‘HOW SHOULD I EAT THESE?’ WITH YOUR MOUTH, ASSHOLE”:
FIRST NATIONS WOMEN’S LITERATURE RESPONDS
TO COLONIAL DISCOURSE
by
Jennifer Payson
B.A., Okanagan University College, 2000

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REOUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTERS OF ARTS
in
GENDER STUDIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
July 2005

©Jennifer Payson, 2005

1^1

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Abstract
The Canadian Indian Act creates a legal definition of First Nations
women’s identity based upon the gendered and racial components of
colonisation. A number of First Nations women writers articulate the impact of
this law as they navigate the literary categories in search of a space for
empowered, complex, challenging narratives of Native womanhood. When
unable to access powerful and complete representations of female Native
sexuality. First Nations women face a false binary of squaw/whore or Indian
princess/Pocahontas. This limited sexual representation results in a larger
damaging narrative of diminished access to legal protection.
The writings of Eden Robinson, Monique Mojica, Beatrice Culleton
(Mosionier), Marilyn Dumont, and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm challenge this false
binary and offer provocative and exciting representations of Native womanhood.
These challenging narratives are located within the notion of Third Space and
hybridity. Third Space allows for the exploration of “less false” images of First
Nations women, and feminist standpoint theory highlights the role of the ‘outside
within’ in creating narratives that challenge the colonial perspective. These
authors’ narratives are neither simple nor easily contained within set boundaries.
They differ in their approaches to tradition, identity, and ideas of representation.
Yet all these women contribute to a dialogue of passion, life, anger, aggression,
and resistance to harmful and damaging stereotypes. First Nations women
writers are engaging in a discourse with legal notions of self that will challenge
the colonial foundations of contemporary Native women’s legal subjectivity.

Payson iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iii

Acknowledgment

iv

Introduction

1

Chapter One

Theory, Issues, and Intersections

10

Chapter Two

History and Colonisation

31

Chapter Three

Connecting the Pieces

50

Chapter Four

Challenges and Transformations

77

Chapter Five

Conclusion: Provoking Narratives

101

Works Cited

106

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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Dr. Dee Horne, and my
committee members. Dr. Maryna Romanets and Dr. Robert Budde, for their
attention to detail and excellent suggestions during the writing of this thesis.
Many thanks to Dr. Jo-Anne Fiske, Dr. Heather Smith, and the late Perry
Shawana for their work with me on an earlier incarnation of the legal theory. I
also thank my sisters, Leone and Julia Payson, and my fiancé Jim Swingle for
their time and comments on this work. My thanks to my parents Jan and Rod
Payson for providing the space and love needed to complete this process, and
hugs to the Grad Office Girls who remained my reality check. I also thank Coral
Edmonds for her continual support and belief that I would succeed.
Finally, this thesis is dedicated to the memory of my Grandma Hazel
Payson who was an amazing, funny, tough woman who inspired her
granddaughters to be the same.

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1

INTRODUCTION
In my work over the past few years, it has become clear to me that there Is
a legacy of racism and sexism woven throughout the very fabric of our Canadian
citizenry via the Indian Act, and this legislation cannot be ignored. Yet this
legislation is continually overlooked due to fictional narratives marking a historical
closure to all the racism and sexism of the past relationships between First
Nations^ people and European colonisers. Within such narratives, a break with
history means issues of racism and sexism no longer require contemporary
discussion. As Lawrence points out: “In Canada, few individuals appear to have
engaged with the depth of the problem that the Indian Act represents - its
overarching nature as a discourse of classification, regulation, and control that
has indelibly ordered how Native people think of things ‘lndian”’(4). In turn, these
narratives are about the interactions between individuals and law. I am intrigued
by discussions of legal identities of First Nations women and, in particular, the
interaction of these colonial narratives with the construction of literary identities.
Many women writers and theorists discuss the impact racism and sexism
has on their lives, and I want to examine specifically a segment of society which
has had legal definitions of their identity entrenched within the Canadian
government for over a hundred years. I am interested in the existence of a
legislated notion of ‘Indianness’ as it relates to an individual’s notion of self and
positioning. In turn, this examination draws upon the relationship between social
' I have elected to use the term First Nations and Native throughout this thesis. I have also used the terms
Aboriginal, Indigenous, and Indian when they are used initially by another author or when referencing a
specific perspective. For example, the U N uses the term Indigenous when referencing issues o f the original
peoples in an area. Both Native and First Nations refer to a diverse group o f Indigenous peoples from
multiple nations.

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2

policy, law, and identities. Feminism has provided my framework for
understanding the world as “whether acknowledged or not, every form of feminist
politics, and there are many, implies a particular way of understanding patriarchy
and the possibilities of change” (Weedon 5). In particular, I am interested in how
people can come to understand their own identities through various narratives.
These narratives surround us in everyday life in school textbooks, ads on
television, characters in movies and novels, and the reporting of the news during
the dinner hour. I believe in the power of narratives to have both negative and
positive impacts on the construction of a sense of self. Thus, I decided to
examine specific narratives of identity within the context of contemporary Native
women’s writing.
I have chosen to examine five First Nations women writers and the way
they explore expressions of identity in their work. I am interested in the ways
identity can be expressed as a direct interaction with the language and
terminology of colonisation. I want to keep stressing the link between a history of
external-based legal definitions of identity through colonisation and current
narratives of Native womanhood.^ As Engel and Munger point out, an
individual’s relationship with law is articulated and negotiated as “day-to-day talk
among friends, [and shapes] the terms of discussion or the images and
conceptual categories that are used in everyday interactions” (11).

In this

manner I am curious how these authors’ texts create interactions with and
transformations of the coloniser’s viewership of Native women’s identity. By

^ “Native womanhood” is used by Anderson throughout her text and is an extremely positive and
empowering way o f speaking about the issue o f identity.

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3

interacting with each other as a community of writers and forming connections
between their own lived experiences and the impacts of colonization, these
authors are drawing attention to these sites of resistance and transformation
while taking part in a regeneration of their own agency within the construction of
Native women’s literary representations.
Focusing on First Nations women’s literature, I had to reach an
understanding of how I would understand that category to exist. It is important to
note that the formation and general acceptance of these conceptual boundaries
shift, depending on who is defining the terms of definition, and can become
particularly problematic when a large institution is responsible for forming the
boundaries of ‘nativeness’.® These issues of shifting boundaries occur not only
within academia, but between writers themselves. In the same manner as those
band leaders who have sought to exclude C-31 women from returning to their
homes due to what they termed arbitrary boundaries of Indianness, authors and
critics look to construct the same boundaries of exclusion around the definition of
Native literature."^ Krupat and Swann point out how one writer refused to submit
writing to a second edited anthology of Native literature based on what he called
a number of “self-nominated Indians” present in the first edition. The editors

^ H eiss discusses this at length with respect to Australian policies for Aborigine peoples. They have
attempted to include a number o f various approaches to this definition o f Aborigine Literature including
lived experience, descent and acceptance in community, who the literature is written for, content, what has
driven the production o f the writing, and how it reflects real life experiences. S ee pages 207-211.
With the changes made to the Indian Act in 1985, groups o f women regained their Status though Bill C31. But rather than being accepted back into their familial properties, they were fought by som e band
leaders who felt a closer affinity to the Canadian government than to the women o f their bands. In a
number o f these situations, the band leaders stated that they felt these Native w om en had been unduly
influenced by white fem inists and that they had turned their backs on the greater goals o f the Nations. In
interviews the Native women replied that to them this all cam e down to the question o f food and shelter for
them and their children. See Shirley Bear.

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4

note, “He did not wish to appear in any follow-up volume that might include other,
to him, at least, questionable Natives” (Krupat and Swann xii). Such examples
of policing the boundaries underline the need for a flexible and responsive
understanding about group identities.

Boundaries must be able to highlight any

necessary reasons for distinctions between people and why there is a group
being considered outside of the categories of Canada, North America, or even
just people. Yet these categorisations do not represent homogenous groups,
and there will not necessarily be a consensus on how any distinctions should be
made around questions of Native identity. Issues of group identity will need to be
considered on a case by case example. In the end, these boundaries can
celebrate “how many different ways there are today to be Indian, and ... how
many different ways there are to write about being Indian” (Krupat and Swann
xiv). Highlighted within these many ways to ‘write about being Indian’ are the
narratives of resistance, transformation, and a (re)presenting of Native
womanhood.
I have limited my authors due to a number of factors, not the least of
which is my close examination of the Indian Act. By using this particular law, I
have narrowed my authors to those who have negotiated their identities within
what is now known as Canada. Yet many of these authors locate their nationality
within altered spheres of influence, and I have respected their self-identifications
when they are mentioned as such. In this manner, their literature is sometimes
understood as Canadian literature, but I have noted and honoured the specific
requests for their identities to be listed as more complex and varied than simply

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5

as ‘Canadian’. This is but one further area of negotiation that speaks to the fluid
and shifting nature of identity.
I selected the authors due to their interaction the three specific literary
genres: novels, plays, and poetry. In this way the analysis is not reliant upon the
particular style of the work, but is more reflective of an overarching relationship
between the writing and the various narratives of identity. Yet with that all said
there is no way this work could address the entire scope of literature or authors
available for examination. This work had to be held to five women whose writing
sparked a keen desire within me for further exploration of their narratives.
Contained within their writings are these questions of identity, exclusion, blood,
gender, law, resistance, transformation, and rejuvenation.
Chapter one establishes the groundwork and structure for this research. I
provide specific definitions to key terms including those concerned with literary
analysis, cultural studies, feminism, colonisation, and legal narratives. This
chapter also draws forth the critical writings of those authors who have inspired
my ongoing research into language, deconstruction, power, and identity. I am
particularly fond of feminist standpoint theory, Third Space, and hybridity for their
attention to the intersection of the marginalised subject and an awareness of
power dynamics. I explore issues of grouping identities, as well as the questions
of difference and “truth.” Finally, this chapter highlights the various forms of
awareness, resistance, and transformations within the texts.
The second chapter is an important discussion of the connection between
history and current identity issues for First Nations women. It traces the origins

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6

of the racism and sexism throughout the Indian Act and, in turn, throughout the
current legal categorisations of First Nations women. This chapter calls attention
to the history of colonisation and an understanding of the purpose of the legal
actions put in place by Canadian law.
My third chapter focuses on the writings of Eden Robinson, Monique
Mojica, Beatrice Culleton (Mosionier), Marilyn Dumont, and Kateri AkiwenzieDamm. By exploring these authors and some of their texts, I examine the
connections between multiple locations of identity construction. This chapter
stresses that the authors are also situated within systems of support and
expectation which are, in turn, based upon various boundaries framing First
Nations women writers. Connections to community can be both helpful and
destructive in a creative exploration of writing as resistance. This chapter further
traces the evidence of the ongoing colonisation of First Nations women’s identity
through various institutions such as school and family services. Finally, I
accentuate how literature, itself, can become one more piece connecting women
to their various systems of support, articulation, and resistance.
The fourth chapter pushes further into the selected texts and positions
them within a framework of transformative resistance. I examine how language,
law, history, race and gender create a destructive binary sexual identity which
positions First Nations women in disadvantaged legal narratives. As a key point
of intersection, the narratives of rape and sexual abuse focus attention on the
impact of negative representations of Native womanhood. This chapter explores
how the texts identify, respond, and transform this destructive legal narrative.

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7

This brings forward questions of how difficult it can be for a subject to cross
certain boundaries and how writers can create narratives to both (re)image
Native women’s identity and Native women’s literature.
I want to acknowledge that my position within this process as one of
privilege. I am a white lower-middle class woman writing about First Nations
women’s literature. This work exists within the framework of a Gender Studies
program which seeks to create positions of empowerment, alliances, and
responsible actions. The theoretical positioning of ‘ally’ work provides the
context for such awareness of privilege. This follows Anne Bishop’s definition of
as ally as “a member of an oppressor group who works to end a form of
oppression which gives her or him privilege” (126). As such, I position myself as
an ally fighting oppression. My work also exists within the responsibilities of a
shared citizenship that endeavours to be anti-racist and anti-oppressive. From a
feminist perspective, this research ties together multiple locations of
discrimination. Bishop states.
All oppressions are interdependent, they all come from the same world­
view, and none can be solved in isolation. We can either perpetuate a
society based on competition, where some win and some lose, or we can
work towards a society based on co-operation, where winning and losing
become irrelevant. In the first scenario, oppression will continue to exist
for almost everyone; in the second, it will fade away, since it serves no
purpose. (11)
Such research pushes non-Native academics towards a better understanding of
the influence of race and gender on the creation of identity. I believe these
critical examinations are most effective when launched from multiple subject
positionings. With that said, there must be a final note about the scope and

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8

intentions of my work. Despite what some might believe, there is no single
Native text or story, no single Native character or plot, and no single process of
identity formation. My research does not speak to all Native literature, and I have
not touched upon numerous examples of Native authors creating resistant and
transformative relationships. I hope that my work adds to a body of knowledge
which seeks to explore further the various ways in which narratives of
representation influence the creation of a sense of self and aspects of group
identities.
Questions of legal narratives and identity construction speak to accessing
legal rights and demanding changes to legal definitions. I ask myself again and
again throughout this process - in what manner are legal definitions of identity
challenged via literature, and in what manner is literature’s treatment of identity
reflective of our relationship with law? Engel and Munger point out that law “can
transform the sense of self simply by increasing individuals’ perceptions of their
own worth, or by reminding them of opportunities they could pursue” (11). Yet
this recognition of the potential positive influence of law on sense of self needs to
be tempered by an awareness of the ongoing damage caused by a law based in
racism and sexism. As Lawrence points out:
A history of colonial control and the reality of ongoing genocide is at the
root of this fear on the part of many Native people that to lose collective
control over even a colonially shaped Native identity is to lose the last
vestiges of Native distinctiveness, that last defence against the colonizing
culture that some Native activists refer to as ‘the Predator.’ In this
resistance to externally imposed change in definitions of Indianness, the
role of the Indian Act in actually shaping Native identity over the past
century has for the most part been disregarded. (21)

Payson

In order to address this question, I ask some further questions about the nature
of identity, history, and power. I find the connections between these various
conflicting narratives, and I locate some positions of articulation, resistance, and
transformation.

9

Payson 10

CHAPTER ONE: Theory, Issues, and Intersections.
If I draw my thesis out as a map, its sections incorporate various
theoretical territories - postcolonial and feminist - and diverse disciplines:
sociology, philosophy, and literature. As well, these territories stretch across the
terrains of both the humanities and the social sciences. Although there are many
approaches to research which keep the humanities and the social sciences
separate, their combination expands the available observations. Leavis affirms
that the study of social sciences is only enhanced by broadening into aspects of
the humanities and literature:
Without the sensitizing familiarity with the subtleties of language, and the
insight into the relations between abstract or generalizing thought and the
concrete of human experience, that the trained fréquentation of literature
alone can bring, the thinking that attends social and political studies will
not have the edge and force it should. (194)
As I do not subscribe to a notion of grand meta-theories, I approach my research
in a multi-disciplinary manner that breaks down any artificial barriers between
theories. While some distinctions between different theoretical approaches can
be both useful and necessary, I believe that holding too tightly to these divisions
can create rigid and unresponsive theoretical perspectives. I need a selection of
various lenses which can contribute to a nuanced discussion of what I am
examining: the situations I am looking at need to be contextualized, and I must
be able to employ different theories for different purposes. I will apply the
strongest points of each theory in order to provide a more complete
understanding of the intersection between literature, law, identity, and narrative.

Payson 11

My goal Is to use those theories which can best challenge dominant
systems of epistemology in order to reconceptualise my own understanding and
reading of First Nations women’s literature. To start, I look to post-modern theory
in order to reject the modernist reliance on grand ‘meta-narratives’ and the
beliefs of progress, rationality, and a search for broad definitions and
understandings of human nature. Post-modern thought focuses attention on the
“fragmented and dispersed nature of contemporary experience” (Seale 328).
This theory coupled with post-structualism allows me to look at the use of
language in the negotiation of systems of power, authority, and social interaction.
This stands in stark contrast with most realist thought which will focus on the
notion of a ‘real’ world which exists in a state independent from various systems
of beliefs, language, or social situations. The important distinction for my work is
the influencing impact of language and writing on the creation of various notions
of identity. Acoose ties together the issues of language and ideology when
reading First Nations writing:
Readers must therefore attempt to understand these stereotypical images
in the context of colonialism, be aware of their own ideological
assumptions, understand how those assumptions encourage cultural
attitudes towards Indigenous women, and approach texts (particularly in
relation to images of Indigenous women) in a critical manner. (68)
This highlights the necessary historical considerations, such as colonialism.
Examining the history of First Nations women’s historical identity leads to other
epistemological questions of how knowledge is created, accepted, validated, and
dispersed throughout time in society.

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I must stress again the importance of challenging the multiple factors
influencing ongoing racist and sexist stereotypes. These factors continue to
operate within a hegemonic patriarchal system which masks the ongoing
damaging effects of such ideologies. As Mamdani states, “Consensual
ideologies more often than not tend to obscure the exercise of power” (882). The
exercise of power through legal and social narratives often leads to damaging
representations of First Nations women’s identity. Deconstruction is a key
component in disrupting the acceptance of the coloniser’s viewership in the
creation of texts. Within a discourse of hegemony, this deconstruction focuses
on the coloniser’s control of identity representation through an unquestioned
authority over ideologies, assumptions, and everyday practises. The acceptance
of such authority means that control is not held via overt power, but it is rather an
outcome of mass acceptance and consent. In disrupting the coloniser’s control
over representation of identity. First Nations women’s writers can push into a
Third Space of representation.^ Soja defines Firstspace and Secondspace being
the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ respectively. Thirdspace, then, “draws upon the
material and mental spaces of the traditional dualism but extends well beyond
them in scope, substance, and meaning” (11). Rather than approaching this
Third Space as somehow either existing between or outside the other two, it is
both/and while also being a new conceptualisation of the space altogether.
Bhabha states.
Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, constitutes the discursive
conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of
' The term Third Space is also referred to as Thirdspace and third space by various theorists. I have opted
to use Third Space unless quoting som eone directly who uses another incarnation o f the word.

Payson 13

culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be
appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew. (37)
It is within this space that alternative articulations of Native womanhood can be
presented.
An individual’s location can influence their perception and understanding
of narrative meaning. A subject interacting with post-colonial power hierarchies
can develop an awareness of the relationship between coloniser and colonised.
This is a key component of the hybrid identity which resists a wholesale
acceptance of the dominant social influences and seeks to take from two, or
more, conflicting manners of seeing the world. The post-colonial subject needs
to be recognised as having this hybridity and this perspective of what Hartsock
refers to as the “outsider within” (Lenz 98) or what Soja would call “thirding-asOthering” (5). The subjects in a position of Third Space do not need to prescribe
their location as being either within the center or completely marginalised.
Rather than choosing one or the other, the subject instead “borrows from them
both, claiming hybridity as her right” (Lenz 111). Some might call those moments
contradictions and argue that if you are not one, you must be the other. But
rather than hold to such simplistic binary notions, I seek an understanding of
those moments as Third Space.
Third Space is the conceptualisation of space beyond binaries. To speak
of Third Space is to demand an understanding of another space altogether. The
defining action of this Third Space is its perspective or its standpoint. As Lenz
asserts, “it is about power, a conscious decision to create a third space ... and
attempts to define that situation in contrast to culturally enforced binary

Payson 14

opposition” (112). A hybrid space can be a powerful location from which to
launch a dialogue about either of the other spaces. The standpoint is one of
‘outsider within’ and allows for both observation and investigation of situations
taken for static and unchanging, while at the same time these positions or
locations resist simplified or essential notions of the group. Bhabha states that
“these ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of
selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and
innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the ideas
of society itself” (1-2). In the end, this desire for a multitude of voices seeks a
method to dislodge the established power structure/discourse. Specific to this
disruption of power dynamics is a conceptualisation of the influence of gender,
race, power, and language. For the complexity of these interactions, I need to
turn to the initial motivation for my research: feminism.
Feminism is a logical choice for understanding questions of Native
Literature, identity, and law because it is sensitive to the impact of culture,
society, and institutional influences. As Donovan points out:
Numerous parallels exist between Native American literature and feminist
literary and cultural theories. Native American literature illumines
feminisms, and feminisms help us to understand many of the issues
raised by Native writers, especially Native women writers. (7)
Feminism is flexible enough to account for personal identifications, yet also broad
enough to exist across other points of oppression such as racism. Feminism is
an umbrella term for a multitude of theory. As Weedon states, “If feminism is a
politics, it is also a theory, or rather a range of theories” (4). As feminism is a
highly individualised personal identification, it follows that there can be no

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general consensus as to the parameters of feminist theory. Some individuals
consider themselves feminists; some espouse its ideals, but resist the term as a
symbol of white middle-class women; and some find the very idea of feminism to
stand in direct conflict with the purpose of human and Aboriginal rights. Yet with
respects to gender and race there needs to be a recognition of the patriarchal
bias that the “assimilationists placed on Aboriginal people aspiring to the values
of the dominant society” (Bell 412). Anderson further supports this need for a
feminist analysis of the relationship between gender and race. She notes that
the images of Native women’s identity were constructed specifically along gender
lines in such a manner that “She was invented and then reinforced because she
proved useful to the colonizer” (Anderson 100). These gender biased actions of
assimilation need to be both articulated and challenged through a feminist
analysis of colonisation.
The fluid and changing definitions of feminism mean that the relationship
between feminism and First Nations issues is neither simple nor universal. As
Donovan notes in her study of Native and non-Native students, this can cause
confusion about the use of the term feminism or an omission of Native women
from areas of study:
The relevance of even the term ‘feminisms’ to Native American
communities is debatable among women. Many white feminist
literary theorists have omitted discussion of Native American
women from their work for fear of being accused of appropriation.
(7 )

DeVault expands on these concerns and notes that “feminist researchers who
take such critiques to heart often come to fear that, rather than dismantling

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systems of domination, we can only add stones to an edifice of power” (215).
The paralysis of fear fails to serve the purpose of anti-oppression and anti­
racism. Feminism is a framework to understand the power structures and the
pressures at work on individuals. Donovan notes how in resistant writing from
both Native and non-Natives “both writers play with language and form, seeking
a new way to express a woman-identified resistance to imperialism and
dominance” (Donovan 14). As a research tool, feminist theory contains the
caveats necessary for careful and critical self-awareness to avoid the continual
appropriation or colonisation of Native peoples. DeVault asserts that labelling
her strategies feminist “serves two important purposes: it announces that these
concerns are still too often absent in the production of knowledge, and it points
toward the history of activism and libratory scholarship that has brought them to
attention” (231). Feminist theories provide the goals and considerations required
for my analysis of the issues of Native literature, legal narratives, identity, and
resistant strategies.
Research into these areas of intersection between race, identity, and
gender has the potential to be regarded by some critics as research done by
white middle class feminists who appropriate the experiences of marginalised
women. These concerns only serve to highlight further the need for such a selfcritical approach as that which can be found within feminist methodology. Note, I
did not say this critical approach is guaranteed. This crucial examination of the
theoretical position must be sought out by the researcher. DeVault explores the
divide between the legitimate concerns of appropriation and the paralysing

Payson 17

influence of self-doubt. She first identifies the essentialising components which
can siience female researchers in case they might speak louder than a whisper
from the supportive background, and then she identifies a path through that
divide between appropriation and paralyzing self-doubt, advocating selfawareness and self-critique:
I did not want to write only about myself; the point of ethnography, after all,
is to spend time in the world, in some other place, and to learn from other
people. And while I shared some experiences and perspectives with the
women I interviewed, there were profound differences as well. Like every
researcher, then, I wrote about others through the lens of self - but a self
that developed and changed as I met those others. (DeVault 190)
I am confident that feminist analysis is best suited to address issues of power
and dominance while demanding a critical self-awareness of my own positioning
and responsibility to this work. Feminist theorists have been highly aware of
historical exclusions, appropriations, and miscommunications with respects to
various marginalised groups. This has meant the creation of some specific
feminist theories which are located within a realm of anti-racist, anti-oppression
work. This includes such theorists as bell hooks, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and
Anne Bishop who have continuaiiy kept a self-critical eye on the actions caught
under the umbrella term of feminism. With that said, no writing and no theory
can ever please everyone, and I can only state that my desire is to write from a
position of awareness and continual self-assessment, with the help of others
around me. Any oversight is mine alone. I continually seek to try and access the
same internal critical awareness and responsibility as that possessed by those
theorists whose work I admire and enjoy. Specifically, I want to reference the
anti-oppression work of Peggy McIntosh.

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McIntosh demands a critical self-awareness of privilege and power
structures and affords a way of comprehending and anticipating the actions and
employment of coercion and dominance. I am making note of her work in
particular due to its amazing influence on my own positioning and understanding
of myself. In drawing a link between sexism and racism, her work highlights how
a non-Native woman can take part in responsible anti-racist research. McIntosh
is able to apply the reaction she has had during specific encounters with men to
her self-awareness in her interactions with women of colour:
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of
unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness
was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women
of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began
to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don’t
see ourselves that way. At the very least, obliviousness of one’s privilege
state can make a person or group irritating to be with. In my class and
place, I did not see myself as racist because I was taught to recognize
racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group,
never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my
group from birth. (61)
In her one piece asking for an awareness of the invisible nature of white
privilege, McIntosh was able to bridge for me different experiences and forms of
oppression. Awareness of my own positioning is a necessary tool for working
with multiple layers of racism, sexism, and privilege present in colonization and
identity formation. And the theory that then pushed me further to articulate the
ongoing impact of subject positioning is feminist standpoint theory.
An important addition to my theoretical approach, feminist standpoint
theory, brings in elements of various theoretical approaches to my understanding
of the location and purpose of both the authors and their literature. Feminist

Payson 19

standpoint theorists have “maintained that marginalized groups of people have
less interest in preserving the status quo and occupy a unique position from
which to view the culture from which they are marginalized” (98). Standpoint
highlights an individual reaching a certain political awareness of the hegemonic
power hierarchy and critiquing the dominant ideologies. Theorists are careful to
point out this search is not necessarily for truth, but for ‘less false’ viewerships.
Harding explains that an “outsider within” is not guaranteed the awareness of
these less false perspectives, but their position may provide a vantage point
which can see “questions and issues that were not visible, ‘important,’ or
legitimate within the dominant institutions, their conceptual frameworks, cultures,
and practices” (Science 17).
This ‘standpoint’ is not a position held in rigid notions of categories, or
boundaries, or characteristics. Rather, this is a fluid position which gains much
of its perspective through its static experience with a dynamic relationship to the
dominant ideologies it seeks to examine. So at these times certain voices are
extremely important within feminist theorists’ work - not necessarily because
they are Other, as such, but because their standpoint begins outside the
dominant structures and ideologies. With respect to feminist work in areas of
international development, Harding states that it is not “because poor. Third
World women are ‘more oppressed’... but, rather because thought that begins
from conceptual frameworks developed to answer questions arising in their lives
starts from outside the Eurocentric conceptual framework” (“Comments” 53).
Lenz then ties this approach directly to literary analysis. Lenz states that

Payson 20

standpoint is a “negotiation of experience and point of view that can be
temporarily stabilized in order to interrogate dominant ideologies” (98). At this
point, perspectives become more closely tied to a form of knowledge production
which is ever changing and shifting. Hekman explains that feminist standpoint
theory: “defines knowledge as particular rather than universal; it jettisons the
neutral observer of modernist epistemology; it defines subjects as constructed by
relational forces rather than as transcendent” (25). In this way, the standpoint
locations provide an ongoing discursive articulation of oppression which
highlights their moments of intersection within a particular time and place;
however, they are fluid. This leaves the option open for a moment of change and
restructuring of those universal truths held firm within the hegemonic power
structure: an interrogation of dominant epistemologies. This is exactly what
Anderson is identifying when she states her awareness that “Native womanhood
was constructed” (99).
Theories also located in the social sciences help my literary analysis
encompass the multiple perspectives occurring at overlapping intervals.
Niranjana describes the formation of these multiple discourses:
the practices of subjection/subjectification implicit in the colonial enterprise
operate not merely through the coercive machinery of the imperial state
but also through the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology,
philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial ‘subject’ constructed through technologies or practices of power/knowledge - is
brought into being within multiple discourses and on multiple sites. (1-2)
Straddling social science and humanities, I look for theories which satisfy my
quest for an understanding of these multiple locations of subject creation.
Through my multifaceted approach connections between people and

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representation and theory become logical and knowable, If only for brief
moments In time. I needed a way to position the discursive subjects which may
or may not be struggling to locate their Third Space or their moments of hybrldlty.
Literary analysis works together with these other theories to find those moments
of Intersection between law and the Impact on Identity. As Engel and Munger
recognise, “Such subtle yet profound effects may be overlooked In traditional
studies of legal Impact, yet they can be detected through the analysis of life
stories” (11). Literary texts exist In their social and historical contexts as
expressions of social change, perhaps pointing to the possibility of new social
structures, or can be read as the articulation of an emerging social
consciousness - a world vision (Filmer 275-277).
My Initial Interest In feminist standpoint theory Is because of an Idea that
hybrid or Third Space perspectives can expose particular realities or experiences
that are “not apparent to someone more fully assimilated Into dominant
Ideologies” (Lenz 102). Thus, an examination and exploration of the experiences
written about by First Nations women would certainly open up challenges and
connections which may not be apparent to someone who has not viewed society
from that particular vantage point. As well, subjects with multiple standpoints can
form both a dialogue between themselves and with others who do not share that
perspective. It Is here that connections, transformations, and translations are
located. This thesis seeks to push Into those moments where the texts create
such movement away from a stable, stagnant position of acceptance of the

Payson 22

status quo. These moments are what Anderson identifies as writing as
resistance (140-145).
At times these texts demand that a reader comes face to face with an
interrogation of dominant discourses. These discourses are what Nelson refers
to as master narratives. These narratives absorb negative stereotypes into a
unified idea of truth in order to enforce their own power structure that is then
accepted as a norm and, in turn, stands as a reinforcement of the negative image
in a self-sustaining cycle. They “exercise a certain authority over our moral
imaginations and play a role in informing o u r ... institutions” (Nelson 6). To not
disrupt the dominant narratives allows hidden dialogues of oppression to remain
unchallenged. The disruption of these damaging master narratives creates an
awareness which is otherwise lacking within the daily interactions of stereotypes
and racist narratives. To those immersed within the dominant ideology of
oppression, textual strategies of resistance and transformation expose a power
structure which operates at an otherwise unacknowledged level that is neither
apparent nor questioned. These oppressive master narratives are much more
obvious to the subject located within the standpoint perspective. Anderson
observes:
Yet when we consider our lived experience, the drunken, easy squaw is
not a character that Aboriginal people know ... so where did these images
come from? How did they become so widespread, and how do they affect
the day-to-day living of contemporary Native women? (99)
Sharing these alternative identity images. First Nations women writers articulate
an understanding of themselves which is radically different from what they face in
the viewership of others every day. By talking and sharing stories of what they

Payson 23

really do in their lives, how they really feel about relationships, these women
begin to put together a new way of understanding and representing First Nations
womanhood. These strategies are what Moses calls “dissenting fictions,”
Anderson identifies as “writing as resistance,” and Nelson refers to as
“counterstories.” According to Nelson, counterstories are produced in relation to
master narratives which claim to represent summaries of socially shared
understandings of identity. Counterstories create a narrative from a position
which “resists an oppressive identity and attempts to replace it with one that
commands respect” (Nelson 6). This process is called many things, but the idea
remains the same: create narratives that “talk back to specific, monolithic notions
of essential identity” (Moses x). In doing so, these narratives pose questions
about how to understand categories, power, and resistance.
When approaching multiple standpoints, a question arises about how to
conceptualise the resulting multiple truths of those perspectives. The purpose in
my theoretical approach is not to create a single system of understanding which
is universally “more true” than others, but to critique the dominant power
structure with a desire to influence a restructuring of ideologies and perspective
to better incorporate those who have been marginalized. As Jamaica Kincaid
states about her own writing: “I aim to be true to something, but it’s not
necessarily the facts” (qtd in Bonetti 125). By examining these various
perspectives, a complex understanding of reality becomes available. As an
activist theorist, adhering to the concept of a non-positional truth is not
necessarily an effective route as this path tends to support dominant power

Payson 24

structures and negative stereotypes. To denote the fallibility of this coloniser’s
notion of truth, feminist standpoint theory uses the term “less false” for the
standpoint perspectives. These challenging narratives call into question the
ideas of truth placed in positions of privilege through the actions of the
colonisers. As Moses explains:
Every story has something to contribute to a larger narrative about power
relationships, about relationships between people and between humans
and the land.... Thus, the poststructuralist problem of locating historical
‘truth’ or of the impossibility of doing so, is decentered. New
interpretations and ‘revisionist’ histories become, simply, part of the story.
(86)
What this demands is a way to unify an understanding of alternative narratives
without the entire group then being understood as a single functioning entity.
Universal understandings of groups without any room for differences within the
group can cause problems and ultimately run “counter productive to resistance
practice” (Moses x). Standpoint creates this space for statements valuing other
perspectives, and other searches for representation.
So this search for alternative perspectives needs to be done without
establishing yet another rigid set of characteristics to define the groups or the
identities of those who have been marginalized. A homogenous understanding
of a group is too simplistic and unchallenging. Yet at the same time, there is a
need to understand an idea of common characteristics in order to identify
anything as Native literature. Otherwise there is no basis upon which to launch
resistance if all individuals must act as lone members to their one person group.
There must be a way to approach the problems of overgrouping cautiously to
prevent further marginalization. This is especially necessary to examine in light

Payson 25

of non-Natives constructing the understanding of Native Literature. As Horne
cautions, “a study devoted to American Indian writers can become a means of
marginalizing them and of perpetuation of the colonial Manichean opposition of
us and them” (xiv). There are ways to group individuals which do not try to limit
them into overly simplified points of difference. Rather, these groups can
confront and address those forces and factors which initially create various forms
of oppression. One needs to emphasize continually the desire never to limit the
“transformative potential of women’s insights by removing their analyses from the
particularities of their circumstances to an abstract, categorical realm” (Lenz 99).
The information gleaned from literary analysis using feminist standpoint theory
must be continually placed within the larger context from which the literature
came. This is the purpose of including multiple narratives.
Feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks states that another way to
break down these current systems and to resist further colonization is through
both creative and non-fiction writing. She advocates the use of writing to explore
a critical examination of black essence. But she also notes there exists a fear
that to break down ideas of a homogenous black identity or essence would risk
losing all unique notions of culture, history, and community. Moses further
expands on this and notes that what arises is a “tension between resistance and
unity... at the heart of the conflicts” as the authors are both fighting essential
ideas while striving for a “unifying essence that would encourage political
solidarity” (x). This is certainly relevant to concerns with respect to First Nations

Payson 26

identity as well. With direct respects to feminism and First Nations women,
Donovan asks this question regarding a notion of monolithic Other;
Yet the question must be raised: is there such a thing as commonality of
aesthetic and cultural expression? If we look for such commonalities, are
we then complicit in cultural obliteration? On the other hand, if we valorize
specificity, do we run the risk of further dividing women from seeking
solutions to problems they face across the world?” (12)
What hooks is able to offer, though, is a continual stressing of the importance of
“the authority of experience” (hooks, “Postmodern Blackness” 426). To demand
a criticism of essentialist, stereotypical, assimilationist categories does not mean
to demand the erasure of unique historical experiences or community of identity.
Rather, this demands an understanding of the unacknowledged privilege which is
taking place unquestioned in the coloniser’s narrative. The methodology of
feminist standpoint theory gives the opportunity for the deconstruction of
dominant power structures and ideologies. Lenz states: “thus posits that no truth
claims are devoid of political investment; its objective is in part to expose the
political investment surrounding otherwise unexamined and generally accepted
‘truths’” (101).
Feminism not only allows for a micro examination of power dynamics, at
times it demands this level of understanding. Many feminist frameworks require
a clear picture and articulation of the micro enactment of relationships and
interactions. My use of theory is framed by the thought that “power is ‘always
already there’... there is no way to disengage from a relationship with power”
(Moses 5). Otherwise, gender roles and hierarchies are reinforced and
positioned as “unquestioning.” The power of unchallenged beliefs and

Payson 27

assumptions is totalizing. When exploring the demands of feminist analysis
DeVault states,
It seems important in every project, therefore, to attend to
connections, aiming for an analysis that shows in some way both
the consequences of power and how it is exercised. Working in
this way will not eliminate the power and privilege of the analyst,
but it can make that power more visible and deploy it in ways that
chart systems of privilege and inequality, offering road maps to
change in those systems for those working from various locations
within them. (217)
It is difficult to discuss some of these issues without talking in terms of hierarchy,
given colonial hierarchical relationships. However, one does not want to buy in
without critical thought to these preconceived notions of hierarchy, which at times
seem to dominate theoretical discussions.
The link between power and identity means that the increasing push within
Canada towards a unified national identity is speaking about a particular form of
power being consolidated. We need to keep in mind that this “single system of
power, that of the modern state framing civil society,...[will then turn] into a
universal norm against which to measure all performances” (Mamdani 862). This
norm is the same one which does not recognise the legacy that colonialism has
left behind for our country, and this norm will then speak for the national identity
of which it will authentically know so little. Weedon speaks specifically to the link
between the ideals of feminism and the actions of resistant narratives:
[...] yet recognizing contradictions and the power relations and interest
which inhere in specific definitions of women’s nature and social role is
only the first stage in the process of change both for individual women and
in the struggle to transform social institutions. This process requires the
development of alternative senses of ourselves as women, and
strategies for transforming existing institutions and practices, (my
emphasis added, 5)

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While I can agree to the inescapable nature of power relations, I subscribe to a
manner of discussion which attempts not to give this hierarchy further validation.
Power does exist, but its distribution is not inherent. Power is relative and
slippery and always shifting. What I need to avoid are those theorists/theories
where power hierarchies are approached as inherent or beyond challenge.
I am aware that the terms master narrative, resistance, counterstories,
and counter narrative can perpetuate a binary division. They can frame all these
discussions and all these understandings of First Nations women’s writing as
only being in response to non-Native actions. Yet at the same time, I am
attracted to these terms for their emphasis on this very real power imbalance
within literary production and identity construction. So I will use them to speak to
this reality of the struggle against a legacy of colonial power structures. This
resistance is against the overpowering narrative being imposed by colonialism
and absorbed into culture via reading and exposure to texts. Master or dominant
narratives are multi-layered perceptions constructed over time. These are the
standard, homogenizing, ‘already understood’ ideas that permeate throughout
perceptions of various interactions and, as Moses observes, this indicates the
need to “address narratives that are concerned with identity both as a multi­
layered, shifting cultural construct (rather than as a biological destiny) and as a
vehicle for cultural critique”(x). I must also note, though, that to talk of resistant
strategies is to acknowledge the overbearing influence of colonizer viewerships.
In the end, I would like to suggest the need to shift this language away from
unquestioning reinforcement of binaries; instead, I will focus on the construction

Payson 29

of a transformative exploration whichi fiighiights tfie power of words in the
creation of positive representations of First Nations womanhood. The reasons
for writing can be both to provide a counterstory for other imaginings of Native
womanhood, as called for by Anderson, or wanting to create art for the
satisfaction of its experience.
Literature interacts with identity by presenting dominant representations,
thus reinforcing the ideas of the master narratives. The canon of great literature
held up as our cultural foundation reinforces dominant narratives by exalting
them (Nelson 7). The impact of what we read is further reinforced by the cultural
landscape of media that surrounds us, against which identity is continually
compared. We are surrounded by media, texts, books, and images which
continually inform our manner of ‘reading’ our surroundings.
Identities are narratively constructed ... identities are constituted
from the first-person perspective through the loosely connected
stories we weave around the things about us that matter most to
us: the acts, experiences, and characteristics we care most about,
and the roles, relationships, and values to which we are most
deeply committed. In the course of this narrative construction, we
draw on stock plots and character types that we borrow from the
familiar stories embodying out culture’s socially shared
understandings. (Nelson 71)
With respect to First Nations women, Janice Acoose points out how individuals
“come to ‘know’ Indigenous peoples only through highly selective images
perpetuated through a similarly highly selective literature, which ultimately
maintains the status quo” (34-35). This creates a twofold effect: when First
Nations women read texts and are faced with these highly selective images, their
own understandings of themselves will be framed within a narrow context that is

Payson 30

prescribed by the texts. In turn, when non-Native peoples are faced with these
images, they will continue to build upon a racist and sexist narrative perpetuated
by colonialism. The historically constructed image of First Nations women, along
with contemporary textual readings of identity, will both “function as ideological
filters through which meaning is derived [and] can subliminally encourage
readers to adopt specific ideological norms and values” (Acoose 51-52). Identity
is a complex interaction between internal and external cues and experiences that
includes how individuals sees themselves and others. In my work, the focus
becomes areas of resistance and transformation. These spaces of tension
highlight the inconstancies between the master narratives and the actual lived
realities. Questions and challenges explore the relationship between writing and
identity; what we read will have an impact on what we think about individuals,
groups, others, and ourselves.

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CHAPER TWO: History and Colonisation
Many First Nations women face a multifaceted problem, namely the
discrimination and sexism woven throughout federal legislation that regulates
their lives, families, and futures. These laws are a direct descendent of earliest
colonial relationships and must be examined within such a context. In particular,
many Aboriginal women have written about the impact that the Indian Act has
had, and continues to have, on their access to residence, their interactions with
others, and their sense of self-identification. But these issues are not solely
within the sphere of First Nations considerations. Colonisation has had an
impact on all aspects of society; sexism and racism permeate language,
literature, media, and everyday interactions between Natives and non-Natives.
Since an individual’s identity can be altered through the public arena, these
issues ultimately come to bear on the very construction of society’s
understanding of Native womanhood. Through the writing and testimonies given
by a number of First Nations women, I will explore how a history of colonisation,
legislation, and misinformation has worked towards a sexist and racist
construction of Aboriginal women’s identity. Although these identities of First
Nations women are diverse, there is a common bond in this relationship to
colonisation. My focus is on the interaction between colonisation and the ways in
which literature is both produced and viewed.
This chapter seeks to discuss the impact of various legal definitions on the
identity creation of First Nations women within Canada. As Lawrence states, “we
should think carefully about the various categories of Native identity that have

Payson 32

been legally defined under federal laws” (4). Prior to discussing the current
situation facing First Nations women, we will briefly examine the historical context
in which we are operating. This historical context has fostered and reinforced the
miscommunications and negative images surrounding Aboriginal issues.
Therefore, it is necessary to take a look at colonisation, its purposes, and its
impact on understandings of race and gender. This, in turn, will lead to a
discussion of discrimination and identity formation. We must understand the
evolution of specific laws within Canada, including the most influential of all: the
Indian Act. This Act needs to be examined within the context of its challenges
and its changes in defining various levels of what many critics have termed
“Indianness.” A main reason I have undertaken this task is that a large segment
of Canadian non-Natives do not recognize the impact of past colonial actions
upon current experiences of First Nations women. But identity construction is
intrinsically tied to history. Engel and Munger stress that “identity reflects a
process of interaction over an extended period of time” (43). I want to challenge
the colonial method of understanding constructions of race and gender with
respects to legal narratives. I hope to open a critical space for new connections
between non-Natives and Natives about the influencing factors that history, law,
and literature can have on the ways we understand identity.
I believe it will be through this discussion of the past that women will be
able to celebrate their identities, stories, and histories. The words of Aboriginal
women themselves best record what their lives, and those of many other women.

Payson 33

had been like prior to Euro-centric notions of power and value. Anderson
explores this process:
Many of the ‘traditions’ we now know stem from Euro-Christian patriarchal
ideals, and many of our own Indigenous traditions have been twisted to
meet western patriarchal hegemony....When we begin to reclaim our
ways, we must question how these traditions are framed, and whether
they are empowering to us. The gendered nature of our tradition can be
extremely damaging if interpreted from a western patriarchal framework.
(36-37)
This speaks to the challenge in remembering and re-evaluating the presentation
and re-enforcement of identity. Whether discussing literature or law, the
narratives explored within the framework of identity shape lives and have an
impact on both the group as well as the individual. Narratives can clarify these
shared experiences and goals; yet my particular examination of literature must
take place within an informed space. The purpose of this chapter is to take on the
challenge of establishing an understanding between the roles of colonisation,
law, and identity formation in order to better articulate this interaction in First
Nations women’s literature. In the end, this is all reflective and indicative of the
greater society in which we live, and where we must navigate various
incarnations and representations of both others and self.
This research can neither make generalizations about all current lived
realities nor assume a pristine utopia existed pre-Colonisation. Emma LaRocque
notes that “we know enough about human history that we cannot assume that all
Aboriginal traditions universally respect and honour women ... there are
indications of male violence and sexism in some Aboriginal societies prior to
European contact and certainly after contact” (Scholar 14). I chose to include

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this statement because I will contrast traditional gender relations with colonial
constructions. I am not conducting a discussion based on easy or clear
generalizations. As LaRocque says, “nonetheless, we are challenged to change,
create, and embrace ‘traditions’ consistent with contemporary and international
human rights standards” (Scholar 14). These discussions are taking place within
contemporary settings, between various actual individuals who are all struggling
to break apart some very old, very powerful notions of law, race, and gender.
For this to work, we will look at their words and experiences, realizing that real
contradictions must be acknowledged and incorporated into this discussion.
Colonialism has resulted in a warped relationship between race and
gender that affects the interaction between identity and law. Through education,
media viewership, and language, colonisation has set up a system for
understanding the “Indianness” of Aboriginal women, which has far reaching
ramification within legal narratives. Narratives of Native womanhood are
fragmented and externally constructed. As Mamdani points out, to “refract the
identity of race through several ethnically-defined identities [was to ensure that]
the very basis of incorporation was a fragmented identity” (870). Identity
becomes key in this debate since law can determine an individual’s ability to
access natural resources based upon their categorization: citizens. Natives, or
indigenous peoples (Benda-Beckmann VIII). Essentially, colonisation involves
attempts by colonisers to engage in “warfare to control those peoples who lived
in areas deemed necessary to this ‘Eurocentric economy’” (Goehring 19). At the
level of economy, politics, and spirituality, colonisation asserts its control through

Payson 35

assimilation and cultural genocide. Economie domination necessitated political
control and, ironically, “the Christian religion fit European man to embark on the
economic subjugation of the world” (Goehring 11). Through the use of law and
space, the coloniser altered the landscape of North America to reflect the new
dominant institutions and governments. Colonisers had multiple purposes in
mind when they “sought to reproduce two connected political identities: race as
an identity that unified its beneficiaries as citizens, and ethnicity as an identity
that fragmented its victims as subjects” (Mamdani 862). My discussion of
colonised women takes on added weight when we consider the role that the
coloniser played in actively constructing particular gendered identities.
At the same time as establishing all the constructions surrounding
‘Indianness,’ the dominant colonial powers were also setting up a system of
understanding First Nations women as the same but different from white women.
In order to ‘Incorporate the Familiar,’ Aboriginal women had to be seen as both
Aboriginal (other, ethnic, brown, savage) and as women (white women/brown
women, but still women). This distinctive treatment of First Nations women
needs specific focus. LaRocque notes:
Typically, the emphasis has been on the harm done by colonial forces to
men, without due regard to the damage done to women ... there is no
question that colonisation has wreaked havoc in the lives of men, but
colonial oppression is not equally experienced within Native communities;
it has a different impact on Native women than on Native men. Women
continue to bear the brunt of social disintegration while being alienated
from decolonisation efforts. (Models 89)
Some understandings of Native womanhood have been studied, but as Bell
notes in her examination of historically produced anthropological texts, “We

Payson 36

certainly do not hear from women, though we hear of them; and the information
is usually about their bodies as sites of pleasure, reproduction and disease”
(emphasis added, 458). First Nations women suffered a double discrimination in
the way colonisers viewed them. They were subordinate due to both their
ethnicity and their gender. This viewership was not limited to only two fractures.
Colonisers constructed First Nations women into multiple contradictory roles
which would ensure the lowest, and most disadvantaged, position. In order to
employ a resistant sensibility, there must be an understanding of the historical
factors which influence the discursive production of subjectivity.
Legislated in 1869, the Indian Act is crucial to my discussion because it
forms the basis for definitions of Indian status on marriage, rather than blood or
family. In 1860 Canada gained full control over Indian Affairs from the British
government who had managed affairs through “the diplomatic tools of cajolery,
coercion... and bribery” (Milloy 56). As the newly formed Province of Canada
slowly gained jurisdiction from Britain the “nation-to-nation relationship was to all
intents and purposes abandoned by Canada at that point” (Lawrence 7).^ From
1869 until 1985, the Act was strictly bound by patrilinear ties. If a woman with
status married any non-status man, even if he was Native or Métis, she lost her
band membership, property, inheritance, burial, medical, educational, and voting
rights on the reserve. But, a non-status woman would be given all those same
rights when she married a status male (Bear 198). The Indian Act pre 1985 was
characterized by its determination of ‘Indianness’ based on gender. This

* For further discussion o f these laws and others which effect First Nations within Canada, please see
Barron and Waldram 1986, Flolmes 1987, Miller 1989, M illoy 1983, and Weaver 1998.

Payson 37

legislation was brutally clear on the status of these women; many women who
separated from their non-status spouses experience homelessness for
themselves and their children.
In the 1950s, women began organizing around that section of the Indian
Act that strips them of their rights after marrying a non-status man. Bear notes
how “some women were returning to their original home communities only to
realize for the first time that they did not belong” (204). Mary Two Axe Early was
the first to speak out publicly after returning to her Mohawk reserve in Quebec
only to find out she was not able to access her previous rights as a status Indian.
Although the Mohawk culture was matrilineal and guaranteed her right to
residence, she could not access financial support or be buried in the community.
The actions of these women gained momentum in the 1970s. In 1973 Lave 11and
Bedard went to the Supreme Court of Canada over Section 12(1)(b). A five to
four decision ruled that the “Indian Act was exempt from the Canadian Bill of
Rights” (Bear 205). Actions such as these were cited as divisionary by some
Native organizations, and the National Indian Brotherhood argued that Indian Act
must remain intact (do not amend Section 12(1)(b) in any way). But in June
1985, largely due to the work of Native Women’s groups. Bill C-31 was
introduced with the intent of ending the legislated gender discrimination of the
Indian Act. Tobique Aboriginal Women’s Group Activists challenged the Act
through occupation of the Band Office, the 100 Mile Walk, and the Sandra
Lovelace court case.^ In 1981 the UN found Canada in breach of the

^ Sandra Lovelace-Sappier who, in 1977, went to the United Nations Human Rights Committee over her
lost status due to clause 12(l)(b ). She talks about her early childhood experience with nuns teaching that

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International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights over sexual discrimination
(Bear 214). It was through international embarrassment that Lovelace’s case
was able to realize a change to the Act. With this said, it still took four more
years of work by the Tobique “seasoned lobbyists” until the changes were made.
The implementation of Bill C-31 resulted in a number of changes to the
Indian Act which sought to end the sex-discrimination previously experienced by
many First Nations women. The first, and extremely emotional, result of Bill C-31
was the reinstatement of band membership to all those women who had married
non-status males: “The grandmothers of the community express the joy that they
feel for the return of their daughters who, through no fault of their own, were
treated with such disrespect under and over the Canadian law” (Bear 217). But
government money did not follow in a proportionate manner and problems began
to develop surrounding resources and service provision. In a series of
interviews, Huntley and Blaney expand on the effects that Bill C-31 has on Native
women living in BC, where ongoing displacement and assimilation tactics seek to
control, regulate, and divide the ability of individuals to “legitimately” claim Native
identification (np). Bear states, “the realities of reserve life still reflect colonial
influences”(219). These divisions took place for multiple generations, and the
eventual search for a solution did not have the required foresight necessary for
adequate provision of support services. As well, women spoke of their inability to
access the information and education services to better understand how they fit
into the registration categories provided.

“w e couldn’t talk Indian. They used to tell us w e were dirty. They made us ashamed w e were Indians”
(Quoted in Bear 203).

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Further problems with the altered Indian Act are based on the Act’s
continual reference to arbitrary determinants of “Indianness.” One example is
that band membership (now split from status) requirement must now be in
agreement with the Constitution Act, and no discrimination based on sex is
allowed. But, as women have found out in the years since its alteration, the new
Indian Act does not guarantee against “hidden sex discrimination” (KrosenbrinkGelissen 123). A number of difficulties arose from an acceptance of the EuroCanadian patrilinear notions of power and status. Some bands felt that the
revised Indian Act was in violation of “their traditional culture” (KrosenbrinkGelissen 124). Many women anticipated a problem with their band upon return,
and have chosen not to relocate. Legally women have an avenue for recourse,
yet they often have limited abilities to use their legal options due to issues of
sociopolitical, cultural, and economic power. There have been cases of bands
creating loopholes to prevent women’s reinstatement to the membership, and
there have been protests from bands to the inclusion of someone’s - mostly a
woman’s - name (Krosenbrink-Gelissen 123). The most common problem
appears to be a lack of available resources for the specific function of reinstating
band membership to women and their families. This has resulted in a hardship
being placed on the band and in further hard feelings from existing reserve
members. Lawrence points out, “a narrow but powerful sense of Native identity
has been fuelled by the profound gap between the lived experiences of the
majority of Native people - who continue to face the reality of brutal racism,
poverty, violent death, and struggles with addictions” (22).

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The impact of colonisation on contemporary constructions of First Nations
women’s identity must be considered due to the very nature of power and
hegemony. Anderson stresses this is the “deliberate dismantling” of the Native
culture through its women (69). Located within this discussion is the integral
component centred on the construction and constraining of identity formation.
Power and hegemony are reliant on miscommunications and identity formation.
The Indian Act is a very interesting example of legislation that has an impact on
identity because of the arbitrary boundaries it places around the definition of
status Indian and how it uses both marriage and identity in its assimilation
attempts (Anderson 70). Because of these interactions between identity and
power, we need a current understanding of this historical legacy of colonisation’s
impact on First Nations women. Legislation can be changed at the level of the
nation, but when alterations are made without a clear understanding of the
impact sexism has on social and political institutions, these underlying power
dynamics will not be addressed. The Tobique Women’s Group fight for media
and political attention resulted in what proved to be superficial changes. Despite
the attempt to remedy sex discrimination, the amended Act still discriminates
against grandchildren of women who have ‘married out.’ Women who had
married non-status men prior to the 1985 revision found their children were much
more vulnerable to the second generation rule. The policies and legislations that
continue to regulate issues of identity are being determined by the coloniser’s
social and political systems. But this is not a point of failure; rather, this points to
the underlying narratives of miscommunication about power and value.

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Acknowledging and reframing these narratives is where new resistances and
challenges can take place.
Colonisers have often used the law to construct very specific
understandings of First Nations women’s identity for the purpose of controlling
and weakening First Nations communities. Laws like the Indian Act have a
widespread and devastating impact on the construction (destruction) of First
Nations women’s identities. Lawrence argues that “because identities are
embedded in systems of power based on race, class, and gender, identity is a
highly political issue, with ramifications for how contemporary and historical
collective experience is understood” (4). Again I must stress that colonisers had
a specific goal in mind with this destruction; Aboriginal women were an integral
piece of First Nations’ social fabric, and altering women’s economic, political, and
spiritual power would weaken the power of entire Nations. Stereotypes,
destructive attitudes, and violence have had a huge impact on “the self-images of
native men and women, respectively, and on their relationship with each other as
well” (LaRocque Scholar 12). I will examine how, in particular, this weakens
communities.
In many accounts. First Nations women existed within a structure of power
and authority. This is not to say that women and men were completely equal
within traditional communities or that all communities had the same gender
relations and power structures. But this history opens up alternative ways to
understand power, gender, and the value of reproductive work. These narratives
speak of First Nations women’s traditional positionings in terms of their value in

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their communities. Anderson traces a number of these stories which encourage
her to “contribute to the future by sharing the information imparted to me about
the sacredness, the power and the beauty of womanhood as it is understood
through various Native cultures” (17). Gender can have its differences, but
individuals each have their own roles, responsibilities, and worthiness which can
value the relationship between Indian women and their reproductive role in
society (Krosenbrink-Gelissen 107). Within a European context, women have
been historically linked with the space of the private/home that is understood only
in reference with the masculine occupation of the public/work sphere.
Krosenbrink-Gelissen questions whether or not these similar linkings of roles and
identity has led First Nations cultures to a similarly inferior positioning of women
within their society where this value of public over private had not previously
existed (108).
Women’s power within traditional settings was based on their abilities to
both produce and reproduce. As Krosenbrink-Gelissen points out, the value
system of “[pre-colonial] Indian households had no dichotomy between the
domestic and public” (108). She is careful to note that while these are
generalized statements, traditional narratives consistently link First Nations
women to their reproductive and caring responsibilities. Although this can be
considered similar to a European understanding of women’s roles, it is noted that
while still based on “their reproductive roles ... in this case it was evaluated
differently” (Krosenbrink-Gelissen, 109 emphasis added). Anderson quotes the
words of Kaaren Olsen: “The divisions of labour were based on practical needs.

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Because women were reproducers as well as producers, their labour consisted
mainly of work at the home” (59). An alternative valuing of public work versus
private work is an important distinction between traditional Aboriginal and
European gender relations:
Within our land-based systems of labour, Native men’s work was never
considered to be more valuable than Native women’s work .... The
incoming European division of labour trapped out women within the
limitations of the western domestic role. Such a system, in which men
were to go out and do the ‘real’ work, while women had to play a
secondary, supporting and inherently less important role in the home
made no sense to our people. (Anderson 60)
The split between public and private understanding of space alters the
expectations of autonomy for an individual’s creation of identity. The coloniser
sets up a societal order where “neither the Aboriginal home nor any Aboriginal
person was ever seen as ‘private’” (Bartlett 15). If people are forced to create
their understanding of their identity in a space which is never given the respect
of privacy, then the very basis to their conceptualisation of their role within
society (and their value within this same society) is compromised. Within the
domestic sphere, indigenous women were either stripped of their own traditional
culture outright, or convinced there just needed to be some slight modifications to
their traditions through a combination of education and surveillance.
Not only do these alterations of Native women’s reproductive value create
a specific internal or personal understanding for Aboriginal but also a particular
external expectation. This means that even when colonised individuals decide to
move outside their prescribed identity constructions, they quickly find out that the
external holds much more power over these boundaries between reality and

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perception. As well, economic-based identity construction has a unique external
relationship with law. Culhane quotes the British theorist E.P.Thompson:
Well, for the most of the time when I was watching, law was running quite
free of economy, doing its errands, defending its property, preparing the
way for it, and so on ... b u t... on several occasions, while I was actually
watching, the lonely hour of the last instance actually came. The last
instance, like an unholy ghost, actually grabbed hold of law, throttled it,
and forced it to change its language and to will into existence forms
appropriate to the mode of production, such as enclosure acts and new
case-law excluding customary common rights. But was law ‘relatively
autonomous’? Oh, yes. Sometimes. Relatively. Of course. (72)
At this point, there are multiple external narratives interacting with one another
about the construction of First Nations women’s identity. When the economy has
such influence over law, the courts have a difficult time executing that objective
positioning they claim for themselves. This was covered most effectively by
Culhane in her discussion of the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on the
Delgamuukw v. R. appeal (360-370). It was found that the trial judge had “erred
when he dismissed the oral history evidence of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en
Chiefs and Elders” (Culhane 360). When institutions are dominated by
misunderstandings and miscommunications regarding the traditional economical,
political, and social construction of First Nations’ communities, the racist and
sexist ideas of the original colonisation are allowed to continue.
One of the most difficult relationships to come to terms with in the legal
system is that between tradition and identity. Tradition runs the risk of forming a
notion of Aboriginal identity frozen in the past. This would make it “virtually
impossible for Native people to engage in contemporary right debates such as
freedom of religion, speech, personal choice, citizenship, or women’s rights”

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(LaRocque Models 90). At times this would suit the purposes of the dominant
legal narrative because keeping First Nations culture as a category only
understood as existing in the historical past allows for a generalised and
simplified identity. Thus an individual possessing these traditional characteristics
is never allowed to mature into an entity complex enough for contemporary
discussion (LaRocque Models 77). Ultimately, the role of tradition in determining
a legal subjectivity is dictated by the coloniser. Tradition becomes one more tool
that can be used to contain the understanding of Aboriginal women’s identities. It
must be stressed at this point that my discussion does not revolve around any
further essential notion of any woman’s role within any society. There is a risk
when talking about tradition that it might become positioned as the only option
and just as bad as legislation in prescribing a role for First Nations women in their
lives and identities. My exploration of the past events attempts to reiterate what
has been written by First Nations women time and time again: traditionally
women had positions of respect and power within their communities. This is not
a discussion about “equality.” Monture-Angus points out that “definitions of
equality often fail to recognize that not all people or peoples are the same” (31).
At no time do I seek out sameness; I maintain a commitment to understanding
power dynamics and value. Specifically, when I discuss Aboriginal women’s
value within their social structure, I am not stating that all First Nations
communities were devoid of sexism, violence, or gender differences. This is not
a universal history, and LaRocque points out that we cannot assume all
Aboriginal traditions approached women with comparable “respect and

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honour"(Scholar 14). I must clearly state that the differences I examine are
based on value and power.
What seems to have been lost at times is the interconnectedness between
women’s rights and Native rights. LaRocque calls attention to this fact when she
notes that “If we wish to act on history rather than be acted on, we can ill afford to
be silent or stay content in the shallows of our male contemporaries .... History
demands of us to assume our dignity, our equality, and our humanity. We must
not move towards the future with anything less. Nor can we pursue scholarship
any other way” (Scholar 15). Many women have articulated that sexual
discrimination is the biggest barrier to Aboriginal women’s equal rights, but as
LaRocque states:
When Aboriginal women demand justice in a contemporary context, they
are accused of betraying ‘solidarity,’ putting them, in effect, in an
absolutely no-win situation between justice and community. Clearly,
‘tradition,’ culture,’ and ‘history’ are political handles with many twists that
result in the continual oppression and silencing of women. (Models 90)
The current mood surrounding Aboriginal issues only increases this crisis of
identity for Aboriginal women. Some believe that such questions on “race, class,
and gender superiority ... were supposed to have been effectively challenged, if
not overrun, in the 1960s” (Wainwright 59). This means that within the Canadian
mindset of neo-liberal paternalistic recognition of equal rights, any problems of
racism towards Aboriginals should have already been solved.^ Those issues of

^Wainwright goes on to explain: “Kahn-Tineta Horn had tried to raise our ire about mistreatment o f Native
peoples, but it was clear that w e didn’t know what she was talking about. Even twenty-six years later,
when she appeared on national television as a spokesperson during the Oka crisis, most o f us didn’t
understand Horn’s concerns. Those sorts o f politics o f experience were to be fou n d .. .in marches against
segregation o f American blacks” (65).

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protest and equal rights which were 'dealt with' in the 1960s could not still be
ongoing. Wainwright contends that writers such as Michael Adams believe that
“there will be no identity crisis because the old essentialist Canadian identity is
being fairly painlessly replaced by new pliancies of self-definition and collective
personality” (56). Wainwright points out that he “cannot ignore, however, the
great number of empowered Canadians who respond with self-protective
concern to what they consider threatening to their political, social, and economic
influence” (56). There is a resistance to any new understandings of subordinate
identities: specifically those of Aboriginal women. In this way, one of the “most
persistent and frustrating stereotypes about native cultures is their relegation to
the p a s t... [which] makes it virtually impossible for Native people to engage in
contemporary rights debates such as freedom of religion, speech, personal
choice, citizenship, or women’s rights” (LaRocque Models 90).
In this increasingly fragmented landscape, identity continues to play an
important role in feminist mobilisation as we are “undoing identity on the grounds
of identity” (Landry and MacLean 145). So if we are to understand ‘woman’ to be
an ever-changing category, which encompasses a multitude of possible
individual positionings and which has been “historically, discursively constructed
and always relative to other categories” (Riley 241)—which are, themselves,
under constant change—then narratives of identity become telling examples of
the multiple possibilities for legal subjectivity. The construction of identity can be
either regarded as a “passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed
or as the instrument through which ... the will determines a cultural meaning for

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itself” (Butler 281).

But is that true for indigenous women who have had their

identity determined for them by such a powerful colonial force? The layerings
are created by a history which has made it so that “she is unable to represent
herself. Her identity is over-determined by the factors of race, class, and gender
within her own culture that have nearly overpowered her” (Katrak 67). When we
have these overlapping social influences, what is remembered and what is held
up as historically accurate can be warped. Turpel notes that even the first steps
towards ending the legacy of colonialism would require:
Recognizing aboriginal peoples’ presence as political communities in
Canada with distinct cultural, linguistic and social systems. It would
require ending bureaucratic regulation of Indian life through the Indian Act.
No court has been honest enough or reflective enough to acknowledge
the colonial character of the regulation of aboriginal life in Canada. (280)
Under Colonisation, the current notions of traditional Native identity have been
formed by “a single institution [which] was to privilege a particular authority ...
defined in terms of both masculinity and seniority” (Mamdani 872). First Nations
women’s issues run the risk of continually being dismissed “by pitting women
against ‘their own people,’ and putting them in an untenable position of having to
choose between gender and culture - as if gender rights were never, or should
never be, an issue within Native families, homes, and traditions” (LaRocque
Models 87). For First Nations women this remembering of tradition must
continually take place with a very clear notion of the residuals left behind from
colonisation and the purposes of that process.

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Canadian legislation must be critically examined in terms of its roots within
a sexist and racist framework. Chatterjee states that law is implicated in the
creation of identity:
The normative qualities of law mean that it is a very powerful tool in the
creation, expression, and also importantly - protection - of identities. As
queer theorists point out, law controls the access to the means of cultural
production ... through which identity is expressed. As a binaristic
structure, law has a vested interest in maintaining the traditional
oppositional forms of identity categories such as subject/object, (np)
This calls for an important re-evaluation of certain discriminations within the
Canadian system, because “meanwhile, aboriginal peoples have had to endure
the violence of a colonial regime which silences aboriginal reality and displays
disregard for aboriginal peoples’ suffering” (Turpel 280). Without a clear
understanding of the impact colonisation has had on legislation and society’s
values, there will not be the required remembering of Aboriginal women’s
traditional identification within Aboriginal society. In this discussion of altering
law and the coloniser’s narratives, Engel and Munger provide further hope that
“the two-way relationship between law and society is ‘mutually constitutive,’
which means that law both affects and is affected by those for whom it is
intended and by society in general” (78). To alter the narratives of society is, in
turn, to have an impact on the very law which has attempted an ongoing
destruction of First Nations women’s identity.

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CHAPTER THREE: Connecting the Pieces
There is an intersection between the literary construction of First Nations
women’s identity and the narratives of identity offered by colonisation, racism,
and law. Academics, authors, writers, and activists point to the role of narratives
in identity construction, and there needs to be a clear examination of the
connections between ‘creation of self and society. Authors and texts must be
looked at within their greater context. The experiences and articulations of the
authors illustrate the influence of social factors and external constructions of
identity. Nelson observes, “equally necessary to our identities is the narrative
activity that takes place from the third-person perspective: other people weave
the things about us that matter most to them into stories that also constitute our
identities” (71). This includes placing the interviews and actions of writers within
the context of history and colonisation. These connections can both expose and
create transformative space. Anderson addresses this space of transformation
when she describes how “with each piece of her own truth-telling writing, she
found more strength in her ability to define herself outside of racist paradigms”
(141). The long struggle for strong representations of First Nations images
created by and for First Nations has been marked by marginalization and
barriers. Vizenor states that “Native American Indian histories and literatures,
oral and written, are imagined from ‘wisps of narratives’” (3). The position of
resistance is very rarely one that is offered much visibility; my goal is to offer a
further exploration of the works of Eden Robinson (Haisla), Monique Mojica

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(Rappahannock, Kuna), Beatrice Culleton (Métis), Marilyn Dumont (Cree, Métis),
and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Anishnaabe).
Reading, writing, and community have a massive effect on an author’s
identity creation. Writers speak of their childhood experiences and the impact of
what they found (or at times did not find) within their reading history. These
moments of intersection between pre-existing literature and the creation of new
literature expose the influence of literature found within schools, homes, and
communities. Such connections between internal identity formation and external
experiences of literature contextualise the relationship between authors and their
surroundings. I am drawn to the relationships and questions highlighted by
Shumaker:
True literary study consists not of breaking apart but of making
connections. When we ask, ‘why this word?’ what we mean is ‘How does
this mean in relation to the story, to everything else in the work? What
other stories does this image bring to the work, and how can we tell those
so that others will see the connections?’ No word or image or story can be
known by itself. (88-89)
Through their various interviews and texts, these authors have made it clear their
work does not stand in isolation. Rather, writing is both a reflection of the
literature the writer reads, and the responsibility a writer feels toward a
community. Through this connection to community. First Nations women’s
writing can contain political implications even when politics are not discussed
directly.
As well, many of the authors talk about the powerful position of reading
and writing on their identity formation. Specifically, authors note the ways
reading is a direct external experience of identity construction. A legacy of

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colonisation ties the writers to inherently political issues, and the political nature
of their work has a distinct influence when they reference other writers within a
text. Akiwenzie-Damm stresses the political nature of First Nations writing:
As far as whether it’s a political act, I do think that when Aboriginal
people or Indigenous people write that yeah, it necessarily is. It’s
like our community, fishing, which we’ve always done, is a political
act because we’ve had to fight for our fishing rights. [Are] really
basic things - getting up in the morning and just living in my
community - a political act? Well, in a way, it is. We’re in a highly
politicized environment all the time, (qtd in Boucher 3)
Akiwenzie-Damm stresses the political nature of ordinary lives that exist within a
context of colonisation and a history of oppression. Dialogue between these
writers often creates mutual support. Over time, these conversations are the
basis for the formation of literary history. This literary history then forms the
basis upon which to build a further foundation of support for First Nations women
writers and create even more varied representations of Native womanhood.
Such a dialogue between authors exists within Mojica’s play. Princess
Pocahontas and the Blue Spots. The beginning “Notes” (12) of her play lists the
quotations and excerpts she used within the text of the play and the original
sources. From traditional Cheyenne phrases to speeches at the Native
Canadian Centre of Toronto to Chrystos to Paula Gunn Allen to “You Light Up
My Life” by Joe Brooks, Mojica has skillfully woven numerous snippets and
flashes of various ways in which people talk about themselves and others. By
weaving their words throughout the written text for the actors, Mojica is creating a
performance of the very literary community which has influenced her to produce
such work herself. This is a key strategy that articulates the importance of “the

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interactivity of identity formation and the importance of narrative in constructing a
self” (Engel and Munger 47). By referencing other writers and their words,
Mojica is reinforcing the notion of solidarity, political activism, and transformation
of the landscape of literature. These links have not been lost on the authors and,
in many instances, they have referenced this relationship to a literary community
within their own writing.
Given the relatively new experience of written versus oral traditions,
contemporary First Nations authors are continually breaking new ground and
creating a new community of authors. This has created a new notion of how First
Nations authors can fit into their community. Culleton addresses this shift by not
thinking of herself as a storyteller, but as a writer. She notes that First Nations
peoples are not even really ‘supposed’ to write at all: ‘Tm not one of those
storytellers. Indians are supposed to be good storytellers. I’m not. I’ve got to
write it down” (qtd in Silvera 323). In this way a new notion of interaction forms
around writing. While a writer referencing other writers is not uncommon, in the
case of Eden Robinson, the author is referencing a very close connection to a
newly created legacy of Haisla literary history. Robinson describes the influence
of her uncle, Gordon Robinson, who was the first Haisla to be published: “He
wrote the non-fiction Tales of the Kitamaat in 1956 or/57. He wrote down stories
he didn’t want people to forget” (qtd in Methot 12). Eden Robinson, in turn, is the
first Haisla to write a novel. Anishnaabe writer and publisher Kateri AkiwenzieDamm also references her connection to both a history and future of Native
writing. She started her own publishing press, Kegedonce Press, specifically to

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promote First Nations writing. She points to the need for support and nurturing of
more marginal work such as poetry and erotica. She states specifically that she
does not “see many Inuit writers, and I look for them. And I don’t see many
young Native women writers. There are Native women writing, but I haven’t seen
many who are able to stay in it for a while, so I think they need to have their work
supported and to be nurtured” (qtd in Boucher 2). These authors are building a
strong supportive community of writers in order to facilitate future alternative
narratives.
Within interviews and prologues, these authors discuss their identity
construction as a process of interactions with reading, writing, and community.
Robinson states: “what makes me is definitely family. I am surrounded by a
family that supports artistic drive. I never felt like I was letting anybody down by
being a Crazy artist” (qtd in Methot 12). Yet this relationship with their work can
also be a painful one. The reason for writing can become more closely tied to a
notion of activism: “But when I think of the characters, for instance, I feel really
sad for what they went though, or I think of myself as that little girl. I guess that’s
why we do the work we do. Because we do care” (Culleton qtd in Silvera 324).
Authors talk about their relationship to writing and the external environment. The
writer can be, in her text, working towards her goal while still creating a piece of
writing that exists within a broader understanding of politicized action.
Akiwenzie-Damm notes, “we’re in a highly politicized environment all the time.
We’re ‘under the authority’ of the Indian Act. From the time you’re born, whether
you’re status or non-status, you’re politicized. So I think [writing] really is a

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political act. It doesn’t matter if the work is overly political” (qtd in Boucher 3). So
the literary community becomes automatically political in so many ways. When
the very choice to write is a political action, the content can only serve to
heighten this issue. Culleton references the community of authors and their
political nature, and she refers to writing as therapeutic and the support in
attending writing workshops and speaking at workshops. “Every writer I know is
political in some way. You have to be. Part of why I write is hoping to change
things. People will read my work and think about what I’m writing” (Culleton qtd
in Silvera 327).
With these connections and support systems also comes responsibility.
As mentioned above, Robinson’s uncle had to contend with breaking new ground
by writing down the knowledge of his community. He speaks of the pressure by
the community to be responsible for the knowledge, “but he got some flack for it.
He was told, ‘you’re not supposed to write them down.’ All our stories are oral”
(Robinson qtd in Methot 12). There is vulnerability in writing down information.^
All members of his community did not entirely embrace this writing, and some felt
this information should never have been recorded in this manner. He had to
make his own choice then based on what he felt and believed and on the
feedback of others. This is a significant responsibility. Robinson encountered
similar issues and was certain to talk to her Elders in order to “get it right.” Yet
even here she later found that she had missed something and information was
recorded that should not have been: “I wrote about a feast, and I found out later

' S ee for example D. B e ll’s work on Aboriginal Australian interactions with law and strategic silences.

Payson 56

that you’re not supposed to write about feasts in Haisla culture” (qtd in Methot
12).

A significant portion of this responsibility comes about due to the
automatic link made between works of fiction and the communities from which
the writers come. Robinson notes that she feels comfortable using general
information, but she shies away from specific Native traditions: “I keep some
scenes more or less as they would happen, but I reworked stuff and made
certain parts up” (qtd in Methot 12). Culleton also felt this responsibility to her
community when she was writing April Raintree. She picked that name in
particular because there were no Raintrees in her community and she had never
met a Raintree. She was aware of how readers attribute truth-telling to literature
produced by a First Nations writer. Possibly due to the early hybrids of fiction
and autobiography, current works of fiction can be held up to closer scrutiny both
by the author’s First Nations community and as representative of all First Nations
peoples by non-Native readers: “I didn’t write about my own sisters because they
had family, and I didn’t want to write about and intrude on the privacy of other
people. So, of course, that’s why I wrote fiction” (Culleton qtd in Silvera 312).
Again with care, Culleton chooses the last name Raintree because she did not
know of any Métis or Native people in Manitoba with that name (qtd in Silvera
313). Authors face issues of identity when reading, and they are aware of this
connection with their writing. These links to their communities cannot be
separated from the creation of their art, and this can lead to difficult decisions
about the intentions of writing. Robinson points out: “I’m a selfish writer. The

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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” (qtd in Methot 12).
This begs the question of the external expectations readers and theorists can
place on artists and how they respond.
While they speak of balancing these pressures in their lives and in their
efforts to create the space to write for their purposes, the authors also talk about
the interaction of multiple layering historical, familial, and political/legal pressures
on the creation of identity. These are the connections within communities of
writers and communities of family. But internal/external pressures can also exist
from non-Native sources that create various expectations towards First Nations
women’s writing. Specifically of interest are the issues of cross-cultural
transaction/translation as readers incorporate these stories into the broader
notion of western literary canon. Robinson writes that her first priority is to
herself. This creates a rather divided intent when there are so many pressures
put onto minority authors to create for political reasons, yet they are ultimately
writers who need to answer their craft. King points out that there is a complex
interaction between all these variables: “these terms, ‘Indian’ and ‘Native,’ are
historical and literary terms much like ‘continent’ and ‘narrative,’ which seem to
suggest specific, known qualities but which hint at vast geographies and varied
voices” (9).
The questioning of Robinson’s ‘credentials’ or her choice of genre
fundamentally tie into a colonial desire to keep clear boundaries between
classifications. “People assumed I couldn’t write about anything that wasn’t

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Native because I’m Native ... but I’m fascinated with serial killers, psychopaths,
and sociopaths. I wrote about non-Native characters [in Traplinesi just to show
them I could” (qtd in Methot 12). These questioning glances cast at Robinson
are at the very heart of what is meant when saying an author is a First Nations
writer. Robinson talks directly to internal and external pressures and those who
attempted to define her and tell her what she is qualified/expected to write about
in her literature. Robinson’s transformations and transgressions of these
boundaries are key to my examination of the significance of her work.
Akiwenzie-Damm replies to the question of boundaries around identity and
writing:
Could I write from a white Canadian perspective? Probably, yeah ... we’ve
been forced into those school systems, we’ve been forced into
mainstream society. We’re fluent in the language. Many of us are forced
to be bi-cultural. So it’s not really being untrue because it’s already part of
who we are and part of our knowledge base, (qtd in Boucher 3)
There is a power of translation available to individuals who have known
themselves in both, or multiple, worlds. Continually First Nations women are not
only denied this power of translation between identifications, but they are held to
an unrealistic notion of unity and cohesiveness.
The expectation of First Nations women’s unity in form and structure is
another example of boundaries others place around Native women’s self­
construction. There needs to be an open approach because even as Mojica
finds her story to create a non-linear structure, Dumont resists this as a pre­
ordained necessity of First Nations writing. Writers and their structure and their
construction of narrative will all vary. As Mojica explains, she is writing according

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to another set of values. Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots has 13
transformations to coordinate with each moon of the lunar year. As well, there
are 4 directions or four sections: “This is the inherent structure of the play, it is
not a structure that was imposed on the story, but rather, a structure that was
informed by the characters .... I learned a lot about trusting my own way of
working” (Mojica 16). Mojica did not set out to write a specific narrative in her
play. Her structure offers up an alternative to the linear norm. Meanwhile
Dumont, in “Circle the Wagons,” pushes against any expectation that Native
authors must always incorporate the circular, non-linear structure. She sees
these expectations as boundaries others form around literary identity
representation:
There it is again, the circle, that 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, so many times ‘we
are’ the circle, the medicine wheel, the moon, the womb, and
sacred hoops, you’d think we were one big tribe, is there nothing
more than the circle in the deep structure of Native literature? (57)
Both these authors state outright how their identities create an expectation of a
particular style of writing. This is a beautiful contradiction, if viewed one way, and
a perfect example of the inability to ever say what, exactly, is a Native style of
writing; a Native structure.
Authors who stand in contrast to one another defy the attempts to bind
Native literature into a simple category. Or, as Krupat explains:
The consequence of this situation is that one feels put in the position of
having to choose between the two terms set in putative opposition, as if it
were not really possible to write on Indian subjects without presenting
one’s bona tides in terms of having danced at powwows with so and so or
having been taken as blood brother by so and so, as if one’s analyses

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required the authority of personal experience to be valid, as if he who had
much experience of Native culture must automatically produce valid
analyses of it. (7)
This calls for an understanding that writers cannot be held to frozen notions of
what is traditional, what is historical, or what has been designated as Native
within the understanding of literature, identity, and society. The ties that may
bind together various communities, families, and writers are not a universal
declaration of unity. To understand the processes or outcomes as unified is to
establish further false notions of boundaries and commonalities. AkiwenzieDamm makes the comparison, “it’s like asking why all European nations aren’t
cohesive, why they don’t agree on everything .... But there’s an expectation that
we should all get along and have the same perspective on things” (qtd in
Boucher 3). In creating a representation of Native women’s identity for a crosscultural transaction, these authors are finding ways to use their ultimate authority
as First Nations women to represent First Nations women.
There is a risk in external factors deciding what is appropriate or suitable
for First Nations women’s identity. There is also a risk in never pushing beyond
community. First Nations women’s identities are complex entities which have to
somehow allow for the inclusion of history, tradition, contemporary issues, and
change. These authors are both exploring and transforming their own
representations with their work. In order to understand what they are doing,
many of their images must be seen within a context of their specific references to
history, colonisation, and family. In turn, the authors must find ways to express
their identity creation with this interaction between the internal experience of self

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and the external pressures for Identification. As noted, these pressures come
from themselves, their community, and non-Native power structures all
attempting to understand or, at times, regulate the boundaries of identity. So
while the pressures exist to regulate their boundaries as writers, that very same
dynamic plays out with their characters’ own understanding of self.
Native literature can produce narratives to counter the damaging effects of
negative images on the identity construction of First Nations women. Acoose
states: “Canadian literature as an expression of the nation’s prevailing ideological
structures continues to erode the ethos of Indigenous peoples generally, and
relative to this discussion. Indigenous women specifically” (51). But through the
production of alternative texts being written by First Nations women, themselves,
the content of ‘Canadian literature’ is changing. The hegemonic representations
of First Nations women’s identity is no longer standing in isolation. King explains,
these narratives, originally seen as ‘sources of fact,’ have become
occasion for a creative examination by contemporary writers of the literary
tension created by the existence of North America and its peoples and the
failure of language to transcend the ‘discourse of conquest.’ (11)
The literature and narratives offered up as the colonisers’ perspectives on Native
identity are being countered by the literature and texts written from resistant
positions of creative re-examination, renewal, and celebration by First Nations
women writers.
Literature can illustrate the connection between colonisation and current
influences of literature, information, family, and support on identity formation. In
turn, literature can recontextualize various ‘sources of fact.’ These authors and
their work stress how history and colonisation have an impact on identity

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creation. Nelson points out, this is an opportunity for an author to “use the story
to repudiate an incorrect understanding of who she is, and replaces this with a
more accurate self-understanding”(19). Counterstories tell those ‘facts’ which
may have been altered, misremembered, or forgotten all together within the
coloniser’s narrative. First Nations women’s literature contains many instances
of these specific types of counterstories. They are significant because they
present the opportunity to articulate a wrong to a greater audience. AkiwenzieDamm states:
Most of us believe our creative work has a function well beyond selfexpression. It expresses the values and aesthetics of our people and
connects us to them and to our ancestors and future generations. It is a
form of activism that both maintains and affirms who we are and protests
against colonisation and assimilation. (Skins vi)
The writing process becomes a political link to everyday lives, and literature
connects to the society in which it is created.
The first connection is that between contemporary identity creation and
history. By acknowledging the women of the past and the difficulties they faced,
authors situate the contemporary discussion of First Nations women’s identity
within a continual experience of colonisation. Dumont’s poem “Helen Betty
Osborne” references historical experiences to highlight the conflict between
Native women and non-Native expressions of womanhood. She says:
it might even turn out to be
about our grandmothers,
beasts of burden in the fur trade
skinning, scraping, pounding, packing,
left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,’
left for white-melting-skinned women,
not bits-of-brown women
left here in this wilderness, this colony. (20)

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Mojica’s contemporary women - they are actually called Contemporary Woman
#1 and #2 - further solidify this connection to history as they act out the various
roles and transformations from past and present. Marie is one of the three
incarnations of Cree and Métis women “who portaged across Canada with white
men on their backs and were then systemically discarded” (15). The scene starts
with the words of Marie who then transforms herself into a contemporary woman
in order to have a dialogue between the two:
‘We women,
make moccasins/ string showshoes / teach them to
walk in the snow/ make canoes.
We,
Hunt/ fish/ put food away for the winter/ teach them to
survive. We,’
in voice of CONTEMPORARY WOMAN #1
‘translate/ navigate/ build alliances with our bodies/
loyalties through our blood.’ (43)
These historical representations of Native womanhood link to contemporary
issues. By making these connections obvious, Dumont and Mojica bind their
explorations of identity to misrepresented ‘sources of facts’ which offer only
negative identities. First Nations women face these images of the past in their
identity creation. Dialogues across history run throughout Princess Pocahontas
as Mojica connects moments of racism and sexism to Contemporary Women’s
expressions of self.
The divided representations of identity offered by April and Cheryl
Raintree further explore this question of dialogue between women. Culleton has
resisted overly romanticized notions of Native identity and presents a brutally
honest examination of what can occur with the internalisation of racism. To read

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April and Cheryl as a single Métis individual allows for a clear picture of the
negative impact colonisation has on identity formation. This combined character
articulates the struggle against both internal and external forces regulating and
placing value on identity. Cheryl finally states to her sister: “Half-breeds aren’t
good enough for you. You’re a bigot against your own people” (Culleton 175).
April’s voice is, at times, overly simplified, but she is articulating the accusations
of outsiders/racists. And, in doing so, April is a manifestation of the impact of
these binaries:
It would be better to be a full-blooded Indian or full-blooded Caucasian.
But being a half-breed, well, there’s just nothing there. You can admire
Indian people for what they once were. They had a distinct heritage, or is
it culture? Anyway, you can see how much was taken from them. And
white people, well, they’ve convinced each other they are the superior
race, and you can see they are responsible for the progress we have
today ... but what have the Métis people got? Nothing. Being half-breed,
you feel only the shortcomings of both sides. (Culleton 142-143)
These bindings around identity are not only being imposed from the outside; the
legacy of colonisation ensures an internal policing takes place as well. Fee
argues “identity is policed from both the outside and inside a minority group, the
temptation for Aboriginal people to privilege so-called racial purity is at least as
great as the temptation for non-Aboriginal people” (Fee 212).
Dumont recognizes and further explores the establishment of boundaries
around Métis identity. In “Leather and Naughahyde”[sic] (58) the woman narrator
articulates this negotiation of value:
I say I’m Métis
like it’s an apology and he says, ‘mmh,’ like he forgives me, like
he’s got a big heart and mine’s pumping diluted blood and his voice
has sounded well-fed up till this point, but now it goes thin like
he’s across the room taking another look and when he returns he’s

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got ‘this look,’ that says he’s leather and I’m naughahyde.
The idea behind any judgment on Métis is that the Native/non-Native is somehow
a clear grouping of identity. These narratives expose the difficulty in determining
boundaries around identity. In establishing concrete notions of what box
contains Native and what box contain non-Native traits, the coloniser’s false
binary cannot conceptualise anything in between; and this reflects the difficulties
with regulating status and Métis rights through law.
Monica Mojica navigates various expressions of Native identity throughout
her work. Princess Pocahontas. Her examples run a range of textual
explorations of identity creation with respects to history, colonisation, law, and
community. At one point Mojica traces the issues of blood and mixed blood from
generation to generation:
When I was born, my mother turned me over to check for the blue spot at
the base of the spine - the sign of Indian blood. When my child was born,
after counting the fingers and the toes, I turned it over to check for the
blue spot at the base of the spine. Even among the half-breeds, it’s one of
the last things to go. (20)
Mojica is talking about what can be held forefront in a mixing of Native and nonNative blood. She notes how this occurs despite the continual mixing, that the
child is still Native. At this point the woman is able to articulate what cannot be
taken away or diluted from her child’s blood: her child is Native. Yet she is living
within a system of governance which continually seeks to regulate varying levels
of ‘nativeness’ based upon this very process of blood quantum. There is a battle
to regulate identity both from the inside and the outside, but this mother is

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tapping into a history of familial identification which is as undeniable as a mark on
the skin.
Authors make reference within their work to the relationship between
literature and identity construction. Dumont references this intertexuality and the
power of language and school in creating this certain ‘standard’:
I have since reconsidered Eliot
and the Great White way of writing English
standard that is
the great white way
has measured, judged and assessed me
all my life
... one wrong sound and you’re shelved in the Native Literature section
resistance writing
a mad Indian
unpredictable
on the war path
native ethnic protest
the Great White way could silence us all
... it’s had its hand over my mouth since my first day of school
since Dick and Jane, ABC’s and fingernail checks
syntactic laws: use the wrong order or
register and you’re a dumb Indian
dumb, drunk, or violent. (“The Devil’s Language” 54)
Mojica carries this theme throughout her text. Found in everything from the
Production Notes, to the character descriptions, to the quotations and excerpts,
and finally the bibliography - Mojica continually references the impact of words
and literature. Her bibliography is split into those books which are recommended
and “Not Recommended (but still useful from the dominant culture perspective)”
(62); Mojica references the texts which contextualise her writing. This is also the
case with the bibliography for her second play Birdwoman and the Suffragettes
where we have two texts “Recommended (with a historical grain of salt)” and
“Not Recommended (romanticized historical novels; good source material for

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satire)” (85). At this point the very texts which have been pointed to as harmful
become fodder for creative transformation. So the literature itself is making
reference to literature’s role in identity construction and, in doing so, literature is
both reference and content.
Culleton also works with the idea of good and bad books and positive and
negative representations. April and Cheryl’s diverging childhood experiences
with literature produces very different contextualising of their identity. Cheryl’s
foster home has access to a collection of books which counter the history and
teachings offered in school: “Mrs. MacAdams is a Métis you know .... They got a
lot of books on Indian tribes and how they used to live a long time ago .... Mrs.
MacAdams gave them to me to read because no one at school would talk or play
with me. They call me names and things, or else they make like I’m not there at
all” (Culleton 43). Meanwhile, April’s experience with literature stressed the
coloniser’s perspective on history:
I knew all about Louis Riel. He was a rebel who had been hanged for
treason. Worse, he had been a crazy half-breed. I had learned about his
folly in history. Also, I had read about the Indians and the various methods
of tortures they had put the missionaries through. No wonder they were
known as savages. So, anything to do with Indians, I despised. (Culleton
42)
Cheryl’s exposure to positive representations within the MacAdams’ household
led her to writing pro-Native school papers and, later in life, political activism and
social action. Culleton is working through all the highs and lows associated with
identity construction within a setting of colonial legacies. Through April and
Cheryl, Culleton is playing out an internal struggle. Cheryl’s childhood is much
more empowering than April’s due to the support and exposure she has to

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positive representations.^ April is very resistant to Cheryl’s writing and speaking
out about positive Native history or experience. Yet when April has no other
means to access help, it is through writing her story that she is finally able to gain
support (Culleton 76). Culleton has April access support through her own literary
truth-telling.
Robinson also references books and reading within Monkev Beach, and
Lisamarie’s experience is resistant and transformative. Lisamarie starts in a
common enough setting of early schooling where “Nothing they taught me meant
anything. None of the stories I read in English had anything to do with my
life”(166). A conflict occurs between Lisamarie and the one teacher who “forced
us to read a book that said that the Indians of the northwest coast of British
Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices. My teacher had
made us each read a paragraph out loud. When my turn came, I sat there
shaking, absolutely furious”(68). Lisamarie’s experiences reflect what Acoose
articulated about her own experiences with school texts that are not
representative of self-identification and which she called “an apparatus of the
prevailing ideology” (40). Acoose further expands on this process of selfidentification:
I learned to passively accept and internalize the easy squaw, Indianwhore, dirty Indian, and drunken Indian stereotypes that subsequently
imprisoned me, and all Indigenous peoples, regardless of o u r ...
differences ... becoming, to a certain extent, what was encouraged by the
ideological collusiveness of textbooks, and the ignorant comments and
peer pressure from non-lndigenous students. (29)

2

C ulleton’s book must be approached as individual issues being played out between these two characters.
She is not so much plotting a path as she is working through these single instances o f difficulty.

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But Lisamarie neither passively accepts nor internalises the school texts.
Lisamarie refuses, refutes and, when silenced by the teacher, begins singing
“Fuck the Oppressors” and is sent to the principal’s office. Strategically located
within this interaction is how Robinson takes the resistance further and is able to
find power for Lisamarie. She links this resistance of Lisamarie to her activist
Uncle Mick, his actions, and his music (68). His support greatly influences
Lisamarie’s identity construction, and when she returns home with the
disciplinary note from the school, “Mick went out and had the teacher’s note
laminated and framed. He hammered a nail into his wall and hung the note in
the centre of the living room. He put his arm around me, swallowed hard a few
times and looked misty. ‘My little warrior’”(69). Mick offers Lisamarie a very
specific viewership - framing - of the note sent home. Intended to be a text of
shame, the note is, within the family structure, positioned by Mick as a text of
pride. At these moments Robinson moves beyond the articulation of the
resistance and is able to create a bond to a source of power. This is why
Lisamarie is, in the end, an empowered, sophisticated, sympathetic character.
Lisamarie’s connection to her family is the most influential factor in her abilities to
survive.
This is similar to the actions and punishments doled out to Cheryl as she
fought the racism of her school environment, yet Cheryl is unable to access this
family or community support system. In a very similar school setting to
Lisamarie’s, Cheryl defies her teacher’s authority:
Her teacher had been reading to the class how the Indians scalped,
tortured, and massacred brave white explorers and missionaries. Cheryl’s

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anger began to build. All of a sudden she had loudly exclaimed, “This is
all a bunch of lies! ....I’m not going to learn this garbage about Indian
people.... Lies! Lies! Lies! Your history books don’t say how the white
people destroyed the Indian way of life. That’s all you white people can do
is teach a bunch of lies to cover your own tracks!” (53-54)
When challenged further by the teacher, Cheryl - like Lisamarie - was able to
respond: “Cheryl had been scared, but she was also stubborn. She believed she
was right, and she intended to stand up for her beliefs, no matter what they
dished out” (54). But rather than her family being a source of support, the power
dynamic established with a foster care system is such that family is more of a
liability. When called in by the principal, Mrs. DesRosier is able to exert power
over Cheryl by threatening her access to her sister: “You’re going to do exactly
as they wish or else I’ll call your worker, have you moved, and then I’ll make sure
you never see April again. Now, are you going to co-operate?” (54). With this
Cheryl agrees to apologize to the teacher. The differing forms of power allotted to
Lisamarie and Cheryl are related to the support they have for an alternative
expression of pride in their identity. Both Cheryl and April are continually denied
agency, and lack the support of family or community. Identity, history, legacy,
and representation are significant factors. A community of support can allow an
individual to “reimagine oneself, to create ever more expansive identities” and
these changing identities can lay claim to altered societal boundaries and “lead to
the conclusion that the individual is positioned on the wrong side of a social
boundary, that she is being treated unfairly, and even that her rights have been
violated” (Engel and Munger 41).

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The legally enforced removal of children from First Nations families affects
the creation of identity. Running throughout Monkey Beach is the legacy of
residential schools, of colonial relations. This history is the source of conflict
between siblings, parents and children, and loved ones. Uncle Mick often
provides this information and describes the impact of what occurred:
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 .... 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 fucking
torture children. (Robinson 109-110)
Foster Care is an important contemporary legal issue within First Nations
communities and brings forward a number of considerations for identity
formation, cultural continuity, and stands as a stark reminder of the legacy of
colonisation. Culleton establishes April as a good kid early on in the novel so we
can see the changes that take place later on in reference to her foster homes
and what she faces in terms of identity. The identity offered to April by the
second foster home is full of words such as “squaw,” “half-breed,” “dirty,” and so
on. This is a process of assimilation; these situations are linked to the history of
colonisation. So when Culleton and Robinson address foster care and
residential schools as legacies of colonisation, they are talking about the ongoing
ramifications of colonisation.^
This literature points to the importance of family - or a re-creation of family
- to access information, wisdom, strength, and support. This is how knowledge
is passed on to the next generation. In the telling, the texts themselves become
^ I cannot fully explore all the legal and political implications o f child welfare issues within the scope o f
this thesis. For som e excellent sources on these policies, please see Monture-Angus, Kelm , Buenafe, and
Fournier and Crey.

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a connection to traditional support. Mick and Ma-ma-oo pass on information to
Lisamarie and provide her with the knowledge and the awareness of her
strengths. It is her connection to her family and her community that provides her
power. In turn, this is what April and Cheryl lack because of this legacy of
colonisation. April and Cheryl’s removal from their parents denied them the
opportunity to access this information and support. Dumont questions the ability
to return to the support of family in her poem “It Crosses My Mind”:
and what will I know of my own
kin in my old age, will they still welcome me, share their stew and
tea, pass me the bannock like it’s mine, will they continue to greet
me in the old way, hand me their babies as my own and send me
away with gifts when I leave and what name will I know them by in
these multicultural intentions. (59)
Robinson stresses the importance of historical knowledge and awareness for
Lisamarie via her talks to Ma-ma-oo and Uncle Mick. It is from these interactions
that Lisamarie is ultimately given the tools to deal with all that comes her way.
From this she gains awareness of herself, her strengths, and her heritage.
To articulate the importance of family support systems, Culleton exposes
what happens when they are not there. The reality is that Native family
structures have been horribly damaged by colonisation. By resisting
romanticized notions of Native identity and very honestly looking at some of the
current issues of constructing a First Nations woman’s identity, Culleton is able to
trace these forces of colonisation and explore the effects of internalized negative
stereotypes. April’s actions and responses are, at times, harsh and troubling but the character represents a culmination of a lifetime of racism and sexism.
Culleton’s book also stresses the need for a balanced approach to

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representation. Although Cheryl has access to many positive representations,
she is also sheltered from some very harsh realities. By never really having to
confront the reality of her childhood and her parents, Cheryl is left to construct
idealistic illusions of her past. She is never allowed to access the more difficult
images and find her own method of coping with these problems; she has been
denied the opportunity to formulate her own way of understanding the effect
colonisation continues to have on people. When Cheryl finally finds their longlost father, she is unable to rectify her illusions of the past with the man standing
before her:
I stand quietly, hiding the horror which is boiling inside of me. I hadn’t
known what to expect. But it wasn’t this, this bent, wasted human form in
front of me. My father! I am horrified and repulsed: by him .... All my
dreams to rebuild the spirit of a once proud nation are destroyed in this
instant. I study the pitiful creature in front of me. My father! A guttercreature! (Culleton 197-8)
Because of this imbalance, Cheryl is going into her adulthood without the tools to
survive. Although she states her work is not autobiographical, Culleton’s life has
provided the incentive for this type of representation (Culleton qtd in Silvera 312).
She speaks of her two sisters committing suicide and the impact of that on her
way of understanding relationships with identity. She needed to write a book
which captured both the positive and the negative images of her life, and this
narrative then functions both as a healing process and as a preventative
strategy.
Family structures and support systems are vital in passing on knowledge
and wisdom and taking the opportunity to present alternative stories. Dumont
holds onto the power of her family in “The Devil’s Language” and asks the reader

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to think “back to your mother’s sound, your mother’s tongue, your mother’s
language” (55). Dumont positions the pieces of familiarity amongst the
challenges of colonisation. She questions how to maintain this identity of her
childhood, while being so firmly situated within an English dominated society.
She again reminds the reader:
where you sat on her knee in a canvas tent
and she fed you bannock and tea
and syllables
that echo in your mind, now
that you can’t make the sound
of that voice that rocks you and sings you to sleep
in the devil’s language. (55)
Robinson is able to use Uncle Mick’s activism and Ma-ma-oo’s knowledge to
pass on crucial information to Lisamarie. These counter colonial stories are
providing both Lisamarie and the reader with missing or misinformed facts and
traditions. A significant example is when telling of how her grandfather Ba-ba-oo
had lost his arm in the Second World War, Lisamarie gains further knowledge of
her family’s past from Uncle Mick. She learns how:
When he came home, he couldn’t get a job or get the money he thought
he should get from Veterans Affairs because they said Indian Affairs was
taking care of him. Indian Affairs said if he wanted the same benefits as a
white vet, he should move off the reserve and give up his status. If he did
that, they’d lose their house and by this time, they had three children and
my dad, Albert, was on the way. (81)
The author further addresses, here, misinformation or ‘sources of facts.’ April
Raintree also highlights the various facts of Métis history with Cheryl replying
through her knowledge and by what was passed on to her from her good foster
family. Cheryl ‘tells’ April, but this is another example of Culleton telling herself,
telling her community, and telling the external reader what can be known about

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Métis history. Literature plays an important role in clarifying the link between the
impact of colonisation and the current representations of First Nations peoples.
Colonial cultures absorb colonised identities and then reflect them back to
First Nations women with parameters and boundaries on what they should
express of themselves. Between the expectation of external groups and the
internalization of these images, this hegemonic discourse confines First Nations
women to a specific identity that then becomes self-reinforcing, reproducing the
hegemonic notion of First Nations women. The influence of these hegemonic
images stresses the importance of “identity’s interactive and intersubjective
development and the importance of the narrative process itself in the formation of
identity” (Engel and Munger 43). But literature can create alternative narratives
to these belief systems. As bell hooks declares, this “coming to voice is an act of
resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self­
transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being
subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless - our
being defined and interpreted by others” (Talking Back 12). The connections
between authors and their acts of reading and writing form a dialogue of renewed
representation. Spahr asserts that “once reading is recognized as dependent on
community, and on the relationship between reader and works as a form of
community itself, reading [and writing] turns into a force that can be manipulated
and used as a tool of resistance” (3).
Texts and their production become a connection to support and healing.
Anderson ties together the act of writing and the greater Native community:

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Writing also gives women a means of surviving oppression and a way to
engage in a healing process .... The process of writing creates a space
where they can deal with anger, pain and sadness, and then begin to
kindle positive feelings about their identity. As women heal and reclaim
their identity, the overall healing movement for Indigenous people takes
hold. (Anderson 141)
The writing process connects between the writers and their communities, the
writers and other writers, the writers and themselves. These systems of support
perpetuate the continual production of texts. Robinson knew this and sought out
the community of writers to facilitate her craft: “I knew I wanted to write, but I was
really struggling. At home, there were no writers. I didn’t know any writers, I
didn’t know what they did, I didn’t know how they got from A to B. So I needed to
hear and see and talk to other writers” (qtd in Methot 12). The creation of these
texts includes both the support and the responsibility of having these connections
to others. Akiwenzie-Damm notes that “despite these differences, what all of the
writers share is our connection to our homelands, our histories of colonisation,
genocide, and displacement, and our will to survive and pass the treasures of our
cultures to future generations” (Skins vi). In turn, the texts act as methods of
exploring the connection between writers and the boundaries of Native identities.
Those characteristics which can lead to a community of First Nations writers can
also set the bookends on what belongs on that shelf.

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CHAPTER FOUR: Challenges and Transformations
Language is an Influential, powerful and transformative tool, and these
characteristics reflect the interaction between narratives and identity. Language
is a tool of change, but it is also one of the means by which the coloniser
attempts to perpetuate damaging identity destruction for First Nations women.
By identifying the coloniser’s construction of an oppressive narrative. First
Nations women authors retell the story and “make visible the relevant details that
the master narrative suppressed” (Nelson 7). They make evident the relationship
between narratives, power, and identity. First Nations women’s narratives have
been linked to gendered identities of oppression and colonisation specifically
through the use of naming. Robinson’s Ma-ma-oo understands the power and
the danger of this: “Names have power. This is the fundamental principle of
magic everywhere. Call out the name of a supernatural being, and you will have
its instant and undivided attention” (Robinson, Monkev Beach 180). Words and
names contain the power to call forth particular images as well as the power to
draw connections between an individual and a disadvantaged subjectivity.
When a group is given limited access to positive self naming, this can limit
the legal narratives available for empowerment and protection. First Nations
women have expressly noted the lack of positive identities made available
through either naming or literature and the importance in challenging the colonial
production of these names. Akiwenzie-Damm stresses the role of colonisation
and genocide in this scarcity of sexually positive narratives for First Nations
women. She explains, “we were defined and categorized by the colonisers ... we

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were renamed and then those names were defined and legislated so as to
separate us from the colonisers and settlers” (Addressing, 144-145). Lawrence
adds that more generally “‘Indianness’ had to be codified to make it a category
that could be granted or withheld, according to the needs of the settler society”
(7). The importance of legal narratives is highlighted throughout these texts from
First Nations women’s authors as they explore issues of gendered violence. But
through their articulation of these names, their identification of the coloniser’s
perspective, their anger, rejection, and refusal - each of these authors have used
literature to create their own space of resistance, celebration, and transformation.
Mojica recognizes the role of naming and history on the current images of
First Nations women. Specifically, she notes how the coloniser altered First
Nations women’s names depending on their relationship to non-Native men. The
three names Pocahontas, Lady Rebecca, and Matoaka all refer to the same
Powhatan woman known for saving Captain John Smith, yet the different names
indicate a variety of situations and ways in which she is viewed. As Mojica points
out. Lady Rebecca is the name which indicates religion, location, and marriage to
a white man, and the name Pocahontas became “the archetype of the ‘good
indian’” while this woman’s initial name is lost from the popular narratives (14).
This is indicative of a cycle of altered naming First Nations women faced during
colonisation. This interaction between a name and a connection to a community
is the same process described by Shirley Bear in her contemporary interaction
with the Indian Act. She struggled to regain access to the name and the
resources available to her prior to her marriage to a non-Native man.

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As names change, so do various external and internal notions of identity,
agency, and access to support and community. Mojica creatively re-examines
this particular issue in history through the transfiguration of a Métis woman from
Marie to Margaret to Madeleine. This third and final transformation - Madeleine
- married a white man only to be abandoned and left with a different name and
no connections to her family or her home: “I am - was married to James
Johnston for fifteen years .... Two days! They left me only two days to get out.
Fifteen years null and void! Null and void in two days! It is called ‘turning o ff”
(Mojica 46). The first incarnation, Marie, had altered her name and committed
herself to a life separate from her support structures. She was assimilated into
an identity that did not afford her protection when she was replaced by a more
legitimate representation of womanhood: a white one. At this point she begins to
speak Cree and Contemporary Woman #1 takes the stage to translate and
confirm her own connection to these historical events as “an essential fiber in the
fabric of our contemporary lives” (Mojica 47). ^ Images of Native womanhood are
positioned in relation to white womanhood, and the coloniser makes clear a
desire to recreate the familiar in order to control Native women’s gendered
identity. The coloniser’s external perspective seeks to recreate a disadvantaged
notion of Native womanhood.
Culleton further explores the interaction between external and internal
influences on identity through April’s experiences of family support. April’s early
years were spent with two parents struggling with their own interaction with
' In fact, the same actress plays the character and a connection is further solidified between the historical
experiences o f this M étis woman and her contemporary counterpart as Madelaine is transformed into
Contemporary W oman #1.

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colonisation, and they offered limited support to April. Her father suffered from
tuberculosis, and her mother had been raised in a residential school and then
worked as a housekeeper for the priest in her hometown (11 -13). Both parents
struggled with being on welfare, the racism in town, and alcohol abuse. During
this time, April’s internal dialogues were marked by confusion about race and
agency. She attempted to situate herself between the two groups of children she
saw at the park. She noted that one group was “brown-skinned children who
looked like Cheryl in most ways ... but they were dirty looking and they dressed
in really raggedy clothes” while the other was “white-skinned, and I used to envy
them, especially the girls with blond hair and blue eyes” (16). She is unsure of
her positioning with respect to her family and the external representations of
Native and non-Native children. This becomes more complex when April enters
the foster care system and must begin to form her self-concept in fluctuating
situations of support and care.
Vastly altered internal dialogues mark the changes in family support
throughout April’s childhood. Her time with the Dions is characterised by positive
and supportive comments towards her by the family. Specifically Mrs. Dion is
kind and caring towards April: “You poor angel. It must be so hard on you” (30).
Then during April’s last visit with Maman Dion in the hospital, she states: “April,
you’re a very special person. Always remember that” (36). During her stay with
the Dions, April’s external actions are positive as she provides emotional support
to her sister, comforts Papa Dion, and forms compassion towards her parents’
situation. But when April moves from the care of the Dions’ to the mistreatment of

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the DeRosiers a change in her familiar support leads to a change in selfunderstanding. This period of April’s life is characterised by increasingly harsh
internalised racist comments. Within the first day at the new foster home, April is
told by Mrs. DeRosier that “you half-breeds, you love to wallow in filth” (37), and
later by one of the DeRosier children that “[April] doesn’t look like the last
squaw”(38). The transformation of April’s naming alters her internalized notions
of self and her family. Throughout her stay at the DeRosiers, April struggles to
maintain a relationship with her positively Native-identified younger sister. She
internalizes the racism and begins to project it forward from herself. April can no
longer accept any positive Native identification and, in turn, believes that
anything negative that happens to her must be because of her Nativeness. The
representations available to her for her construction of a self-narrative do not
afford her any positive options for being both respected and valued and a Native
woman. In particular, the above mentioned use of the word squaw marks a
deliberate attack on a positive sexual identity, and this colonial perspective runs
throughout the other texts as well.
Much of Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas explores the alteration of First
Nations women’s identities based on their gender. Specifically, she articulates
the active destruction of images of Native women’s sexual power. Mojica
exposes the modification of Indigenous Mexican women’s deities from women in
roles of power to Catholic virgins with new names. The “Deity/ Woman of the
Puna/ Virgin Transfiguration” (35) speaks directly to the attempts to desexualise

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and purify these powerful women in order to view them as controlled and
contained:
scrubbed clean
made lighter, non threatening
chastebarren.
No longer allied with the darkness
of moon tides
but twisted and misaligned
with the darkness of evil
the invaders sinful apple
in my hand! (37)
Mojica reveals the assaulting nature of this coloniser action when she tells how
the Deities are transfigured into Virgins: “stripped - of our names and our light”
(37). Through this act of stripping and exposing the Deities, the colonial
perspective leaves them with only a weakened identification. Mojica illustrates
the contrast between the coloniser’s dark negative representations of Indigenous
women’s sexuality with her description of the inherent light contained within the
sexualised powerful Deities. With this she highlights the tension between
representations and the power in controlling the boundaries around identity. First
Nations women’s representation on the coloniser’s terms does not afford the
same illustration Mojica offers here. There is only a binary, and this binary does
not ever propose a powerful position.
Native women have two choices within these gendered representations by
the coloniser. One option is a stark, unthreatening non-sexuality, while the other
is a sexuality that can only be labelled as squaw or whore. This lack of positive
or powerful sexual images and ideas is exactly what Akiwenzie-Damm noticed
about erotic writing and the sexual identities available for First Nations women.

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She could not locate any realistic scope of Native women’s sexuality.
Discovering any sex-positive Native writing was difficult. She notes, “there was
some erotic writing by Indigenous writers around - it just took some searching. A
lot of searching. Too much searching” (Addressing, 143). The representations
of First Nations women’s sexuality were only offered from the coloniser’s
perspective.
In the short story “Queen of the North” Robinson exposes this as a
consumable sexuality.^ Karaoke must interact with the attempted consumption
of her exotic Otherness by Arnold, the observer:
‘Would you - ’ he blushed harder, ‘shake your hair out of that baseball
cap?’
I shrugged, pulled the cap off, and let my hair loose. It hung limply down
to my waist. My scalp felt like it was oozing enough oil to cause
environmental damage.
‘You should keep it down all times,’ he said. (Robinson Traplines 208-9)
Arnold wants to view Karaoke as one more item for him to purchase and
consume, and he is unwilling to view her outside of an exotic sexual
representation. He does not see Karaoke as a fundraiser or a volunteer. She is
a Native woman who should have her hair down at all times. At this moment,
Arnold’s positioning of Karaoke is limited to the damaging negative stereotypes
of First Nations women’s representation. The coloniser has reinforced this racist
and sexist understanding of who Karaoke is within this interaction. Robinson is
highlighting the limited options Karaoke faces for her viewership from a colonial
perspective. There is no space allotted for a complex, realistic representation of
Robinson introduces the character o f Karaoke which starts the storyline to be continued in Monkev
Beach.

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Karaoke’s Native womanhood. Anderson observes, “When negative images of
Native women are so ingrained in the Canadian consciousness ... is it easy to
see how Native women might begin to think of themselves as ‘easy squaws’”
(106). As Arnold wants to perceive Karaoke as the sexualised Other, he must
also believe that she is deserving of specific treatment from the coloniser. This
means she is available for his particular perception, interaction, and
consumption. Despite Karaoke’s own experience of her hair being greasy and
decidedly not sexy, Arnold insists that she wear it down for the fulfilment of his
coloniser viewership.
Dumont explores these issues of the coloniser’s perspective and identity
in her “Squaw Poems” (18). Through this poem Dumont exposes the physical
impact of words on a woman as she is struck by the shout of “hey squaw!” and in
response to that blow “her ears stung and she shook, fearful of the other words/
like fists that would follow” (18). The external physical reaction is then explained
at a deeper level; “For a moment her spirit drained like/ water from a basin” (18).
She is well aware of the meaning of that word and notes the relationship between
labels as “squaw is to whore/ as/ Indian maiden is to virgin/ squaw is to shore/
as/ Indian princess is to lady” (19). Dumont takes this choice between Princess
and squaw and explores how this is a bound notion of Native womanhood
determined by external expectations and limitations. Dumont explores the
confines of the available images: “I would become the Indian princess, not the
squaw dragging/ her soul after laundry, meals, needy kids and abusive
husbands. These were my choices” (19). By highlighting the binary choices for

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Native women’s sexuality, Dumont stresses the role of the coloniser’s
perspective in the representation of Native women. The only ‘respectful’ sexual
option becomes a whitewashed sexuality that does not contain passion or desire
and which is bound by rules to avoid certain lipstick colours and styles of shoe.
The risk, otherwise, is to be understood in an unprotected representation, so
Dumont states that she “never moved in ways that might be interpreted as loose”
(18). The external viewership polices continually and Dumont confirms, “I
became what Jean Rhys phrased, ‘aggressively/ respectable.’ I’d be so god­
damned respectable that white people/ would feel slovenly in my presence” (18).
What has been established by such naming is that Native women can somehow
be constructed as ‘deserving’ of different treatment, protection, and respect.
Sexual identity is political. When First Nations women are only offered
limited binary choices these unrealistic representations are damaging and
dangerous. Akiwenzie-Damm struggles against “the hang ups that I acquired as
an Anishnaabe woman who was raised under the Indian Act, as a Roman
Catholic, without having seen an erotic story or poem by an Indigenous writer
until I was in my late 20’s” (Addressing 150-151)/" She notes specifically that
they lack the positive images that would be contained in love poetry or erotics.
As Chrystos states, “American Indian writing is invisible; American Indian
women’s writing is more invisible; American Indian women’s poetry, still more
invisible. Native women’s love poetry and erotics are so invisible, so far back in
the closet, that they’re practically in somebody else’s apartment” (qtd in Miranda,

^ The specific damages and dangers were discovered by A kiwenzie-D am m when she began doing AIDS
work in First Nations communities and experienced the silence around discussions o f sexuality.

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146). This image of a healthy, passionate sexuality is widely unavailable, and
then not seen when it is produced. Miranda proposes that this might be because
“stereotypes about Native women, for example, may take up all the available
space in the American public’s head, leaving no room for writers who are not
either squaw sluts, Pocahontas, or Indian princesses” (138). The limited positive
sexual representations are then tied to specific constructions of vulnerable legal
identities.
Legal narratives are also about expectations of safety and treatment. The
critical moment of considering these gendered narratives is within the articulation
of this viewership and an acknowledgement of the impact that a defined legal
categorisation has on individuals. Janice Acoose states clearly that “the legal
categorization as ‘Indian’ traumatically altered my life” (23). As a damning blow,
this colonial legacy has resulted in a notion that First Nations women’s identity
does not avail itself to the same rights or protection as others. Literature’s
examination of rape and First Nations women further reflects this lack of
protection. The representations offered contemporary Native women cannot be
separated from the coloniser’s attitude about Native women’s sexuality,
womanhood or value. Miranda lists the histories of Canada, the United States,
and Mexico which include purposeful death by rape, the epidemics of sexually
transmitted diseases, the kidnapping of young women, breaking up of families,
sterilization campaigns and so on. At the end of this brutal and violent list of
those “historical traumas that directly targeted Native women’s bodies and our
ability to express ourselves in language and literacy,” Miranda simply states that

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“all of this was legal” (138). The law sanctioned all these interactions between
Indigenous women of North America and the institutions of governments and
colonisation. The legal subjectivities of those women did not afford them
protection from harm.
Dumont links current violence against Native women with historical events
in her poem “Helen Betty Osborne.” She ties this poem to herself, her family,
and a shared ancestry. Dumont wonders,
if I set out to write this poem about you
it might turn out instead to be about me [...]
it might even turn out to be
about our grandmothers,
beasts of burden in the fur trade. (20)
This poem is about the 1971 murder of a 19-year-old high school student in The
Pas, Manitoba."^ It took 16 years to finally prosecute one of the four men.
Dumont posits that this poem “might turn out to be/ about this young Native girl/
growing up in rural Alberta” (20). Four white men forced Helen Betty Osborne
into a car, beat her, raped her, and eventually stabbed her over 50 times with
what is believed to be a screwdriver. Dumont states, “it might turn out to be/
about hunting season instead,/ about ‘open season’ on Native women” (20). She
was left naked and dead, wearing only her winter boots. Dumont tells us about
“bits-of-brown women/ left here in this wilderness, this colony” (20).

Many

believed that the 16-year delay in prosecution was due to Osborne being Native
and the reluctance of witnesses and the police to solve this murder. Dumont
summarizes:

See the full report o f the Aboriginal Justice Implementation Comm ission regarding the 1987 trial for the
murder o f Helen Betty Osborne and the question o f police involvem ent with the death o f JJ Harper in 1988.

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it might be about the ‘townsfolk’ (gentle word)
townsfolk who ‘believed Native girls were easy’
and ‘less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence.’
Betty, if I write this poem. (20)
The provincial Inquiry formed to investigate the delay in prosecution notes that
there is “very real racism (intentional and unintentional) which underlies the
attitude of our society generally toward the original people of this country” (AJIC,
Racism, np). The report further notes segregated public facilities, differential
treatment by police officials, failure to investigate violence against Native peoples
in the town, and that “Police refused to take seriously the stories of Aboriginal
women being sexually harassed by non-Aboriginal men” (np). Further, the report
asserts that the method of questioning suspects - initially only Native men - was
based on race, and the lack of care in the initial processing of evidence was
based on the suspect’s race and community status. The difficulties in solving this
murder and the inability to gain support from the towns/b//c “undoubtedly was
motivated in part by the fact that the victim was an Indian woman” (np).® Both
this crime and this poem are about Helen Betty Osborne’s legal narrative and her
ability to access protection and justice.
April Raintree’s sexual assault is another example of this link between a
literary narrative and the destructive legal narratives available to First Nations
women. The words of April’s rapists establish a link between a legacy of
colonisation, racism, and assault. The language continually denies April’s right to

® From the report: “It is clear that Betty Osborne would not have been killed if she had not been Aboriginal
.... Those who abducted her showed a total lack o f regard for her person or her rights as an individual.
Those who stood by w hile the physical assault took place, while sexual advances were made and while she
was being beaten to death showed their own racism, sexism and indifference. Those who knew the story
and remained silent must share their guilt.” (Aboriginal Justice Implementation Com m ission, Conclusion,
np)

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access safety; “you fucking little savage. You’re asking for i t .... you little
savages like it rough, eh?” (130). These words reinforce the violently damaging
identity offered to April. The fact that this is a ‘mistaken identity’ is significant in
positioning April’s identity in contrast to her sister’s. April has turned away from
all identifications with First Nations women, and believes herself to be immune
from their ‘fate’ as she puts it. Her identity construction at this point in the text
relies on her passing as non-Native. She wonders “how he knew I was partIndian. Just because I had long black hair?”(128). Engel and Munger state that
one’s “sense of self determines the perceptions of fairness and unfairness” (16).
April decided that she must have been known as a Native woman. If she
can position the assault as having been committed on a Native prostitute, she
can understand the violence with her internalized racist view of Native women’s
identity.® In turn, this separates April’s own self-identification with the person who
was attacked - April understands the assault to have happened to someone who
must not have deserved the same rights to protection. Even within the rape
scene, April comments on issues of rights: “he hit back much harder, as if he had
a right to do whatever he pleased” (128).^ April’s beliefs about her own rights
change depending on how she believes herself to be perceived by others, and
she has a form of relief when she finds out that the rape was supposed to
happen to a prostitute. This indicates April’s attitude about what treatment or
protection can be expected towards Native women, sex-trade workers, as

®See F ee’s discussion regarding April’s feelings about the rape (220-221).
^ This reference to colonisers’ ‘rights’ runs throughout the text and is an important questioning moment for
identity formation. This stresses the variation in legal subjectivity for both April and Cheryl. See for
exam ple p40 where April openly questions what her rights were in a situation.

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opposed to ‘passing’ Métis and white women. She has no positive
representations to draw on that say otherwise.
Destructive legal narratives position First Nations women as more
vulnerable to violence. ® These narratives do not resist notions of traditionalism,
nor decode images of identity, nor resist those constructions of identity that have
been brought forth in a setting of colonialism. Legal narratives are highly
susceptible to the coloniser’s construction of Native womanhood, and violent acts
against First Nations women perpetuate them. April Raintree’s sexual assault
ties her experience of violence to a narrative undeserving of protection or
respect. During her brutal rape she is called “bitch”(127), “a real fighting
squaw”(128), and “whore”(130). Her identity is used to imply that she is
somehow less deserving of access to safety. This is why rape is about law,
colonisation, racism, and sexism. The ability to access safety depends on your
identity as articulated to Lisamarie by her Aunt Trudy, “Honey ... if you were
some little white girl, that would be true. But you’re a mouthy Indian, and
everyone thinks we’re born sluts ... no one would have cared. You would have
been hurt or dead, and no one would have given a flying fuck” (255). Dumont
addresses this in her examination of the damaging identity boundaries created by
the label squaw: “As a young/ girl I held the image of that woman in my mind and
she became/ the measure of what I should never be” (18). Through such
See J. Fiske’s work on the creation o f unequal legal subjectivities for First Nations w om en within the
Canadian Courts. A s w ell see Patti Ginn’s work on legal subjectivities and the ability o f Native males to
call forth a legitimate subject o f ‘renewed’ native spirituality whereas Native w om en cannot do the same
with a notion o f fem inist identity. As well, The Story o f Jane D oe documents how in a situation o f rape,
violence, and sexuality there can be limitations o f choices o f identity available to be drawn upon. One
exam ple in Jane D oe was the woman w hose complaint o f sexual assault was not even documented because
o f the presence o f sex toys in her apartment. O f course, this could also turn into a conversation about sex
trade workers, race, and the disappearing women o f the Lower East Side in Vancouver.

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articulations, these authors explore the coloniser’s understanding of Native
women’s access to safety. This perspective seeks to set boundaries around both
internal and external expectations of agency for First Nations women.
Through transformative narratives, First Nations women authors can
challenge the harmful and negative colonial images and reclaim their rights to
create their own legal subjectivity. Engel and Munger highlight the role of law as
an integral player in this interaction between identity, boundaries, and perception:
the ‘mutually constitutive’ reiationship between law and its social
context... legal rights and social and cultural settings ‘mutuaily
shape’ one another.... Law is one of the elements that constitute
the categories and routines of everyday life; and, in turn, these very
categories and routines - and the individuals who participate in
them - give form and meaning to the law. The term ‘legal
consciousness’ is now widely used to characterize this two-way
process and the behaviour and cognition of the social actors who
participate in it. (11)
The above discussions of identities and narratives highlight the interaction
between self-perceptions and action. In this manner law contains elements of
“discourse, process, practice, and systems of domination and resistance" (Hirsch
and Lazarus-Black 4, emphasis added). Lazarus-Black goes on to state that law
both enforces a “subordinate subjectivity” by perpetuating the patriarchal
framework, but also provides the basic tools necessary to challenge this system
(6). For these reasons power, resistance, and identity can be linked to the notion
of a legai subject.
These authors all find their own ways to reply to the coloniser’s destructive
approach to First Nations women’s identity. They do so with their anger, their
articulation of injustice, and - ultimately - their transformation of the available

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images of sexual Native womanhood. For example, April accesses the legal
courts and is given a chance to reply with a narrative of survival. Most
importantly, her assault did not end in her death and she survives to provide her
own legal narrative, unlike Helen Betty Osborne. These authors also reply with
anger. As Dumont describes within her “Squaw Poems,” there is that key
moment when resistance is articulated: “But she breathed and drew inside her
fierce/ face and screamed till his image disappeared like vapour” (18). In the
Deity/Virgin transfiguration Mojica tells of the women who refused to be
Christianized and “in the high tablelands/ my sisters and 1/ refuse to weep,/ our
eyes, instead, spit fire” (36).

Lisamarie also uses anger as motivation

throughout Monkev Beach and Ma-ma-oo can see the power in this:
‘You been in a lot of trouble these days.’
I stared at my feet and waited for the lecture.
‘Your ba-ba-oo was a fighter too. Second war. I was so proud of him.’
(173)
Moses points out that these moments in dissenting fictions are forged in struggle
and they “posit a dissenting subject, a subject who is an agent in her (or his) own
construction and who positions herself in relation to historical experience and
current forces that would determine her identity” (12). These moments seek to
alter the monologue of the coloniser.
Resistance is found in a direct dialogue with the coloniser(s). Lisamarie’s
confrontation with a carload of men eerily mimics real events:
All three guys in the car were wearing black baseball caps and sunglasses
even though it was cloudy. I couldn’t tell what colour their hair was, and
there was mud all over their license plates. One of them had a black
moustache, but it was obviously fake. (250)

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Robinson gives Lisamarie the opportunity to reply to the group of men in the car,
and she does so with a vengeance: “Yeah, show me what a man you are,
dickless” (251). Her encounter with the men has her articulating the true
cowardly behaviour of such men, “Yeah, you’re so brave with a girl, aren’t you,
asswipe? Can’t stand up to someone your own size, can you? Cowards like you
gotta pick on girls to feel like men” (250). These are the articulations of the
struggle, of the battle. April did not have the same anger, but she is able to
survive the painful story so similar to that of Helen Betty Osborne. She survives
and is able to tell her story to police, have it taken seriously, and have her story
validated as a legal narrative. She is also able to articulate her own private reply
to the rapists. During one of her ritualistic baths she screams “you bastards! You
lousy dirty bastards. I wish you were all dead!” (164). After the guilty verdict she
“sighed with relief. Justice, to a certain point, had been done” (170). Unlike
Helen Betty Osborne, April and Lisamarie survived and had the opportunity to
reply to these men. Through these articulations of literature, these two
characters are able to create the space of justified anger and rebuttal and a
refusal to be constructed solely within the coloniser’s perspective.
Mojica further disrupts the coloniser’s construction of First Nations
women’s identities. She calls upon the audience to resist the damaging images;
instead, she invites the audience to view the performances as a transformation of
identity construction. The opening scene sets the tone clearly as Princess
Buttered-On-Both-Sides enters in a “white ‘buckskin’ dress and carrying an over­
sized ear of corn” (18). She offers up those visual cues which are supposed to

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remain subtle and unquestioned, here, for ridicule and spectacle. This trickster
character gees on to perform as the Cigar Store Squaw as a resistance to the
historical representations of Native women. The character exclaims to the
audience:
I wanna be the girl next door! (removes buckskin yoke in exasperation) I
wanna have lots and lots of blonde hair - great big blonde hair. I wanna
be - Doris Day, Farrah Fawcett, Daryl Hannah - Oh, you know the one Christie Brinkley! (hums “Uptown Girl” while putting on white buckskin
mini-dress) I wanna be a cover girl, a beauty queen. Miss America, Miss
North American Indian! (49)
In her transformation of the coloniser’s perspective, Mojica continually transforms
both subjects and objects on stage within view of the audience. She makes them
take part in the disruption of appearances and preconceived ideas. Mojica notes
in her preamble that the “Objects and set pieces appear to be one thing but
become something else; they can be turned inside-out to reveal another reality”
(17). Princess Pocahontas takes part in a creative re-examination of various
representations and is part of what Tompkins refers to as post-colonial
metatheatre (47). This is also what Bhabha calls “spectacular resistance”:
To the extent to which discourse is a form of defensive warfare, mimicry
marks those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility:
signs of spectacular resistance. When the words of the master become
the site of hybridity - the warlike sign of the Native - then we may not only
read between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality
that they so lucidly contain. (121)
While Mojica plays off the damaging images and “Princess Buttered-On-BothSides performs a Hollywood ‘Injun dance”’(19), the clichéd image must intersect
with the twists and turns of contemporary tensions as the Trickster goes on to
offer the audience “handfuls of cornnuts from the plastic bag she bought them in”

Payson 95

(18). Princess Pocahontas is a play within a play calling attention to its own selfreferentiality and asking the audience to do the same to their images and ideas
about the construction of First Nations womanhood.
Robinson also identifies and replies to the perspective of the coloniser. In
her short story “Queen of the North,” Robinson exposes Arnold’s attempt to
situate Karaoke firmly as the Other to be consumed, like fry bread. This is the
moment where literature offers an alternative reading of this attempted identity
construction. Arnold persists in understanding Karaoke as exotic and other, but
Karaoke replies to the reader rather than to the coloniser directly:
We said nothing more until I'd fried the last piece of bread. I handed him
the plate and bowed. I expected him to leave then, but he bowed back to
me and said, ‘thank you.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Thank you. The money's going to a good cause. It'll-’
‘How should I eat these?’ he interrupted me.
With your mouth, asshole. ‘Put some syrup on them, or jam, or honey.
Anything you want.’
‘Anything?’ he said, staring deep into my eyes.
Oh, barf. ‘Whatever.’ (208)
Robinson transforms this dialogue, not in the event itself, but in the words that
are written for Karaoke and the reader only. The coloniser is oblivious, but the
reader knows what has been said about him, and Robinson repositions the
coloniser’s perspective as ridiculous. This is a powerful unity created with the
reader which refuses an Othering of Karaoke and her identity, “‘Good-bye,
Arnold,’ I said, picking up the money and starting towards the cashiers. He said
something else but I kept on walking ...’’(“Queen” 208-9). Arnold wants to see

Payson 96

Karaoke as his own Pocahontas. By repositioning the gaze of the coloniser,
Robinson articulates the frustration in being placed within this positioning and
highlights the scene as absurd. She transforms the interaction and Karaoke
does not hear Arnold’s final words. Robinson silences the coloniser in the end.
In doing so, she creates the only legitimate dialogue as that existing between the
reader and Karaoke.

What Arnold “hears” is not the actual message and the

reader exists in a conspiracy relationship with both Karaoke and Robinson.
First Nations women writing erotica transform the landscape of what is
available to read as a representation of sexual desire outside the coloniser’s
binary. The coloniser, though, resists this transformation of representation.
Miranda argues that as Native women’s love poetry and erotics become visible,
so too do the histories of violence and gendered colonisation. She reasons that
“we cannot be allowed to see Indigenous women in all their erotic glory without
also seeing and acknowledging all that has been done to make those women their bodies and culture - extinct” (145). This is unsettling to the coloniser, and
Miranda notes that the articulation of Native women’s stories risk threatening the
greater national identities with “the jarring intersection of a democratic ‘nation’
and genocide”(145). Love poetry and erotics transform First Nations women’s
representation by forming new links and connections to their sexual desire and
passion. Reading and writing these stories make a “more ‘real,’ less
stereotypical, artificially constructed American Indian woman visible” (Miranda
145).

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Akiwenzie-Damm approached her collection of Indigenous Erotica as
counterstory to articulate these missing representations. She states that “from
the outset, the intention of the project was to advance an alternative to some of
the stereotypes and misconceptions about indigenous peoples, particularly with
regards to relationship and sexuality” (Addressing 146). The ability to write and
collect this material is a struggle. Akiwenzie-Damm acknowledges the internal
and external barriers to produce this writing without feeling judged or ashamed.
But Miranda states that “the repression of such writing accomplishes nothing less
than the shutting down of our best writers based on fears of the transformational
potential of their work” (147). With respect to her erotic writing, Akiwenzie-Damm
states, “In my own work, I believe I am finally breaking through most barriers and
can write freely” (Addressing 150-151). In doing so. First Nations women writers
transform the availability of positive passionate representations of Native
women’s sexual desires - desires which are not produced and consumed by the
coloniser’s perspective.
Having established the probable experience of living one’s whole life
without ever encountering “a single erotic poem or story by an Indigenous writer”
(143), Akiwenzie-Damm took control of the situation and began writing and
collecting these stories herself. Within her poem “daughter of Pele,” AkiwenzieDamm tells the reader “i am a volcano shuddering/ hot magma flowing beneath
the surface/ ready to erupt” (np). Akiwenzie-Damm’s reply is passion. The
literature of love and erotics is sexual desire not contained within the coloniser’s
binary. Again drawing on the heat and power of the volcano, Akiwenzie-Damm’s

Payson 98

“lehua flower” reveals that “I touched the lehua flower/ and recognized at once/
the vital beauty of woman” (np). The life-affirming power of passionate desire
stands in stark contrast to the goals of the coloniser. Akiwenzie-Damm links this
all to a refusal to partake in the genocide:
Neither the colonizing governments with their missions of genocide and
assimilation nor the missionaries with their sexually repressive dogma of
‘good and ‘evil cared to accept our attitudes to sexuality and certainly not
any open expression of it, cultural, artistic, creative or not! ... we were
supposed to vanish, to die, to assimilate into oblivion, not to procreate for
God’s sake! (Akiwenzie-Damm, Addressing. 145)
By doing so Akiwenzie-Damm has been able to place First Nations women’s
desire and sexuality within a broader community of erotic writing, and she works
to further that community by collecting and releasing her edition of Native
women’s erotics.®
Dumont celebrates Native womanhood in the poem “A Bowl of Smooth
Brown Wood” (42). She provides a swaying, curved, smooth, fertile, floral poem
in stark contrast to the harsh binary divisions offered in “Squaw Poems”(18).
After articulating the coloniser’s images of Native womanhood, she goes to
reinforce her own understanding and experience which values the “round, space
in the curve of, the curl of your belly bow, in the curl of your belly-body, arms and
legs, a bowl of smooth brown wood” (42). She speaks of the freedom in this
representation found in the “woman’s space, space free of rule or sin,/ free to
move, thrust out and back and around without censor” (42). Specifically Dumont
references the external viewership, but this time - unlike in Squaw Poems - she
excludes the coloniser. She states that this woman’s experience takes place
®In 2003 A kiwenzie-Dam m released Without Reservation: Indigenous Literary Erotica through her
publishing company K egedonce Press.

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“without viewer except the mind’s eye of the wise woman, the compassionate
woman inside who loves the gentle swish of her womb in hips free of scrutiny”
(42). This representation is being offered in a safe welcoming space that
reminds the reader that this body, this Native woman’s body, is able to be
imaged as a celebration. She stresses the timeless nature of this image; it is
“older than the memory of itself, the memory of itself changing” (42).
First Nations women writers resist and transform the coloniser’s
representation of Native womanhood. Through their production of questioning
and resistant texts these authors have challenged the colonial historical
production of First Nations women’s identities. By replacing stereotypical binary
options of Pocahontas or squaw with sexually positive erotics and transformative
narratives, they offer alternative expressions of Native womanhood. These
narratives also expose the relationship between identity and the production of a
legal narrative for women whose very Nativeness is encoded in law. In the
production of these texts, these authors propose an understanding of Native
womanhood from their own perspectives. Narratives are continually produced
and these “ever-changing stories give meaning to past experiences, prepare the
individual for future experiences, and help to integrate the individual’s
understanding of social interactions” (Engel and Munger 12). Specifically,
literature that disrupts the coloniser’s binary construction of First Nations
women’s gendered identity will also challenge their legal subjectivity. The
relationship between First Nations women’s identities and their legal narratives
reflects the manner in which law seeks to maintain binaries of representation.

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Chatterjee states that “law shows profound difficulties in reacting to nonbinaristic, fluid, post-modern subjectivities” (93) and that these transformative
narratives serve to solidify alternative legal narratives. As Nelson points out,
these literatures of resistance challenge the coloniser’s perspective by “rejecting
its assumptions that people with a particular group identity are to be subordinated
to others or denied access to personal and social goods” (8). Transformative
literature provides the reader with an ally in a renewed articulation of what it
means to be a Native woman. Acoose notes that through interaction with
resistant and transformative literature her students:
become encouraged and empowered because they understand that our
numerous cultures, languages, and belief systems have survived. Finding
reflections of that peculiar ideology within the literature encourages
students to understand that we are evolving, intelligent, and contributing
members of the world community. (37)
This produces alternative expectations for personal safety, expressions of
sexuality, and celebrations of identity.

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CONCLUSION: Provoking Narratives
The writings of Robinson, Culleton, Mojica, Dumont, and AkiwenzieDamm all add to a body of knowledge which resists the damaging history of
colonisation. Their narratives explore and articulate the ways in which
contemporary First Nations women still interact with a colonised subjectivity. By
highlighting this connection, these authors draw attention to the points of tension
between tradition and contemporary issues. In turn, the authors’ creation of
challenging, resistant, transformative, and celebratory narratives offers a
representation beyond a binary understanding of Native womanhood. By
resisting legal identities, these authors counter notions of us/them, inside/outside,
and simple divisions of who is and who is not Native. The transformative power
of language provides writing as a counterbalance to the already existing negative
representations which are firmly entrenched in various texts, including literature.
First Nations women writers expose the boundaries limiting the representations
of Native womanhood, but they also point to the difficulty in negotiating these
transformative texts and their feelings of responsibility to their communities and
families. These difficulties highlight the homogenizing effects of generalisations
in approaching First Nations literature.
While Third Space and hybridity counter the rigid ideas of binary divisions,
these discussions can sometimes risk only reinforcing the very boundaries they
seek to explode. This same tension exists for me in my exploration of First
Nations women’s literature. I have continually struggled to find a way to talk
about my experience of this literature without totalizing these women’s writing

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into pat categorisations. Dumont’s “The Devil’s Language” (54) states that “one
wrong sound and you’re shelved in the Native Literature section/ resistance
writing/ a mad Indian” (54). I tried in many ways to use language that reflects
various reactions and readings of these authors. I want to resist an academic
drive within me to locate hard and fast rules of conduct with the texts. Instead, I
wanted an interactive examination of the ongoing relationship between the
coloniser’s perspective and First Nations women’s creation of literary narratives
of self. The texts exposed moments of provocation, aggression, confusion, and
anger. The narratives created by First Nations women are complex
constructions incorporating the inherent difficulties of externally policed identities.
These are narratives of inspiration, rejuvenation, transformation, and - yes resistance.
Beatrice Culleton’s writing provides a space of awareness and healing by
identifying the damaging effects of racism and colonisation. The brutal honesty
of April is key in this discussion. By placing a character such as April alongside
Cheryl, Culleton explores very difficult questions about identity construction
within a context of racism and sexism. April’s difficulties in dealing with her own
Native identity, her anger, and her prejudice all stem from Culleton’s own
experience and loss. By producing a narrative that has crossed the boundary
from autobiography to narrative, Culleton re-examines the internalised messages
of race and gender. April struggles to make various connections to self and
identity within a context of law, violence, and colonisation. As character with a
shifting or confused identity, April can offer a more “complex and powerful

Payson103

understanding of her position” through her attempts to locate her own identity
within a shifting landscape of belonging and changing standpoint (Lenz 102).
The shifting self does not muddy the water, but rather it exposes the very real
situation of identity creation within fluid borders and shifting landscapes. This is
the struggle of attempting to categorise Native women within a context of
overbearing destructive legal narratives. In the end, April states that she does
this all “For my sister and her son. For my parents. For my people” (Culleton
228).
Eden Robinson’s writing draws from the strength and support of her family
and community. Her narratives reflect this connection as they provide the details
to keep her culture alive and moving forward in regenerative and challenging
ways. Her writing of family maintains a connection to the past. Ma-ma-oo
struggles to grant Lisamarie access to what is necessary to find the strength in
both her family traditions and her access to contemporary knowledge and
strength. In the hybridity of traditions and the contemporary fantastic, Lisamarie
locates her most powerful tools of survival and empowerment. She takes her
family history and combines it with strategic current images, creating a moment
of connection between tradition and contemporary interactions. In doing so,
Robinson creates a hybrid genre which explodes the coloniser’s bound notions of
First Nations literature and identity creation.
The poetry of Marilyn Dumont also juxtaposes images as a challenge to
the ludicrous nature of the binary. She articulates the physical effects of labels,
while using language to articulate the physical violence acted upon one woman.

Payson 104

In doing so, Dumont allows the reader to wonder with her what it would mean to
write that poem - what would it say to write a poem about Helen Betty Osborne.
In doing so, Dumont draws multi-generational connections between
contemporary First Nations women, a woman who was murdered in 1971, and
the grandmothers of the fur trade. In writing poems about language, violence,
beauty, and selfhood, Dumont positions First Nations women’s identity as an
ongoing contemporary discussion which continues to challenge the notion of a
frozen or unchanging First Nations womanhood.
Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots performs the
written word as resistance in an important re-examination of history, naming, and
transformation. As for the construction of traditional notions of identity with this
text, it is done with tongue planted quite firmly in cheek. The play performs
multiple layerings of messages and the set, costumes and props themselves all
transform as well as the roles of the two women within the play. The mimicking
theatre being presented within the play of Princess Pocahontas is a resistant
strategy. The two women of the play are then, in turn, playing multiple roles giving the two “contemporary native women” a connection to all the cumulative
historical images of First Nations womanhood and, in turn, giving these women
active roles in the construction of their current identities. Their transformative
performance of multiple roles places the notion of rigid identity into contention. In
turn, this approach to identity is then reflected in a fluid approach to other items
which may be thought of as ‘known.’

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Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm explores the significance of erotica and positive
sexual representations for First Nations women. The coloniser’s ongoing
viewership of First Nations women’s sexuality only exists within a damaging
binary of squaw/whore or Indian princess - and neither of these options offers a
full representation of Native womanhood. In the end, the history of such naming
has resulted in a limited legal narrative concerning protection and respect for
First Nations women. Akiwenzie-Damm confirms the limiting effect of this binary
and seeks to explode these boundaries with her collections of erotic writing.
Positive sensual representations provide a space of provocative and challenging
renewal for First Nations women’s sexual identities. When looking at erotica and
the issues surrounding its production, collection and distribution, AkinwenzieDamm immediately locates the power in these narratives beyond the coloniser’s
binary:
Very clearly that this is a huge political statement. To reclaim and
express our sexuality is part of the larger path to de-colonisation and
freedom .... we’ll not only free our minds, we’ll free our bodies, our spirits,
our whole selves. We’ll live without reservation. (Addressing 151)

Payson106

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