin Canada, Davidar had been publisher, CEO and co-founder of Penguin India for 15 years, signing up such bestselling writers as Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry. 95See Pooley, "Tough Sell," http://proquest.umi.com. 96Winstanley was working with Westwood Creative Artists Ltd. when Boyden brought his 400 page draft of Three Day Road to her. At that time, she worked with writers, Rohinton Mistry, Yann Martel, Naomi Klein, Barbara Gowdy, and Josef Skvorecky. She is now an executive editor with Penguin Canada. 9 For a discussion of Three Day Road's publishing history see Pooley, "Tough Sell," http://proquest.umi.com and Adams, "'Everyone Was Gonna Win But Me.'" http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081113.wboyden13/BNStory/ Entertainment/ 98The novel received critical acclaim from a number of peer-reviewed Canadian scholarly journals as well as newspapers and magazines. It was nominated for the Governor General's Award and won the following awards: the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize; CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year; Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award; McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year; and the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Silver Award for Fiction. 99Varty, http://www.straight.com/article/three-day-road-by-joseph-boyden. 100The dust jacket states only that the photograph is from the collection of Archives Canada. 101 Hunt, "One for the Road," 116. 102The town where Niska meets Xavier's train on his return from war is more than likely Moosonee; however, it is not named as such in the novel. 103Varty, http://www.straight.com/article/three-day-road-by-joseph-boyden. 104lndigenous communities also discover new histories of their ancestors and are also enriched by Boyden's storytelling. 105Ryan, "Writing Survivance," 297-298. 106While not part of the mainstream historical narrative of Canada, the Native contribution to WWII has not been entirely ignored and has been the subject of a number of books, a dissertation and a film. 107Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 222-223. 108Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 222. 109Boyden grew up with stories of the famous Ojibwa sniper, Francis Peghamagabow. As he explains in an interview, "I spent much of my youth . . . near both Christian Island and Parry Island reserves, and it was here my Ojibwa friends first told me the legend of Francis Peghamagabow, the great Indian marksman of the First World War.... He returned to Parry Island a hero, becoming chief of the reserve. And yet very few people know of him anymore. The idea for my novel began as a combination of my own family's history combined with the myth of Francis." See Penguin Three Day Road Reading Guide, http://us.penguingroup.com/ static/rguides/us/three_day_road.html. 110Boyden, Three Day Road, (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005) 265. All future references to this edition will be cited parenthically in the text. 1110wens, Mixedblood Messages, 26. 112Richler, 143. 113Hall, "Histories, Empires," 69. 114Richler, 143. 115Ryan, "Writing Survivance," 304. 116l use the term Oji-Cree in this and similar occasions throughout this section instead of Cree as it more appropriately signifies the Ojibwa/Cree mixedblood ancestry at the turn of the last century. Niska's mother, for example, was Ojibwa. 117Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 238. 118Although there are various descriptions of the legendary windigo, Basil Johnston's characterization quoted by Ruffo in "A Windigo Tale," is apt: The Weendigo was a giant Manitou in the form of a man or woman, who towered five to eight times above the height of a man . . . (and) it was inflicted with never-ending hunger. The Weendigo was gaunt to the point of

239 emaciation. With bones pushing out against his skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Weendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody from its constant chewing with jagged teeth. When the Weendigo set to attack a human being, a dark snow cloud would shroud its upper body from the waist up. The air would turn cold, so the trees crackled. Then the wind would rise. (167) 119McLeod, Songs to Kill a Wihtikow, 8-9. 120Ruffo, "A Windigo Tale," 167, 172. Ruffo understands "the concept of Windigo [as] both a noun and a verb. Thing and action" (176) in much the same way that Vizenor thinks through the concept of trickster. 121 After Elijah kills Sergeant Breech, he tells Xavier of the sexual abuse he suffered at school. See pp 314-315. As a result, there is a direct link here between this traumatic experience and his later wartime windigo atrocities. Significantly, Xavier does not respond to Elijah's story. He has neither the language nor the experience to imagine Elijah's pain. As a result, he is protected from much of the windigo darkness and destruction. 122Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 230. 123This is a story that Niska cannot bring herself to tell aloud to her nephew. 124King, Introduction, All My Relations, xiii. 125Wyile, Speaking in the Past Tense, 235. 126Vizenor, "Native American Indian Literature," 227. 127Notably, however, western novelists have also added their critique of the dominant historical discourse on WWI. See for example, Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy. 128Shackleton, "The Trickster Figure," 110. 129 Vizenor, "Native American Literature," 223. In the same article, Vizenor makes the point that 'tragic wisdom' as a component of trickster storytelling should not be confused with the "insidious nostalgia for tragic miseries" which, he argues, characterizes mainstream western representations of Native Americans (223).

Chapter 4

1Blaeser, "Writing Voices Speaking," 53. Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse: Comic and Tragic," 69. 3Blaeser, Trailing You, xi. Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes," 193, 194. 5This sorry situation is related to the lack of a readership for poetry in Canada; consequently, for better or worse, the genre has not achieved the status of a commodity in the global book market as has the novel. Poetry, Indigenous or not, has a very small niche market in Canada and is published by small presses which, for the most part, rely on ever decreasing government subsidies. 6University instructors such as Susan Gingell have responded to the call by The Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in 2000 "to include Aboriginal oral traditions in post-secondary English department curricula." See Gingell, "Teaching the Talk that Walks," 285 -300. This article also discusses the appropriate pedagogical strategies for teaching what Gingell terms textualized orature in the university classroom. 7The increasing number of high school and university courses that include Indigenous poetry is in large part due to the publication of the following two anthologies, the first published in three editions in 1992, 1998, 2005 and the second devoted entirely to poetry: Moses and Goldie, Anthology of Canadian Native Literature; Armstrong and Grauer, Native Poetry in Canada. These two anthologies have played a key role in creating and defining the field on Indigenous literature in Canada, introducing it to a new generation of writers, readers, students and scholars.

240 A number of Indigenous poets have won awards for their work including Beth Brant, Maria Campbell, Marilyn Dumont, Louise Halfe, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias and Gregory Scofield. 9See, for example, Louis Owens' argument that "[t]he people [Columbus] mistakenly and unrepentantly called 'Indians' have indeed 'learned to speak,' appropriating the master discourse . .. abrogating its authority, making the invaders language our language, english with a lower­ case e, and turning it against the centre." Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 4. 10Moses and Goldie, Preface, Anthology, x. 11Gingell argues that Indigenous writers select poetry over other genres for another reason: "What these resisting writers are doing in choosing either poetic style or form is . .. appropriating to their own purpose the Western hierarchy of genres that places poetry above prose. That purpose here is to counter-balance another Western hierarchy - that of written over oral. .. ." See Gingell, "When X Equals Zero," 458. Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, "The Tears That Wove Our Songs, 13. "Sky Dancer" is the English translation of Halfe's Cree name. 3This concept comes from the title of Murray and Rice, Talking on the Page. 14Siemerling, New North American Studies, 63. 15For more on "serious play" see Vizenor," Trickster Discourse: Comic and Tragic Themes," 69. 16Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 79. 17Dumont, "The Devil's Language," line 2. 18Lutz, Contemporary Challenges, 49. 19For a discussion of Michif, the traditional language of the Metis people, see Norman E. Fleury, "Michif Language and Metis Culture," National Gatherings on Indigenous Knowledge, under Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, http://www.traditions.gc.ca/docs/ docs_disc_fleury_e.cfm (accessed 12 July 2008). 20Within a Native American context, 'red' english is often used interchangeably with 'rez' or 'broken' english. 21The Metis National Council defines the term 'Metis' as follows: "Written with a small 'm,' metis is a racial term for anyone of mixed Indian and European ancestry. Written with a capital 'M,' Metis is a socio-cultural or political term for those originally of mixed ancestry who evolved into a distinct [l]ndigenous people during a certain historical period in a certain region in Canada." Quoted in Andrews, "Irony Metis Style." http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/cpjrn/vol50/andrews.html (accessed 12 July 2008). As Andrews notes, however, a number of Indigenous writers such as Gregory Scofield strategically identify as Metis for political reasons even though, unlike Maria Campbell, they were not brought up in a Metis community. 22Gingell, "'One Small Medicine,'" 190. 23Gingell, "When X Equals Zero," 454. 24Blaeser, quoted in Andrews, "Living History," 6. 25Brill de Ramirez, "The Power and Presence," 82-102. Renate Eigenbrod discusses the response of some Indigenous writers to critics such as Brill de Ramirez who argue that all readers of Native American literary texts are 'welcomed' into the world of the poem as long as they have done the necessary hard work of listening appropriately. Armand Garnet Ruffo, for example, is one poet and critic cited by Eigenbrod who draws a binary between cultural insiders/outsiders, arguing that for 'outsiders' to engage in an ethical reading of an Indigenous poem is a profoundly more difficult proposition than Brill de Ramirez suggests. See Armand Garnet Ruffo, "Inside Looking Out," 174, cited in Eigenbrod, Travelling Knowledges, 41. 26For a discussion of the very different response of James Bay Cree students to Campbell's poem, 'Jacob,' see my concluding chapter. 27Part of the hard work for these students was coming to understand the historical and political context of these poems. Like the general public, for the most part, their knowledge of Indigenous histories and issues in Canada was woefully inadequate. They also had to learn that some poets, 'write home' to audiences from within their own communities using a variety of Indigenous languages. As a result, non-Aboriginal students (and even Aboriginal students from outside of specific Indigenous language groups) had to accept the fact of not understanding a poem in its totality - ever.

241 28Moore, quoted in Stigter, "The Dialectics and Dialogics," 50. 29Owens, I Hear the Train, 10. 30 This course, which I taught for Trent's Department of English Literature during the 2008 winter term, was one of the most exciting teaching experiences that I have had in my long career at the University. 31For a very helpful discussion of strategic 'code switching' in Indigenous poetry see Gingell, "When X Equals Zero," 452-453. 32 In his books, articles and in his film, Harold of Orange, Gerald Vizenor often takes aim at social scientists who study Native Literatures in order to categorize and analyze Indigenous cultures, a process that he argues de-humanizes Native American peoples. See, for example, Vizenor, Introduction, Narrative Chance, 5-6. 33Gingell, "When X Equals Zero," 449. 34Schorcht, Storied Voices, 16. 35The controversy over the appropriation of the Native voice has, to some degree subsided; however, there are poets and critics such as Armand Ruffo who would profoundly disagree with this position. See note 16. 3 Marken, Foreword, 4. 37Within the context of Campbell's Stories, the male pronoun here is appropriate. As she states in the Introduction, "These are old men's stories. I had hoped when I became a student of storytelling that I would get old women teachers but that was not meant to be." See Campbell, Stories, 2. 38Rasporich, "Native Women Writing," 31. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb.htm. 39Brill de Ramirez, "The Power and Presence," 83. 40Blaeser, quoted in Andrews, "Living History," 6. 41Marken, Foreword, 5. 42For further discussion of these oral strategies, see Blaeser, "Writing Voices," 59-64 and Brill de Ramirez, "The Power and Presence," 84-85. 43Battson, Introduction, Word Up. xi. For more on the 'spoken word' poetry movement, see Crown, "Sonic Revolutionaries," 213-226; Fisher, "From Coffee House to School House," 115- 131; and Sutton, "Spoken Word" 213-233. 44Algarin, Introduction, Aloud, 9. 45For a discussion on the trickster trope of the "Signifying Monkey,' see Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. 46Akiwenzie-Damm, "GitooklSay It," 10. 47Volk, quoted in Algarin, Introduction, Aloud, 9. On the one occasion that I was present at one of Campbell's poetry readings at the University of Toronto) she chose to perform her poetry orally, standing and with her audience sitting around her. When Temagami First Nation Chief, Gary Potts, came to Trent as the Northern Chair Lecturer in 1996, he was asked to engage in storytelling which he found impossible to do behind the lectern. Eden Robinson found it very difficult as well in 2007 when she was the Margaret Laurence Lecturer and required to tell stories from behind a lectern. 48See for example, Robinson, Write It on Your Heart. The oral strategies in this text not only lift the words off the page but also turn the reader/listener into an oral performer and storyteller. 49Thomas King, "Godzilla vs. Postcolonial," 13. 50Moses and Goldie, Preface, Anthology, 2nd ed., xx. 51For an unusually accessible discussion of "serious play," see Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse: Comic and Tragic," 67-83. 52Quoted in Bowers, "'Ethnic Glue,"" 251. 53Blaeser, "Writing Voices," 59-60. For their final essay assignment in the course, students were given this quote and asked to respond to it by discussing the way in which six poets on the course deploy trickster strategies in their texts. 54Akiwenzie-Damm, Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. 55Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, "Without Reservation: Erotica Indigenous Style," 100. 56Taylor, Introduction, Me Sexy, 2. 57Akiwenzie-Damm, Introduction, Without Reservation, xii.

242 58Scofield, Native Canadians. 590wens, / Hear the Train, 208. 60Chaat Smith, "From Lake Geneva," 6, 4. 61Episkenew, "Aboriginal Policy through Literary Eyes," 125-126. 62Campbell, Halfbreed, 2. 63For a discussion of Canada's 'myth of tolerance,' see Mackey, The House of Difference, 101-106. 64According to Episkenew, "[w]hen Harold Cardinal published The Unjust Society in 1969, he became the first Aboriginal person to 'write back' and point out the grave flaws in Canada's public policies." While it was read by an elite group of non-Aboriginals in Canada," Episkenew adds that "[it] was not accessible to many Aboriginal people because most had only a limited and second rate educate. See Episkenew, "Aboriginal Policy," 125. 65While there were other Native writers during the 1960s and 1970s in Canada writing to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences, McKenzie argues that "Campbell was specifically writing to a non-Aboriginal audience and explaining cultural difference, thereby invoking a new tradition of sorts in Aboriginal literature." See McKenzie, Before the Country, 106. 66Acoose, Neither Indian Princesses, 91-92. 67The abuse of Aboriginal children in Canadian residential schools did not reach the attention of the mainstream media or the public until 1999 with the publication of John Milloy's A National Crime. 68Campbell, "Jacob." Stories, 86. All further line references to this poem are cited parenthetically in the text. 69'Menacing mimicry' is a neologism coined by Homi Bhabha. For a full discussion of the term in its postcolonial context, see his chapters, "Of Mimicry and Man," The Location of Culture," 85- 101. 70Highway, "A Note on Nanabush,' Dry Lips, 12. 71Gingell, "When X Equals Zero", 460. 72Gingell, "When X Equals Zero", 455. 73Campbell describes the year she spent at residential school very briefly in Halfbreed, 46-47. Writing in 1973, before the scandal of the schools became public knowledge, she does not name the school she attended. 74Campbell, "Jacob," Stories, 91-92. All further line references in this poem are cited parenthetically in the text. 75Campbell, Stories, 100. 76Campbell, Stories, 102. "Griffiths and Campbell, The Book of Jessica, 17. 78Quoted in Owens, Introduction, Gerald Vizenor, 1-2. 79 Armstrong and Grauer, Native Poetry," 239. 80 Blaeser, Trailing You, xi. 81Quoted in Spalding, "An Interview with Louise Halfe," 44. 82See Milloy, A National Crime. 83Cook, "Bone Memory," 87. 84Spalding, 47. 85Spalding, 47. 86Stigter, "Dialectics and Dialogics," 49, 54. 87Gingell, "When X Equals Zero," 453. 88Halfe, "Valentine Dialogue," Bear Bones and Feathers. All further line references will be cited parenthetically from this text. 89Halfe, "The Tears," 13. "Quoted in Owens, Introduction, 1-2. 91Kelly, 52. 92l would like to thank my student, Nicholas Ferrio, for this insight. 93Kelly, 52.

243 94See Mathew 22:37-40: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' All the law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." 95See Mathew 5.5. 96The use of the Cree words, soniyas, iskwew, and moniyas, meaning 'money,' 'women' and 'whitemen,' respectively, suggest that the narrator is marking her difference from the ways of the 'white' world. 97A very general apology and request for forgiveness by Pope John Paul II in 1994 for the past sins of members of the church, but not the Church itself, is presumably the one referred to in the poem. For more information, see http://www.religioustolerance.org/popeapo2.htm (accessed 20 June 2008). 98Gingell, "When X Equals Zero," 454. "Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 160. Subsequent references to this article will be cited parenthetically. 100They include the following, in Seesequasis' words: "themes of transformation . .. along with the characteristics that are definable as Native consciousness: the humour, reversals, chance, the role of animals, the trickster." See Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 160. 101Seesequasis suggests that Engels's Bear should be understood as Native literature because it imagines through the power of metaphor a relationship of equality and full communication between a human and an animal. See Seesequasis, "Trick orTreat,"160. 102Ruffo, "Bear," in Without Reservation. Subsequent references to this poem will be cited parenthetically by line number. The poem has also been published in An Anthology of Native Canadian Poetry in English (2005) 447-448. 103For a discussion of the history of the versions of the folktale and fairytale, Goldilocks, see Opie, 260-263. 104For a discussion of the revisions in later editions of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, to make them suitable to the children of the new German bourgeoisie, see Tatar, 3-38. 105Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 4. 106Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse: The Comic and the Tragic, 70. 107" Keon discusses the difference between his 'traditional' Native family and non-Native families: "I don't ever recall having an argument with any member of my family about a case of ownership. I used to get really confused when a non-Native friend would shout, This is mine!' I guess that all came because in the past the subsistence of a Native group required interdependency." See "Wayne Keon," Moses and Goldie, Anthology, 211-212. 108Keon, "if ever i heard," Without Reservation, 56. All subsequent line references will be cited in parenthesis from this edition. 109This was the first impression of a number of my students; however, they quickly changed their minds when they came to understand the complexity of the poem. 110Vizenor quoted in Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversation, 21. 111Jahner, "Trickster Discourse," 44. 112Elias, "Fragments that Rune Up,'" 193. See also endnote 120, page 36. 113Akiwenzie-Damm is Managing Editor of Kegedonce Press which she founded in 1993 to publish the work of Indigenous writers and artists. She also founded an Indigenous performing arts production company, NiSHin Productions, in 1999. 1 4 Akiwenzie-Damm, "fish head soup," Without Reservation, 25. All subsequent parenthetical line references to this poem are from the same collection. 115Akiwenzie-Damm, "GitooklSay It," 11. 116Marie Annharte Baker chose her Welsh middle name, Annharte, as her nom de plume because it is the name of a character in the movie How Green Was My Valley which "offers hope for poor people," See Butling, "Make Sense of My World," 89. Butling, "Making Sense of My World," 110. 118McLeod, "Plains Cree Identity," 477. 119Butling, "Making Sense of My World," 110. 120Lawrence, "Gender, Race and the Regulation," 4.

244 121See also Campbell's memoir, Halfbreed, originally published in 1973 which documents, a generation before Scofield, the marginal, dispossessed status on the Metis in Canada. 122See Scofield's / Knew Two Metis Women, an account of the lives of both his mother and his 'aunt.' 123Richards, "January Interview: Gregory Scofield." For a thoughtful discussion of 'mixed- blood' and gay identities in Scofield's poetry, see Driskill. 124Quoted in Holmes, "Why Poetry Still Matters," http://proquest.umi.com. 125The terms 'mixed-breed' and 'mixed-blood' is used in this context to refer to an essentialist and very problematic biological racial hybridity while the term mixedblood, one of Vizenor's neologisms used throughout my dissertation, refers to cultural hybridity. For more discussion on these terms see Pulitano, Towards a Native Critical Theory, 146. 126Butling, "Make Sense of My World," 96. 127Annharte, "Cheeky Moon," Being on the Moon, 69. All further parenthetical line references to this poem are from the same collection. 128Halfe, "The Tears That Wove Our Songs," 13. 129Annharte, "Raced Out to Write This Up," Being on the Moon, 60. 130Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 93. 131 From the title of Acoose's Neither Indian Princess Nor Easy Squaw. 132Cuthand, "Post-Oka Kinda Woman," Moses and Goldie, Anthology, 3rd ed. 255. All further references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 133Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversation, 154. 134Dumont, "Positive Images of Nativeness," 47. 135Dumont, "Positive Images of Nativeness," 47. 136Dumont, "Positive Images of Nativeness," 47. 137Dumont, "Circle the Wagons," in A Really Good Brown Girl, 57. All further references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 138Godard, "Notes from the Cultural Field," 234.

Chapter 5

1I have appropriated this term from the title of Margery Fee's and Jane Flick's article, "Coyote Pedagogy: Knowing Where the Borders are in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water" where they argue that "Coyote pedagogy requires training in illegal border-crossing" (131). 2Brant, "The Good Red Road," 197. 3Pettigrew, "Coyote Discovers America," 221. Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 89. 5Phelan,145. 6See Vizenor on the compassionate trickster in Vizenor quoted in Coltelli, Winged Words, 162. 7Phelan,131. Phelan also notes that political lessons are part of Coyote pedagogy: Coyote stories challenge ideas of identity as they present a being with the ability to shape-shift, to embody aspects of other beings while remaining itself. They suggest a world in which caution and care are called for, in which we cannot assume who is who and what is what. The consequences of this are several. First, we cannot presume that 'commonsense' ideas about identity or political affiliations are accurate. Our certainties may turn out to be the means by which we are subjugated. Second, feminists may gain from challenging traditional notions of moral action in politics, looking for avenues for creative trickery rather than resolute moral clarity and integrity. (131) 8Highway, Comparing Mythologies, 10. 9For her discussion of the acceptance of Native women writers by Women's Studies faculty in Canada, see Brant, "The Good Red Road," 196. In the same article, however, she is critical of the Eurocentric character of Women's Studies conferences. As she argues, "Race and class have yet to be addressed; or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours" (196).

245 10Brant, "The Good Red Road,"195. 11Brant, "The Good Red Road," 196. 12See Brant, Gathering of Spirit, 10. 13Kobayashi, "The Work of Beth Brant." http://www.angelfire.com/ca/aboriginalwomlitgrp4/page1.html. 14Allen quoted in Williams, 228. For further discussion of 'two-spirited' Native North Americans see also Jacobs et al., Two-Spirited People and Driskill, "Call Me Brother." 15Moses and Goldie, Anthology, 1st ed. 369. 16Vizenor and Lee, Postlndian Conversations, 79. 17Moses and Goldie, Preface: Two Voices, xiii. 18 Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong, 82. 19As Pettigrew suggests, Coyote is a spiritual being, who "according to tradition, aimed arrows and shot the stars into the heavens. Coyote created the tangible environment for humanity" (217). 20Pettigrew, 213. 21Cartoons featuring these two characters have been shown on American TV networks from 1966 to the present. 22Brant, "Coyote Learns a New Trick," Moses and Goldie, Anthology, 1st ed. 148. Further references to this story will be cited parenthetically. 23Brant, "Writing as Witness," 15. 24Prince-Hughes, 27 note 5. 25Brant, Mohawk Trail, 19. Further references to this story will be cited parenthically. 26For a discussion of both traditional and contemporary Mohawk matriarchal society see Native Women's Association of Canada, Matriarchy and the Canadian Charter. matriarchyandthecanadiancharter.pdf, http://www.nwac-hg. org/en/reports.html (accessed 20 February 2008). 27Eigenbrod, "The Oral and the Written," 93. 28HarperPerennial, an imprint of HarperCollins, published a paperback version in 2006. 29Penguin published a second edition in 2005. 30The first HarperPerennial paperback edition was published in 1993 followed by a HarperPerennial Canada paperback edition in 1999. 31The first HarperPerennial Canada paperback edition was published in 2000. 32Groundwood published the first, A Coyote Columbus Story, and Key Porter the following two, Coyote Sings to the Moon and Coyofe's New Suit. 33Stackhouse, A10. 34Stackhouse, A10. 35Vizenor has little patience for some the higher profile AIM members, characterizing them as simulations of the 'stoic Indian' and "the radicals who never seemed to smile." See Vizenor, Crossbloods, 48. Despite King's membership in AIM, Vizenor has great admiration for his writing. See Vizenor, "Native American Indian Literature," 223. 36King, "Godzilla," 241. 37Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 21. 38Taylor, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew. 39Gruber, "Humorous Restorifications," 234. 40Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 1. 41 King, A Short History of Indians, 1-2. All further references to this text will be cited parenthically. 42King and Vizenor critique those 'traditional' anthropologists who have made Indigenous peoples in North America the silenced objects of their academic gaze and, in the process, have contructed them as, for example, simulations of the stoic 'Indian; however, contemporary anthropologists such as James Clifford have revolutionized the field, discrediting the work of these earlier anthropologists. See, for example, Clifford's The Predicament of Culture. 43Gruber, "Humorous Restorifications," 234. 44Gruber, "Humorous Restorifications," 234. 45My experience teaching this story suggests that those readers with a secular background will not understand a number of King's New Testament allusions.

246 4BMatthew 19:21. 47During a Passover visit to Jerusalem, Jesus' parents spend three days looking for him. They eventually find him in the Temple discussing Jewish Law with the rabbis and scholars. Mary chastises him: "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing (Luke 2:48). And He said to them, "Why is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?" (Luke 2: 49). 48See Genesis 2:3: "And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made."

Chapter 6

Justice, "We are Not There Yet," 266. 2Vizenor and Lee, Postlndian Conversations, 89. 3See Wyile, in Shackleton, "Monique Mojica," 261. 4See Chaat Smith, "From Lake Geneva," 17. 5Seesequasis, "Trick or Treat," 154.

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280 APPENDIX

Brief biographical information of writers and critics quoted in the text (Biographical details for writers on whose work I focus are included in the text of this dissertation.)

Acoose, Janice A writer and journalist of Metis/Saulteaux ancestry, Acoose is Associate Professor of English at the Saskatoon campus of the First Nations University of Canada.

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, a mixedblood Anishnabe writer, poet, editor and publisher, is a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation.

Algarin, Miguel A retired professor of English at Rutgers University, Algarin is a Puerto Rican Poet and writer and Executive Director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Theatre.

Allen, Paula Gunn Allen, a Native American poet, novelist and critic of Laguna, Sioux and Lebanese ancestry, was Professor Emeritus of English/Creative Writing/American Indian Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles prior to her death in 2008.

Anakshi, Dua Anakshi is Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University in Toronto.

Anderson, Chris Metis from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Anderson is Assistant Professor in the School of Native Studies at the University of Alberta.

Andrews, Jennifer Andrews is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of New Brunswick.

Appleford, Rob Appleford is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, specializing in Native American/ Aboriginal/First Nations Literatures.

Baker, Marie Annharte An Anishinaabe poet and essayist, Baker is the co-founder of the Regina Aboriginal Writers' Group.

281 Battson, Jill Battson, a former art director and filmmaker, is active in the spoken word movement in Canada and the United States.

Bird, Gloria A member of the Spokane Tribe of Washington State, Bird is a poet, scholar and an Associate Editor of the Wicazo Sa Review.

Blaeser, Kimberly Blaeser, of Ojibway and German descent from White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, is a poet, journalist and fiction writer. She is also Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Brandt, Di Brandt is an award-winning poet, essayist, teacher and editor and has held the Canada Research Chair in English/Creative Writing at Brandon University, Manitoba, since 2005.

Brill de Ramirez, Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez is Professor of English at Bradley University specializing in literary criticism and theory and American Indian Literature.

Brydon, Diana Brydon holds the Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Cunningham, Shawna Cunningham is a Metis scholar and Director of the Native Centre at the University of Calgary,

Chaat Smith, Paul Chaat Smith, an enrolled member of the Comanche Tribe of Oklahoma, is an artist, author and art curator.

Christian, Barbara Christian, an African American feminist literary critic and activist, was Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley prior to her death in 2000.

Cook, Meira A South African author of poetry, fiction, and essays, Cook teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

282 Crosby, Marcia Of Tsimshian and Haida ancestry, Crosby is a writer, curator and instructor in History and Native Studies at Malaspina University, Malaspina, BC.

Davidson, Arnold The late Davidson was a Research Professor of Canadian Studies at Duke University.

Deines, Brian Deines is a Canadian author and illustrator of children's books.

Dickason, Olive Dickason, a journalist and scholar of French Metis and English ancestry, taught Amerindian and Canadian history at the University of Alberta until her retirement in 1992.

Dumont, Marilyn Dumont is an award-winning Metis poet born in Northwestern Alberta. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and teaches English and Creative Writing.

Eigenbrod, Renate Eigenbrod, a first generation Canadian of German ancestry, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Elias, Amy Elias is Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee; her work focuses on digital technologies and Indigenous American Literatures.

Emberley, Julia Emberley is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Western Ontario.

Episkenew, Jo-Ann Episkenew, a member of the Metis Nation of Saskatchewan, teaches at the First Nations University of Canada.

Fagan, Kristina Fagan's ancestry is Labrador Metis. She is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan.

Gingell, Susan Gingell is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan specializing in Canadian and other decolonizing literatures.

283 Godard, Barbara Godard, a feminist literary theorist, translator, and editor, is Professor Emeritus of English at York University.

Goldie, Terry Goldie is a Professor of English at York University where he teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures.

Griffiths. Linda A playwright and actor, Griffiths is an Adjunct Professor in the University of Toronto's Master's Program in Creative Writing.

Gruber, Eva Eva Gruber is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies at the University of Contance in Germany, specializing in Native North American writing.

Halfe, Louise Bernice A poet from Saddle Lake Reserve in Two Hills, Alberta, Halfe was Saskatchewan's Poet Laureate for 2005-2006.

Hall, Stuart A cultural theorist, Hall was a founding member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University and, before retiring in 1997, was Professor of Sociology at the Open University in the UK.

Harjo, Joy A member of Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, Harjo is a poet, musician and author. She lives in Hawaii.

Henighen, Stephen Henighen is Professor of Spanish American Literature at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Highway, Tomson Highway is a Cree novelist, children's author and award-winning playwright who lives half the year in Southern France and the other half in Northern Ontario.

Hill, Richard William Of Cree ancestry, Hill is Assistant Professor of Aboriginal Arts in the Department of Visual Arts, York University.

284 hooks, bell hooks is a Professor of English at City College in New York where she teaches, researches and writes on topics of gender, race, teaching and the significance of media for contemporary culture.

Home, Dee Home is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Northern British Columbia.

Howells, Coral Ann Howells is Professor of Canadian Literature at Reading University, UK.

Hoy, Helen Hoy is Professor in the Department of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Hulan, Renee Hulan is Associate Dean of Arts at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Iyer, Pico Iyer, a self-described "global village on two legs", is a prolific essayist and author of numerous books dealing with our emerging global culture.

Jahner, Elaine Jahner was a Professor of English and Native American Studies at Dartmouth University until her death in 2003.

Justice, Daniel Heath Justice is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and teaches Aboriginal Literatures at the University of Toronto.

Keeshig-Tobias, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation, is a children's author and storyteller.

Kelly, Don An Ojibway stand-up comic, Kelly is also he host and star of the APTN series Fish out of Water.

Keon, Wayne Keon is an Ojibway poet, songwriter and financial analyst.

285 Knowles, Ric Knowles is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is also a playwright and director.

Kobayashi, Tamai Born in Japan and raised in Canada, Kobayashi is a writer, screenwriter, and videomaker.

Krupat, Arnold Krupat teaches in the Global Studies and Literature Departments at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville NY.

LaRocque, Emma A Cree/Metis activist, scholar, writer and poet, LaRoque is Professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Lawrence, Bonita Lawrence, of mixed-blood Mi'kmaw ancestry, is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at York University.

Levin, Martin Levin is the Books Editor at the Globe and Mail (Toronto) newspaper.

Lincoln, Kenneth A writer and poet, Lincoln teaches Contemporary and Native American Literature at UCLA.

Lorde, Audre American poet Lorde taught English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College and was Poet Laureate of New York 1991-1992 before her death in 1992.

Lutz, Hartmut Lutz, a German scholar and literary critic, is Professor of American and Canadian Studies at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universitat Greifswald in Northwestern Germany.

Marken, Ron A Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Marken has taught in the Native Studies and English Departments.

McLeod, Neal McLeod, an artist, poet, actor and scholar from the James Smith Cree Reserve in Saskatchewan, is Associate Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Trent University.

286 McMaster, Gerald McMaster, a Cree born in Saskatchewan, is a visual artist and scholar. He is currently Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. From 2000-2005 he was Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.

Mihesuah, Devon Abbott Mihesuah is member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and is Professor of Global Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas.

Miller, Jim Miller is a Canada Research Chair and faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. A filmmaker, writer and composer, Minh-ha is a feminist, postcolonial theorist.

Moore, David L. Moore is a professor in the Department of English at The University of Montana.

Moses, Daniel David Of Delaware descent, Moses grew up on a farm near the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario. A former president of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto, he is a poet, playwright and dramaturge who now teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen's University.

Murray, Laura Murray is the Undergraduate Chair of the English Department at Queen's University,

Owens, Louis A literary critic and fiction writer of Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish ancestry, Louis Owens was Professor of English and Native American Studies and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis at the time of his death in 2002.

Petrone, Penny Petrone's groundbreaking books, First People, First Voices (1983); Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English (1988); and Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present (1990) initiated the scholarly study of First Nations Literature in Canada. She was an award-winning teacher at Lakehead University. She died in 2005.

287 Pettigrew, Dawn Karima A Creek/Cherokee writer, poet and musician, Pettigrew is also a journalist and television personality.

Phelan, Shane Phelan teaches Political Science at the University of New Mexico.

Prince-Hughes, Tara Prince-Hughes teaches English at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington, specializing in Native American Literature and gender.

Pulitano, Elvira Pulitano received her PhD in Native American Literature from the University of New Mexico and is now teaching in the English Department at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Rasporich, Beverly Rasporich is Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary.

Richler, Noah Richler is a prize-winning producer and host of radio documentaries and features. He is also a free-lance newspaper columnist and author.

Rice, Keren Rice teaches linguistics at the University of Toronto, where she is Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives.

Riddington, Jillian Riddington is a writer and ethnographer who has worked extensively with the Dane-Zaa First Nation.

Rose, Wendy Rose is a Native American poet, activist and academic of Hopi, Miwok and European descent. She heads the American Indian Studies Program at Fresno City College in Fresno, California.

Ross, Ian Ross is an award-winning Metis playwright, essayist and journalist living in Winnipeg.

Ryan, Allan Ryan is an Associate Professor in Canadian Studies and Art History at Carleton University and holds the New Sun Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture.

288 Schorcht, Blanca Associate Professor and Regional Chair of English at The University of Northern British Columbia, Schorcht's interest lies in the interface between oral and written traditions.

Seesequasis, Paul Seesequasis, a mixedblood Cree from Saskatchewan, is a writer, editor, publisher and journalist.

Shackleton, Mark Shackleton is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Shohat, Ella An Iraqi-Israeli scholar, Shohat is Professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies at CUNY.

Siemerling, Winfried Siemerling teaches English and Comparative Lieterature at the Universite de Sherbrooke. He is affiliated with the W.E.B. du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

Simard, Colleen Of Ojibway, French, Cree and Swedish ancestry, Simard is a freelance filmmaker and journalist.

Somers-Willett, Susan B. Anthony Poet Somers-Willett was Assistant Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

Spalding, Esta Spalding is a Canadian author, screenwriter and poet based in Guelph, Ontario.

Stackhouse, John Stackhouse, an award winning journalist and author, is presently editor of the Business section of the Globe and Mail (Toronto).

Stam, Robert Stam is Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU.

Stigter, Shelley Of Cree-Dutch descent, Stigter is a member of the Peepeekisis Nation and currently teaches in the First Nations Transition Program at the University of Lethbridge.

289 Sugars, Cynthia Sugars is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Her work focuses on the links between national identities and cultural narratives.

Taylor, Drew Hayden Taylor is an Anishinaabe playwright, essayist and filmmaker from Curve Lake, Ontario.

Valaskakis, Gail The late Valaskakis, of Chippewa and Dutch ancestry, was a Professor Emeritus in Communication Arts at Concordia University. Until her death in 2007, she was Director of Research at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation in Ottawa.

Van Camp, Richard Van Camp, from the Dogrib (Tlicho) Nation, is an award-winning author and storyteller.

Velie, Alan Velie is Director of Undergraduate Programs at the University of Oklahoma's English Department. He specializes in Shakespeare, the Bible and American Indian Literature.

Volk, Patricia Author Patricia Volk has published a novel and two collections of short essays. She is a former columnist for New York Newsday and lives in New York City.

Wagamese, Richard Wagamese, an Anishnabe from the Wabasseemoong First Nation in north­ western Ontario, is a fiction writer, storyteller and journalist.

Wall, Karolle Wall is Associate Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Wallace, Anthony A psychological anthropologist and historian, Wallace taught at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1988.

Walton, Priscilla Walton is a Professor in the English Department at Carleton University.

290 Warley, Linda Warley is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, focusing on post WW II autobiographies and Native American Literatures.

Wilmot, Glenn Wilmot is a Professor in the Department of English at Queen's University.

Wilson, Angela Cavender Wilson, a Wahpetunwan Dakota, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Arizona State University.

Wyile, Herb Wyile teaches Canadian Literature in the Department of English at Acadia University.

Young-lng, Greg Young-lng, a Cree from Le Pas, Manitoba, is a writer, editor, and poet and a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. He stepped down as publisher of Theytus books in 2004.

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