Native writers educating white public

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OPINION

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting (in my Native Studies 211 Class) Lee Maracle's Saskatoon visit, co-sponsored by the Native Studies Department and the Press Gang Publishers.

Maracle, one of Canada's most prolific Native writers, is described by Press Gang Publishers as "a gifted orator and an acclaimed writer and poet." In addition to Ravensong, the book she was promoting, Maracle has authored I Am Woman, Bobbie Lee: Indian Rebel, Sojourner's Truther and Other Stories, and Sundogs. She's been published in numerous anthologies and journals and has co-edited Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures.

As a teacher of literature within the university system, having books like Maracle's to work with encourages students (both Native and non-Native) to understand the totality and complexity of relations between Native peoples and Canada. Her books, like numerous other books authored by Native peoples, have raised the consciousness of many by calling attention to the peculiar situation of Native people in Canada.

Also, as a Native author, Maracle calls attention to what Metis writer Emma Larouque describes in Contemporary Challenges: Conversations With Canadian Native Authors as "a thousand angles from which to see Native people - our vastness, our diversity, our different personalities, never mind just plainly, our humanity."

Native writers like Lee Maracle are extremely important because previous to Maria Campbell's 1973 Halfbreed, our lives were written about and constructed by non-Native writers who knew little about our cultures or peoples. Consequently, our cultures have been misrepresented, distorted and fragmented; our being dehumanized and objectified."

The kinds of images created by white writers encourages powerful stereotypes that foster dangerously racist cultural attitudes. In The Disappearing Debate: Racism and Censorship, Marlene Nourbese Philip explains that "the danger with writers carrying their unfettered imaginations into another culture - particularly one like the Native Canadian culture - which theirs has oppressed and exploited, is that without careful thought, they are likely to perpetuate stereotypical and one-dimensional views of that culture.

As the Manitoba Justice Inquiry concluded in its 1991 report, stereotypes do foster dangerous and bizarre behaviors. That report concluded that in 1971 in La Pas, Man. Helen Betty Osborne, who was brutally beaten, sexually assaulted, and then murdered, "fell victim to vicious stereotypes born of ignorance and aggression when she was picked up by four drunken men looking for sex. Her attackers seemed to be operating on the assumption that Aboriginal women were promiscuous and open to enticement through alcohol or violence. It is obvious the men who abducted Osborne believed that young Aboriginal women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification."

In an article entitled A Theory of Literature in Society: The Hermeneutic Approach, Joan Rockwell explains that "what we read does affect us as a sort of persuasive experience." Using the universal existence of censorship as an example, she says that "all societies, or at least the policy-making rulers, believe that representations of human action, even when known to be fictional, may have some potentially dangerous influence on peoples beliefs, and consequently (possibly) on their social behavior."

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o in his essay on literature and society describes literature as "a subtle weapon because literature works through influencing emotions, the imagination, the consciousness of a people. "Thiong'o argues that literature "Shapes our attitudes of life" and that "the product of a writer's pen both reflects reality and also attempts to persuade us to take a certain attitude to that reality."

Remembering some of the things white writers wrote about us (which I was encouraged to read in university) really disturbed me. Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow says of an Indiancamp: "We watched the whole outfit as we would have watched ugly and perhaps dangerous animals from a blind. We could smell those camps a mile away with a clothespin on our noses," and the "hiverants" who "were the most Indian of the Metis" as "crawling and filthy, and the moral excesses of a people with few social-restrictions (who) were likely to sadden the travelling priests...The more Indian the Metis the more insatiable the desire for drink."

One of Canada's most esteemed authors, Margaret Laurence, writing about a fictional "French Halfbreed" family describes them as people whose "English was broken and full of obscenities. They did not belong among the Cree (or) the Scots-Irish and Ukranians...They were neither flesh, fowl, nor good salt herring. When their men were not working at odd jobs or as section hands on the CPR, they lived on relief."

With all of the horrific things written about us, I'd say that Native writers like Maracle have a lot of hard work ahead of them. But, keeping in mind that there are now

a whole army of Native writers like Jeannette Armstrong, Stan, Doug, Ruth, and Beth Cuthand, Louise Halfe, Lenore Keeshig, Tobias, Daniel Davis Moses, Jordan Wheller, Floyd Favel, Drew Taylor, Emma LaRocque, Beatrice Culleton, Thomas King, Basil Johnson, Tomson Highway, Ruby Slipperjack, Marie Baker, Brian Campbell, Sue Duranger, Pat Dieter-McArthur, Lynn Acoose, and Sky Blue Morin - to name just a few - I'd say that white Canadians are finally going to know us.