‘Witnessing the Violence of the Settler State in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song’

A Canadian literary scholar based in Australia, I read “Aboriginal/Indigenous” Australian and Canadian literatures in English as sites where the ways in which we perceive racial and cultural violence might be re-configured. Cognizant of the role that literary studies discourse has had and continues to have in these nations as a tool for the maintenance of official, state-recognised ‘reconciliation’ narratives, my work looks instead to the literary encounter itself as a potential site for registering, or witnessing, the violence that the settler state attempts to screen off behind the scenes of its official attitudes towards reconciliation. This article will explore the concept of literary witnessing in an archive of trans-Indigenous literature across settler colonial states, linking award-winning authors Alexis Wright (Waanyi, writing in Australia) and Lee Maracle (Sto:lo, writing in Canada). Analysing Wright’s Carpentaria and Maracle’s Celia’s Song, I trace how these novels enact and inspire, but also complicate, witnessing in Canada and Australia (both of which maintain official policies of inclusion and multiculturalism, but are actually held up by a regime of continuing racialized violence). I also examine how these works of literature model ignorance and choosing to turn away as a form of violence and a roadblock to justice. Finally, I ask how these novels might provide models for subjectivity and justice that subvert the judiciary systems of these settler states, dislodging ‘witnessing’ from its place in discourses of state-authorized “justice”, and placing it in the realm of Indigenous law and the potential of an ethical (literary) encounter.

O relato de vida indígena e outros (sub)gêneros literários em A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami, Meu nome é Rigoberta Menchu e assim nasceu minha consciência e Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel struggles of a Native Canadian woman

Partindo de três obras primárias: A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami, de Davi Kopenawa e Bruce Albert, Meu nome é Rigoberta Menchú e assim nasceu minha consciência, de Rigoberta Menchú e Elizabeth Burgos, e Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel Struggles of a Native Canadian Woman, de Lee Maracle e Don Barnett, busco apontar e reforçar algumas das características desses relatos de vida indígena (SALLES, 2020) a partir de uma análise comparativa com outros gêneros (a saber, narrativas de vida étnica, narrativas de exílio, autoetnografia e ecobiografia). Para tal, a “virada etnográfica” ocorrida no campo das ciências sociais, que trouxe maior fluidez para a classificação de trabalhos como relatos de vida indígena, assim como a discussão sobre gêneros literários nos são bastante caras nesse artigo.

Gender Perspectives in Lee Maracle’s I am Woman

Lee Maracle is a prolific Native Canadian woman writer, whose memoir I Am Woman abounds with gender perspectives. In I Am Woman Maracle discusses about the oppression of Native women and the anti-woman attitude of the Native men. Violence over Native women are expounded with incidents from Native women’s lives in some of the remarkable chapters like Rusty. In I Am Woman Lee Maracle also discusses about the violence within and outside Native women’s home. The paper also tells us how Native women are doubly oppressed and how their contribution towards society goes unrecognized. It also discusses how Native women are considered as subhuman. The paper at its conclusion points out how Native women attempt to reconstruct their society inspite of oppression.

After This, Nothing Happened: Indigenous Academic Writing and Chickadee Peoples’ Words

Canadian Indigenous scholars valiantly search for stores of resilience and strength in contemporary Canada to demystify the tragic place of Indians in Canada. It is very much a journey of self-discovery and recovery of a positive identity and lost human dignity that allows the restoration of pride to succeed with the gifts Creation provides to Indigenous peoples. Cook- Lynn (2007) addresses this quest to locate safe places of connecting to those stories in her important work Anti-Indianism in Modern America: Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth, where she writes about the obligation of Indigenous scholars to project strong voices to people who “believe in the stereotypical assumption that Indians are ‘damned’.. vanished, or pathetic remnants of a race” and “let’s get rid of Indian reservations” or “let’s abrogate Indian treaties.” Instead of feeling inspired to find places of good will far too much energy is sapped escaping spaces of hate, indifference and inexcusable innocence. The cultural, historical and social confusion of a one-sided portrayal of Canadian colonization creates for researchers/witnesses at all levels of education huge gaps in understanding the unresolved pain and injury of Canada’s colonial past on Canada’s First Nations. Indigenous peoples are invisible in most areas of academic study, normally relegated to special programs like Aboriginal Studies as if Indigenous world-views, knowledge, culture and vision for Canada’s future required mere comma’s in course material that feel like “oh yea, then there are aboriginal people who feel” that stand for inclusion but feel like after thoughts only if a visible “Indian” finds a seat in the class. Indigenous students’ experience within the academy has is often a ‘Dickenish’ tale. It is a tale of two extremes; the best of times and the worst of times mostly simultaneously as each glorious lesson learned carries the lonely burden of responsibility to challenge the shame and humiliation of each racist, ignorant and arrogant colonial myth perpetuated. Like Oliver Twist we want more. This paper was conceived out of an invitation by Indigenous author Lee Maracle at the 2009 University of Toronto SAGE (Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement) writing retreat where Lee and the Cree Elder Pauline Shirt spun webs of stories to encourage Indigenous scholars to explore and express our survival of vicious, traumatic and intentional cultural upheavals.

Sisterhood and Solidarity: An Exploration of the Role of Women in the Development of Chinese-Indigenous Relations in Disappearing Moon Cafe and “Yin Chin”

History class tells us a narrative of first contact between Indigenous people and colonizers that is very narrow in scope. The discussion is often limited to accounts of European colonizers; the brutal assimilation tactics that destroyed the culture of the first peoples of this land are often excluded. Also forgotten are the other stories of first contact that existed synchronously – the stories that do not revolve around dominant society. Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café provocatively spotlights the instances of connection between Chinese and Indigenous communities both historically and in modern day. Lee cautiously manoeuvres around issues of love, miscegenation, intergenerational trauma and cultural norms, particularly focusing on the relationships that exist between both Chinese and Indigenous characters and communities. Lee Maracle focalizes these Chinese-Indigenous relationships from an Indigenous perspective in her piece “Yin Chin.” Together, the texts highlight female strength and emphasize the importance of women in bridging together the two communities. Through the narratives they tell that surpass temporal boundaries and implicitly through their writing as two female authors, the texts suggest that women are society’s mechanism of resistance to social barriers.

Book Review: Memory Serves: Oratories

In Memory Serves, Stó:lō (Coast Salish) rememberer and storyteller Lee Maracle weaves together a selection of her speeches and lectures into a single volume of oratories. In the preface, Maracle expresses the worry that in the process of converting these spoken pieces into written form, “the words can lose much of the personality of the speaker” (xii). Her voice as a storyteller, however, coheres beautifully on the page, carrying the rhythm and consonance of her original orations. The recurrence of several themes (decoloniality, sovereignty, direction, memory) that arise throughout the text also gives us a powerful sense of her memory and personality as an Indigenous woman, elder, and rememberer who is anchored by the cultural values of her people.