Literary Relationships:

Settler Feminist Readings of Visions of Justice in Indigenous Women’s First-Person Narratives

by

Élise Couture-Grondin

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

© Copyright by Élise Couture-Grondin 2018

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Literary Relationships:

Settler Feminist Readings of Visions of Justice in Indigenous Women’s First-Person Narratives

Élise Couture-Grondin

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways that stories by Indigenous women matter to decolonization

and reframe debates about transitional justice in Canada. My corpus is comprised of Indigenous

women’s life writing in Canada (in French and English) and in Guatemala (in Spanish) in the

1970s and 1980s, and epistolary exchanges published in Quebec between 2008 and 2016. Each

chapter addresses the relationships between author and audience—literary projects—and

between reader and text—ways of reading—to examine tensions and affinities in Indigenous and

settler engagements for justice. My readings respond to two intertwined objectives: prioritizing

Indigenous women writers’ visions of justice, while problematizing the position of settler critics’

and settlers’ feeling of what is right and just. My methodological approach juxtaposes feminist,

antiracist and decolonial theories with Indigenous women’s writing, in order to think with the

texts, and treat the stories themselves as theory.

In chapter one, I contend that Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony (1983) offers the reader a

text-based relationship rooted in her understanding of the incommensurability of the reader’s and

the author’s epistemological positions. In chapter two, I look at Indigenous and non-Indigenous

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writers’ relationship to territory in Aimititau! Parlons-nous! (2008) and explore how Nahka

Bertrand, Joan Pawnee-Parent and Rita Mestokosho’s unapologetic but generous voices relate to

non-Indigenous people’s discomfort with their positions as settlers. Chapter three discusses

Joséphine Bacon (2010), Rita Mestokosho (2011) and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s (2016) gesture

of friendship in their correspondence with Quebecois writers as a critical and unsettling mode of

relationships. In the final chapter, I propose a reciprocal reading that requires a displacement of

my academic voice and that takes seriously An Antane Kapesh’s (1976) and Mini Aodla

Freeman’s (1978) embodied writing about their experiences of colonialism. Throughout my

analyses of the texts, I propose a settler feminist approach that accounts for positionality,

grounds itself in embodied (self-) criticism and considers the materiality of literary relationships.

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Résumé

Cette thèse explore comment l’écriture littéraire de femmes autochtones joue un rôle dans

la décolonisation en redirigeant les priorités pour la justice dans le contexte de la justice

transitionnelle au Canada. Mon corpus comprend des récits de vie écrit par des femmes

autochtones en français et en anglais au Canada et en espagnol au Guatemala, publiés dans les

années 1970 et 1980, et des échanges épistolaires produit au Québec entre 2008 et 2016. Chaque

chapitre aborde les relations entre l’auteure et l’audience (les projets littéraires) et entre la

lectrice et le texte (les méthodologies de lecture) dans le but d’analyser des tensions et des

affinités entre les engagements des Autochtones et des non-Autochtones pour la justice. L’étude

répond à deux objectifs reliés : prioriser les visions de la justice des écrivaines autochtones et

problématiser les positions des critiques non-Autochtones ainsi que leurs sentiments à propos de

ce qui est juste. Mon approche méthodologique juxtapose les théories féministes, antiracistes et

décoloniales avec la littérature de femmes autochtones pour penser avec le texte et traiter les

textes littéraires comme théorie.

Dans le premier chapitre, je soutiens que le témoignage de Rigoberta Menchú (1983)

offre à la lectrice une relation ancrée dans le texte ainsi que dans sa compréhension de

l’incommensurabilité des positions épistémologiques occupées par l’auteure et la lectrice. Dans

le deuxième chapitre, j’analyse la relation au territoire qu’ont les écrivain·e·s autochtones et non-

autochtones dans Aimititau! Parlons-nous! (2008) et j’explore comment Nahka Bertrand, Joan

Pawnee-Parent et Rita Mestokosho entrent en relation avec les correspondant·e·s non

autochtones qui montrent un inconfort à occuper leur position comme settlers. Le chapitre trois

aborde le mouvement d’amitié comme un mode critique de relation dans les échanges

épistolaires de Joséphine Bacon (2010), Rita Mestokosho (2011) et Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s

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(2016) avec des écrivains québécois. Dans le dernier chapitre, je propose une lecture réciproque

qui requiert un déplacement de ma voix académique et prend au sérieux l’écriture ‘encorporée’

de l’expérience du colonialisme d’An Antane Kapesh (1976) et de Mini Aodla Freeman (1978).

À travers les analyses littéraires, je mets en pratique une approche féministe settler qui rend

compte de la positionalité, qui s’inscrit dans une (auto)critique ‘encorporée’ et qui considère la

matérialité des relations littéraires.

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Acknowledgments

This research project began as I came to be aware of the violence of past and ongoing

colonization in the Americas, in Canada and in Quebec. I turned to Indigenous women’s literary

and political voices to learn about the colonial history and the decolonial practices that unfold in

my own context and to unlearn what I knew about my relationship to this land. This research is

the result of my relationships to literary texts by Rigoberta Menchú, An Antane Kapesh, Mini

Aodla Freeman, Nakha Bertrand, Joan Pawnee-Parent, Rita Mestokosho, Joséphine Bacon and

Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. These relationships have changed me as a person, a feminist, a settler

and a scholar. I feel grateful for having had the opportunity to research, read and write about

these texts in Karonta and at home, in Teionitiohtia:ke. I have been marked by these texts and by

encounters at different events, conferences, manifestations, vigils, where I heard passionate and

brilliant Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, writers, students and leaders speak about their

visions of how we can transform ourselves and our communities. Some of these spaces where I

have found inspiration and motivation were Kwahiatonhk! Wendake’s Book Fair, the JHI

working group “Disruptions,” the Indigenous Literary Studies Association’s meetings, the World

Social Forum and the World Forum of Theology and Liberation, and the Kanien’kehá’ka

language class at La maison de l’amitié in Teionitiohtia:ke.

I thank the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, the Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario government for their

financial support, as well as my grandfather Armand Couture for his generous grant and his

encouragement throughout my graduate studies. I want to thank Juan Carlos Godenzzi who

guided me through the first steps of this research and encouraged me to engage in this journey. I

have learned quite a lot working with my supervisor Neil ten Kortenaar who pushed me to write

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with an authentic voice and whose ways of reading and of asking questions have not ceased to

impress me and guided me through this process. I was also delighted to work with Courtney Jung

and Julia Emberley who have been very supportive and offered useful advise. I thank Deanna

Reder who provided important feedback on the last version of this dissertation and made me

push my reflection further in chapter four. Thanks to Marlene Goldman and Ann Komaromi for

engaging with my work. My precious thanks to upstanding scholars and generous friends

Isabella Huberman, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard, Irina Sandinova and Toshi Tomori for stimulating

discussions, for reading and editing my work and for the laughs, dances and joy.

This thesis would not have been completed without the unwavering support of my family

and friends. My deepest thanks to my mother and late father for being a loving, creative and

feminist family, and special thanks to my mother for reading and engaging with my work in

passionate and rigorous ways and for sharing her experience as a professor and researcher. To

Louis, Geneviève and Félix, thank you for your care, energy and friendship. Julie, Maude,

Jacinthe, Lucia, Jonathan, Guillaume, Joannie, Charles, Jean-François, thank you for being there

all along and cheering me on when I needed it. Carlos, thank you for understanding how

important this project was to me. Thank you for your trust and your love.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... vi

Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... viii

INTRODUCTION. Relating to Indigenous Women’s Writing in the Post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission Context .......................................................................................... 1

i. Non-Indigenous Commitment to Decolonization .................................................................. 11

ii. Reading Indigenous Women Writing in Transitional Justice Contexts ............................... 16

iii. Readings of Indigenous Women’s Visions of Indigenous Polities ..................................... 23

iv. Indigenous Women’s Experience as Knowledge ................................................................ 27

v. Embodied and Embedded Positions: Feminist Readings of Difference ............................... 32

vi. Cultural Difference: Connecting the Non-Indigenous Position on Culture to Indigenous Women’s Critique of Cultural Forms of Justice ............................................................... 38

vii. Non-Indigenous Literary Criticism of Indigenous Texts ................................................... 44

viii. Reading Knowledges in Stories and Academic Works ..................................................... 49

ix. Outline ................................................................................................................................. 56

Affirmative Reading of Rigoberta Menchú’s Testimony: Epistemological CHAPTER 1.Difference in a Text-Based Relationship .................................................................................. 59

1.1 Introduction: The Everyday Violence of the Hierarchical Order ...................................... 59

1.2 A Feminist and Decolonial Approach to Difference ......................................................... 68

1.2.1 “A continuous relationship, between parts in parallel”: Connecting Menchú’s and Braidotti’s Theories of Difference .................................................................. 68

1.2.2 Culture Wars, Epistemological Turmoil: The Context of Reception .................... 76

1.3 Doing Justice to Testimonio: From Political Actions to the Politics of the Text .............. 82

1.4 Toward an Epistemological Ground Worthy of Menchú’s Justice Project ....................... 89

1.4.1 Redefining Culture Through Complexity .............................................................. 89

1.4.2 Engagement With the Text in Non-Oppositional Terms ....................................... 95

1.4.3 Rigoberta Menchú, The Author ........................................................................... 100

1.4.4 Subjectivity-In-Relation: Meeting Menchú Through Her Relationships ............ 102

1.5 Polyphony: Justice Made of Different Voices ................................................................. 106

1.6 Conclusion: Testimonio as a Text-Based Relationship ................................................... 111

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Territories of Relationships in Aimititau! Parlons-Nous!: Reading Tensions in CHAPTER 2.Epistolary Exchanges Between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Writers .............................. 116

2.1 Introduction: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Writers Meeting in the Literary Territory ........................................................................................................................... 116

2.1.1 Rethinking Relationships in the Transitional Justice Context ............................. 122

2.1.2 Discursive and Affective Relationships in the Epistolary Genre ........................ 126

2.2 How to Read Tensions? ................................................................................................... 129

2.2.1 We Share No Common Nature: Bruno Latour’s Concept of the Collective ....... 130

2.2.2 Indigenous Voices From Different Grounds ....................................................... 135

2.3 The Territory as Political Community ............................................................................. 139

2.3.1 Indigeneity and the Link to Nature ...................................................................... 139

2.3.2 “Don’t Pretend To Meet Me in The Wind”: Questioning The Idea of Nature as a Bridge ............................................................................................................... 140

2.4 The Territory as Multinaturecultural .............................................................................. 148

2.4.1 The Racialization of Indigeneity ......................................................................... 148

2.4.2 “You Don’t Know What It Is To Be Indian!”: The Experience of Racism ......... 151

2.5 The Territory As The Earth ............................................................................................. 159

2.5.1 Transforming Hierarchical Relationships ............................................................ 159

2.5.2 “Everything is Intimately Linked”: The Politics of Non-Humans ...................... 163

2.5.3 “Writing Is Living With Words In The Present”: The Act of Writing ................ 169

2.6 Conclusion: Reading Tensions as Respectful Disagreement .......................................... 176

Innu and Quebecois Writers Sharing Literary Projects: Reading Friendship as CHAPTER 3.a Critical Mode of Relationship .............................................................................................. 180

3.1 Introduction: Friendship as a Mode of Intercultural Relationship .................................. 180

3.2 How to Read Friendship? ................................................................................................ 186

3.2.1 Friendship as Affirmative Ethics and Critical Category ..................................... 186

3.2.2 Unsettling Critique with Embodiment and Relationality .................................... 187

3.2.3 Methodological Shift: “‘We’ Are in This Together” ........................................... 202

3.3 Uashtessiu: Lumière d’automne: Poetry as a Path and a Home ...................................... 206

3.4 Nous Sommes Tous des Sauvages: Sharing Authorial Voice ......................................... 219

3.5 Kuei à Toi: Conversation sur le Racisme: The Epistolary Exchange as Treaty .............. 231

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3.6 Conclusion: Literary Friendship as an Indigenous Project for Justice ............................ 247

“The Things I Know about How it Affects Me”: Meeting An Antane Kapesh CHAPTER 4.and Mini Aodla Freeman in their Literary Territory .............................................................. 251

4.1 Introduction: Understanding Our Literary Relationships ............................................... 251

4.2 Reciprocity as a Feminist and Decolonial Practice of Reading ....................................... 256

4.3 First Reading ................................................................................................................... 260

4.3.1 Their Analysis of (in) Present Time .................................................................... 260

4.3.2 The Settler I Am Not ........................................................................................... 262

4.3.3 The Texts’ Relationships to the Settler ............................................................... 264

4.4 Second Reading ............................................................................................................... 275

4.4.1 Their Critical Voice ............................................................................................. 275

4.4.2 A Long-Term Relationship With the Texts ......................................................... 276

4.4.3 The Authors’ Voices as Women .......................................................................... 277

4.5 Third Reading .................................................................................................................. 292

4.5.1 Their Literary Project .......................................................................................... 292

4.5.2 Making the Difficulty the Object of Analysis ..................................................... 293

4.5.3 The Spaces Where We Can Meet ........................................................................ 295

4.6 Conclusion: Meeting The Authors in Their Literary Territory ....................................... 304

CONCLUSION. AFFIRMATIVE READINGS OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S WRITING ........................ 307

WORKS CITED .......................................................................................................................... 324

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INTRODUCTION.

Relating to Indigenous Women’s Writing in the Post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission Context

In a keynote address showcased as one of the reconciliation events of the 2017 Congress

of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a non-Indigenous member of the audience asked Leanne

Simpson what, according to her, non-Indigenous people could do to participate in the process of

decolonization. The Nishnaabeg scholar refused to answer and said, “I don’t know. You have to

figure it out.”1 What can we do? commonly arises as a question in events featuring Indigenous

scholars or activists and attests to settlers’ desire to act upon what they are hearing.2 The

question seems to confer authority on the keynote speaker. However, it is so broadly framed that

it moves away from the subject matter of the talk itself and therefore from what the speaker

prioritizes.

Simpson’s talk was composed of four stories about land, bodies and resurgence, about

embodied and lived interpretations of Nishnaabeg knowledge.3 She started by addressing the

violence of cognitive imperialism which she defines, in Dancing on our Turtle’s Back (2011), as

1 “Freedom Sings: Land/Bodies/Resurgence” given at Ryerson University on May 28th, 2017. I am paraphrasing both the question and the answer. 2 The term “settler” acknowledges the historical and structural position of non-Indigenous people on Indigenous lands and the system of privilege and power they/we benefit from based on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. In this thesis, I write from my own position as a white settler, but settlers are also people of color and “arrivants” (Byrd), although their positions in the colonial system of privilege and power differ greatly. See Jodi A. Byrd for more discussions on the tension between structures of oppression that affect Indigenous peoples and those which affect “arrivants” and people of color in “multicultural” countries like the United States and Canada. 3 Specifically Michi Saagiig knowledge, that of the Anishinaabe of south-western Ontario from the Kawartha Lakes region.

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a mechanism of neo-assimilation coming from the belief that only Western knowledge is valid:

“In both subtle and overt ways, the current generation of Indigenous Peoples has been repeatedly

told that individually we are stupid, and that collectively our nations were and are void of higher

thought” (32).4 Cognitive imperialism has an impact on Indigenous peoples,5 according to her,

who become unable to see the various strategies of resistance, for instance, of Elders who

“‘protected’ their interpretations by embodying them and by living them” (19). Simpson insists

on the personal and embodied character of learning and change. In her work, she theorizes

Indigenous resistance to colonialism through Nishnaabeg concepts like “biskaabiiyang” or “mino

bimaadiziwin”6 and she contends, “Indigenous thought can only be learned through the personal;

this is because our greatest influence is on ourselves, and because living in a good way is an

incredible disruption of the colonial metanarrative in and of itself” (41). Simpson prioritizes the

transformations of Indigenous spaces through the subject’s enactment of Indigenous

epistemologies and ontologies.

4 See also Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Marie Battiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Henderson. 5 I use the term “Indigenous peoples,” following the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Canada, Indigenous peoples include First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. The government of Canada has recently changed (in 2015) its usage from “Aboriginal” to “Indigenous” renaming the Indigenous and Northern Affairs. When possible, I privilege using the name of the people. 6 Simpson explains that “Biskaabiiyang” means to look back and adds that it has been used in the same way Indigenous scholars have used “decolonizing,” that is, “to pick up the things we were forced to leave behind, whether they are songs, dances, values, or philosophies, and bring them into existence in the future” (49-50). About “mino bimaadiziwin,” Simpson contends, “In order to have a positive identity we have to be living in ways that illuminate that identity, and that propels us toward mino bimaadiziwin, the good life” (13). These concepts are important, according to her, because they are linked to the diverse ways to be Nishnaabe and because their meanings have local resonances.

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Her choice to present four stories in her keynote address, including short stories and a

video, instead of using the academic language of her book, designates these forms as spaces of

knowledge and of justice. She theorizes this decision:

Storytelling is at its core decolonizing, because it is a process of remembering, visioning

and creating a just reality where Nishnaabeg live as both Nishnaabeg and peoples.

Storytelling then becomes a lens through which we can envision our way out of cognitive

imperialism, where we can create models and mirrors where none existed, and where we

can experience the spaces of freedom and justice. (33)

Simpson’s understanding of the practice of reading or listening to stories is also specific to

Nishnaabeg epistemology and lived relationships. She argues that the meaning of one story is not

transparent or contained in a single interpretation, but depends significantly on the listener: “It

can take many years after hearing a story to know the meaning of that story in one’s heart […]

Elders are constantly telling us (particularly writers and academics) that one has to live the

knowledge in order to know it” (104). The meaning does not emerge from the story, but from

how the Nishnaabeg listener lives in relationship with the story. The belief that stories are spaces

of knowledge production that inform decolonizing struggles, attached to particular local and

global contexts, is not irremediably attached to the stories themselves, but to listeners who learn

this subjective and shared knowledge. If Simpson speaks specifically about the Nishbaabeg

context, I ask: How can non-Indigenous people become listeners to Indigenous stories from their

own positions? How to theorize/live the relationship between Indigenous stories and non-

Indigenous responses to them?

In the context of Simpson’s talk, the question What can we do? reveals the tension

between “reconciliation” as a primarily non-Indigenous justice project of renewing relationships

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between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples, even when attempting to put Indigenous

perspectives at the centre, and resurgence as an Indigenous project concerned, not with “trying to

transform the colonial outside [settler structures and subjects],” but with “a flourishment of the

Indigenous inside [Indigenous communities and subjects]” (Simpson 17, emphasis in the

original). Simpson’s conception of resurgence can explain her refusal to answer the question

about what settlers can do in the first place. In this regard, the interaction brings up another

concern: What does resurgence mean politically and methodologically for non-Indigenous

people engaged in transforming colonial dynamics? I begin my thesis with this instance of an

“academic reconciliation event” because it depicts non-Indigenous people’s (and institutions’)

urge to act upon the challenge of decolonizing, but also points to the absence of an answer to

what decolonization means, or more precisely, to the various local, embodied and embedded,7

possible answers. Simpson asked the audience to take responsibility and perhaps, as it seemed to

me, to be better listeners. What types of response can settler people/activists/scholars offer to the

affirmation and the exercise of Indigenous stories as decolonizing? More precisely, in this thesis,

I ask how to read Indigenous texts, particularly those written by Indigenous women, from a

settler position that uses critical tools from feminist, antiracist, and decolonial methodologies.

***

This thesis explores the ways that stories by Indigenous women matter to decolonization

and reframe debates about transitional justice in Canada. Each chapter addresses the

relationships between author and audience—literary projects—and between reader and text—

ways of reading—to examine tensions and affinities in Indigenous and settler engagements for

7 I use these concepts “embodied and embedded” following Rosi Braidotti’s usage. See more on these terms in section v.

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justice. My objectives are two-fold: firstly, I analyze how Indigenous women’s writing reframes

practices and theories of justice in the context of transitional justice in order to underline what

these texts prioritize, and how they establish relationships with the readers. Secondly, I seek to

be accountable in my literary analyses to the relationships that are created when researching,

writing and reading Indigenous women’s texts from a feminist settler position of commitment to

decolonization.

The corpus constitutes texts from two periods marked by the necessity to redress justice. I

read three texts from the 1970s and 1980s, decades in which many Indigenous people, including

Rigoberta Menchú, An Antane Kapesh and Mini Aodla Freeman, used life writing to denounce

ongoing colonial injustices across the Americas. I also read four collaborative epistolary volumes

produced in Quebec between 2008 and 2016, which corresponds to the period of activity of the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada: Aimititau! Parlons-nous!, a collection of

correspondence between twenty-nine Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, was followed by

Uashtessiu. Lumière d’automne, by Rita Mestokosho and Jean Désy; Nous sommes tous des

sauvages by Joséphine Bacon and José Acquelin; and Kuei, je te salue. Conversation sur le

racisme by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine and Deni Ellis Béchard. What appeals to me in these texts

is the enactment of interpersonal relationships within discursive and literary spaces.

Literary criticism, as a relationship, can be marked by invasion, appropriation,

imposition, respect, collaboration, or transformation; it is marked simultaneously by colonial

habits and by specific visions of (decolonial) justice. On the one hand, colonial habits encompass

Indigenous and non-Indigenous people’s conscious or unconscious ways of thinking, acting,

feeling and living relationships that are marked by binary oppositions, including between settler

and Indigenous cultures, literacy and orality, tradition and contemporaneity, that come with

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specific values organized in hierarchies.8 On the other hand, justice projects also drive settler

practices of reading Indigenous texts through, for instance, settlers’ desires to help, to raise

awareness, to find solutions, to reconcile, to meet the other, to criticize domination, and to

decolonize.

The question that directs my analyses—how to read—points to a methodological and

ethical challenge: how to produce knowledge or how to write on a text, and why does it matter.

My approach builds on a feminist engagement to produce knowledge from a situated position.

My discussion of the texts starts from my relationship to them and is limited to what I am able to

say, see and feel from my position. In order to unsettle colonial ways of thinking about literature,

experience, theory and Indigeneity, notably binary oppositions, I develop two strategies. First, I

juxtapose feminist, antiracist and decolonial theories by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars

with Indigenous women’s writing, to think with the text, treating the stories as theory. Second, I

privilege an analysis of complexity that accounts for the incommensurability of Indigenous and

non-Indigenous people’s positions as well as our complicity/co-implication in both colonial

reproduction and decolonial strategies.9 My analysis of the corpus can be situated in relation to

8 Sara Ahmed writes about habits in the article “Phenomenology of Whiteness.” She explains, “I will consider what ‘whiteness’ does without assuming whiteness as an ontological given, but as that which has been received, or become given, over time. Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space” (150). She argues, “Public spaces take shape through the habitual actions of bodies, such that the contours of space could be described as habitual. I turn to the concept of habits to theorize not so much how bodies acquire their shape, but how spaces acquire the shape of the bodies that ‘inhabit’ them” (156). For her, habits concern what “bodies do” and what “bodies can do” (156). 9 I put pronouns of the second person plural “we” and “our” in italics throughout the thesis to underline that they identify different groups. Often I use “we” to refer to non-Indigenous and Indigenous readers and literary critics, while always speaking from my position as a settler reader. When I use it in relation to a group in particular, I specify in the text: “We” sometimes refers to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to scholars, settler scholars, or settlers. The italics mark

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the fields of Indigenous Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, Feminist Studies and Transitional

Justice, and more specifically to feminist, antiracist and decolonial critiques internal to these

disciplines.

All writing involves interpersonal relationships, but life writing and epistolary exchanges,

the genres I focus on, foreground such relationships and are therefore ideal for asking how

Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can speak to each other. Constructed through the first-

person singular, they establish a relationship to a second-person singular, either the reader or the

correspondent. I propose to envision how the relationships between the subjects “I” and “you” in

the corpus can foster accountability in the readers. The texts I chose from Menchú, Kapesh and

Aodla Freeman all address the issue of relationships with ladinos/whites/qallunat, knowing these

will be part of the readership.10 These three writers offer narratives that are elaborated from the

construction of the subjective and political position, in the form of the first-person singular: I,

Rigoberta Menchú, Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, and My Life Among the Qallunaat. The

challenge for literary critics working with these texts is to go beyond the politics of raising

awareness within settler spaces to examine how the aesthetics are developed according to

specific visions of justice in Indigenous literary spaces. Indigenous women writers’ visions of

the necessity of thinking about the difference between these actors included in the “we,” as well as about how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are terms that describe heterogeneous groups. 10 I write “whites,” “white people,” “settlers,” with lower cases following Sara Ahmed and Janice Acoose’s usage. The latter explains, “in this book I deconstruct the authoritative centre of the white-eurocanadian-christian patriarchy by using lower case letters to signal a politically motivated de-authorization in my life and thought of the concepts that had for too long held too much power” (13). I capitalize “Indigenous,” “Innu,” “Maya Quiche,” and “Inuit.”

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justice include their conceptions of what the text—testimony, autobiography or memoir—can

do.11

In the epistolary exchanges, the “I” and the “you” are defined by whether the writers are

Indigenous or non-Indigenous. While authors know that a larger audience will read their

correspondence, they do not address these readers but the named person with whom they

establish a relationship, and to whom they are accountable. The idea of breaking the silence

between Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors and of building interpersonal relationships in

the literary field show how cultural differences and assumptions about culture complicate the

belief that in order to achieve justice (or in order to reconcile) we can just “all get along

together.” The construction of the writers’ subjective and political position depends on their

sense of belonging to a “common humanity” or to specific communities. The challenge for

literary criticism comes from the centrality of the notion of culture in both Indigenous and non-

Indigenous visions of justice, although Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of culture

and justice are incommensurable.

This thesis proposes to be attentive, then, to the types of relationships and to the

construction of subject positions that particular texts and readings invite. I explore in the four

11 These terms, testimony, autobiography, and memoir, are used to describe the genres of Menchú, Kapesh and Aodla Freeman’s texts respectively. Menchú is a predominant figure of the genre of testimonio, which emerged in Latin America in the 1970s, and I discuss further the importance of the genre in chapter one. In my analysis of Kapesh and Aodla Freeman’s texts, my objective is not to discuss the power of the text in relation to Western genres, but to examine their visions of what these texts can achieve. In the three cases, I am interested in how life writing produces knowledge and can be read as theories of transitional justice, colonialism or indigeneity. I use the term life-writing to encompass the different genres using the first-person singular and addressing personal experiences. As for the epistolary genre, the objective is not “writing one’s own life” but exchanging with another writer, but this genre also mobilizes the first-person singular in ways that put emphasis on the lived experience of the author.

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chapters that follow how readings may focus on Indigenous women’s position as subaltern,

victim, culturally different Indigenous subject, or human, readings which may downplay, it

seems to me, the significance of their literary production. I argue that Indigenous women writers

put forward visions of relational and local justice embedded in subjective and communal

knowledges. One way of reading Indigenous women’s writing from a settler position, I propose,

is to read these texts as theory, that is, as intellectual, critical and creative productions that

inform the readers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, about justice, colonialism, difference,

and relationships. Arguing that Indigenous stories may be read as theory requires destabilizing

what these categories mean.

Dian Million describes theorizing as a practice, “a strategic comprehension that may have

the power to change a paradigm or reinvest a political movement with a new vision to act”

(“Intense” 321, my emphasis). For her, part of this practice of theorizing is “intense dreaming”:

Dreaming to me is the effort to make sense of relations in the worlds we live, dreaming

and empathizing intensely our relations with past and present and the future without the

boundaries of linear time. Dreaming is a communicative sacred activity. Dreaming often

allows us to creatively sidestep all the neat little boxes that obscure larger relations and

syntheses of imagination. I also believe that dreaming, theory, narrative, and critical

thinking are not exclusive of each other. (“Intense” 314-315)

Dreaming, or this activity that makes other views available, is a practice which impacts on ways

of seeing, relating, thinking and acting. Scholars in Indigenous Literary Studies have criticized

the application of Western theories or critical categories to the analysis of Indigenous literatures.

The idea of grounding literary criticism in Indigenous theories is based on the recognition of

“orally based communal knowledges as organized narrative systems” (Million, “Intense” 322).

10

Indigenous stories are central to these narrative systems and they have the potential to dispute

common sense and reorient thinking.12 Million asserts, “Story is Indigenous theory” (“Intense”

322).

In addition to critical insights that can be found in Indigenous literary texts, I believe that

feminist, antiracist, decolonial perspectives—and theories by Rosi Braidotti, Dian Million,

Chandra Tapalde Mohanty, Joanne Barker, Bruno Latour, Shawn Wilson, among others—are

necessary in order to learn how to read these texts from a settler position because they provide

analysis of how colonial and patriarchal structures of power operate and are continually

reproduced. The texts’ critical insights resonate with, challenge, deepen or change our

comprehension of literature, relationships, gender justice, decolonization, Indigeneity and

transitional justice. The proposition that stories can be read as theory is significant in the field of

Indigenous Literary Studies because it challenges non-Indigenous conceptions of theory and

because it takes seriously the knowledge produced and shared in Indigenous women’s stories; it

is also significant in the field of justice because Indigenous women’s stories make justice by

opening to a field of contestation and transforming how we—Indigenous and non-Indigenous,

though in different ways—come to know and live the past, present and future. The texts’ justice-

making takes different forms and entails reactivating memory, advancing human rights, taking

responsibility, denouncing injustice, and envisioning other types of relationships.

12 The American critic Jonathan Culler defines theory as a genre that “has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong” (3). He gives the examples of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida who have influenced methodologies in literary studies. Culler adds, “The main effect of theory is the disputing of ‘common sense’: common-sense views about meaning, writing, literature, experience” (4).

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In this introduction, I situate my corpus and my approach in relation to different visions

of justice in the transitional justice and neoliberal contexts, in the fields of Indigenous Literary

Criticism, Feminisms, and Indigenous Studies.

i. Non-Indigenous Commitment to Decolonization

At an event on reconciliation in Montreal,13 Ellen Gabriel and Hayden King14 were asked

the same question as Leanne Simpson: What can we, non-Indigenous people, do? Ellen Gabriel

first refused to answer, but later offered, “There are so many issues. Be informed on these

issues.” She was referring not only to the conditions of life and the violence under which

Indigenous peoples are forced to live, but to the Canadian political, economic, and social systems

which continue to be based on elitism, hierarchies and discrimination, and on the exploitation

and destruction of the territory. For her, what non-Indigenous Canadians can do is not try to help

Indigenous peoples, but work to change Canadian politics. In turn, Hayden King answered that,

first, non-Indigenous people can try to build relationships with Indigenous peoples around them

and, second, to start looking critically at their institutions and change them. King added, “You

don’t need us to do that.”15 Gabriel and King asked non-Indigenous people to act locally, in their

own contexts, without having to rely on Indigenous peoples, who are already engaged in

transforming their own contexts, as well as in educating settlers, as in reconciliation events such

as this one.

13 Conversations on Reconciliation: “Tiotiá:ke and Mooniyaang: Land Acknowledgement.” Onishka, Indigenous Contemporary Scene, Montreal, June 9, 2017. 14 Ellen Gabriel is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) from Kanehsatà:ke who was an important leader during the Oka Crisis and has continued since to work as an activist. Hayden King is as an Anishinaabe writer, student and educator (see his blog https://biidwewidam.com). He is from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing (Christian Island) in Huronia, Ontario. 15 I am paraphrasing their answers.

12

Commenting on some settlers’ desire to move into action, Lee Maracle writes, in her

autobiography Bobbi Lee, “Don’t come to us saying, ‘what can we do to help’ […] You need to

challenge your friends, your family whenever they utter inhuman sentiments about some other

race of people,” and she adds, “so long as your own home needs cleaning, don’t come to mine,

broom in hand” (Bobbi 241).16 Maracle challenges the relationship that is created through the

struggle for justice in Canada between Canadians who help and Indigenous peoples who are

victims. For her, colonialism is a problem for all, Canadians as well as Indigenous: “If we are all

dead we cannot have peace. If we are allowed to die this country will be left with their violence.

They will be left with the memory of inactivity in the face of our genocide” (Bobbi 10). In

opposition to the inactivity of the Canadian people in the context of genocide, Indigenous

peoples have resisted and struggled against their programmed disappearance.17 Maracle contends

that the work of Indigenous activists to decolonize the country must be recognized by settlers

who, in turn, need to be more active against colonial violence.

Gabriel, King, and Maracle point to the settlers’ responsibility to act from their own

position. Likewise, Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill argue that settler scholars have to

take responsibility for being more creative in their engagement for justice:

One component of this challenge [of actively seeking alliances in which differences are

respected and issues of land and tribal belonging are not erased in order to create

solidarity] will be for allies who are settlers to become more familiar and more proactive

16 Lee Maracle wrote Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel in the 1970s but, because of problems with the editor Donald Barnett, it was published only in 1990 in a version that included an epilogue on many aspects that were left out in the first version. 17 Leanne Simpson and others argue that Indigenous mobilization did not start in the 1960s but 400 years ago, when contact first took place.

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in their critiques of settler colonialism, and to not rely upon Indigenous people to teach

them how to become effective allies. (19)

How to become more proactive is not simple because actions—including researching, writing

and reading—can reproduce colonial dynamics. Moreover, if settlers have to work from their

own contexts, they cannot engage in isolation, disconnected from Indigenous resurgence:

“Indigenous resurgence is ultimately about reframing the conversation around decolonization in

order to re-center and reinvigorate Indigenous nationhood” (Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel

18).18 Settlers engaged in decolonization cannot rely on Indigenous peoples to teach them, but

they need to learn to be witness to Indigenous resurgences, in order to reframe even what it

means to be proactive.

Sarah Hunt argues that “for non-indigenous people interested in engaging with

Indigenous ontologies, this may involve becoming unhinged, uncomfortable, or stepping beyond

the position of ‘expert’ in order to also be a witness or listener” (31). Yet, listening does not

come as a straightforward task. The critique of the position of “expert” concerns epistemology,

how knowledge is produced, but also how the subject is positioned as someone-who-knows;

according to Hunt, non-Indigenous people should “step beyond” that position. The capacity to

listen, or to read, is affected by previous knowledge, assumptions, and cultural standards.19 I

18 In turn, Corey Snelgrove, Rita Kaur Dhamoon and Jeff Corntassel argue that Indigenous resurgence should also be thought in relation to “the conditions and contingencies of settler colonialism, studies of settler colonialism and practices of solidarity” (4). Although the concept of resurgence invites us to conceive of Indigenous spaces as incommensurable to settler spaces, it cannot be disconnected from the conditions of domination caused by colonialism. 19 Janice Acoose argues that misrepresentations of Indigenous women in literature brings the necessity for the critics to challenge their assumptions, and “to think critically about the relationship between text and reader with a view to understanding how one’s own way of being, knowing, seeing, and understanding the world has been shaped and informed by literature, an

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propose that, more specifically, the objective is to become better “experts,” not founded on

authoritative knowledge, but rather on working on critical and creative skills in the engagement

against the reproduction of colonial structures and dynamics, including working on how to

listen/how to read.

Another challenge for non-Indigenous people committed to decolonizing, feeling the urge

to do something, is to accept that the outcome of decolonization is unknown. Eve Tuck and K.

Wayne Yang explain:

Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What

will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the

settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps

cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. (35, emphasis in

the original)

Along the same lines, Aman Sium, Chandni Desai and Eric Ritskes argue that we do not know

what decolonization looks like. “Decolonization is a messy, dynamic, and a contradictory

process” (II). They argue that definitions of decolonization, as well as of who is Indigenous,

remain open because Indigenous knowledges and decolonization are embedded in everyday life:

“the desired outcomes of decolonization are diverse and located at multiple sites in multiple

forms” (Ibid.). Decolonization is sustained by Indigenous knowledges, and these are diverse,

developing, and contextual. Perhaps, then, settlers’ ways to engage in decolonization are also

apparatus of the prevailing ideology which I have previously characterized as white-canadian-christian-patriarchal (40).

15

diverse, developing, and contextual, although these are incommensurable to Indigenous modes of

resistance.

I adopt the concept of incommensurability, used by various scholars of Indigenous

Studies such as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Jeff Corntassel, and Helen Hoy, who convey an

insurmountable divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples while encouraging non-

Indigenous scholars to work, engage, and relate to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous

epistemologies and ontologies responsibly. Incommensurability 1) insists on spaces of

knowledge that cannot be appropriated; 2) signals the impossibility of comparing and putting

differences on a single scale; and 3) accepts misunderstanding as a problem that does not have to

be resolved or reconciled. Acknowledging incommensurable relationships between Indigenous

peoples and settlers asks for an epistemological shift in which settlers are not the ones who

know, characterize differences and solve problems.

Corey Snelgrove, Rita Kaur Dhamoon and Jeff Corntassel contend, “solidarity between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples must be grounded in actual practices and place-based

relationships, and be approached as incommensurable but not incompatible” (3, my emphasis).

Through my reading of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony and her understanding of

incommensurability, I propose the term “text-based relationships” that makes me attentive to

different types of relationships and subject positions produced in literary and academic spaces,

and that considers the materiality of the texts written by Indigenous women. Relationships

between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are deployed in the texts, as well as in the

reading of Indigenous texts from a non-Indigenous position. To speak in terms of relationship is

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important to me, first of all, because it resonates with Indigenous epistemologies,20 and second,

because it underlines the impossibility of reflecting on settler colonialism, or on non-Indigenous

positions, without considering the connections to Indigenous peoples’ resistance to colonialism.

To analyze the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is complicated by

a double bind: the important task of getting rid of binary oppositions, including that between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and the crucial emphasis on the difference between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to avoid colonial dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and

appropriation, which undermine claims to self-determination. Following the work of Chandra

Tapalde Mohanty, Helen Hoy comments on this issue and argues that the divide between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples “misses… the necessary acknowledgment of ‘co-

implication,’ awareness of asymmetrical but mutually constitutive histories, relationships, and

responsibilities” (194 in Hoy 17). Our responsibilities, positions and visions are not the same,

but we are co-implicated in the colonial and decolonial practices of our time.21

ii. Reading Indigenous Women Writing in Transitional Justice Contexts

The project of reconciliation appeals to many Canadians and Canadian institutions,

including universities, which have committed to answering the Commission’s call to action, and

to Indigenous peoples who have seen an opportunity to bring forward Indigenous visions,

knowledges and practices. However, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have also largely

20 See Shawn Wilson, and the last section of the introduction. 21 I use italics for “our” and “we” to think about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are co-implicated in what I am describing and I use the italics to make us imagine all the dissensions that are part of these collective pronouns. In sum, the italics point to the incommensurability and co-implication of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. I am more specific when I use “we” to refer to non-Indigenous people or scholars.

17

criticized reconciliation for being superficially enacted,22 for distracting and downplaying

Indigenous claims to the restitution of the land,23 and for supporting a white vision of justice.24

Jeff Corntassel explains that there is no word for reconciliation in Indigenous languages, which

is for him, the “truest test of its lack of relevance to communities” (“Re-envisioning resurgence”

93). The critiques of reconciliation importantly reframe practices and theories of justice, in ways

that make it relevant to communities. At the same time, Indigenous peoples use the discourse on

reconciliation in ways that are relevant to them. I find it risky to stand behind a statement like

Corntassel’s, as a non-Indigenous scholar, and to dismiss the project of reconciliation altogether.

This is because any statement about what is relevant to entire communities will be met with

contradictions and dissension. The tension between criticism (in this case of reconciliation) and

lived affirmative practices is one issue I explore in my analysis of the epistolary exchanges in

chapters two and three. For now, I expand on some of the limits of reconciliation in the current

transitional justice context.

22 See, for instance, Leslie Thielen-Wilson who argues that reconciliation is superficial and contributes to giving a positive image of Canada instead of encouraging structural transformations. 23 Jeff Corntassel and Taiaiake Alfred argue that the discourse of reconciliation redirects the attention away from the claims to restitution of land. The TRC’s final report addresses the question of land and suggests that Canada should support a vision of Canadian sovereignty that is compatible with Indigenous sovereignty. They speak of the “lands we now share”: “Reconciliation must inspire Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples to transform Canadian society so that out children and grandchildren can live together in dignity, peace, and prosperity on these lands we now share” (Honouring 8). They also insist on the idea that reconciliation from an Indigenous perspective must include reconciliation with land, that is, a respectful relationship to land. Going further, however, Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang argue that decolonization “must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically” (“Decolonization” 7). 24 See, among others, Corntassel, Simpson, Coulthard, and Tuck and Yang.

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The dynamics of reconciliation events or literary texts are significant for encouraging

embodied and contextual forms of learning; yet they also foster the idea that reconciliation can

be an interpersonal, human relationship, which misses how colonialism historically and

structurally positions Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjects in relations of power (a question I

explore in depth in chapter 2). Reconciliation can easily shift to “moves to innocence,” which

evade settlers’ complicity with modes of colonial reproduction (Tuck and Yang,

“Decolonization”). While settlers can recognize “acute” forms of violence—for instance, abuses

in Indian Residential Schools in Canada or extreme violence against Indigenous communities

during the civil war in Guatemala—they often avoid recognizing their participation in colonial

structures of relationships that position settlers and Indigenous peoples according to specific

power and privileges (Nagy). Rosemary Nagy describes this “settler denial” as the “inability of

Whites in South Africa and non-Aboriginals in Canada to acknowledge the existence of and their

connection to systemic violence” (350). This means that transition from a context of abuses and

violence to one of defence of human rights can be done without questioning connected forms of

structural violence. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang sum up by arguing that reconciliation furthers

settler futurity while “decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity” (35).

Truth commissions are one of the mechanisms of accountability used in transitional

justice contexts. Jennifer Matsunaga defines transitional justice as “a complex form of political

and legal intervention used by state governments to redress state-sanctioned and large-scale

harms” (24).25 As a concept, transitional justice was used for the first time at the 1988 Aspen

25 Transitional justice has also been defined as the “judicial and non-judicial mechanisms of accountability introduced in the period of transformation from authoritarian to democratic government, or from a conflict society to a post-conflict society, in order to address earlier violations of human rights” (Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos 3) or as “a response to massive or

19

Institute Conference, where practitioners from different disciplines met in order to offer solutions

to the practical problems of these transitions (Arthur, “Transitions”). The objectives were to

stabilize internal politics and consolidate a liberal democracy based on human rights.26 Ruti

Teitel, who identifies three phases of transitional justice, situates the emergence of the field,

however, in the wake of the Second World War with the Nuremberg trials, and describes the

third phase as the humanitarian impulse to defend human rights in countries where there has

been no transition. This last phase includes settler states that have addressed the need for

reparations of the colonial harms.

Matsunga specifies that the projects of decolonization and of transitional justice are

incommensurable. Courtney Jung responds to the tensions that transitional justice mechanisms

create in relation to decolonial struggles by arguing that Indigenous peoples and the government

of Canada do not engage in transitional justice with the same objectives. For instance, for

Indigenous peoples, transitional justice can be a space to address a broad scope of issues

affecting their lives, connecting the past and present with their visions of an Indigenous futurity

and sovereignty, while the government may limit the scope of justice to addressing the policy of

residential schooling in a defence of human rights rather than Indigenous collective rights (Jung).

Jung distinguishes transitional justice from human rights, explaining that in the first case,

systematic violence of human rights that aims to recognize victims and to prevent the recurrence of abuse” (Arthur, Identities 1). 26 At the same time, socialism, including social democracy, had lost its legitimacy, and the need to address structural causes at the roots of violence had been downplayed (Teitel). Indeed, Paige Arthur explains that the terms “transition,” “democracy,” “human rights,” and “political changes” had been embedded in a situated and particular way of seeing justice, tied to the hegemony of liberal democracy in the post-Soviet era (“Transitions”). In most cases, transitions came with the implementation or development of neoliberal policies, which reinforced socio-economical inequities.

20

institutions are expected to be transformed: “The transitional justice framework is distinct from a

human rights framework to the extent it balances demands for criminal prosecutions against a

perceived need to sustain democratic institutions in a transitional setting where such institutions

may be fragile” (241). Therefore, the objectives of “peace” through consolidating institutions

and reaffirming national unity often outbalance the objectives of justice potentially achieved

through prosecutions or deep transformations of institutions and societal structures. The failure

to address structural injustices is one of the common criticisms of transitional justice.27

What most of the critiques of transitional justice and reconciliation miss, however, is that

the tension between Indigenous and settler futurity is gendered.28 Sam Grey and Alison James

propose the term “double settler denial” to refer to settlers’ blind spot concerning the centrality

of gender violence to the colonial project. For Christine Bell and Catherine O’Rouke, the central

problem concerns the conception of “transition.” They describe “a growing feminist unease with

the ‘from’ (male-defined political violence) and ‘to’ (liberal democratic framework) of

transitional justice discourse” (23). The vision of justice that sustains the mechanisms of

transitional justice treats gender analysis and women’s visions as secondary, for instance, in

definitions of what constitutes a crime and in appropriate responses to historical violence

(Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos). Therefore, there is a need for a feminist transitional justice that puts

gender justice at the centre of priorities. When “transition” means reparations for the colonial

harms in a settler state, it seems crucial to attend to Indigenous women and men’s understandings

of the desired change, conceived of as decolonization rather than transitional justice. The point in

27 Greg Grandin and Paige Arthur argue that transitional justice mechanisms should address socio-economic conditions. Balint, Evans, and McMillan propose a new model for transitional justice based on “structural justice,” which is, according to them, the priority for redressing colonial injustice in the context of Australia. 28 Transitional justice structurally excludes women (Franke; Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos).

21

insisting on the incommensurability of decolonization and transitional justice is also to situate

Indigenous peoples’ struggle for self-determination, and against colonial violence, as well as

their participation in transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions, as inscribed in a

history of Indigenous men and women’s actions and strategies of resistance, instead of as

emerging in a time when settler states decide to support reconciliation. Yet, Indigenous feminists

have also pointed to how decolonial struggles have deprioritized gender justice, arguing that

women’s concerns were individual ones rather than collective or that their demands would be

meet once decolonization was achieved. If transitional justice is criticized for being implicated in

the patriarchal and neoliberal structures of the government (Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos), there is

also a need to be critical of the ways in which decolonial struggles have excluded Indigenous

women’s strategies of resistance, demands for security within and outside their communities, and

visions of Indigenous futurity.

In the chapters that follow, I situate Indigenous women’s writing in relation to transitional

justice contexts in Canada and Guatemala. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

(2009-2015, TRC) and the Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico in Guatemala (1996-1999,

CEH) have provided particular readings of colonial injustices that have been central to

institutional strategies to address past and present colonial harms. Yet, governments are often

reluctant to implement the Commissions’ recommendations.29 The final reports produced by

these Commissions should be distinguished, therefore, from the political and social contexts in

which they are received, read and implemented or not. The final reports’ analyses hold

institutional legitimacy without being attached to the government’s control or even to its

endorsement. In Guatemala, Memoria del Silencio connects the violence of the civil war, during

29 See Fullard and Rousseau in the case of Guatemala.

22

which 629 massacres of Indigenous communities were committed, to historical and colonial

violence, concluding that these massacres constitute genocide—a conclusion that the government

has refused to endorse. In Canada, the TRC’s final report participated in redressing history,

educating the greater public about colonial history and providing a vision of reconciliation that

would not be superficial: the final report responded to many criticisms that had been developed

since the institution of the Commission, for instance, underlining the importance of defining

reconciliation from Indigenous perspectives, knowledges, and relationship to the land, of

addressing ongoing colonial violence and inequalities, and criticizing the lack of political will. It

is important to stress, however, that, in both Guatemala and Canada, the final reports and the

methodology used by these Commissions lack a gender analysis.30 These commissions provide

particular readings of injustice and visions of justice that mark our time, but they cannot be the

only way to imagine decolonial justice or the only mechanism of accountability to hold settler

people and government responsible for colonial harms.

Reading texts by Indigenous writers, and specifically by Indigenous women, produced

before and during the truth and reconciliation commissions, may expand our conceptions of

“transition” and of “justice.” I insist that Indigenous leaders, writers, and activists are active

agents in transitional justice contexts, even when their work does not take the directions of

institutional strategies. For instance, Ronald Niezen affirms that the TRC privileged testimonies

about the experience of Survivors31 of residential schools, but explains that some of Survivors

took the opportunity to talk about “another significant priority, usually something that produced

in them a sense of outrage comparable to, or even greater than, that of their school experience”

30 See Grey and James, in the case of the TRC. 31 I capitalize “Survivor(s)” following the final report of the TRC, which uses this term to talk about the former students of the Canada’s residential schools.

23

(99). Examples include the plea of a mother whose child had been taken into custody, the

personal feeling of injustice caused by the disruption of traditional forms of governance, the high

representation and mortality rate of Native women in jail, and experiences of trouble with the

law and of racism in the workplace (Niezen 100-101). These are all narratives of injustices that

were unexpected in the commission’s settings but crucial to the ways in which Survivors imagine

justice for themselves. Reading Indigenous texts in relation to transitional justice aims at

changing the focus from what the non-Indigenous project of reconciliation enables to the past

and present work of Indigenous subjects. While my analysis aims at privileging how the texts

matter to Indigenous ways of envisioning justice, rather than situating them in relation to non-

Indigenous audiences and Canadian politics of reconciliation alone, my thesis seeks to contribute

the field of non-Indigenous literary criticism of Indigenous texts by theorizing the limits and

possibilities of non-Indigenous readings of these visions of justice.

iii. Readings of Indigenous Women’s Visions of Indigenous Polities

Dian Million explains that truth commissions as the TRC are a product of our time, “an

age of human rights, global violence, mass media, and neoliberalism” (Therapeutic 2), and

“appear to represent our human desires for a just peace in what appears to be an increasingly

brutal world” (Ibid.). Million argues that justice claims based on Indigenous trauma and those

based on the rights to self-determination, both based in the same context of international law, are

not “necessarily compatible projects” (Therapeutic 3). In what Million calls the “therapeutic

culture,” characterized by the politics of wellness and the emphasis on self-care, the ways in

which we read narratives of violence, injustices or trauma turn self-determination into a project

of healing that resonates with the neoliberal interest in self-management.

24

In this context, Dian Million argues that Indigenous women’s writing addresses colonial

injustices but also offers alternative models: “Indigenous women have articulated the pain and

violence of colonization. But […] they are also ardent and eloquent in posing alternative

Indigenous polities” (Therapeutic 55). The challenge is to read these alternative Indigenous

polities taking into account that the logic of trauma produces the figure of the victim, and that the

neoliberal logic makes the responsibility for dysfunction fall on Indigenous communities. One

objective in insisting on visions of justice in Indigenous women’s writing is to avoid a reading

that focuses on Indigenous women as victims of colonialism.

In the 1970s, many Indigenous women wrote their memoirs, autobiographies and

testimonies using the first-person singular and “this ‘bearing witness’ occurred at a moment

when international rights movements solicited such personal voices” (Million, Therapeutic 57).

According to Million, after the Second World War, the Canadian state had become aware of its

marginalized subjects, but the state understood the “Indian problem” through the concept of

anomie, that is, the incapacity to adapt to society. From the 1970s on, however, discourses that

denounced colonialism shifted to see Canada as a perpetrator of injustices and Indigenous

peoples as victims of them. Showing the devastating effects of colonialism has become central to

the task of raising awareness. Yet, as Million argues, “the damage was to their selves, to their

self-esteem and worth” (Therapeutic 88). Moreover, assuming victimhood undermines

Indigenous peoples’ goal to ask for “a greater degree of autonomy, self-determination, and

sovereignty” (Therapeutic 81). Eve Tuck questions the belief that “stories of damage” pay off in

reparations: “are the wins worth the long term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged?”

(“Suspending” 415). For her, these stories are based on a particular theory of change that

requires Indigenous peoples to think of themselves as broken, that sees change as produced by

outsiders rather than by communities, and that hinges on humanizing the oppressed. For her,

25

raising awareness does not necessarily bring change. Rather, she proposes an approach that starts

with Indigenous gendered subjectivity, focusing on the subjective aspect of change.32

In addition to the problems related to thinking of Indigenous subjects as damaged,

Million affirms that considering Indigenous peoples as autonomous is also intertwined in specific

ways with neoliberal logics. The state became receptive to Indigenous peoples’ demand for self-

determination at the same time as it adopted neoliberal reforms in the 1970s on. Yet, the state

understood the demand for more autonomy by putting the responsibility on First Nations

governments to solve their problems: “government programs for health and education were also

slated to return to the community for administration, touted as moves for self-determination”

(Therapeutic 19). The return of the administration of their own affairs to communities transferred

the responsibility for well-being. Million adds,

In both Canada and the United States, at the same moment that we work to “heal,” we are

continuously assailed by the ongoing damages that are wreaked by racism, gender

violence, political powerlessness, and the continuing breakdown of our affective

networks, our communities, and our families. (Therapeutic 20)

In this new context, dysfunction becomes a consequence of the inability of self-governing

Indigenous individuals or singular communities to self-manage and to heal, instead of a

consequence of past and present colonialism (Million, Therapeutic 111).

32 Tuck’s argument resonates with other works that privilege a focus inward, notably by Leanne Simpson. See also Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, which addresses the tension between demanding the state’s recognition for rights and working within Indigenous contexts.

26

For Million, Indigenous women writers have articulated victimhood and the process of

healing in their own ways, presenting an “enduring vision for a polity, one whose values could

inform an Indigenous self-determination” (Therapeutic 117). A reading that focuses on damage

and healing risks reifying Indigenous identity as broken and putting responsibility on individuals

instead of fostering a critique of ongoing structural discrimination. In Rigoberta Menchú, An

Antane Kapesh and Mini Aodla Freeman’s texts, dysfunction and damage clearly come as a

consequence of colonialism, and the articulation of pain and violence is part of their literary

project of envisioning justice. Analyses of these texts must challenge the relationships between

subaltern and intellectual, victim and perpetrator, culturally different speaker and readers who

defend human rights, the humanized and the humanitarian, which tends to situate justice in non-

Indigenous spaces.

For Million, at the same time as Indigenous women write about their experiences of

victimhood, damage or healing in ways that may feed colonial logic, they also articulate visions

of justice that are attached to Indigenous polities or ways of living. This argument is crucial

because Indigenous women’s concerns have often been dismissed on the basis of being complicit

with Western individualism. Million proposes to consider that Indigenous cultures hold “the

intense imaginary affective dreaming power of the people’s will to live and thrive” and as a

“space where we create and negotiate multiple subjectivities” (Therapeutic 166). Cultural

productions as subjective sites of affirmation contradict the reading of Indigenous subjects as

solely damaged or broken, and insist on their desire and capacity to activate Indigenous

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polities.33 Million offers an important understanding of the affective power of Indigenous

desires, imagination and visions:

While the therapeutic turn appears to show great concern for our emotional well-being,

less is understood about how affect charges positive moments, not just compromising

ones. Affectively formed proposition, that is, dreaming (literally and figuratively) and

action partake in these same intensities; the potential of Indigenous imaginaries, intense

desires for holistic societies, or for societies with different political imagination informing

them, have impact. There is in fact no shortage of these imaginaries, but not as much

belief in affectively informed Indigenous conceptual frames. (Therapeutic 50)

Looking for visions of justice in Indigenous women’s writing as activating Indigenous polities

acknowledges the affectively informed Indigenous conceptual frames.

iv. Indigenous Women’s Experience as Knowledge

My corpus presents first-person narratives, in which the experience of the author is

central to the production of knowledge.34 Rigoberta Menchú, An Antane Kapesh and Mini Aodla

Freeman speak of cultural traditions in relation to colonialism and to the imposition of the white

settler culture. Through their description of the effects of colonialism on their lives, they offer

alternative interpretations of colonial history that situate their lived experience as well as

Indigenous governance, epistemologies and beliefs in relation to the present state of colonial

relations. Jo-Ann Episkenew argues, “Indigenous autobiography is not merely a retelling of

33 See also Tuck’s proposition for “desire-based research frameworks” (“Suspending”). 34 For more on non-fiction and the importance of developing a critical notion of experience when analysing these texts, see Robert Warrior, The People and the Word.

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colonial horror stories, however. It also depicts the resilience of Indigenous people and

articulates their emotions in a way that inspires hope in its readers” (73-74).35 She understands

the healing power of stories through the relationships it creates with readers. Yet, for her,

Indigenous autobiography goes beyond the individual subject and has an impact on the

community: “Indigenous autobiography goes beyond catharsis. It is an act of imagination that

inspires social regeneration by providing eyewitness testimony to historical injustices” (75).

Autobiography as an “act of imagination” providing “eyewitness testimony” seems to be

enlarged to Indigenous literature. Episkenew comments on Indigenous readings of these texts:

Reading Indigenous literature helps Indigenous people understand how colonial public

policies have affected our relatives in the past and continue to affect us in the present. In

the process of “reading for our lives,” we reassemble our individual and collective

memories to gain a sense of both personal and community control, thereby reclaiming the

Indigenous knowledges that colonial policies attempted to eradicate, clarifying feelings

about self and community, and validating Indigenous ideas, values, and beliefs. (16,

emphasis added)

35 Indigenous autobiography cannot be analyzed according to Western theories about autobiography. Diane Boudreau notes, for instance, “It is clear that An Antane Kapesh does not write to satisfy the vain feelings of the self-obsessed individual who seeks glory and notoriety, but to fight for collective survival” (126, my translation). For her, what distinguishes Indigenous autobiographies is that they are attached to the collective. Warren Cariou speaks of “life-telling” which crosses boundaries between writing and oral forms. For him, it is particularly important to focus on “oral narration of our lives” in the context of Indigenous cultures: “I argue that each example of life-telling is fundamentally a performance of cultural sovereignty and community self-determination, first because the storyteller’s act of telling the story is an affirmation of the continued value of Indigenous oral forms of knowledge, and second because the continued life of the story depends upon members of the community to do the work of remembering” (315). Many Indigenous scholars point to the importance of lived experience in stories, notably Dian Million who uses the term “literature of experience” to describe Indigenous women’s writing, or Robert Warrior who contends that we must develop a critical notion of experience in order to analyze Indigenous non-fictional literatures.

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Indigenous literature is not only a description but a theory of colonialism, in which lived

experience is crucial.36 For Lee Maracle, Indigenous women’s first-person narratives are creative

non-fiction based on Indigenous knowledges: “Creative non-fiction is bound by the original

foundations handed to us by ancestors, ceremony, laws, and our relationship to creation. We

place our obligations before us when we re-member. To what end do I wish to re-create this

moment? What direction do I wish this memory to travel in the future?” (Memory 3). Episkenew

and Maracle insist on the effects of the texts on readers, that is, on their role in the community.

These texts do not present a transparent experience, accessible to readers, but create a discourse

tied to Indigenous intellectual traditions and to literary traditions (to specific genres, fiction or

non-fiction, and the editing process). Menchú, Kapesh and Aodla Freeman’s texts use the forms

of testimony, autobiography and memoirs while encoding subjective and shared Indigenous

knowledges; their first-person narratives are discursive productions that matter to them as

Indigenous women subjects.

How to read experience in first-person narratives, and more broadly in Indigenous

literatures? In the article “The Evidence of Experience,” Joan Scott explains that there are two

possible ways of interpreting experience in the text or in the process of “reading for our lives”

36 The Quebecois critic Diane Boudreau, who published Histoire de la littérature amérindienne au Québec: oralité et écriture in 1993, qualifies Indigenous literature as a “literature of dispossession.” She argues that Indigenous writers describe how colonial structures have dispossessed them yet only offers a limited view of the intellectual contribution of these texts: “We should note that, generally, Indigenous authors do not elaborate theories of dispossession, which would probably be premature, since the study of the phenomena is still recent and observations of the facts must precede analysis” (134, my translation). This view shows the hierarchy and temporal progression from description to theory, but also assumes that the description of facts is not a production of meaning. Indigenous literature goes beyond the description of dispossession, because, as I argued above, these texts are spaces of knowledge production, and more precisely, because they affirmatively activate Indigenous knowledges in order to develop critiques (theories) of colonialism.

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(Episkenew). In the first one, reading corresponds to “a coming to consciousness” of the subject

who recognizes his or her “authentic identity, one he [or she] had always shared, would always

share with others like him [or her]self” (Scott 794). In the second reading, the text or discourse

does not give access to truth but to an interpretation that substitutes another truth: the reading

becomes “a clarifying moment, after which he [or she] sees (that is, understands) differently”

(Ibid.). Scott argues, “There is all the difference between subjective perceptual clarity and

transparent vision” (Ibid.). She criticizes how experience becomes a tool to have a “transparent

vision” of historical records. For her, “historians of difference” often “take as self-evident the

identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference.

They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent

attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it” (777). The point, she says, is not to confirm

that difference exists, but to show how it is constructed. “To grant such status is not to make ‘the

literary’ foundational, but to open new possibilities for analyzing discursive productions of social

and political reality as complex, contradictory processes” (794). From this perspective,

Indigenous women’s writing does not provide direct access to their experience as dispossessed

historical subjects, that can be generalized to all Indigenous men and/or women, but allows us to

witness how their textual strategies participate in the construction of their difference and provide

subjective perceptual clarity. This is why literary analysis is crucial in order to underline the

political and historical power of the text.

Although many critics have insisted on the extra-literary function of Indigenous

literatures (among others Gunn Allen and Episkenew), taking Indigenous knowledges seriously

requires literary analysis to underline the meaning-making power literary texts enact. Julia

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Emberley proposes that there is no testimony without “a poetics of truth-telling” (7, emphasis

added).37 New versions of history are not only based on the experience of the colonized people

accessible through the genre of testimony, but also on the mobilization of alternative types of

knowledges and genres. Emberley says, “critics in the social and human sciences brandish an

ideal of ‘concrete reality’ in relation to testimonial speech acts, as if such a discourse could

materialize without metaphorical agents of expression or narrative and performative modes of

mediation” (5). However, Indigenous practices of witnessing violence, including different types

of genres, stories and truth-telling practices, are important in projects of justice precisely because

they activate Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. Emberley adds, “One of the important

aspects of testimonial discourse lies in the process of transforming violence from its

representation as a historical reality into a creative force for change through contemporary

reparative practices” (19). The “creative force for change” in Indigenous texts resonates with

Dian Million’s belief in “affectively informed Indigenous conceptual frames” (Therapeutic 50).

The point, then, is that Indigenous knowledges activated in stories (that are decolonizing) include

what Million calls “felt knowledge.” “Felt knowledge,” which is both personal and communal,

provides a particular analysis of colonialism based on experience. Million explains,

I suggest ways that Indigenous women participated in creating new language for

communities to address the real multi-layered facets of their histories and concerns by

insisting on the inclusion of our lived experience, rich with emotional knowledges, of

37 Some critics have raised the problem of focusing uniquely on historical truth and downplaying the literary aspects of text (Acoose, Larocque, McKegney). Helen Hoy says, “What concern me are disjunctive readings saying, ‘Slash fails as a novel, but I’m glad I read it because I learned a lot about Native history’” (Hoy 41). Hoy discusses the aesthetics of authenticity and the problem with some of the early novels by Indigenous women, which were not considered great novels, but were read for their historical insights.

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what pain and grief and hope meant or mean in our pasts and futures. (Million, “Felt

Knowledge” 54)

Acknowledging the importance of “felt knowledge,” the description of violent aspects of history

can be interpreted not as a discourse of dispossession, a story of damage, but as the production of

knowledge that provides new interpretations and directs new lines of affective engagements.

Million explains that this knowledge about history has been dismissed because it is felt as well as

intellectualized, which is particularly so for women: “Our felt scholarship continues to be

segregated as a ‘feminine’ experience, as polemic, or at worst as not knowledge at all” (Ibid.).

Million’s felt theory is a particular reading of “colonialism as a felt, affective

relationship” (“Felt knowledge” 47). She explains, “It felt shameful to be an Indian in Canada for

most of that nation’s history” (Ibid.). In turn, prejudices and discrimination do not stem from

ignorance, according to her, but from felt common knowledge. Colonial domination can feel

right: “It is the systemic knowledge; it feels right” (Ibid.). Non-Indigenous understanding of

Indigenous knowledge and culture can feel right, and these affects must be critically examined.38

v. Embodied and Embedded Positions: Feminist Readings of Difference

Reading Indigenous women’s writing is part of a feminist project that considers gender

justice as crucial to decolonizing practices while aiming at decolonizing feminism. My approach

is informed by the work of both Indigenous feminists and antiracist feminists, who insist on the

importance of social positions and of the different experiences lived by women. Non-Indigenous

women scholars in the field of Indigenous studies are often hesitant to use a feminist approach

38 See also Eva Mackay, who argues that settlers need to think and feel differently about their relationships with Indigenous peoples, unsettling settler colonial expectations of entitlement.

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because various Indigenous women refuse to identify with feminism and because of the history

of white feminists’ paternalism.39 Joanne Barker explains that disidentification with feminism is

an important feature of Indigenous women’s politics (“Indigenous”). First, for some Indigenous

women, feminism has no place in their cultural understanding of their own position as women

within the community. Second, other Indigenous women are critical of feminism because it has

been developed from the experience of white women who assumed a shared experience of

patriarchal oppression. Women of colour and Indigenous women have claimed that their

oppression is also marked by other structures of domination, notably racism and colonialism.40

Ien Ang explains, “non-Western women in ‘white/Western’ societies can only begin to

speak with a hesitating ‘I’m a feminist, but...’ in which the meaning and substance of feminism

itself become problematized” (394). Ang criticizes that, even when differences are taken into

account, the logic of inclusion of multicultural diversity in feminist movements, which according

to her act as nations, objectifies the difference of women who are invited to raise their voice.

This feminist position of inclusion of diversity reproduces colonialism and racism. Ang explains

that women’s priorities are often incommensurable, and hence cannot be subsumed to feminism,

because of different experiences of patriarchy that require different strategies of resistance: she

gives the example of white feminists’ struggle for sexual liberation as being incommensurable to

black feminists’ fight against the sexualization of their bodies. For her, the challenge of feminist

practice is to develop a “politics of partiality” (395), which recognizes that communication

across differences often fails:

39 Helen Hoy and Julia Emberley do offer non-Indigenous feminist analyses of Indigenous women’s writing. 40 The concept of intersectionality has been an important contribution of Black Feminism, developed notably in the work of Kimberley Crenshaw, and it has become crucial in antiracist feminist theories. See also Sirma Bilge and Julie Perrault.

34

The way difference should be “dealt with,” then, is typically imagined by the feminist

establishment through such benevolent terms as “recognition,” “understanding” and

“dialogue.” The problem with such terms is first of all that they reveal an overconfident

faith in the power and possibility of open and honest communication to “overcome” or

“settle” differences, of a power-free speech situation without interference by entrenched

presumptions, sensitivities and preconceived ideas. It is a faith in our (limitless?) capacity

not only to speak, but, more importantly, to listen and hear. (396)

Ang questions our capacity to listen and hear in ways that reconcile the gaps of

incommensurability.

Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill argue that Indigenous feminist theories are not on the margin of

feminism, but are an integral part of it: “there cannot be feminist thought and theory without

Native feminist theory” (Arvin et al. 14). Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill privilege the term “Native

feminist theories” over “Native feminist(s)” and “Native feminism(s),” which they consider

“identity-derived labels.” They define “Native feminist theories” as “those theories that make

substantial advances in understandings of the connections between settler colonialism and both

heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism” (11). They explain that “Indigenous women have been

at the forefront of struggles against domination long before the nineteenth century, especially in

the face of empire” and add, “The experiences and intellectual contributions of Indigenous

women are not on the margins; we have been an invisible presence in the center, hidden by the

gendered logics of settler colonialism for over 500 years” (Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 14).41

41 Paula Gunn Allen speaks about the “red roots of white feminism” and argues, “the gynocratic tribes of the American continent provided the basis for all the dreams of liberation that characterize the modern world” (214).

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Indigenous women’s voices, actions, and visions are and have been central to feminisms as well

as to decolonization, resurgence and Indigenous resistance to colonialism.

There are good reasons why some Indigenous women writers refuse to identify with

feminism. Yet, I believe that their discourses contribute to analyses of power that are crucial to

Indigenous feminist theories. Moreover, analyzing these texts at the intersection of Indigenous

literary studies, Indigenous studies and transitional justice without considering internal feminist

critiques in these fields would impair my ability to situate these Indigenous women’s voices.

Critical of the logic of inclusion/exclusion of Canadian, Indigenous, and feminist politics, some

Indigenous women have had to find a space of their own, and literary works constitute one space

in which Indigenous women articulate their vision of justice and politics. Reading these texts

necessitates an analysis of difference that accounts for the intersections of gender and race, and a

particular attention to non-Indigenous people’s assumptions about cultural difference and

feminist practice.

Emma Larocque explains that the emphasis on cultural differences turns the attention of

Indigenous politics toward finding ‘culturally appropriate’ responses: “The question is, to what

extent is difference discourse serving us as women? How different are we, and from whom,

exactly, are we to be different? Who is defining the difference?” (“Métis” 66). Larocque refuses

to see feminism as a practice from outside of the community and says that we should consider

the complexity of differences today: “But our difference today, as it was in pre-Columbian times,

is much more dynamic, diverse, complex and nuanced than what the popularized and stereotyped

‘cultural differences’ discourse suggests” (“Métis” 66). The discourse on “cultural difference”

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has served at times to exclude Indigenous women’s priorities from self-determination

struggles.42

When Indigenous women attend to women’s issues, these usually need to be situated in a

larger political frame, “one that considers how dominant groups tend to control the rhetoric on

tradition, identity, and culture in the process of constructing national identities” (Altamirano-

Jimenez 116). Therefore, instead of a meta-narrative of Indigeneity, reduced to “an ethic and a

logic of preservation” (116), Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez proposes to look at how Indigenous

feminism produces “relevant local meanings” about identities, experiences, and history (116).

Local meanings and place-based research which are advocated for by Indigenous scholars—for

instance, in national readings of texts—also have to be situated in the micro-politics of women’s

agency, in which bodies constitute a primary space of both oppression and liberation. This view

of the body as a local/localized place for resistance and self-determination does not have to be

seen as rooted in Western individualism and neoliberalism—although it might be complicit with

these structures—but rather in the belief that Indigenous knowledges are contextual and

personal. Rauna Kuokkanen proposes an understanding of self-determination as connected to

“the individual as relational, autonomous and self-determining” (237). Self-determination,

therefore, is closely related to the capacity to be self-defining.

Indigenous women’s writing intervenes in decolonial politics and rhetoric, providing

different models than those based on binary oppositions for understanding Indigenous

42 In Memory Serves, Lee Maracle explains that the recourse to pre-conquest matriarchal society often serves as an excuse to overlook gender violence in the present. For instance, defenders of gender complementarity as an Indigenous model of gender relations often argue that feminism is a view from the outside and that Indigenous peoples should reject it. Maracle disagrees with this idea and states, “Unlike those who dismiss Indigenous feminists for being influenced from outside our world (as though men were not), I believe feminism is a response to the Canadian-state orchestrated invasion of our areas of jurisdiction by Indigenous men” (149).

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subjectivity. Reading self-determination in the texts as the capacity to self-define opens us to a

multiplicity of differences and invites a theoretical approach that engages with these differences.

Moreover, I argue that we should not only attend to the differences between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous peoples, as well as internal differences within these groups including gender

difference, but also differences within subjects who are not coherent, transparent subjects. Eve

Tuck proposes an ethics of research that looks at the “self-determination of lived lives,” which

recognizes subjects’ contradictions in reproducing as well as resisting colonial habits. This

analysis of subjects’ desires “more closely matches the experiences of people who, at different

points in a single day, reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up

hands/fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures—that is, everybody”

(Tuck, “Suspending” 420). The challenge, I argue, is to work from a differential approach that

accounts for the complexity of embodied and embedded positions: embodied because subjects,

“framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire as core qualities” (Braidotti,

The Posthuman 26), are singular members of groups and communities, and embedded because

positions come from specific contexts, material grounds, connections and relationships. I use this

formulation “embodied and embedded” based on my reading of Rosi Braidotti’s theory of power.

Her approach comes from Michel Foucault’s own reading of power “as both a restrictive

(potestas) and productive (potentia) force. This means that power formations not only function at

the material level but are also expressed in systems of theoretical and cultural representation,

political and normative narratives and social modes of identification” (Ibid.). It is important to

remember, in the light of the above quotes by Tuck and Braidotti, that no (embodied and

embedded) position is self-evident and directly accessible to the subject’s consciousness.

Through this approach, the concept of and struggle for gender justice is marked by power that

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operates within the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, discourses

about its prioritization or not, and modes of identification.

vi. Cultural Difference: Connecting the Non-Indigenous Position on Culture

to Indigenous Women’s Critique of Cultural Forms of Justice

Culture has been central to the understandings of colonial injustices and efforts to

imagine justice. Yet, it is important to note that “culture” means different things in Indigenous

and non-Indigenous frameworks. The TRC defines colonial violence as “cultural genocide” that

was meant to disorganize Indigenous societies completely in order for “Aboriginal peoples to

cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada”

(Honouring 1). As a response, cultural revival is often presented as a way of repairing the

violence of cultural genocide.

Verna St-Denis explains that the focus on cultural revival in Indigenous education, which

emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, put the responsibility on Indigenous communities to revive

cultural integrity in order to avoid their children’s failure in class, instead of looking at the past

and present conditions of colonialism (171). This approach, criticized by St-Denis, objectifies

culture, as something that can be “lost” and “found,” and it creates an expectation or a desire to

revive the “exotic Indian” of the past (169). One problem is that it passes over the creative ways

in which Indigenous peoples have lived their lives often through drastic and violent

transformations (Deloria in St-Denis 171). Cultural difference becomes the centre of attention:

“Rather than acknowledging the need for a critical examination of how and why race matters in

our society, it is often suggested that it is Aboriginal people and their culture that must be

explained to and understood by those in position of racial dominance” (163). Furthermore, St-

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Denis adds that Indigenous peoples’ preoccupation with cultural authenticity is beneficial for the

status quo:

If cultural authenticity is the problem then we don’t have to look at what is the immensely

more difficult task of challenging the conscious and unconscious ways in which the

ideology of white identity as superior is normalized and naturalized in our schools and

nation, both in the past and in the present. (178)

The focus on cultural authenticity is problematic in the context of non-Indigenous people’s

engagement in decolonial struggles, and of Indigenous women’s concerns about decolonization

and gender justice. In the first case, non-Indigenous people’s desires for knowing, relating to,

and appropriating Indigenous cultures involve the reproduction of colonial dynamics. In the

second case, Indigenous women’s priorities are dismissed on the grounds of not being culturally

authentic.

From a non-Indigenous position, it has become impossible to use the notion of “culture”

without being critical of Western assumptions. Renate Eigenbrod explains that the colonizers

want the land, but also the culture: “Further, they want it ‘uncontaminated’… they want it

‘unspoiled,’ ‘truly different’ from the modern society and its conveniences, to which they have

privileged access” (26). In addition to the analysis of “cultural genocide,” therefore, it is

important to understand “the contradictory desires in white societies” (Eigenbrod 25), which

want Indigenous peoples to be different enough, but not so much as to create frictions.

According to Wolfe, the desire for unspoiled culture cannot be separated from the technologies

of genocide: “The style of romantic stereotyping that I have termed ‘repressive authenticity,’

which is a feature of settler-colonial discourse in many countries, is not genocidal in itself,

though it eliminates large numbers of empirical natives from official reckonings and, as such, is

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often concomitant with genocidal practice” (402). For Patrick Wolfe, the colonial structures of

extinction and appropriation, assimilation and exclusion, work within a “logic of elimination”

that contributes to “the practical elimination of the natives in order [for settler society] to

establish itself on their territory” (387). This desire for cultural difference, which erases the

empirical subjects’ complex experience, should be something we must guard against, and we

must draw away from an uncritical search for authentic culture in literary criticism.

At the same time, both cultural genocide and cultural revival are gendered concepts.

Indigenous feminists insist that gender violence is central to colonialism although Indigenous

women’s concerns have often been excluded from Indigenous self-determination struggles’

priorities as well (Anderson; Arvin, Tuck and Morrill; Huhndorf and Suzack; Million; Smith).

Heteropatriarchy constitutes a central feature of colonial power that seeks to control and police

Native sexuality and promote heteronormativity (Morgensen; Arvin, Tuck and Morrill).43 The

settler projects of Christianising and civilizing disrupted intergenerational relationships through

the schools and interpersonal relationships within Indigenous communities and families by

putting the man at the head of the family and by prioritizing the man’s participation in social and

political life over women’s roles (Barker, “Gender” 132). The Indian Act established

patrilineality which means that women who “married out” could no longer pass on the status to

43 Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill say that both heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism have been naturalized in settler colonialism. They define heteropatriarchy as “the social system in which heterosexuality and patriarchy are perceived as normal and natural, and in which other configurations are perceived as abnormal, aberrant, and abhorrent” (13) and heteropaternalism as “the presumption that heteropatriarchal nuclear-domestic arrangements, in which the father is both the center and leader/boss, should serve as the model for social arrangements of the state and its institutions” (13).

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their children, despite the closeness of the relationships they entertain with the community.44

When Indigenous women started to protest against the discriminatory provision of the Indian Act

in the 1970s, opposition to their demands also came from within the communities (Barker,

“Gender”). Kim Anderson explains that their political actions to defend their rights against the

Canadian state “alerted women to other discriminations they faced… also from within their own

communities” (A Recognition 126). Their demands for respecting their rights as Indigenous

women were considered “not only non- but anti-Indian” (Barker, “Gender” 127), that is, going

against the aim of self-determination.

Joanne Barker points to the difficulty of understanding how patriarchal, heterosexist, and

homophobic relationships “came to define the social conditions of oppression within Indian

social and interpersonal relations” (“Gender” 132). She continues:

The important conceptual challenge in understanding the impact of these ideologies on

Indian peoples is the refusal of a social evolutionary framework in which Indian societies

are mapped onto a historical trajectory from the utopic pristine to the tragically

contaminated. (Ibid., emphasis added)

On the one hand, gender justice is situated in a pristine past, before patriarchy was imposed, and

on the other hand, gender violence but also feminist responses to it are considered a form of

“contamination.” The evolutionary framework organizes categories associated with indigeneity

around the notions of purity or contamination: Indian princess or squaw, orality or literacy,

traditional or contemporary ways of living. Through this framework, it becomes impossible to

44 An amendment to the Indian Act was made in 1985 with Bill C-31 to eliminate discrimination against Indigenous women. However, although the women who married before 1985 could transfer status to their children, they could not do so to their grandchildren.

42

see Indian polities, epistemologies, beliefs, and ways of living, feeling and interacting with the

world. Rather, Indigenous peoples are either imagined as living in the past, a time before the

conquest, or as victims of colonization. The “tragic contamination” does not foster a reading of

contemporary injustice, but a nostalgia for uncontaminated culture while reinforcing the idea that

Indigenous knowledges are incompatible with the present. Either through fixity of the past or

dysfunction in the present, the belief that Indigenous peoples would cease to exist as identifiable

groups is a corollary to the belief in progress. The Indian Act “was based on an inherently racist

and sexist assumption that Indian governance, epistemologies and beliefs, and gender roles were

irrelevant and invalid, even dangerous impediments to progress” (Barker, “Gender” 131).

Marie Battiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Henderson explain further that

Indigenous understandings of culture are radically different from the Western ones. They explain

that there is no equivalent to culture in Algonquian thought, and that, in the Mi’kmaq language,

there are different words related to how they maintain traditions, consciousness and language45:

“Based on our experience, we reject the concept of culture for Indigenous knowledge, heritage,

and consciousness, and instead connect each Indigenous manifestation as part of a particular

ecological order” (35). For them, it is a mistake to think of either nature or culture as a fixed

background: “Indigenous peoples do not view humanity as separate from the natural world” (24)

and culture is not an entity detached from the natural world. They write:

The Eurocentric emphasis on coherent wholes at the expense of unique processes of

change and internal inconsistencies, conflicts, and contradictions was and remains a

45 “How we maintain contact with our traditions is said as telinuisimk. How we maintain our consciousness is said telilnuo’lti’k. How we maintain our language is said as tlinuita’sim.” (Battiste and Henderson 35).

43

serious limitation to Eurocentric understanding of Indigenous knowledge and heritage. In

this sense, Eurocentric thinkers have taken culture as their abstract possession and

Indigenous knowledge as merely symbolic and ideational. (31)

Battiste and Henderson argue, “Indigenous knowledge does not fit into the Eurocentric concept

of ‘culture’” (35). Considering that Indigenous knowledge is “cultural knowledge” brings

particular Eurocentric understandings of Indigeneity, knowledge and culture forward. Culture is

a slippery term because, on the one hand, there is a belief that Europeans/Euro-Americans have

culture in the sense of civilization while Indigenous peoples have no culture, but are closer to

nature. On the other hand, Europeans/Euro-Americans are the protagonists of History while other

cultures have no history but culture. Indigenous peoples often insist on their connection to land

and to the earth, but it is important to understand these claims aside from the binary opposition

between culture and nature. Moreover, Indigenous peoples want to defend their culture, but we

should be careful about what this term stands for and how we understand it.46

Leanne Simpson also affirms that there is no word for “culture” in the Nishnaabeg

language: “our ‘culture’ was and is a series of interrelated processes that engage our full beings

and require our full presence” (141). She refers to the work of Scott Lyons who looked for words

to express “culture,” and interpreted these words “to respond to a single ‘overarching concern:

the desire to produce more life’” (142). Simpson adds, “Resurgence movements then, must be

movements to create more life, propel life, nurture life, motion, presence and emergence” (143).

46 Lee Maracle conceives of “culture” as a mask that has been used to counter colonization, but that must be removed in order to “begin to see difference, complex and separating” (Memory 89).

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Reading texts as being culturally embedded, therefore, could mean that they aspire to creating

more life and that they are intimately linked to lived experiences.

To situate literary texts in relation to justice practices is an attempt to move away from

readings that expect the reproduction of “cultural” contents in the texts, that frame the discourse

through the figure of the victim of colonialism or that centre the power of the text on what it does

to the non-Indigenous audience. Instead, reading visions of justice in the text underlines the

meaning-making power of creative and intellectual Indigenous production.

vii. Non-Indigenous Literary Criticism of Indigenous Texts

How to work with difference and incommensurability has been a question in the field of

non-Indigenous literary criticism of Indigenous texts.47 In order to centre Indigenous knowledges

in literary criticism and in order to conduct appropriate reading of Indigenous texts, non-

Indigenous and Indigenous scholars have insisted on the necessity to become “culturally literate”

(Eigenbrod).48 Renate Eigenbrod and Helen Hoy have proposed to do literary analysis that

accounts for the power dynamics at play when working from the position of a cultural outsider,

47 It is also a question raised by Indigenous scholars, notably concerning a differential approach to texts from different national contexts. For instance, Deanna Reder imagines a comparative approach to Coast Salish and Anishinaabeg literary traditions (see her contribution in Fagan et al.). Positionality is a preoccupation for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous literary scholars. See for instance the comments by the editors of Read, Listen, Tell about their positionality and their relationships to the texts: “We do not read from a so-called neutral, omniscient perspective from which we can understand everything: instead, we read from particular positions that can include both insights and blind spots, positions that change as we learn more about a particular context or consider the perspectives of others” (McCall et al. 4). 48 Eigenbrod underlines the importance of being “culturally literate,” while pointing to other important aspects of literary criticism, such as acknowledging the complexity of Indigenous literatures (xv), acquiring knowledge on “the history of colonization from a Native perspective (61), getting rid “of preconceived notions of linear and dualistic thinking and be[ing] open to complexities and indeterminacies” (206).

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that is, a community outsider. They work from a position of incommensurability, acknowledging

that they cannot “know fully” Indigenous cultures (Eigenbrod 43). Eigenbrod states, “I position

my own work not so much in regards to furthering a nation-specific understanding of Aboriginal

literature, but rather in the context of Canadian discourses of redress and reconciliation as a

contribution to facilitating Aboriginal voices” (36). Similarly, Hoy insists on defining a position

for non-Indigenous critics that avoids colonial appropriation of Indigenous voices: “my intention

is not so much to explicate the texts here, to provide normative readings, or to imagine how a

cultural insider might read them” (11). They are both aware of the danger of imposing a

perspective from the outside, and they avoid closure in their readings of Indigenous texts by

constantly questioning the statements that they make on literary texts. This reading practice

prioritizes unsettling the discourse produced by non-Indigenous scholars to avoid the damage

that could be perpetuated by analyzing Indigenous texts in inadequate ways.

Hoy discerns a potential problem, however, in avoiding assertions: “are the potentially

decolonizing effects of the text neutralized by a hermeneutics of indeterminacy?” (98). Sam

McKegney also questions this type of “reading work that professes to be inadequate throughout”

(“Strategies” 62), arguing that not analyzing these texts can produce different types of harm. For

him, the desire not to do damage to the texts often prevents critics from engaging with them: “I

have become increasingly concerned recently that the dominant strategies by non-Native critics

to avoid doing damage to Indigenous texts have had unintended inverse (and adverse) effects of

obfuscating Indigenous voices and stagnating the critical field” (“Strategies” 58). He criticizes

46

what he calls the “strategies of ethical disengagement” (Ibid.).49 McKegney rather suggests,

“true commitment to ‘the literature itself’ is a commitment to community, nationhood, and

sovereignty” (in Fagan et al. 29, his emphasis). What McKegney means by “true commitment to

‘the literature itself’” is not self-evident. Although he criticizes Eigenbrod and Hoy for being too

self-reflexive and not assertive enough, they both commit to thorough literary analysis of their

corpus. Moreover, I note that McKegney himself is being self-reflexive but identifies damage

differently than the other two critics. On the one hand, McKegney is right in wanting more than

the objective of destabilizing the settler position through focusing on the texts themselves and on

how we can engage with them as readers. On the other hand, being self-reflexive for Eigenbrod

and Hoy seems to mean to reflect on the types of relationships they wish to establish with the

text. Perhaps, then, their focus is not inward, but rather on the effects of destabilizing the subject

positions of the-one-who-knows. I believe that the task of reflecting on how subject positions for

scholars and for writers produce different types of relationships is crucial and should be based on

a commitment to the texts themselves.

How to read Indigenous texts from a non-Indigenous position? Lee Maracle argues that

colonialism entails the invasion of the territory as well as the invasion of interpretation, which is

another way of understanding Leanne Simpson’s definition of cognitive imperialism.50 Maracle

explains that the Diaspora, the term she uses to refer to settlers, “granted themselves the right to

claim discovery, and then proceeded to define, delineate, and demarcate the cultural, intellectual,

49 He names four of these strategies: retreating into silence (not engaging with the text), focusing inward (self-reflexivity), dealing in the purviews of non-Natives (staying in non-Native spaces), and presenting only tentative critical statements (“Strategies” 58). 50 See also Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who writes, “Indigenous peoples have been, in many ways, oppressed by theory” (39). Her 1999 work Decolonizing Methodologies is crucial in the field for her analysis of how methodologies are tied to colonial structures and matter to processes of decolonization.

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economic, spiritual, and physical being for the entire world” (Memory 230). Literary criticism

has been marked by the imposition of Western categories on Indigenous texts.51 Therefore,

literary scholars have proposed to study Indigenous literatures taking into account the insights of

Indigenous studies in order to avoid the imposition of Western literary categories and to ground

the analysis in Indigenous knowledge, visions and priorities.52 Kimberley Blaeser proposes to

look for “critical methods and voices that seem to arise out of the literature itself (this as opposed

to critical approaches applied from an already established critical language or attempts to make

the literature fit already established genres and categories of meaning)” (54). Literary criticism

must find theoretical and epistemological models within the text. Critics who have theorized the

concept of literary sovereignty have asserted the importance of literary texts in Indigenous

intellectual traditions (Brooks, Warrior, Weaver, Womack).53 Indigenous knowledges have been

developed in the literary and academic fields.

Invasive interpretation can take the form of imposing Western standards or appropriating

of Indigenous knowledges. Maracle encourages readers to respect the distance between the poet

and the audience, between a text and a reading. She argues that non-Indigenous literary critics

51 See for example Nathalie Melas and Rey Chow. 52 See St-Amand, Maracle, Martin, Episkenew, Eigenbrod, among others. 53 Since the 1990s, many Indigenous scholars have insisted on reading Indigenous literatures from a national perspective. In the United States, “American Indian literary nationalism” (AILN) proposed reading texts in relation to the author’s national epistemologies, ontologies, and aesthetics. Lisa Brooks defines AILN as “a dynamic model that posits the existence of a field of Native American literature and supports (but does not advocate exclusively for) scholarship that draws on theoretical and epistemological models that arise from Indigenous languages and literatures, as well as the many, varied, complex, and changing modes in which Native nations have operated on the ground, in particular places, over a wide expanse of time” (“Afterword” 244, my emphasis). Brooks insists on “the multifaceted, lived experience of families who gather in particular places” (“Afterword” 244).53 Like culture, the term “nation” must be questioned. Brooks uses Jace Weaver’s term of “upbuilding” to describe the process of nation building as “a process of gathering from within” (“Afterword” 229).

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should not ask what is the intention of the author, criticizing the colonial habit “to speculate on

what is in the mind, body, heart, and spirit of others” (Memory 230). This critique of focusing on

the intention of the author can inform any practice of literary criticism, but Maracle explains it is

based on the Salish methodology, according to which multiple points of view are necessary, but

somebody else’s vision cannot be appropriated: “We recognize that we are not able to walk

inside the body/mind/heart/spirit of the being/phenomenon; we cannot know the

thoughts/thinking, emotions/emotionality, and spirit/spirituality of the being or phenomenon”

(Memory 241). In addition, each person must be accountable to his or her position by confronting

its limits: “When studying a subject, we first face our attitudes, our beliefs, and our agendas. We

face the filters through which our specific cultural and personal origins affect clear and clean

vision” (Memory 234). A clear and clean vision for the literary critics seems to concern the

ability to put into question the assumptions that direct the reading. Although these assumptions

cannot all be transparent to the subject, non-Indigenous and Indigenous literary critics have

worked on underlining some of the colonial assumptions that tint readings of Indigenous texts.

Maracle discusses more precisely the relationship between the person who recounts a

story and the listener. She explains, “In the longhouse, the listeners add to the story when they

notice a gap or a pause, and our elders are happy because they know that we are listening”

(Memory 220-221). These additions are not meant to show that they understood, but that they are

listening. The focus on listening rather than understanding seems important to underline the

relationship produced by the transmission of knowledge or the learning process, rather than on

insisting on knowledge as an object that can be appropriated. Maracle uses this practice of the

longhouse to discuss how she writes stories and how we can read them. For her the purpose of

hearing or reading a story is to “transform ourselves in accordance with our agreement with and

understanding of the story” (Memory 229). She contends, “If the listener is empowered to move

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to his/her dream space and imagine him/herself, it is a good story…” (Memory 114). The power

of a story lies in how it activates transformations for the reader. Maracle asks herself: “How do

we shape the story so that listeners are inspired to consider conduct that will explicitly direct

them to the specifics of transformation without narrowing or defining what may be learned?

Without limiting the myriad of directions the transformation of all listeners might take?”

(Memory 245). It is important to note that the transformation comes from the listener and not

from what the author has wanted to teach. Similarly, the aim of research is the transformation of

visions: “The spiritual objective of study is to transform the way we see, to broaden the field of

vision” (Memory 250, my emphasis). For me, the crucial point in learning how to read

Indigenous texts and how to be a listener is that the texts do not teach me about Indigenous

cultures and knowledges as such, but rather ask questions of me to which I must respond and

thus teach me how to prioritize, to think and to read, broadening my field of vision.

viii. Reading Knowledges in Stories and Academic Works

As I have argued above, non-Indigenous critics cannot embrace reconciliation as a justice

project without criticizing how it reproduces colonial relationships and they cannot adopt

resurgence as a model without maintaining a respectful distance in order to avoid appropriating

Indigenous spaces for justice. One way to respond to the project of resurgence, I propose, is to

read stories as theory, which situates both theory and story on a same field of knowledge

production. Stories and storytelling have been theorized in the field of Indigenous studies as a

form of knowledge participating in decolonization.54 Stories are not merely counter-historical

54 Sarah Hunt understands stories as a space and a methodology for discussing Indigenous ontologies: “Stories and storytelling are widely acknowledged as culturally nuanced ways of

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accounts, “Stories in Indigenous epistemologies are disruptive, sustaining, knowledge producing,

and theory-in-action. Stories are decolonization theory in its most natural form” (Sium and

Ritskes II). Linda Tuhiwai Smith says that through their testimonies, a form of personal

storytelling, Indigenous peoples intervene in the production of alternative knowledges and

versions of history, and in theoretical insights (30): “Coming to know the past has been part of

the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative

knowledges” (36). To read stories as theory destabilizes what we understand as theory and as

Indigenous knowledges. The first way in which it destabilizes the academic notion of theory is

that it challenges the binary opposition between theory and practice. Reading stories as theory

itself is a practice, which is not specifically attached to Indigenous ones. Firstly, within

Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, the ways in which a story provides meaning, impacts

on listeners, creates relationships and activates Indigenous knowledges would probably be

described otherwise than through the concept of “theory.” Second, reading stories as theory is a

challenging idea in the field of Literary Studies for texts written by both Indigenous and non-

Indigenous people because it disrupts a perceived hierarchy between the production of theory

and of literary texts. This hierarchy, however, is particularly dangerous in the context where non-

Indigenous researchers engage with Indigenous stories because it reiterates the historical and

colonial perceived hierarchy between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples. In addition, as I

argued above, the idea that stories are practices and theories of decolonization is developed in the

knowing, produced within networks of relational meaning-making” (27). For Aman Sium and Eric Ritskes, Indigenous stories play an important role in decolonization because they work within a different epistemology that challenges Western conceptions of objectivity: “By telling our stories we’re at the same time disrupting dominant notions of intellectual rigor and legitimacy, while also redefining scholarship as a process that begins with the self” (IV).

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field of Indigenous studies as shared knowledge, and it resonates in meaningful ways with

communities’ protocols around stories, as explained by Simpson and Maracle. Although the idea

of reading stories as theory may be productive in Literary Studies and other disciplines, notably

to review our ideas about what constitutes knowledge production, the methodology I proposed in

this thesis is grounded in a particular understanding of the hierarchies produced by the binary

oppositions between theory and practice, theory and literature, Western “culture” and non-

Western cultures,55 aesthetic and politics56 in the context of the relationships between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Battiste and Henderson ask the question, “What is Indigenous Knowledge?” and

maintain that there is no short and straightforward answer (35). The point is not to know or

define Indigenous knowledges but to examine how these knowledges are produced, received, and

how they circulate in different spaces. They state:

In the past few centuries, the context of this question has been “What can savages know

and how do they think?” It is a question loaded with Eurocentric arrogance. It continues

55 In the opposition between Western “culture” and non-Western cultures, the concept of “culture” does not refer to the same thing. The first occurrence refers to the culture as the Western civilization that connects all Western communities. We should note that we often overlook the diversity of Western cultures, for instance, the difference between Canada, Finland, Italy and so on, creating the illusion of one block constituting “Western culture.” In the second occurrence, non-Western cultures stand for those who are different from the main actor of History, the West. Therefore, non-Western cultures have “culture” but no history, civilization, literacy, intelligence, science. 56 I do not discuss this opposition at length but I consider it is crucial. Western literature is often linked to aesthetics while non-Western literature is deemed political. This is a problem in the history of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers, since the latter have historically refused that the former have a sense of aesthetic. In my thesis, I hope to balance the need to address the politics and the aesthetics by grounding my analysis within the literary texts. On the other hand, the opposition between aesthetics and politics gives the wrong impression that aesthetics is not always political.

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to be a difficult question for non-Europeans to answer because Eurocentric thought has

created a mysticism around Indigenous knowledge that distances the outsider from

Indigenous peoples and what they know. (35)

Battiste and Henderson identify three problems with trying to understand Indigenous knowledge

from a Eurocentric point of view: the divergent ways of seeing “culture”; the differences among

Indigenous peoples concerning what is Indigenous knowledge; and the “practical, personal, and

contextual aspect of Indigenous knowledge” that makes it attached to the bearer of knowledge

(36). I believe that these problems require non-Indigenous peoples to be attentive to the

incommensurability of definitions of “culture,” as well as of understanding knowledge,

relationship or justice; to pay attention to differences not only between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous peoples, but between and within Indigenous nations, including gender difference; and

to acknowledge the specificity of locations, contexts, embodiment and experience.

The methodological challenge of addressing reading practices concerns as much literary

as academic texts. Shawn Wilson argues that one difference between Indigenous and Western

epistemology is that the latter is attached to objectivity while the former focuses on relationships.

He proposes an Indigenous research paradigm based on Indigenous ontology and epistemology.

He says, “In an Indigenous ontology there may be multiple realities” and adds, “reality is in the

relationship that one has with the truth. Thus an object or thing is not as important as one’s

relationships to it” (73). Indigenous languages reflect the difference with Western epistemology,

according to Wilson, as they are constructed around verbs rather than nouns: “Objects

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themselves are not named; rather what they might be used for is described” (73).57 The

production of knowledge comes from relationships between things, rather than through an

“objective” distance from the things themselves. Knowledge is relationships: “These

relationships […] include interpersonal, intrapersonal, environmental and spiritual relationships,

and relationships with ideas” (74). In an Indigenous research paradigm the researcher is not

above but in relation to what she is analyzing. There is no separation between the subject and

object of knowledge.

The emphasis on relationships in Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm is appealing to

me, first, because it resonates with feminist critiques of objectivity with which I am familiar58

and, second, because I learn about how to do research when reading his work. I do not apply his

methodology, but his methodology has an effect on mine. Wilson’s work has been crucial for me

in making apparent that literary criticism is a relationship. Many scholars in Indigenous Studies

insist on the local character of Indigenous knowledges, including Wilson who also claims the

importance of making explicit our relationships within academic work to stop pretending that

there is a distance between our theories and our lives. What I do know/live is the relationships

that are produced through my practice of research based on literary criticism. In this regard, in

my thesis, I do not read Indigenous women’s writing from a specific nation, in order to further

the understandings or production of knowledge specific to one community or nation (as if I could

say things about the Maya Quiche, the Innu or the Inuit). I read texts produced in different local

contexts to ask what they prioritize in their justice projects and what those priorities make me

understand about the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

57 See also Battiste and Henderson for a discussion on the epistemology attached to Indigenous languages: 50-56, 73-85. 58 See Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway.

54

Contextualizing and historicizing the difference between Indigenous and Western

knowledges and cultures is important. However, tracing a clear-cut separation between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives can reinforce notions of cultural purity and

naturalize Indigenous difference in ways that can be particularly damaging for Indigenous

women when cultural identity serves to exclude women’s perspectives. Speaking from an

Indigenous feminist position, Joyce Green says, “Tradition is neither a monolith, nor is it

axiomatically good” (26-27). Furthermore, Craig S. Womack contends that the term “Native

perspectives” should always be used in plural (360), because the singular form creates a division

between good Indigenous traditional values and evil contemporary Western values (359).

Therefore, theorizing Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’ incommensurability should not

foster binary oppositions between these groups but draw attention to the complexity of their

relationships and of their differences.

I understand Indigenous epistemology to be radically different, though not isolated, from

Western epistemology. Western thinkers, including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Bruno

Latour, have also challenged the separation between subject and object and the conception of

Western objectivity. My methodology consists in creating links between different types of texts,

which are always attached to the limits and the potential of my position as author/scholar. I do

not read Indigenous scholars alongside Western ones to legitimize the former’s theories and

discredit the latter’s. I create another discourse from my own sets of relationships with different

types of texts coming from diverse contexts. Tuhiwai Smith contends, “decolonization… does

not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory and research or Western knowledge.

Rather, it is about centring our concerns and world views and then coming to know and

understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes” (41). I am

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concerned with what the concepts of resurgence, stories as decolonizing, and

incommensurability, developed in Indigenous studies, mean for me as a non-Indigenous scholar.

While my thesis particularly addresses how to read Indigenous writers and scholars, the

question about how to read non-Indigenous scholars has arisen. Through my research, I have

noticed that I often felt suspicious while reading scholarly work by non-Indigenous scholars, and

I conducted a much less generous reading of their contribution to the field of Indigenous literary

studies or Indigenous studies. I believe that my inclination revealed at least two things: first, my

reluctance to identify with other settler scholars whom I suspected of not being critical enough or

reproducing colonial dynamics, and second, my own instances of patronizing when I read

Indigenous scholars with much more positive predispositions. Anticolonial struggle is a

contradictory process in which subjects, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, both resist and are

complicit with colonial structures, in ways that are often difficult to make apparent. I have

worked to change my relationships to these texts, but I did not want to offer less generous

readings of Indigenous scholars’ work; on the contrary, I aimed at reading better non-Indigenous

scholars committed to producing critical and creative academic works. I use the term “generous”

to convey the affective state of mind one has when approaching particular texts, but also the

political and methodological approaches one adopts. A generous reading focuses on identifying

the strength of a text as well as what we learn from it, considering that it is often a harder task

than to note its flaws.59 Changing academic practices of suspicion, accusation and critique, and

59 I am indebted to my mother who has showed me, through years of experience in academic research and teaching, the critical importance and the difficulty of identifying the strengths and situating the contributions of a text, research, or intervention, instead of identifying what it does not do.

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changing relationships between non-Indigenous people might be part of the project to unsettle

how power works in academic spaces.

ix. Outline

In the first chapter, I analyze Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, written during the civil war

in Guatemala to denounce political and colonial violence. Menchú’s testimony has become a

canonical text of world literature, and its critical reception is extensive. Examining how this text

was received in the North allows me to investigate different visions of justice with which literary

critics invest Indigenous literature. The text was primarily understood not through the divide

between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, but through the relationships between the

North and the South, between a multicultural society, which seeks to provide justice to all, and

the violence of a country recounted through the eyes of an Indigenous woman. Rigoberta

Menchú’s testimony should be considered, I argue, beyond its power to raise awareness and to

challenge Western politics and epistemology, because this reading continues to place her as a

subaltern in relation to the intellectual. Reading her testimony as a theory of transitional justice

prioritizes her vision of Indigenous relational justice. My methodological approach is grounded

in a critique of difference elaborated from the reading of the text and linked to the feminist

theories of Rosi Braidotti and Chandra Tapalde Mohanty.

In chapter two, I question non-Indigenous assumptions about Indigenous cultures, in

particular the fact that they are closer to nature. I show that the binary opposition between culture

and nature organizes non-Indigenous understanding of both difference and commonality, and I

examine how these understandings play a role in the creation of relationships between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Quebecois writers in the volume of epistolary exchange

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Aimititau! Parlons-nous! I analyze how Nahka Bertrand, Joan Pawnee-Parent and Rita

Mestokosho challenge the Quebecois writers’ vision of commonality and focus on an analysis of

the materiality of racism as well as of relationships. Methodologically, to analyze the materiality,

affects, and embodied and embedded positions challenges the conceptual binary opposition

between nature and culture, which has also been criticized by Western thinkers, including Bruno

Latour. I ask how discourses on cultural and racial differences situate subjects engaged in justice,

and what kinds of affect are produced by these discourses.

In chapter three, I examine the volumes of correspondence that followed Aimititau to

argue that antiracist strategies also situate subjects engaged in justice. I read the engagement of

Rita Mestokosho, Joséphine Bacon, and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine in establishing a relationship

with the Quebecois writers as inscribed in an Innu vision of friendship that is unsettling for non-

Indigenous antiracist literary critics. Through showing the tension between the importance of

asserting difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and the importance of

engaging in relationships of respect in which friendship is practised, I argue that multiple

strategies of decolonization must be part of struggles for change and that prioritizing affirmation,

creativity and ethical engagements can be productive. I discuss Rosi Braidotti’s statement that

“‘We’ are in this together” in relation to Indigenous visions of relationships to theorize our co-

implication in the struggle for decolonization while acknowledging the complexity of our

differences and the ethical predicament of desiring justice in a renewal of relationships between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

In chapter four, I ask how to relate, within their literary territory, to An Antane Kapesh’s

autobiography and Mini Aodla Freeman’s memoirs published in the 1970s. Kapesh and Aodla

Freeman both write about the drastic changes that occurred in their community in the 1950s.

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While Kapesh is profoundly critical of the whites’ conceptions of justice and mendacious

culture, Aodla Freeman adopts a gentle tone that promotes understanding and respectful

relationships, even when she criticizes the settlers’ colonial attitudes and actions. This chapter

acknowledges my difficulty to find an ethical and affirmative way to read these texts together,

which would account for the specificity of the texts and the strength of their voices addressing

both Innu or Inuit and non-Indigenous audiences. I argue that the texts’ insistence on the value of

experience, affect, and processes of learning encouraged me to question what my experience of

reading was, how the text affected me, and how I learned through this relationship. While I

initially sought to read these texts as theories of colonialism that could illuminate our

understanding of colonial relationships (between Innu and white, Inuit and qallunaat

[southerners]), I shifted to reflect on reading as reciprocity, a process through which I become

personally involved as a scholar who meet with the texts, in order to have “a chance at a better

understanding of what it is we need to do” (Armstrong 9). This chapter is constructed around

previous versions of it that were not satisfying, and focuses on the difficulties I encountered in

my analysis of their figurations of the settler, of their voices as women, and of their visions of

relationships between settlers and Innu or Inuit.

I conclude by engaging with the idea of thinking with the text, explaining more

thoroughly what I mean by affirmative readings of Indigenous texts in the post-TRC context,

marked by a “new” awareness of colonial injustice for settlers. I connect my ethical

preoccupation about how to read to the principles of research protocols to underline how my

thesis—my relationships to my corpus—contribute to discussions on methodology in the field of

Indigenous Literary Studies.

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CHAPTER 1.

AFFIRMATIVE READING OF RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ’S TESTIMONY: EPISTEMOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE IN A TEXT-BASED

RELATIONSHIP

No hay justicia social sin justicia cognitiva.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos60

Tal vez sea crear una cultura de paz. La paz como resultado de nuestros profundos valores y no como resultado de la guerra. Es aquí donde nuestra añejada civilización milenaria, que tuvo sus

avances y sus retrocesos, tiene una aportación concreta que hacer.

Rigoberta Menchú61

1.1 Introduction: The Everyday Violence of the Hierarchical Order

In 1982, Rigoberta Menchú gave an interview to the anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-

Debray in Paris, which was published a year later as Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació

la conciencia [I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian woman in Guatemala]. Menchú recounts her

story, and the story of her family and community in Chimel, a small village in the department of

60 “There is no social justice without cognitive justice.” Personal notes. World Social Forum, Montreal, August 2016. See also de Sousa Santos, Refundación Del Estado En América Latina: Perspectivas Desde Una Epistemología Del Sur, 2010. 61 “Perhaps it would be to create a peace culture. Peace as a result of our profound values and not as a result of war. Here is where our matured thousand-year-old culture, which has had its advances and regressions, can make a concrete contribution.” In Rigoberta: La nieta de los Mayas (1998), 166.

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El Quiche.62 She narrates their life in the mountains and the obligation to travel down to the

coast to work in the finca (plantation), revealing her comprehension of exploitation,

discrimination and sexual violence through the difference between ladino landowners and

Indigenous peasants and workers.63 She understands exploitation notably through the difference

between the rich and the poor: “There were rich and poor people. Rich people exploited the poor;

our sweat, our work. So they made themselves richer” (RM 144).64 In addition, Menchú stresses

the discrimination between poor ladinos and the Indigenous; although the former suffer from

exploitation, they emphasize their racial standing: “we are poor but we are not Indians” (RM

145).65 Throughout the book, she also draws attention to the specific ways in which Indigenous

women suffer from exploitation and discrimination: for instance, those who come to work in the

city as maids are usually pushed toward prostitution (RM 120) and it seems “normal” for the

ladina woman to ask the maids to sexually entertain her sons (RM 121). The author connects the

different structures of domination between rich and poor, ladinos and Indigenous, and men and

women. She argues, “Our enemies were not the landowners but the whole system” (RM 142)66

and the whole system relies on dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land. Writing in the

62 In many critical works, Rigoberta Menchú is called by her first name, which is common when writing on the protagonist of a story. However, because of the nature of the genre, testimonio, and of the critical discussions often centered on the issues of accuracy and truth, which puts the focus on the narrator’s voice and choices rather than on the protagonist of a narrative, the familiarity may appear as condescending. I call her by her last name to reflect the usage when speaking of scholars and authors, insisting on her role as a narrator-author who constructs the narrative of her own life. 63 Ladinos are descendants of Spanish people living in Guatemala. Often mixed-raced, they differ from Indigenous peoples mostly by culture, language, and position of power. 64 I use RM as an abbreviation to refer to Menchú’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la consciencia. All quotes are my own translations of the original version in Spanish, which appears in footnotes for reference. “Que había ricos y pobres. Que los ricos explotaban a los pobres; nuestro sudor, nuestro trabajo. Por eso eran cada vez más ricos.” 65 “Somos pobres pero no somos Indios.” 66 “Nuestros enemigos no eran los terratenientes sino que era todo el sistema.”

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context of intense state brutality, Menchú explains that the problem of exploitation,

discrimination and sexual violence was increased when “murderous generals” come to power

and violence against Indigenous peoples escalated (RM 144).67 Survival strategies in the fincas,

struggles to keep the land, resistance to the military and paramilitary coming to their village and

women’s participation in political organizations all respond to different, but interconnected,

forms of suffering that inform the raising of Menchú’s consciousness.

Her testimony made public the violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan authoritarian

regime against citizens considered subversives or enemies of the nation, in the polarized

conjuncture of the Cold War. Indigenous peoples were particularly affected by these policies

because of the communitarian nature of their social and political organization, mistaken for a

form of communism, and because they lived in the mountains where guerrillas were suspected of

hiding. Menchú responds to these accusations by stating that many anti-communist priests who

came to her region could witness that “the people was not communist but undernourished, the

people was not communist but discriminated against by the system” (RM 160).68 The state

rhetoric qualified the violence as a “civil war” between the state and the guerrillas; yet, the

Comisión de esclarecimiento histórico (CEH) [Commission for Historical Enlightening] (1996-

1999) concluded that the state was responsible for 93% of this violence.69 Menchú recounts

67 “Generales asesinos.” She mentions the general Kjell Laugerud who was in power from 1974 to 1978. 68 “el pueblo no era comunista sino que era desnutrido, vieron que el pueblo no era comunista sino que era discriminado por el sistema.” 69 The term “civil war” was used by Latin America’s governments in the 1970s and 1980s to justify the violence of their interventions through the rhetoric of subversive groups in the country; Guatemala is no exception. The CEH distinguishes the violations of human rights, committed by the government or its agents, and the facts of violence, committed by the guerrillas. The report concludes that the government was responsible for 93% of the violence and that the guerrillas were responsible for 3% (CEH 1: 324).

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episodes of torture, abductions, rapes, and massacres, which are now recognized as part of the

genocide of Maya populations led by the state from 1962 to 1996.70 In 1980, after her brother,

father, and mother had been tortured and killed by governmental forces, Menchú was forced to

leave the country. Her testimony was published in 1983, when Guatemala was at the peak of the

violence, and the urgency to stop the genocide in Guatemala was undeniable.

The democratic transition began in 1985, but only succeeded in 1996 with the instalment

of the Commission that investigated over 34 years of violations of human rights. The final report,

published in 1999, identified different causes for the culture of terror, among which were the

impact of colonial heritage, structural violence, and pervasive racism in contemporary

Guatemala. Many scholars of transitional justice explain that transition to democracy requires a

break with the violence of the past, not only with the abuses committed during a specific period,

whether a civil war or dictatorship, but also with the more insidious forms of historical,

structural, socio-economical and gender injustices that connect the pre- and post-war context.

These scholars argue that the efforts at transitional justice in Guatemala, and elsewhere, give too

little importance to how civil war and dictatorship’s violence, considered exceptional and

arbitrary, is embedded in historical heritage and specific structures of domination.71

70 The Commission for Historical Enlightening’s (CEH’s) report, published in 1999, establishes 1962 as the initial date for the “civil war.” The CEH concludes that the 629 massacres that happened between 1962 and 1996 constitute genocide against the Maya people of Guatemala, which means that the violations of human rights described in the report were perpetrated “with the intention of destroying, totally or partially” Maya communities (CEH 1: 315). The tensions, though, have been present for years, with a CIA-led coup in 1954, which assumed an anti-communist rhetoric as a justification for the overthrow. The first massacre happened in 1978 in Pánzos where the military responded with violence to the economic and political demands from the community. 71 See Paige Arthur and Greg Grandin.

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Menchú does connect historical and political violence, notably through her understanding

of gender violence. She recounts, for instance, that, when two “comrades” [compañeras] are

pregnant after being raped by soldiers, the community tells them that “their situation was not

unusual because [their] Ancestors have been raped the same way; they had unwanted children,

without love for having a son” (RM 169).72 She notes, “If we think about it […] Spain has much

to do with our condition, and with the people’s sense of suffering, precisely of the Indigenous

Peoples’ suffering” (RM 211).73 Throughout the book, Menchú speaks of rape as an integral part

of the massacres (RM 167, 170, 199, 222, 260) and of sexual violence as a tool of torture,

notably in the case of her mother (RM 223). In addition, she specifies that not only women can

be victims but Elders and children too, which is a sign, for her, of the extent of the soldiers’

inhumanity (RM 172). She recounts cases of extreme violence: the torture of her mother and her

brother, and how her friend Doña Petrona Chona was brutally murdered and dismembered

because she refused the advances of the landowners’ son (RM 176-178).

I, Rigoberta Menchú brought international attention to the violations of human rights in

her country and, also, gave a voice to the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala (and of Latin

America) through the new literary genre of testimonio. Her insistence on denouncing the

violence against Indigenous women in the contexts of the abusive regime and of colonization has

been mostly overlooked. Moreover, despite being a canonical text of world literature, Menchú’s

testimony has received little attention in Indigenous Studies as a discourse on Indigeneity. The

72 “La misma comunidad le ayudaba y le decía que no era un caso raro sino que así fue con nuestros antepasados que fueron violados, que tuvieron hijos sin querer, sin amor de tener un hijo.” 73 “Aunque, si se piensa, España tiene que ver mucho con nuestra situación. Tiene que ver mucho con el sentido del sufrimiento del mismo pueblo, precisamente del sufrimiento de los indígenas.”

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text has been representative of the “multicultural turn” in the United States and its inclusion in

the university curriculum has been an entry point for North American students to encounter “the

other,” but its contribution in rethinking Indigenous difference in the contemporary world

through the perspective of an Indigenous woman has been largely ignored. The fact that the text

has been important in discussions about multiculturalism in the North is significant with regard

to how Indigenous peoples can be considered “another racialized minority group in the

diasporas” (Byrd xxiv), disregarding historical dispossession, (cultural) genocide, and

appropriation of the land. In the case of Menchú’s testimony, there is a possible tension between

the urgency to end the political violence of the “civil war” and the urgency to address and end

colonial violence.74 Menchú’s text and transitional justice practices share the same objective of

engaging with human rights in a way that prevents the recurrence of abuses and injustices.75

However, by prioritizing an understanding of Indigenous difference, the text challenges the idea

of a transition from state violence to peace because of past and ongoing colonial and gender

violence and injustices.

As the testimony suggests, the context of transitional justice in Guatemala is an

opportunity to address how state violence has exacerbated existing forms of violence against

Indigenous Peoples. The link between transitional justice and decolonization has not been the

main focus of transitional justice in Latin America, concerned with the consolidation of

74 In the introduction and prologue, Burgos-Debray talks about external and internal colonialism. She says that if the ladinos in Guatemala are ready to condemn the first, which concerns the relation of imperialism that the North maintains with the South, they most often refuse to see the second, which concerns the domination of a white ladino class over Indigenous population in Latin America. For readers from the North, it might also be easier to denounce imperialism and violence abroad than to acknowledge past and ongoing colonialism in one’s own context. 75 See Arthur’s definition, transitional justice as “a response to massive or systematic violence of human rights that aims to recognize victims and to prevent the recurrence of abuse” (Identities in Transition 1).

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democratic institutions and political stability. However, the CEH is one of the Latin American

truth commissions that have addressed the necessity of making the connection with

decolonization by digging into the historical roots of the state abuses and the genocide of

Indigenous peoples in Guatemala. I read I, Rigoberta Menchú as presenting a theory of

Indigeneity that is significant for transitional justice because 1) it claims that specific periods of

violence are rooted in historical, colonial and sexual violence; 2) it traces an alternative practice,

a specifically literary one, to the transitional justice mechanisms that have proven difficult to

implement76; and 3) it works on different levels of violence, including the production of

knowledge, with the implicit aim of achieving the non-repetition—“never again”—of violence

like the government-led genocide. If the context of reception in the 1980s and early 1990s was

tied to the urgency of moving into action to stop the genocide, the post-conflict context,

characterized by the continuity of the structures of racism, sexism and exploitation at the roots of

genocide, points to the theoretical, epistemological, and political imperative to rethink a

decolonizing approach to Indigenous difference.

Despite the text’s presence in university classrooms, colonial structures also determine

the ways in which the text circulated in the North. On the one hand, academics and others from

the One-Third World can be easily touched by or even mobilized against violence in the Two-

Thirds World77 without necessarily acknowledging their own immediate contexts of violence

(the colonial context in the North). On the other hand, most critics have looked into the

76 While transitional justice mechanisms can be judicial or non-judicial, the former are extremely limited. The CEH’s findings, for instance, could not be used for prosecutions and the final report could not name names. Moreover, amnesties to those responsible for human rights abuses are often considered as a way to promote peace and focus on the future of the nation. 77 Chandra Tapalde Mohanty uses the terms One-Third World and Two-Thirds World to insist that a majority of the population (two-thirds of the world) is living in the so-called “Third World.”

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materiality of the production and circulation of the testimony with the objectives either of

encouraging solidarity with the narrator, and more generally with Guatemala, or of criticizing

Western academia through the theorization of the new literary genre, in a way that foregrounds

the readers’ engagement in political actions or in self-critique. In a non-Indigenous context, the

“other” too often serves to define the moral value of the “self” when knowledge is produced

about the testimony. I propose to read I, Rigoberta Menchú as theory in order to refuse the

hierarchy between “self” and “others,” and between theory and literature. Moreover, I believe we

should be careful in thinking of violence as characterizing the site from where Menchú speaks,

not to deny the violence but to carefully establish a relationship with the text that does not situate

Menchú’s voice only in relation to her experience of injustice that readers respond to by asking

how to do justice. In order to consider this text in the field of transitional justice, it has to be

considered as one of the sites where justice is already being enacted.

Menchú wants the readers in the North, and in Guatemala, to become aware of the

structures of domination that affect Indigenous peoples in particularly violent ways: “The

objective was precisely to inform the entire world of what was happening in Guatemala as well

as to inform the people within the country” (RM 210).78 Nevertheless, her text does not only

expose the acute violence of the Guatemalan regime, but describes her life in her community of

Chimel to show the readers that she is part of a millennium-old culture. The details about

ceremonies and customs, particularly through what she decides to reveal or conceal, establish a

relationship to an audience that is mostly non-Indigenous. The text appeal to Western readers;

however, I argue, the power of the text does not stem from fostering Western readers’ move to

action but from actively creating an epistemological site that itself performs justice through the

78 “El objetivo era precisamente informar al mundo entero de lo que pasaba en Guatemala e informar también la misma gente interna.”

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type of relationship that the text establishes with the readers. In this chapter, I contend that the

power of the text is not external to it, activated by Western readers’ critiques or actions, but

deployed within the literary arena. The text resists Western readers’ appropriation of it, for the

way in which Menchú speaks of Indigenous difference puts an emphasis on the epistemological

difference between her and the readers. This strategy importantly blocks a reading of the text

through empathy, which often means through identification with the narrator. Menchú’s

construction of her subjectivity, through the narration, affirms and creates an epistemological site

incommensurable to Western epistemology that articulates her vision of justice, which in turn

envisions the contribution of her people to a “culture of peace” (Nieta 166).79 She does not only

narrate her subjectivity as a “poor Indian woman,” but positions her subjectivity through

complexity, polyphony and relationality. I propose to read the text affirmatively, that is, through

the author’s theorization of difference rather than as a marker of difference. This way I prioritize

Menchú’s own literary project. Moreover, I seek to move away from the binary oppositions

between non-Western or Native informant, who describes life, experience and injustices, and

Western literary critics who produce a theoretical discourse on it or act upon it. In what follows,

I offer a feminist and decolonial reading that underlines Menchú’s discourse on Indigenous

difference. I situate the text in its context of reception in the North and I discuss how the power

of the text has often been assessed through its effects on the readers rather than through the

epistemological displacements it asks for on the theoretical level. These shifts do not only

require a critique of Western epistemology, but also affirmative readings of the text considered

in its own epistemological field, incommensurable to Western epistemology, but in relation with

it. In the last section of the chapter, I read Menchú’s construction of her subjectivity in the text

79 I refer to Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas (1998) with the abbreviation “Nieta”: “una cultura de paz.”

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through the concepts of complexity, relationality and polyphony in order to start imagining such

a reading.

1.2 A Feminist and Decolonial Approach to Difference

1.2.1 “A continuous relationship, between parts in parallel”: Connecting Menchú’s and

Braidotti’s Theories of Difference

Menchú has been considered a subaltern who narrates her story orally rather than writing

it. She herself insists that her knowledge does not come from books but from her experience.

This “experiential knowledge” has been considered as shedding a new light on history from the

perspective of the subaltern, subverting Western modes of production of truth(s). This view risks

assuming that experience has taught Menchú directly and that her narration is not her own

construction. Ultimately, acknowledging experiential knowledge may create a binary between

experience and theory, literature and activism, the subaltern and the intellectual, which are

categories that serve to dismiss the literariness or the artfulness of Menchú’s literary project. In

this chapter, I propose a feminist and decolonial approach to the text’s own theorization of

difference, which requires a shift from a system of thought based on binary oppositions to one

based on complexity and materiality. The objective of this section is to read Menchú along with

theory, acknowledging the text and the responses to it as both sites for producing theory, in order

to strengthen a decolonizing approach to the text.

Differences are referred to throughout the testimony, as Menchú talks about the poor,

women, illiterates, homosexuals, peasants, workers, and Indigenous peoples. She particularly

attends to how hierarchies, generated by these differences, affect the latter, and both isolate them

from the ladinos and create divisions between Indigenous communities. For instance, she

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recounts that the general in power at the time aimed at dividing the community through the

distribution of smallholdings, which later weakened their potential for resistance when the army

was invading a village. At the height of violence, Menchú’s community decided to move all the

people to a small parcel of land to enable their fight against state forces. In order to create links

with other peoples and strengthen resistance, Menchú also travelled to other communities,

learned other Indigenous languages—mam, cakchiquel, tzutuhil (RM 188)—, and taught others

the resistance strategies her village had developed against military invasions and massacres. She

recounts that part of her political education was to become aware that her community’s suffering

was shared by other Indigenous communities in Guatemala. She knew other Indigenous ethnic

groups in the fincas or in her visits to other aldeas [small villages]; they spoke other languages

(RM 61), wore clothes that had different meanings (RM 37), and ate different kinds of food

depending on the region (RM 217). At the same time, through these encounters, Menchú comes

to realize that she is “Indigenous.” She claims that something common to different Indigenous

peoples is the culture: “And everything of that culture comes from the land. The religiousness of

the people comes from our culture, from harvesting corn and bean, which are two elements that

are very important in a community” (RM 37).80 Menchú’s definition of “culture” makes her

imagine the larger community of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, distinct from ladinos.

The ladinos understand Indigenous culture only through folklore. Menchú explains, for

instance, that the representation of Indigenous women, through the election of Indigenous queens

in every village, is linked to the folklorization of Indigenous culture. She does not know where

this tradition comes from and thinks, “It is like folklore which, I believe, has been imposed after

80 “Y todo lo que es la cultura viene de la tierra. La religiosidad que tiene el pueblo viene de nuestra cultura, de nuestra cosecha de maíz, del fríjol que son dos elementos muy importantes en una comunidad.”

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[colonization]” (RM 232).81 She criticizes that the mayor’s office makes a business out of the

Indigenous queen without consideration for the person and for the community (RM 233-234).

The folklorization of Indigenous culture comes with the subordination of its people to ladinos.

While working as a maid in the capital, she suffers from seeing the dog getting better food than

herself: “For me it was quite painful to accept the idea that the Indian was inferior” (RM 145).82

She notes, “there was a time when they said the ladinos doubted that we were people. Thinking

we were a sort of animal. All this is clear to me now” (RM 149).83 Menchú is aware of the

hierarchy in the value of life in the ladino culture. Nevertheless, she notes that in her culture, all

life has value: “As I said, an animal’s life means a lot to us. The life of a tree. And the life of any

object that exists in nature means a lot. And even more the life of a human being” (RM 196).84

Menchú valorizes Indigenous difference in a way that unsettles Western understanding of it.

She defines “culture” through the relationships with the land and through the practices of

the people on the land. When she explains that every child is born with his or her nahual, an

animal that represents the earth, the animals, the water and sun (RM 39), she describes the

importance of their relationships to the other than human: “all the kingdoms that exist for us on

earth have to do with the human and give to the human. It is not a part isolated from the human;

the human over here and the animal over there, but there is a continuous relationship, between

81 “Es algo folklore que me imagino que se ha impuesto después.” 82 “Para mí era bastante doloroso aceptar la idea de que el indio es menor.” 83 “Hubo un tiempo en que dicen que los ladinos dudaban que nosotros éramos gente. Que éramos una clase de animal. Todo eso llegué a clarificarlo en mí misma.” 84 “Como decía, la vida de un animal para nosotros, significa mucho. La vida de un árbol. Y la vida de cualquier objeto que exista en la naturaleza significa mucho. Y mucho más la vida de ser humano.”

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parts in parallel” (RM 41).85 In addition to stressing the differences between Indigenous

communities, it is through this Indigenous culture that Menchú characterizes difference rather

than through the folklore, which ladinos privilege in their relationships to Indigenous peoples.

When she speaks of Indigenous women, she also insists on “their relationships with the land;

between the land and the mother” (RM 245). For her, this special link, not accessible to men, is

something unique to women. Therefore, Menchú distinguishes Indigenous peoples from ladinos,

women from men, but asserts the equal value of all.

Her strategy resonates with feminist Rosi Braidotti’s engagement for rethinking

difference affirmatively, that is, otherwise than through binary oppositions. According to

Braidotti, Western Humanist thought, which has been a long-standing tendency in academic

thinking, but has also influenced ideas that circulate as common sense, follows the logic of the

Same, in which there is one ideal of “Man,” a European idealized self-image, that recognizes the

universal principles of beauty, truth, justice, morality, and reason. Her work is in continuity with

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and affirms that they “offer the perfect synthesis of this

dominant image of the subject as masculine/white/heterosexual/speaking a standard

language/property-owning/urbanized” (“Complexity” 212). Those who cannot recognize

themselves in this figure, because of their sex, race or species, are structurally excluded and

considered “others” of the Same. As otherness is constructed through a dialectic that privileges a

system of thought based on binary oppositions, to be different means to be worth less (The

Posthuman 15). Braidotti proposes to move away from the dialectics of difference (Self vs.

others), and proposes to adopt a vitalist approach based on Deleuze’s conception of difference:

85 “Todos los reinos que existen para nosotros en la tierra tienen que ver con el hombre y contribuyen al hombre. No es parte aislada del hombre; que hombre por allí, que animal por allá, sino que es una constante relación, es algo paralelo.”

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“[Deleuze] argues that the affirmation of difference as pure positivity entails the abolition of the

dialectics of negation in favour of multiple, nomadic thought. ‘Multiple’ does not mean the

dispersal of forces in a given field, but rather, a redefinition of the embodied subject in terms of

desire and affectivity, situated in the element of speed, that is to say, time” (Patterns 111).

Therefore, as the theoretical ground for differences moves away from binary oppositions, critical

readings are enabled to engage the complexity of subjects through affects, desires, and

embodiment (positioning), a strategy to which my analysis is committed.

Menchú prioritizes a complex understanding of the situation of injustice based on her

experience: “We don’t really need advice or theories or documents, because life has taught us.

For my part, there is enough with the horrors that I had to endure. I also felt in the deepest part of

my being what discrimination is. My life is exactly a narration of exploitation” (RM 158).86

Menchú put a lot of emphasis on the narrator’s experience throughout the text, hiding the process

of construction of the narration. Yet, the statement that her life is a narration draws attention to

her interpretation of her own life through the conception of exploitation.

The tension between written texts and life experience is exemplified in the first lines of

the testimony, among the most quoted by critics, which starts with three affirmative statements

about which we will most likely have no doubt: “My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty-

three years old. I would like to offer this living testimony….” Two statements follow about a

methodology that she didn’t use: “I would like to offer this living testimony, which I haven’t

learned from a book and which I haven’t learned alone either, since I learned it all with my

86 “No necesitamos mucho de consejos o de teorías o de documentos, ya que la vida nos ha enseñado. Yo, de mi parte, con los horrores que he sufrido es suficiente. También he sentido en lo mas hondo de mi ser lo que es la discriminación. Lo que es la explotación, eso narra exactamente mi vida.”

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people and this is something I would like to stress” (RM 21, emphasis added).87 The negative

form directly challenges possible expectations held by readers from the North, while an

affirmation, like “I learned from my experience, and with the whole community,” would have

left the assumptions of the primacy of literacy and the autonomy of the subject unquestioned.

While many critical discussions of the testimony focus on criticizing literacy and the Western

conception of the subject, they often regard Menchú’s experience through an idealistic view of

the subaltern’s position in the margin, rather than considering the complexity of the ways in

which oppression and injustices can be understood through the concreteness of embodiment and

daily life, but also that she uses the concept of exploitation to produce the narration of her life. I

would like to underline that the critique of colonialism through that of literacy—that is, saying

that we should focus on the subaltern’s experience to reinterpret history—brings about an

inversion in the value of the terms in a way that idealizes experience and minimizes the

complexity of Menchú’s identity and agency.

Menchú criticizes the primacy of literacy and opposes it to her experience. Nevertheless,

I see her testimony as challenging this opposition rather than reinforcing the definitions that

make literacy and experience antithetical. Experience should not be taken either as an

unmediated source of knowledge or as completely accessible to consciousness, hers or the

readers’, as it is primarily embodied and embedded in structures of power. Chandra Tapalde

Mohanty explains: “In fact narratives of historical experience are crucial to political thinking not

because they present an unmediated version of the ‘truth’ but because they can destabilize

received truths and locate debate in the complexities and contradictions of historical life” (244). I

87 “Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú. Tengo veintitrés años. Quisiera dar este testimonio vivo que no he aprendido en un libro y que tampoco he aprendido sola ya que todo esto lo he aprendido con mi pueblo y es algo que yo quisiera enfocar.”

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understand Menchú’s emphasis on experience as a plea for considering life in all its intricacies.

Her identities as an Indigenous woman, a protagonist of literature, an activist and a narrator-

author are performed through the production of the testimony, which is not a reflection of who

she is, but a construction of who she is becoming through her own embodied interpretations and

her multiple relationships.

The insistence throughout the testimony on the difference between learning from books

and learning from life experiences paradoxically contradicts Menchú’s effort to offer a book to

learn from. I believe that the assertion that she didn’t learn from books doesn’t dismiss written

texts, but critiques the production of knowledge. It seems obvious that she did not mean this

book to tell readers that they are unworthy of understanding her justice project because they

haven’t lived her life. What seems important, though, is the use of a different methodology in

which her relations and her experience are taken into account. The process of learning that she

describes contrasts with the imposition of a Western literacy and reminds readers of the

structural and epistemological difference between her and us. The statement that she didn’t learn

alone is not only a claim that she represents her people, but that her experience is embodied and

embedded in a particular location made of relationships with others.

Cultural integrity was used, in the context of the controversy mentioned above and about

which I say more below, to defend Menchú from the accusation of lying, arguing that her

veracity cannot be understood through Western objectivity but through Maya “culture.” This

argument reinforces the hope that Menchú, as a “representative” of her community, will give us

access to “cultural knowledge.” This possibility can only come, according to this logic, with the

counterpart of acculturation (Raquidel 206–207): “Obviously, Rigoberta loses power because she

needs to use a language borrowed from the oppressive ladinos” (Sommer 148). This supposes

that, by trying to bring attention to the injustice lived by Indigenous peoples, Menchú gave up on

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what would be an authentic cultural expression. Wanting to overprotect cultural integrity and the

subaltern’s voice might have the reverse effect of thinking that there is no place for an alternative

voice in the production of meanings, or that political strategies must subvert cultural authenticity.

Mohanty argues that one methodological habit of feminist practice is to assume that Two-Thirds

World women’s difference is stable and ahistorical. This way we situate complexity on the side

of One-Third World women, and reassert the victimization of other women, which “erases all

marginal and resistant modes and experiences” (Mohanty 40–41). In order to move away from a

static view of culture, which works notably through colonial and patriarchal structures of

thinking, we need to get rid of binary oppositions, and start looking at the complexity of life

experience.

Reading Menchú as a discourse on Indigeneity risks simplifying her culture and granting

too much importance to experience in relation to the production of a text as a defining feature of

Indigenous culture. I wish to avoid both traps. As a narrator, Menchú’s testimony can be

considered an oral expression. Yet, Neil ten Kortenaar argues, “the distinction between orality

and literacy presumes the separation of two things that cannot be separated. The distinction is

therefore entirely ideological: its meaning is projected onto it and is not inherent in it” (13).

Kortenaar proposes a decolonial perspective on the primacy of literacy that allows him to

consider African postcolonial literature. He offers a critical view on the “literacy thesis” which

conveys the idea “that literacy changes people and brings into being modern individuals” (13).

The literacy thesis pretends to explain the divide between cultures through the opposition

between orality and literacy, saying that:

Alphabetic literacy or print have been credited with inspiring or at least making possible

monotheism, the law, large states with their bureaucracy, Greek philosophy, history,

nationalism, democracy, secularism, science, the hierarchical division of mind and body,

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and the very concept of person. The contradictions involved here (literacy enables

monotheism and secularism, imperial bureaucracy and democracy) are held to be a

historical condition rather than a flaw in the thesis. (Kortenaar 12)

Following Karin Barber, Kortenaar proposes to distinguish the term “texts” from ordinary

language. Menchú’s dictation is a text, before it was ever transcribed and published, because it is

a self-contained verbal construction set aside from ordinary speech. The distinction between text

and ordinary speech is particularly relevant nowadays with social media, in which written forms

(ex. SMS, twits) are closer to ordinary language than to text: “Thus the first requirement for

understanding texts is understanding that they refer to what people do with them” (Barber quoted

by Kortenaar, 20, emphasis added). Taking seriously Menchú’s narration through literary

analysis and what she does with the text is, hence, part of a decolonial perspective on the

testimony. Although Menchú did not write her book, she dictated her narration and authorized its

publication. Her intention was to have her narrative circulate in the world of print among readers.

We need to consider not how literacy betrays her project, but is integral to her project.

1.2.2 Culture Wars, Epistemological Turmoil: The Context of Reception

In what follows, I must distance myself from the text itself to look into the context of

reception, which has influenced the way in which the testimony has been read. I, Rigoberta

Menchú made known the voice of a Maya Quiche woman through a new literary genre,

testimonio,88 and conveyed the urgency of stopping the Guatemalan state’s violence. Both

88 Most critics identify Miguel Barnet’s testimony published in 1964 as the first testimonio. The new literary genre was established officially in 1970 when the journal Casa de las Américas decided to add a new category for literary prizes; testimony was defined as a first-hand account

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aspects were challenging for the United States: while the implication of the United States in the

Guatemalan “civil war” was coming to light, the fiercest threat seemed to come from the

testimony’s integration into the academic curriculum at Stanford University, marking an

important step for the multicultural turn in literary studies (Grandin, Who is 1). The academic

landscape was then changing as more students from ethnic minorities and professors formed

during the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s joined universities. The change in the

Western civilization course to include texts from the Americas, including “non-Western” texts

like Menchú’s, Franz Fanon’s, Aimé Césaire’s and others, was highly mediatized and

controversial, participating in what is known as the “culture wars.”

In 1999, David Stoll publishes research that contradicts some facts of Rigoberta

Menchú’s story,89 arguing that the woman wrongly gave the impression that the guerrilla had

strong support from Indigenous peasantry in Guatemala. Stoll accuses Menchú of distorting the

description of events for the sake of her political agenda, and criticizes any literary scholars who

would use the testimony to do the same (Beverley xv). Stoll’s own agenda is to prove that

Indigenous peoples were caught “between two fires” and that the guerrilla should be held partly

responsible for the slaughter, basing his evidence on the testimony of other Indigenous men and

women from the region. Stoll claims that his goal was not to discredit Menchú, while he

provided a rationale for discrediting Menchú’s testimonio and the study of non-Western texts

of an aspect of Hispano-American literature that has to be historically reliable, and of literary quality (Román-Lagunas 213). 89 Stoll alleged that she was lying concerning, notably, the fact that she witnessed the murder and torture of her brother, the ways in which her father died in the Spanish embassy, and the fact that she was uneducated and didn’t learn Spanish at school.

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altogether, which has been used by conservatives who opposed Stanford University’s decision

and considered multiculturalism a threat to their ideal of Western civilization.

The important media campaign that followed circumscribed the conflict to a struggle

about books and not about ideas. Mary Louise Pratt explains90: “The lucha-libros (book-

struggle) impeded a dialogue on what really was at stake: whether the United States would

recognize and develop itself as a pluriethnic, heterogeneous, democratic, and postcolonial

society” (183–184, my translation). For Pratt, the opponents were not against Rigoberta Menchú

as such, but used her testimony to discredit the whole project of opening education to

multiculturalism in the United States (187). The effect of the media campaign was both the

depoliticization and the negation of the literary value of Menchú’s testimonial narrative. On the

one hand, Stoll argued that the testimony could be read as literature, but not as history

(Beverley 3), relegating Menchú’s political discourse to the level of literary discourse. On the

other, conservatives who denounced the politicization of the “neutral” discipline of literary

appreciation questioned the value of the testimonio as literature (Beasley-Murray 122).

Ultimately, the book was removed from many universities’ curriculums because its

legitimacy was based on factual veracity. However, there is a shared understanding that the

contested facts were minor in relation to what the text made apparent, which is, as Beverley

phrases it, the “Big Lie of racism” (2). Stoll himself says:

There is no doubt about the most important points: that a dictatorship massacred

thousands of indigenous peasants, that the victims included half of Rigoberta’s immediate

90 Mary Louise Pratt, professor at Stanford University at the time, was part of this new generation of professors that had been formed in the flourishing moment of 1968-1970s.

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family, that she fled to Mexico to save her life, and that she joined a revolutionary

movement to liberate her country. (xviii)

The insistence on discrediting Menchú based on the details of the narration brings Stoll to

contend that his research is objective in opposition to Menchú’s narration. However, as Pratt

mentions, Stoll’s book also entails various errors, notably the use of one or two contradictory

testimonies as fact.91 For Beverley, Stoll defended a political and ideological position, hidden

behind the veil of academic objectivity (5).

In the midst of these contesting political agendas, there seem to be confusion about what

objectivity means. The necessity to defend Menchú against the conservatives’ attacks

encouraged relativistic positions about what counts as truth, authenticity, and knowledge, which

are of no critical help to rethink Menchú’s position as a narrator who intends to challenge the

historical construction of the Indigenous as exotic, unintelligent and subversive enemies of the

nation.92 On the other side, conservatives seem to uphold objectivity, the proof of detached facts

in monological discourse, while the situation in Guatemala requires much more nuanced studies

of a complex situation. In the recent publication Who is Rigoberta Menchú? Greg Grandin

argues that the two commissions on the violations of human rights in Guatemala, by the Catholic

91 Pratt says that Stoll’s book is hard to read and full of contradictory statements. She gives many examples. One of them is that in chapter 8, Stoll refers to two different eyewitnesses’ testimonies about whether Menchú’s father was present when the guerrilla first arrived to the village. Then, in chapter 12 and 17, he assumes as a fact that he was present (Pratt 195). Moreover, Pratt explains that Menchú’s detractors and those who wanted to see the book out of the curriculum didn’t have any interest in Stoll’s book, because the story, the truth and reality that Stoll pretended to reveal was of no interest to them. Pratt argues that Stoll wrote a book for an nonexistent public (Pratt 188). 92 The CEH explains: “Toward the end of the 1970s, the army and dominant sectors of the country created the “Indigenous-Guerrillero” identity, situating it within the concept of internal enemy. Such definition served to repress claims for socioeconomic, political, and ethnic-cultural demands, which had been developing for the last decades” (CEH 3: 164).

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Church and by the United Nations, have “largely vindicated Menchú’s version of events” (Who

is v). Grandin adds, against the idea assumed by Stoll, that Rigoberta Menchú would have been a

puppet for the CUC [Comité de Unidad Campesina]: “What makes Menchú’s testimony so

extraordinary is how far her engagement with ideas outstripped whatever orientation she might

have received from organizers” (Who is 30). However, Grandin’s contribution is not to analyze

Menchú’s literary engagement, but to prove her right and restore her credibility through an

analysis of the commissions’ finding, notably concerning genocide in Guatemala. The effect of

the controversy was to frame the discussions about Menchú’s testimony along the axes of left

and right politics, constraining her discourse in the structure of Western politics. Duncan Earle

quotes a Maya man who explained that the opposition between left and right is not a Maya

dialectic, which would rather be a dialectic about:

[…] invaders and invaded, the crimes of theft, rape, and racism for five centuries that no

one will address, even though it is everywhere present, even though we continue to live

those crimes… The left organizations want our involvement but not our agenda. They

think of us as racists who want to emphasize our cultural differences. But that just

preserves their prejudices, and makes them blind to it as well. They do not understand the

dialectic of Conquest. (299)

The controversy specifically, and the critical reception in general, have created a space in which

one is for or against Menchú, defending or discrediting her,93 but both positions hardly consider

93 Beverley criticizes Stoll’s choice to put Menchú’s face on the cover of his books, using her notoriety to sell a book in which he discredits her. In a similar way, I was struck by Greg Grandin’s title Who is Rigoberta Menchú? for a book in which only the introduction is dedicated to this question. The rest of the volume is the publication of two essays by Grandin in which he engages with Guatemala’s “civil war,” the question of genocide and the activities of the Commission. I can’t help but think that both cases use Menchú as an icon that automatically

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seriously Menchú’s justice project, which is about addressing the challenge of contemporary

colonialism. The language used to speak about the testimony, and the controversy that follows,

seems to be inappropriate with regards to what really is at stake in the text. It also shows that

people from the right or the left seem unable to address the question of colonization, of the land,

and of Indigenous difference, and prefer to analyze the texts in relation to the tensions between

North and South, the West and the non-West. What an analysis of the critical reception shows is

that even people committed to justice and human rights, people from the left, might reproduce

colonial habits of thoughts.

I identify two important critical tendencies that link text and politics in the analysis of

Menchú’s testimony by sympathetic readers from the Left. 1) The first concerns the text’s

objective to raise awareness about Guatemala’s authoritative regime. The testimony is

considered a cry for help that encourages, through empathy, the readers’ engagement in political

action. This view contends that literature can change mentalities and people’s practices in a way

that promotes human rights. 2) The second builds a critique of Western scholarship upon the idea

that literacy is complicit with colonial power and, hence, inevitably constrains Menchú’s

discourse. On the one hand, there is a concern that her choice to produce a text corrupts her

cultural authenticity. On the other, the simple fact that an Indigenous woman produces this text

becomes challenging for the intellectual centre. One critical perspective is deconstructive of

epistemology, and the other affirms political actions. It is more difficult, however, to find critical

works that propose new ways of thinking and doing research, changing the critique of

brings attention to their writing, without giving much space to the Indigenous woman, although my inclinations are toward Grandin’s project to put Menchú’s discourse in relation to the Commission’s findings.

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epistemology in affirmative readings of the text. I want to propose a third way to analyze

Menchú’s testimony, arguing that, rather than as a instrument with the objectives of raising

awareness and challenging Western production of knowledge, the text can be read as a discourse

on Indigeneity, as an engagement with the ways in which the construction of subjectivity is

crucial to the justice project in the aftermath of the genocide.

The problem with the two tendencies is that the criticism of the intellectual’s position of

power requires the idealization of Menchú’s discourse as occupying a natural position to criticize

colonial power. Both critical tendencies are committed to justice, but paradoxically entail the

contradictory desires of building solidarity and helping the other, and of criticizing one’s own

site of power. These desires reaffirm the opposition between intellectual and subaltern, Western

and non-Western modes of production by raising one at the expense of the other. I propose to

deconstruct the desire for justice of the two tendencies before re-reading them through Menchú’s

own discourse. The decolonization of affect (theoretically and in one’s own academic practice)

opens up a space for considering Menchú’s text as a significant discourse on Indigeneity and

human rights that can be powerful not only by its external impacts (the readers’ engagement in

political actions or in self-critique), but as a theoretical engagement for decolonization.

1.3 Doing Justice to Testimonio: From Political Actions to the Politics of

the Text

There is a common idea that testimonio plays a role in fostering social justice but how it

does so remain unclear. Kimberley A. Nance defines testimonio as: “the body of works in which

speaking subjects who present themselves as somehow ‘ordinary’ represent a personal

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experience of injustice, whether directly to the reader or through the offices of a collaborating

writer, with the goal of inducing readers to participate in a project of social justice” (7). Many

scholars, indeed, including Nance, underline the pragmatic aim of making the readership aware

of specific issues, and of fostering political action. In this view, testimonio is not quite a practice

of resistance, but an instrument in the struggle for more justice: “Menchú’s testimonio has been

received by some as a ‘near-euphoric celebration of a poetics of solidarity’ because of its impact

on the reader” (Nance 5). This response contrasts with another one, more pessimistic, about what

the genre can actually achieve. On the one hand, the enthusiasm suggests a “concrete” way to

express solidarity; on the other, the pragmatic effects of the testimonio are almost impossible to

evaluate. How to prove that the text induces a change in the reader? Nance considers this

problem and states, “at its best, reading testimonio may make the reader more likely to act, but it

can never make that act a certainty […] testimonio offers no promise to change the world

directly, but it does offer readers a means of changing their minds about the world, a

development that may, in turn, lead to activism” (159). Facing the problem of proving how

testimonio leads to social change, Nance argues that, before moving into action, readers might

need to change their mind about the world. She presents an analysis of Menchú’s rhetorical

strategies to achieve this goal. On a basic level, when the testimony came out, it was for many in

the North the first time that they would read or hear from an Indigenous woman (including

Indigenous peoples in the North).94 Pratt recounts that when she was teaching the book it used to

have transformative effects: “a lot of the students face for the first time the idea that wealthy

people are wealthy because poor people are poor. For a lot of them, reading the book destabilizes

94 An Antane Kapesh published her autobiography Je suis une maudite sauvagesse in 1976 in Quebec, but the public and critical reception of the book was not comparable to the fame of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony. Other testimonies have been published before, like Domitila Barros’s in Bolivia, but Menchú’s created an unprecedented reaction on the international level.

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their relations to their nation and historical present” (190). In this way, testimonio might

encourage us to think critically about difference, violence, and injustices, but I am sceptical

about the view that considers literature well-equipped to change our mind, primarily because

(material) changes of our ideas take time to become embodied knowledge.

To ask about the concrete effects of testimonio is, for a great part, to ask about the

reader’s affective response to the text. Generally and simplistically, Menchú’s message is “stop

being racist,” “stop having prejudices against us,” “stop thinking through hierarchies.” The

readers can hear this message and be convinced, without necessarily changing their racist

attitudes or the racist structures of their thought. Sara Ahmed asserts the non-performativity of

anti-racism, that is, saying that you are anti-racist doesn’t make you anti-racist. She criticizes that

the Western (anti-racist) subject’s bad feelings about a situation of injustice ultimately make him

or her feel good about the sensibility they have. The book has emotional effects on the reader and

the author, and can increase the sensibility toward interior complexity, but these effects do not

operate in linear and causal temporalities. Feeling bad reading Menchú’s testimonio is an

experience shared by most of the readers, but it cannot be a starting point for a critical analysis of

its discourse and its politics. What is more, the “justice effect” created by the reading should be

considered an important feature of the site from which Western scholars produce knowledge

about testimonio.

Empathy may have led some people to actions: writing a letter to the Prime Minister of

Canada, becoming informed about the intervention of the United States (and the North more

generally) in wars abroad, giving money to organizations and engaging in activist groups or

NGOs to help Guatemala end the regime of terror. It is impossible, though, to prove that the

reading of the book caused such actions, and that they would not have been undertaken

otherwise. Moreover, if the objective of the book was to encourage actions through empathy, it

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would ask the reader to identify with Menchú’s experience when she talks about suffering, pain

and impotence. However, Menchú insists that the reader does not have access to her form of

knowledge, which comes from embodied experience of injustices. She explains that, because of

necessity and urgency, resistance came in the community before they could understand the

structures of exploitation and domination that were affecting them (RM 145). In a way, even

though readers could feel the urgency of acting because of the book’s timely denunciation of the

Guatemalan’s regime, they could not feel Menchú’s description of urgency as a question of life

and death lived in the flesh. This reminds us of the difference between the readers and the

narrator, which has to be defined otherwise than through the opposition between the intellectual

and the subaltern.

Behind the desire to hear Menchú’s call for actions and to find concrete paths for political

actions lies the idea that Western readers have an ethical obligation to help Guatemala and

Rigoberta Menchú with her project for justice. Nance says that, in order to be effective,

testimonio has to remind the readers that they have their own space from which they can help

(79). This idea, despite the attention to the subject’s position and the possible interpretation that

one can help by changing one’s site, is problematic because it resonates with the common

thought that subaltern’s testimonio asks for Western intellectuals’ input. What Menchú teaches

us is that there is no direct relation between being able to theorize the causes of a situation and

knowing what practical solution is the best. In other words, an intellectual doesn’t know better

what to do than people who suffered from injustice, and vice versa. Menchú develops a critique

of the paternalistic desire to help through her criticism of feminism, discussing differences

among women. She starts by distinguishing Indigenous women, from working, peasant, poor

ladina, and middle-class women, explaining that a specific aspect of Indigenous women’s lives

in Guatemala is to link motherhood with the earth (RM 245). She speaks of her experience with

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women from the North and criticizes the imposition of feminist models on their struggle: “we

arrived at the conclusion that many women take care of others’ issues, but not of their own. This

hurts and it shows that we ourselves need to find solutions to our problems, without asking that

somebody else come to resolve it because this would be a lie” (RM 246).95 Menchú clearly

announces that the book is not a cry for help. She links this conclusion with the criticism of the

hierarchy between intellectual and illiterate people: “to lead we need a person that knows in

practice. It is not that we know better when we have endured starvation, but we have true

awareness only when we have truly lived things” (RM 248).96 She might amplify the opposition

between intellectual and illiterate, but she primarily asserts the responsibility for illiterate people

to participate in finding solutions for themselves. She claims, “We need to erase the barriers that

exist. Divisions between ethnic groups, languages, Indigenous and ladinos, women and men,

intellectuals and non-intellectuals” (RM 248).97 To be sure, Menchú does not contend that we

overlook the immanent differences of these groups; rather, these differences should not be

organized hierarchically.

Against the structure of exploitation based on hierarchies and abuse, she offers a vision of

how we (Indigenous and ladinos, women and men) can work together toward dismantling

hierarchies. Menchú recounts that with other Indigenous women, she had considered forming an

Indigenous women’s organization in Guatemala, but that they decided that it was not an adequate

95 “… llegábamos a una conclusión, que muchas mujeres se encargan de la problemática de otros, pero sin embargo la propia, la dejan de lado. Eso es algo que duele y que nos demuestra un ejemplo de que nosotras mismas tenemos que solucionar la problemática y no pedir que alguien la venga a solucionar porque eso es mentira.” 96 “Claro, para dirigir se necesita una persona que conozca la práctica. No es que opine mejor cuando se ha sufrido más hambre. Pero tenemos verdadera conciencia, sólo cuando hemos vivido verdaderamente las cosas.” 97 “Tenemos que borrar las barreras que existen. De etnias, de indios y ladinos, de lenguas, de mujer y hombre, de intelectual y no intelectual.”

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context to do so, that it would mean separating the work of women and men, and that what was

needed was to work together against the various forms of domination. For her, breaking with the

oppositions means working together, sharing the same objective of eliminating hierarchies. She

states that men must be part of the conversation to end machismo (RM 246) which is part of the

whole society but also of the smaller activist groups: “I realize that a lot of the comrades are

revolutionary, they are good comrades, but they never stop feeling that, when a woman is in

charge, they still think that their opinion is better” (RM 245).98 Menchú understands that men are

responsible for enacting a profound change, alongside women, of all types of relationships, and

inversely, women should not work in separate organizations because they want to contribute to

the well-being of the whole community.

Menchú worked in organizations of resistance with ladinos as well, which required

challenging her own prejudices. Similar to her belief that men and women need to work together,

she states, “In order to effect a change, we had to unite, Indigenous and ladinos” (RM 194).99 She

indicates that through discussions, criticism and self-criticism, they could learn together and

enact this “profound change” (RM 192): “little by little I was discovering a lot of things with the

ladinos that I needed to understand and, at the same time, they were also understanding a lot of

things with us, Indigenous peoples” (Ibid.).100 She refers to her own relationship to her

intellectual ladino friend: “He taught me to clarify certain ideas that I had wrong, like saying that

all ladinos were evil. However, he didn’t teach me with ideas; he rather taught me in a practical

98 “Me doy cuenta que muchos compañeros son revolucionarios, son buenos compañeros, pero nunca dejan de sentir aquella cosa que, cuando una mujer es responsable de ellos, piensan que lo que ellos opinan es mejor.” 99 “Para hacer el cambio teníamos que unirnos, indios y ladinos.” 100 “Poco a poco fui descubriendo muchas cosas en que había que tener comprensión con los compañeros ladinos y, al mismo tiempo en que ellos tenían que tener comprensión con nosotros, los indígenas.”

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way, in his behaviour toward me” (RM 191).101 She values the knowledge she acquires because

of this relationship, and criticizes the other ladinos’ tendency to teach with ideas or books rather

than through practice.

The value of experience should not be opposed to intellectual work, either as inferior or

superior; rather, both are registers of knowledge. Nevertheless, I believe that a criticism of power

relations and hierarchies between the intellectual and the subaltern, necessary for the reading of

the testimonio, created an inversion of the value of the binary terms without breaking with the

opposition altogether. An idealization of experience, justified by Menchú’s repetition that she

didn’t learn from books, brought expectations of “concrete” results in a logic that is dismissive of

discourses and appreciative of political actions. This demeanour must be understood together

with the idealization of the margin as a space from which criticism is produced “naturally,”

which risks downplaying Menchú’s critical and creative production of her narration and absolves

scholars from the responsibility of working from their own political and epistemological sites,

often more steeped in books than in life experiences of injustice. My argument is not that

concrete actions are not desirable, on the contrary, but they are just not the best way to assess

Menchú’s text.

Instead of considering the effects of the text on readers, I propose considering the politics

of Menchú’s testimonio embedded in the text, rather than external to it, as it contributes to

contemporary debates on Indigenous difference with which we can engage critically. Menchú’s

text does not offer a solution to epistemological and political challenges, but she invites readers

to a relationship with her based on what she knows about community and her own process of

101 “Me enseño a clarificar mis ideas falsas, de decir que todos los ladinos eran malos. Pero él no me enseño con ideas, sino que me enseñó desde la práctica, en todo su comportamiento conmigo.”

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raising awareness. If readers can approach the text to enhance their awareness, Menchú warns

them against the paternalistic desire to help. Instead, readers may engage in working with her

toward dismantling hierarchies and imagining other types of relationship, notably with the text

itself.

1.4 Toward an Epistemological Ground Worthy of Menchú’s Justice

Project

In order to change our way of seeing the political potential of the text, I now consider the

important line of criticism that underlines the subversive power of Menchú’s text against

Western epistemology. I propose that the critique of epistemology should not only be an

inversion of the value between literacy and experience, Western and non-Western ways of

thinking, but a deconstruction of binary oppositions altogether, based on Menchú’s conception of

relationships. Specifically, to read difference affirmatively entails questioning the usual

positioning of Menchú the narrator and of the readers or critics. To do so, I argue that the

distance that Menchú keeps from the reader through narrative silences, secrets, is meant to

encourage not identification but a relationship between the narrator and the reader where each

keeps their own position.

1.4.1 Redefining Culture Through Complexity

Although what first astonishes the non-Indigenous reader may be the depiction of

violence and human rights abuses, the passages about cultural practices are as central and afford

crucial hints concerning Menchú’s strategies to reach out to the non-Indigenous audience. In the

introduction, Burgos-Debray explains that she did not follow some people’s advice to remove the

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descriptive passages on the ceremonies of birth, marriage, and sowing time because they would

distract the readers from the narration of events. She contends, “Rigoberta does not only tell us

about her suffering, but also demonstrates a cautious pride in making us known her thousand-

year-old culture” (RM 7).102 For instance, Menchú invokes “the laws of the Ancestors” (RM

84),103 mentioning that her Ancestors “were not sinners; they could not kill” (RM 93)104 and they

“would always ask for permission to everything that exists in order to use it or to eat it or

anything. And now this no longer exists” (Ibid.).105 The reference to these laws makes clear that

the genocide is more than physical; it involves the extermination of another culture, a culture

despised because it would never engage in such extermination itself. In the chapter on the

ceremony of birth, Menchú notes, “the custom in my culture makes us respect everyone, yet we

have never been respected” (RM 28).106 These passages contrast with the violence of colonial

domination, gender abuses, and state repression; they suggest that she wants the readers to

become aware of more than the facts about these injustices.

Menchú’s strategies to make readers know her culture include protecting it from

misunderstanding and appropriation. Sharing her narration involves risks: speaking in a second

language, meeting with the editor anthropologist, publishing a book, which will be read by

people who know nothing about the Maya Quiche. Menchú is aware of the types of interaction

between Indigenous peoples and ladinos, when the latter related to her culture as exotic or

102 “Rigoberta no sólo nos cuenta sus sufrimientos y los de su pueblo, sino que también hace gala de un orgullo discreto para hacernos conocer su cultura milenaria.” 103 “Leyes de los antepasados.” 104 “…ellos no fueron pecadores, no sabían matar.” 105 “Y dicen, nuestros antepasados nunca pasaron por alto que había que pedirle permiso a todo ser que existe para utilizarlo y para poder comer y todo eso. Y eso ya no existe.” 106 “Muchas veces la costumbre en nuestra cultura nos ha hecho que nosotros respetemos a todos, sin embargo a nosotros nunca nos han respetado.”

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insignificant. Her father had also warned her about the danger of acculturation and of distancing

herself from her community if she learned Spanish. Nevertheless, Menchú, who believes that

linguistic barriers perpetuate injustice, decides, against her father’s wishes, to learn the language

and use it to speak from her position within the community. Her narration situates her within the

relationships of her family and community while reaching out to distant readers in a way that

makes her cross borders.

Menchú engages on several occasions with issues of acculturation and appropriation: for

instance, she juxtaposes two images in the same paragraph to express that, for her, Indigenous

peoples cannot accept either having a baby at the hospital or seeing ladinos wearing Indigenous

clothes (RM 29). The first represents the adoption by Indigenous peoples of ladino practices; the

second, a gesture of appropriation that subverts the value they give to their clothes.

Acknowledging the need to protect her ways from these threats, Menchú explains that she cannot

reveal everything in her book: “We, the Indigenous peoples, have hidden our identity, have kept

a lot of secrets, and this is why we are discriminated against” (RM 41).107 She also states that

part of her contribution as an activist is to speak about her people:

But I need a long time to narrate [the stories] of my people because it cannot be

understood easily. Of course, here, in my narration, I think that I give a picture of it.

However, I am still hiding my identity as Indigenous. I am hiding what I consider that

nobody knows, not even an anthropologist or an intellectual, although they have a lot of

books, they are not able to discern all our secrets. (RM 271)108

107 “Nosotros los indígenas hemos ocultado nuestra identidad, hemos guardado muchos secretos, por eso somos discriminados.” 108 “Pero yo necesito mucho tiempo para contar sobre mi pueblo porque no se entiende así. Claro, aquí, en toda mi narración yo creo que doy una imagen de eso. Pero, sin embargo, todavía

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Revealing these “secrets” would risk the appropriation by the “other,” but keeping them also

seems to encourage discrimination. Menchú wants the reader to understand the double bind, and

reveals the site of silence as one of resistance: “A priest arrives at our villages and all we

Indigenous close our mouths […] But when we are among ourselves, we know how to discuss,

how to think, and how to judge. What happens is that, because they’ve never give us space to

talk, to judge and to take into account our opinions, we also just don’t want to open our mouth”

(RM 196).109 Therefore, silences, represented through the repetition of the “secret” trope, have to

be read as a literary and political strategy to keep the reader at a distance and to affirm the

complexity of Indigenous ways of life, which remains incommensurable to non-Indigenous

readers.

The secrets entail details she cannot reveal about the tradition of attributing a nahual to

every child (RM 41), the plants used as medicine (RM 95), the traps [trampas] that serve as self-

defence against the military (RM 151, 196), the trick that her mother taught her to calm down the

dogs and avoid being bitten (RM 215) and, also, her sister’s secret that she has direct links to the

guerrilla, which would compromise her family (RM 267). Through these examples, I understand

that secrets are a means of protection for Menchú’s people: protection from misunderstanding,

appropriation and physical threats, and defence of intellectual heritage. This form of resistance

sigo ocultando mi identidad como indígena. Sigo ocultando lo que yo considero que nadie sabe, ni siquiera un antropólogo, ni un intelectual, por más que tenga muchos libros, no saben distinguir todos nuestros secretos.” 109 “Llega un cura a nuestras aldeas, todos los indígenas nos tapamos la boca […] Pero cuando estamos entre nosotros los indígenas, sabemos discutir, sabemos pensar y sabemos opinar. Lo que pasa es, que como no nos han dado el espacio de palabra, no nos han dado el espacio de hablar, de opinar y de tomar en cuenta nuestras opiniones, nosotros tampoco hemos abierto la boca por gusto.”

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has been passed on from generation to generation: “[our Elders] say, the obligation of the parents

is to keep all the secrets until the last, the last generations, so that we do not give the ladinos our

secrets, that we do not teach the ladinos the Ancestors’ tricks” (RM 93).110 The secrets remind

the readers of the distance between them and the narrator, which is even more important when

we consider the habit of readers from the North, derived from the autobiographical genre, to

assume that the narrator of a personal story will be accessible and sincere. Dorris Sommer

explains, “these projections of presence and truth are not at all generous. Rather, they allow the

unproblematized appropriation that cuts down the distance between writer and reader, and pass

over the insistence in the text of the political value to keep us at a certain distance” (137, my

translation). Sommer argues that the narration requires no identification between the reader and

the narrator. She underlines the function of the textual strategy as encouraging the reader’s desire

to know more about the Maya Quiche culture before cutting down this curiosity. This strategy

underscores two different cultural entities; Menchú’s assertion that she will not reveal everything

about her culture makes her different from “us,” the readers, not different from her community

(Sommer 143). Nevertheless, the point is not to refuse to relate to Menchú’s narration, but to do

so from a place that does not reassert hierarchies.

The secrets make us reflect on a particular relationship between Menchú and the non-

Indigenous and ladino readers. However, they are not only a literary strategy to keep readers at a

distance, but are also based on the community’s protocols for sharing knowledge. Secrets are the

knowledge that pertains to the community, and they entails different levels of wisdom: what

cannot be revealed to the ladinos, what can or cannot be shared between parents and children,

110 “Dicen, la obligación de los padres es guardar todos sus secretos hasta las últimas, las últimas generaciones, para no darles sus secretos a los ladinos, para no enseñarles a los ladinos los trucos de los antepasados.”

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what is shared from an Elder to one person who then becomes responsible for transmitting the

wisdom to the next generation. In her description of the ceremony of death, Menchú explains

that, when the Elders know that they will die, they choose one person close to them “to make the

last recommendations and transmit, at the same time, the secrets of our Ancestors and of how to

behave well within the Indigenous community and in the presence of the ladino” (RM 226).111

Menchú’s father had told her that failing to preserve the secrets through this protocol would be

like “assassinating the Ancestors” (RM 213-214). Secrets are, therefore, a way to maintain the

relationship to the Ancestors.

The distribution of knowledge is not equal among Menchú's people; some people have

privileged access to knowledge and the community respect the different levels between children,

parents, young couples, Elders and Ancestors. I believe this social organization can teach the

readers about respecting the value of the relationships when wisdom is shared. Menchú offers a

relationship to the readers through a text in which she shares knowledge. The secrets point to a

paradox that readers must confront: when we try to come closer we get further away; but by

respecting distance we come closer. The issue arises when “coming closer” means to react to the

text through the urge to act, to help or to know, the feeling of pity, or the desire to identify with

Menchú's pain and struggle. For me, respecting distance means being in relationship with her

through the text. The difficulty is to define what respect means concretely in the readers'

relationship to the text. I will propose some pathways to enact this respect through affirmative

readings of the text, that is, through readings that focus on the strength of Menchú’s voice and on

111 “…para hacerle las últimas recomendaciones y transmitirle, a la vez, el secreto de sus antepasados y también trasmitirle su propia experiencia, sus reflexiones. Los secretos, las recomendaciones de cómo hay que comportarse en la vida, ante la comunidad indígena, ante el ladino.”

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the complexity, relationality and polyphony related to her position. First, I argue that in order to

read affirmation we must work at unsettling the binary opposition that define the difference

between the author and the reader in oppositional and hierarchical ways.

1.4.2 Engagement With the Text in Non-Oppositional Terms

Scholars have argued that the genre of testimonio challenged the role of the intellectual in

Latin America, because it featured voices from the margin that produced alternative narratives

(Beverley, Yúdice). Chandra Tapalde Mohanty notes, “the point is not simply that one should

have a voice; the more crucial question concerns the sort of voice one comes to have as the result

of one’s location, both as an individual and as part of collectives” (216). The inclusion of voices

in a specific regime of truth (non-Indigenous and elitist) does not challenge the role of

intellectuals. The new literary genre, however, gave a responsibility for subjects to change their

relations to institutions that distribute value and power (Yúdice 212). Beverley states that what is

at stake in testimonio is “the recognition not only that the other exists as something outside

ourselves, not subject to our will and desires, but also of the other’s sense of what is true and

what is false” (7).112 He argues that it is not enough for academics to aspire to “know”

adequately the text; they must learn to criticize academic knowledge itself (Ibid.). I agree with

Beverley if knowing the text means knowing Menchú as a subject or as a representative of her

culture. Yet I believe that the project to criticize academic knowledge risks overlooking the

productive aspects of the text.

112 See also Joan Scott, who makes a distinction between reading the “subaltern’s” experience as difference or as a narrative providing another interpretation of history.

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In the engagement with Menchú’s testimonio, many critics insist on the challenge to hear

differently in order to avoid the demeanour of “the ‘committed’ ethnographer or solidarity

activist” that give voice to the subaltern, which is seen as available to speak to us (Beverley 66).

“To hear differently” aspires at a critical reading based on a different epistemology, possibly

responding to Gayatri Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern cannot speak. However, this

proposition still holds on to the idea that, through the best methodology—one that would

criticize Western thought—the voice of the subaltern will be accessible. Spivak makes clear that

the structural gap gives no space for the subaltern to speak from a site of his or her own. The

postcolonial theorist is regularly quoted in analysis of Menchú’s testimonio (among others by

Beasley-Murray, Beverley, Franco, and Trinch), but the rigorous critique of structures of

domination and of postcolonial power often gives place to a reiteration of a negative conception

of difference that operates through hierarchical binary oppositions. The subaltern’s position is

either negatively valued as determined by its structural relation to the intellectual and the West,

or transformed, in a reactive gesture, into an idealized site of critique, which results from the

Western scholar’s desire to disavow the intellectual’s position of power. The idealization of the

space of the margin as one that is naturally in a position of subverting the structures of

domination, exploitation, and subordination flattens the complex ways in which subjects resist;

moreover, it nourishes the intellectual’s desire to be part of the margin, to be in the place of

Menchú, without having to live the material conditions of violence and pain. Menchú elaborates

a different understanding of her site of enunciation, not as a margin in relation to an intellectual

and powerful centre, but a place from which she can speak out of experience, which has its own

value, but which cannot be fully accessible to readers. The question that remains is how to relate,

as distant but committed readers, to this particular space constructed by the narrator in the text.

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Another position associated with the responsibility to hear the subalterns’ voices has been

that there is no way to engage ethically with their discourses. However, I believe that the critique

of the intellectual’s position of power cannot be a justification for disengagement. Along the

same lines, Nance deplores that “most scholars have agreed more or less politely not to criticize

testimonio seriously as text, and/or to substitute either admiration for its producers or suspicion

of their motives for any politically engaged textual analysis of the product” (12).113 There are

numerous reasons to explain abstention: the lack of authority to speak on testimonio’s textual

object; the lack of appropriate analytical tools; or the awareness that a wrong methodology could

do political damage (Nance 10). Yet, abstention encourages the status quo instead of the

transformation of intellectual practices, whereas colonial and patriarchal habits of thought are

complex and embodied and can only be addressed in practice. Disengaging from reading the text

cannot be an ethical position; at best, it can be an acknowledgment that one is not ready for the

leap it would entail.

Nance agrees with Satya Mohanty that avoiding critical readings of testimonio prevents

critics from taking seriously the voice of the speakers. For S. Mohanty, an engaged stance

enables criticism based on the idea that both sides can benefit from it (in Nance 11). If we are to

engage in those ways, we need to accept the idea that both the “subaltern” and the “intellectual”

can be wrong, while giving a particular attention to habits of thought that require

defamiliarization.114 In many ways, critics who engage with the text put themselves at risk. This

idea is crucial to the ethical challenge of reading across epistemological fields, particularly in the

context of testimonio. Scholars must do more than listen to the subaltern voice, in a sort of

113 See also Sam McKegney in the context of Indigenous literary criticism in the North. 114 The concept of defamiliarization is a concept used by Rosi Braidotti to describe the task of taking a distance with structures of domination.

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challenge to Spivak’s admonition that the subaltern cannot speak, but have to take risks in the

intellectual inquiry/creation. Reading testimonio requires a kind of pragmatism that differs from

the concreteness of activism “on the ground,” but that tries to bring out the possibilities of active

and creative work in the intellectual endeavour to rethink collaborative justice projects. For me,

this means that we do not only take action from our own epistemological location as non-

Indigenous scholars, but that we work from the tensions that lie in the inbetweenness of the

relationship to the text.

In Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas, a second book published in 1998, Menchú writes,

“Perhaps we could put together common strategies, more human and more sensitive, more

respectful” (Nieta 293).115 She decries, once again, that “the world we live in is a world that

breaks us up” (Nieta 158),116 and offers a vision of intercultural relationships that makes space

for Indigenous wisdom: “Understanding a new relationship with our people would help us

profoundly to create new relationships in the plural, diverse, multiethnic and pluricultural world.

To accept that our humanity can be a beautiful multi-coloured garden” (Nieta 156).117 Menchú

acknowledges the challenge of translation across ways of thinking: “How to merge Western

thinking with that of an ancient, communitarian culture, which has its very own and very

profound characteristics, which has its symbolism and its own communal framework? How to

sow the foundation of an intercultural relationship between our peoples?” (Nieta 87)118 She does

115 “Quizá podamos armar estrategias comunes, más humanas y más sensibles, más respetuosas.” 116 “…muchas veces el mundo que vivimos es un mundo que fragmenta, que divide, que destruye, que mete discordia y que termina en guerras.” 117 “Entender una nueva relación con nuestros pueblos nos ayudaría profundamente para crear nuevas relaciones en el mundo plural, diverso, multiétnico y pluricultural. Aceptar que nuestra humanidad puede ser un hermoso jardín multicolor.” 118 “¿Cómo fundir el pensamiento Occidental con el de una cultura comunitaria, milenaria, que tiene características muy propias y muy profundas, que posee sus simbologías y su propio

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not provide direct answers to these questions, yet she points to the necessity to recognize her

culture’s incommensurability and capacity to enter in relationship with other peoples.

As I argued above, the power of the text should not be measured through the political

actions it fosters but through the qualitative transformations that the book enables:

It’s like this time compelled us to make a quantitative and qualitative leap in the whole

world, in which we too, the Indigenous peoples, will make our contribution. We go out to

the world to say: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we need to break the silence because we want

to speak about our own, we love our Mother Earth, we love life.’ (Nieta 191)119

Menchú wishes to see more Indigenous peoples speaking up, suggesting that the “quality” of

speech would change on a global scale. What they have to share, when they speak up, is not only

the denunciation of violence as victims of multiple structures of domination, but their love for

the Earth and for life, their vision of a “culture of peace” (Nieta 166).120 She contends, “the

Indigenous world view [cosmovisión] has to be a contribution to humanity’s sacred thinking”

(Nieta 163).121 These statements, written by Menchú fifteen years after the publication of her

first testimony, are marked by her experience as a Nobel Peace Prize winner (1992) and by her

work at the United Nations in defence of the rights of Indigenous peoples. The narrative structure

of La nieta alternates between the description of state violence, which continued after 1983 until

esquema comunitario? ¿Cómo sembrar las bases de una relación intercultural entre nuestro pueblos?” 119 “Este tiempo como que nos obligó a dar un salto cuantitativo y cualitativo en todo el mundo, donde nosotros los indígenas también daremos una contribución. Salimos al mundo a decir: ‘Señores, hay que romper el silencio porque nosotros queremos hablar de lo nuestro, queremos a nuestra madre Tierra, queremos la vida.’” 120 “…una cultura de paz.” 121 “La cosmovisión indígena debe ser una aportación al pensamiento sagrado de la humanidad.”

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1998, or of episodes of discrimination lived by the narrator when crossing borders, and the

affirmative depiction of Indigenous visions of relationships and of the future. It is harder to find

this affirmative voice in the first testimony. At the time, “it was very painful to live the content

of the book again” (Nieta 254).122 However, I believe that we find this affirmation in the

description of cultural ways, which, according to Menchú’s comments in La nieta, perform a

crucial role. More than being anthropological facts, the presentation of her culture situates

Menchú in relation to her family, community and Ancestors, shows how she has learned from

them and confirms that her ancient culture can contribute to contemporary politics.

1.4.3 Rigoberta Menchú, The Author

Menchú’s voice is framed by her performance of speaking as Rigoberta Menchú to

distant readers. Her name as author is different from the name she carries in her community. She

explains, “My name was Rigoberta Menchú Tum only from 1979. Actually, my real name, and

my grandmother’s, is M’in” (Nieta 114).123 “Rigoberta” comes from the municipality’s

requirement to choose a Spanish (Christian) name, in order to register her when she was born.

Therefore, the title “Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia” [I am Rigoberta

Menchú and this is how my consciousness was born] is made from her “legal identity” (Ibid.)124

recognized by the Guatemalan state. If the author speaks as “Rigoberta Menchú Tum” and not as

“M’in” it is because she establishes a particular relationship to the readers. She speaks as a

citizen of Guatemala, where the majority of the population is Indigenous (perhaps 60% or 80%

122 “Fue muy doloroso volver a vivir el contenido del libro.” 123 “Porque yo me llamo Rigoberta Menchú Tum sólo a partir de 1979. In realidad, mi verdadero nombre, y el de mi abuela, es M’in.” 124 “…identidad legal.”

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according to what she knows) (RM 193). The title can refer to how she has become aware of

being “Indigenous,” which is an identity that operates within the colonial, capitalist and

politically violent system, or to her position as “a woman who is aware” (RM 261) and who can

contribute in fostering peace as an Indigenous citizen of the world.

Before addressing herself to a larger audience, Menchú narrates her story to

anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. The latter recounts that they spent eight days recording

the narration in her apartment in Paris: “Our relationship was excellent from the beginning and

was strengthened after the few days in which she shared her life, her family’s life, her

community’s life with me” (RM 13).125 In La nieta, Menchú discloses the circumstances of

production of her first testimony, explaining that her friend, writer and historian Arturo

Taracena, convinced her to “dictate the book” (Nieta 252)126 to someone other than himself:

“We needed someone with a name and with entries in the academic and editorial world” (Nieta

313).127 Menchú tells us nothing about her personal relationship to Burgos-Debray, which must

have been intense, given the nature of their meeting, and made of respectful exchanges as

Burgos-Debray indicates. However, Menchú points to the problem associated with authorship for

the book: “I acknowledge that, at the time, […] I was gullible and naïve. I simply did not know

the commercial rules when I wrote this memoir. I just thank the creator for being alive and I had

125 “Nuestras relaciones fueron excelentes desde el principio, y se intensificaron al cabo de los días, a medida que me confiaba su vida, la de su familia, la de su comunidad.” 126 “…él me convenció para dictar el libro.” 127 “Él (Arturo Taracena) sostenía que si el libro lo escribíamos él y yo, un exiliado y una indígena, nadie le iba a hacer caso, resultaría una especie de panfleto en familia. Necesitábamos una persona con nombre y con entrada en el mundo académico y editorial.”

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no idea of my rights as author” (Nieta 253, emphasis added).128 Menchú does not make the same

mistake with the second book, whose authorship is attributed to her, with the collaboration of

Dante Liano and Gianni Minà. The issue of authorship points to the tension between

epistemological spaces: her relationship to Burgos-Debray occurs within the limits of a space

with which she was not familiar—the academic and editorial world—and over which she has

little control. Nevertheless, she has written the book, and has strategized for its distribution, from

a place of her own: “The only way to construct the historical memory of the Peoples is writing it

[sic]” (Nieta 313).129 Menchú highlights the importance of presenting herself as an author.

1.4.4 Subjectivity-In-Relation: Meeting Menchú Through Her Relationships

How do we meet Menchú as an author? Her voice has become emblematic of the struggle

against the Guatemalan regime and of the defense of the rights of the Indigenous Peoples. The

structure and content of the book are in part responsible for the iconization of the narrator.

Menchú’s identity is constructed throughout the text as a representative of her culture, as the first

lines of the testimony attests: “My personal situation encompasses the whole reality of my

people” (RM 21).130 Burgos-Debray also says in the prologue that the story of Menchú’s life

“incarnates the life of all Indians from the American continent” (RM 9).131 This identity is a

political strategy to focus attention on the violence suffered by Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala.

Paradoxically, it renders difficult the analysis of complexity because the logic of

128 “Reconozco que en esos años… yo era inocente e ingenua. Simplemente no conocía las reglas comerciales cuando escribí esa memoria. Sólo daba gracias al creador por estar viva y no tenía ninguna idea de mis derechos de autor.” 129 “La única manera de construir la memoria histórica de los pueblos era escribiendo.” 130 “Mi situación personal engloba toda la realidad de un pueblo.” 131 “Encarna la vida de todos los indios del continente americano.”

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representativeness simplifies the needs and demands of different groups and gives the impression

that they share oppression in the same way. Moreover, it overlooks Menchú’s construction of her

own voice in relation to her people: “We have had the experience in Guatemala that people have

said, poor Indians that cannot speak. Therefore, many of them say, I will speak for them. This

hurts a lot. It is part of discrimination” (RM 253).132 I would be careful to say that Menchú

speaks for her people, her community, but she does state that she did not write the book alone.

She wants to stress her position within the community: “I want to say that I was not the only one

who was important. I was one in the family, like all my siblings. That my community was

important too” (RM 143).133 Rather, she shows how they have developed a language to speak

about a shared situation:

We started to use the term enemies.134 Because in our culture, there is no enemy that can

compare to the how those people have exploited us, oppressed us, discriminated us;

rather, for us, in the community, we are all equal. We all need to help each other. We all

need to trade our little things. There is nothing greater and nothing better. (RM 149)135

She has had to develop a language in order to understand exploitation, oppression and

discrimination, a task that, she considers, has been undertaken collectively.

132 “Hemos tenido la experiencia en Guatemala, que siempre nos han dicho, pobres los indios, no pueden hablar. Entonces, muchos dicen, yo hablo por ellos. Eso nos duele mucho. Es parte de la discriminación.” 133 “Quisiera decir que no sólo era yo la importante. Yo era una de la familia, como todos mis hermanos. Que era toda mi comunidad también.” 134 The choice of word seems important here given that Indigenous peoples were themselves considered as “internal enemies” of the country at the time. 135 “Empezamos a emplear el término enemigos. Porque en nuestra cultura no existe un enemigo como el punto a que han llegado esa gente con nosotros, de explotarnos, de oprimirnos, de discriminarnos; sino que para nosotros, en la comunidad, todos somos iguales. Todos tenemos que prestar servicios unos a otros. Todos tenemos que intercambiar nuestras cosas pequeñas. No existe algo más grande y algo mejor.”

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Throughout the book she recounts the process that led her to having “political clarity.”136

The first time that she becomes aware of the issue of exploitation is when she starts going to the

finca with her mother at a very young age but she was too young to help working: “So, facing

this situation, I felt useless and coward because I could do nothing for my mother, except taking

care of my little brother. And this is how my consciousness was born” (RM 55).137 Then, she

develops a language to speak of the different forms of oppression with the help of other people

from the community: “Because I knew the finca, I knew the high plateau, I knew parts of the

capital, but I did not know the issues of all the Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala” (RM 143).138

Later, she follows her father to his meeting with the people from the CUC: “[they] arrived at an

understanding that the roots of [their] problems was exploitation” (RM 144).139 Her father and

mother have taught her to speak up, as a responsibility toward the community. When her father

let Menchú express herself in the community, she clarifies, “It was not so much that I was

someone important because I was catechist; rather, it was my participation in the community”

(RM 110).140 She also learns from her mother to show the example based on her own actions,

which are a “living testimony” (RM 221).141 Menchú’s mother taught her that women should

participate just like men do in the struggle. She says, “the woman has an unbelievable role in the

136 “Claridad política”: This is an expression that Menchú uses in various occasions (133, 195, 246). 137 “Entonces, ante esto, pues, yo me sentía muy inútil y cobarde de no poder hacer nada por mi madre, únicamente cuidar a mi hermanito. Y así es cuando a mí me nació la conciencia, pues.” 138 “Porque yo conocía la finca, conocía el altiplano, conocía ya parte de la capital, pero, sin embargo, no conocía la problemática de todos los indígenas en Guatemala.” 139 “Logramos entender que toda la raíz de nuestra problemática era la explotación.” 140 “No era tanto de que yo fuera importante porque yo era catequista, sino que era más mi participación en la comunidad.” 141 “…testimonio vivo.”

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revolutionary fight” and women fight “not because we aspire to power but because we want

something left for human beings” (RM 258).

She notes that she has witnessed the situation of other people who suffered in other,

sometimes more extreme, ways than she herself did (RM 191). When she visits other

communities to teach them about self-defence techniques against the army, she receives

teachings from them too, in a form of reciprocity: “I was close to other communities and they

taught me a lot of things, including some that I had already lost” (RM 195).142 At the time, she

realizes that Indigenous communities share a culture and should unite to be stronger. Her

political formation comes from the community: “I can say that I did not make my political

formation in college but I have tried to convert my own experience in a general situation of the

people” (RM 144).143 Menchú does not speak for others but shows how other people have

influenced her thinking.

Menchú responds to the necessity to focus attention on the regime’s violence, but also to

show the complexity of Indigenous identities. I argue, along with Chandra Tapalde Mohanty,

that we should be able to distinguish material reality from categories of representation. Mohanty

argues: “Strategic coalitions that construct oppositional political identities for themselves are

based on generalization and provisional unities, but the analysis of these group identities cannot

be based on universalistic, ahistorical categories” (36). She explains that critical work that blurs

the lines between material realities and categories of representation

142 “Estuve cerca de muchas etnias y me enseñaron muchas cosas, incluso que yo había perdido ya.” 143 “Yo puedo decir, no tuve un colegio para mi formación política, sino que mi misma experiencia traté de convertirla en una situación general de todo el pueblo.”

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eventually ends up constructing monolithic images of “Third Word women” by ignoring

the complex and mobile relationships between their historical materiality on the level of

specific oppressions and political choices, on the one hand, and their general discursive

representations, on the other. (37)

Therefore, Menchú might strategically construct an oppositional political identity, but the

analysis of her testimony must avoid a universalist and ahistorical understanding of Indigenous

difference. Taking Menchú as a representative of her culture is politically effective to focus

attention on the human rights abuses against Indigenous communities, but is theoretically

dangerous as it reproduces Western colonial patterns of production of knowledge of the other.

The political strategy should not be seen as the only aim of Menchú in recounting her story. I

identify four objectives: 1) to raise awareness about Guatemala’s issues, which requires her to

represent her people; 2) to transmit her knowledge about the injustices lived by Indigenous

communities in Guatemala, among which are a generalized illiteracy, but also the imposition of

Western literacy as policy of assimilation; 3) to construct a discourse on Indigenous difference in

a way that it becomes recognized and respected; 4) to contribute to fostering peace through

Indigenous speech. Menchú shifts between assuming her role as a spokesperson in relation to a

large distant audience and asserting her subjective position, embedded in the relationships to her

community.

1.5 Polyphony: Justice Made of Different Voices

I have claimed that Menchú is not quite a representative of her culture but that she

constructs her subjectivity through the narration in a way that asserts the value of her people’s

contribution to peace, which is significant in a context of transitional justice. The way that she

frames her voice focuses attention on embodiment and relationships. In the narration, polyphony

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comes as a textual strategy embedded in the ceremony’s protocol, and in cross-cultural

communication. Menchú’s subjectivity-in-relation is constructed through the multiple voices she

integrates into her discourse to develop her views. The idea of a subject in relation matters

because it sets in motion a different epistemological direction, through which we can avoid the

figure of the “subaltern”; distinguish resistance from other forms of political actions; and insist

on the complexity of Indigenous women’s subjectivity. The text’s polyphony, in line with the

author’s community’s relations, should not be deemed a marker of cultural identity in contrast

with that of Western subjects, but an element of an epistemology based on relations.144

The editorial choice of punctuation that privileges free indirect speech contributes to the

impression that Menchú appropriates the voice of others. The formulation “he/she says” or “they

say” followed by free indirect speech often appears in the narration. For instance, Menchú

explains what had happened when her mother, her brother and herself had left the finca one time,

before the end of the month: “He [one of the neighbours] says that at the end of the month, the

corporal did as if we had completed our work for this month… The corporal took our pay.

Therefore, the corporals have all what they earn and what they start taking from other people and

have their beautiful little house in the highland…” (RM 46). The voice of the neighbours

resonates with that of Menchú, which seems to become more present toward the end of the

passage, when she speaks of the corporals in plural. Other instances include when she shares

what she has learned from others, which converts into her own discourse: “The explanation that

our parents give to us from a young age is that we should not waste water, even when we have

144 Yúdice proposes understanding the epistemological difference through the pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire and theology of liberation. Both insist on the process of raising awareness, which Yúdice defines as “the acquisition of knowledge of oneself and of the world that subaltern groups reach by facing dominant discourses in their own flesh” (212, my translation). With this comparison, Yúdice achieves a meaningful analysis of Menchú’s critical discourse as distinct from other Latin American approaches.

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enough. Water is pure, it is something clean, which gives life to the human. Without water we

cannot live…” (RM 80). Her voice and the voice of her parents becomes almost the same. In

some passages that use direct speech, the voices of other people are distinct. However, in the

quotes above, these voices becomes mingled with Menchú’s.

In fact, the collaborative nature of the textual construction often renders impossible a

distinction between Menchú’s voice and other members of her community’s, between Menchú’s

authority and Burgos-Debray’s. The editor’s inclusion of epigraphs before each chapter, with the

agreement of the author, also participates in creating a sense of polyphony. One voice can almost

be exchanged for another in this passage from the Popol Vuh, chosen by Burgos-Debray: “We

have always lived here: it is just that we keep living in a place where we enjoy ourselves and

where we want to die. Only here can we be resurrected; in other parts we would never find

ourselves whole and our pain would be eternal” (RM 21).145 Burgos-Debray’s emphasis on the

claim to stay in the territory where one lives connects to Menchú’s description of her roots and

her family, and also reveals the injustice of her exile. The epigraphs come from the Popol Vuh as

well as the book of Chilam Balam, the Bible, Miguel Angel Asturias and Menchú herself,

insisting (respectively) on Maya ancestral culture, the Catholic’s influence in the life of Maya

people, the ladino literary tradition of Indigenismo, and an Indigenous women’s voice that can

enter in dialogue in equal authority with these traditions from/about/used by Indigenous Peoples.

However, these traditions cannot be considered uncritically as Burgos-Debray mentions in the

prologue that ladinos appropriate readily Mayas’, Aztecs’, and Incas’ great cultures and history,

but refuse to acknowledge the conditions of poverty in which Indigenous Peoples live today. The

145 “Siempre hemos vivido aquí: es justo que continuemos viviendo donde nos place y donde queremos morir. Solo aquí podemos resucitar; en otras partes jamás volveríamos a encontrarnos completes y nuestro dolor seria eterno.”

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epigraphs situate Menchú’s contribution in terms of existing literary traditions as one from an

Indigenous position, leading the reader to criticize habits of thought in engaging Indigenous

difference.

Menchú presents herself in relation to her family, friends, community, and those with

whom she has worked in organizations. The way she situates herself in relation to her

community and that she integrates the voice of others is emphasized in the description of

wedding ceremonies. Menchú uses past and present verbal tenses in a way that mixes her own

experience with traditions. She narrates the ceremonies for her sister’s wedding among other

traditions which were shared by other members of the community:

They recount a sort of general panorama of their life. That at such a time, and such a time

we were ill, but nevertheless we never lost faith; that our Ancestors suffered as well, and

a lot of things. After, comes a prayer that will be made by the young couple that will

marry. “Mother Earth you have to provide food to eat. We are men of corn […]” (RM

92)146

Sometimes, as in this passage, the use of the present tense makes uncertain if the narration refers

to the events as they happened or if it is used to express habits, customs that are always followed.

Other places in the text state more clearly that she is referring to her own experience, as when

she says, “After the second ceremony, we had to go to work at the plantation. We stayed four

146 “Cuentan como un panorama general de su vida. Que tal tiempo, y que tal tiempo estuvimos enfermos pero, sin embargo nunca perdimos la confianza, que nuestros antepasados sufrieron lo mismo y un montonón de cosas. Después viene una oración que será dicha por los muchachos que se van a casar. ‘Madre tierra nos tienes que dar de comer. Somos hombres de maíz […]’.”

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months on the coast and after five months we could do the third ceremony” (RM 95).147 The

contrast between particular events and traditions puts the emphasis on the difficulty of practising

the latter.

What she narrates about state violence and cultural practices comes from multiple voices

that are not always specified, but that represent, in a certain way, the wisdom of the community.

This strategy suggests that her own narration of state violence emerges from her community’s

practices, for instance when all members of the community are invited to speak during

ceremonies: “Then starts the broader ceremony, made of dialogues. One entire day in which

people sit to discuss” (RM 94).148 After the Elders have talked, she says, everybody can join the

discussion: “It is like a discourse on the part of all, everybody participates, and gives opinions”

(RM 95).149 Menchú notes that young people like her are cautious because they have much

respect for the speech of the Elders. Nevertheless, her book perpetuates her community’s

rhetorical practices, notably by participating in the critique of hierarchies and relations of

subordination that has been part of traditions and ceremonies:

They [the Elders] say this is the way our Ancestors lived, that white people did such and

such thing, and they start accusing white people. That our Ancestors sowed a lot of corn.

That not one tribe would ever be short of corn, not one community and that they were all

147 “Después de la segunda costumbre tuvimos que bajar a trabajar a la finca. Pasamos cuatro meses en la costa y fue a los cinco meses que se hizo la tercera costumbre.” 148 “Ya se empieza la ceremonia más amplia, así de diálogo. Es un día entero donde se sientan a hablar.” 149 “Es como un discurso de parte de todos, participan todos, dan todos sus opiniones.”

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together … who is responsible? White people are, those who came here. That is why we

shouldn’t trust white people. They are thieves. (RM 94)150

Voices are brought in Menchú’s narration to reproduce the rhythm of dialogues, and to create a

meaningful critique of exploitation and discrimination based on historical and intergenerational

practices. Her contribution, from her voice as an Indigenous woman, could be read, then, as

participating in the polyphony of the pluricultural world, not only made of different cultures, but

of different epistemologies.151

1.6 Conclusion: Testimonio as a Text-Based Relationship

Reading I, Rigoberta Menchú, twenty years after Guatemala’s transition and ten years

after the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, brings me to argue for an

affirmative reading of this particular discourse on Indigenous difference, characterized by the

necessity of ending colonial hierarchies and acknowledging the value of all lives. The affirmative

reading that I propose starts from the text’s context of production and publication marked by the

violence of the Guatemalan regime and the “culture wars” in the North, to argue that the political

and ethical reach of Menchú’s testimony has to be located in the text itself and in the

inbetweenness of its relationship to distant but committed readers. This relationship requires

unsettling the affective figures of the benevolent intellectual and of the victimized subaltern that

turns literary criticism into a relation of help in which the reader is the subject who knows how to

150 “Que dicen que eran así nuestros abuelos, que hicieron tal cosa los blancos y así empiezan a culpar a los blancos. Que nuestros antepasados sembraban bastante maíz. Que no hacía falta maíz para ninguna tribu, para ninguna comunidad y que era todos juntos…. ¿Y quién es el culpable? Los blancos son, los que vinieron aquí. Por eso, no hay que confiarse en los blancos. Los blancos son ladrones.” 151 See Boaventura de Sousa Santos on cognitive justice or Walter Mignolo on the “pluriverse” as an alternative to universality.

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do justice or the perpetrator in a position of self-critique. Both relationships continue to be based

on binary oppositions that reinforce hierarchies.

Beyond the types of readings that we should not do, I see two ways of entering in

relationship with the text, and learning from it: 1) to read how she has learned (how she has

become aware) through relationships and experience, and 2) to read what she knows of

respectful relationships. First, Menchú does not reveal the "secret" of genocide in order for the

readers to be centred on themselves (feeling pity, the urge to act, or seeing atrocity as reflecting

the evil of their position). In addition, she chooses not to reveal the secrets of her people because

she wants the readers to remain in their location, without crossing the lines through

appropriation, misunderstanding or paternalism. Readers have to occupy their position as white

and they cannot just occupy their position as white. The feeling of helplessness that the readers

feel in this position is quite different from the feeling of helplessness that Menchú describes

when she goes to the finca with her mother. Nevertheless, helplessness is what initiated her

process of raising awareness and of looking for the root causes of injustices. She has learned

through different relationships and she offers a relationship to the readers by telling them her

story. As readers, we learn how to become aware from the relationships with the text; we learn to

learn with others; we learn to learn about systems of oppression from experiences, notably the

experience of reading the text.

Second, the readers are brought to challenge the idealism about their position as

intellectuals who know, who better understand the dynamics of intersectionality (exploitation,

discrimination, gender violence, genocide) and who can help. They also have to challenge the

idealism about the subaltern's position as being in the perfect location to criticize power. As

white, we are told, you cannot simply occupy a white position of privilege and you cannot help

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the subaltern. I think that the readers are invited to share another type of "idealism" (another type

of experience) made of Menchú's vision of non-hierarchical and respectful relationships based on

Indigenous wisdom. A "different" (affirmative) reading of the text would let more space for

Menchú's vision of justice rather than focusing on the injustices she denounces.

Menchú’s insistence on the distance between her and the readers creates a space of her

own, a language of her own based on her experience and a discourse that fosters justice not

(only) in a space outside the text, but within it. The text performs principles of non-hierarchy by

situating her voice within the relationships to her community and by envisioning the possibility

of working together across differences and across the incommensurability. The narrator does not

use the terms “subaltern” or “illiterate” to oppose to the intellectuals, but she does speak about

those who are “not intellectual,” but who know and are able to understand and administer their

own affairs. Menchú reminds us, particularly One-Third World readers, that we cannot

understand everything and that she does not want us to understand everything. The point,

therefore, is not to make literary analysis of the text, in order to understand how different

Menchú’s culture is, but to read how her theorization of difference becomes a literary strategy to

effect a change in the relationships with non-Indigenous readers.

A feminist approach to the text privileges an understanding of difference that avoids the

dialectic between the one and others and that considers its construction from the narration of

Menchú’s subjectivity, which is embodied in her experience and embedded in her community’s

practices. Feminist theories, particularly intersectional feminist theories, stress the different

experiences lived by women in order not to universalize the experience of oppression. Mohanty

criticizes the way that women are often unified through the concept of sisterhood or the belief

that women share the experience of patriarchal oppression. She argues that, in this case,

“feminism is not defined as a highly contested political terrain” (109). Some Indigenous women

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scholars are concerned by the scope of difference in the field of feminist practices, but also in the

field of Indigenous self-determination, showing that Indigenous identity is also a “highly

contested political terrain.”152 If we read Menchú’s voice as representing her people, we risk

naturalizing and idealizing Indigenous Peoples’ experience. Menchú offers a theory of

Indigeneity not because of her representativeness (of her people or of a new literary genre), but

because of her engagement in thinking about Indigenous difference in relation to contemporary

politics, forms of violence, and sites of knowledge production. Focusing on an analysis of the

text and considering her production in the field of theory are part of a decolonial approach based

on a critique of the literacy theory, which establishes Western literacy as a condition of

civilizational exceptionality. I have aimed at finding a balance between discussing what literary

analysis and what the text can do, respecting the distance between and the limits of each project.

When I argue that we should read Menchú’s text as a discourse on Indigeneity and colonialism, I

do not argue that one methodology would reveal this discourse. I rather contend that taking the

text seriously as a text activates its political charge in a way that can be productive.

Earlier in this chapter, I put together Menchú’s discussion on difference and Braidotti’s

theory of subjectivity. My objective in doing so is not to impose Western and feminist categories

on the discourse of the Maya Quiche narrator-author but to examine how their insights inform

each other. This link comes from my own position as a feminist scholar in the North as well as

from Menchú’s critique of the feminists’ desire to help. She says that we learn better in actual

relationships, for instance, in grassroots organizations. This affirmation entails a double bind: on

the one hand, Menchú points to an important problem, which is the tendency to “teach with

ideas,” often disconnected from material grounds, and to impose inadequate theoretical models.

152 See among others Altaminaro-Jimenez, Barker and Million.

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On the other hand, her emphasis on her own activism and process of learning can turn into an

idealization of experience, of activism and of the margin, which strengthens the division between

experience and discourse, evading the ways in which experience is mediated through

interpretations and discourses are embodied and embedded. Menchú’s text reaches out to readers

who are usually not in the groups she participates in. She teaches through affect and relationships

within the text. In fact, I contend that Menchú offers a text-based relationship to learn from. The

text-based relationship reminds the non-Indigenous readers of epistemological distance rather

than pointing to assimilation because of her production of a text or encouraging identification

and appropriation in literary analysis. In the next chapter, I analyze the collaborative epistolary

volume Aimititau! Parlons-nous! exploring how the text becomes the ground on which to

establish relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and how this ground,

conceived of through different images of territory, activate or neutralize colonial practices of

identification and appropriation.

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CHAPTER 2.

TERRITORIES OF RELATIONSHIPS IN AIMITITAU! PARLONS-NOUS!: READING TENSIONS IN EPISTOLARY EXCHANGES BETWEEN INDIGENOUS AND NON-INDIGENOUS WRITERS

Ilnu:

il m’a dit: les temps sont superposés

Béante, Marie-Andrée Gill

2.1 Introduction: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Writers Meeting in the

Literary Territory

In the documentary Québékoisie (2013), Olivier Higgins and Mélanie Carrier introduce

themselves as young travelers who have been around the world, but realized they were ignorant

about the different nations living in their homeland. They decide to go on a bike trip to the North

Shore to visit and get to know the Innu communities along the road 138. Their road trip enacts a

conception of spatiality that enlarges through meeting with other cultures; it contrasts, in the

film, with the defined space of the reserves where they meet the Innu. These encounters reveal

the difference between the relationships of the filmmakers and their subjects to the territory. On

the one hand, the filmmakers chose Québékoisie as a title because they understand the term as

referring to “an area where the borders become blurred, vague, a space […] rather apolitical. A

word which echoes to a huge area where animals run, rivers flow and many people live together”

(Carrier). This evocative description suggests that the apolitical space imagined through its fauna

and flora is more productive than the political, legal, and geographical borders of the province in

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order to establish relationships anew. On the other hand, Olivier Higgins explains in a voiceover

that he felt welcomed by the Innu, but recounts that, in Betsiamites (Pessamit), somebody told

him that white people would never be at home in Quebec. The filmmaker continues with the

reflection, “I wonder if my face will always have the color of the settler.” In contrast with travels

to foreign countries, their trip to the Innu territory imposes an identity on the filmmakers: that of

the settler. Québékoisie’s road trip shows that Quebecois’s identity may be (re)situated through

the processes of “getting to know” Indigenous peoples. Moreover, it reveals how different spaces

are related to subject positions, identities, processes of racialization, as well as to the ways in

which knowledge is gathered about Indigenous peoples.

In Canada, diverse projects in cinema, art, performance, and literature have aimed at

establishing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. In the last years,

collaborative works have become privileged ways to avoid the re-centering of settler identities,

visions, and practices. Two examples are the exposition “Dialogue Deux” which paired six

Quebecois and six Indigenous artists to work on interdisciplinary art creations153 and Muliats,

the first performance produced by the troupe Menuentakuan, which seeks “to promote the

collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through artistic events.”154 Other

examples in Canada include Going Home Star by the Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the

collective volume Kwe: Standing with our Sisters (2014), edited by Joseph Boyden.

153 The exposition was presented at the Centre d’exposition de Rouyn-Noranda, from June 7 to September 20 2015. http://www.cern.ca/exposition/dialogue-deux. 154 The performance was presented in February 2016 at the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier, Montreal, and continues to be performed in other places in the world. See: https://natashakanapefontaine.com/menuentakuan/. “Menuentakuan” comes from the Innu-aimun and means “To drink tea together, to tell each other the truth with pleasure and good humor” (This definition appears on Menuentakuan’s website: menuentakuan.ca/en/).

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In Quebec, a unique form of collaboration through epistolary exchanges between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers appeared with Aimititau! Parlons-nous! [Let’s talk to

each other], published in 2008. Twenty-nine Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers who had not

known each other previously exchanged letters, poems, short stories and essays during nine

months in 2007.155 The result is a unique literary project that finds no equivalent in Canada. The

volume developed into a site of experimentation for cross-cultural encounters, in which diverse

strategies, themes, tones, and genres work to establish communication. The director, Laure

Morali, a writer and poet from Brittany living in Montreal, imagined this literary exchange after

her experience in an Innu community and her relationship with an Elder. When she came back to

Montreal, she realized that the voices of Indigenous men and women were not heard and the

project for the book came as a dream:

We could leave a few chosen words at each other’s door to show our mutual respect, and

fill the silence that appeals to the dark side of imagination. Then, we could realize we

have similarities and that our differences are a wealth. The urgency to speak out gave a

name to this dream: Aimititau! Let’s talk to each other! (Ai 8)156

Aimititau is a call to break the silence defining relationships between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous people. The book’s back cover announces, “a new language from the territory of

friendship and creativity materialises. It is a lived alterity, reciprocal gaze, reminder of history

155 The Indigenous writers come from the Innu, Wendat, Cree, Mi’kmag, Metis, Nipissing, Denee, Tepehuane or Kiowa nations. 156 I use “Ai” for the quotations, specifying in the text who is the author. All translations are mine, with the original in a footnote: “Nous pourrions déposer quelques mots choisis à la porte l’un de l’autre pour nous signifier mutuellement notre respect, et faire taire ce silence qui sollicite les côtés sombres de l’imagination. Nous pourrions alors nous rendre compte de nos ressemblances et de la richesse de nos différences. L’urgence de la parole a imposé au rêve son nom : Aimititau! Parlons-nous!”

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and of the fragility of speech and of the world.”157 Morali contends that, despite the diversity of

identity, political and subjective positions, the writers “accepted to be transformed by a meeting.

They knew that the loving care of words would create a force of attraction capable of sustaining

all the exchanges” (Ai 10).158

The presentation of the book by Morali and the writers who participate resorts to an array

of rather positive and politically safe terms to talk about the relationships between Indigenous

and non-Indigenous writers, like “friendship,” “exchange,” “dialogue,” “meeting of two worlds,”

“two solitudes,” “bridge,” “alterity,” or the “wealth” of our differences. The book’s project to

break the silence, to talk to one another, and to create this relationship that is lacking in

Montreal’s social panorama does not insist on the current colonial, racial, and gender structural

injustices, but conveys the aspiration that we could all get along. On the other hand, the structure

of the exchanges themselves stresses cultural/racial/colonial differences between Indigenous and

Quebecois authors. Despite an overall positive language about difference, many authors talk

about the “duty of remembrance,” “genocide,” “tutelage,” “residential schools,” “reserves,” and

“cultural survival,” insisting on how colonialism continues to affect these relationships in the

present.

The encounters happen on the literary territory. Yet, as in Québékoisie, the authors (in

this case both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) refer to particular images of territory in their

desire to go toward the other. The presence of the natural world, the environment and the

157 “Une nouvelle langue appartenant au territoire de l’amitié et de la création voit ainsi le jour. Elle est altérité vécue, regard de l’un vers l’autre, rappel de l’histoire, fragilité de la parole et du monde.” 158 Les écrivains/es “ont accepté de se laisser transformer par une rencontre. Ils savaient que le travail amoureux des mots exercerait une force d’attraction capable de soutenir tous les échanges.”

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question of land is striking throughout the volume. Different images of space are used as a means

for the authors to situate themselves in a specific political, geographical, affective, familial or

global territory. This attention to territory speaks to both the goal of decolonization, and to the

aspiration to think of a common ground from where the authors relate to each other. Shared

grounds are imagined as a common nature, a shared responsibility facing the ecological crisis, or

a task of reconsidering political sovereignty over land. The recourse to these images to build a

bridge between writers sometimes works in a fluid and friendly way, but it also creates tensions,

particularly when it is linked to assumptions about Indigenous cultures, to a Quebecois writer’s

desire to become Indian or to identify as mixed-race (métis).159 The assumption that Indigenous

159 In this chapter, I do not use the term "Métis" to refer to the Métis Nation of Western Canada, but rather to discuss a common usage of the term in Quebec, particularly by settlers. In volume three of the TRC’s final report, “Métis” is used “to describe people of mixed descent who were not able, or chose not, to be registered as Indians under the Indian Act” (4). The report explains, “in the government’s vision, there was no place for the Métis Nation that proclaimed itself in the Canadian Northwest in the nineteenth century. Neither was there any place for the large number of Aboriginal people who, for a variety of reasons, chose not to terminate their Treaty rights, or for those women, and their children, who lost their Indian Act status by marrying a person who did not have such status. These individuals were classed or identifies alternately as ‘non-status Indians,’ ‘half-breeds,’ or ‘Métis.’” (Ibid.). Therefore, the Commission uses a term that encompasses these different ways of referring to the “Métis” with the aim of acknowledging how the residential school system affected them. In 2016, the Supreme Court judgment in Daniels v. Canada has given Métis the same rights as status Indians. In French, in addition to the Métis Nation, the word “métis” can also be used to refer to people born of parents of different origins, which may or may not be linked to Indigenous heritage, and can be of any mixture. Furthermore, in Quebec, and more generally in the East, there has been a problematic self-identification of settlers as “Métis,” oftentimes based, in this case, on a distant Indigenous ancestor. Adam Gaudry and Darryl Leroux explain, “The major problem with using a mixed-raced understanding of “Métis” is that it finds “Métis” everywhere and in so doing denies the more explicit peoplehood of the Métis Nation. The question has never been whether in the early days of New France colonists formed alliances and/or intermarried with Indigenous peoples; it has been whether these relations gave rise to distinct, self-aware, and historically identifiable peoples who persist today” (120). I explain in this chapter that the “desire métis” of settlers is based on an appropriation of Indigenous identity, which moreover denies the specificity of the Métis Nation.

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peoples are closer to nature appears in various instances and becomes a contested political terrain

in which cultural differences are conceived.

This chapter addresses the specificity of the epistolary genre in the context of

transforming the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Quebec. I ask

how the literary projects speak to the justice projects in the context of colonialism, and how

cultural and racial differences play a role in shared or contesting vision of commonalities. My

analysis of Aimititau shows some ways in which the ground for the exchanges is imagined as

land, and as such, how it is linked to processes of racialization160: 1) racial hierarchies have

contributed to justifying colonialism; 2) present multiculturalism, based on an inclusive nation,

erases Indigenous difference; and 3) land is attached to Indigenous ways of living,

epistemologies and ontologies which are incommensurable with those of Western tradition.

Moreover, because the concept of nature, as well as those of territory, land, environment and the

earth are so important in the volume, I propose to ground my analysis of the place of imagined

territories in cross-cultural communication in my reading of Bruno Latour’s critique of the

binary opposition between nature and culture. Doing so gives me the tools to understand how the

concept of nature is crucial to Western ways of considering cultural differences; it also allows

me to situate certain claims by Quebecois writers in the Western tradition. Finally, I argue that

the tensions that appear in the exchanges give place to a practice of respectful disagreement in

relation to how a common territory can be defined and how “to bridge” differences. In this

chapter, I analyse both the literary project and the text itself, and I will start by situating

Aimititau in relation to the transitional justice context and to the epistolary genre.

160 Based on the work of George Lipsitz, Tuck and Yang claim “that instead of looking for racialized people,” we should “look at how space is racialized (in his work, how the same space exists under White and Black spatial imaginaries” (“Unbecoming Claims” 815).

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2.1.1 Rethinking Relationships in the Transitional Justice Context

The Québékoisie filmmakers’ desire to go toward the other, to fight ignorance and

stereotypes, is considered a gesture of reconciliation in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission. In fact, the film was presented as one of the “actions of reconciliation” during the

TRC’s final event, held in Ottawa in June 2015.161 During this event, no one came on stage to

present an action of restitution or to acknowledge issues regarding stolen land, although the final

report states that no reconciliation is possible if we—settlers and the settler-state—do not change

our relationship to territory.162 Indigenous scholars argue that reconciliation cannot be thought

without restitution (Taiaiake Alfred) and repatriation (Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization”).163 In

fact, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang see a conflict between the projects of reconciliation and

decolonization as the former seeks to rescue settler-state futurity, while the latter is accountable

to Indigenous futurity.164 They make clear that the goal of decolonization is the repatriation of

161 The “Actions of reconciliation,” in which “national organizations [were] invited to state their commitment to continued efforts towards reconciliation,” were one of the highlights of the second day of the TRC’s final event. See the program: http://myrobust.com/growwithamp/TRC/Ottawa_2015/program/trc-program-web.pdf. 162 The commission recommends the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, which continues to found law cases until today. They encourage the government to recognize Indigenous sovereignty in a way that is viable with Canadian sovereignty. They claim, following the vision of Indigenous peoples, that reconciliation cannot be achieved if we do not reconcile with the earth. 163 Lee Maracle speaks of rematriation instead of “repatriation” to insist that ending with family and domestic abuses should be a priority in the fight for decolonization and to criticize the “government-to-government relations that do little to revive the female governing structures within our nations” (Memory 152). She argues, “rematriation and the restoration of our original systems would be a feminist activity” (Memory 130). 164 Tuck and Yand uses the word “futurity” without defining the term. For me, the use of “futurity” refers to the ways of conceiving the future, which differs according to different epistemologies and ontologies. It does not refer to the future as such—to what will happen—but to how imagined futures are mobilized in the present. Therefore, the term speaks to a conception of time, and to how future relate to the present and to the past. In fact, Tuck and Yang distinguish

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the land, and they criticize that decolonization has been used to different purposes, turning the

term into a metaphor in expression like “decolonizing methods,” “decolonizing ways of

thinking,” or “decolonizing academia” (“Decolonization” 2). For them, it is important to

distinguish between the different projects of justice and to assert that decolonization does not

respond to the same goals as critical methodologies or other social justice struggles put forward.

Since the end of the TRC, universities and different social organizations have committed

to answer the calls of the Commission by adopting practices of “reconciliation.” Different art

projects have also engaged in practicing “reconciliation” with productions that seek to raise

awareness about Indigenous issues or create bridges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous

peoples.165 In this context, reconciliation has become a polysemous term that serves settler

futurity at times, but also motivates people to engage with projects of justice aligned with

Indigenous demands, visions, and practices. The TRC itself was a request by Indigenous peoples.

Furthermore, its final report integrated most of the critiques of the project of reconciliation that

have been written since the beginning of its institution. In sum, reconciliation, as a project, has to

be situated in relation both to the national impulse to rescue settler certainties and to the current

context in which a variety of actors engage in different ways with the challenge called for by the

TRC to “establi[sh] and mainta[in] a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and

non-Aboriginal peoples in this country” (Honouring 6).

the projects of reconciliation and of decolonization by their different ways of conceiving the future of justice and engagement in the present. 165 It is common to see literature and art characterized in function of reconciliation, for instance, this CBC’s reconciliation reading list: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2016/10/a-reconciliation-reading-list-15-must-read-books.html.

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One problem in turning decolonization into a metaphor is that it allows non-Indigenous

people to deny their responsibilities and to make “moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization”

(Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization” 3). In other words, engaging in forms of decolonial justice, or

more generally with Indigenous issues, can become a way for non-Indigenous people to situate

themselves as innocent in relation to colonial injustices. Tuck and Yang define these “moves to

innocence” as “those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of

guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change

much at all” (“Decolonization” 10). Instances of “moves to innocence” are: claiming a distant

Native ancestor (what Vine Deloria calls the “Indian-grandmother complex”), becoming without

becoming Indian, the homogenization of various experiences of oppression as colonization, the

belief that if you free your mind the rest will follow, describing Indigenous peoples as on the

verge of extinction and reoccupying stolen land. For them, “such moves ultimately represent

settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation” (“Decolonization” 4). I understand these

“fantasies” as part of subjective positionings, but also as discursive propositions that circulate

within the settler-state structures, and that are closely linked to the ways in which settlers have

imagined territory.

I take seriously Tuck and Yang’s narrow definition of decolonization as concerning the

repatriation of the land. At the same time, the question of the land is intimately linked to

interpersonal relationships, to power relations, and to ways of living, thinking and producing

knowledge. Tuck and Yang say, “Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both

because the settlers make land their new home and source of capital, and also because the

disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological,

cosmological violence” (“Decolonization” 5). Along these lines, Glen Coulthard argues that anti-

colonialism is a question of land: “not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply

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informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about

living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and

nonexploitative terms” (13, emphasis in the original). This system of reciprocal relationships can

be imagined between the Canadian government and Indigenous nations, but can also very

concretely affect daily relationships within Indigenous communities, and between Indigenous

and non-Indigenous peoples.

How to situate, then, the literary practice in relation to transitional justice as well as to the

project of decolonization, which means taking seriously the question of the land? One of the

productive aspects of the book, I argue, is to offer no straightforward solution and no resolution

at the end of each correspondence and of the volume, but create a space for a diversity of

strategies, of local practices. This counters the settler-state’s desire for certainty in the pursuit of

the project of reconciliation (Woolford). At the same time, this diversity becomes meaningful

only if we analyse its micro-politics and the complexity of the power at play in the different

positioning. In this chapter, I situate my analysis of Aimititau in relation to the current context of

transitional justice, which orientates discussions and practices of reparation in relation to

colonialism. Yet, I believe that I am accountable to the authors who participated in the

correspondence and engaged in creating relationships with one another from different cultural

backgrounds. The literary project resonates with the projects of reconciliation: with fantasies of

easier paths as well as with important engagements for change. I recognize the authors’

commitment, and the ways in which the practice puts their bodies at the forefront of efforts to

build cross-cultural encounters. In my analysis of the exchanges, I insist on the idea that no

position is apolitical in the engagement for making justice and that no position prevents us from

reproducing colonial, heterosexist and racist habits.

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Most of the critique of reconciliation points to the superficial ways in which it is

addressed in relation to the need for restitution and structural changes. Accordingly, working on

interpersonal relationships can be considered a flimsy form of justice-making. Yet, subjective

engagements at the level of micro-politics are important. For instance, legal scholar Grace Li Xiu

Woo shows how the Supreme Court of Canada functions within both postcolonial and colonial

structures at the same time, explaining that the colonial paradigm is hard to transform although

the Supreme Court has enshrined postcolonial principles. One of the aspects that slow down the

process, she says, is the fact that the judges come from contexts in which they have had no

relationships at all with Indigenous peoples, which makes it harder for them to understand or

empathize with their situation.166 From a feminist and antiracist perspective, which takes into

account the subject’s experience and embodiment, transformation occurs when the subject is

involved. The point, then, is not to blame subjects for their “moves to innocence,” but to analyse

in which discursive, political and affective terrains relationships between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous peoples are being created in the present.

2.1.2 Discursive and Affective Relationships in the Epistolary Genre

The epistolary genre pushes us to reflect on the tension between critique and affect,

between the discursive and the interpersonal. One of the difficulties in analysing Aimititau

comes, rightly, from the fact that this literary practice entails social and affective dimensions. For

Hélène Destrempes, professor of literature at the Université de Moncton, and one of the few to

analyse Aimititau closely, “the interest of the collection resides, at the risk of simplifying, more

in the unsaid of the speaking position than in the ideological dimension of the words exchanged”

166 Indigenous scholars also talk about the importance of relationships or relationality in Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies (Wilson).

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(137, my translation).167 She adds that the correspondence constitutes “a substitute of

conversation” which favours “intercultural mediation” (Ibid.).168 The writers’ speaking positions

are indeed very interesting because the fact that each is paired with another individual makes

them care for the addressee on a personal level. The writers are not allowed to be strangers to

each other. The epistolary genre ties the act of writing to lived experience, but it is not equivalent

to a face-to-face encounter. When you face someone, much is said through silence, smiles, body

language, moving hands, sighs, tears or laughs, while the literary encounter entails a different

relation to emotions and a space-time of reflection, a distance. Writers try to find the right words

to establish communication, while they also know that a larger public will read the result of their

work. Moreover, because they do not meet in person, but through discourses in a specific project

of intercultural exchange, the authors are pushed to position themselves within their cultural

groups. Their speaking positions, therefore, are formed through the relationships to the other and

to imagined territories on which ground the encounter is considered possible. I believe that the

discursive or ideological dimension of the exchanges matters because the diversity of the

speaking positions shows an array of discursive propositions attached to the social relationships

between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Writers imagine differently their relationships to territory; they also consider the action of

writing, and of creating a relationship within the literary space in different ways. Despite “the

words’ loving care,” literature cannot be a neutral space for communication, but always reflects

how the authors position themselves. Writing itself has had much harmful symbolic weight

167 “L’intérêt même du recueil réside, à la limite, plus dans le non-dit de la posture énonciatrice que dans la dimension idéologique des propos échangés.” 168 “Un substitut de conversation (facteur de proximité)” qui favorise “la médiation interculturelle.”

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attached to it as a way of distinguishing between cultures. Ideas about writing as a “cultural”

technology and oral literatures as “closer to nature” are part of the colonial system, which

justifies the theft of territory. Colonial relations of power mark the ways in which territory is

envisioned, including the space of literary engagement.

Despite the importance of the written word in the literary project, Morali indicates that

the Indigenous writers who participate in the book are “heirs of oral tradition” (Ai 7).169 Joan

Pawnee-Parent (Métis/Nipissing) writes, “It’s funny, I realise that the texts I write are sustained

by speech and not by paper, little cousin of my brother Tree” (Ai 184).170 Lison Mestokosho

(Innu) remarks that it is not the same to write in Innu and that she feels good about it: “It’s the

first time that I write in my language, and yet I speak it fluently. It’s funny. The way of writing is

not the same” (Ai 257).171 The volume is written in French but some authors write in Innu—the

language most represented and which gave the book its title—translated or not into French. The

presence of Indigenous languages in the book is significant for their recognition as an important

space for knowledge, belonging, and creativity. It is important as well to acknowledge that

French is not the mother tongue of many Indigenous authors. Jean-Pierre Girard (Québécois)

says, “I am exactly grateful, this is the word, at the idea of conversing with you in French.

Without you, Anne-Marie, this correspondence would be impossible” (Ai 103).172 Moreover, the

education in French is associated with the forced replacement of Indigenous modes of living and

ways of thinking by those of settlers. Education was also considered as a way to “civilize”

169 “Héritiers de la tradition orale.” 170 “C’est drôle, je réalise que les textes que j’écris sont pour la plupart portés par la parole et non par le papier, petit cousin de mon frère Arbre.” 171 “C’est la première fois que j’écris un texte dans ma langue, pourtant je la parle couramment. C’est drôle. La façon d’écrire n’est pas la même.” 172 “Je vous suis exactement reconnaissant, c’est le mot, à l’idée de pouvoir converser avec vous en français. Sans vous, Anne-Marie, cette correspondance serait impossible.”

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Indigenous peoples because writing was deemed as an important step toward civilization.173 It is

in this context that I examine the role that is given to writing in the creation of renewed (and

new) relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

I think that the relationship between critique and affect, the discursive and the

interpersonal might direct the focus of the literary exchange away from the separation between

the oral and the written. Methodologically, in my analysis of the correspondence, I do not insist

on how writers bring their cultural traditions to the text or how orality appears in Indigenous

authors’ writing. I insist on creating links between different colonial/decolonial discourses about

nature, land and environment that appear in the micro-politics of relationship in the exchange. I

analyse how discourses, images, positions, and strategies, specifically in relation to the territory,

play a role in the justice project of breaking silence and creating relationships between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

2.2 How to Read Tensions?

The questions of land, relationship to nature and responsibility toward the environment

are important when Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples take on the task of reimagining

cross-cultural relationships. Non-Indigenous writers in Aimititau see the necessity of envisioning

a different relationship to nature, which is aligned with some Indigenous visions of renewed

relationships, but also fraught with colonial ways of considering the separation between humans

173 Although education has been central to the civilizing process, residential schools were offering poor levels of education to Aboriginal children. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott designed policies concerning residential schools with the aim of assimilating the Indians. In 1920, attendance to residential schools became compulsory. Scott wrote then, “our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic” (TRC, Honouring 3).

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and nature. The Quebecois’ desire or aspiration to be closer to nature functions in particular ways

when used as a pretext to get closer to an Indigenous person because it is linked to assumptions

about cultures and differences. I will look to French sociologist Bruno Latour whose work is

useful in understanding how nature is intricately linked to cultural/racial differences and how

certain positions by Quebecois writers create tensions in the exchange. Then, I analyse one of the

exchanges between two Indigenous writers, underlining that the tensions do not only occur

between Indigenous peoples and settlers.

2.2.1 We Share No Common Nature: Bruno Latour’s Concept of the Collective

Bruno Latour explains that the conceptual separation between nature and culture is proper

to Western modern thought. For Latour, the binaries constitutive of modernity like nature-

culture, soul-body, self-others, are constructions that do not correspond to our materiality of our

social life.174 His sociological approach, then, seeks to find better conceptual tools to describe

the materiality of interactions between actants,175 which can be humans and non-humans. The

separation between nature and culture is also linked to a series of binary oppositions between

humans and non-humans, men and women, white people and people of color, in which the

disadvantageous social differences of non-humans, women, and people of color are naturalized.

174 Latour in Nous n’avons jamais été modernes [We have never been modern] explains this gap between conceptual categories and what happens in the materiality of social life. Conceptual constructions are naturalized and appear as truth that we need to demystify. 175 Latour uses “actants” instead of actors to decentre human agency and insist on how non-humans also act upon and participate in the collective.

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For Latour, nature is the concept that enables the hierarchies between beings to fit within one

organized series (Politiques 42).176

Latour explains the binary opposition between nature and culture through Plato’s myth of

the cave, which is an allegory for the relationship between science and society. The shadows on

the cave wall are allegories of the human life of values, representations and controversies. The

philosopher/scientist must leave the cave in order to access truth, which is “not man-made” but is

facts of the natural world. Experts who extract themselves from the world of the subjective can

establish facts through objective methods. Once the experts have gathered knowledge about

natural laws, through objectivity, they return to the cave and establish order. In this paradigm,

nature is exterior, inert, a world of things and indisputable facts, while the social is like a prison

from which we can emancipate ourselves in order to reach truth, through objectivity. There are

natural facts and human representations of them. The modern conception of nature affects in at

least two ways our conceptions of Indigenous difference: thinking that there is one nature for all

and that Indigenous peoples are closer to it.

The idea that nature is universal, while differences come from cultural values and

interpretations is rooted in the binary self-others in which “self” is the Western subject of

knowledge production. This model of organizing difference prevents us from seeing the extent of

the disagreement between cultures, including different epistemologies and ontologies. Latour

176 Binarism has been criticized, notably by feminist theorists like Rosi Braidotti, who claims the importance of the body as “intelligent matter,” both nature and culture: The body is “matière intelligente et, en même temps, intelligence matérialisée” (la philosophie 68). Donna Haraway argues that the separation between body and soul remains “remarkably resilient” (When Species 71). For her, this separation subsists because we have not been able to rethink the borders between humans and non-humans, which entail animals, technology, cells, and all elements of nature.

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says that multiculturalism stems from mononaturalism: within this paradigm, which he calls an

“ethnocentrism of inanimate nature” (Un monde 289), pluralism is easily tolerable because it is

based on an indisputable common ground – nature – a neutral world of objective observable facts

that can be reached through (Western) scientific method.

In the modern way of thinking, Indigenous peoples are imagined to have privileged ties

with nature, because the separation between facts and values founds a hierarchy between

cultures. The hierarchy follows a specific teleological temporality that aims at distinguishing

facts from values, object and subject of knowledge, nature and the human capacity to understand

facts of nature. The idea of a temporal continuity between oral tradition and written tradition

feeds the belief that writing would have helped culture to become detached from nature, to

acquire a historical consciousness and a rational capacity for analysis. This trajectory, as I

explained in chapter one with the “literary thesis,” gives rise to a hierarchy between “civilized”

cultures with writing and detached from nature, and those with oral traditions, which have

“stayed” closer to nature, and hence somehow lack rationality. In sum, the “ethnocentrism of

inanimate nature” excludes non-Western epistemologies that would make different sense of our

social life, of temporality, and of space.

For Latour, the current ecological crisis requires a change in Western epistemology

because it contradicts the modern temporality of progress: it becomes impossible to see nature

and science as detached from human politics.177 Therefore, he considers the ecological crisis as a

crisis of objectivity that makes us see the entanglements between all the elements, between

nature and culture, humans and non-humans, and subject and object. In order to understand these

177 For other analyses of how the ecological crisis changes our relation to progress, see Ulrick Beck and Isabelle Stengers.

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entanglements, Latour proposes to see the social as association. In this view, there is no exterior

world of indisputable truths, but the socialization of humans and non-humans in an expanding

collective. The task of representation is to recognize, through an explicit procedure, the

associations of humans and non-humans to decide what will unify them in a future common

world (Politiques 61). The exterior is not constituted by an inert nature, but by those, human and

non-human, who are temporarily excluded from the collective. The collective is an ever-

increasing list of associations between human and non-human actants, rather than subjects or

objects (Politiques 116). To collect in one whole all that we want to underline builds toward a

progressive composition of the common world, which is not predetermined.

Losing nature as a common ground, Latour says, enables public dialogue; the moderns

“can make contact with Others and benefit from their contribution to the elaboration of common

worlds” (Ibid.). Latour claims that we—the moderns, specifically in this case white settlers—

should not relate to others through anthropology but diplomacy, that is, establishing relationships

with other cultures through negotiation about what they can contribute to the collective (Un

monde). An intermediary strategy, he proposes, is to practise symmetrical anthropology, which

subverts the traditional curiosity for non-Western tradition and myths. Symmetrical anthropology

studies non-Western cultures’ science, techniques, law, economics, and religions (what would

usually be considered as sociology, political science and natural science), and Western cultures’

heritage, celebrations, traditions (which becomes a way to situate Western cultures in specific

traditions rather than as the model for universal civilization). This strategy, according to Latour,

enables us to measure the extent of our disagreement, the extent of the difference between our

worlds, which touches the centre of truth production, including knowledge about nature and non-

humans.

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Furthermore, the French sociologist explains that, if we change our perspective to see the

social in terms of associations of humans and non-humans, temporality changes, and the future

becomes that which brings a greater number of attachments, or relationships. For instance,

scientific discoveries do not allow us to be more detached from nature, from the irrationality of

our human nature, but bring new subjects into social life, that is, new relationships between

humans and non-humans. He criticizes the role of the expert and says that we are all, in a

situation of collective experimentation.178 Latour’s critique of the modern conceptual separation

between nature and culture encourages us to conceive of a common world through collectives

that are yet to be formed through diplomacy and negotiation. His critique of the separation

between nature and culture, linked to who can produce knowledge and who can participate in

public dialogue and political life, is useful when analysing the processes through which

relationships between Quebecois and Indigenous peoples are created because the exclusion of the

latter is constitutive of colonialism. The modern way of thinking about cultures and nature

produce an epistemology and a politics based on a unique truth and a unique power that puts at

its centre a Western subject. For Latour, negotiation entails listening to the actors that are part of

the collective in a way that contributes to the formation of the collective. In my analysis of

Aimititau, I propose to examine how the writers do the kind of negotiating Latour advocates

concerning the ways in which the collective is formed, even while repeating at times the idea that

nature is a common ground. A productive aspect of the book, I contend, might be to play with

the different levels of relationships to the territory.

178 Latour uses the phrase “Learning pacts”: “expression utilisée pour remplacer celle de contrat social qui lierait les humains entre eux de façon totalisée pour former une société; le pacte d’apprentissage ne suppose rien d’autre que l’ignorance commune des gouvernants et des gouvernés en situation d’expérimentation collective” (Politiques 359).

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2.2.2 Indigenous Voices From Different Grounds

Aimititau stresses the difference between Quebecois and Indigenous writers because of

the structures of the exchanges. There is, however, one correspondence between two Indigenous

writers, Alain Connolly (Innu) and Yves Sioui Durand (Huron-Wendat), which stresses the

difference in their experience of colonization. The Innu people live in the Eastern part of Quebec

and in Labrador; there are nine communities, and more than 10 000 speakers of Innu.179 Innu

writers have been publishing bilingual editions in Innu and French. The Huron-Wendat live in

one community, Wendake, near Quebec City. In the last years, they have been trying to revive

their language, which is a challenge since hardly any speakers are alive to transmit their

knowledge. There are written documents, however, since their language was used as an

international language of communication at the time of colonization.

The exchange between Connolly and Sioui Durand presents two contrasting views

concerning Indigenous peoples’ close link to nature attached to the authors’ positions within

their nations. Connolly adopts an affirmative vision of change built on the strength of his

ancestors who had a particular relationship to the land. He writes a letter addressed to them:

You maintained close relationships with the territory, a place of so much labour and of

joy too among your loved ones, family and friends, all those who shared this existence.

You knew all the elements of the Nitassinan, even to moss on the smallest stone. You

knew the moods and meanderings of lakes and the rivers’ long course. The language of

the wind, the sky, stars, trees, and animals, they all spoke to you directly to reveal it was

179 This number is based on the 2011 Census of Population by Statistics Canada.

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worth wandering the seashore and highlands and discovering the magnificence of

creation. (Ai 123)180

Connolly insists on the strength of his people and on the land as a space of knowledge. Sioui

Durand describes another reality:

In a collective indifference, I see young people drowning, innocent victims of neglect, of

the absence of a transmission of values, of gestures that found identity. Playing Indians is

easier! Depicting this false identity, which embraces a continuity that does not exist,

outrage toward this makeup, this costume to entertain tourists as if we were saying: Look!

Everything’s good! We are still there, unchanged! (Ai 128)181

Sioui Durand sees the danger of a utopic vision of Indigenous cultures when current issues are

not addressed. Connolly’s position can be interpreted as idealistic but he answers back that his

Innu culture is close to him; it is part of his present, something he knows and embodies. He

writes:

I am the son of a hunter. I am of those Piekuakamilnuatsh. I am of this technological era.

180 “Vous entreteniez une relation intime avec le territoire, lieu de tant de labeurs, mais de joies aussi, parmi les vôtres, famille et amis, tous ceux qui partageaient cette existence. Le Nitassinan, vous en connaissiez tous les éléments jusqu’à la moindre pierre mousseuse. Ses lacs et ses rivières au long cours, vous en avez connu les humeurs et les méandres. Le langage du vent, du ciel, des étoiles, des arbres et des animaux, tous s’addressaient directement à vous pour vous révéler que ça valait la peine de parcourir les rivages de la mer et les hautes terres et de découvrir les splendeurs de la création.” 181 “Dans l’indifférence collective, je vois se noyer les plus jeunes, victimes innocentes de l’abandon, de l’absence d’une transmission des valeurs, des gestes qui fondent l’identité. Jouer aux Indiens, c’est plus facile! Mettre en scène cette fausse identité qui sert de ressort à une perrenité qui n’existe pas, outrer ce maquillage, ce déguisement pour distraire les touristes comme si on leur disait : Regardez! Tout va bien! Nous sommes toujours là, inchangés!”

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I am a humble descendant of these great nomad hunters (Ai 122, italics in the original)182

He has a positive view on intercultural relationships compatible with the actualization of Innu

cultural memory: “I believe that [the world] becomes larger, enriching with time. It gets better.

We now share our lives with another people. A whole planet complements our universe, which

opens new paths for your nomad sons who will venture to new territories” (Ai 123).183

Sioui Durand offers a totally different perspective talking about “the great degeneration

of the world” (Ai 130)184: “What we are today is only a lighter reflection of what they have been,

those, the great, the strong, the rightful!” (Ai 125)185 and “renewal can only be made through the

cultural reconstruction of our peoples” (Ai 130).186 This discourse, which claims to be more

“realistic,” describes the experience of colonization lived by the Wendat. Yet, if generalized, it

risks confirming the colonial belief that Indigenous peoples have already disappeared or are

meant to, which is not the case for all communities. Connolly’s affirmative view contradicts this

belief by asserting the possibility of continuing to embody Indigenous traditions in the present

time. The point is that both visions are “realistic” because they are attached to the materiality of

the authors’ lived experience. Local demands from Indigenous peoples will most likely be very

different depending on how colonial structures affected and continues to affect the nation, the

community, families, Indigenous men, women and children.

182 “Je suis le fils d’un chasseur. / Je suis des Piekuakamilnuatsh. / Je suis de cette ère technologique. / Je suis un humble descendant de ces grands chasseurs nomades.” 183 “Je crois qu’il devient (le monde) plus vaste en s’enrichissant avec le temps. Il se bonifie. Nous partageons maintenant nos vies avec un autre peuple. Toute une planète complète notre univers, ce qui ouvre de nouvelles voies à vos fils nomades qui s’aventureront sur de nouveaux territoires.” 184 “…la grande dégénérescence du monde.” 185 “Ce que nous sommes aujourd’hui n’est que le reflet pâli de ce qu’ils ont été, eux, les grands, les forts, les droits!” 186 “…le renouvellement ne peut passer que par la reconstruction culturelle de nos peuples.”

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Because discourses on nature tend to universalize propositions, underlining the embodied

and embedded character of claims, discourses and visions of the world becomes crucial when

examining Indigenous critiques of colonialism and particular relationships with territories.

Connolly writes, “I realize that I put forward a positive thinking and occluded the negative.

Thanks to you, the subject is more fully explored” (Ai 131).187 Accepting different perspectives

is important, particularly since they appear in an exchange between two Indigenous writers

whose positions could be simplified. However, I believe that the crucial point, as I will show

throughout my analysis of Aimititau, is that all positions are political, situated and multifaceted

and that claims about nature are never neutral, always made on a highly contested political

terrain, and critically linked to subject position. Situating these claims, I contend, sheds a

particular light on how colonialism, multiculturalism, and environmental crisis all play a role in

how we imagine relationships anew.

In what follows, I make links between three images of territory theorized within critical

Indigenous studies (political community, mixity [métissage], and the earth) and images that are

used by the authors as grounds to create relationships, in order to underline the kind of

negotiating that Latour proposes, which in this particular case appears as a negotiation between

settler and Indigenous futurities.

187 “Je m’aperçois que j’ai mis de l’avant une pensée positive et occulté le côté négatif. Grâce à toi, le sujet est maintenant plus complet.”

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2.3 The Territory as Political Community

2.3.1 Indigeneity and the Link to Nature

Nature as an idea is never apolitical. In the context of settler colonialism, settlers’ ideas of

nature as a common ground and of the First Nations’ close link to nature work together in

dismissing Indigenous political communities. The colonial way to relate to the land is based on

racist assumptions about cultures, that is, about different ways of living and polities. These

assumptions are not only part of the social or conceptual imagination but are inscribed in the law,

more specifically in the Doctrine of Discovery. Therefore, they are at the centre of the structures

of the settler-state.

The TRC’s final report explains that the residential school system was based on the

settlers’ “belief that [they] were bringing civilization to savage people who could never civilize

themselves,” a belief that comes from a feeling of “racial and cultural superiority” (Honouring

46). The colonization of the land was legally grounded in the Doctrine of Discovery which

assumed that the land was open to claim because “Indigenous people simply occupied, rather

than owned, the land. True ownership, they claimed, could come only with European-style

agriculture” (Ibid.).188 Colonization was legitimized by the concept of a “just war” promoted by

Christian authorities and by a legal conception of the God-given “right to colonize the lands they

‘discovered’ as long as they converted the Indigenous populations” (Ibid.). Although the

conception of racial superiority has changed over time, from a hierarchy created by God to the

one explained through science, the racial difference is based in both cases on the way of living

and of relating to the land.

188 See Robert J. Miller et al. and Steven T. Newcomb.

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Robert A. William Jr. shows that the discourse and the practice of conquest has roots in

the Medieval and Renaissance period in Europe, particularly during the Crusades in which

Christian Europeans could conquer non-Christian people and their land to “[enforce] their

peculiar vision of a universally binding natural law” (13). This natural law was a vertical

organisation of the relationships between god, humans, and the natural world, and a hierarchical

vision on the relationships between Christian people and non-Christian people. This conception

of universal law was brought to the Americas, and Indigenous peoples were denied any legal

status or rights “because ‘heathens’ and ‘infidels’ were legally presumed to lack the rational

capacity necessary to assume an equal status or to exercise equal rights under the West’s

medievally derived colonizing law” (326). Settlers considered that Indigenous peoples had only a

“natural right” to live on this land but no “civic rights” because they did not have “civilization”

in the Western sense of it.

Saying that Indigenous peoples are closer to nature can be a way of delegitimizing their

political organization, and hence, their claims to territory. It comes with the structural and

subjective feeling of superiority for white settlers, whose conception and use of the land was

considered the only valid one.

2.3.2 “Don’t Pretend To Meet Me in The Wind”: Questioning The Idea of Nature as a

Bridge

Aimititau opens up with an exchange of poems by Violaine Forest (Québécoise) and letters

by Robert Seven-Crows (Métis/Mi’kmag). The authors do not address each other directly, not

even in the “Letters to Violaine” in which Seven-Crows shares observations and reflections

made during his trips to Brittany, the Reunion Islands, and the region of the Laurentians in

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Quebec. However, they talk to each other through the resonances of the words they choose and

the themes of ignorance, alterity, and nature. Forest starts the exchange with a long poem of

eight pages, in which she asserts her ignorance:

It’s a quite small poem taking quite little space a blank page resonates to the infinite It’s so small the fear why talk about it? I don’t know the name of the clouds yet I have seen my first flight of birds starting from North to South (Ai 17)189

The words “small,” “little,” and “blank” prepares the assertion that “she doesn’t know.”

Communication starts from a “blank page,” a speech that does not occupy the whole space. She

asserts her ignorance of the other: the other of the natural world and also of other peoples. She

says, “I do not know the name of the clouds”, and repeats this statement for the stars, birds,

flowers, guides, winds, people, and adds, “I don’t know the silence / of my brother” (Ai 24). She

also establishes the limits of her knowledge by identifying what she does know, which is often

linked to personal experiences: “I don’t know the direction of the rivers which sing to the East of

the great river / but I know that my grandfather fished for salmon there” (Ai 21).190 Being able to

recognize the limits of her knowledge opens up the possibility of meeting the other: “the blank

189 “C’est un bien petit poème / ça prend bien peu de place / une page blanche / résonne à l’infini / C’est si petit / la peur / pourquoi en parler? / Je ne connais pas le nom des nuages / Pourtant / j’ai vu mon premier vol d’oiseaux / partant du nord au sud.” 190 “Je ne connais pas le sens des rivières qui chantent à l’est du fleuve / mais je sais que mon grand-père y pêchait le saumon.”

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page / resonates to the infinite.” At the end of the poem, she envisions reconciliation as

openness:

I run through reconciliation free of wind arms wide open to an invigorating morning my first flights of birds Savage (Ai 24)191

These verses convey the image of embracing nature “arms wide open.” While the word “savage”

could have meant “wild” referring to the birds, the use of the singular and the capital letter rather

suggest that it refers to the author who “runs through reconciliation.” This new identity coming

at the very end of the poem indicates the association she makes among asserting her ignorance,

embracing nature and becoming savage. The savage is associated with the natural world as well

as with undoing the constraints of Western thinking.

In his Letter to Violaine, Robert Seven-Crows echoes the phrase “I do not know…” and

writes, “I don’t know this place. The only thing I know is that they have left from here” (Ai

25).192 He writes from Brittany and refers to the colonizers coming from France. Commenting

on his visits to the fortified cities and islands, he says, “I understood the fear felt by visitors when

they saw us, ‘happy pagans,’ in our sea canoes, rich, free, beautiful, healthy, and in harmony

with the territory” (Ai 26).193 As a response to Forest’s poem replete with references to the

natural world, Seven-Crows recalls how Indigenous peoples, before colonization, were living in

a different relationship to their environment, a relationship that impressed the colonizers, but that

191 “Je cours dans la réconciliation / libre de vent / bras tendus / au matin vivifiant / mes premiers vols d’oiseaux / Sauvage.” 192 “Je ne connais pas cette place. La seule chose que je connaisse d’elle, c’est qu’ils sont partis d’ici.” 193 “J’ai compris la peur que les visiteurs ont éprouvée en nous voyant, ‘heureux Païens’, dans nos canots de mer, riches, libres, beaux, en santé et en harmonie avec le territoire.”

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was also devalued by them. He addressed the history of colonization by imagining what settlers

might have felt: “A trip of fear, uncertainty, exploration, hope, conquest, madness, prestige, war,

improvement, meetings, discoveries, ego—Jack Carter and Sam Chaplin’s ego” (Ai 25).194 The

emotions linked to colonization as imagined by Seven-Crows could perhaps describe, to a certain

extent, the settlers’ contemporary realization (almost a discovery) that Indigenous peoples

continue to live on this land, changing ignorance and fear into encounters and hope. It is

interesting that he mentions ego because it seems that Forest’s intention to untangle her own ego

through her zones of ignorance is still fraught with settlers’ contradictory desires about the

position and identity of the savage.

In response to the letter, Forest continues the poem trying to be receptive to her

observations about nature, and listening to what it can teach her: “I don’t know the blue / of this

engulfed America / I start with lakes / the first to talk / Birds on their head / they talk about

Elders / Beyond the vegetal world / the animals’ yard reign / They are quicksilver and mercury /

They talk slowly (Ai 34).”195 Here, lakes talk about Elders and animals talk slowly. Learning

from the natural world is a motif that appears in various exchanges throughout the book. In this

poem, the territory is a repository of knowledge and a keeper of memory. It offers a very

different image from the capitalist way of seeing territory as a resource ready for extraction. In

his third letter, Seven-Crows criticizes that people still deny global warming even when it

already has repercussions on the lives of people, including him. He echoes again his

194 “Un voyage de peur, d’incertitude, d’exploration, d’espoir, de conquête, de folie, de prestige, de guerre, d’enrichissement, de rencontres, de découvertes, d’ego – l’ego de Jack Carter et Sam Chaplin.” 195 “Je ne connais pas le bleu / De cette Amérique engloutie / Je commence par les lacs / Qui parlent les premiers / Des oiseaux sur la tête / Ils parlent des vieux / Au-delà du monde végétal / Règne la cour des animaux / Ils sont vif-argent et mercure / Ils parlent lentement.”

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correspondent’s writing by saying “I should ask stones and water to tell me the story, the true

one…” (Ai 36).196 The story that stones could recount is intimately related to the story of the

people living on the same territory, the people who lived on the Wabozsippi River. In this

correspondence, the recognition of the ignorance of the white author goes hand in hand with the

recognition of the territory as a repository of a knowledge that has been transmitted over

generations in Indigenous communities.

Quebecois writers adopt an attitude of openness toward their ignorance, and try to undo

the feeling of superiority that comes with the white position, including their position toward

nature. Isabelle Miron (Québécoise) uses a strategy similar to Violaine Forest’s to insist on her

openness to the other. She contends she must say,

not yes to who I am, but yes to what erases me, to what takes in me the shape of a tree

and of the sky and of the grass when I tilt. Yes to what circulates between us, you and me

like earth and tide and lightning. Yes to what shivers in me to be leaf, what shivers to

untie in me what chains me up, this idea of oneself to which we hold on to like the last

damned. (Ai 144)197

Miron is herself like nature, like the tree, the sky and the grass. She asks Jean Sioui (Wendat):

“You talk to me about your Mother Earth and I ask myself: ‘Can we still hear her from here,

196 “Il faudrait que je demande aux pierres et à l’eau de me conter l’histoire, la vraie…” 197 “Car il faut d’abord se dire avant que de dire, se dire oui. Non pas oui à ce que je suis, mais oui à ce qui m’efface, à ce qui en moi prend l’allure de l’arbre et du ciel et de l’herbe quand je me penche. Un oui à ce qui circule entre nous, vous et moi comme terre et marées et foudres qui tombent. Oui à ce qui tremble en moi d’être feuille, ce qui tremble de se défaire de ce moi qui m’enchaîne, cette idée de soi à laquelle on s’accroche, comme derniers damnés.”

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from where I am?’” (Ai 142).198 She talks about the wind from the North, “a wind that comes

from your place… It brings you to me, and through it I travel towards you” (Ibid.).199 Miron uses

the natural world as that which links them beyond (structural/national) differences, yet Sioui

doesn’t play this game and answers:

Don’t pretend to meet me in the wind. It would take good play-acting to believe I am still

a happy savage. My village is built from bricks and asthma. The Mother Earth I am

talking about suffers from a hundred thousand borders jabbed into her stomach. Our

territories are shared between First Nations who are slandered and companies that plan

without consulting nature. (Ai 143)200

Sioui offers a critical view on the simplified and apolitical image of the close relation between

First Nations and Mother Earth. He clarifies that the way in which nature plays a role in the

creation of just relationships must be understood otherwise than through the reiteration of the

“noble savage.” Sioui’s intervention reminds the reader that the exploitation of resources, the

dispossession of ancestral territory and the displacement of Indigenous peoples to reserves or to

cities are part of the process of colonization.

While the act of unlearning and deconstructing dominant identities and ways of knowing

seems crucial to renovating the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples,

198 “Vous me parlez de votre Terre Mère et je me demande: peut-on encore l’entendre ici, d’où je suis?” 199 “…un vent qui vient de chez vous… Il vous amène jusqu’à moi, et par ce vent je voyage vers vous.” 200 “Ne prétendez pas me rencontrer dans la liberté des vents. Il faudrait aujourd’hui tout un cinéma pour me croire encore heureux sauvage. Mon village s’édifie de briques et d’asthmes. La Terre Mère dont je parle souffre dans son ventre piqué de cent mille bornes. Nos territoires se partagent entre Premières Nations qu’on médit et compagnies qui projettent sans consulter la nature.”

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the use of nature to counter the rigidity of Western traditions can shift to the desire to get closer

to nature in order to become Indian. Some could argue that this desire is positive since it asserts

the value of Indigenous cultures, yet this colonial desire is characterized by wanting to be in the

place of the other, while not wanting to lose privileges. In another set of correspondence, Louis

Hamelin (Québécois) states, “I always wanted to become an Indian. In that sense, you are

anterior to me and I envy you… And nowadays, who still wants to be Quebecois?” (Ai 63).201

Domingo Cisneros (Tepehuane) answers, “Everything is so complicated. We want to be

ourselves and also somebody else” (Ai 67).202 Through this statement, Cisneros underlines the

contradiction in the necessity to unlearn colonial structures of thought for white settlers, when

this uprooting is made by adopting the roots of another. The desire to be Indian rarely refers to

the legal, political and historical status that comes with this identity. Hamelin says, “To become

Quebecois, we go to Quebec. But where do we become Indian?” (Ai 64).203 Being Quebecois is

attached to a political territory, but being Indian seems to be attached to something more vague:

“I suspect that to become Indian, it is not so much a territory that we need to select, but a history.

A relationship to the living world, to time… A region of the soul, rather than a country”

(Ibid.).204 For Hamelin, Indigeneity is attached to a type of relationship to the living world, but

has no attachment or political and civic roots to a geographical land. Moreover, Hamelin’s views

are oblivious to the fact that Indigeneity has been defined through “politics of authenticity” that

are based on “the arbitrariness and absolutes of federal categories of Native legal status and

201 “… j’ai toujours voulu devenir un Indien. En ce sens, tu m’es antérieur et je t’envie. Tu es, toi, un Indien arrivé. Et de nos jours, qui veut encore devenir Québécois?” 202 “Tout est si compliqué. Nous voulons être nous-mêmes et aussi quelqu’un d’autre.” 203 “Pour devenir Québécois, on va au Québec. Mais où devient-on indien?” 204 “Je soupçonne que pour s’amérindianiser, ce n’est pas tant un territoire qu’il faut élire, qu’une histoire. Un rapport au monde vivant, au temps… Une région de l’âme, plutôt qu’un pays et pas un autre.”

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rights” (Barker, Native 2). These categories are tied to “racialized perceptions about physical

appearance and biological difference, where degrees of blood are assumed to be equated with

degrees of cultural identity” (Ibid.). Saying that being Indian corresponds to “a region of the

soul” passes over the importance of contested land and blood quantum in definitions of Indian

identities. Cisneros questions the idea that being Indian would be a mindscape and responds: “I

answer you that you become Indian when They accept you, welcome you, adopt you, incorporate

you. It is an inclusive, generous and welcoming society” (Ai 67, emphasis in the original).205

Cisneros insists on Indigenous political communities, characterized by hospitality and making

decisions for themselves.206 This part of the exchange underlines the problems in defining

Indigenous political communities in relation to a specific geographical territory. Lisa Brooks

highlights the relationship between community and land for Indigenous peoples who understand

the term “nation” in different ways than settler-states do; for instance, “the activity of nation-

building, in the Abenaki sense, is not a means of boundary-making but rather a process of

gathering from within” (“At the Gathering” 229). The image that Indian identity unfolds in the

soul rather than in a political territory shows how indianity is mobile within settler-states—

through the natural world, identity formations of Indians as well as settlers and one’s own soul—

while also immobilized in time and space.207

As I explained earlier when describing the Doctrine of Discovery, the belief that Indians

are close to nature participates in legitimizing the settler-state’s sovereignty over land. The

205 “Et je te réponds que tu deviens indien quand Eux t’acceptent, t’accueillent, t’adoptent, t’incorporent. C’est une société qui inclut, qui est généreuse et hospitalière.” 206 Cisneros does not define Indigenous political communities through blood quantum, but asserts their power to determine who is part of it. Joanne Barker talks about the possibility of rearticulation “to other discourses than those of oppression (as the oppressed)” (Native 10), therefore negotiating between federal and Native categories of identity. 207 See Byrd for the image of “transit” to think the mobility of Indianity in settler-states.

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University of Ottawa scholar Corrie Scott adds that the idealized figure of the Indian plays a role

in this colonizing process 208: “This fantastical [fantasmatique] Indian personifies a natural and

sovereign order that eludes culture. The message linked to nature is, therefore, independent and

superior to a particular culture and seems to hold an authority that comes from a sacred

originality” (102, my translation).209 Scott explains, indeed, that the appropriation of Indian

identity allows for the legitimization of the relationships to the territory considered to be natural,

which “conceals relationships of domination” (Ibid.). She refers to the work of Christian

Morissonneau for whom “forest and Indian, nature and primitive life transform the individual

into a new man [sic]” (in Scott 106; Morissonneau 107, my translation).210 Quebecois identity

defined through the relationship to nature and to the Indian is rooted not only in the political

imagining of a nation, but in an original link to the land. The “new man” takes from the Indian

freedom from convention, legitimacy to dwell on this land, wisdom and know-how, but remains

white, while the Indian is transformed into a fantastical figure that is not considered to be part of

any particular political and geographical community.

2.4 The Territory as Multinaturecultural

2.4.1 The Racialization of Indigeneity

Aimititau came before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, although the latter’s

creation had been announced in 2006 as part of the Indian Residential School Settlement

208 Voir aussi Crosby, Marcia. “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” 1991. 209 “Cet Indien fantasmatique incarne un ordre naturel et souverain qui échappe à la culture. Le message qui est lié à la nature est ainsi indépendant et supérieur à une culture en particulier et semble de cette façon détenir une autorité qui vient d’une originalité sacrée.” 210 “La forêt et l’Indien, la nature et la vie primitive transforment l’individu en un homme nouveau.”

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Agreement. At the time, important discussions about cultural differences and accommodation

took place with the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in Quebec.211 Its final report stated that the

commission could not address the situation of First Nations because it entailed a different context

that could not be treated within the same debate about accommodations for culturally-different

groups.212 This statement recognizes the incommensurability of Indigenous difference, yet the

predominance of the “multicultural” or “intercultural” to imagine the political space for cultural

difference often erases Indigeneity. Literary projects that seek to create bridges between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples must be thought through the conflict between the

awareness of the distinct status of Indigenous peoples in relation to the debate on the

intercultural, to the Quebecois’ reticence to identify as settlers and to acknowledge systemic

racism.

“Color-blind” discourses are common in Quebec and tend to exonerate individuals from

historical responsibility about racial injustices. Scott, who says that francophones feel “a

semantic unease with the word ‘race’” (21), takes on Sherene Razack’s definition of the ideology

of ‘colour blindness’, defined as “a will to conceive of oneself as innocent and outside History, a

deliberate oversight,” which “often goes along the desire to ignore, or worse, to negate systemic

racism’s existence” (24). Now, racism is easier to deny for white people who do not live it daily.

White people’s racial identity is rendered invisible, while being central to the ways in which

cultural differences are thought and people of color are made visible. Latour warns that

multiculture is based on mononature, that is, on one system of truth, and that pluralism is

211 The official title was the Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences. The final report was published in 2008. 212 See the final report. https://www.mce.gouv.qc.ca/publications/CCPARDC/rapport-final-integral-en.pdf, 34.

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accepted as long as it does not threaten that system of truth. The question is, therefore, whether

the common ground thought of as “multi” or “mixed-race” occludes structural injustices, and

whether, and how, Indigenous reality can participate in the making of a collective with non-

Indigenous people. I explained above that Aimititau gives the impression that we could all get

along, while there is also a place for criticizing the continuity of colonialism. One important

question is what place do Indigenous writers occupy within the volume and in relation to

Morali’s project. How are colonial and cultural differences erased or asserted?

Hélène Destrempes understands the ethics of meeting (l’« éthique de la rencontre ») in

Aimititau as the non-Indigenous person’s acculturation to the “images and […] values associated

with Indigenous reality, as if meeting each other could happen provided that non-Indigenous

identity is veiled” (138-139).213 She sees this “desired acculturation” as a sign of the space given

to Indigenous realities in the book, in which, there is, indeed, space for Indigenous voices and

visions. Nevertheless, I do not believe the valorisation of Indigenous cultures through an

inversion of processes of acculturation contributes to the deconstruction of racial hierarchies. On

the contrary, it strengthens them because the desire to appropriate Indigenous identity or to

celebrate mixed-raced identities is, as Patrick Wolfe argues, part of the “logic of elimination”

that “marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society”

(390). He explains that the way in which indigeneity is recuperated, appropriated or celebrated

within the settler-colonial society is “concomitant with genocidal practice” because “it eliminates

large numbers of empirical natives from official reckonings” (402). This is why it is problematic

when Indians are idealized as being closer to nature and antithetical to the Western ways of

213 “images et […] valeurs associées à la réalité autochtone, comme si la rencontre des uns et des autres ne pouvait s’opérer qu’à condition de voiler l’identité non autochtone.”

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consuming or exploiting nature, because Indigeneity is appropriated but Indigenous subjects

disappear in the present space we inhabit. We, particularly settlers, must be careful, then, about

how we define the space of Indigenous difference.

The hierarchies between cultures that are so obvious in the legitimation of colonialism

and in the Doctrine of Discovery are often thought of as matter of the past in the present

multicultural society. “Old” racial hierarchies, South African-U.S. scholar David Theo Goldberg

argues, are replaced by the appeal to the “multi- and the middle, the mixed and hybrid [which]

assume the romanticized value of ‘all getting along’” (Postracial 22). Yet, the postracial claim to

mixity makes whiteness invisible or “less obviously or visibly racial” (Postracial 109), while

marginalized groups are made “hyper-visible, even as the conditions producing their precarity

have been increasingly ignored by policy-makers and their powerful supporters” (Ibid.). For

Goldberg, the postracial is a characteristic of our time: racism is thought “to be over, socially

irrelevant, no longer of real concern” (Postracial viii)214 while new and old forms of racism

proliferate.

In the exchange between Nahka Bertrand and Jean Désy, the celebration of mixity

contrasts with the lived experience of racism that reminds them of the daily obstacles to define

commonalities.

2.4.2 “You Don’t Know What It Is To Be Indian!”: The Experience of Racism

Quebecois poet Jean Désy starts his correspondence with Nahka Bertrand (born to a Dene

father and a Quebecois mother) with the story of his friendship with Qalingo Tookalak, an Inuit

214 Already in 1993, David Theo Goldberg wrote: “The prevailing view concerning contemporary racism is that it is something that belongs to the past” (Racist viii).

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from Nunavik, who guided him on his journey in the North. Désy recounts that, after a long and

difficult day in the tundra at -40o Celsius, he stated proudly that he had been “as good as an

Inuit.” His friend’s response had hurt him: “Qalingo, scathingly, told me that although I had been

good, yes, proving my relative worth in adversity, I would never, but never! (and he repeated it),

be an Inuit” (Ai 148).215 Désy explains that he now understands that his friend’s admonition

came out from his pride and not from racism:

When I think about it now, I must admit that I understand Qalingo said this out of pride. I

would not dare to pretend it was “racism,” first because this word has become taboo these

days, and especially because I never noticed any sign of racism in my friend’s actions,

remarks or intonation. (Ai 150)216

This analysis of the event is surprising: Désy seems to think that racism can be practised by an

Inuit man against a white man, and vice versa, without any consideration for the concrete power

relations that mark these positions. This vision of racism, not grounded in its specific history that

produced the white (masculine) subject as a universal, accepts the commensurability of

differences: all peoples might feel racism against others. In addition, signs of racism can be

identified in an individual’s behaviours, conveying that racism is attached to racist people who

can be recognized as such, rather than to structures that affect everyone.

Désy proposes then to think of racial mixing as that which brings us closer. He sends

Bertrand his essay “How do we name ourselves?” in which he contends that the negation in the

215 “Qalingo, cinglant, me répondit que si j’avais été bon, oui, prouvant ma valeur relative face à l’adversité, jamais, mais jamais! (et il le répéta), je ne serais un Inuit.” 216 “En y réfléchissant, je dois avouer qu’il me semble comprendre que c’était par fierté que Qalingo s’était ainsi exprimé. Je n’oserais prétendre par ‘racisme’, d’abord parce que ce mot est devenu tabou ces années-ci, d’autant plus que je n’ai jamais perçu quelque trace que ce soit de racisme dans les agissements, les propos ou les intonations de mon ami.”

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term “non-Indigenous” produces awkwardness: “Aren’t all ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’

‘Quebecois’?” (Ai 159).217 This statement suggests that, without the separation generated by

these words, apartheid would no longer exist, and that the political territory of Quebec could

unify people despite racial or cultural differences. For the same reasons, he explains that the term

“white” is not appropriate:

Why not “white”? Because our time and collective will reach the stage of erasing the

“white” racism that particularly dominated at the time of colonisation? Many people no

longer believe it is ‘politically correct’ to say “white” or “black” or “yellow.” What is

desired, and with the best intentions in the world, is the disintegration of all racism, which

explains this relative taboo concerning the word “white.” (Ai 160)218

In encouraging a position that erases racial differences, Désy proposes to deconstruct racism, but

only succeeds in negating its existence. This way of seeing justice is entrenched in Canadian

society. In 1969, the White Paper, submitted by Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, was built on the idea that

to repeal the Indian Act would render society more egalitarian. Sabine Hargous describes this

project instead as a “technocratic program of genocide” (41), because it would negate the

protection of their distinct status altogether. The idea of equality for everyone erases First

Nations’ historical difference, which sustains their demands for respecting their nations and

territories in a way that encourages a nation-to-nation relationship. Moreover, the Canadian

promise of integration is undermined by continuous racial discrimination, which prevents

217 “‘Autochtones’ et ‘non-Autochtones’ ne sont-ils pas tous ‘québécois’?” 218 “Pourquoi pas ‘blanc’? Parce que le temps et la volonté collective est à l’effacement d’un racisme ‘blanc’ qui régna particulièrement du temps de toutes les colonisations? Plusieurs ne croient plus qu’il est encore ‘politiquement correct’ de dire ‘blanc’ ou ‘noir’ ou ‘jaune’. Ce qui est souhaité, et avec les meilleures intentions du monde, c’est la désintégration des racismes, d’où ce tabou relatif entourant le mot ‘blanc.’”

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Indigenous peoples from becoming the same as Canadian citizens. Unawareness of racial

injustices often lies in the belief that justice is/should be accessible for everyone.

The tendency to adopt a post-racial position is understood by postcolonial theorist Sara

Ahmed as a characteristic of contemporary white society: “The desire to act in a non-racist or

anti-racist way when one hears about racism, in my view, can function as a defense against

hearing how that racism implicates which subjects, in the sense that it shapes the spaces

inhabited by white subjects in the unfinished present” (“Declarations” para. 57). Moreover, the

post-racist position leads people to be oblivious to the conditions of oppression that unfair and

discriminatory structures perpetuate. Because Désy bestows great importance on language in his

project to “disintegrate racism,” it is important to note that racism does not only exist in words,

names, and colours, but that it sticks to us, we live it through the body, and it affects us in many

ways, including the way we speak and express ourselves. Ahmed explains that antiracism is not

performative, that is, the statement that one is not racist does not lead to the expected outcome:

“But race, like sex, is sticky; it sticks to us, or we become ‘us’ as an effect of how it sticks, even

when we think we are beyond it. Beginning to live with that stickiness, to think it, feel it, do it, is

about creating a space to deal with the effects of racism” (“Declarations” para. 49). Désy wants

to define a common identity, a “we” that would bring us together, both Indigenous and non-

Indigenous, but in order to do so he avoids taking into account the material conditions of life.

That is, his effort to imagine a “we” strays the attention from the fact that erasing differences

between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in order to reach equality is at the same time

part of the project of assimilation and impossible because of rampant racism. More importantly,

the fight against racism does not aim at erasing difference, from an Indigenous perspective, but

at enabling a space where Indigenous peoples can live according to that difference, without

discrimination.

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Bertrand answers Désy’s desire to find a common name: “Your text shocked me a lot,

while amusing me, to say the least” (Ai 162).219 She clarifies that, collectively, Indigenous

peoples living in Quebec do not identify as Quebecois because it would mean “the assimilation

to the Quebecois’ imaginary and ever-changing designation” (Ai 164)220 and because they have

never ceded their territory. While Désy imagines Quebec as a postracial space where it is

possible to create a mixed-race collective, Bertrand reminds him and the readers that this

territory is unceded. In order to situate herself in relation to her vision of the territory, she insists

on her embodied knowledge of racism. She recounts a story of her childhood, when a young boy

in her class cried out: “It’s all bullshit. We all know that Indians and Eskimos have lost their

culture. They have it easy. They drink all the time and go around in skidoos to buy cheap

smuggled cigarettes from the local shop when they get their welfare cheque. No taxes” (Ai

154).221 The author does not use this accumulation of stereotypes to deconstruct them, but rather

to show the effects on her. She recounts:

I feel miserable and want to disappear under the carpet. At the same time I want to

scream, cry out my anger towards his indifference, his ignorance, towards this image he

projects on me […]

My teacher asks me if I have something to say or to defend. I hold her gaze for a time

and I’m convinced that she can see the anger released by my body in black and stormy

clouds, a blistering rage towards unawareness…

219 “Votre texte m’a beaucoup choquée, tout en m’amusant, pour le moins dire.” 220 “… l’assimilation à la désignation imaginaire et en mouvement perpétuel du Québécois.” 221 “C’est juste de la bullshit ça. On sait toutes que les Indiens pis les Eskimos ont pu de culture. Y’ont tout cuit dans le bec. Ça boit tout le temps pis ça se promène en skidoo pour aller au dépanneur acheter des cigarettes contrebandes cheap quand y’ont leur chèque de BS. Pas de taxes.”

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“This is not how it is, you don’t know what it is to be Indian!”

The bell rings. Class ends… (Ai 154)222

Bodies are at the foreground in the relationship between the two young people. For Bertrand,

anger takes the form of “black and stormy clouds” that emerge from her body and which can be

seen by the teacher. The boy’s body also takes part in this episode of racism, particularly as it is

protected by the inaction of other classmates and of the teacher. Words are not detached from the

context in which they are pronounced and heard: words, speech, actions, and bodies are linked at

the moment when racism occurs. While Bertrand’s body is made visible and marked by

difference by this discriminatory speech, the boy’s body is out of sight, protected by his

structural, material, and privileged position.

Désy is touched by the story, but continues to put emphasis on finding ways to erase

difference, which according to him separates us: “The question about racial mixing is crucial. It

is fascinating that we all in this country continue to talk about ‘White’ and ‘Indian’ people!” (Ai

156).223 These denominations are indeed restrictive because they are categories that limit our

comprehension of how people identify themselves, notably as Quebecois instead of Canadian or

White, and as Innu instead of Indian or Indigenous, or how people decide to identify through

terms other than ethnic, national or racial groups. Yet, Désy replaces these concepts by another,

222 “J’ai envie de me morfondre dans le tapis, de disparaître. En même temps je veux crier, gueuler ma colère envers son indifférence, son ignorance, envers cette image qu’il projette sur moi (…) Ma professeure me demande si j’ai quelque chose à ajouter ou à défendre. Je soutiens son regard et je suis certaine qu’elle voit la colère qui se dégage de mon corps en nuages noirs et orageux, une foudroyante fureur envers l’inconscience… ‘C’est pas comme ça, vous ne savez pas c’est quoi être indien!’ C’est la cloche. Fin de classe…” 223 “Cette question métisse est fondamentale. Fascinant que nous tous, dans ce pays, nous parlions encore des ‘Blancs’ et des ‘Indiens!’”

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that is, “racial mixing” (“métissage”), which marks everybody and simplifies the concrete

differences lived by people. While Désy emphasizes the creation of new concepts, new words,

Bertrand insists on the need to self-define. Talking about her own experience, she writes,

The young girl from Roberval self-defines as being both Québécoise and Indigenous, and

hence, of mixed origins […] She defines her identity by identifying terms that she

accepts, to know and understand better her place in the world. Above all else, she is the

one who names herself. (Ai 163)224

Désy understands the freedom to self-define in a surprising way and answers back: “The dream-

function [la fonction rêveuse] is probably more determining than the real and geographical or

political function, determined by a place or a country” (Ai 165).225 He refers here to the people

who define first in relation to their culture, language, memories, and dreams, instead of the

physical territory, mentioning for instance Greek and Algerian immigrants who do not feel

Quebecois either, and are attached to their own cultures. Comparing the cultural attachment of

immigrants to the Indigenous peoples’ attachment to their culture occludes how the theft of

Indigenous land was based on cultural genocide and how restitution of land is considered central

to reparatory justice by Indigenous peoples. The geographical and political function of identity

formation is crucial to Indigeneity in relation to the space of the city and the reserve, to band

membership, and Indian status determined by Canada as a political entity. It is particularly

224 “La jeune fille de Roberval se définit elle-même comme étant à la fois québécoise et autochtone et donc métisse […] Elle défend son identité en s’identifiant aux termes qu’elle accepte, pour mieux connaître et comprendre sa place dans le monde. Elle se nomme, avant tout, elle-même.” 225 “La fonction rêveuse est probablement plus déterminante chez les humains que la fonction réelle et géographique ou politique, déterminée par un lieu ou un pays.”

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important because there are contested versions of how this territory, which has been taken, is

imagined.

Bertrand’s story is about the materiality of living in a racialized body on unceded land,

that is, in the context of colonialism in Quebec. Désy, on the other hand, imagines his own body

through mixity on a land that makes no racial distinctions and includes everyone. However, he

identifies as Quebecois and would like to expand political and civic identity through racial

mixity. His own embodiment as white settler disappears, and his body appears only in the story

of being like (or not like) the Inuit. Identifying as white or as settler would blend his identity

with the West, the English Canadians and U.S. Americans, while racial mixity creates an identity

attached to the territory, giving solid roots for the political community understood as Quebec. He

also talks about his daughter’s body which looks mixed-race according to him: “we could believe

she was born at Malioténam or Salvador de Bahia!” (Ai 165). He sees her according to his

imagined postracial land, in which being Innu or Brazilian is interchangeable, instead of through

the materiality of Quebecois culture. Interestingly, Désy does not define himself in relation to

Quebecois culture, language, and memories (tradition), but to a specific territory, Quebec,

imagined as postracial, that is, a common geographical and political space for all. He would like

to see this political space occupied by Indigenous peoples, but does not seem to see the

incommensurability of the difference between conceptions of this territory.

Bertrand adds that Indigenous peoples do not want to identify as Quebecois for “it would

mean the cultural loss for the Indigenous individual who identifies as a human being that comes

from this territory, who depends on this territory, considered as a ‘Mother Earth.’ Indigenous

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culture and identity would then become a real nonsense” (Ai 164).226 Bertrand evokes the way in

which Indigenous peoples identify as humans through a particular idea of humanity grounded in

a conception of territory as Mother Earth, which has been a different than the Quebecois’ self-

definition: “‘Quebecois people’ have chosen to name themselves ‘Quebecois’, therefore it is the

right way to name them” (Ibid.). For her, there is a need to assert difference, to speak about

Indigenous conceptions of the territory and to respect how Quebecois name themselves. I

understand her desire to mark a difference in the ways in which they imagine their humanity,

which are potentially incompatible or irreconcilable, in relation to Latour’s view of intercultural

relationship as one between different systems of truth, with which actors need to negotiate.

Along these lines, I argue that it is through asserting difference—not only racial but

epistemological and ontological difference—that a conception of a multi-natureculture and of an

“inclusive” collective can be formed.

2.5 The Territory As The Earth

2.5.1 Transforming Hierarchical Relationships

In the context of the environmental crisis, many people say that we should have listened

more to Indigenous peoples. In fact, listening is often mentioned as a way of making justice. If

the environmental crisis is a crisis of objectivity, Latour sees the necessity of epistemological

shifts that allow for negotiation and diplomacy with other modes of knowledge. His model of

negotiation with other cultures insists on the condition of listening to the propositions of actants

226 “Cela signifierait la perte culturelle de contact de l’Indigène, qui se définit comme étant un être humain qui provient de ce territoire, qui dépend de ce territoire externe, et le considère comme une ‘mère terre.’ C’est alors que la culture et l’identité autochtone deviendraient une vraie absurdité.”

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in order for them to be considered in the collective. To listen in a way that structurally changes

the position of the collective and of the actants is not self-evident, common or obvious. It is hard

to truly listen, partly because multiculturalism, as the model through which we make sense of

racial justice, is based on mononaturalism, which is a central idea to Western ontologies and

epistemologies (although it has also been criticized and challenged). Battiste and Henderson say

that the current demand for Indigenous peoples to share their knowledge “is an extraordinarily

bold request” particularly because “the colonizing peoples have done nothing to create trust or to

build relationships with our ecologies or with our knowledge” (11). The same goal of protecting

the environment from degradation may be conceived of in different paradigms of the collective,

relationality, and attachments. Caring for the environment, the fear of its degradation, and the

desire to safeguard the humanity can be grounded in old Western pattern of relationships of

domination. Moreover, using the care for the environment for the task of establishing

relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can be fraught with the

association of nature and Indigeneity, as well as with engagements that continue to deny the

variety of contributions by Indigenous peoples. Therefore, the non-Indigenous people’s urge to

protect nature should not prevent them from taking responsibility to condemn colonization and

make justice to Indigenous peoples. Listening to Indigenous knowledge cannot be about finding

alternative ways of protecting Western views on humanity, but might on the contrary enlarge

negotiation to different conceptions of justice, including decolonial justice.

Along these lines, the final report of the TRC warns against a superficial comprehension

of reconciliation; it encourages, indeed, working on reconciliation from the perspective of

Indigenous knowledge:

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Canadians have much to benefit from listening to the voices, experiences, and wisdom of

Survivors, Elders, and Traditional Knowledge Keepers—and much more to learn about

reconciliation. Aboriginal peoples have an important contribution to make to

reconciliation. Their knowledge systems, oral histories, laws, and connections to the land

have vitally informed the reconciliation process to date, and are essential to its ongoing

progress. (Honouring 9)

It is crucial to consider how Indigenous knowledge, including respect for the environment, has

contributed to imagining peaceful relationships with settlers because it envisions reconciliation

not only as a white project initiated by the Church and the government’s apologies, but as a

project for justice that has been integral to the Indigenous ways of living throughout colonial

history.227

The report reports the words of Elder Reg Crowshoe who claims, “Indigenous peoples’

world views, oral history traditions, and practices have much to teach us about how to establish

respectful relationships among peoples and with the land and all living things” (Honouring 18).

According to him, stories include teachings about reconciliation and about how to relate to the

land. He claims that stories are as important as theories, which I understand in the way in which

both contribute in making sense of the world in which we live.228 This view forces us to consider

227 The TRC’s final report establishes the beginning of reconciliation in the 1980s with the Churches’ apologies for their implication in the Indian residential school system. This places reconciliation in the particular context addressed by the commission. However, reconciliation in the sense of encouraging respectful relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers can be considered as initiating with Indigenous efforts to build relationships of respect with Settlers from the first moments of colonization. 228 Leanne Simpson says, “A theory in its most basic form is simply an explanation for why we do things we do” (39). She adds, “Our Elders consider Creation Stories to be of paramount

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the production of knowledge otherwise in the engagement for a more just world. The

commissioners, who have heard this message from different elders and survivors, say,

Reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, from an Aboriginal

perspective, also requires reconciliation with the natural world. If human beings resolve

problems between themselves but continue to destroy the natural world, then

reconciliation remains incomplete. This is a perspective that we as Commissioners have

repeatedly heard: reconciliation will never occur unless we are also reconciled with the

earth. (Ibid.)

The assertion that reconciliation cannot occur if we do not reconcile with the earth seems crucial

from an Indigenous perspective. If taken seriously, this statement is deeply subversive as it

concerns rethinking colonial and capitalist models of society that we know today. However,

Tuck and Yang remind us that it can also be problematic to mingle all types of social justice

struggles because it tends to conceal the ways in which different fights for justice enter into

competition, oftentimes relegating the aim of decolonization, in the sense of repatriation, to the

margin.

In the next two sets of correspondence, the concern for the ecological crisis becomes an

opportunity to claim the necessity to change all types of relationships, but also to create a

connection with the other. At the same time, this concern goes with an effort to recognize

difference between the authors’ speaking positions. In both exchanges, the relationships to non-

importance because they provide the ontological and epistemological framework to interpret other Aandisokaanan and Dibaajimowinan in a culturally inherent way” (40).

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humans, from the Indigenous perspective, are an integral part of this project. In the first, Joan

Pawnee-Parent (Métis/Nipissing) holds a non-hierarchical view of the relationships between

humans and non-humans. Her exchange with Andrée A. Michaud (Québécoise) invokes the

relationship with the natural world, but also, again, of self-critique, in a way that calls into

question relations of domination. The second correspondence, between Denise Brassard

(Québécoise) and Rita Mestokosho (Innu), is rooted in the physical territory and the writers’

bodies and experience, which underline the materiality of the literary project of encounter, of the

link between writing and life.

2.5.2 “Everything is Intimately Linked”: The Politics of Non-Humans

Joan Pawnee-Parent starts the exchange by describing her life with her father, his love for

nature, the importance of the birch tree, and his way of building a fire. The strength of her father

was important in her perception of their lives: “When the garden and the wood shed were at their

maximum capacity, my father would show them to us as if we were rich. And, in my mind, with

what I heard outside home (especially at school), I thought we were quite poor. I know now that

he did not talk nonsense” (Ai 182).229 Their wealth comes from their different way of life and of

relating to nature. For the author, they involved an intimate relationship with the vegetal world:

“I have lived great disappointments with humans and, each time, I have found reassurance next

to my plant friends” (Ai 194).230

229 “Quand le jardin et la Shed à bois étaient au maximum de leur capacité, mon père nous les montrait comme si nous étions riches. Et moi, dans ma tête, avec ce que j’entendais, à l’extérieur de chez nous (surtout à l’école), je pensais que nous étions bien pauvres. Je sais maintenant qu’il ne m’a pas raconté n’importe quoi.” 230 “J’ai vécu de grandes déceptions avec les humains et, chaque fois, j’ai trouvé réconfort auprès de mes amies les plantes.”

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Andrée A. Michaud answers by connecting her own experience to Pawnee-Parent’s

description of her father:

Are you the one speaking? Is it me? When I was reading the passage on the way to start a

fire in the story you sent me, I thought about my own father, who wasn’t Aboriginal, but

knew the woods like the back of his hand, knew how to call a moose, to gut a pike or a

trout, to recognize the age of the dried trails of deer, fox, otter. (Ai 186)231

Her father knew in similar ways, she says, how to live in the woods. Yet, this knowledge has

been lost since they moved to the city. She likes to live in the city, but also feels sometimes like

“a bear in a cage” (Ai 187). In the beginning of the exchange, she looks for what links her to the

other: “Before starting to write this letter, I established a list of our commonalities. It seemed to

me like a good way to begin the conversation […] I wrote down that we both loved plants, that

you were a grandmother while I was a grandaunt” (Ibid.).232 However, she realizes that stressing

similarities occludes important differences and adds: “Anyway, this list did not mean anything; it

was only a way to pretend that four centuries did not put us apart” (Ai 188).233 Michaud recounts

the shock she felt when she read the history books by Sabine Hargous and T.C. McLuhan.234 She

reinterprets the Quebecois motto “I remember” by saying, “I remember what has been done to

231 “Est-ce toi qui parles? Est-ce moi? Quand j’ai lu ce passage sur la manière de partir un feu dans le conte que tu m’as envoyé, j’ai pensé à mon propre père, qui n’était pas Amérindien, mais connaissait le bois comme le fond de sa poche, savait câler l’orignal, vider un brochet ou une truite, reconnaître l’âge des pistes séchées du chevreuil, du renard, de la loutre.” 232 “Avant de commencer à t’écrire cette lettre, j’avais établi la liste de nos points communs. Ça me semblait une bonne façon d’entamer la conversation [...] J’avais noté que nous aimions toutes deux les plantes, que tu étais grand-mère alors que j’étais grand-tante…” 233 “De toute façon, cette liste ne signifiait rien, elle n’était qu’une manière de prétendre que quatre siècle ne nous séparaient pas.” 234 Sabine Hargous. Les Indiens du Canada. Montréal: Éditions Sélect, 1980, and T.C. McLuhan (dir.) and Edward S. Curtis (photographs). Pieds nus sur la terre sacrée. Denoël Lacombe, 1974.

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Indigenous Peoples. I should not forget” (Ai 190).235 Through self-critique she performs the

process which Quebecois people undergo when becoming aware of colonial history. Making

explicit this process, in the context of the correspondence, suggests that looking for similarities

in superficial ways might participate in a relationship of domination because it places the

creation of relationships in an ahistorical horizon.

It is from this realization that Michaud shares her preoccupation with ecological issues.

She mentions the blue-green algae that prevents people from swimming in the lakes: “The fault

should be attributed to the ways in which we manage our resources, to the tendency we have to

think they are inexhaustible and unchanging, to our greed…” (Ai 191).236 She links the feeling of

superiority that settlers had to Indigenous peoples, as well as to nature, and recognizes the

different types of relationships that are part of Indigenous visions of relationships: “We would

probably live in a society that is more respectful of its environment if we had listened to you, and

perhaps we would not struggle with ecological issues that make us look like fools” (Ibid.).237

Pawnee-Parent echoes Michaud’s letter saying, “I remember the smoke signals of some

of my ancestors” (Ai 194, italics in the original).238 She shares the responsibility to look back at

history, and says that she, too, had a task to revive memory about colonialism “because memory

was not all transmitted to me! I also dig into several books to better understand a part of my

235 “Je me souviens de ce qui a été fait aux peuples autochtones. Je ne dois pas oublier.” 236 “Mais la faute, il faut l’attribuer à la façon dont nous disposons de nos ressources, à cette tendance que nous avons à les croire inépuisables et inaltérables, à notre avidité…” 237 “On vivrait probablement dans une société davantage respectueuse de son environnement si on avait su vous écouter, et peut-être qu’on ne serait pas aux prises avec certains problèmes écologiques devant lesquels on a l’air assez con, merci…” 238 “Je me souviens des signaux de fumée de certains de mes ancêtres.”

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heritage” (Ai 197).239 Part of her heritage is “ancestral knowledge, intimately linked to nature,”

which she states, “would help us go through the great disruptions toward which we rush… We

must be blind to not see the smoke signals, don’t you think?” (Ibid.).240 The smoke signals of her

ancestors indicate the urgency to act in the face of ecological crisis, and to revive the memory of

alternative relationships to the environment. Pawnee-Parent talks of her own relationship to

nature: “Nature is my spiritual guide. I feel quite ignorant when I face the great mysteries, but

one thing I know, however, is that without the plant kingdom we wouldn’t be here. We totally

and entirely depend on it” (Ai 194).241 Then, she links the genocide of Indigenous peoples with

the genocide of her “brother” trees, caused by clearcutting. Without the plant kingdom, she says,

we would not exist: “Throughout the years, life has led me to have a more global vision of the

link between plants and ecology, plants and health, plants and politics. Everything is intimately

linked” (Ai 197).242 Her vision of the link between humans and non-humans connects different

sites of violence:

I find that our ‘humanity’ is full of itself when it claims to be superior to other realms

[…] without wanting to make a melodrama, look at the dirtying by our society’s

discontent of, among others, hyper-sexualized young girls… poor children! All the

239 “… car la mémoire ne m’a pas été toute transmise! J’ai puisé moi aussi dans certains livres pour mieux comprendre une partie de mon héritage.” 240 “Dans les temps à venir, qui accompagneront notre évolution, nous aurons sûrement à faire un mea culpa, mea maxima culpa pour ne pas avoir honoré les savoirs ancestraux, intimement liés à la nature, qui nous aiderait à traverser les grands bouleversements vers lesquels nous nous précipitons… Des réponses ont déjà été trouvées dans ce grand et formidable réservoir qu’est la nature… et l’humain de s’approprier ce savoir à des fins de plus en plus pécuniaires.” 241 “La nature est mon guide spirituel. Je me sens bien ignorante devant les grands mystères; mais une chose que je sais, par contre, c’est que sans le règne végétale nous ne serions pas ici. Nous en dépendons entièrement et totalement.” 242 “Au fil des ans, la vie m’a poussée à avoir une vision plus globale du lien entre les végétaux et l’écologie, les végétaux et la santé, les végétaux et la politique. Tout est intimement lié.”

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passages of life have been recuperated and circulated by industry […] We must inspire

ourselves from the beauty of the world to feed our children. (Ai 196)243

The connection between non-humans and the hyper-sexualization of young girls is not

coincidental. The attitude of superiority towards nature is imbricated with the subordination and

discrimination against women. Patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism are structures of

domination that demand we reimagine justice through non-hierarchical, non-dominant

relationships between men and women, human and non-human, white and non-white, settlers

and Indigenous peoples. Yet, these different types of relationships require different types of

actions. Justice making is more effective when it stems from local contexts in which the

imbrication of systems of domination works in specific ways.

In this particular case, Pawnee-Parent envisions an important role for women in the work

for justice: “I’m looking forward to seeing women live a healthy rage which will assure the

protection of their children and grand-children… We have lost the North where our

grandmothers are, wise women for important passages of life, old women, the elders, those who

know…” (Ai 196).244 This desire to see women at the forefront of justice fights is important

because it specifically situates women as agents of change. For her, plants were also agents of

transformation and accompanied her in hard times. This attests to a larger view of the actants

243 “Je trouve que notre ‘humanité’ est bien imbue d’elle-même en se proclamant supérieure aux autres règnes. Désormais, ce que les humains ne portent plus à l’intérieur, ils essaient de le porter à l’extérieur… Et, sans vouloir faire du mélodrame, regarde les éclaboussures du mal-être de notre société, entres autres, sur les petites filles hypersexualisées… pauvres enfants! Tous les passages de la vie sont récupérés et recyclés pour l’industrie… Nous devons nous inspirer de la beauté du monde pour nourrir nos enfants.” 244 “J’ai hâte de voir les femmes vivre une saine colère qui assurera la protection de leurs enfants et petits-enfants… Nous avons perdu le nord où sont les grands-mères, les femmes sages pour les passages importants de la vie, les anciennes, les aînées, celle qui savent…”

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that are part of the collective. Reading her discourse in the context of the literary exchange to

create renewed relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, it seems

important that this task take into account other types of relationships, including the one to the

next generations, to the plant kingdom, and to women.

In the exchange, different forms of domination seem to be equated. At the same time,

there is an important link that is made between “losing the North,” cultural genocide, and the

weakening of Indigenous women’s roles. Tuck and Yang warns against considering all struggles

as the same, particularly because the project of decolonization often enters in competition with

other social justice struggles. Yet, there is a challenge to find ways of connecting struggles, of

creating possibilities for solidarity in which people can support the fight of others while

acknowledging incommensurability. This point might be particularly important in the creation of

a relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, when the latter wants to situate

their actions in solidarity with decolonial struggles. More than mingling social justice struggles,

Pawnee-Parent shows that those fights are interrelated from her situated perspective, while she

provides at the same time a holistic vision of justice based on her position as Indigenous, woman,

and friend of plants. The exchange with Michaud politicizes the environmental degradation by

linking it to the historical context (their attempt at building a relationship is marked by centuries

of colonization) as well as to the local context (they have to deal with different types of injustices

and can imagine solidarity through this). In sum, the exchange shows that environmental

preoccupations, particularly when used as a way to bridge difference between Indigenous and

non-Indigenous peoples, cannot be addressed in isolation. Conversely, the struggle for

decolonization, although its goals respond to Indigenous futurity, cannot be isolated from other

justice struggles.

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2.5.3 “Writing Is Living With Words In The Present”: The Act of Writing

Rita Mestokosho (Innu) also talks of the importance of her relationship to nature and of

her responsibility towards the Earth. She starts off the correspondence by addressing her

suffering caused by the flooding of her grandparents’ traditional territory by the Romaine River

where the government has authorized the construction of a dam. Mestokosho begins the dialogue

by describing how the exploitation and transformation of the territory worry her. She understands

the creation of the common through the shared responsibility toward the environment:

Whether we are red, yellow, white or black, we are all accountable to our mother the

earth. There is a state of urgency, and, for our children, we must act now…

You, my white sister whom I don’t know, your life is probably close to mine. Because

you take up your pen to express your heart and your soul’s colours. (Ai 38)245

In this passage, the issue of the environment goes beyond racial differences. Mestokosho

recognizes that writing makes her and Brassard speak through the heart, considering their

experience of writing instead of their identities. Yet, the author shows that the effects of the

exploitation of the territory touch her family and community concretely and specifically. To

discuss about her worries concerning the environment is therefore a way of developing a critical

discourse on colonialism and on the exploitation of the land.

Denise Brassard (Québécoise) waits until she goes to the lake of her childhood before

answering her: “If you allow me, I will wait until next week to send you a first text. The thing is

245 “Que nous soyons rouge, jaune, blanc ou noir, nous sommes responsables de notre mère la terre. Il y a un état d’urgence et pour nos enfants, il faut agir maintenant… / Toi, ma sœur blanche que je ne connais pas, ta vie est sans doute proche de la mienne. Car tu as pris la plume pour exprimer ton cœur, et les couleurs de ton âme.”

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that I will spend the week at Lac Saint-Jean (to write), an Innu territory and one that you know

well (Laure told me that you had studied in Saguenay), so a territory that we share in some way”

(Ai 38).246 Brassard looks for a way to define what relates them by speaking about her own

relationship to the territory, the one where her grandparents “who were not nomads as you can

imagine, but farmers,” used to live (Ai 39).247 The type of writing that emerges in this space that

reminds her of her childhood is different from what daily life allows. She writes about the lake:

I come to the one who calls into question words and writing, its reach and its raison

d’être call for a different poetry, pared down, less talkative, and measures my silences

with the perspicacity of a judge. It is perhaps not by chance that the day before going

there, precisely to write, laryngitis broke out. I lost my voice. (Ai 40)248

The image of the lake, personified, brings the readers to a space where relationships include

those between humans and non-humans. This is how Brassard answers Mestokosho’s call to act

against environmental degradation. The Quebecois writer does not situate herself in a position of

domination toward nature, but is prepared to lose her voice to focus on listening. She imagines

writing as “pared-down,” “less talkative.” It is worth noting a tension in the analysis of this

correspondence between the deconstruction of a hierarchical relationship between humans and

246 “Si tu le permets, je vais attendre la semaine prochaine pour t’envoyer un premier texte. C’est que je vais aller passer la semaine au Lac Saint-Jean (pour écrire), un territoire innu et que tu connais bien, je crois (Laure m’a dit que tu avais étudié au Saguenay), donc un lieu que d’une certaine façon nous partageons.” 247 “… qui n’étaient pas nomades comme tu l’imagines bien, mais cultivateurs.” 248 “Je viens vers lui qui remet en question les mots, l’écriture, sa portée, sa raison d’être, appelle à une poésie autre, dépouillée, moins bavarde, et mesure mes silences avec une acuité de juge. Ce n’est peut-être pas par hasard qu’à la veille de m’y rendre, précisément pour écrire, une laryngite s’est déclarée. J’ai perdu la voix.”

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non-humans, and the appeal to the natural world to establish the communication with the Innu

correspondent.

In the next letter, Mestokosho describes her everyday relationship to nature by referring

to a kinship with the river:

I often think about the river, whether small, wide or large, winding, I often think about

her as if she were of my blood, my sister.

What do you think about this? That we would need a bridge other than writing? I really

like writing because it allows me to shape my thoughts, to share them.

But to move into action, you and me, we should build a bridge of friendship and broaden

it around the universe. (Ai 49)249

The significance of the blood relation with the River seems to go beyond what can be understood

by the white readers. Mestokosho asks her Quebecois counterpart, “what do you think about

this?” She underlines, moreover, the limits of writing in the creation of friendship without

rejecting this option altogether. What does she mean when she suggests that another bridge

would be necessary? The Innu writer had written before in the exchange: “I dream of the day

when I will breathe the words that we share together” (Ai 43)250 and “I share with you my

worries as if it were a way to breathe” (Ibid.).251 Writing does not have to be a technique that

249 “Je pense souvent à la rivière, qu’elle soit petite, large ou grande, sinueuse, je pense à elle comme si elle était ma sœur de sang. / Que penses-tu de tout cela? Qu’il faudrait un autre pont que l’écriture? / J’aime beaucoup écrire, car cela me permet de travailler mes pensées, de les partager. / Mais pour passer à l’action, il s’agirait pour toi et moi de construire un pont d’amitié et de l’agrandir autour de l’univers.” 250 “Je rêve du jour où je vais respirer les mots que nous partagerons ensemble.” 251 “Je partage avec vous mes inquiétudes comme si c’était une façon de respirer.”

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develops an objective and exterior rational thought; it doesn’t have to detach us from ourselves

to reach a world of ideas. Writing is material, is part of oneself, of possible actions, of ways of

living. Mestokosho writes: “I often think about the connection with writing, an embodied

relationship, because it exists for me, this relationship to the earth” (Ai 58).252 Is it possible to

conceive of writing without considering the separation between nature and culture, between

rationality and body associated with literacy? Seeing writing as close to bodies, lived experience,

and the self leads us to see difference in a non-hierarchical way, as a set of material conditions

for the existence of each person. For instance, the relationship between Brassard and the lake is

different than that of Mestokosho with the river. The vision of writing described by the latter

brings us to think about poetic or critical engagement in a continuity of engagements in daily

life.

At the end of the correspondence, Brassard proposes sharing a personal story. When she

was younger, during a personal growth workshop through dance, she felt she was losing control

of her body: “A force with great power. I slowly realized that this force had an identity and that it

took over mine: I was the bear […] He whispered to me to embody myself, to inhabit my body

with all my energy and be grounded; this is the way your spirit will free itself” (Ai 52).253 She

explains that she hesitated to recount the story because she did not want to appropriate symbols

from Indigenous traditions and because she had the impression that she did not own this story.

She allows herself to recount it now that her perception has changed:

252 “Je pense souvent à la connexion avec l’écriture, ce lien charnel, car il existe pour moi, ce lien à la terre.” 253 “Une force d’une grande puissance. J’ai peu à peu réalisé que cette force avait une identité, et qu’elle prenait le dessus sur la mienne : j’étais l’ours […] ‘Incarne-toi, me soufflait-il, de toute ton énergie habite ton corps et ancre-le dans le sol ; ainsi seulement ton esprit se libérera.’”

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This teaching is not mine. It belongs to the breath of wind, better, it is the breath, the

breath of the spirit which gratified me with his presence […] I may well work to give

myself a story, to compose an account of my life, what my memory holds more precious

doesn’t belong to me, but to these sites: my sole presence at the heart of this landscape,

prepared to listen, gives me the chance to make it audible. (Ai 54)254

Brassard talks with good reasons of her hesitation to recount the story. The explication that she

gives is written in a poetic language. We understand that the creation of the narrative that is

shared required time and that her interpretation had matured. It doesn’t prevent her, however,

from shocking her correspondent or some readers. Mestokosho receives enthusiastically the story

and responds with a poem that closes the exchange:

Let’s talk about real things Even though you speak a different language than mine Find the thought of the North during this eternal winter On the mysterious island of time I am a solitary nomad And with your stranger’s words You found a way to tell me the truth Simply as you live it (Ai 59, italics in the original)255

The first verse resonates with the title of the book. I have suggested that the book helps us think

about the challenges of a renovated justice between Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This poem

254 “Cette leçon ne m’appartient pas. Elle appartient au souffle, mieux, elle est le souffle, celui de l’esprit qui m’a gratifiée de sa présence […] J’ai beau travailler à me donner une histoire, me composer un récit de vie, ce que ma mémoire recèle de plus précieux ne m’appartient pas, mais habite en ces lieux : seule ma présence en toute écoute au cœur du paysage peut me le rendre audible.” 255 “Parlons-nous des vraies choses / Même si tu parles une langue différente de la mienne / Trouve la pensée du Nord en cet hiver éternel / Sur cette île mystérieuse qu’est le temps / Je suis une nomade solitaire / Et avec tes mots d’étrangère / Tu as su me dire la vérité / Simplement comme tu la vis.”

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in particular helps me envision a practice for creating fair relationships. On the one hand,

Mestokosho recognizes the difference that separates her from Brassard: “Even though you speak

a different language than mine” and “your stranger’s words” reveal a material and embodied

difference that cannot be overcome and that she does not want to transcend. The difference

enables a critical perspective on the capacity to establish a relationship, while respecting who the

other is: “You found a way to tell me the truth / Simply as you live it.” She understands that

Brassard has recounted her experience “as she has lived it” as a non-Indigenous woman and does

not interpret further the meaning of that story. On the other hand, the fact that the poem is in the

present tense—“On the mysterious island of time / I am a solitary nomad”—insists on the

immediacy of their relationship in the exchange, as well as on not going too fast in trying to find

resolution. It also marks an authenticity to the present embodied conditions, understood as the

communication of truth as one lives it. Mestokosho writes, “To write is to live with the words in

the present time. I breathe every word to reach you with my breath” (Ai 58).256 Mestokosho’s

conception of writing seems attached to her environmental consciousness, or simply to her

awareness of dwelling in the world. Writing and living are put on the same level throughout the

exchange which contributes to breaking with the illusion that thoughts, developed through

writing, would be detached from bodies and from the material and concrete conditions that

makes them possible.

Brassard organizes the necessary conditions in order for her writing to be embodied in the

relation to nature. Mestokosho explains that her writing is linked organically to her ways of

256 “Écrire, c’est vivre avec les mots au présent. Je respire chaque mot pour souffler jusqu’à vous.”

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thinking and living in daily life. She notes this difference in the modes of writing between her

and Brassard:

I learn to know you better when I read your thoughts through the flowing river. I am

thirsty for reading each thought that passes through your mind. What I write is what I

think, and sometimes, what I live. I am just a voice that passes through time. Your writing

is different from mine, it is close to your expectations. (Ai 49)257

Brassard recounts episodes of her life that she considers relevant to establishing a connection

with the Innu writer: her stay at the lake of her childhood, her trip to the fjord, and her meeting

with the spirit of the bear. Mestokosho describes what she feels and what she thinks about their

literary exchange. In doing so, she develops her thinking about the link between living and

writing during the literary exchange, which she experiences in full presence of her body and

mind. The shared words, which fill in the silence evoked by Laure Morali, become a practice

linked to everyday life. The link between living and writing underlines both the materiality of the

project of correspondence and its limits since it requires only a temporary engagement, whose

scope in the life of the writers remains unknown to the readers.

While the exchange happens with fluidity and openness, and strategies to become closer

appeal to the natural world, the difference noted by Mestokosho is significant because it

concerns ways of thinking and writing. Mestokosho says, when she talks about her grandparents

257 “J’apprends à te connaître en lisant tes pensées à travers la rivière fluide. J’ai soif de lire chaque pensée qui traverse ton esprit. Ce que j’écris, c’est ce que je pense, et parfois ce que je vis. Je suis seulement une voix qui traverse le temps. Ton écriture est différente de la mienne, elle est proche de tes attentes.”

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and about spirits “who are here,” “it is in my language that I honour them” (Ai 57).258 She sends

a poem in Innu without translation, and explains later: “The poem in Innu-aimun expresses my

deep feelings for my children. Yet, it also expresses the feeling of sharing with other than

ourselves” (Ai 56).259 She adds “it’s the relationship with others which makes us grow” (Ai

57).260 The poem in Innu-aimun is important because it takes language as a space to think of

relationships with the correspondent from an Innu perspective.

2.6 Conclusion: Reading Tensions as Respectful Disagreement

In the last exchange, Rita Mestokosho’s view about the intimate link between writing and

life brings an understanding of how embodiment, experience, and affect are important aspects of

writing and thinking; her writing is not a reflection of her life, it is life. Considering that

thoughts, images and discourses are not detached from the material conditions of our social life, I

have proposed to underline the concreteness of imagining territory for people faced with the task

of creating relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The exchanges in the

volume cannot be taken as social practices disconnected from the fact that communication

happens on the literary territory, which is in turn a social, political and intimate space. The

authors’ effort to build a bridge with the other implicates their bodies and affect, as well as those

images of commonality and disagreement that they convey to the text.

Most of the exchanges seem to feed the image that we can/should all get along. Even

tensions are perceived as necessary difficulties in the formation of friendship: Morali says that

258 “C’est dans ma langue que je les honore.” 259 “Le poème en innu-aimun exprime profondément mes sentiments pour mes enfants. Mais il exprime aussi le sentiment de partage avec d’autres que nous-mêmes.” 260 “…c’est la relation avec les autres qui nous fait grandir.”

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the exchange between Nahka Bertrand and Jean Désy “enabled a genuine debate between a well-

established author and a young one who publishes here for the first time” (Ai 11), and that, in the

one between Isabelle Miron and Jean Sioui, “images flow, colors blend, elders awaken.”261 Yet,

taking into account the tensions that are apparent in the exchanges, particularly these last two,

the analysis of Aimititau leads me to ask: what image could make us envision respectful

disagreement—not precisely incommensurable difference, but how differences-as-multiple-

singularities form the worlds in which we live.

Latour has pointed to our difficulty as Western thinkers to be attentive to the complexity

of lived experience in relation to conceptual categories. My goal with this chapter is to come to

an understanding of how we position ourselves in the work of establishing relationships across

nations. The structure of the correspondence situates the writers as representatives of their

people. Saying that all positions are political, situated and multifaceted is meant to complicate

this logic of representativeness and to focus on micro-politics, embodiment and affect. There is

no settler position, no anticolonial position, and no Indigenous positions that make an ideal core

for justice, that is, that can resonate with all subjects’ need and demand for justice. Aimititau is a

productive, ground-breaking, and inspiring practice that is full of contradictions, tensions, and

moments of settler fantasies of easier paths toward justice. What interests me in how the authors

engage in creating relationships is the diversity of images of territory that serves as a ground to

envision commonality or disagreement and that shows how the volume offers a negotiation

between Quebecois-settler and Indigenous futurities.

261 “…a permis un véritable débat entre un écrivain au long cours et une jeune auteure, qui voit ses textes publiés ici pour la première fois”; “les images s’écoulent, les couleurs se mélangent, les ancêtres se réveillent.”

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One aim of my literary analysis was to remain accountable to the authors’ practice and

engagement. To do so, my methodology underlined differences, not only between Indigenous

and non-Indigenous peoples, but within these heterogeneous groups. Aimititau provides an

interesting site of experimentation for mapping subject positions and discursive attempts to

create bridges across colonial difference. Different ways of imagining territories affect

knowledge production: there is a crucial distinction to make between an image of territory as

marked by political boundaries and one in which territory is a relative, between thinking that

territory can be owned and that it can be a repository of knowledge, between a smooth surface

for intercultural encounter and unceded land where colonial and racial injustices are perpetuated.

These images are attached to Western or Indigenous epistemologies, but to read the specificity of

their use by subjects who positioned themselves in relation to them might require going beyond

the dialectics that they seem to encourage.

What kind of epistemological shift is needed to establish new relationships between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples? I find Latour’s proposition to reconsider the concept of

nature provocative considering how ubiquitous this concept is today in visions of justice for/of

Indigenous Peoples, sometimes as a way to assert the strength of Indigenous communities, other

times as a way for settler subjects to get closer to Indigenous peoples or to claim a shared natural

common ground. Underlining the complex implications of the use of “nature” should divest our

attention from the easy (essential) association of Indigenous peoples and nature. This is not to

undermine important claims by Indigenous leaders from different nations about particular

knowledge systems, ways of living, ethics and politics that are attached to the conception of the

natural world as the Mother Earth. It is rather to enable a description of various experiences of

“being Indigenous” in contemporary time while underlining the importance of thinking about

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territory, about different ways in which the space—including the city, reserve, family, country,

continent—plays a role in relation to identities.

For settler scholar Eva Mackey, the aspiration to build new types of relationships between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples lies on the settlers’ capacity to unsettle their expectation

of entitlement over the land. She says we should live in the present as if Indigenous sovereignty

were effective (129). The film Québékoisie and some of the exchanges in Aimititau reveal the

uneasiness with which Quebecois people identify as settlers. The Quebecois people want justice,

but often retreat by choosing images that are comforting instead of facing colonial history and

ongoing colonial injustices. In addition, being a settler seems to blend Quebecois identity with

the West and the English-speaking North America, much like the term “Indigenous” blends

different cultural groups and nations. Settler identity, however, is not a subject position that is

openly embraced unless the subject is critical of privileges, colonial injustices and nationalism. If

critique allows the settler to identify as such, I have shown in my analysis of the exchange that it

does not prevent subjects from reiterating colonial tropes or settler fantasies. Critique positions

the settler in a “safer” site, but from what exactly does critique protect the settler from engaging

with? This question is the starting point of the next chapter, in which I ask more specifically how

the authors’ subjective engagement in epistolary volumes that followed Aimititau in Quebec

potentially modifies our relation to critique.

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CHAPTER 3.

INNU AND QUEBECOIS WRITERS SHARING LITERARY PROJECTS: READING FRIENDSHIP AS A CRITICAL MODE OF

RELATIONSHIP

Je rêve encore d’une possible amitié

entre nos deux mondes sans morale sans préjugé

sans peur sans prétention.

Rita Mestokosho

Je m’enracine dans l’ami que tu es.

Joséphine Bacon

On cherche tellement à mettre des mots sur ce que l’on veut critiquer, commenter, analyser,

qu’on perd le sens de ce qui importe.

Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

3.1 Introduction: Friendship as a Mode of Intercultural Relationship

In the wake of the epistolary practice initiated by Aimititau! Parlons-nous! in 2008,

three Innu women chose to engage in correspondence with Quebecois writers. Rita

Mestokosho and Joséphine Bacon, who had participated in Laure Morali’s project, were two

of them: the former created a new pair with Jean Désy in Uashtessiu: Lumière d’automne

[Fall’s light] (2010); the latter continued her exchange with José Acquelin transformed into a

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project of their own in Nous sommes tous des sauvages [We Are All Savages] (2011).

Natasha Kanapé Fontaine adopted the genre a few years later in her discussion with Deni

Ellis Béchard in Kuei à toi: Conversation sur le racisme [Kuei to you: Conversation on

racism] (2016). In the three cases, the authors knew each other and planned together their

project of correspondence. Perhaps for this reason, their exchanges are not marked by

tensions like the ones we find in Aimititau. The Innu writers do not challenge the Quebecois,

nor do they intend to convince them of their visions. With strong voices, they affirmatively

position themselves both within their cultural environment—within the set of their

relationships—and in relation to the shared project of correspondence, which begins with the

acknowledgment of friendship.

Rita Mestokosho speaks to Jean Désy as “her brother” and writes, “May fishing be

good / my friend / healer poet...” (Ua 25)262 From the start, she refers to Désy as a friend. Yet

her vision of friendship includes non-human others: a bird (Ua 18), the soul (Ua 61) and

prayer (Ua 22) are also friends. Joséphine Bacon writes to José Acquelin, “you are the water

of my friendship / I am the fire of your friendship / you lead me to a meadow / where you

offer me all directions / I root myself in the friend / that you are” (Nous 37).263 In this

passage, Bacon also links friendship to natural elements. Instead of claiming roots in her Innu

territory (which she does in other poems in the book), she says that she roots herself in

friendship. This image is powerful and expresses how the relationship with the Quebecois

262 I use the abbreviations “Ua” to indicate references to Uashtessiu. Lumière d’automne; “Nous” for Nous sommes tous des sauvages, and “Kuei” for Kuei, à toi. Conversation sur le racisme. All translations are mine for the three volumes, with the original in footnotes. “Que la pêche soit bonne / mon ami / guérisseur poète…” 263 “Tu es l’eau de mon amitié / je suis le feu de ton amitié / tu me conduis dans un pré / où tu m’offres les directions / je m’enracine dans l’ami / que tu es.”

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other is part of her life in this territory; it also puts emphasis on her personal relationship with

Acquelin whom she had known for some years at the time of writing these verses. Natasha

Kanapé Fontaine starts her first letter to Deni Ellis Béchard with “Kuei kuei my friend” (Kuei

14) and ends with “Iame uenepeshish nuitsheuakan,” which she translates as “see you soon

my friend” (Kuei 17).264 Although their project is about criticizing structural racism, the

authors do so in a non-oppositional way. In fact, they develop parallel but interdependent

discourses on the necessity to change the status quo. The three Innu writers prioritize the

affirmation and strengthening of their relationships with their Quebecois friends instead of

challenging their positions. I situate these affirmative stances in relation to Indigenous ethics

that promote reciprocity, responsibility and respect in all relationships, and focus on

reconstruction of Indigenous spaces. In other words, the Innu writers’ claim to friendship

takes root in Innu understandings of relationships.

Despite embracing friendship with their Quebecois correspondents, the Innu writers

insist on important differences concerning their relationship to the land, their communities,

and colonial history. They write about the possibility of sharing poetic space (Uashtessiu),

authorial voice (Nous sommes tous des sauvages), and a commitment to criticize ongoing

racism (Kuei à toi). Commenting on the shared poetic space in Uashtessiu, Michèle Lacombe

says that Mestokosho insists both on “particularity and […] a greater measure of collective

autonomy for her people” and on the possibility of “solidarity with those who are not Innu”

(168-169). Bacon’s commitment to share authorial voice with Acquelin in two co-written

poems comes with the necessity of openly sharing the truth about colonial history as well as

264 Kanapé Fontaine says that “iame uenepeshish” means “à bientôt” or “nous nous reverrons bientôt” while a more literal translation would be “au revoir, pour un petit temps.”

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with the impossibility of “getting over” past and present colonial injustices. Kanapé Fontaine

fully and intimately engages in her discussion on racism, which is nuanced by the account of

her own experience. She asserts the necessity of bringing light to the next generation and

considers the epistolary exchange a treaty that cannot be betrayed because of the writers’

authentic engagement.

Through their shared project, the authors position themselves within the same group,

as friends, humans and poets; at the same time, the cross-cultural epistolary form marks them

as representatives of their cultural groups. Nevertheless, I propose to understand difference

between the authors, not as cultural, but as involving their respective embodied and

embedded position in relation to shared literary practice, that is, in relation to the justice

project in which they engage. The Innu cultural ground matters. However, the Innu women

writers are not merely engaging in what could be seen as cross-cultural encounters, as if there

were a common ground legitimizing these encounters or as if colonialism were not the

elephant in the room. Moreover, being silenced or being disconnected from the land,

community, and family, which are often historical conditions of being “Indigenous,” are not

cultural differences. Their voices, therefore, should not be seen as significant for giving

access to culture. Their voices shake the assumed ground of colonial relations of power. They

deploy difference as a resistance to the colonial erasure of Innu bodies and culture through a

voice that insists on affirmation, embodiment, relationship and friendship.

In my analysis of the three volumes, I discuss the singularity of the Innu and

Quebecois voices through the authors’ own vision of the literary project they engage in and

of its significance in relation to ongoing colonialism. In the first part of this chapter, I address

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the methodological challenge of reading affirmation in the context of colonialism. I believe

that the writers’ claim to friendship reveals the limitations of some critical perspectives that

are inadequate to assess the contribution of affirmative justice practices, often deemed as

secondary or supplementary to critiques of injustice, domination and violence. Moreover, in

significant and damaging ways, oppositional thinking defining the colonizers and the

colonized, settlers and Indigenous peoples, situates the latter merely as victims of oppression.

The three Innu women do not identify as victims. What kind of critical discourse, then,

enables a productive conversation worthy of their practice of writing? How can affirmative

voices be articulated to the necessary critique of injustices, domination, and violence?

Colonial and racist structures mark everyone, although our challenges while

navigating through them are not the same. These structures position Indigenous and non-

Indigenous peoples in different locations; however, I contend that we need to both inhabit

and attend to these locations as well as to propose non-dialectical ways of considering

difference. Methodologically, a non-dialectical and non-oppositional reading of difference, as

the multiplicity of micro-differences of a singular life, allows us to consider friendship as a

critical practice in the context of colonialism. Politically, the distinction between Indigenous

and non-Indigenous peoples is crucial.

The Innu writers readily assume responsibility for their cultural group, while the

Quebecois writers take responsibility not by embracing identification with their culture, but

by taking distance from it—by being critical of it. Yet this distance does not necessarily

mean an assertion of their position as non-Indigenous and settlers. Having said that,

understanding the complexity of subject positions requires going beyond associating

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affirmation with Indigenous subjects and critique or deconstruction with settler subjects.

First, I believe that settler subjects positioned themselves in a safe space by being critical.

Although Sarah Ahmed and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang contend that white settler subjects

need to remain critical and attentive to the reproduction of racist and colonial habits, I believe

that critique can limit one’s vision of change based on lived relationships. For me, more

importantly, these scholars underline how changes cannot come merely from becoming

aware and ask for material transformations that are embodied and that function in

contradictory ways.

Second, I argue that critique does not have to be thought dialectically with affirmation

since both work toward changing the status quo. Antiracist and anticolonial critiques cannot

only be fed by better analysis of how injustices and power relations are reproduced; they

require engagements in relationships that produce change. I have often heard Indigenous

activists say that in order for an embodied and significant transformation to happen for white

settler subjects, they need to be in relationship with Indigenous peoples (not just to know but

to be in relation with).265 The epistolary genre brings Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers

together in particular ways, as humans and as members of specific cultural groups. My

methodology proposes to follow this logic transposed to the relationship between a non-

Indigenous literary criticism and an Indigenous text to look for both the affective complexity

of subject positions and cultural understanding of colonial relationships. I could try to situate

265 On various occasions, Viviane Michel, president of Quebec Native Women (2012-present), has said that a good starting point for Quebecois people to take action is to go meet Indigenous Peoples in their communities; for instance, in the panel « Femmes, autochtones et la décolonisation de l’éducation » (Université de Montréal, June 11, 2015) and in her speech during the demonstration to denounce rape culture on October 26, 2016, in Montreal.

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the Innu writers’ vision of friendship in the Innu culture or read it in relation to other

Indigenous cultures (to get to know their concept of friendship), but my objective is to relate

the Innu writers’ visions of friendship to antiracist, decolonial and feminist critical

perspectives, which have been crucial to my own way of reading my corpus. This

methodology considers the Innu women’s position with regards to friendship as a practice

that provides critical insights. In the next section, in order to propose a methodological shift,

in which friendship becomes a situated and singular vision of Innu women writers on the

possibility of respectful relationships, I discuss definitions of critique and put them in relation

to critical perspectives that account for affect, embodiment, and difference.

3.2 How to Read Friendship?

3.2.1 Friendship as Affirmative Ethics and Critical Category

In the three books, friendship is claimed as a type of relationship that may include the

acknowledgement of different positions and visions. Therefore, the discourse that results is

constructed in a non-oppositional way while attending to the singularity of the authors. Still,

friendship is unsettling, partly because, from antiracist and anticolonial perspectives, it is

most often not considered a critical concept—critical, in the sense of being important or

involving judicious evaluation266—enabling us to reflect on how justice can be made in the

Quebecois/Canadian colonial present.267 Moreover, from these perspectives, there is much

266 Definition from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/critical. 267 Friendship has been used as a critical concept by Leela Gandhi who discusses the politics of friendship to analyse “some ‘minor’ forms of anti-imperialism that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century” (1). She defines the concept of

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suspicion about any superficial claim to cross-cultural connection, solidarity, or

commonality.268 How can friendship become a critical category? I see three parts to the

answer: 1) by bringing critique to a non-oppositional ground; 2) said positively, this ground

is materiality, which makes us see friendship, in the context of these exchanges, not as an

ideal disconnected from conditions of life, but as a practice, embodied and relational; 3) and

friendship, as a vision of relationality through difference and affect, may provide an

alternative view of what can be common or shared between Indigenous and non-Indigenous

peoples.

3.2.2 Unsettling Critique with Embodiment and Relationality

“Declarations of Whiteness” by Sarah Ahmed and “Decolonization is not a metaphor”

by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang grounded my critical approach to Aimititau! Parlons-nous!

in the previous chapter. These two articles show how subjects position themselves in relation

to the justice project they claim to be part of.269 They show that identifying with justice

friendship through the work of Aristotle, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler’s coalitional politics to analyse the cross-cultural collaborations between Western anti-imperialists and anticolonial South Asians. 268 Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Cornatassel propose a contextual approach to the question of solidarity—place-based solidarities. They also argue that contextualizing settler colonial studies requires centering “Indigenous people’s own articulations of Indigenous-settler relations, their governance, legal, and diplomatic orders, and the transformative visions entailed within Indigenous political thought” (26). Their call is to avoid considering settler’s critiques of settler colonialism in isolation from Indigenous critiques. 269 Tuck and Yang argue that anti-racism and decolonization are incommensurable struggles that cannot be conflated. I agree with them, although I think it is a challenge to articulate them without conflating them. The parallels that I draw between the articles by Tuck and Yang and the one by Ahmed are not to erase difference between decolonization and

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projects potentially makes people feel good, despite ongoing injustices, and paradoxically

makes them withdraw from full engagement in the changes needed. Therefore, antiracism

becomes a claim that does not translate into actions that change the structures of racism and

the project of getting along with Indigenous peoples takes the form of “moves to innocence”

instead of transformative actions. Ahmed says that white subjects should not move too fast

into a safe antiracist position, which would be a space beyond criticizing racism: “To hear the

work of exposure requires that white subjects inhabit the critique, with its lengthy duration,

and to recognise the world that is re-described by the critique as one in which they live”

(“Declarations” para. 57, emphasis in the original). She adds, “the task for white subjects

would be to stay implicated in what they critique” (“Declarations” para. 59). She uses

critique here as a continuous work to understand structures of racism and self-critique in the

sense of staying implicated. On the other hand, Tuck and Yang criticize settlers’ desire to

imagine what decolonization would look like. They define decolonization as the repatriation

of land, “all of the land, and not just symbolically” (“Decolonization” 7), saying that

decolonization is accountable to Indigenous ways of imagining it. Their definition is meant to

be unsettling not only to settler subjects’ sense of entitlement to the land, but also to their

ideas of how justice can be enacted. Both articles address the issue of how certain forms of

engagement in justice can be transformed into protection from being unsettled and,

ultimately, from enacting genuine changes. Yet, what would constitute genuine changes is

left undefined. Their theoretical insights point to what we should avoid doing without

antiracism but to show how both explain how subjects situate themselves in relation to justice projects.

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affirming what can be done or what has been done already that has contributed to the justice-

making project.270 The problem they identify is that asserting what justice can look like,

particularly for white settler subjects, protects them/us from being unsettled or challenged,

and participates in a colonial desire to know what to do. Yet if no affirmative position in the

making of justice is protected from reproducing colonial habits, no critical position is either.

In fact, situating oneself in the position of critique can function through the colonial desire to

“make good,” to know that we, settler scholars, are doing the right thing, and to distance

ourselves from those who, we think, are merely reproducing patterns of domination. I would

like to question whether critique itself, in the sense of a negative assessment of others’

failure, is not a sort of “move to innocence” that protects the subject who criticizes from

being changed by other types of risky relationships that do not prioritize critique or from

engaging fully, affectively, politically in transformations.

In the last chapter, I discussed how subjects define their position in relation to

imagined shared territories that impact efforts to create relationships between Indigenous and

non-Indigenous peoples. Some of the images were more comforting than others; for instance,

a post-racial society comes across as less threatening than unceded land. However, images of

commonality or disagreement work in non-linear ways and cannot be associated with a

particular, fixed position of justice or injustice. Although the idea that racial differences are

irrelevant is central to the post-racial condition, which occludes ongoing racial injustices, it

becomes at times a discursive and political strategy to relate to each other on a human level.

270 These two articles in particular insist on not affirming what can be done. However, Eve Tuck, for instance, in “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” proposes to engage in desire-based rather than damage-based research, which I see as a way to focus on affirmative ethics.

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Insisting on the structural relation of the subject to both racist and antiracist, both colonial

and decolonial discourses, might encourage ways of thinking that avoid the binary

oppositions between racist and anti-racist positions, as well as between “moves to innocence”

and full engagement in decolonization. The goal is not to downplay the ethical stance taken

by subjects who prioritize anti-racism and decolonization in their life and their work, but to

recognize that different agendas can contribute to transforming racist and colonial structures.

Engaging in antiracist and decolonial struggles requires one to take a position, but this

position is multifaceted and situated. It does not make change effective now; rather, it places

the subject in a position to accept and desire changes. Therefore, we might need to unsettle

the benevolent aura that comes with the engagement for justice and with positioning oneself

through critique, which encourages polarization (those who are antiracist and fight for

decolonization versus those who are racist and claim innocence) and politics of blame (the

former blaming the latter for their weakness).

Ahmed sees critique as an effort to remain vigilant and the obligation to stay

implicated. Critique, therefore, is intimately linked to self-critique. The definitions of

criticism, linked to literary criticism and to the act of faultfinding, both position the subject in

some place of authority in relation to the text or the other.

The first meaning of criticism in the dictionary refers to “the art of evaluating or

analyzing works of art or literature.”271 The practice of critical thinking, and of literary

criticism, depends much on the methodology that is adopted. The act of interpretation entails

a relation of power based on a particular vision of reading; it is also a creation of a new

271 Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/criticism.

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discourse based on the embodied and embedded vision of the critics. Antiracist, anticolonial

and feminist perspectives provide crucial tools to literary criticism, particularly to position

non-Indigenous analysis of Indigenous texts. These perspectives contribute understanding of

structures of domination and power relations that are often addressed in texts by Indigenous

women and that invariably mark the relationship between settler literary critics and

Indigenous creators. Rosi Braidotti puts emphasis on the critique of dominant theoretical

models based on the knowing subject and privileges an analysis of the materiality of the

embodied and embedded position of the subject. For David Theo Goldberg, the antiracist

critique is a practice and theory of differentiation that is attentive to the materiality of one’s

own and of the other’s conditions. Literary criticism, as a construction, necessitates a

differentiation between the author’s and the critic’s agendas, and between what the literary

text and literary criticism can each do. Seeing this process of construction as a relationship

makes us see how literary texts establish priorities for research and provide a vision, a lens

through which to look at the issues under scrutiny. The product of literary criticism becomes

the field of negotiation between what the text can do and desires to do, and what criticism

can do and desires to do, between the respective capacities and aspirations.

The second meaning of criticism is “the act of criticizing usually unfavourably.”272

To criticize has two meanings, and it places the subject in a position “to consider the merits

and demerits of and judge accordingly” and “to point out the faults of.”273 To criticize is to

evaluate, but it can also mean specifically the act of faultfinding. Exercising critical thinking

is often valued as the capacity to find faults and flaws rather than being able to identify what

272 Ibid. 273 Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/criticize.

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does work, what is productive and why it did so. Leanne Simpson and Shawn Wilson

criticize the negativity attached to the work of the critic in the academy who underlines the

flaws in the work of other scholars without being able to work from affinities and to consider

the singularity of the other’s position.

In sum, critique can be 1) a way of reading, 2) a social assessing of one’s own and

other’s material conditions, 3) the methodological care for ways of assessing, and 4) a

positioning of one’s own way of producing knowledge within communities or within a set of

relationships. Critique can be an act of differentiation and taking distance from (from others,

from methodologies, from a social situation) or entering into relationship. Critique is also

intimately linked to 5) self-critique in the sense of positioning oneself within these sets of

relations and with regard to how these aspects of knowledge production pass through the self.

There are multiple ways of defining critique other than faultfinding, yet this meaning is ever

present in our academic endeavour.

Critique of other’s ideas, positions, and choices is integral to academic activities, and

to scholars’ positioning. My literary criticism of the epistolary exchange, which links

scholarship, literary creativity and lived relationships, brings me to question, in the context of

my own research, what kind of academic work and justice actions are valued. What kinds of

relationships are created through the academic endeavour of criticizing the failure of the

other? Could we imagine strategies adopted by scholars to acknowledge that they can

produce, create and be inspired by others’ limitations?274 How much do we take into account

274 I use limitations here as what is out of reach for subjects, what is beyond our capacities. Braidotti sees limits as bio-organic, what a subject can think, understand, do in the spatial

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embodiment and relationships in the production of knowledge in the academia? Many

scholars have shown that the Western conception of objectivity is an illusion, that

embodiment, position and subjectivity are part of intellectual work, and that being attentive

to them is a form of “feminist objectivity” (Haraway, “Situated”) that refuses the possibility

of transcending responsibility. Yet how much life and lived experience are scholars ready to

welcome in their methodologies? What does it mean to be responsible in the process of

thinking and writing, that is, of producing knowledge? I think that to attend to the singularity

of subjects brings analysis to a material field of complexity of our embodied and relational

lives. In what follows, I come back to the work of the scholars I mentioned above to discuss

how affirmation matters to their critical perspectives and contributes to alternatives to

oppositional thinking. A way to show that friendship can be a critical category is to consider

it as an affirmative practice, based on critique and creativity, deconstruction and

reconstruction, and working through the relationships between these.

3.2.2.1 Critique and Creativity

Rosi Braidotti argues that critical perspectives like feminism, antiracism,

anticolonialism, and critiques of anthropocentrism require both critique, under the form of

defamiliarizing, and creativity. She gives the example of feminists who had to defamiliarize

and temporal limitations of his or her embodiment (la philosophie 251). Limitations are not the space of failure for the subject, but an ethical affirmation of the subject’s capacities. Donna Haraway theorizes the concept of boundaries and limits in at least two ways: the ontological limits that we (re)construct in thinking about subjects (undoing boundaries between male/female, human/non-human, organic/inorganic) and the epistemological limits of each embodied and embedded vision tied to specific position.

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themselves with dominant representations of femininity and masculinity and created

“alternative ways of embodying and experiencing our sexualized selves” (“Complexity”

220). For Braidotti, subjects are implicated in the critique of dominant theoretical models and

dominant institutions: “Defamiliarization is a sobering process by which the knowing subject

evolves from the normative vision of the self he or she had become accustomed to”

(“Complexity” 221). She explains that it “involves the loss of cherished habits of thought and

representation, a move that can also produce fear, sense of insecurity, and nostalgia”

(“Complexity” 219). The transformation that the subject undergoes through this process

needs to be oriented through affirmative ethics, defined as “a mode of actualization of

sustainable forms of transformations” (la philosophie 256).275 To engage in affirmative

ethics leads to a differential approach because it is attentive to what bodies can do. Saying “‘I

can’t take it anymore’ is an ethical statement and not the assertion of a failure” (Ibid.).276

Asserting what a body can do and what it cannot is central to affirmative ethics.

The ethical statement “I can’t take it anymore” for Indigenous peoples who live under

colonialism can take many forms that do not have to be accessible to settlers and that do not

necessarily conform to the type of resistance that settlers imagine, while being deeply

significant for the subject who takes this stance. For settlers, saying that they/we “can’t take

it anymore” can also be an ethical stance that seeks transformation of colonial relations of

domination. Criticism of colonialism is essential, however we also need creativity to find new

forms of transformations that are worthy of the ethical task. Since colonialism impacts the

275 My translation. L’éthique affirmative “est un mode d’actualisation des formes durables de transformation.” 276 “‘Je n’en peux plus’ est une déclaration éthique et non pas l’affirmation d’une défaite.”

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affective structures of subjects, of both colonized people and colonizers, working with affect,

imagination, and creativity seems crucial to break the cycle of oppressive relationships.

Theorizing transformation through affirmative ethics tied to bodies and conditions of

everyday life allows considering the complexity of how colonial power mark us as subjects.

3.2.2.2 Antiracist Critique and “The Dream”

David Theo Goldberg’s theory of antiracism provides a useful framework to situate

both affirmation and critique in a horizontal and complex horizon of justice. Goldberg says

that antiracism is a critique from below, a critical coalitional politics. For him, critical work

consists both in uncovering ongoing injustices and in active engagements in reimagining.

Goldberg says that racism is “failing to exercise reflective (and by extension self-reflective)

critical judgement”277; it is to “lack critical and indeed self-critical imagination,” and

constitutes “an ignorant or arrogant refusal to consider conditions beyond one’s own and

those akin to one” (Postracial 160). He argues that we must find appropriate critical

responses specific to the conditions at work, which means that criticism must be linked to the

materiality of what is criticized.

Goldberg makes a distinction between “racial” and “non-racial” anti-racisms. The

latter avoids referring to race in the work against oppression, following the logic that it would

reinforce racial inequalities (Postracial 165). Goldberg seems to privilege the former, racial

anti-racism, which looks at how race works through social structures to disadvantage certain

277 He says so based on Hannah Arendt’s concept of thoughtlessness: “Racisms constitute thoughtlessness, in the Arendtian sense of failing to exercise reflective (and by extension self-reflective) critical judgement (Arendt 1963/2006: 234-52)” (Goldberg, Postracial 60).

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groups. Nevertheless, he says, “Anti-racism requires not just being against the existing and

past forms of racist expression, but doing so in the name of an affirming set of ideals – the

dream – of what a society not driven by racial consideration in any (consequential) way

would look like” (Postracial 164).

The “anti” of antiracism does not only mean “being against,” but also changing the

landscape of possibilities, “heterogenizing not just the imagination but also those who are

contributing to the social transformation of the imagined commonplace” (Goldberg,

Postracial 169). Social transformations entail a great diversity of subjects who will imagine

the conditions of change in divergent ways. Heterogenizing is a project of asserting

difference; not only considering how minority groups are different, but how differences

multiply when one is attentive to singularity and to embodiment. In this chapter,

contributions to literary exchanges by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors make us

see spaces in which justice can be imagined, enacted, and practiced: poetry and life,

friendship and history, antiracism and self-reflexivity. Their visions both deconstruct colonial

habits and reconstruct spaces for changes that make them accountable to their respective

positionality and relationality.

3.2.2.3 Reconstruction and Deconstruction

Affirmative ethics and “the dream” resonate with Indigenous scholars’ focus on

resurgence as an important practice of decolonization. Although decolonization entails

undoing, unsettling, and deconstructing colonialism, the theorization of resurgence shows

that it is crucial to centre Indigenous visions, laws, epistemologies, politics and ethics.

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Leanne Simpson calls for reconstructing, instead of putting all efforts in deconstructing

colonial structures:

I am not so concerned with how we dismantle the master’s house, that is, which sets

of theories we use to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we

(re)build our own house, or our own houses. I have spent enough time taking down

the master’s house, and now I want most of my energy to go into visioning and

building our new house. (32)

Simpson commits to decolonizing by theorizing Indigenous resurgence from Nishnaabeg

concepts. Reconstruction can be a form of deconstruction in the sense that it chooses as a

strategy and priority to center Indigenous ways of knowing, relating, feeling, expressing, and

living, which destabilizes the colonial project of disconnection of Indigenous peoples with

their Indigenous ways.

If resurgence constitutes an Indigenous space of engagement and knowledge

production, what does reconstruction and resurgence mean for non-Indigenous scholars?

What are white settler subjects’ relationships to projects of reconstruction? Is it that, as

Ahmed and Tuck and Yang suggest, white settler subjects cannot engage in imaginings

without asserting a white settler futurity? Are white settler subjects necessarily needed to

deconstruct, take distance from their culture, and criticize injustices? Perhaps, yet critique

places them in a particular position and one condition of the reproduction of colonial thought

appears in the re-centering of colonial subjects through critical perspectives on the colonial

centre. For Gayatri Spivak, self-reflexivity becomes another manifestation of centrality:

“[Spivak] suggests that poststructuralist philosophers’ high level of auto-reflexivity is simply

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an intensified expression of Europe’s discursive hegemony, rebuilt in a weakened mode of

decentred subjectivity” (Braidotti, la philosophie 121).278 Critique and self-critique,

therefore, can become safe spaces in the sense that they do not entail a revision of power

relations. Although it is important to situate resurgence in an Indigenous space, the

apportioning of the tasks of reconstruction to Indigenous peoples and of deconstruction to

white settlers confirms assumptions about how they respectively contribute to knowledge

production, particularly under Western academic standards of critical works.

In the context of African Americans, bell hooks says that black people also need to

deconstruct; she insists “that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with

concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to

abstract thinking and the production of critical theory” (23). Braidotti comments on bell

hooks’ work,

In her text ‘Postmodern Blackness,’ she even claims that it would be racist to force

those “other” subjects to merely give empirical report of their lives, leaving, once

again, all the discursive power in the hands of colonizers or dominant subjects.

Assigning to black people the quest of authenticity and identity affirmation and to

white people the critique of unitary identity would be, according to her, a repetition of

the worst racist stereotypes. We must work differently and in a spirit of resonances

278 “Elle suggère que le niveau élevé d’autoréflexivité de la part des philosophes poststructuralistes est simplement l’expression exacerbée par l’Europe de son hégémonie discursive, refondue dans un mode affaibli de subjectivité décentrée.”

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between parallel but distinct projects so that we respect reciprocal complexities. (La

philosophie 122)279

The Indigenous project of resurgence entails the production of critical theory. It is harder to

understand the claim to friendship, in the context of the exchange with Quebecois writers, as

an Indigenous space of critical thinking. Yet these volumes show that Indigenous affirmative

visions can seek to establish other kinds of relationships with Quebecois settlers. Moreover,

the relationship that is created challenges Quebecois writers (as well as readers and critics) to

formulate or engage in an affirmative approach that account for reciprocal complexities, and

that do not reproduce colonial modes of appropriation. I find the concept of affirmation to be

useful to attend to the complexity of subjects’ position, which does not have to be about

identity affirmation and deconstruction of identity, but can be about locating an ethical stance

for subjects to undergo transformations in a sustainable way, that is, respecting what a body

can take—and what the texts can do in the theoretical field.

3.2.2.4 Relationships Replacing Negativity

Leanne Simpson and Shawn Wilson both insist on the local and embodied aspect of

critical perspectives. They propose thinking of criticism as a set of relationships instead of

feeding the negativity attached through the act of faultfinding. Simpson says,

279 “Dans son texte ‘De la négritude postmoderne’, elle avance même que ce serait du racisme que d’obliger ces sujets ‘autres’ à ne donner que des comptes rendus empiriques de leur vécu, laissant, encore une fois, tout le pouvoir discursif dans les mains des colonisateurs ou des sujets dominants. Aux Noirs, la quête d’authenticité et l’affirmation identitaire, aux Blancs la critique des identités unitaires serait, selon elle, une répétition des pires stéréotypes racistes. Il faut travailler autrement et dans un esprit de résonance entre des projets parallèles mais distincts et ce de façon à respecter les complexités réciproques.”

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[…] we need to be careful with our criticism. We should not blindly follow the

academy’s love affair with criticism, ripping apart other Indigenous academic’s

work—with whom we probably have more in common than virtually any other

academics in the world. Instead, we should highlight the positive within each other’s

work, and save our criticism for the forces that continually try to rip us apart. (55)

Simpson talks to a community of Indigenous scholars, but underlines “the academy’s love

affair with criticism” which, I believe, affects all scholars. Faultfinding gives authority.

Moreover, it is often harder to say how a text, a theory or a practice makes a contribution

rather than to point to the flaws of it.

Shawn Wilson talks about the “relational quality of knowledge,” which brings us to

see that “all knowledge is cultural knowledge” (91), but also that it is produced by a subject

in relation to ideas, scholars, family, specific environments, and different epistemologies. He

explains that criticizing others’ ideas is fraught because we don’t know the whole set of

relationships which this person is accountable to: “One person cannot possibly know all of

the relationships that brought about another’s ideas. Making judgement of others’ worth or

values then is also impossible” (92). Wilson says that one must be accountable to these

relationships: “As all knowledge is cultural and based in a relational context, we therefore

need a methodology and axiology that is accountable to the relationships that we form in our

search for enlightenment” (95). One way to be accountable to these relationships is to make

them apparent, to put ideas in context. In other words, we should be accountable to the

materiality of how our own and others’ ideas are produced, used or dismissed.

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Wilson mentions a friend’s belief that, “If research doesn’t change you as a person,

then you aren’t doing it right” (83). Changes do not occur when one adopts a new idea,

project or position, but through long-term engagement. In my own research, I strive to

account for embodiment, complexity and affect, and for the ways in which racism,

colonialism, and sexism operate in ongoing injustices. Being scholars we learn to become

critical, to exercise critical thinking, but can we link it to lived relationships? The academic

world pushes us to privilege critiques and analysis of violence, injustices and domination

over critiques and analysis of affirmative stances, love, and lived relationships. The

importance given to the latter in the field of Indigenous Studies, particularly with regards to

the idea of resurgence of cultural heritage and reconstruction, aligns with a position in which

embodiment, complexity and affect are the ground for affirmation.

When I reminded myself of the embodied and relational nature of knowledge and

responsibility, what initially appeared to me as a tension between the critique of structural

injustices and the assertion of our shared humanity and friendship now became situated

engagements attached to one’s relations. Both Quebecois and Innu and Indigenous peoples

need to criticize and assert, but they do so in different modes, using different strategies. What

is clear is that no a priori common ground can be assumed between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous peoples. However, can we address injustices together? Can we engage together in

practices that are productive, significant, and inspiring for others? What kind of “we” can be

claimed when we work against colonialism?

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3.2.3 Methodological Shift: “‘We’ Are in This Together”

In the next section, I engage with Rosi Braidotti’s work to suggest that justice projects

depend on the conception of subjectivity and collectivity and on the methodology that are

adopted. Braidotti says that the vision of the subject has “important implications for the

production of scientific knowledge” (“Complexity” 210). Her critique of Western humanism

leads her to argue that we distance ourselves from Western methodologies.

In Indigenous Studies, there is an important preoccupation with asserting Indigenous

methodologies280 and not applying Western theories to Indigenous contexts. My discussion

of Braidotti is not meant to impose a Western feminist critique on an Indigenous contexts but

to account, much in the ways that Wilson encourages scholars to do, for my position and my

relationships. Braidotti’s work has inspired me to make a commitment to think otherwise, as

have Wilson, Simpson, and other Indigenous scholars and Indigenous feminists.

There are important structural differences between Braidotti’s theory and Indigenous

scholars’ insights, but there are also resonances that I find productive.281 Moreover, I believe

that it is from my situated position inspired by Western and Indigenous scholars that I can

contribute to discussions on Indigenous literatures and justice. Braidotti provides compelling

ways to think about methodology as well as about the issue I underlined above concerning

280 See Shawn Wilson and Leanne Simpson. Also in this line of thinking, Decolonizing methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith has been crucial. 281 Braidotti claims that critical perspectives that seem to be going in opposite directions, even to be contradictory or coming from completely different traditions, for instance Western antihumanism and non-Western neohumanism, can present “resonances between their efforts and respective political aims and passions” (“Complexity” 218-219).

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the necessity to engage in both critique and creativity by insisting on the complexity and

materiality of the subject.

Braidotti situates her conceptualization of the subject against the vision coming from

Western humanism: “This humanistic subject of Western science claimed to be structured

and ordained along the axes of self-reflexive individualism and rationality, which are the

legacy of the European enlightenment and are indexed on a linear and progressive temporal

line” (“Complexity” 209). Braidotti provides a different figuration of the subject in order to

make an important methodological shift.

The feminist philosopher offers a vision of “complexity against methodological

nationalism”282; methodological nationalism is “at the heart of the accepted vision of science

as simultaneously the distillation of rationality and the quintessence of the European culture”

(“Complexity” 210). Western science has transformed Europe

from a concrete geopolitical location, and a specifically grounded history, into an

abstract concept and a normative ideal that can be implemented across space and

time… This titanic sense of entitlement rests structurally on the claim to universality

and also on a hierarchical and dialectical vision of Otherness or difference. (Ibid.)

“Methodological nationalism” situates the humanistic subject of Western science as a

universal model to think about subjectivity while Otherness is thought in relation to it

dialectically: “The others—women or sexual minorities; natives, indigenous and non-

282 She explains this idea in “Complexity against Methogological Nationalism,” Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (209-238) and in la philosophie… là où on ne l’attend pas (127-134).

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Europeans, and earth or animal others—have been marginalized, excluded, exploited, and

disposed of accordingly” (“Complexity” 212). Therefore, this Western conception of

subjectivity, which founds science and hence the production of truths, comes with a vision of

difference.

The Western vision of human impacts on methodologies and practices used to enter in

relationships with other humans. Claims to a shared humanity often leave the Western vision

of the “human,” which is highly exclusionary, unquestioned. On the other hand, when

Indigenous peoples claim humanity, it might be marked by the “human” of Western science,

or else inscribed in a very different epistemology and ontology that present different

methodologies and practices in order to enter in relationship with others.

Braidotti’s critique of humanism and nomadic vision of the subject283 opens to an

important methodological shift. Through a politics of location, difference becomes an

affirmation of a singularity instead of being defined dialectically against the human of

Western humanism. This subject comes with “a double commitment”: “on the one hand, to

processes of change and, on the other, to a strong ethics of the ecosophical sense of

community—of ‘our’ being in this together” (“Complexity” 210). Braidotti uses a figure of

shared commonality, through the phrase “‘we’ are in this together,” to imagine how subjects

bear responsibility in the world. She adds,

Our copresence, that is to say, the simultaneity of our being in the world together, sets

the tune for the ethics of our interaction with both human and nonhuman others. An

283 See Rosi Braidotti. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press, 1994.

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ethical relation based on biocentered egalitarianism requires us to synchronize the

perception and anticipation of togetherness, of our shared, common condition. (Ibid.)

This vision of the subject as singularity in ethical interaction with others grounds a

methodology that is attentive to relationships and complexity.

In accordance with her vision of the subject, which insists on embodiment, singularity

and the proliferation of differences, Braidotti understands the assertion of “we” as the

subject’s situated relation to commonality.

This process-oriented vision of the subject is capable of a universalistic reach, though

it rejects moral and cognitive universalism. It expresses a grounded, partial form of

accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity and relationality. The fact that

‘we’ are in this together results in a renewed claim to community and belonging by

singular subjects. This results in a proliferation of locally situated micro-universalist

claims. (“Complexity” 218)

When she says that “we” are in this together, “we” does not refer uniquely to humans: “the

displacement of anthropocentrism and recognition of transspecies solidarity are based on the

awareness of ‘our’ being in this together; that is to say, environmentally based, embodied,

and embedded, in symbiosis with each other” (“Complexity” 224). This shared common

condition is not the “humanity” we share, but our materiality. She says, “I am committed to

start my critical work from this complexity, not from a nostalgic reinvention of an all-

inclusive holistic ideal” (“Complexity” 227). This vision of the common based on the

singularity of embodied subjects whose imagination has universal reach is one that

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encourages an analysis of complexity through claiming their humanness as well as cultural

identity.

In my analysis of the exchanges that follow, I show how the visions of the subject are

linked to visions of justice. I focus on the singularity of difference to underline how the

authors contribute to thinking about engagement, relationships, as well as friendship. I

believe that imagining “our” being in this together through particular singularities helps to

understand the kind of cross-cultural engagement that is made possible in the epistolary

genre.

3.3 Uashtessiu: Lumière d’automne: Poetry as a Path and a Home

In Uashtessiu, Jean Désy and Rita Mestokosho use two poetic images to express their

relationship to space, the path and the home. These images reveal epistemological and

ontological differences in the two authors’ visions, and lead to questions like what is home?

and what kind of path(s) leads each of them home? Home cannot be considered uniquely as

an intimate place of the family, particularly because the territory in which the correspondence

is written has been a home for different Indigenous nations long before the arrival of settlers.

Colonialism has disconnected Indigenous peoples from their families, communities, land, and

home, while Euro-Canadians have established a new home in colonized land. Through their

images of space, both authors reflect on their sensual relationship to territory and to poetry,

which has become the mediation between the two poets.

Désy writes the prologue, Mestokosho the epilogue. In these texts at the edges of the

correspondence, the authors write on their vision of their project. Between them, the structure

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of the exchange follows the rhythm of the four seasons. Writing is marked by the authors’

relationship to the endless time of nature’s cycle and by the present relationship to (shared)

territory and poetry. Mestokosho and Désy met after Aimititau! Parlons-nous! was published.

Désy explains in the prologue that, following this meeting, he wrote to her:

I’m filled with emotion to know Rita Mestokosho now, and Lison Mestokosho and

Jean-Charles Piétacho, I am moved because, as I said in front of everyone, I have the

feeling of coming full circle. My poet’s soul can exist without the masks of a precise

social occupation, knowing that my true profession in this world is to be a poet. (Ua

6)284

She answers him: “It was simply wonderful, the stopover at the lake. I’m catching my breath

before leaving soon for Peru where I will speak about my life as a poet. I am invited as a

woman who believes in poetry” (Ua 9).285 Both identify as poets, but throughout the

exchange, their visions of poetry differ, particularly when they express their view on how

their collaborative literary practice participates in political change. Although they use the

same poetic images to envision how they relate to each other, their understanding and use of

these tropes convey distinct conceptions of both poetry and relationships. This difference in

how they consider the engagement of the subject in poetry marks a significant divergence in

their views about making justice.

284 “Je suis ému de connaître Rita Mestokosho maintenant, et Lison Mestokosho et Jean-Charles Piétacho, ému parce que, comme je le disais devant tout le monde, j’ai le sentiment de boucler la boucle, mon âme de poète pouvant exister sans les masques d’une occupation sociale précise, sachant que mon vrai métier en ce monde est d’être poète.” 285 “Ce fut tout simplement merveilleux, ce petit arrêt au bord du lac. Je reprends mon souffle, pour repartir bientôt où je vais aller parler de ma vie de poète au Pérou. Je suis invitée en tant que femme qui croit à la poésie.”

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For Désy, “Aimititau has become a text that cannot be overlooked in our common

literature,” and it is a way of showing that “we are capable of loving, let’s admit it, and of

dreaming of a fundamental métisserie between us which will rely on exchanged and shared

words, although it is obvious that there will always be disagreement between communities”

(Ua 12).286 For Mestokosho, Aimititau and the experience of sharing words is a way to see

and to live: “Poetry is part of my life. Without it, I don’t see the colours” (Ua 78).287 She

says in the epilogue of the volume, “When Uashtessiu is born, it is a time of clarity in which

colors bring about a profound change in our lives” (Ua 109).288 She considers that this

practice of sharing changes something for the subjects who are engaged in it. She adds, “We

knew that the true nature of the infinite is hidden in us. And that to give of ourselves can help

humanity to change” (Ibid.).289 Being and creating with the other is a way of situating oneself

in a process of transformation that goes beyond the individual self. Although these quotes by

Désy and Mestokosho resonate with each other in tone and in the trust they have in the power

of the poetic exchange, they have different views about their engagement and how it effects

change socially and subjectively.

The first aspect of divergence between their conceptions of the literary practice

concerns the role of language. Désy holds the same view as he did in Aimititau; he seeks a

286 “Aimititau devient un incontournable de notre littérature commune… Nous sommes capables d’amour, avouons-le, et de rêver entre nous d’une métisserie fondamentale qui reposera sur des paroles échangées et partagées, bien qu’il soit évident qu’entre les communautés, il y aura toujours des différends.” 287 “La poésie est une partie de ma vie. Sans elle, je ne vois pas les couleurs.” 288 “Quand Uashtessiu prend naissance, c’est un temps de clarté où les couleurs apportent le changement profond sur nos vies.” 289 “Nous savions que la véritable nature de l’infini se cache en nous. Et que de donner de soi-même peut aider l’humanité à changer.”

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common language to refer to “us.” He writes, “I have dreamed that my country’s nations

talked to each other / But the languages were so foreign” (Ua 58).290 Then, he describes life

in the North, where he had lived for several years, and says, “I have loved this life which did

not make noise / I have dreamed of my life without noise” (Ibid.).291 Going to the North

changed his life and offered an environment, quite different from the city, one in which

nature dominates, and which brought him to meet with the Inuit. After describing his love of

silence in the North, Désy reiterates his desire to “build the country” through “a common

language” that would take into consideration the diversity of people, including non-human

others of this country (Ua 59). Mestokosho responds: “I dream again / of a language free of

noise / where people would not use a bunch of words / that make you lose your head / and

that repeat the same things” (Ua 60).292 Mestokosho’s response pushes us to think of how we

could stop repeating the same mistake when we take on the task of imagining commonality.

Rather than imagining the physical territory as a space without noise, like Désy, she dreams

“of a language free of noise.” She does not insist on using a common language, but relying

less on words, and more on the “language of the heart” (Ua 22). She echoes Désy’s dream of

commonality with another concept, friendship: “I dream again / of a possible friendship /

between our two worlds / without moral without prejudice / without fear without pretention”

(Ua 60).293 Unlike the language of commonality, which seeks similarities, friendship might

290 “J’ai rêvé que les nations de mon pays se parlaient / Mais les langues étaient tellement étrangères.” 291 “J’ai aimé cette vie qui ne faisait pas de bruit / J’ai rêvé de ma vie sans bruit.” 292 “Je rêve encore / D’une langue sans bruit / où les gens n’utiliseront pas des tas de mots / qui font perdre la tête / et qui répètent les mêmes choses.” 293 “Je rêve encore / d’une possible amitié / entre nos deux mondes / sans morale sans préjugé / sans peur sans prétention.”

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be the critical position from which to speak the “language of the heart” within a lived

relationship. The image of “our two worlds” insists that there is no common ground from

where to enact friendship and situates them apart in two distinct cultural traditions. Yet, the

possessive pronoun “our” situates their respective engagement in being friends with each

other on an equal footing. By contrast, Désy’s use of the possessive pronoun in “my

country’s nations” indicates a sense of ownership over a land that can accommodate different

nations.

Mestokosho’s poem finishes with “As for the small bear / I still dream about it / I only

pray / that he is in the nutshimit” (Ua 61).294 A footnote gives the definition of the last word,

in Innu: “the interior of land, our home.”295 The nutshimit as a home, a world inhabited by

the Innu people and by the bear, contrasts with Désy’s view of land in the North as a space

without noise, as a new home for him. Moreover, Mestokosho uses an Innu word, nutshimit,

to inscribe a conception of both land and home. Doing so, she asserts the incommensurability

of their visions of land, which are based on different languages. In this context, the use of

nutshimit also suggests that the Innu language is like a home to her or that it is a way to come

home.

The second difference in their views about subjective engagement concerns the role

of poetry, which is for Mestokosho a way toward the interior and for Désy, a way to the

natural world. The image of the path is linked to that of the home as well as to their

294 “Quant au petit ours / je rêve encore de lui / je prie seulement / qu’il soit dans le nutshimit.” 295 “l’intérieur des terres, notre maison.”

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engagement in the path of corresponding with one another. Mestokosho sends a first poem to

Désy, presenting poetry as accompanying everyone in life:

Kuei, to you Here I am so happy for everything simply to be here in the midst of life I know poetry is present for us all craftspeople of great paths and small roads small tracks great portages. Let us travel peacefully on the great river of life. And let us allow speech to say these words… (Ua 11)296

The author says she is “in the midst of life” where “poetry is present,” suggesting that she

does not create poetry but lives with it. Poetry accompanies poets on the paths they craft. The

different words “paths,” “roads,” “tracks,” and “portages” refers to movements through the

territory as well as to directions we give to our lives, associating ways of living to the

awareness of territory. The pronoun in the call “Let us travel peacefully” is also ambiguous:

on the one hand, it could refer to “us all,” each poet, each person, Indigenous and non-

Indigenous peoples who live a life anchored in this particular territory, while following

specific paths; on the other, the last verse of the poem indicates that she is also expressing her

wishes to travel peacefully with her correspondent in the space of the book.

The image of the path appears in other instances, in the exchange, including a series

of six poems by Mestokosho titled “On the road again” (in English in the original). This title

296 “Kuei, à toi / Voilà je suis tellement heureuse pour tout, / simplement d’être là / au beau milieu de la vie / je sais que la poésie est présente / pour nous tous / artisans des grands chemins / et des petites routes / des petits sentiers / des grands portages. Naviguons paisiblement / sur la grande rivière de la vie. Et laissons la parole dire ces mots…”

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echoes road narratives, yet rather than speaking of a subject formation that happens through

travelling extensively through territories, the author refers to a “road trip” inward. In the first

poem of the series, she writes:

We will go see this much talked-about cave there where bears dozed during long winters there where great cold penetrated our bones there where I fell asleep a lifetime. The road that leads to the cave is there somewhere close to my chest on the left side. We will go together… (Ua 13)297

The anaphora “there where” expresses the importance of this place for the poet, which is both

outside, on the physical land, and inside, within the poet’s body. The cave symbolizes the

heart of the author, that which is closest to the author, where “we will go together.” The use

of ellipses at the end of this poem (and in others) appears like an invitation for Désy to make

the trip with her toward her interiority and singularity.

Désy also uses the metaphor of the path to describe the poetic experience. The path to

poetry comes with an assertion of the close relationship between nature and human bodies: “I

think we should aspire to reinvent a country more and more mixed, amalgamated to the sea

and the sun and black spruce, to end up forgetting our origins while knowing and

acknowledging them perfectly in order to launch our human world on the only path that

297 “On ira voir cette fameuse grotte / là où les ours ont sommeillé des grands hivers / là où les grands froid on pénétré nos os / là où je me suis endormie / une vie entière. / La route qui mène vers la grotte / est là quelque part / proche de ma poitrine / du côté gauche. / On ira ensemble…”

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matters, that is, the poetic path” (Ua 35).298 For him, poetry brings us closer to what makes

us humans, including the relationship with nature. At the same time, this shared human world

could become, in his view, a basis for a common political collective. Their literary practice

allows the poets to share sensibility as humans and a common project as citizens. Désy

writes, “It is writing that binds us and links us, dear Innu poet, I am not forgetting it. When

you visit me, I tell myself that my day is blessed. I know, I know forever that it is only by

speaking to each other that we will build a country of peace and poetry” (Ua 79).299 Their

writing is the project that they share and that links them. For Désy, it is also an opportunity to

speak to her with the heart of a child, with his authenticity and sensibility (Ua 79). He sees

their exchange as building a relationship, exchanging on their lives, memories and desires. It

is through this speaking with their heart that they will build a country of peace and poetry.

The use of the word “country” shows that he considers their relationship as reflecting the one

between their nations.

Mestokosho distinguishes between poetry and writing: “Writing and poetry are two

distinct things for me. I write because I need to or when I have something to say. As for

poetry, it has always existed” (Ua 78).300 Poetry does not need writing to exist, and if we

share poetry, then we share something else than just writing; we share the sensible experience

298 “Je crois que nous devrions aspirer à réinventer un pays de plus en plus métissé, amalgamé à la mer et au soleil et aux épinettes noires, finir par oublier nos origines tout en les connaissant et en les reconnaissant parfaitement afin de lancer notre monde humain dans la seule voie qui ait de l’importance, c’est-à-dire la voie poétique.” 299 “C’est l’écriture qui nous lie et nous relie, chère poète innue, je ne l’oublie pas. Quand je vous reçois, je me dis que ma journée est bénie. Je sais, je sais pour toujours que ce n’est qu’en nous parlant que nous bâtirons un pays de paix et de poésie.” 300 “L’écriture et la poésie sont deux choses distinctes pour moi. J’écris par besoin ou quand j’ai quelque chose à dire. La poésie, quant à elle, existe depuis toujours.”

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of life or the language of the heart. The difference in their view of poetry might be linked to

their view on culture. The poet, as subject, is for Désy a cultural transmitter or one who can

share his or her humanity and sensibility. For Mestokosho, the poet is the subject who walks

in life, which entails a very different relationship to nature. In a way, Mestokosho’s view on

poetry is intimately linked to cultural knowledge and oral traditions. Her conception also

points to the intangible of culture, what cannot be entirely grasped in writing. The intangible

aspects of culture or the language of the heart could be what brings humans closer beyond

races and cultures. Yet it is part of the specificity of people’s own conception of what it

means to be human, and, in the case of Indigenous cultures, it can only flourish through a

critical relationship to colonialism.

Finally, a third aspect that differentiates the authors is how they understand the

environment as a home. Désy notices this divergence and tells her: “You often write poems

that turn me upside down. We are the earth. We are part of mother earth. The earth is us.

There is no step to be taken between us and our mother-house. This is poetic. This is self-

evident. Like two poems exchanged, sometimes, are self-evident” (Ua 93).301 Désy says it is

“self-evident”; yet, the absence of ontological separation between the self and nature in

Mestokosho’s poetry is a fundamental difference between their perspectives and goes beyond

Désy’s temporary understanding of it. Désy notes that in Mestokosho’s poetry there is no

separation between “us” and the mother-house; she provides an image of a common space

that is attractive to Désy and that he interprets from his own understanding. Through this

301 “Vous écrivez souvent des poèmes qui me chavirent. Nous sommes la terre. Nous faisons partie de la terre-mère. La terre, c’est nous. Il n’y a pas de pas à franchir entre nous et notre maison-mère. Cela est poétique. Cela va de soi. Comme deux poèmes échangés, parfois, vont de soi.”

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image, we see the singularity of Mestokosho’s vision of the common. Elsewhere in the text,

the Quebecois poet refers to the image of home: “When I walk on snow / in the taiga of

hinterland / where I feel at home” (Ua 86)302 and “I am at the Innu’s home as at my mother’s

[…] The Innu’s home feels like my own […] At the Innu’s I am in front of my sea [ma mer]”

(Ua 37).303 Désy plays with the homonyms “mère” [mother] and “mer” [sea] indicating a

connection between home and the Innu territory, which borders the sea on the North Shore.

Another of his poems reads:

When I will visit you dear poet you will be at home in your village and my own village will be in my pockets I travel to be at home At home on a river in my canoe At home is always elsewhere Everywhere and nowhere As long as someone waits for me A soul who likes bannock and tea And the currents of the sea when it is quiet … and our lives as people from the North Shore (Ua 46).304

His home is not in a particular place, but forms itself through relationships and encounters,

particularly those with the Indigenous peoples who like “bannock and tea.” Instead of

defining himself in relation to his Quebecois culture, his subjectivity is formed through the

movement toward and relationships with the Innu. He can afford to have no roots; his home

302 “Quand je marche sur la neige / Dans la taïga de l’arrière-pays / Où je me sens chez moi.” 303 “Je suis chez les Innus comme si j’étais chez ma mère […] Chez les Innus je me sens chez moi […] Chez les Innus je suis devant la mer.” 304 “Quand j’irai vous rendre visite chère poète / Vous serez chez vous dans votre village / Et mon village à moi sera dans mes poches / Je voyage pour être chez moi / Chez moi sur une rivière dans mon canot / Chez moi c’est toujours l’ailleurs / Partout et nulle part / Dans la mesure où quelqu’un m’attend / Une âme qui aime la banique et le thé / Et les courses sur la mer quand elle est tranquille / … Et de nos vies de Nord-Côtiers.”

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“is always elsewhere / everywhere and nowhere.” He can therefore adopt the Innu home as

his own.

In the section on summer, both authors write about the sea. For Désy, the sea is both

where “he hears the Innu language” (Ua 42) and a space of mixing: “Let this sea which is

yours, which is mine, which is ours, dear Rita, be the place of all mixtures, the place of all

encounters” (Ua 51).305 Their way of speaking of the sea reflects the difference in their

conception of home. Mestokosho writes, “You, it calls you / it does not leave me / it waits for

me every morning / following in my footsteps” (Ua 47).306 She says that the sea attracts

Désy while it is part of who she is. Saying that the sea calls Désy also puts into question the

intimate connection he makes with his association of sea and home.

Mestokosho talks about home like her body. If mother earth is a home, then, there is

no difference between the earth and the body. She made this connection in her exchange with

Denise Brassard in Aimititau when she writes that the river is her blood sister. Here she says,

I have long thought of this season of this state of being an inward nomad where our body our house nestles looking for happiness. Perhaps our home our mother the earth needs us that she dreams of our arms

that she looks for our footprint. We are a tiny flake

305 “Que cette mer qui est la vôtre, qui est la mienne, qui est la nôtre, chère Rita, soit le lieu de tous les amalgames, le lieu de toutes les rencontres.” 306 “Vous, elle vous appelle / elle ne me quitte pas / elle m’attend chaque matin / emboîtant mes pas.”

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of snow, of rain, of lifeblood… (Ua 92)307

The movement toward the interior appears again. The verb “nestles” that follows “our body”

and “our house,” in the third person singular, indicates that body and house are the same

subject. Désy situates himself in relation to another territory, the Innu territory or the natural

world, anchoring the roots of his Quebecois identity in his travel toward the other.

Mestokosho, on the other hand, makes clear the profound and intimate relationship with the

territory. Both territory and body are claimed as spaces of her own. She does not insist on a

cultural identity but on a relationship with the earth, which is indeed deeply rooted in her

culture. For Mestokosho, there is reciprocity between body and earth: “our mother the earth

needs us.” Her understanding of this intimacy and reciprocity are part of an epistemology and

ontology that can show a way to a more respectful relationship to the other. She talks about

“being an inward nomad” and about the earth as her home: these images of subjectivity and

collectivity are grounded in cultural knowledge about how to be human. Mestokosho

recognizes herself in her people:

I always end up seeing myself in my people when I look at them when I listen to them speak even when I come from afar I know who I am […] Now, discuss amongst yourselves and tell them that we are still there amongst you and that we know who we are… (Ua 36)308

307 “J’ai longtemps songé à cette saison / à cet état d’être nomade intérieur / où notre corps notre maison / se blottit à la recherche du bonheur. / Peut-être que notre maison / notre terre la mère a besoin de nous / qu’elle rêve de nos bras / qu’elle cherche nos pas. / Nous sommes un tout petit flocon / de neige, de pluie, de sève…”

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This poem articulates the poet’s vision of her subjective connection to her community. She

uses the pronoun “I” to describe how she recognizes herself in her people. She says, “I know

who I am” before shifting to the plural form “We know who we are.” Her community is

formed of subjects who, like her, know who they are in their complex singularity. Likewise,

friendship seems to be formed in similar ways as a relationship of sharing different paths

toward interiority. She calls on Désy to talk with his Quebecois comrades, to tell them that

the Innu still exist, that they know who they are. Doing so, she reminds him of his

responsibility toward his own community, and she addresses non-Indigenous readers, which

Désy avoids doing. Désy says that he recognizes himself in the Innu people, not in his own.

Another poem conveys this image of a respectful relationship to the earth: “Write on

the snow… with your nomad footsteps. / Write on the snow with your laughter that splits the

river. / Write on the snow with yourself…” (Ua 94)309 “Write on the snow,” repeated three

times can mean to literally put inscriptions on the snow or to write about it. It indicates a

responsibility of the author toward the subject of writing. In the line “Write… with your

nomad footsteps,” writing is like walking; it is a trace that marks the landscape, while it is

also ephemeral. The second verse suggests that human actions or reactions produce an effect

on the natural elements. The author has a responsibility toward the environment as well as

toward what he or she writes because writing is not disconnected from the material world.

308 “Je finis toujours par me retrouver / en regardant les miens / en les écoutant parler / même si j’arrive de loin / je sais qui je suis […] Voilà parlez entre vous / et dites leur / que nous sommes encore là / parmi vous / et que nous savons / qui nous sommes…” 309 “Écrivez sur la neige… avec vos pas de nomade. / Écrivez sur la neige avec votre rire qui fend la rivière. / Écrivez sur la neige avec vous-mêmes…”

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The last verse confirms this interpretation as it evokes the inscription of our bodies or of our

actions, such as writing, on nature.

There is a clear distinction between the two poets’ positions on how to build

relationships through poetry. This task entails cultural epistemological and ontological

difference. I think that this difference in the exchange shows the uneasiness with which

settlers define their home because they/we do not want our home to be built on historical

violence. Mestokosho says that she recognizes herself in her people; Désy says that he

recognizes his mother in the Innu territory and in the sea. Based on this difference, their

vision of friendship is necessarily distinct. Désy scarcely uses the word friend which comes

only at page 79 when he starts a letter with “my friend.” Perhaps he is careful at first not to

use the term friendship, which is usually established over time, trust and intimacy. It shows,

by contrast, how Mestokosho’s claim to friendship becomes an affirmative and ethical

stance, which situates the correspondents on an affective terrain in which they can be

something else than enemies, and work together from their respective position.

3.4 Nous Sommes Tous des Sauvages: Sharing Authorial Voice

Joséphine Bacon and José Acquelin join their writing once again in a project of their

own in Nous sommes tous des sauvages in 2011. Like the exchange discussed above, the Innu

writer embraces friendship, while asserting the specificity of her position in relation to

colonial history. Bacon and Acquelin propose two co-written poems, the first and the last of

the volume, which stand as a counter practice for the colonial appropriation of voice; instead

they enter together in a zone that implicates both subjects who need to find their position in

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relation to the shared authorial voice. The rest of the volume is composed of exchanged

poems in which the authors contemplate a possible friendship across colonial difference.

Louis Hamelin, who signs the afterword, argues that by redefining the term “savage,”

which appears in the title and in the first co-signed poem, the authors identify with each

other, and subvert the many historical meanings of this term through poetic language. The

idea that poetry can unify their voices is in tension with the way colonial history has

separated them. Hamelin sees a difference between them through their poetic style, while I

see the difference in how they position themselves in regard to the literary project. The play

with pronouns reminds the reader of the importance of distinguishing these positions even

when claiming a common “we.” Like Mestokosho, Bacon’s insistence on identifying with

her culture does not prevent establishing a relationship of friendship with the other. In

Aimititau, Bacon writes, “You my friend / I see you today / where will you be tomorrow? / I

sense your life now / Happy that you are here / To tell me how much / My culture is real” (Ai

303).310 Her assertive voice contrasts with Acquelin’s aspiration to unlearn. His poems in

Nous sommes tous des sauvages insist on humanity in the sense of vulnerability, that is, of

unlearning how to be the dominant knowing subject.

The first co-signed poem, “Before us,” starts with the first person singular, referring to

both Bacon and Acquelin individually, and shifts toward the first person plural at the end.

I am waiting for a beginning that cannot end brief accusation blames

310 “Toi mon ami / Je te vois aujourd’hui / où seras-tu demain? / Je perçois ta vie maintenant, / Heureuse que tu sois là / Pour me dire à quel point / Ma culture est présente.”

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the savage that we are do you remember those who will be after you? in the burst of your laughter-tears lies our poetry. (Nous 9)311

In the first verse, the subject is “waiting for a beginning / that cannot end,” which conveys

the image of a process that, once started, cannot be ended. This process could refer to the

epistolary exchange initiated by Aimititau and which continued beyond it, or perhaps, to the

effort of creating a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. From

the start, the “I” is relational and ambiguous because of the double authorial voice. Then, if

the goal of the volume is to put together two voices, there is one image that stands in the way,

literally in the sequence of verses and figuratively, of claiming “we”: the savage. Both

authors are the savage that is blamed. Depending on who is speaking, this statement takes on

a different form: the image of the savage has been imposed on Indigenous peoples as a sign

of inferiority, but this logic has also been reversed to critique the violence of colonialism,

when settlers’ violence is considered savage.

The play with pronouns continues in the next verse with a question to the formal

second person singular: “do you remember those / who will be after you?” The pronoun

“you” may call out to the reader to feel concerned by their poetic and political construction,

or it can refer to both authors mutually asking this question of each other. “After you”

311 “Avant nous / J’attends un commencement / qui ne peut finir / l’accusation brève culpabilise / le sauvage que nous sommes / vous souvenez vous de ceux / qui seront après vous? / dans l’éclat de vos rires-larmes / se trouve / notre poésie.”

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mirrors the title of the poem, “Before us.” This verse also links memory to the responsibility

toward future generations. The authors question the other on their sense of connection to past

and future generations. At the same time, they situate their co-writing in a particular

historical moment in which sharing this question is now possible. The ambivalence between

identifying as “we” and calling on the other to remember draws attention to how “I,” “you,”

and “we” imagine those future generations, and it underlines the fragility of the project of

sharing voice. The poem finishes with “our poetry,” which stands as a shared priority for now

and an ideal mediation for expressing this fragility. If we can go beyond the weight of

colonial images such as the savage that separate us, we can achieve the sharing of poetry,

which also means to share humanity composed of “the burst of your laughter-tears.” The

poem succeeds in keeping the ambivalence through what can be shared and what pulls us

apart showing that it is a constant negotiation.

The passage from “I” to “we” and “you” creates a strong relationship between both

poets, but also with the readers and a community of people who are also waiting for this

process to begin. Looking at the title (“Before us”) and the last line (“our poetry”), this first

poem of the collection situates their poetry in a territory that has been occupied before they

were there, notably by images like “the savage,” which they also aim at transforming through

poetry. The poem plays with the desire to conceive of “us” as a collective and a responsibility

to situate “you” and “me” in a historical context.

The next poem by Bacon reaffirms strongly the relationship and distance between “I”

and “you,” reminding the addressee, and the reader, from the beginning of the exchange, that

this poetic quest of forging a common voice has not been achieved yet. She writes, “I dream

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of one story / that would dictate without mistake / an entire life” (Nous 10).312 To share one

voice would require sharing one story: the truth about colonial history. She continues,

you don’t look at me you don’t see me you don’t listen at me you don’t talk to me you are here as conqueror of my land you imprison me in my land you deprive me of my identity you deprive me of my land you chain me up in reserves that you have created you want to be master of my spirit […] (Nous 10)313

The insistence on “you,” standing for the white settler subject, reverses the process through

which colonialism has imposed identities on Indigenous Peoples. She creates a figure and

leaves no doubt of the identity of the settler. She describes in a few lines the extent of

colonial domination and the effects on her (“me”), her “land,” her “identity,” and her “spirit.”

The list of statements are not addressed to Acquelin who has not done these things personally

to her, but it addresses his position as member of the group of Quebecois-settlers to make

them/us (“you”) realize of the extent of violence. The personification of settlers through the

pronoun “you” is important here because colonialism is often discussed in a depersonalized

way as if no one were responsible for what happened in the past and for the rigidity of a

structure that continues to mark us and that specifically perpetuates the violence toward

Indigenous peoples’ body, land, identity, and spirit. The poem, in the present time, insists on

the continuity of these colonial relations.

312 “Je rêve d’un seul récit / qui dicterait sans faute / toute une vie vécue.” 313 “Tu ne me regardes pas / tu ne me vois pas / tu ne m’entends pas / tu ne m’écoutes pas / tu ne me parles pas / tu es ici en conquérant de ma Terre / tu m’emprisonnes dans ma Terre / tu me prives de mon identité / tu me prives de mon territoire / tu m’enchaînes dans des réserves que tu as créées / tu veux être maître de mon esprit …”

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Bacon writes a poem near the end of the volume that mirrors the previous one, and

where she claims who she is in affirmative ways:

My wealth is called salmon my house is called caribou my fire is called black spruce my canoe is called birch my dress is called lichen my headdress is called eagle my song is called drum and I am called human (Nous 63).314

In the first poem, she names all the identities that have been imposed on her and on

Indigenous peoples (Montagnais, Cri, Tête de boule, and so on), while in the second one she

can be human. The latter poem is based on her cultural ways of relating to elements of the

environment. Again, as for Mestokosho, her culture is not an identity but a relationship to the

natural world, which makes her simply human in her own terms. She has acknowledged

history and colonial relations of power, before claiming her humanity in order to establish the

contrast. Because of colonial relations, the pronoun “we” cannot be defined by a shared

humanity, because being human is also culturally specific. In sum, these two poems

reflecting each other put into relation critique and affirmation, as two important discursive

strategies.

314 “ma richesse s’appelle / saumon / ma maison s’appelle / caribou / mon feu s’appelle / épinette noire / mon canot s’appelle / boulot / ma robe s’appelle / lichen / ma coiffe s’appelle / aigle / mon chant s’appelle / tambour / moi je m’appelle / humain.”

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Acquelin thinks of poetry as a space for describing beauty, as well as for breaking

free from the structures of language and from the white settler subject’s certainty: “It is

sometimes salutary / to send language off walking / in the silence of beauty” (Nous 50).315

He adds, “the true begins where / there is no certainty” (Nous 52).316 These lines echo what

he wrote in Aimititau: “I must forget what they put in my brain” (Ai 308),317 confirming the

importance of letting go of certainties in order to encounter the truth. Poetry can unsettle

colonial categories and perhaps colonial thinking: “We are all savages / we all deserve a cure

by poetry / that the Earth keeps in reserve” (Nous 18).318 For Acquelin, from a Quebecois

perspective, the “poetry treatment” seems to mean the necessity to have a greater sensibility.

He says,

friendship is a shortcut that realists swindle […] and even if I am in the compulsion of matter my bones’ lodes are transmuted by the headlight flashing of your eyes invented by the light. (Nous 25)319

The Quebecois poet warns against those who do not trust friendship to establish respectful

structural relationships. The epistolary genre brings together individuals who are otherwise

disconnected; in this vein, Acquelin sees this as an opportunity to be changed by this

friendship. Even if he is affected by the materiality of colonial relationships, in his “bones’

315 “il est parfois salutaire / d’envoyer promener le langage / dans le silence de la beauté.” 316 “le vrai commence là où / il n’y a pas de certitude.” 317 “il faut que j’oublie ce qu’on m’a cloué au crâne.” 318 “nous sommes tous des sauvages / nous méritons tous une cure de poèmes / que la Terre garde encore en réserve.” 319 “l’amitié est un raccourci que les réalistes flouent … et même si je suis entre les manies de la matière / les filons de mes os sont transmutés / par l’appel de phare de tes yeux / inventés par la lumière.”

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lodes,” he is transformed by his contact with the other poet’s light. The relationship with the

Innu correspondent is precious; he is changed by the relationship.

The relationship with nature allows poetry to make a bridge between the Innu and

Quebecois writers, but while the elements of the natural world are part of Bacon’s cultural

humanness, they are a way for Acquelin to question certainty. I find the Quebecois writer’s

voice weaker when he deems it necessary to end with a racial reference, because he

paradoxically reasserts stereotypes about cultures:

even if I have white skin I believe in neither skin nor whiteness even if you have red skin do you only believe in epidermis which broods a fire without difficulty yes let’s talk to each other that my past was Arabic and geometrical that your territory was virgin and generous. (Nous 14)320

The proposition to look beyond the skin color is both a way to take a distance from white

settler subjectivity and a simplified vision of historical difference that defines the Innu

writer’s territory as virgin and generous. He continues, talking about the future that will “go

beyond our hearts / toward a simple ideal / I was going to say natural / before and after all

cultures” (Ibid.).321 The last verse echoes the first poem of the collection, “Before us”, and

the last one, “After all.” Acquelin seems to consider that their poetic exchange can aspire to

this “simple ideal” beyond cultures. It seems that, at times, Acquelin loses sight of the

complexity offered by their co-signed poems in which vulnerability and intricate historical

320 “même si je suis de peau blanche / je ne crois ni à la peau ni au blanc / même si tu es de peau rouge / ne crois-tu qu’à l’épiderme / qui couve un feu sans mal / oui parlons-nous / que mon passé fût arabe et géométrique / que ton territoire fût vierge et généreux.” 321 “du dépassement de nos cœurs / vers un idéal simple / j’allais dire naturel / avant et après toutes les cultures…”

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positioning produce no easy ideal relationship. Yet Acquelin also provides a compelling

image of shared vulnerability and of how collective and personal histories affect who we are

and how we present ourselves to others: “don’t look at the man [sic] / pierce him through to

his origins / see through his contortions” (Nous 16).322 For him, sharing humanity here is not

based on a universal image of the human but on the invisible, the silence and the beauty that

unify “us.” His vision of the subject is not based on identity and race, but on what is not

necessarily perceptible. Then he says, “silence tortures those who are incapable of it” (Nous

27)323; this statement contradicts the belief that it is by speaking to each other that we will

necessarily achieve justice, which is what the epistolary exchanges often seem to suggest.

Sharing the invisible and silence is much more difficult to describe, but seems compelling in

a context in which so many discourses compete in their claims to justice. In a poem that starts

with “in short, savour life,” Acquelin writes, “more modestly / I enjoy the invisible / since it

files / my angles” (Nous 29).324 What is invisible brings uncertainty, but also modesty, and

works on the sharp angles that we have in our perspectives. Eva Mackey contends that

decolonization calls for us to live more comfortably with uncertainty (166). In French, the

word “angles” [angles] is very similar to the word “ongles” [nails]. The image that Acquelin

uses, therefore, suggests that the uncomfortable tasks of challenging our perspectives, our

angles, becomes for him one of many banal and intimate practices of taking care of his body,

of himself, like filing nails.

322 “…ne regarde pas l’homme / transperce-le jusqu’à ses origines / vois au travers de ses contorsions.” 323 “…le silence torture ceux qui en sont incapables.” 324 “…bref savourer la vie […] plus modestement / j’apprécie l’invisible / depuis qu’il me lime / les angles.”

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Responding to Acquelin’s poems, Bacon writes, “I am alive / I do not give up / my

history” (Nous 41).325 She asserts cultural specificity, but she is also touched by Acquelin’s

words. She continues, “your words hit me / only a quiet melody hears them / music maestro /

give the breath of wind / in the beating of hearts / of a deaf humanity” (Ibid.).326 For her,

identifying with the natural world is not a poetic strategy but precisely a way to situate her

identity within the Innu cultural ground and to make her discourse politically significant. In

order to engage in the relationship with Acquelin, Bacon needs to assert the resurgence of her

people:

come back sacred bark of old canoes that my grandfathers lift up with pride drop on their shoulders to reach the vein of the Earth which is aroused while waiting for them (Nous 19).327

The work that has to be done for Bacon is to restore pride in the Innu culture, which has

always privileged a respectful relationship with the Earth. She writes,

one night in a dream I saw the wind dance I saw my skirts dance in unison as one breath

325 “Je suis vivante / je ne renonce pas / à mon histoire.” 326 “…tes mots m’atteignent / seule une mélodie silencieuse les entend / musique maestro / donne le souffle de l’air / dans les battements des cœurs / de l’humanité sourde.” 327 “…reviens-nous / écorce sacrée / des canots anciens / que mes grands-pères / soulèvent avec fierté / déposent sur leurs épaules / pour rejoindre / la veine de la Terre / qui s’émoustille / en les attendant.”

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here we see the immensity of the Earth (Nous 21).328

The images of dancing, of unison or sharing one breath come from the relationships with the

Earth: in order to envision a respectful relationship to the other, she draws from what her

culture knows to be a respectful relationship between humans and the Earth.

She says, “I refuse / to be banished / from this world” (Nous 28).329 This emphasis on

Innu culture does not seem to be meant to prevent her and Acquelin from creating a

respectful relationship, quite the opposite. Bacon strives to create a relationship in which they

care for each other and can share a perspective: “I would like to pass along gentle words /

catch the speech […] to see again these eyes / this shared look,” she continues in the same

poem: “I follow you / to the end of your soul […] you belong to no race” (Nous 32).330 She

makes sure that she can contribute to thinking about what “we” want for our shared

humanity. Her claim to friendship can be seen as an affirmative ethics, understood by

Braidotti as the understanding that “‘we’ are in this together” which accepts singular views of

the whole. Bacon welcomes the exchange with Acquelin and says, “I take root in the friend /

that you are” (Nous 37).331 The goals of resurgence, which requires acknowledging

specificity, and of building friendship are not exclusive.

328 “…une nuit de rêve / j’ai vu le vent / danser / j’ai vu mes jupes / danser à l’unisson / d’un souffle / c’est ici qu’on voit / l’immensité de la Terre.” 329 “Je refuse / d’être bannie / de ce monde.” 330 “J’aimerais passer des mots tendres / attraper la parole … / revoir ces yeux ce regard partagé” and she continues in the same poem: “je te suis / jusqu’au bout de ton âme… tu n’appartiens à aucune race.” 331 “je m’enracine dans l’ami / que tu es.”

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In the last poem, “After all,” co-signed, the “I” passes by “you” and is brought together

in “we,” using a similar linguistic strategy to the first poem to underline the complexity of

relating across culture and to think of a “we.”

I am there without power a guilty absence yet I know you are here a silence reaches our solitudes inhabited by a din where we no longer are invited (65).332

The first verse asserts the presence of the authors being engaged in this process evoked in the

first poem, while acknowledging powerlessness. Friendship might bring, however, some

power or at least reassurance: “yet I know you are here.” Silence becomes the link between

their “inhabited solitudes.” These individual spaces are imagined filled with “a din / where

we are no longer / invited.” The authors have left these spaces of solitude, which are

inhabited and filled with habits, including that of identifying one another as savage. If we are

no longer invited into these individual spaces, can poetry be an invitation to create new

relationships? The “we” in the poem conveys at the same time the possibility of friendship

and of looking back at history. Finally, the instability of the first person plural shows that the

priority is not to define ‘us’ but to experiment with our relationships being engaged in this

process.

332 “Après tout / Je suis là / sans pouvoir / une absence coupable / pourtant je te sais ici / un silence rejoint / nos solitudes habitées / par un vacarme / où nous ne sommes plus / invités.”

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3.5 Kuei à Toi: Conversation sur le Racisme: The Epistolary Exchange

as Treaty

Deni Ellis Béchard and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine decided to engage in an epistolary

exchange on racism after they witnessed an episode at the North Shore Book Fair. Kanapé

Fontaine had decided to respond publicly to the journalist Denise Bombardier’s

characterization of Indigenous culture as “deadly” and “antiscientific” in an article published

in the Journal de Montréal.333 When Kanapé Fontaine stood up to confront Bombardier in a

panel at the Book Fair, the latter spoke louder, did not listen to her, and ended up reading a

definition of the Aboriginal from her own book.334 In an interview, Béchard says that it was a

blatant example of racism in which the white settler does not let the Indigenous person

speaks, does not listen, and thinks that, as a white person, he or she knows better.335 The idea

of the exchange came up, then, as an opportunity for Béchard and Kanapé Fontaine to discuss

how racism continues to mark social relationships.

Their epistolary project situates them both as part of a collective that needs to deal

with racism. The common ground for their literary relationship becomes the belief that

structures of racism affect everyone. Therefore, racism is not taken as a relation of

domination between white settler racists and people of color who are victims, but as a

333 See the article by Denise Bombardier http://www.journaldemontreal.com/2015/01/21/la-culture-autochtone-qui-tue and one of the responses, by Widia Larivière http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/widia-lariviere/lettre-ouverte-a-denise-bombardier_b_6616006.html. 334 Both authors describe this episode in the book, 11-17. 335Entrevue à Radio Canada - http://ici.radio-canada.ca/emissions/radio-canada_cet_apres-midi/2015-2016/archives.asp?date=2016/05/12&indTime=1233&idmedia=7513609

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structure that affects everyone in different ways. Kanapé Fontaine says, “I think that from

now on, being aware of the history of our relationships and questioning their present state

and the circumstances that have led to this state, are the first bases to lead off the debate in

the public space” (Kuei 42).336 Béchard says, “The first step is to express a desire to work

together and to solve the problem” (Kuei 62).337 Throughout the book, both acknowledge

their own racism but place it in different contexts. For Kanapé Fontaine, racism is linked to

colonial relations; for Béchard, it is situated in relation to or in tension with multiculturalism.

Béchard starts by raising the issue that non-Indigenous people easily speak about

multiculturalism, but are ignorant about the reality of First Nations, Metis and Inuit. “We,

non-Indigenous people [allochtone], are convinced that we are always right, that our

domination over the world is the sign of the righteousness of our thoughts and actions… Yet

we don’t know how to listen” (Kuei 12).338 He continues,

I write you this letter to open a dialogue between our people, and not to blame non-

Indigenous people for this racist culture. None of us have invented it. It is a heritage.

However, we are responsible for understanding and changing it. It’s not easy, since it

336 “Je crois qu’à partir de maintenant, prendre conscience de l’histoire de nos relations et s’interroger sur leur état actuel, sur les circonstances ayant mené à cet état, sont les premières bases de ce que l’on peut lancer dans l’espace public.” 337 “Le premier pas, c’est d’exprimer un désir de travailler ensemble et de résoudre le problème.” 338 “Nous, les Allochtones, nous sommes persuadés que nous avons toujours raison, que notre domination sur le monde est le signe de la justesse de nos pensées et de nos actions… Or, nous ne savons pas écouter.”

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is difficult for us to perceive what is obvious. We live in our culture like we breathe

the air that surrounds us; we take it for granted. (Ibid.)339

He says we, non-Indigenous, are responsible for changing this racist culture, which seems to

mean changing ourselves since “we live in our culture like we breathe.” Changes, for him,

come from listening and sharing the space of speech. This is the way he understands their

project of exchange: “Above all, we must listen to each other. Non-Indigenous people must

learn to share the space of speech to find a balance between theirs and that of Indigenous

peoples’” (Kuei 13).340 Later, Béchard explains that it is by listening to stories by Indigenous

peoples that he could understand colonial history: “the experiences and pain of all these

individuals are less and less abstract” (Kuei 55).341 He insists on the idea that these stories

can humanize the situation: “We are emotional beings, and our beliefs, as well as our

prejudices, often stem from emotional reactions. To understand better the experiences of

Indigenous peoples, non-Indigenous people must read and listen to their stories” (Kuei

54).342

339 “Je t’écris cette lettre pour ouvrir un dialogue entre nos peuples, et non pour culpabiliser les Allochtones de cette culture raciste. Aucun d’entre nous ne l’a inventée. Nous en avons hérité. Toutefois, nous sommes responsables de la comprendre et de la changer. Ce n’est pas facile, car nous avons de la difficulté à percevoir ce qui nous semble aller de soi. Nous vivons dans notre culture comme nous respirons l’air qui nous entoure; nous la tenons pour acquise.” 340 “Surtout, il faut s’écouter. Il faut que les Allochtones apprennent à partager l’espace de la parole pour trouver un équilibre entre la leur et celle des Autochtones.” 341 “Les expériences et les douleurs de tous ces individus sont de moins en moins abstraites.” 342 “Nous sommes des êtres émotionnels et nos croyances, de même que nos préjugés, découlent souvent de nos réactions émotives. Pour mieux comprendre les expériences des Autochtones, les Allochtones doivent lire et écouter leurs histoires.”

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Kanapé Fontaine says that she engaged in this project because she wanted “to write

about the relationships between our peoples” (Kuei 14).343 Relationships are not only marked

by racism and colonialism, but also by betrayal: “we think that the solution is reconciliation

[…] but how many times has reconciliation betrayed us? As many as the treaties that were

signed. But what is the purpose of these treaties if they are to be betrayed?” (Kuei 104)344 For

her, not only ignorance, prejudices and stereotypes mark their relationships, but also betrayal

which is at the heart of colonial relationships. Therefore, non-Indigenous people need to

listen but also to respect their word. She thinks of their correspondence as an authentic way

to relate that could escape betrayal.

We correspond. Me, in Montreal, and you, during your travels. We continue the path

of those who came before us on this road of the dreamed word, the concealed word.

We sign each letter like a new treaty but, here, our exchanged word will be difficult to

betray. Because we are political and true. We are authentic. We know how to learn,

how to teach each other. We give each other knowledge. (Kuei 104)345

343 “Pour écrire sur les relations entre nos peuples.” 344 “On croit que la solution, c’est la réconciliation … mais combien de fois la réconciliation a-t-elle été trompée? Autant de fois que des traités ont été signés. Mais à quoi servent ces traités si ce n’est que pour être trahis? À quoi sert la réconciliation si ce n’est pour être trompée?” 345 “Nous correspondons. Moi, à Montréal, et toi, pendant tes voyages. Nous continuons la route de tous ceux qui nous ont précédés sur ce chemin de la parole rêvée, la parole occultée. Nous signons chaque lettre comme un nouveau traité mais, ici, notre parole échangée sera difficile à trahir. Parce que nous sommes politiques et que nous sommes vrais. Nous sommes authentiques. Nous savons apprendre, nous enseigner l’un à l’autre. Nous nous donnons du savoir.”

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She appropriates the treaty relation to give meaning to their epistolary practice. One of the

recommendations of the TRC is to honour the treaties that have been broken.346 Here,

Kanapé Fontaine hopes that they can respect their word because they are political and true.

The image of the treaty resonates in many ways with the epistolary practice between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, particularly when the authors are bearing the

responsibility to represent their cultural group. However, unlike political negotiation, the

epistolary genre turns every subject who engages in it into a representative. The term

representative might not be adequate because, as writers, the Innu women and Quebecois

men have not been chosen to be spokespeople. The epistolary genre is produced through the

interactions of two writers, but each writer comes with a set of relationships that connects

them to their community. Therefore, it does not reflect a nation-to-nation relationship as

such, but, as Lee Maracle calls it, a spirit-to-spirit one.347

The fact that their exchange is written and published, rather than spoken privately,

gives authority to their words. Moreover, the epistolary genre positions both writers (albeit

temporarily and ideally) within a horizontal relation of power in which they are accountable

to the addressee. Their exchange becomes very personal and emotional, which also makes it

346 Many scholars have used the Two-Row Wampum as an Indigenous model for political relationships. Eva Mackay, for example, uses the image of “treaty as a verb” to insist on the treaty as an ongoing interactional process based on the idea of polishing the Covenant chain, that is, of regularly renewing the terms of the alliance (139): “It is […] significant that colonizers appeared to be able at that time to see Indigenous nations as nations and participate in the protocols of polishing the chain, even if, as we know, such participation did not continue to the present” (140). 347 Lee Maracle often uses the expression “spirit-to-spirit” relationships in Memory Serves. She says that nation-to-nation relationships do not always serve Indigenous women. She says, “We need to object to men who call for government-to-government relations that do little to revive the female governing structures within our nations” (152).

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feel authentic; it can be judged by the extent of their implications as subjects rather than by

the ideas that they express. Their personal experience, or what they are ready to share with

the other, is central to the way they position themselves in the exchange. The idea that both

subjects learn through the exchange reinforces the idea of shared commitment. Being

engaged in this project of exchange, they learn not only about the other, but also about

themselves. To put the emphasis on engagement is different than privileging the project of

raising awareness. Yet both authors shift between trying to convince others and describing

the changes they themselves have undergone.

Kanapé Fontaine says that they write “in order perhaps to enable the healing of our

collective unconscious” (Kuei 14).348 Later she says, “We write to chart the future of the

coming generation. It is reassuring. We also write to develop our own thinking, to put into

question our own perceptions of the world” (Kuei 140).349 She recognizes the role that the

epistolary exchange can play in changing the subjects who participate in it. If, for Béchard,

racism is a heritage, for Kanapé Fontaine the heritage is the wound of colonialism and

silence: “When we are sad, we are silent” (Kuei 21).350 She continues, “Silence comes with

the wound. And the wound generates fear in some cases, particularly when the relationship

with the other is woven with a violence worn by history” (Ibid.).351 She explains that the

history of the relationship with the “white man,” as she says the Innu people still call non-

348 “… afin que nous puissions, peut-être, guérir notre inconscient collectif.” 349 “Nous écrivons pour tracer l’avenir à la génération qui vient. C’est rassurant. Nous écrivons également pour approfondir notre propre pensée, pour remettre en question nos propres perceptions du monde.” 350 “Lorsque nous sommes tristes, nous sommes silencieux.” 351 “…le silence vient avec la blessure. Et la blessure engendre la peur dans certains cas, surtout quand la relation avec l’autre est tissé d’une violence usée par l’histoire.”

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Indigenous people, has instilled fear in the former. What she fears herself is that her Innu

culture becomes completely annihilated.

For Kanapé Fontaine, Quebecois people suffer from a “collective amnesia” that

erased Indigenous peoples from the history of the country, to the point that Indigenous

peoples “have now come to believe, without being asked, that they needed to erase

themselves” (Kuei 50).352 She adds, “A great threat subsists: that the collective amnesia that

has been intentionally created by past governments finally defeats my generation” (Kuei

93).353 The Innu writer fears that cultural genocide would be complete, that people would no

longer know what their purpose is or their culture: “We look at the most spiritual people of

the community as though they are somehow eccentric, lost in their imaginary. As if their

sensitivity for the environment were a superficial and insignificant thing. As if this

relationship to nature had not forged our old societies, for centuries and centuries” (Ibid.).354

For Kanapé Fontaine, who was not raised in the Innu tradition, the close link to nature is

something that is being lost. The repetition in the expression for “centuries and centuries”

amplifies the author’s passionate tone and insists on the scope of what has been potentially

lost. It also forces us to imagine a life before the five centuries of colonialism. She writes,

352 “Certains en sont même venus à croire, sans qu’on leur demande, qu’ils devaient d’effacer eux-mêmes.” 353 “Un grand danger subsiste: que l’amnésie collective qui a été créée délibérément par les gouvernements passés ait finalement raison de ma génération.” 354 “On regarde les plus spirituels de la communauté comme des personnes un peu farfelues, un peu perdues dans leur imaginaire. Comme si leur sensibilité à l’environnement était une chose superficielle et insignifiante. Comme si ce rapport à la nature n’avait jamais forgé nos sociétés anciennes, durant des siècles et des siècles.”

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“Sometimes, I admit, I fear that I idealize us” (Kuei 76).355 The Innu poet explains that

nobody taught her the foundations of her culture, so that she had to learn by herself. When

she claims, “We are still here. We are still alive. We carry on” (Kuei 60),356 it appears to be a

statement directed not just to white people but also to herself, as though she had passed

through this realization when looking for her own identity.

In his reflection on dismantling racism, Béchard denounces stereotypes, including the

romantic image of the noble Indian:

But who amongst us truly listens to these minority voices? Previously, I thought that I

listened to them. Everything I read on Indigenous peoples was really romantic: an

Edenic mythology constructed by the whites to underline the extent with which we

had taken distance from nature and that we had destroyed it. The stories of noble

Amerindians from the plains occluded indeed the suffering of Indigenous peoples.

(Kuei 97-98)357

What does it mean to “truly listen”? For Béchard it seems that the reality check comes from

underlining suffering. Although he rightly points to the obscuring of actual living conditions

by romantic images, showing suffering cannot be the only way of countering racism and

colonialism. Then, he recounts that, when he was in high school, his friends had laughed at

355 “Parfois, je t’avoue, j’ai peur de nous idéaliser.” 356 “Nous sommes encore là. Nous sommes encore vivants. Nous nous sommes perpétués.” 357 “Mais qui d’entre nous écoute véritablement ces voix minoritaire? Autrefois, je pensais que je les écoutais. Tout ce que je lisais sur les Autochtones était très romantique : une mythologie édénique construite par les Blancs pour souligner à quel point on s’était éloignés de la nature et qu’on l’avait détruite. Les histoires des nobles Amérindiens des plaines cachaient en réalité les souffrances des Autochtones.”

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him one time because he was attracted to an Indigenous woman: “I understood that, between

the mythology about Indigenous peoples and my friends’ racism, there was another reality of

which I knew absolutely nothing” (Kuei 98).358 He criticizes the romantic idea that has been

forged concerning Indigenous peoples and that has nothing to do with the experience of

racism in his family or at school. He insists on the complexity of Indigenous peoples’

experience in contrast with the romantic image that non-Indigenous people entertain about

them: “Indigenous peoples, like any group of humans, are complex and have multiple

cultures” (Kuei 28).359 He says, “racism is always based on simplification” (Kuei 19).360

According to him, white people are less challenged when they/we associate Indigenous

peoples with nature than when they/we talk about their suffering (Kuei 72). I find this

statement very interesting in the context of the exchange, particularly because nature is

important in Kanapé Fontaine’s discourse. She sees as a problem that spiritual people are

seen as disconnected from reality. Moreover, Béchard assumes that showing suffering is

more destabilizing to white people than showing other aspects of Indigenous peoples’ lives,

but to truly hear that Indigenous peoples have lived in this territory and have forged ethics for

“centuries and centuries” might be unsettling in different ways.

358 “J’ai compris qu’entre la mythologie sur les Autochtones et le racisme de mes amis, il existait une autre réalité dont je ne savais absolument rien.” 359 “…les Autochtones, comme n’importe quel groupe d’humains, sont complexes et ils ont des cultures multiples.” 360 “…le racisme est toujours basé sur la simplification.”

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Kanapé Fontaine says, “through speaking in public forums, my instinct leads me to

simplify my words” (Kuei 70).361 She continues, “we seek so much to attach words to what

we want to criticize, comment, analyse that we lose the sense of what matters” (Ibid.).362 Her

experience as activist showed her that there are times when it is beneficial to simplify.

Moreover, she shows that romanticizing and idealizing had been part of her process of

learning about her culture, while learning to embody it. In fact, Kanapé Fontaine does not

talk much about suffering but rather about empowerment through knowing who you are,

including knowing her complicity with racist cultures. This might be even more challenging.

I note that knowing who you are seems particularly important in the writing of the three Innu

poets as a condition to a respectful relationship with the other, while the Quebecois writers

do not insist on this challenge.

Kanapé Fontaine talks explicitly about her racism:

I question myself. In fact, I am looking for the path that will bring me to confront

myself, to confront my feelings, to confront my own racism. Because I am racist! I

am aware that I am. I work in this society, I speak out against racism, I want to uproot

the giant tree of the settler, the colonial, colonialism, but I don’t know how to face my

own racism! (Kuei 101)363

361 “…à force de parler sur les tribunes publiques, mon instinct me commande de simplifier mes mots.” 362 “On cherche tellement à mettre des mots sur ce que l’on veut critiquer, commenter, analyser, qu’on perd le sens de ce qui importe.” 363 “Je me questionne. En fait, je suis à la recherche de ce sentier qui me mènera à la confrontation avec moi-même, à la confrontation avec mes sentiments, à la confrontation avec mon propre racisme. Parce que je le suis! Je me rends compte que je le suis. Je travaille

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Her racism, as she explains elsewhere, comes in part from generalisations about white

people. She gives a specific example in the context of their exchange:

Perhaps, if I speak in this way, it is to uproot myself. It is to convince myself that I am

clean, that I am right, that I have the right to talk like that, to confront others while I

don’t do so with myself. Because I must admit, Deni, how profoundly I went inside

myself in the last letters. I was shaken. I struggled with myself! I struggled with my

own racism! I read you, I hear you, I am happy about our exchange but, deep down, I

am only half listening. (Kuei 102)364

Kanapé Fontaine’s voice as a poet and activist is strong, assertive, and passionate, which we

can see in this passage by the use of exclamation points and short sentences centered on

verbs. She also questions herself, wondering whether she protects herself by confronting

others about their racist attitudes. In the exchange, she does not confront Béchard but admits

that, despite her good will, she can only half listen. What the exchange seems to have

generated is a stronger self-reflexivity about her subjective positioning. At the same time,

saying that all conditions are not there for her to fully listen matters because it decenters the

settler’s sense of entitlement and assumption that he or she is to be listened to. These

dans cette société, je parle contre le racisme, je veux déraciner l’arbre géant du colon, du colonial, du colonialisme, mais je ne sais pas regarder en face mon propre racisme!...” 364 “Peut-être que si je parle ainsi, c’est pour me déraciner moi-même. C’est pour me convaincre que je suis propre, que j’ai raison, que j’ai le droit de parler de la sorte, de confronter les autres alors que je ne le fais pas avec moi-même. Car il faut que je t’avoue, Deni, combien je suis profondément entrée en moi-même dans mes dernières missives. J’en ai été bouleversée. Je me suis butée à moi-même ! Je me suis butée à mon racisme ! Je te lis, je t’entends, je suis heureuse de notre échange mais, au fond, je ne t’écoute que d’une oreille.”

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conditions require more than enabling horizontal relationships in the present and establishing

dialogue in good faith, even if the discussion is on ongoing injustice. Kanapé Fontaine

continues by explaining the ways she sees freedom from structures of domination affect us:

“Freedom looks like sovereignty to me. Freedom, on an individual level, is exactly to be

master of oneself. Master of our ideas, reflections, body, feelings, emotions, spirituality.

Master of our sense of sharing and of our sense of listening. This is my idea of freedom”

(Ibid.).365 The admission that she is half listening, therefore, is an assertion of her freedom,

of her conception of and aspiration to it. It is interesting that she defines freedom through

individuality as well as through sovereignty.

Béchard responds: “Everybody should talk about racism as you did. I admire you for

what you were able to say in your letter […] Who, amongst us, can say he [sic] is not racist?”

(Kuei 106-107)366 Béchard talks about the “ordinary racism” of his father, “a banal and

irrational racism that many humans have learned to reproduce without thinking […] This is

what makes it so pernicious: it is an automatism that is transmitted without effort” (Kuei

29).367 He talks about his friends’ racism and the interracial relationships that he had when

365 “Elle a des allures de souveraineté, la liberté. La liberté, au sens individuel, c’est exactement être maître de soi. Maître de ses idées, de ses réflexions, de son corps, de ses sentiments, de ses émotions, de sa spiritualité. Maître de son sens du partage, de sons sens de l’écoute. Voilà mon idée de la liberté.” 366 “Tout le monde devrait parler du racisme comme tu l’as fait. Je t’admire pour ce que tu es arrivée à dire dans ta lettre… Qui, parmi nous, peut dire qu’il n’est pas raciste?” 367 “C’est un racisme ordinaire que j’ai entendu mille fois partout sur la planète, un racisme banal et irrationnel que beaucoup d’humains ont appris à reproduire sans y réfléchir. Celui de mon père n’avait rien d’exceptionnel. C’est d’ailleurs ce qui le rend tellement pernicieux : c’est un automatiste qui se transmet quasiment sans effort.”

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younger. He deplores that today people refuse to be called out on racist attitudes or words

because it is generally inacceptable to be racist.

Here is what I dream of: a society where a person could tell another: ‘what you just

said is racist’ and where the other would feel free to answer: ‘I am sorry. I was not

aware. I will think about it.’ Or else, if not understanding why, this person could ask

humbly: ‘Can you explain why to me? I would like to understand.’ (Kuei 108)368

He says that we should be able to recognize our racism in order to better understand it.

Having said that, Béchard does not give examples of how he participates, in the present, in

the racist structures that permeate our lives, or how he benefits from privileges by being

white. He mostly gives examples of when he was younger or of his relatives. His “dream” is

appealing for the absence of self-defensive and aggressive attitudes. However, it requires that

people be already self-aware of their position within contemporary structural racism. In fact,

the exchange’s personal and friendly tone suggests that self-critique and accountability might

be more productive than challenging the other. Although Béchard’s dream would be to

enable productive critiques to educate one another, it is hard to imagine, even in the context

of this correspondence in which both authors are aware of racism, that one of them would

challenge the other on what they consider a racist way of thinking. The relationship of

respect prevents each from intervening in the other’s effort to take a position in relation to

368 “Voici ce dont je rêve: une société où une personne pourrait dire à une autre : ‘Ce que tu viens de dire est raciste’ et où l’autre se sentirait la liberté de répondre : ‘Je m’excuse. Je ne m’en suis pas rendu compte. Je vais y réfléchir.’ Ou bien, si elle ne comprend pas pourquoi, elle pose la question avec humilité : ‘Peux-tu mieux m’expliquer pourquoi? J’aimerais bien comprendre’.”

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justice. However, the relationship to the other requires (is productive of) self-positionings,

self-critique and changes.

Béchard’s tone throughout the exchange suggests that he would like to raise

awareness about the present situation lived by Indigenous peoples who experience racism; he

would like Quebecois people to become aware of their racist attitudes. Yet we can question

this strategy. Wanting to raise awareness by talking about suffering can have the perverse

effect of dehumanizing the “victims” further instead of pushing for change.369 The idea of

destabilizing Quebecois people through showing how Indigenous peoples suffer from racism

presents several problems. Among others, it can reinforce the idea that Indigenous peoples

cannot adapt to the present, to contemporary times, that is, to modernity and white culture.

On the other hand, Béchard situates himself in a place where he knows he has to be, by

adopting an antiracist position, but he cannot find examples for his continuous complicity in

the present. My point is not that Béchard is off the mark; instead, I want to take seriously his

statement that, “We are not even able to talk about our weakness” (Kuei 109).370 Béchard

situates his weakness in the past, along with the process he underwent to become aware of

how racism implicates him as a subject, or in the future as he says that he will probably see

369 Eve Tuck criticizes the vision of change that is founded on damage-based research. She says that damage-centered research is “extremely popular in social science research” (“Suspending” 414) and she defines it as “research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (“Suspending” 413). The problem is that “it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (Ibid.). 370 “On n’arrive même pas à parler de nos faiblesses.”

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his blind spots in a few years (Kuei 123).371 Kanapé Fontaine also talks of her process of

becoming aware, yet she recognizes her weakness in the present time, particularly in the

context of the exchange, saying that she tends to idealize, simplify or half-listen.

Kanapé Fontaine uses the expression in the above quotation: “to convince myself that

I am clean,” seeing that the absence of self-critique justifies her criticism of others. Self-

critique leads her to consider racism in a nuanced way that avoids using binary oppositions.

She says, “And the racist? Doesn’t he [sic] look too for understanding himself, while being

confronted with his own interior void, as a result of a lack of knowledge transmission, of

wisdom?” (Kuei 103)372 Untangling the possibility for her to occupy the place of the racist

person makes her contemplate the “humanity” of the other, or rather, the materiality in which

each subject lives.

Although she is representing Innu—and perhaps Indigenous—people in this

exchange, she does not embody the figure of the victim, but situates herself in the

engagement to find ways to live well,373 and to reflect better on the world in which we live.

In fact, she suggests that Quebecois people need to recognize the violence of colonial history,

which has turned Indigenous peoples into subjects that are marked by this violence. She

371 “Dans quelques années, je vais surement relire ce livre et me rendre compte de tout ce que j’ignorais au moment de l’écrire.” 372 “Et le raciste? Ne cherche-t-il pas lui aussi à se comprendre, mais en se butant à son propre vide intérieur, résultat d’un manque de transmission des connaissances, des savoirs?” 373 To “live well” is a concept that has been used by Indigenous scholars, notably in Latin America where the concept of “Buen vivir” is central to Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. Leanne Simpson also talks about “living in a good way” as “an incredible disruption of the colonial metanarrative” (41). Lee Maracle talks about the “good life” throughout Memory Serves; she says, “our community needs the old stories, old poems, and the old songs that have charted this journey to the good life for thousands of years” (Memory 173).

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struggles to become something else than a victim, to embody a force of assertiveness closer

to what it means to be human for the Innu: “Many among us bear what I name ‘the wound of

colonialism.’ Quebecois people must become aware of that. Five hundred years of history,

we do not forget it. We remember. It is in our blood and in the eyes of our children. This is

why we try to transmit them light” (Kuei 33-34).374 Her assertiveness is linked to what she

would like to see in her community, for instance, when she said, at the beginning of the book,

that perhaps the exchange could help heal their collective unconscious. The wound of

colonialism turns Indigenous peoples into a group with an identity based on being colonized

and victimized from which, Kanapé Fontaine suggests, Indigenous subjects might want to

distance themselves. Healing is what is needed and it seems to be based on the transmission

not only of the critique of colonial history of violence but also of the light and hope that can

be transmitted to younger generations. Kanapé Fontaine says, “we continue the path of those

who came before us.” It is surely because of the work of Indigenous leaders that there is hope

in the present to transmit affirmative views of life to the children. This is based on the work

for the reconstruction of cultural landmarks that reasserts Indigenous ontologies and

epistemologies. I believe Kanapé Fontaine participates in the process of reconstruction by

defining freedom through the idea of sovereignty and by taking the freedom to engage in

epistolary exchange with Béchard in her own terms, passionate but half-listening, envisioning

friendship while engaging the difficulties created through it.

374 “Ce que je nomme la ‘blessure de la colonisation’, beaucoup d’entre nous la portent. Il faut que les Québécois en prennent conscience. Cinq cents ans d’histoire, on ne l’oublie pas. On se souvient. C’est dans notre sang et dans les yeux de nos enfants. C’est pour cette raison que nous cherchons à leur transmettre la lumière.”

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3.6 Conclusion: Literary Friendship as an Indigenous Project for Justice

Three Innu writers of the epistolary exchanges I examined in this chapter offer

conceptions of subjectivity that are linked to affirmative and situated visions of justice.

Mestokosho conceives of poetry as life. Sharing poetry means sharing the embodied

experience of walking through life, particular to each subject. Being in relationship is also

part of life and requires, for her, to be accountable to the other and to the Earth. She strongly

asserts her vision of subjectivity as well as of relationality grounded in Innu cultural

knowledge. Likewise, friendship with the non-Indigenous correspondent and Indigenous

resurgence are not exclusive for Bacon. However, both need to be thought of in relation to

the truth of colonial history. Bacon’s project of sharing one voice with Acquelin suggests the

importance of entering into relationship despite the fragility of the shared discourse in the

present. The current context both enables collaborative engagements and makes them

vulnerable sites for making justice. Finally, Kanapé Fontaine suggests that her exchange with

Béchard is like a treaty now to be respected. She says that they can learn through the

relationship to the other. In fact, she is destabilized by the exchange and shares intimate

thoughts about the embodied limitations of her antiracist engagement. By doing so, she

shows that antiracism is not an ideal subject position but a continuous engagement to know

who she is. Affirmation can bring light to the next generation, which also means better ways

of knowing who they are, and healing the wound of colonialism. There is an ethics of

responsibility, reciprocity and respect that emerges from the embodied and embedded visions

of the three Innu writers. What then do these affirmative stances mean to the Quebecois

subjects engaged in these projects?

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Désy and Acquelin consider their relationships with Mestokosho and Bacon

respectively as precious. For Désy, their collaborative writing becomes a model to follow in

the field of literature in Quebec. He adopts the Innu territory as his own, but Mestokosho

reminds him of his responsibility toward his own community to make known that Indigenous

peoples are still here and that they know who they are. How can non-Indigenous people be

accountable to Indigenous affirmative practices in their own communities, without

appropriating these practices? What would it mean for the Quebecois people to know who

they are? For Acquelin, the exchange is an opportunity to become involved as a subject in

transformative changes that destabilize the dominant position. Acquelin’s insistence on

silence suggests that sharing co-presence, without the necessity of creating a discourse on it,

might be sometimes an effective way to heal relationships. Finally, Béchard is committed to

acknowledging his racist heritage and the injustices it creates, but paradoxically Kanapé

Fontaine recognizes in more straightforward ways her own implication in racist structures.

Béchard insists on listening, but can he hear, from his position that privileges critiques of

injustices and complexity, the necessity to sometimes simplify or bring light and hope? Can

he acknowledge, like Kanapé Fontaine, his ways of half-listening?

In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith identifies twenty-five

Indigenous projects, significantly showing the diversity of paths undertaken by Indigenous

Peoples to make justice. To heterogenize spaces for social transformation, as Goldberg

argues, entails a greater diversity of subjects imagining justice projects. Working through this

diversity might prevent us from thinking about justice and injustice in dialectical terms. If

justice positions are political, situated and multifaceted and critiques of injustices can take

various forms, what can we say about engagements for change? Can we imagine a definition

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of justice projects, linked to the complexity of embodiment and affect, as those practices and

discourses that generate more possibilities and capacities for transformative actions and

subjective engagements?

The critique of superficial solidarity, of looking for commonalities and sharing

humanity, points to the necessity of having a structural analysis of racism and of present-day

colonialism. The ways in which difference is mingled into the Quebecois’ desire to become

Indian, to identify as mixed-raced, or to claim a close relationship to nature are understood by

Tuck and Yang as “moves to innocence.” But here I have suggested that critiques that do not

consider the complexity of affect, experience, and life, can also become “moves to

innocence,” in the sense of a form of protection from listening to difference; I do not

necessarily mean a protection from listening to Indigenous peoples, but rather from being

attentive to the diversity of ways in which subjects (Indigenous but also non-Indigenous

people) engage in and are touched by transformations. Critiques of racism are important and

take different forms, sometimes equated with “knowing who you are” or asserting affirmative

types of relationships, as in claims to friendship. On the other hand, critique itself is a type of

relationship, a way of being in the academia, as Leanne Simpson argues.

Since the Western production of knowledge has been so detrimental to Indigenous

communities and cultures,375 how we work as academics (and as activists) should be an

important question to address. Does our work enhance the field of possibilities and capacities

or does it take away the energy of other subjects who are engaged? A methodology that

brings embodiment, difference, and affirmation in the field of justice might bring another

375 See Tuhiwai Smith, and Battiste and Henderson.

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understanding of “‘our’ being in this together” from the singular position of subjectivities. In

the next chapter, I read first-person narratives by two Indigenous women who propose

distinct ways of envisioning justice in relation to their literary project in order to address how

the relationships, difference and incommensurability between my position as a feminist

settler critic and the authors’ position as Indigenous women writers affect knowledge

production about justice.

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CHAPTER 4.

“THE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HOW IT AFFECTS ME”: MEETING AN ANTANE KAPESH AND MINI AODLA FREEMAN IN THEIR

LITERARY TERRITORY

To ‘decolonize’ means to understand as fully as possible the forms colonialism takes in our own times.

Dian Million, “Felt Knowledge”

I want you to tell me how you feel about it, how it affects you, the things you know about how it affects you. Then we’ll have a better understanding; we’ll have a chance at a better

understanding of what it is we need to do.

Jeannette Armstrong

4.1 Introduction: Understanding Our Literary Relationships

Eukuan nin matshimanitu Innu-iskueu/Je suis une maudite sauvagesse [I am a damned

savage] (1976)376 by An Antane Kapesh and Life Among the Qallunaat (1978)377 by Mini Aodla

Freeman are first-person narratives that address the changes that took place in the 1950s, when

the settler state’s colonial project of expansion of its territories further north imposed deep

transformations on the authors’ Innu and Inuit communities. This period represents, for Kapesh,

the settlers’ invasion of her land and the creation of reserves. In turn, Aodla Freeman struggles to

376 The book was published in a bilingual format with the Innu version on left pages and the French translation on the right pages. 377 Qallunaat is the word for white people in Inuktitut. Qallunaaq is the singular form.

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adapt to a new environment in the South, in Ottawa, while her community suffers from

relocation further north. These texts feature strong female voices narrating their experience of

dispossession and displacement, feelings of confinement or estrangement. In my analysis, I have

aimed at exploring how their literary projects unsettle my assumptions, as a feminist settler

reader, or, said differently, I have wanted to challenge myself in proposing an affirmative

reading that would underline the strength of their voices. I have asked, forty years later, what can

I learn from their analysis of colonial relationships based on their lived experiences?

Kapesh and Aodla Freeman use very different literary strategies, tones, and structures to

engage their audiences. The former writes with rage about the imposition of the white ways of

living and the destruction of her culture; the latter offers a witty analysis of misunderstanding

and discrimination in her interpersonal relationships with qallunaat.378 Both situate their writing

in continuity with the intergenerational transmission of knowledge embedded in cultural

practices by referring to the stories that were passed on orally in their families. In addition, they

create a new type of relationship with their people, envisioning how their literary projects can

build connections to future Innu and Inuit audiences. Taking into account that they assert their

positions as mother, grandmother, daughter or aunt within their communities and perform these

roles through their writing practice, how can I understand their strategies for reaching out to

settler readers? What is my relation to them?

Je suis une maudite sauvagesse recounts the colonial expansion into and exploitation of

the Innu traditional territory, which intensified when the train reached the region and the Iron

Ore Company opened a gold mine, leading to the foundation of Schefferville. Kapesh’s

378 “Qallunaat” is used without capital letter in the text, a rule that I follow in this chapter.

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community was forced to settle close to Sept-Îles, where her children started to attend residential

school, and to move on two different occasions, until two reserves were created in the

municipality of Schefferville: Lake-John, where Kapesh decided to stay, and Matimekush.379 For

the author, the obligation to settle is one of the worst impositions of the colonial order:

“Nowadays, I, an Innu woman, feel very weary and nostalgic to remain in the same place. I can

only walk around my house and I know that, as long as I’m alive, I will not be able to escape the

run in which the settler has confined me” (Sau 151).380 In the course of forty years, her children

lose their language, because she had been unable to raise them the way her parents raised her,

and the nomadic style of life had been replaced by confinement in what she sees as an animal

run. She sees writing as necessary in order to share her analysis of colonialism with the next

generations. Kapesh’s writing creates a space that strengthens and valorizes the voices of her

people: “every Innu […] could talk about the extent to which the stranger has misled us since he

enslaved us” (Sau 99).381 In the preface, she states that “in [her] book, there is no white speech”:

her book is an Innu territory where she can speak up as Innu and as “sauvagesse,” a term that she

reappropriates proudly because she considers it is attached to her past life in the woods, before

living in the colonial space of the reserve.

In Life Among the Qallunaat, Aodla Freeman recounts growing up in her community of

Cape Hope Island, in the James Bay region, what is now Nunavut, as well as her experience in

379 The reserve of Maliotenam (Uashat) was also created at the time in the limits of Sept-Îles. 380 I use “Sau” to refer to the 2015 edition of Eukuan nin matshimanitu Innu-iskueu/Je suis une maudite sauvagesse. Translations are mine. I include the original version in footnotes: “Aujourd’hui, moi, une femme innu, je me sens très lasse et nostalgique à rester toujours au même endroit, il n’y a qu’aux alentours de ma maison que je me promène et je sais qu’aussi longtemps que je vivrai, jamais je ne pourrai m’évader de l’enclos où le Blanc m’a enfermée.” 381 “Chaque Innu… pourrait dire à quel point l’étranger nous a trompés depuis qu’il nous a asservis.”

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residential schools and in different jobs, including her work as a translator for the government

which leads her to move to Ottawa in 1957. At the time, she also witnessed the relocation of her

community from Cape Hope to Great Whales (Kuujjuarapik, Nunavik) further north: “as they

had not been allowed to bring their canoes, they had nothing with which to survive the strange

surroundings that they were adapting to. My father had never been idle in all his life, and there

he was with nothing to do” (Qa 69).382 The author links her experience of estrangement in the

South to her people’s struggle to adapt to “strange surroundings” in the North. Aodla Freeman

offers an Inuk woman’s views on the life of the qallunaat in the city, particularly in the first part

of the book, which starts with her arrival in Ottawa and her observations about the qallunaat

people’s things, habits, rules and laws. This “reverse ethnography” (Rak et al. 262) changes the

relation of power that comes with knowledge production about the other.383 While the title and

the three headings that structure the 1978 edition make the description of the qallunaat a central

aspect of the narrative,384 Aodla Freeman explains that she initially wanted the book to be titled

James Bay Inuit, since most of it concerns her life in the community (Qa xv). For her, writing

came from an obligation not to forget the Inuit ways, based notably on passing on knowledge to

the next generations (Qa xiv). As stories are considered central to Inuit pedagogy, hers are

382 I use the abbreviation “Qa” for the quotes, which come from the 2015 edition of Life Among the Qallunaat. 383 The title of Life Among the Qallunaat was thought up by the editor as a response to the anthropological work by German scholar Bernhard Adolph Hantzsch, My Life Among the Eskimos, published in 1977 (Rak et al. 265). 384 In the 1978 edition, these sections are organised into three major parts: Ottawamillunga: In Ottawa; Inullivunga: Born to Inuk Ways; Qallunanillunga: Among the Qallunaat, which according to Julia Rak, Keavy Martin, and Norma Dunning, the editors of the newest edition, “emphasizes the importance of the qallunaat sections more than the sections about the people of James Bay” (270). Indeed, the third section starts when Aodla Freeman is brought by the missionaries to the boarding school, but is about both her experience in schools and the return to her home in summers. It is interesting to note that the titles of the three sections chosen by the editor in 1978 are in Inuktitut and English, creating the impression of authenticity as if it were a choice of the author herself, which was not.

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spaces of education for younger Inuit who confront changes in their lives as well as for qallunaat

who would seek to learn respectful ways to relate to the Inuit.385

In my analysis of the texts, I ask how to read Kapesh’s Innu speech and Aodla Freeman’s

Inuit storytelling as a feminist settler scholar, taking into account the texts’ different audiences.

The context of reception has changed since the 1970s. Both texts have been republished in 2015,

a context marked by “the changes to the image and use of memoir as a genre and […] the rise of

Indigenous literature and orality as recognized areas of study” (Rak et al. 261).386 Moreover, the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission has brought attention to the renewal of relationships

between Indigenous peoples and settlers, and crystallized the value of speaking up, as the

Survivors’ testimonies have been central to the Commission’s methodology to establish truth. I

ask, what are the conditions of production and the aims of the authors as they decide to “speak

up”? How can I read together Kapesh’s fierce critique of colonial paternalism and Aodla

Freeman’s witty analysis of the qallunaat’s “immature,” discriminatory behaviours? Am I able to

hear—and to listen—when Kapesh shouts her rage on the page? Do I appropriately read—and

learn from—the silences that Aodla Freeman describes in moments when she has to deal with

discrimination? I acknowledge my desire to listen and learn from the texts while being aware

that colonial habits pervade these actions and the ways in which I conceive of them.

In this chapter, I ponder how to read these texts ethically from a feminist, non-Indigenous

position, in relation to my objective of reimagining respectful relationships between Innu or Inuit

385 The editors of the last edition comment that her book “will not only educate qallunaat but will also empower generations of younger Inuit, who continue to grapple with the impacts of the twentieth century” (Rak et al. 269). 386 In the latest edition of Life Among the Qallunaat, Aodla Freeman explains that distribution of her book was jeopardized because over half of the copies were stored away while awaiting verification that she did not say anything compromising about residential schools.

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and settlers. The difficulty of finding satisfying answers has challenged me to rewrite this

chapter many times. In what follows, I look back at the work I have produced over the last two

years, taking as the centre of my analysis my relationship to the texts established during this

period through different versions of this chapter. I discuss what was attractive to me in them and

what was not quite satisfying. This methodology brings me to adopt a more personal academic

voice, which allows, I contend, meeting the authors in their literary territory, characterized by the

importance of lived experience and embodied positions, and taking responsibility for my reading

as a feminist settler scholar.

From this position, I realize now that a challenge has emerged from the tension between

the academic timeline of productivity and the impossibility of producing a reading that I would

find satisfying enough to put an end to my work with the texts. This difficulty has become a

unique opportunity to reflect back on some of my critical habits and to reconsider the way in

which I construct discourses around literary texts. Therefore, this chapter emerges from unique

circumstances and does not pretend to offer an analytical strategy to be applied to Indigenous

women’s writing in general. However, I do aim to contribute to a better understanding of literary

criticism as a relationship that involves bodies, desires, and anxieties. These aspects of

knowledge production are worth academic attention if the goal is to imagine decolonial tools for

criticism.

4.2 Reciprocity as a Feminist and Decolonial Practice of Reading

My experience of reading Kapesh’s and Aodla Freeman’s “contact stories” has been

shaped by their different tones and different experiences of colonial relationships. Aodla

Freeman understands the relationships between Inuit and qallunaat as a series of exchanges,

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which are nevertheless marked by unequal relations of power. Contact with the qallunaat had

already changed the Inuit a long time before, notably with their conversion to Catholicism. The

author neither idealizes nor demonizes the qallunaat culture and states it would take another book

to explain her preferences in both cultures (Qa 70). For instance, in the chapter ‘Grandmother’s

qullik was very bright,’ Aodla Freeman explains the technology used by her grandmother, the

qullik or seal oil lamp, to get light in the early morning. She describes how the Inuit women

fixed and trimmed the wick and liquefied the fats of the seal in order to use these lamps. She

herself has known electricity from a young age and electric lights are part of her life; she says

that now she “can reach up and switch on a gadget” in order to have light (Qa 18). She adds,

“Though I realize how lucky and in comfort I am, I will never cease to believe that my ancestors

were smart and resourceful” (Qa 18). This view contrasts with Kapesh’s rejection of all aspects

of the white life, which are threatening her traditional way of life: “When the white (man) blocks

the rivers to produce electricity, I don’t see any purpose for me, an Innu woman living in the

wood. Electricity is not part of my culture, but is part of the white people’s. As an Innu woman, I

am more worried now about our hunting territory because this is my life” (Sau 116).387 Kapesh’s

rage-filled description of the effects of colonialism on her life is based on the recent exploitation

of the Innu traditional territory: “I, an Innu woman, find it brutal and harmful to live the

stranger’s life as we do now” (Sau 137).388 One aim of this chapter has been to examine how

settlers’ readings of Indigenous literature as “truth” can be unsettled by the different ways in

387 “Quand le Blanc barre des rivières pour en tirer de l’électricité, je ne peux pas voir à quoi va me servir cette électricité à moi, une femme innu dans le bois. L’électricité ne fait pas partie de ma culture, elle fait partie de celle du Blanc. En tant que femme innu, je m’inquiète à présent davantage de notre territoire de chasse parce que c’est cela ma vie de femme innu.” 388 “Moi, une femme innu, je trouve brutale et néfaste la vie que nous vivons maintenant qui est celle de l’étranger.”

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which Indigenous women’s first-person narratives are constructed and by their understandings of

colonialism based on lived experience.

My project of reading these texts together stems from my belief that putting emphasis on

this diversity aligns with feminist practices that are attentive to differences and to subject

positions. Based on Dian Million proposition that “To ‘decolonize’ means to understand as fully

as possible the forms colonialism takes in our own times” (“Felt Knowledge” 55), I originally

argued that Kapesh’s and Aodla Freeman’s first-person narratives sharpen present analysis of

colonialism presenting different forms that colonial relationships take.389 However, considering

the various ways in which I have written on the wealth of these texts, I have wondered what it

means to “understand as fully as possible.” Jeannette Armstrong’s Okanagan concept

“naw’qinwixw” helps me to envision an answer:

I’ll try and tell you how I see it, what I know about it, how I think about it, how I feel

about it, how I feel it might affect me, or affect things I know about, and that will help

inform you. But I’m requesting the same things from you. I want you to tell me how you

feel about it, how it affects you, the things you know about how it affects you. Then we’ll

have a better understanding; we’ll have a chance at a better understanding of what it is

we need to do. We can only do that by giving as much clarity from our diverse points of

view. So, to seek the most diverse view is what naw’qinwixw asks for. (Armstrong 8-9, in

Million, Therapeutic 27, my emphasis)

Million uses Armstrong’s concept to think about “the sociality of working toward a more

expansive idea of community that [Armstrong] see[s] as an Indigenous feminist one articulated

389 I use italics to mark statements that I retrieve from earlier versions.

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and emerging from struggle” (Million, Therapeutic 27). For me, naw’qinwixw significantly links

subjective experience to the value of community and allows me to imagine the literary texts I

analyze as part of a community composed by Indigenous women writers. My understanding of

this concept has evolved as I wrote this chapter. I wanted to be able to read Kapesh and Aodla

Freeman together to underline how they see, know, think, feel and are affected in different ways.

Although I thought of my work as producing another “view” that dialogues with the texts, I did

not quite imagine my work as involved in the type of reciprocity Armstrong is describing, mostly

because my experience of colonialism has nothing to do with the authors’. But is that difference

and distance not what brings “the most diverse view”?

In previous versions, although I wanted to shape my methodology based on my reading

of the texts, I put a distance between my own subjective position and the position of feminist

settler readers. I believe now that it is this distance that enabled me to write several different

interpretations of the texts: they did not present incorrect readings of the texts, but they were not

grounded in the materiality of my relationship to the texts. I consider now that the focus on my

embodied and affective relationship to the texts, rather than my position as feminist and settler,

makes for a more committed feminist methodology. Prioritizing relationships in my literary

criticism means that 1) I underline that the texts do not speak for themselves, presenting history,

experience or a message, but they are constructions with which to engage; 2) I do not pretend to

be a distant critic; and 3) I aim at finding balance between my objectives and the texts’ visions.

The result has been that, rather than analyzing the text, I write on “the things I know about how it

affects me” and examine the relationship between my situated and lived experience of reading

and the authors’ embodied methodology to write on colonial injustices, mediated by the literary

territory of the texts themselves. In what follows, I discuss how I constructed three previous

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versions of this chapter, and start from their productive aspects and shortcomings to explore my

critical habits in relation to my literary analysis of Kapesh’s and Aodla Freeman’s narrations.

4.3 First Reading

4.3.1 Their Analysis of (in) Present Time

When I first approached the texts, I was astounded by the editor’s comment on Life

Among the Qallunaat in 1978, that, upon her arrival in Ottawa, Aodla Freeman had to grapple

“with a white—qallunaat—world that was hundreds of miles and seemingly hundreds of years

distant from her James Bay home.”390 In this quote, the North and South constitute distinct

space-times, which, notwithstanding the editor’s good intentions, operate within a line of

progress that renders the people living in the North fixed in the past. Although the concept of

progress has been largely criticized, it continues to mark common visions about the legitimacy of

the settler state’s sovereignty and about the value of Western education, laws, literacy, and ways

of life. I originally proposed to read Kapesh’s and Aodla Freeman’s stories as enacting

Indigenous sovereignty,391 putting into place in their literary projects Indigenous views of time

and place, which should not be interpreted through colonial categories.

390 Another statements of this kind was by Alex Stevenson, Former Administrator of the Arctic, who explains in the foreword of the 1978 edition that the 1950s was “an era of rapidly increasing public interest in Canada’s vast northland” and that “the native people were no longer living in the isolation of their past way of life” (9). 391 Ted Chamberlin argues that stories are crucial to maintaining bonds with the land and justifying the right to inhabit it. The editors of the volume Storied Communities claim that generating new narratives is essential in order to build an Indigenous political future. They define a politics of narrative, which accounts for the conditions in which a story is told, and the ways in which it intervenes in the formation of a community (15). In other words, narrative’s capacity to fix meaning (defining a community) is its political power, which for them has been

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Aodla Freeman’s narration, I argued, unsettles the binary oppositions between tradition

and contemporaneity, conservatism and adaptation, and resistance and inclusion/assimilation

through her account of how Inuit teachings have helped her cope with the challenges she met in

the city. She presents the possibility of embodying her Inukism in the present and in the city as

she analyzes the qallunaat’s cultural difference from her Inuk perspective. In a recent interview,

she explains that her nieces and nephews now live in houses, and that she thinks that her book

can help people who move from their communities to cities to cope with this transition.392

Kapesh, in turn, insists on asserting that the life before the arrival of settlers was better. At first, I

saw the danger of reading this literary strategy as situating the space and time of justice in a

pristine past. I highlighted that the mobility of Indigenous knowledges was crucial to Indigenous

futures (Hunt), challenging what Joanne Barker calls the evolutionary framework, which situates

Indigeneity in terms of a transformation from “pristine past” to “tragic contamination.” Kapesh’s

text refused a nostalgic view on Innu culture, notably through giving no access to details of her

childhood in the woods. Rather, her text directs attention to the illegitimacy of the colonial

enterprise, which is based on the misconstrued ideas that “Indians” were “savages” and that the

white people brought them civilization.

I considered that settler readers’ long-lasting assumptions about sovereignty and progress

could make “them” interpret Aodla Freeman’s and Kapesh’s narration as attached to their past

life, a time before colonial relationships, a time before writing. This reading, based on an

held too long by the settler government and which should now be rearticulated from an indigenous perspective. 392 See “Culture shock: Mini Aodla Freeman recalls moving from James Bay to Ottawa in the 1950s,” an interview by Roseanna Deerchild, CBC, 29 November 2015.

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idealistic view of culture, would make their narration of “cultural life” a form of contamination

because of the recourse to a “white form of expression.” I wanted to explore other readings, and

argued that their texts showed the possibility for Indigenous knowledges, and particularly Innu

speech and Inuit storytelling, to be mobile and useful, for Indigenous subjects who live in either

the reserve or the city. By writing stories of (im)mobility together with their critiques of

colonialism, Kapesh and Aodla Freeman manage to strengthen their claims to the territory and to

pass on tools to the following generations to make sense of the transformation of Innu and Inuit

environments. Therefore, I understood these texts as offering an intellectual effort to make sense

of the deep transformations imposed upon their communities in a way that assures continuity of

their cultural practices for the next generations and assert, by the same token, their

contemporary presence on the land.

Although I still believe that it is crucial to unsettle assumptions about progress and

sovereignty, about colonial time and space, this version was not satisfying because the critiques

of colonial nostalgia, teleology, and colonial spatiotemporality were developed in diverse

disciplinary fields; I could not circumscribe precisely how Kapesh’s and Aodla Freeman’s

literary texts contributed to my understanding of these critical notions. These have been crucial

to understanding the issues to ponder when producing knowledge as a settler scholar, but they

have also created a distance between the texts and me. I felt the need to offer a different reading,

but only explained why, without producing one.

4.3.2 The Settler I Am Not

The first version of this chapter addressed how challenging reading Indigenous texts

should be. Sarah Hunt argues, “for non-indigenous people interested in engaging with

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Indigenous ontologies, this may involve becoming unhinged, uncomfortable, or stepping beyond

the position of ‘expert’ in order to also be a witness or listener” (31). I commented, the lack of

answers is surely unsettling for the expert who looks for better ways to be one. I kept looking for

answers in how the texts could enlighten my views, but could not identify what was truly

challenging to me, a feminist non-Indigenous scholar who does not believe in progress, who

values the knowledge contained in the stories, and who wants to support Indigenous peoples’

claim to sovereignty on this land where I live.

My objective was to read them in affirmative ways and prioritize their voices as women

but I could not figure out how exactly it would change my way of working, writing, and relating

to the texts. I could only imagine how these texts were challenging for an “ideal” settler reader

who had not become aware (yet) of the danger of the evolutionary framework. No one is

protected from reactivating binary divisions, anthropological concerns for tradition, and nostalgia

for the past in more insidious ways, because these beliefs are engrained in Western ways of

thinking. However, addressing the methodological problem does not tell me how these specific

texts can be challenging to me and how I can read the texts ethically.

The settler critic I imagined needing educating was not me. It has been much harder to

discuss my critical position, and yet, I feel, today, that this position is shared by most of the

settler scholars I know in the field of Indigenous Literary Studies. These scholars are informed,

aware of the traps to avoid, respectful, sometimes unaware of their works’ failures but ready to

be confronted on them, careful about doing further damage to the texts through inadequate

readings, and building relationships with Indigenous texts, individuals, and communities. As I

have argued in my reading of Aimititau, writing about how we/I occupy the position of the settler

is hard because once we/I identify as such we/I immediately want to take our distance with it.

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Letting go this figure of the “ideal” settler brings me to explore the materiality of lived

relationships. How am I establishing a relationship with the text and what do the texts allow and

refuse? In my analysis of Aimititau, I argued that establishing interpersonal relationship in the

literary territory requires a discursive analysis. In this chapter, my focus on relationship points to

a lived experience of reading the text that sheds light on structural relationships of power rather

than, for instance, on an interpersonal relationship between the author and me as reader. In the

next sections, I discuss how Kapesh and Aodla Freeman treat the figure of the settler in the text,

and reflect on the distance between these literary figures and the settler readers.

4.3.3 The Texts’ Relationships to the Settler

4.3.3.1 Kauapishit

Kapesh starts her book, “At first, when the white (man) arrived on our land,” [Au début,

quand le Blanc est arrivé sur nos terres], which addresses the history of her community in the

middle of the twentieth century, as the white people started to exploit the region: “When the

stranger wanted to use and destroy our lands, he did not ask for anybody’s authorization or for

the Innu’s approval” (Sau 93).393 Initially, I read her narration of this specific moment as

mirroring the history of the arrival of white settlers from the 17th century. Yet, her story of

contact describes the interactions of a recent past lived by the narrator. Unlike Rigoberta

Menchú, she does not seek to link her experience to other Indigenous peoples but strongly asserts

her experience as Innu.

393 “Quand l’étranger a voulu utiliser et détruire nos terres, il n’a pas demandé l’autorisation à quelqu’un, il n’a pas non plus sollicité l’Innu pour vérifier son accord.”

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Kapesh does not describe much of her interpersonal interactions with the white people,

but describes the different effects of the arrival of the settlers on her land. She personifies the

colonial system using the term “kauapishit” [le Blanc] which I translate as “settler(s),” “the white

people,” as well as the “white (man).”394 The Innu language has no grammatical gender395; yet,

when I read “le Blanc” in sentences that emphasize the masculinity of this figure through the

“neutral” pronouns “le” [the], “lui” [him], and “il” [he], I see a “white (man).” I do not mean to

neglect white women’s responsibility, but I believe that the use of “white (man)” as a figure

reminds us of the paternalistic and patriarchal aspects of colonialism, and that this interpretation

is supported by Kapesh’s construction of her voice as an Innu mother in opposition to that

figure.396

The books’ chapters read as a catalogue of injustices, organized according to the steps of

colonization, and to the different roles undertaken by the white (man): priests, traders,

professors, gamekeepers, alcohol sellers, policemen and judges, journalists and filmmakers,

policy makers, as well as common white people. Each chapter’s title highlights an aspect of the

white culture, referring to how these figures have participated in the dispossession of the Innu

people, under the form of: 1) exploitation of the land, 2) education in French, 3) distress caused

by alcoholism, 4) laws limiting hunting, 5) discrimination in the system of justice and its

application, 6) the misrepresentation of the Innu culture through dysfunction and stereotypes, 7)

forced displacement and creation of reserves, and 8) the common belief among white people that

the Innu people are “sauvages” and “sauvagesses.” The heaviness of this enumeration is

394 I write “white (man)” with a parenthesis to recall the intricacies of this figure in translation. 395 See Drapeau, Lynn. Grammaire de la langue Innue. Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2014. 396 In Kuei, je te salue. Conversations sur le racisme, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine writes that they use the term “white man” to describe white people: “À force de voir la puissance de l’ “homme blanc” (on vous nomme toujours ainsi au sein de nos communautés)” (23).

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overwhelming for readers who feel indignation at the violence of colonial oppression, which

affects all aspects of the author’s life. I read Kapesh’s narration of injustice from the

predisposition that I, too, consider these as extremely violent, and that I want to listen to what

she has to say about it. I want to be on her side and, at the same time, respectful of her speech.

From which position can I make this claim? I note that I do not recognize myself in the figures

that Kapesh describes as perpetuating racist violence and oppression. In fact, she probably does

not write to those people, who will most likely not read the book. So, does she write for a settler

audience at all?

In the description of the white people, Kapesh focuses on their malevolence, as they

imposed their decisions without consulting the Innu. She depicts the absence of exchanges and

discussions, and insists that “the white (man) does not tell the truth” (Sau 153).397 For instance,

when the school was constructed in 1953, the Innu were misled to believe that education would

be beneficial to their children who would then become priests, doctors, or engineers. Kapesh

recounts:

When we saw its construction, we never thought that this school would make us lose our

culture and we never imagined that later it would be the source of a miserable life for us.

When they built the school, they said all positive things and they presented all kinds of

good things. They proceeded this way, at first, to please us. (Sau 107)398

397 “Le blanc ne dit pas la vérité.” 398 “À l’époque où nous vivions dans le bois, nous les Innu, on nous a construit une école. C’était en 1953. Quand nous l’avons vu se construire, jamais nous n’avons cru que cette école nous ferait perdre notre culture innu et jamais nous n’avons pu concevoir qu’elle serait source de vie misérable pour nous plus tard. Quand on a pensé nous construire une école, on nous a dit toutes sortes de bonnes choses et on nous a présenté toutes sortes de belles choses. On a procédé de cette façon au début, seulement pour nous contenter.”

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Her knowledge of colonial deception enables her analysis of the white people’s shallow view of

cultural recovery twenty years later. When the white people include Innu lessons in school, in the

1970s, Kapesh sees that this decision is only meant “to please [them]” (Sau 111), since, she

explains, the lessons are for one hour a week starting in fourth or fifth grade. The hypocrisy of

the settlers when they arrived on her land is mirrored, in the repetition of the phrase “to please

us,” by the hypocrisy of the white people who are keen on preserving the “culture.” Kapesh

asserts, “Today, we often hear the white (man) say: ‘The Indian should be proud of the Indian

culture.’ I don’t believe the white (man) when he says that because he is the one who buried our

Innu culture and our language” (Sau 112, emphasis added).399 The author is distrustful of the

white people’s good intentions and weary of paternalism: “I can no longer hear the foreigner say

that he is my brother, I have enough of the white way of life. During the twenty years in which I

have lived in the same place, here at Lake-John, our house was wretched, I have endured all sorts

of ordeals and my children have been corrupted in vain” (Sau 148).400 Although I have chosen to

translate “kauapishit” as “the white (man),” I hear in my translation of this quote in particular the

absence of a feminist relationship between white and Innu women. I need a second translation

that reminds me of this absence: “I can no longer hear the foreigner say that she is my sister […]

I have endured all sorts of ordeals and my children have been corrupted in vain.” White feminists

have not been there to raise their voice, denounce the violence committed against Innu women

and children, and actually claim “sisterhood” in the fight against patriarchal, paternalistic and

399 “Aujourd’hui nous entendons souvent le Blanc affirmer: ‘L’Indien doit être fier lui aussi de sa culture indienne.’ Je ne crois pas le Blanc quand il dit cela car c’est lui qui a enterré notre culture et notre langue innu.” 400 “Moi, je ne peux plus entendre l’étranger me dire qu’il est mon frère, j’en ai assez de la vie de Blanc. Pendant les vingt années où j’ai habité au même endroit ici au lac John, notre maison était lamentable, j’ai eu toutes sortes d’épreuves inutilement et mes enfants ont été corrompus vainement.”

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colonial structures. Instead, white feminists have often reproduced the type of paternalism that

Kapesh condemns or have been unable to make the struggle against colonial domination part of

their priorities.

Kapesh suggests that the white people’s justice exacerbates the Innu people’s

marginalization, because the Innu continue not to be consulted, the white people’s view of

reparatory justice is superficial, and the application of law is deficient and discriminatory.

Kapesh recounts three occasions when the police have arrested her son. Once she witnessed two

policemen beating her son. When she complained to the chief of police, he denied everything,

but added, “You are lucky that I was not there when the policemen hurt your son because he

would be dead now!” (Sau 128).401 This story conveys the feeling that there is absolutely no

access to justice for the Innu: “When the policemen torture us this way, they fear no one: among

all the government officials who have been assigned to this job, there is really no one you can

trust to protect and defend us, the Innu” (Sau 130).402 The author adds that the Innu do not

contest the policemen’s distorted declarations, later, in court, because they fear their case will be

worse in the next arrest. This chapter is replete with stories about the police from various Innu

who had suffered arbitrary arrests, assaults, and false declarations in the court, which all

corroborate her son’s experience. The accumulating stories perhaps seek to convince the readers

that we can trust her. If the Innu are used to hearing such stories, we can think that Kapesh

recounts them to inform settler readers of the extent of their justice system’s dysfunction.

401 “Quand les policiers ont blessés ton gars, une chance que ce n’est pas moi qui étais là, il serait mort!” 402 “Quand les policiers nous torturent de cette façon, ils ne craignent personne : parmi tous ces fonctionnaires qui ont été affectés à ce poste, il n’y a vraiment personne de confiance pour nous protéger et nous défendre, nous les Innu.”

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As an informed reader, I understand both that the past and ongoing injustices she

describes are not acceptable and that post-colonial paternalism is in continuity with colonial

relationships. What has been more difficult to understand is that, regardless of my understanding,

Kapesh is suspicious of white people; she is suspicious of me. Instead of taking my distance

from the figure of the settler reader, how can I embody my position and see that, even when I

want to understand the rage and feel indignation, even when I want Kapesh to be free and live

her life according to her wishes, the text is still suspicious of my vision of justice. I want to

accept, without disengaging, that trust is not an a priori in the relationship between the text and

me.

4.3.3.2 Qallunaat

In contrast with Kapesh, Aodla Freeman puts the emphasis on cultural encounters as an

integral part of the Inuit life, because of the trade with the qallunaat, the proximity of the Cree,

and her own life in the city. Aodla Freeman explains that the term “qallunaat” has different

etymologies, like “people who pamper their eyebrows” (Qa 7) and “humans who pamper or fuss

with nature, of materialistic habit. Avaricious people” (Qa 86), but she specifies,

I know for sure that it does not mean ‘white man’—there is no meaning in it at all

pertaining to colour or white or man. I know for sure, too, that it was the qallunaat who

named themselves white men, to divide themselves from other colours, for it is surely

them who have always been aware of different racial colours. (Ibid.)

Her family taught her to avoid prejudices: “no matter how different people seem, either low,

middle, or high class, and especially whatever nationality they were. I was only to respect them.

Grandmother would say, you look very unhealthy if you practise prejudice” (Qa 35). In her

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grandmother’s teachings, the negative effects of prejudices are turned toward oneself first.

Moreover, she states that she never saw the missionaries as qallunaat because they had black

hair, spoke her language and were given Inuk names, like “Henariaaluvinik—the late Big Henry”

(Qa 85). Her understanding of being Inuk is not based on racial difference: “Inuit differentiated

themselves from the animals of nature, not from other races. ‘Inuk’ means a human; ‘Inuuk’

means two humans; ‘Inuit’ means many humans” (Qa 87).

Her education about cultural difference is based on the Inuit’s relationships to the Cree.

She explains that discrimination is something that only teenagers practise, associating it with

immaturity: “I have never known of any other discrimination among Inuit and Indians other than

teenagers, but they always grew out of them [sic]” (Qa 136). Child-rearing is an important theme

in the book that establishes a difference between Inuit and qallunaat. Aodla Freeman recounts

that, in her first visit to a qallunaat family, she was shocked by the kind of discipline imposed on

children:

They were not allowed to be normal the way children in my culture are allowed: free to

move, free to ask questions, free to think aloud, and most of all, free to make comments

so that they will get wiser. As they grow older, questioning becomes a boring habit—they

have gained wisdom and eventually become more intelligent. The more intelligent they

become, the quieter they are. (Qa 8)

Through her narration of various episodes of discrimination experienced in the South and of the

principles of Inuit education, the author encourages qallunaat readers to “grow up” and grow out

of their racist mentalities in order to engage with Inuit people in more human ways.

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Qallunaat present themselves as people-who-know yet are largely ignorant or wrongly

informed about the Inuit. She writes: “Who had ever heard about North? Every time I said where

I came from, it just seemed appalling to my questioners” (Qa 29), and later, “Whoever heard of

Inuk in the South anyway? Not the people I meet.” (Qa 62). In fact, what qallunaat know about

Inuit is based on stereotypes and prejudices. Aodla Freeman denounces the qallunaat’s view of

racial differences as dehumanizing and that she has not been considered “a plain human being

with feelings, aches, hatred, the desire to cheat, lie, love, adore, understanding, kindness,

humanity, pain, joy, happiness, gratitude, and all the other things that every other being was

capable of having, doing, thinking and acting” (Qa 220); rather, she is seen through cultural

stereotypes of Inuit as “a bunch of smiley, happy people” (Ibid.).

The book opens with this difficulty of establishing meaningful relationships with the

qallunaat in the South:

Whenever I meet a person for the first time, I am always asked, “How do you like the

weather?” The weather is something I am very aware of, just as I am aware of many

things which the qallunaat take so much for granted. Surely people in the South must

have more interesting questions than “How do you like the weather?” (Qa 3)

The question about the weather, repeated on several occasions throughout the book, becomes an

indicator of the qallunaat’s incapacity to establish authentic relationships with her, an Inuk

woman. When she finally meets a man who asks interesting questions like “What do you miss

most from home? What can you not get used to here?” she comments, “I was amazed by him. He

was the first qallunaaq I had met who asked very human questions. How come the people I see

every day do not ask me those questions?” (Qa 16). Beginning the book with this issue gives a

particular perspective on the book, which does answer this type of “human questions,”

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describing what she misses from home and what she cannot become accustomed to, and hence

proposing a different type of relationship that has not been possible for her to have with

qallunaat.

In the first chapter, she also recounts how the qallunaat girls living at the governmental

residency judged her by her appearance, when they first met her, considering that her hairdo was

“out of date and too long” and that her clothes were surprisingly “as up to date as [the girls’]”

(Qa 4). As they watch her unpack, the girls expect to see cultural objects that would mark their

new roommate as Inuk:

I concluded […] that they expected to see sealskin clothing, maybe along with a folding

igloo. When I got to the bottom, one of them asked, ‘Where are your clothes?’ I wanted

to laugh and say, as to any well-known friend, what do you mean? I have been putting

them in this locker. We sat and talked afterwards, and they asked, ‘How do you like the

weather?’

Aodla Freeman wants to laugh at the situation, but cannot share this type of humour with the

girls. One of the girls manifests their “immaturity” when she asks disdainfully where were her

“skins.” Aodla Freeman reacts but remains silent: “Well, it was too much for me. One of the girls

seemed to have the knack of saving everyone from the feeling of intrusion and said, ‘How awful

we are, watching her unpack.’ The others took the hint, said goodnight and left (Qa 4). Aodla

Freeman’s silence in episodes when she experiences discrimination attests to her wisdom and

self-control rather than to her passivity. Keavy Martin notes that, even when “it was too much for

[her],” Aodla Freeman did not make known her feelings in an outburst (“The Rhetoric” 4).

Martin explains that, in Inuit pedagogy, the use of silence, instead of a reprimand, allows

“individuals the cognitive space to reflect on their own behaviour” (“The Rhetoric” 5).

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Although silence can have an active function in her relationships with the qallunaat, the

author indicates that the feeling of estrangement in the South and the impossibility of

communicating with people prevent her from being herself.

The nurses and doctors spoke to me only when they needed a translator. Otherwise I was

different and strange to them. The people I worked with were polite, that was all. They

didn’t stand around with me to discuss little personal experiences, as they did among

themselves. I saw and I heard. I never made known my feelings or frustrations. Though I

was enjoying this adventure and found my classes challenging, there was something

missing. Humanity was not there, that which I had been brought up to need. I missed it…

I kept telling myself that I would know and feel it again once I got home. (Qa 194-195)

She misses the type of relationships that her environment, her home, enables. Even when she

meets an Inuk man in the South for the first time, she feels that her workspace does not allow her

to relate to him in the same way she would in the North:

I wanted to welcome him the way I would have in my own home, to make tea and

converse about his trip. My surroundings did not at all allow me to be me. The steel desks

seemed to say, you are part of us, do not act like a human being. There was a great big

lump in my throat and my tears were hard to keep back. (Qa 17)

This meeting makes her feel alone: “He made me wish that I had an Inuk girl to chum with, to

make comments about things I see in an Inuit way. No matter how hard I tried to communicate

with my qallunaaq [friend], my comments never seemed to hit her right” (Ibid.). On the one

hand, Aodla Freeman feels loneliness, as the type of communication she knows is not allowed in

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the South. On the other hand, she is aware of the ability or inability of her interlocutors to

understand her.

When I read about the interactions Aodla Freeman describes, I believe I would act

differently than the qallunaat she has met. As with Kapesh, I am drawn to take distance. In this

case, Aodla Freeman encourages qallunaat to take distance from their/our culture’s

“immaturity.” Her writing offers, at moments, possibilities of relating to each other beyond these

incommensurable differences, notably through letting readers identify with her critiques of the

qallunaat culture. Readers can agree, for instance, with her vision of how bureaucracy is

dehumanizing or with her critique of the consumerist society, when she describes qallunaat

shopping as “walking as if they had big loads on their backs, but there was nothing on their

backs, just little handbags in their hands” (Qa 8). Her comments about normative behaviours in

qallunaat culture have an effect of defamiliarizing rules that are considered normal and

beneficial. She suggests, therefore, that white culture is prejudicial to white people, that she

wants them/us to be able to question qallunaat environments and that other ways of living are

possible and desirable. The book, in which she can answer human questions and share feelings

and thoughts, becomes a familiar space in which she decides upon the types of relationships that

are created. Aodla Freeman treats the reader as she would like to be treated, that is, as an

intelligent person who can learn, adapt, think, and feel. The cognitive space that she creates

through her narration gives a particular responsibility to the reader to work on not being like the

qallunaat she describes. If Kapesh does not trust me as a settler reader because of the settler habit

of enacting paternalism in all types of relationships, Aodla Freeman trusts my capacity to learn

and offers a particular relationship that makes me responsible for engaging respectfully with her

text.

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4.4 Second Reading

4.4.1 Their Critical Voice

In my second attempt to read these texts together, I changed my strategy to focus on the

specificity of the authors’ critical voices. I argued that their literary projects are key sites to

explore the tension between gender justice and decolonization. The chapter was constructed

around close readings, organized in four sections (their views of their sites of enunciation,

colonial relationships, cognitive imperialism and justice), so that we could hear Kapesh and

Aodla Freeman’s visions. To put emphasis on their voices as women, I situated their texts in

relation to Indigenous feminist readings of the Indigenous women’s production of the 1970s.403

For instance, Janice Acoose considers that Maria Campbell’s memoir,404 published in 1973,

“established a new literary trend that encouraged Indigenous writers to create more realistic

images of Indigenous women and challenged eurocanadian readers of literature to re-examine

their former beliefs” (105).405 One of the ways in which these texts challenge settler readers,

Million argues, is that they “exploded the measured ‘objective’ accounts of Canadian (and US)

colonial histories” (Therapeutic 31). Although I proposed to read these texts as knowledge, it has

been hard to understand/live how their “alternative truth” affected me and affected the

production of my own discourse. I wanted to imagine that their challenge to settlers’ beliefs

entails more than eliminating stereotypes and deconstructing binary oppositions, and that their

403 The texts by Kapesh and Aodla Freeman have not received as much critical attention as Maria Campbell, Lee Maracle and Ruby Slipperjack. 404 Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973), a bestseller, has been considered as settler readers’ “first close-up view of Canadian settler colonialism, lived through the experiences of an Indigenous woman” (Razack et al. 1). 405 Janice Acoose does not capitalize “eurocanadians.”

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alternative discourses on colonial history transform the structures of knowledge production

rather than contributing to the proliferation of versions, of “alternative truths.”406 In fact, the

narration of these experiences arises from a specific epistemological ground: what matters might

not (only) be what they say about colonial relationships, but how they say it.

For Million, these authors offer a version of history “that can be felt as well as

intellectualized” (Therapeutic 62). The point for settler readers would be, not only to witness

their truths, but to feel them. If Million argues that colonialism is a “felt, affective relationship”

(Million, Therapeutic 46), how can settlers make sense of their involvement in it? In this regard,

I have come to realize that what the text does to me, how it affects me and what types of reading

feel right are relevant questions. The literary texts convene personal experience in the process of

producing knowledge and show me the way to write on what is closest to me. The resulting

analysis of colonialism comes from material relationship and embodied knowledge, rather than

detached truth.

4.4.2 A Long-Term Relationship With the Texts

If these texts provide critical insights, how do they affect my own process of knowledge

production? I propose to imagine concretely what it would mean to consider these texts as theory

and to relate to them as such. When I read texts like Leanne Simpson’s Dancing on Our Turtle’s

Back and Dian Million’s Therapeutic Nation, I learn concepts like “cognitive imperialism” and

“felt knowledge,” which enrich my thinking and writing. However, I do not learn only from

statements and concepts that can back up my arguments. From a fine theoretical work, I learn

406 See Womack for his critical understanding of experience in Indigenous texts and in the production of truth. He notes, “Just when minorities are insisting on telling their own histories, it would seem, they find out that history is fiction” (353).

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how to think, how to ask questions and how to write about Indigeneity, decolonization,

relationships. These texts are part of my academic landscape within which I have built

connections; they affect me and, even when I do not quote them, they are part of the

relationships that sustain my research. When I ask new questions and confront new difficulties, I

return to them and read them differently, discovering each time new aspects that they bring to

light.

I think that literary texts, like Kapesh’s and Aodla Freeman’s, can do a similar kind of

work. I want to learn to think through them, with them, and I envision this interaction as a long-

term relationship. Their texts will stay on my shelves, alongside other literary and critical books,

which I use for reference when I know they will be useful to my research. At the same time, I am

aware of the limits of reading them as critical theory: they do more; they do something different.

On the one hand, the claim that I can or should read them as theory allows me to imagine critical

theory and my relationship to the texts otherwise. On the other hand, I wonder if this proposition

only serves my needs, and am critical of what may well be a provisional way of establishing

relationship to the texts. What I have realized while writing this chapter is the impact of the texts,

based on embodied knowledge, on me. My analysis of the authors’ voices as Innu mother and

Inuk granddaughter has changed when I considered what has been hard for me to understand

rather than what the texts enlighten.

4.4.3 The Authors’ Voices as Women

4.4.3.1 Kapesh’s Analysis of Colonialism as an Innu Mother

While I want to imagine what justice could look like—what an ethical reading could look

like, Kapesh speaks as a mother from what she knows and what she has experienced. She seems

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to have no aim at imagining how I could read her text ethically or how we could relate in the

future. I feel compelled to listen to Kapesh in ways that would, in fact, go against her

understanding of settler-Innu relationships. There are no relationships between settlers and Innu,

in Kapesh’s book, that are not shaped by paternalism, except the one that the author establishes

with the readers, because she does not invert the power relation by telling settler readers what

they should do (how they should read). She wants them/us to take responsibility. Because of my

difficulty in identifying how the text reaches out to white people, it has been easier for me to

explore the links that the narration creates with the Innu community. After reading the text for

the first time, I had wanted to write on how powerful her writing was, while I did not quite know

what an affirmative reading would look like.

Kapesh’s role as a mother, first, comes in the narration through her inability to raise her

children in the bush. When she moved close to Sept-Îles in 1953, her children started to attend

residential school and were raised in a completely different culture, creating a break in the family

relationships:

It doesn’t make any sense that my children understand better their white professors than

me, and it doesn’t make any sense that the white professors understand my children better

than I do. Today, I have issues with my children who go to school: when I, an Innu

woman, speak to my children in Innu, they do not understand me, and when they speak, I

cannot quite understand them because my children barely speak Innu today. (Sau 113)407

407 “Ça n’a pas de sens que mes enfants comprennent mieux leurs professeurs blancs que moi et ça n’a pas de sens que les professeurs blancs comprennent mieux mes enfants que moi. Aujourd’hui j’ai des problèmes avec mes enfants qui vont à l’école : moi qui suis femme innu, quand je parle innu à mes enfants, ils ne me comprennent pas et quand eux me parlent, je ne les

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Although she dedicates her book to her eight children, this passage does not address them

directly, enacting through her writing the disruption of the intimate relationship with her

children.

Second, Kapesh considers her role as a mother in conflict with the white male figure,

whom she holds responsible for her children’s dysfunction: “I consider that the white (man) is

the instigator of all our disturbed actions as well as those of our children: it’s he who changed

our culture” (Sau 133).408 Against the claim that white education brings progress, she shows that

the white (man) “has raised” the Innu children badly and that the imposition of white culture has

only brought problems (Sau 137). This conclusion brings her to affirm that dysfunction is not

culturally rooted, but is the result of the white (man)’s domination. It is significant that Kapesh

understands the responsibility of the white people in disturbing her relationship with her

children, because she does not take the responsibility as a mother: “I do not like to see my

children wander. The white (man) has spoiled them and he should find ways to put them right”

(Sau 149).409 She asks settlers to take responsibility for colonial violence because they are the

ones who created the problems in the first place. On the one hand, she wants white people to

realize the extent of colonial violence, so that they can act differently and repair their misdeeds.

On the other, she asserts the value of Innu ethics but does not take responsibility to teach white

people about it.

comprends pas bien parce que déjà, mes enfants sont à peine capables de parler innu aujourd’hui.” 408 “Je considère que c’est le Blanc qui est l’instigateur de toutes nos actions déréglées d’aujourd’hui et de toutes celles de nos enfants: c’est lui qui a changé notre culture.” 409 “Je n’aime pas voir mes enfants flâner. C’est le Blanc qui les a gâchés et c’est à lui à chercher à les remettre dans le droit chemin.”

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While Kapesh speaks as a mother, I do not understand her role as a woman through an

abstract notion of motherhood, linked to the image of the Mother Earth or mother of all. This

image fixes the significance of women’s roles into an idealized comprehension of their

contributions to communities and seems to give everyone access to her teaching as an Innu

mother. The fact that Kapesh addresses her role in the education and transmission of knowledge

to the next generation, and that she talks about the affective bonds with her children is significant

in the context of colonialism, in which many women have been denied their political and public

status, as well as their most intimate bonding with their children, parents, family members,

friends, and with their own bodies. While the value of Innu education has been generally

belittled, as well as the capacities of Innu mothers to raise their children adequately, thinking that

Kapesh can teach settler readers as a mother would enact a form of appropriation (that is, taking

these teachings out of context to the service of settlers). In sum, Kapesh cannot be a mother for

her own children because of colonial management; she cannot be a “mother” either to settlers

who would like to learn from her Innu knowledge. However, she can be a mother to future Innu

audiences that will engage with her book.

Kapesh, indeed, reclaims her position as a mother offering teachings to her children and

to the next generations of Innu children, not about her past life, but about colonialism. This new

type of intergenerational communication envisions an Innu readership for books written in Innu

which does not quite exist yet. In the preface, “Language travels” [Le voyage du langage], she

contends,

In my book, there is no white speech. When I considered writing to defend myself and to

defend my children’s culture, I carefully thought about it because I knew that writing was

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not part of my life, and I did not want to leave for a trip in the big city because of this

book I was about to write.410

Kapesh moves across boundaries, not to occupy a white space (the city, the book) but to create

an Innu space from where to speak up, and to speak out. In so doing, she contests the colonial

imprint on her that made her sedentary, marked by the limits of the reserve and by the

categorization of the book as a “white” mode of expression: “It’s true, the Innu doesn’t have

books but here is what I think: every Innu owns stories in their head, every Innu could talk about

the life that we lived in the past and the one we live in the present” (Sau 99).411 Her book is an

Innu speech. I am not much interested in defining what an Innu speech is—does it rely on

language, identity, land, values?—because it entails defining what is and what is not “Innu.”

Rather, I underline how her assertion establishes a new type of relationship with a future Innu

audience.412 Again, the point is not to imagine or define this future relationship, but rather to

assert the importance that this relationship is out of the white people’s reach. In the epigraph,

addressed to her children, she expresses, “I would be happy to see another Innu writing a book in

Innu.”413 She adds later on, “There should be many books written in Innu so that children can

410 “Dans mon livre, il n’y a pas de parole de Blanc. Quand j’ai songé à écrire pour me défendre et pour défendre la culture de mes enfants, j’ai d’abord bien réfléchi car je savais qu’il ne faisait pas partie de ma vie à moi d’écrire et je n’aimais pas tellement partir en voyage dans la grande ville à cause de ce livre que je songeais à faire.” 411 “C’est vrai, l’Innu n’a pas de livre mais voici ce que je pense: chaque Innu possède des histoires dans sa tête, chaque Innu pourrait raconter la vie que nous vivions dans le passé et la vie des Blancs que nous vivons à present.” 412 Quotes from Kapesh’s book, considered recommendations from an elder, have been included in the rationale of a project for the integration of Innu language and culture at school, the Tshiueten Project. This project has been led among others by Saguenay’s Native Friendship Centre, which has reedited Kapesh’s book in 2015. Another example of how Kapesh’s text resonates with younger generations is Naomi Fontaine’s choice of one of its passages as the epigraph of her most recent novel, Manikanetish (Mémoire d’encrier, 2017). 413 “Je serais heureuse si je voyais un autre Innu écrire un livre en langue innu.”

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read them” (Sau 113).414 Kapesh insists that her book is not a Western cultural artefact, nor a

form of assimilation, and that the white has no voice in it. Moreover, her voice, intelligence,

thoughts, and history are not rooted in literacy and in what the white (man) brought them, but in

the transmission of knowledge over generations.

For instance, Kapesh’s rewriting of the state’s version of the history of the discovery of

iron in the Innu territory stems from knowledge passed on in her family. Kapesh recounts that, in

1970, for Schefferville’s centenary, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau came to make a speech, in

which he referred to Father Babel as the discoverer of iron ore. Surprised by this story, which she

had never heard from any other Innu (Sau 100), Kapesh went to see her father who tells her,

“Don’t pay attention to this lie. The story you just heard, the stranger has invented it”

(Sau 101).415 Oral history indicates that it is Tshishenish Pien who showed Fathers Babel and

Arnaud where to find the iron. Kapesh writes,

You will never find this story in a book because, before the foreigner taught us his

culture, we, the Innu people, did not write to recount the past. Now that the white people

have taught us their way of living and they broke ours, we have lost our culture, and this

is why we, too, need to write like the white people. (Sau 99)416

414 “Il devrait y avoir plusieurs livres écrits en Innu pour que les enfants puissent les lire.” 415 “Voyons, n’écoute pas ce mensonge. L’histoire que tu as entendue aujourd’hui, l’étranger vient de l’inventer.” 416 “Ceci est l’histoire de Tshishenish Pien et des Pères Babel et Arnaud. Vous ne trouverez cette histoire nulle part dans un livre car avant que l’étranger nous enseigne sa culture, nous les Innu, n’avions jamais vécu de telle manière que nous écrivions pour raconter les choses du passé. En ce moment, maintenant que le Blanc nous a enseigné sa façon de vivre et qu’il a brisé la nôtre, nous regrettons notre manière de vivre à nous, c’est pour cela que nous devons maintenant, nous aussi, écrire comme le Blanc.”

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Through this story, Kapesh situates her writing in the context of resistance against cultural

genocide at the same time as she asserts the oral transmission of history in her family. Her book

continues this practice, offering an Innu version of historical truth, by recounting the process of

colonization in the Innu ancestral territory. As her father did with her, she shows her children

how to recognize the colonizers’ lies.

One of the original contributions by Kapesh is the proposition of an alternative history of

contact, which is based on a fictive reported speech of what the white people did not say or

should have said:

We have never heard the white (man) telling us, or sending us an official letter in which

he tells us: ‘I am white and you are Innu. The land where you live belongs to you, Innu; I

know this is not my land. But I will tell you something, I will ask you something, I will

make you a request.’

The white (man) has never told us: ‘Would you agree that I come to live on your land

with you? Would you agree that I use your land? Would you agree that I destroy your

land for my profit? Would you agree that I build dams on your rivers and that I

contaminate your rivers and lakes? Before accepting my request, think about it and try to

understand. You could regret your decision to let me live on your land in the future,

because if you agree, I will open a mine. Then, I will exploit and destroy your territory.

And I’ll block the rivers and soil your lakes. What do you think? Would you like to drink

polluted water? (Sau 94-95, emphasis in the original)417

417 “Nous n’avons jamais entendu le Blanc nous dire et nous n’avons jamais reçu de lettre officielle dans laquelle il nous dit: ‘Moi, je suis Blanc et vous, vous êtes Innu. Les terres où vous êtes, il est vrai qu’elles vous appartiennent à vous, Innu; je sais, ce ne sont pas mes terres à moi.

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This extensive passage is an example of the rhetorical strategies used by Kapesh throughout the

book to criticize the actions of the white people. She talks for the white (man), making explicit

his twisted mind. Kapesh wants the white people to tell the truth, but she certainly does not want

them to express what she imagines as being their truth. The satirical tone used by the author

creates the possibility of understanding the colonial past through the lens of an Innu analysis of

the colonial project, which contravenes the Innu’s principles of diplomacy, legal order, and

social organization. The creative rewriting of the white (man)’s speech is an act of resistance,

which calls into question white discursive strategies to justify domination. This passage also

constitutes a unique example of the appropriate of white voice by an Indigenous woman, in a

long, ongoing history where the opposite has taken place.

My reading of Kapesh’s literary strategy attests to my desire to focus on the strength of

her voice as well as on the new links her literary project creates. I wonder how such a reading

connects to Kapesh’s affirmation that “[her] culture no longer exists today.” In one passage,

Kapesh criticizes that the media only represents the Innu as dysfunctional and damaged and that

the Innu children cannot see the positive aspects of the Innu culture, like the building of canoes,

the preparation of timitshipashikan [the best Innu food], or the techniques of fishing and hunting

Mais je vais vous dire quelque chose, je vais vous demander quelque chose, je vais vous faire une requête’. Le Blanc ne nous a jamais dit: ‘Vous les Innu, êtes-vous d’accord que j’aille me joindre à vous dans votre territoire? Êtes-vous d’accord que j’utilise votre territoire? Êtes-vous d’accord que je détruise votre territoire pour mon profit? Êtes-vous d’accord que je construise des barrages sur vos rivières et que je pollue vos ruisseaux et vos lacs? Avant que vous, vous n’acceptiez ma requête, réfléchissez bien et essayer de bien comprendre. Il pourrait arriver que vous regrettiez dans l’avenir de m’avoir permis d’aller vous rejoindre chez vous, car si vous êtes d’accord que j’aille sur vos terres, j’irai pour y ouvrir une mine. Une fois la mine ouverte, je devrai ensuite exploiter et ruiner toute l’étendue de votre pays. Et je barrerai toutes vos rivières et salirai tous vos lacs. Qu’en pensez-vous? Aimeriez-vous boire de l’eau polluée?”

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(Sau 139). She writes, “I am well aware that it is, nowadays, very hard to show me my true

culture of an Innu woman because my life as it was before no longer exists (because my culture

no longer exists today). When I think about it, only in my mind did I conserve my past life”

(Ibid.).418 If her memories about the past life remain vivid in her mind, and the book would give

her a chance to transmit this knowledge, her writing addresses the embodied conditions of her

present life marked by the injustices of the colonial system. She addresses what is closest to her,

which is the impingement on her parenting capacities. I have struggled to understand her

statement, “my culture no longer exists today.” It seemed to contribute to the belief that

“Indians” are of the past or meant to disappear. My first reaction was bewilderment, thinking

about the Innu writers who have published after her and whom I have heard speak proudly about

their culture. I have also heard, however, Joséphine Bacon explain that the Innu-aimun of the

Nitassinan, the ancestral territory, is not the same language as the Innu-aimun spoken in the

city.419 On second thought, I understood that it is true that Kapesh’s culture as she had known it,

in the woods, no longer exists. In her statement, “culture” is attached to the Innu language and to

a set of practices related to living on and with the land that are no longer part of her life. Her

statement is both a reminder of the devastating effects of colonialism and a provocation to

readers to let go of their idealistic desire to touch, live, know her culture. What settler readers

need to know is not her culture, but cultural genocide. Moreover, even as the Innu work toward

cultural affirmation and resurgence, it does not absolve settlers of their responsibility to engage

in reparations for colonial violence.

418 “Je sais bien qu’aujourd’hui il est très difficile de me montrer ma vraie culture de femme innu parce que ma vie d’avant n’existe plus aujourd’hui (parce que ma culture n’existe plus aujourd’hui). Quand j’y médite, il n’y a que dans ma tête que j’ai conservé ma vie d’autrefois.” 419 Personal notes. “Journée Aimititau! Parlons-nous! à l’Espace de la diversité,” organized by Mémoire d’encrier, Montreal, 28 Septembre 2017.

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4.4.3.2 Aodla Freeman’s Education as Inuk Granddaughter

While Kapesh states that her culture no longer exists, Aodla Freeman claims that she is

between two cultures: she has learned from both her grandmother who raised her after the death

of her mother at the age of three and from her education in qallunaat schools, notably how to

manage her emotions while being far from home. She stresses the opposition between the South

and the North, between Ottawa and James Bay, associated with different ways of living, types of

knowledge, and pedagogies. In qallunaat environments, she learns from her observations and

interactions, to which she often reacts by remaining silent. In contrast, her education in the Inuit

ways was through stories shared by her parents and elders.

In the chapter “School is not the only place of education,” Aodla Freeman recalls one

year that she stayed at home with her family and heard many stories. She explains that “stories

were passed on verbally from generation to generation […] Sometimes, someone would invent a

new one or tell the old ones over and over” (Qa 111). Aodla Freeman herself contributed to “the

memory of [her] ancestors” (Ibid.) with her story about Nakuk and Maviak who are looking for a

name for their newborn son. Nakuk imagines him as a great hunter of muskox, their principal

source of livelihood, which is becoming scarce, and decides to call him Malittak, meaning, “he is

followed.” He calls him this based on his hope to see many herds of muskox again. But, at that

moment, the qallunaat prohibit them from hunting muskox for the next fifty years. Nakuk is very

troubled and thinks,

We are very fortunate that our son does not know and will never have to know how to

hunt muskox, for he is fresh and will have the strength to be a great seal, polar bear,

whale and narwhal hunter. Yes, he is very fortunate; for this we will name him Arlu—

killerwhale—the most feared and relentless hunter of the seas. (Qa 113)

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Among other teachings, her story tells about the value of being able to adapt to new

circumstances as Inuit. This story fulfils one objective of the book itself, which is to show how

she could manage to live in the South among the qallunaat, helping younger Inuit people to

grapple with a new life. While I considered, at first, the significance of this story only in relation

to the Inuit, I interpret it now as showing qallunaat the Inuit’s remarkable capacity of adaptation

as well as teaching them about the value itself of adapting to other environments and other

peoples.

Aodla Freeman speaks of a story that her grandfather shared with her, a prediction that

Big Henry, one of the qallunaat missionaries who integrated into the community made: “Symma

would tell us, ‘This is what Henariaaluk—Big Henry—used to talk about, that the qallunaat will

have wars, that the future will be worse, that one day our land will be full of qallunaat, that no

one will know the other, that there will be unrest among Inuit” (Qa 85). Big Henry’s prediction

recounted by Symma has gained power by the time Aodla Freeman reinterprets it years later in

another context. When she moves to the South and her people is forced to move to Great Whale,

she writes, “Today, I keep thinking about those predictions, that I thought at one time were just

stories” (Ibid.). She places herself in the position of most readers who could think that stories are

“just stories,” and yet, she expresses how significant they are in Inuit ways of making sense of

events: “There may be no war in Inuit land and there may never have been one, but I begin to see

that there is unrest among Inuit. Certainly qallunaat are becoming many in our land and the Inuit

are beginning not to know each other” (Ibid.). While Kapesh’s family stories were meant to

redress truth in historical records, Aodla Freeman refers her to a prediction that was made in the

past that enables her to become aware of the changes in relationships between Inuit people. Other

stories included in the book, like the one she has invented, mentioned above, are also turn toward

the future by giving indications, teachings, about how to live, to adapt, to relate to others.

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In Ottawa, although she could use Inuit teachings to adapt to the new environment, Aodla

Freeman had to educate herself about the rules that organize the qallunaat’s life. She describes

the oppressive feeling caused by the obligation to follow all these rules, including walking in

designated spaces in the park (Qa 48-49), eating at the right time, and following the

governmental residence’s diverse rules, which “made [her] feel [she] could not move unless

[she] was told to” (Qa 3). In contrast, she presents the rules of her culture as an integral part of

who she is: “My culture has rules too, but I learned them when my bones and brain were soft, so

they were easily embedded and put there to stay. I keep telling myself that I was born twice, once

to grow and learn my own culture, and secondly, to learn qallunaat culture” (Qa 70).

Understandably, it is much easier for her to navigate within the codes of her own culture. With

the image that these rules were inscribed in her body from a young age, Aodla Freeman conveys

the difficulty of changing our habits. Again, the author creates a bridge with settler readers,

showing sensitivity about the uneasy task of modifying what she sees as their immature

behaviours, which are otherwise often accepted in qallunaat culture. She shows, through her own

example as a woman, the possibility of being critical of certain rules when they become

prejudicial.

According to the wedding tradition, Aodla Freeman was tied to her angilissiak, “waiting-

for-you-to-grow-up” (Qa 70), an Inuk chosen for her when she was a baby in an agreement made

between her father and the boy’s parents. As a young woman, she accepts work as a translator at

the Moosonee hospital, thinking that she is not ready to return home and marry (Qa 193). When

the time comes that her father asks her to come back home to plan her wedding, Aodla Freeman

explains, “I felt nothing. I did not feel bad about going with them or not. As far as I was

concerned, I was in the hands of the people who knew the course of my future. I could not fight

my elders, but nothing was said” (Qa 204). She trusts her elders, with reason, because her

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grandmother ultimately pushes her to go back to the South to avoid the marriage. She considers

that the man is not good enough, that he is too lazy: “I could see that Grandmother had no

choice, and I sure did not either. I looked at Grandmother. I had always thought that she would

be the one who would force me to marry and strongly follow the traditions, but it was not so”

(Qa 205-206). Her elder shows Aodla Freeman the possibility of not following tradition when it

puts her at a disadvantage.

The author does not criticize the wedding arrangements for the lack of freedom they

impose on her, because she recognizes their importance in the relationships between families.

She also sees that, in many cases, it facilitates the life of women and is part of her integration to

the community ties (Qa 56). Her acceptance of these rules, even after confessing that she was not

ready to marry and leave her life learning and working in the South, surprised me at first because

of my own understanding of freedom. I note, however, that, for the author, what was felt to be

more constraining were the various rules in the South that differ from her ways of living: “Who

is free? Not I, as long as I lived in the South” (Qa 48-49). Her position as a woman is never

detached from her experience as an Inuk, and my reading as a settler is marked by feminist

teachings. One of them is that, as white women, we must work at dismantling the paternalism

that structures our relationships with women of colour and Indigenous women. Another is that

there is a diversity of feminist positions and of experiences lived by women that are sometimes

incommensurable.

Aodla Freeman uses the image of “gifts” to speak ironically of cultural exchanges or,

more precisely, of what qallunaat men have brought to the Inuit in the North. She recounts that

qallunaat men, in the North, treat Inuit women as sexual objects, without taking responsibility for

unexpected pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, referred to as their “gifts” to Inuit.

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Aodla Freeman concludes, “And, of course, it does not happen only in that community—it has

happened in the four corners of the world” (Qa 57). This comment situates gender violence in a

global context, rather than as particular to Inuit communities. In this context, arranged weddings

can be seen as beneficial to Inuit women as a way to avoid this type of sexual violence. Another

example of gifts are those made to her grandfather and leader of her community, Weetaltuk, who

had various tools as well as windows in his house, “which he must have received from a

qallunaaq friend” (Qa 86). These gifts, unlike the unacknowledged pregnancies or the diseases,

are consciously made to build a relationship, but they are nonetheless harmful. The author

comments, “That was probably how it began, how the qallunaat came to rub off their

materialistic nature on the simple Inuit of Hudson Bay who had depended on nature alone”

(Ibid.). In addition, one day, qallunaat brought army clothes to the men of her community, which

she didn’t like because the men “looked overpowering and strange” and the clothes had an

unpleasant smell (Qa 83). These examples suggest that qallunaat transform Inuit relationships in

ways that allow different forms of gender violence and bring a particular view of masculinity.

While gifts are usually a good thing that supposes reciprocity, Aodla Freeman presents them as

unwanted source of disruption. In turn, the qallunaat do not receive gifts from the Inuit yet we

can think that something they could have received would have been the teaching of a gift

economy in which exchanges are reciprocal.

What makes both cultures on equal footing in the text is the poor sexual education given

to qallunaat and Inuit girls. Aodla Freeman recounts her experience of being a girl growing up in

both cultures. Her first menstruation is a source of bewilderment.420 Her grandmother tells her

420 Kim Anderson writes, “Our ways of dealing with taboos around menstruation are perhaps the most common example of the need for better education and a critical practice of tradition” (A

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she is now a woman, but explains her new state with very evasive terms, saying that she

shouldn’t be touched by men or otherwise the bleeding would stop. At school, the nuns are

worried that young women would get pregnant and mistake the irregular period of the young

Aodla Freeman for a sign of pregnancy. Puzzled by the situation, Aodla Freeman tells them that

many men have “touched” her, not understanding the use of the euphemism. The nuns are forced

to explain to her how babies are conceived, an explanation that differed from the one she had

heard from her grandmother. She reflects, “I know now that it was the boys who were taught

when they reached an age—the time to know about sex—not the girls. The girls would learn

from their angilissiat when the time came. I had not reached that stage. I was utterly confused

and did not know who to believe” (Qa 170). In this case, Aodla Freeman speaks of her confusion

and criticizes the lack of education in both cultural settings.

Moreover, when puberty comes, no one, at home or at school, explains to her how her

body would change. That year, the nuns refused to hang up her school portrait because “[her]

chest was too obvious” (Qa 172). She states, “Believe me, the nuns were as old-fashioned as my

grandmother” (Ibid.), an association between Indigenous and settler that is not often seen.

Perhaps Aodla Freeman wants to convince the readers that the problems with Inuit traditions are

not caused because these are outdated; white culture has similar types of problems and can be

“old-fashioned.” These stories indicate, specifically to feminist readers, that Inuit women do not

need to “liberate” themselves from certain Inuit traditions that could appear constraining,

particularly if only to be caught afterward in Western patriarchal relationships or in paternalistic

Recognition 37). For her, “a critical practice of tradition” entails avoiding traditions that “exclude women, render them invisible, or shame them” (Ibid.). She proposes in her book strategies to reaffirm traditions in affirmative ways.

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dynamics. However, they can use their wisdom to avoid oppressive behaviours and violence

whenever possible. This wisdom is passed on from the grandmother to the author to younger

Inuit women. The author states that, at that moment, she decided she would raise her daughter

differently: “It was so vague, it sounded so mysterious, and a bit frightening (I swear on the solid

ground I walk on today that my daughter will know everything)” (Qa 171). When, years later,

she became the supervisor for the middle school girls in Moosonee, she taught them the way she

would have liked to be taught (Qa 255). Based on her experience and her grandmother’s

teachings, she indicates that one can enact changes when cultural codes are deficient.

The stories she recounts of her childhood and her process of growing up as an Inuk

woman create a relationship with the readers in which she encourages them to accept learning

from other peoples. Aodla Freeman opens up the possibility that Inuit pedagogy teaches

something to the qallunaat, and I do want to learn from her text. However, she does not provide

easy pathways for settler readers, but allows them the space to “grow up” to the standards of

their own intellectual and affective capacities.

4.5 Third Reading

4.5.1 Their Literary Project

In the third version of this chapter, I built on my previous work to ask how the authors’

critical voice challenged my vision of feminist, decolonial justice. I concentrated on how both

authors understood their voices in relationship to their people. Reflecting on the audience to

which they address their narration, I have asserted that the force of their literary engagement

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comes from making their writing matter to their “cultural,” local contexts,421 in the way they

establish new links to the community and reach out to the settlers from a position of strength.

Despite the fact that Kapesh and Aodla Freeman’s first-person narratives seem to reach out to

settler readers by putting emphasis on listening and learning, their texts do not provide a vision

of a harmonious future or a future of reconciliation, in which their speech becomes the starting or

ending point of liberation (ours, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous, or theirs, as Indigenous).

Kapesh’s Innu speech can be interpreted as creating relationships with(in) her community

and with future generations, yet she also warns settler readers that Indigenous peoples’ resilience

cannot be a sign for them to disengage or evade their responsibility to actively work in

eradicating colonial attitudes and practices. On the other hand, Aodla Freeman’s friendly

invitation to learn with her is complicated by her understanding of Inuit pedagogy, in which

silence provides a cognitive space where the interlocutor can learn. They demand settler readers

to take responsibility and to be able to learn from other models than the white one. The texts do

not teach settler readers about Innu and Inuit visions of justice; instead, they enable types of

relationships with the readers that require of them long-term engagement, from their own

contexts, beyond their relationships to the literary texts.

4.5.2 Making the Difficulty the Object of Analysis

The lack of answers is surely unsettling for the expert who looks for better ways to be

one. I have written this sentence in the first version of this chapter, when I could not foresee what

would become the most challenging aspect of my relationship to the texts. After not being

421 See Altamirano-Jimenez for her explication of how “local meanings” matter to Indigenous feminist practice.

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satisfied, again, by a version of this chapter (the third) that I submitted to my supervisor, the

latter suggested that I make the difficulty the centre of my attention. In the context of my work

with Kapesh and Aodla Freeman, my difficulty was to write a chapter that was satisfying enough

and I did not consider writing about my own academic anxiety. However, I realized that I was so

interested in the specificity of their literary critical voice that I did not consider my own process

of producing knowledge on the texts. I have started to ask myself about the types of relationships

that my literary criticism established through these versions that brought me anxiety. Because I

had learned from the texts how it matters to produce knowledge from one’s own positions, I

could redirect my attention to the materiality of my links to the texts.

I had the impression that I understood better what the text does in relationship to an Innu

readership, than to a settler one. However, that does not feel right because I am in no position to

evaluate what the text does in a local context. On the other hand, I have expressed my anxiety

about producing a text that feels right, that can be useful or that could illuminate our/my

understanding of colonial relationships. I suspect, now, that this anxiety operates within the

structures of the colonial “felt, affective relationship,” in which particular knowledge or action

feels right.422 In regard to felt common knowledge, some people have to unlearn their views of

Indigenous peoples as “culturally exotic,” as victims or as vanished. I have insisted at various

moments on the necessity not to idealize Indigenous cultures; yet this has been a basic felt and

intellectualized knowledge since the beginning of this project. Rather, I may have to inquire into

422 As I explained in the introduction, Million argues that a non-Indigenous passenger on a bus that sees immediately the Indigenous person who sleeps as drunk is not ignorant, but reiterates “felt common knowledge, perhaps informed by disgust or boredom, but rarely curiosity, the invitation to inquiry” (Therapeutic 47). In other words, prejudices do not stem from ignorance, but “felt common knowledge.” The problem is not (just) what we do not know but what we “know.”

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my own desire to find answers, enlightenment, in the texts; what I may need to stop idealizing is

the work I would like to do as a scholar. As I write this chapter, I feel that I need more

relationships and less detached knowledge, more humility and more tools to express sources of

bewilderment. In what follows, I engage with the spaces that, I consider, the authors leave open

to interpretation.

4.5.3 The Spaces Where We Can Meet

4.5.3.1 “How Will the White Woman Consider Us in the Future?”

While Kapesh creatively engages with what the white people did not say in the past, she

leaves open what they will say in the future. The last chapter, “How will the white (man)

consider us in the future?” [Comment le Blanc nous considérera-t-il à l’avenir?], prefigures no

resolved future and leaves it open to the readers to take responsibility to answer her question. In

this chapter, she mentions one occasion in which she has heard white people telling the truth,

which is when they say (when they realized?) that the Innu no longer know how to live. Kapesh

often hears people say, “The damned savages from Schefferville don’t know how to live,” and

she responds, “The white (man) tells the truth when he says that. He has taken our culture and

our land and today, it is true, we don’t know how to live” (Sau 154).423 The white people’s

statement is meant to denigrate the Innu, but Kapesh considers that they, in fact, denigrate

themselves. She reappropriates the pejorative terms and concludes by claiming, in the post-face,

that she is a “damned Sauvagesse”:

423 “‘Les maudits sauvages de Schefferville ne savent pas vivre.’ Le Blanc dit vrai quand il dit cela. Il nous a volé notre culture et notre territoire et aujourd’hui, c’est vrai, nous ne savons pas vivre.”

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I am a damned Sauvagesse. I am proud, today, when I hear people call me Sauvagesse.

When I hear the White (man) pronounce this word, I understand that he is telling me over

and over again that I am a true Innu and that I was the first to live in the woods. Now, all

that live in the woods belongs to the best life. May the white (man) always call me

Sauvagesse.424

This passage is strong because it subverts the white (man)’s voice, which loses its power to

instill shame in the Innu, but it also unsettles white readers that would prefer using a respectful

language. Kapesh points to the risk that, behind the white people’s respect, there can be a denial

of the value of her view of the best life and of the ongoing state of colonial relationships.

A crucial message is that, before the imposition of the white literacy and the white laws,

“[they] were more civilized and [their] life was more acceptable” (Sau 132).425 Through the

description of peace practised by the Innu, she re-appropriates the language of justice:

The settler should have left them in peace, he shouldn’t have attempted either to

command them or try to teach them everything. He should have thought: “I am now on

the Innu territory and they govern themselves and they are self-sufficient.” This is what

the foreigner should have noticed when he saw us for the first time. If the foreigner had

424 “Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse. Je suis fière quand, aujourd’hui, je m’entends traiter de Sauvagesse. Quand j’entends le Blanc prononcer ce mot, je comprends qu’il me redit sans cesse que je suis une vraie Innu et que c’est moi la première à avoir vécu dans le bois. Or, toute chose qui vit dans le bois correspond à la vie la meilleure. Puisse le Blanc me toujours traiter de Sauvagesse.” 425 “À l’époque où nous n’étions encore jamais allés devant les tribunaux, nous étions plus civilisés et notre vie était plus convenable. Ce n’est ni la prison ni les tribunaux qui nous ont civilisés.”

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kept his culture for himself, we would have kept ours and there wouldn’t be so many

conflicts between settlers and Innu. (Sau 97)426

Kapesh describes what could have happened if white people had not imposed their culture: the

Innu would not have imposed their ways either. She adds that the white people would probably

not have been able to adapt to Innu laws, relativizing the incapacity of the Innu to adapt to the

white system while asserting the existence of the Innu legal order.427 Kapesh states, “The Innu

always took care of the foreigner who had the idea of coming on our territory. We have never

heard of even one foreigner… that had been maltreated or assaulted by the Innu in the same way

as the white people treat us” (Sau 105).428 She does not treat the readers as settlers treat the Innu,

notably through paternalistic behaviour. Therefore, she does not teach settlers, but speaks of their

responsibility: “And if the white (man) does not want to understand that it is his task to seek

peace with us, it’s he who should go back from where he comes from” (Sau 154).429 This

statement, which is the last sentence, makes me understand that Kapesh’s rage-filled tone is not

meant to cut off relationships, but that it is also not her task to imagine what peace between

white people and Innu will look like. In her vision, we, settlers, should find ways to establish

426 “Le Blanc aurait du leur laisser la paix, il n’aurait pas dû essayer de les commander ni d'essayer de tout leur apprendre. Il aurait dû se dire : ‘Je suis arrivé en territoire innu, les Innu se dirigent eux-mêmes et se suffise à eux-mêmes.’ C’est ce que l’étranger aurait du remarquer quand il les a vus pour la première fois. Si le Blanc avait gardé sa culture pour lui-même, de notre côté nous aurions gardé la nôtre et aujourd’hui il n’y aurait pas tant de conflits entre Blancs et Innu.” 427 Legal scholars Jean-Paul Lacasse and Valérie Cabanes explain, “The Innu juridical order can be defined as the set of rules that the Innu people decided on to live together before the influence and the imposition of European-inspired laws” (144, my translation). 428 “C’est toujours l’Innu qui a pris soin, à l’intérieur des terres, de tous les étrangers qui ont eu l’idée de venir sur notre territoire. Et jamais nous n’avons entendu dire qu’un des étrangers dont les Innu ont pris soin dans le bois, et qui se trouvait pourtant seul, a été maltraité et offensé par eux de la façon dont lui le Blanc nous traite les Innu.” 429 “Et si le Blanc ne veut pas comprendre qu’il lui revient à lui de rechercher la paix avec nous, c’est lui qui devrait retourner d’où il est venu.”

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relationship differently, ask the Innu what they think, and consult them on their vision of peace.

White people, after all, are responsible for the dysfunctional behaviours of Kapesh’s children as

well as for the dysfunctional relationships between the Innu and settlers. Kapesh expresses her

desire for white people to engage in reparations for what they have done, without saying what

these should look like.

The last chapter of Kapesh’s book ends with a question that I find difficult to answer.

However, I want to feel engaged in the task of responding and I reformulate her question: How

will the white woman consider us in the future? I am writing from Kapesh’s future. I am

impressed by the strength of her political voice. I understand, through the question she is asking

me, her future reader, that I must be able to raise my own political voice. It matters to me to

participate in actions that unsettle colonial structures and colonial relations, and I see this

research, despite its limitations, as one, and certainly not the only one, of the possible actions.

Before beginning my doctoral studies, I knew very little about colonial history, Indigenous

politics and theories, and Indigenous women’s writing. Reading Kapesh and other Indigenous

voices has changed me. I consider Kapesh as Innu and as equal and I am also worried that,

through saying this, I am putting forward my own vision of equality, of what is just. I hear that

Kapesh wants to be considered “sauvagesse,” in the sense that she knew how to live a good life

in the woods before the white people arrived to her land. Now that the white system of justice

has been imposed on her people, she underlines that the Innu are not treated the same and do not

actually have access to justice.

I am in Kapesh’s future. The context has changed since 1976; there have been different

truth commissions and various moments of settlers’ “coming out of ignorance.” However, many

things have not changed. In 2015, as I was working on Kapesh’s writing, Indigenous women

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denounced the physical, psychological and sexual abuses by police officers of Val-d’Or. These

testimonies reminded me of Kapesh’s denunciation of police abuses of force against the Innu.

Considering that one year after, in 2016, we learned that there would be no prosecution against

the police officers of Val-d’Or, I do wonder if forty years from now Innu women will still have

to fear and live these abuses. Forty years from now, will Indigenous women be able to trust the

police and the white people? How to hear and read this type of testimony by Indigenous women

was one of the questions I addressed in this thesis. I do trust Kapesh’s testimony and the

Indigenous women of Val-d’Or’s testimonies, and consider that, if we were to impose our system

of justice upon their own, we should be able to provide them with security, equal treatment, and

the possibility to live a good life that would not have to be based on resisting colonial violence.

4.5.3.2 Toward Being “Inuk-Washed”

Another type of storytelling in Aodla Freeman’s book, apart from the stories that have

been passed on to her and those about what she experienced, is what she has witnessed. In the

chapter “I am in the middle,” she gives an account of what she has seen while working at

Frobisher Bay (Iqaluit), another Inuit community. She notes that people there are “in the middle”

as she is. She recounts the story of an Inuk who has taken a job and is now caught between his

desire to go hunting and the obligation to follow a qallunaat schedule. He wants to “feed his wife

and children on the seal,” so he goes hunting and loses his job because he is seen as “unreliable.”

Later, the hunt stops being successful and he has no money left:

… his problems and worries are swelling up in his mind. His wife no longer looks up to

him with happiness when he used to bring in seal—she is too wrapped up herself with the

problems that have arisen in her home. The husband finds some friends who are making

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homebrew or who have bought from the qallunaat, at five to ten dollars, a bottle. He finds

this drink very intriguing and it makes him forget his problems. So now he sleeps in the

day and gets up at night when his friends are available… His home begins to be a regular

meeting hall. His wife, who is terrified (in some cases) of people who drink, is no longer

amused by her regular visitors. The rules that were given to her by the qallunaat to have

the children in school are no longer an obstacle. She has a greater obstacle to overcome:

her drinking husband. (Qa 51-52)

The new attitude of the husband is as worrying as the school where the children have to go,

which are both causes of familial disruptions. In addition to that, she learns that “she has

tuberculosis, one of the many gifts her ancestors have received from the qallunaat” (Qa 52), and

her parents have to take care of her children.

Aodla Freeman, then, recounts the story of the qallunaat working in the North who are

“in the middle between their jobs […] and their authorities in the South” (Qa 52). The authorities

in the South are disconnected from the problems faced by Inuit. They care about making sure

that qallunaat going North can adapt so they give them “survival courses” and provide them with

the commodities they are used to. However, they do not think about giving similar resources to

the Inuit who are dealing with various issues. In this case, the qallunaat’s silence is not a sign of

respect, but a sign that they do not consider Inuit thinking and feeling people. They make

decisions about Inuit lives without consulting them. For instance, they plan the construction of

houses in their settlement in an environment that they don’t know without asking for their

advice, and if the Inuit raise an issue, they are not heard. The author notes, “To them, the Inuit

did not seem to have that problem. They remember their smiles and handshakes…” (Qa 52).

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In Aodla Freeman’s account, one qallunaaq distinguishes himself because he becomes

affected by the Inuit environment and by his relationship to the Inuk man, whom he follows, one

day, on his hunt trip, reversing the logic of the “gifts” described above:

On the whole, he enjoys it all—the freedom of not having to look at the clock for once.

He sees igloo building, harpoons being used, stalking of seals, dogs being harnessed, the

whip being handled. He sees how an Inuk can handle a mass of dogs with few commands,

how an Inuk can get out of ice chunks when stuck with his sled… For the first time, he

sees the Inuk as a capable person. (Qa 54)

Coming back from the hunt, he goes to the Inuk’s home and begins to understand Inuit ways,

language, arts and customs: “To him, the Inuit are human after all, with feelings, ways,

affections, able to think, capable of a daily life which he would never choose for himself. His

way of approaching the Inuk begins to change…” (Qa 54). He adopts certain habits of the Inuit

and when he is back with the qallunaat from the South, he reacts differently: “He lets his

colleagues and boss dream on with their big plans, and he agrees to them […] No matter how he

feels and how much he understands the Inuk way, he chooses to be quiet and to sit back and

listen. He is now ‘Inuk-washed’” (Qa 55).430 The choice of the word “Inuk-washed” leads to a

particular understanding of the qallunaat’s transformation as “involuntary […] (like

brainwashing might)” (Martin 6). He has changed by living with the hunter, in the Inuit territory,

and not through, for instance, convincing explanations of how and why he should change. Keavy

Martin explains, “the qallunaaq has been purged of some of his immature tendencies, and his

430 Martin explains that while working on the reedition, the editors “retrieve the term ‘Inuk-washed’ from Aodla Freeman’s original typescript; the 1978 Hurtig publication had instead rendered that line, ‘He is now Inuit’ (56). And indeed, the process of becoming accustomed to Inuit ways of thinking is not exactly the same as being Inuit” (“The Rhetoric” 6).

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behaviour is now conditioned unavoidably by his experience in the North” (6). If Aodla Freeman

opens the possibility of recognizing each other, the only positive outcome she presents is when a

qallunaaq man recognized an Inuk man as a capable human and changed his way of seeing and

knowing the Inuit. No other story included in the book entails recognition between a qallunaaq

and an Inuk woman or one that involves the author herself. Rather, as I showed above, the

author’s relationships with other women in the South are marked by the difficulty of

communicating, even with friends.

Significantly, what makes the qallunaaq “Inuk-washed” is not an overt defence of the

Inuit point of view, with which he is now familiar, but his silence while he disagrees with his

boss and colleagues. The reason is that he “wonders how his boss will understand him” and fears

that “what he says will affect his job, which he cannot afford to lose” (Qa 55). Martin expresses

her discomfort with the man’s silence in a context in which he continues to profit from the

activities of the administration: “the ethics of this imitation become questionable indeed” (“The

Rhetoric” 6). She considers that it might be his responsibility to say something that could change

the qallunaat’s decision-making process. Yet, she also notes, “It seems safe to assume that the

author does not equate being ‘Inuk-washed’ with being complicit in oppression” (“The Rhetoric”

8). I admit to my own uneasiness with this passage, particularly because I imagined how difficult

it would be for me to keep quiet and not jump into the discussion. I am not sure, however, if the

desire to speak would emerge out of a sense of responsibility or of a feeling that I know better or

both. Perhaps, for the man, challenging his boss, thinking he knew the best way to “deal with”

the Inuit, would have been another way to be an immature qallunaaq.

I note that the qallunaaq’s decision not to contest his superiors’ decision does not come

from a retreat but from the knowledge that they will not change their mind. I read his silence,

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therefore, as active learning to embody knowledge otherwise. Aodla Freeman describes the

man’s transformation as physical shifts: “he no longer talks fast, no longer feels like giving rules

that only he understands, but explains in a way that the Inuk will understand… he no longer

hurries, and even his posture is no longer like a stiff, frozen seal. It has become thawed, warm,

and the Inuk realizes that he too is human after all” (Qa 55). The focus of her narration is not on

how he benefits from his job with the government, but how he benefits from these physical

changes induced by his relationships with the Inuk man. The latter recognizes his own humanity

in the change of his embodiment. Furthermore, what impresses me in the story is that the

qallunaaq does not only change in relation to the Inuit, but also to the other qallunaat. We are/I

am used to thinking about the problems of colonialism as an issue concerning the relationships

between Indigenous peoples and settlers, between each one’s interests and rights. For Aodla

Freeman, qallunaat culture has negative effects on the qallunaat as well as on the Inuit, and she

suggests that Inuit teachings may change the way in which qallunaat interact.

In Aodla Freeman’s text, silence is not necessarily attached to consent, shame or

complicity, and bodily responses play a role in communication. Because Aodla Freeman

indicates that silence has value in Inuit education, readers should look beyond what she utters in

her stories, to understand what she avoids mentioning. The author treats the reader as she would

like to be treated, although she might be more upset than she shows by the attitude of settler

readers. What is remarkable about silence in Aodla Freeman’s narration is that “this tactic gives

a large amount of credit to the intelligence of the misbehaving person” (Martin, “The Rhetoric”

5). The literary project is a space of recognition in which Aodla Freeman offers a different kind

of interaction than the hunting trip. The qallunaaq reader can recognize her “as a capable person”

through her ability to construct her narrative and deploy literary strategies, and she, in turn, can

recognize the readers’ capacity to relate to the text in ways that change them. In the text,

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however, qallunaat are recognized as humans not for their capacity to speak, explicate or

administer, but actually to remain silent even in situations in which they know better.

What Aodla Freeman’s writing asks of the reader seems opposed to Kapesh’s own

understanding of the readers’ implication. While the former points to the value of the intimate

space of change, which is created through meaningful relationships with people and with the

land, and makes me question the pertinence of intervening for Indigenous peoples against

colonial domination, the latter challenges me to have a political voice against colonial

domination and makes me see my responsibility in finding ways to relate to Kapesh, and to the

Innu people, respectfully. Both conclusions matter to the way I position myself as a scholar, a

settler, a feminist, a person engaged in thinking about the decolonial process.

4.6 Conclusion: Meeting The Authors in Their Literary Territory

When I first imagined how to organize the corpus of my thesis into chapters, I had thought

that there was no methodological imperative to organize the texts into a chronology. Still, I have

imagined this chapter as the second one, partly because I saw its links with Rigoberta Menchú’s

life writing. When I started to rewrite this chapter as a discussion on how I had constructed it, in

a more personal voice, it had become, obviously, the final chapter. In order to write it, I needed

my discussion of how difficult it is to identify as a settler (the current chapter 2) and of how

settler critics can situate themselves through critical perspectives in ways that sometimes prevent

affirmative relationships to flourish (chapter 3). I also needed Rita Mestokosho, Joséphine Bacon

and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s powerful messages to give me the strength to understand my

own embodied position incommensurable to but in relationship with these texts. In fact,

perspectives from Critical Race, Feminist, and Indigenous Studies taught me the imperative to

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unsettle the position of settler readers and the multiple risks of reasserting damageable dynamics,

but they did not show me how to do so. Although there are powerful examples of scholars who

write in more personal ways, I find it easier to work from a certain distant academic tone because

I know better what it looks like and what is expected. I now believe that a more personal

description of the dynamics of knowledge production in literary criticism provides new

methodological tools in order to approach the texts.

The answer to my question of what I learn from these texts about colonial relationships

does not matter as much as the preoccupation with how I learn with the texts to ask pertinent

questions. In fact, the texts did not do what I originally wanted them to do: to show me or teach

me, much in the way that critical theory does, how to sharpen my comprehension of colonial

relationships—at least, not in the ways I expected. I have learned through attending events that

create connections between Indigenous peoples and settlers that the latter need to learn and relate

to the former, but should not put the burden of teaching on them. First, it seems right to imagine

that Indigenous peoples and settlers usually have very different visions of teaching and learning.

Second, the emotional labour that Indigenous peoples in all types of domain need to perform

when they commit to educating settlers should be acknowledged. This brings me to formulate an

ethical concern underlying my dissatisfaction with previous versions of this chapter: what does it

mean for settler scholars to remain detached while producing knowledge on decolonizing

practices? What kind of emotional labour do we, settlers, refuse to engage in? The initial

question leading the construction of this chapter had to change to: how does the particular

relationship between the texts and me, in the context of this thesis, change me as I tried to

develop decolonial practices of reading?

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To write about my experience of writing this chapter has become for me an ethical way of

establishing a relationship with the texts. It has been hard to write with this personal critical

voice, because it is difficult to adopt the right tone, not too self-centred and not too detached. At

the same time, it has also been easier because speaking of what is closest to me, the materiality

of my embodiment and affects while I read and write, brings me a self-assurance, not that what I

say is true, but that I explore the affects that are at play in colonial relationships. I am aware that

I am not transparent to myself, just as the authors do not offer transparent narrations of their

lives. To write from these problems has been an opportunity to revise my close readings of the

texts. While I had focused on how they could enlighten my views of decolonial strategies of

reading, I shifted to explore the opacity of my critical habits. For the first version, I was not

aware that I was establishing a distance between my embodied and affective position and the

position of the “ideal” settler critic. In the second version, I wanted to find illuminating answers

in the texts without involving myself too much: by putting emphasis on the authors’ voice in

their local contexts I created another type of distance. In the third version, I wanted it to be easy

to write about these texts, because, after all, I know about literary criticism and about how to

construct chapters. In this last version, however, I have aimed at some kind of reciprocity. The

result has been a narration of how I have changed through my reading of the texts, how I have

been thinking with them and how they have shown me ways to explore colonial affective

relationships otherwise.

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CONCLUSION.

AFFIRMATIVE READINGS OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S WRITING

Writing is an act of courage for most… Writing is also a gift… Along with the gift came instruction to use this gift on behalf of love. I feel a personal responsibility and a strong desire to

tell the truth. Sometimes that desire is a physical craving as I sit in front of my machine, sweating, hurting, struggling with a contra language to conceive new words.

Beth Brant

au bout des déconstructions se tient planant

l’espace de tout ce que tu veux d’autre

Béante, Marie-Andrée Gill

Literary Texts as Gifts

At Kwahiatonhk!, Wendake’s First Nations Book Fair (2017), Roseanna Deerchild spoke

of her last volume of poetry, Calling Down the Sky, which narrates her mother’s experience at

residential school as well as the effects on their relationship: “mama calls me babe and my girl /

but cannot say i love you” (16). Deerchild recounted that she had heard only as a teenager that

her mother had attended residential schools, for the latter was not then ready to speak about her

experience. When she finally was, Deerchild could not listen to her. In the volume, she writes,

“mama’s voice / begs me to hear her / to take this story from her / but I am not ready / my angry

hands / still cannot hold / our stories together / too thin threads / break between us / mama does

not speak / again / the silence blankets” (21). Both needed to be ready, to bring their “stories

together,” to engage in this exchange between the daughter’s “angry hands” and her mother’s

voice. The poet recounted that the process of listening to the stories, writing them down and

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receiving her mother’s approval when she “got it right” lasted five years.431 Through this

process, they connected as mother and daughter, Survivor and intergenerational Survivor,

storyteller and poet.

Deerchild did not only listen: recreating these stories through poetry allowed her to give

back to her mother a “gift of memories,” the title of one of her poems: “mama sitting in the

middle / surrounded by her children / her long braids / her blue dress / these are pictures / of my

mother / that do not exist / I would make them for her / a gift of memories” (78). In her talk at

the Book Fair, Deerchild spoke of literary texts as gifts, certainly referring to this particular

exchange with her mother, but also conveying that this book is a gift to the readers. In an

interview on CBC (21 July 2017), she stressed the particular responsibility that hearing these

stories gives Canadians to act so that this type of violence never repeats itself again.

The gift reminded me of the same image used by Mini Aodla Freeman to invoke

undesired cultural impositions by the qallunaat. Thinking of literary texts as gifts supposes

another kind of dynamics, one in which qallunaat respectfully receive Inuit insights and engage

in reciprocal exchanges.432 Life Among the Qallunaat offers the author’s perspectives on,

memories of, and visions for the James Bay people, the qallunaat and the relationships between

them. If we consider this text as a gift, what type of responsibility does it demand from readers,

from literary scholars? Can literary criticism “offer back” some insights in return, in ways that do

431 See the interview with Deerchild on CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/books/calling-down-the-sky-1.4079237 21 July 2017. 432 See also Rauna Kuokkanen who engages with the image of the gift in relation to the academic context in Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift.

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not resemble cultural impositions? Can settler readers engage in reciprocal relationships with

Indigenous literary projects?

In this thesis, I have looked at two types of texts—the epistolary genre and life-writing—

arguing that they establish particular relationships with readers. The correspondence creates an

interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers based on exchanged words, which

create an intimacy that would not be possible otherwise: “We could leave a few chosen words at

each other’s door to show our mutual respect” (Morali in Ai 8).433 They build a relationship that

differs in many ways from face-to-face encounters, notably because the genre allows time and

distance to explore the possibilities and failures of cross-national communication. In turn, first-

person narratives allow different types of relationships both within the writers’ own communities

and with settler readers, by offering their views on justice, dispossession and discrimination, as

well as on their literary projects. Their ways of reaching out to settler readers is particular to each

text. However, in all cases, settler readers are invited to respond to Menchú’s, Kapesh’s and

Aodla Freeman’s views of non-hierarchical relationships, peace and mutual respect on other

grounds than the reiteration of colonial relationships, although it is also impossible to evade

colonial relationships.

Unsettling Colonial Habits

When I started to imagine this research project, I knew very little of the Indigenous

peoples of Quebec, Canada and Latin America apart from a particular historical version of

colonialism. I became aware of my ignorance of Kébec and Kanata’s colonial violence and

433 “Nous pourrions déposer quelques mots choisis à la porte l’un de l’autre pour nous signifier mutuellement notre respect.”

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contemporary Indigenous politics in a moment in which I was studying dictatorial and

patriarchal violence in the South. I realized that, at the university, analyses of our context, our

present, in both the South and the North (though differently), makes no space (or little space) for

Indigenous voices, lives, communities, visions and epistemologies, and that, at the same time,

aiming at listening to the voices of Indigenous peoples—and reading their texts—is steeped in

tensions, discomfort, anxieties, as well as hope, certain types of desires and particular feelings of

justice. From my position as a feminist student, I chose to read Indigenous women’s writing

because I wanted to think with them about our context of ongoing colonial and patriarchal

structures of domination, and because I wanted to address the question of difference between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples as well as between women. Methodologically, I

imagined an intersection between the debates concerning difference, subjectivity and

relationships in the fields of Indigenous and Feminist Studies. I have framed my reading of

Indigenous women’s writing in each chapter through the politics of location, which I originally

learned from feminist theorists and activists, and understood better through my relationship to

the texts.

The first chapter on Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony reflects my preoccupation with

research made in the North about violence happening elsewhere, while overlooking violence at

home. Menchú’s testimony is the only text of my corpus that is part of the world literature canon,

that has been widely read, and that has received a daunting number of critical responses. Chapter

one asks how settler readers from the North can hear her as an Indigenous woman beyond the

denunciation of violence in the South. What does our practice of reading this text in the North

tells us about settlers’ incapacity to acknowledge violence in their/our own context (Kanata, the

United States, Turtle Island universities)? In order to break the cycle of violence in our readings,

in literary criticism, manifested notably in producing analyses of Indigenous texts that serve the

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interest of settlers, I have insisted on what affirmative ethics Menchú’s text puts into operation in

relation to distant readers, but also what it does beyond the responses that these readers provide.

In my own context, Tiohtià:ke, Aimititau! Parlons-nous! was one of the first texts in

which I encounter the voices of Indigenous writers. The epistolary genre puts emphasis on the

exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous positions. However, the writers engage with

each other through their visions and feelings about the land, their lives, their families, and their

understanding of friendship, home, poetry, and racism. I saw a tension between the necessity to

acknowledge position, difference and incommensurability, and the desire to build relationships

on another basis. My reading of the text has changed over time, but the epistolary genre certainly

inspired the way I initially framed the problematic of this thesis through the objective of

rethinking the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. It is not surprising,

then, that the epistolary volumes that follow Aimititau formed chapter three. In my first readings

of Lumière d’automne, Nous sommes tous des sauvages and Kuei, à toi, I could not see their

critical contributions until I truly focused on the three Innu women writers’ voice and their

affirmative engagement in sharing their words from their own positions as Indigenous women.

The fact that they do not challenge the Quebecois correspondent at times that I consider they

could, challenged my own understanding of the critical perspectives that directed my reading. In

chapter three, more than the others, I enacted what I mean by thinking with the texts as I have

framed the questions of this chapter according to what the texts did to me.

In chapter four, I did not know how to enact this principle of thinking with the text—

taking it as theory—in dynamics that would come from the text, so it took time. Initially, I was

touched by how Kapesh and Aodla Freeman denounce colonial dispossession and discrimination

in the 1970s. These texts had received very little critical and popular response, and I wanted to

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look at how they inform us on colonial injustice now, in a time that many settlers consider

colonial relationships must change. Their texts brought my research some distance from the

current post-TRC context and, at the same time, made me see that the “new” awareness of

colonial injustices is in fact situated in a history of repetition of those moments since, at least, the

1970s. My own relationships to the texts made me explore in a very personal way colonial

critical habits that I could not notice with clarity at the beginning of this project.

My research addresses the context of my own position and the conditions of my

ignorance, as well as my relationship to Indigenous female writers’ visions of colonial history

and contemporary issues. What type of relationships does literary criticism make possible in this

context? In order to explore these dynamics, I have looked at the construction of the “I” in

narratives by Indigenous women writers, and proposed to unsettle certain images associated with

Indigenous authors, like the subaltern, the victim, the culturally different and the human. This

goes with reimagining the position of the settler reader too often thought of as the intellectual,

the one who helps and makes justice, the scholar and the culturally neutral human. The texts

provide alternative figures that allow rethinking these positions: Menchú’s distant reader,

Kapesh’s kauapishit (white (man)), Aodla Freeman’s immature qallunaat, and Quebecois

correspondents’ uneasiness with their own position. While we often conceive of Indigenous texts

as educating settlers, I have shown that they also entail crucial moments of silence and restraint,

as well as other conceptions of what education can be. It brings me to analyze how we engage as

settlers in decolonial justice when we become aware of colonial violence and to ask how to read

Indigenous texts in the post-TRC context marked by this awareness. Becoming aware of colonial

injustice is both a subjective and collective experience, and asks for a shift in settlers’ way of

thinking, acting, and feeling.

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From Ignorance to Embodied (Self-) Criticism

Allusions to the passage from ignorance to awareness are common in settler productions.

The documentary The Invisible Nation (2007) begins with Richard Desjardins’s realization that

he did not know the Algonquin people who had lived just across the river from his home. In

Québékoisie (2014), Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins acknowledge that they had travelled

around the world to meet people from other cultures, without being aware of the Indigenous

nations that lived in the province of Quebec, notably the Innu. In both cases, the films feature

their encounters with the people, the Algonquin and the Innu, as well as historical perspectives

on the relationships between these peoples and the Quebecois; they address respectively the

dispossession of Algonquin land by the Quebecois government and the violence of Quebecois’

ignorance during, and after, the Oka crisis in 1990. Once settlers know these historical facts and

are aware of Indigenous nations living in the same territory, what do they/we do with this

awareness?

In the aftermath of the TRC, which constituted a collective coming out of ignorance

experience, people have asked how to enact “reconciliation,” the institutional project of justice

for Indigenous peoples of Kanata. Andrew Woolford, who writes about some of the limitations

of the Commission in 2013, argues that, since the risks of “reconciliation” are incalculable and

unmanageable, "there is a growing appeal to affirmative models of repair that are more

aggressive in their pursuit of certainty" (432).434 Woolford clearly distinguishes certainty-

making, which is for him synonymous with “bracketing justice,” from “justice-making,” which

434 The author uses the term “affirmative” to talk about certainty-making. It reminds us that an “ethics of affirmation,” an expression that I use in my thesis project, is in no way intended to create certainty.

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is an approximation of the just, a process “open to deconstructive challenge so that new

injustices are not built on the edifice of previous wrongs” (430). Certainty-making is not only the

government’s option to reduce anxiety in the context of reconciliation; it is inscribed in a

colonial epistemology that wants to solve problems, to find solutions and to know. However, the

“solution” to settler ignorance cannot be (settler) knowledge. Both settler ignorance and settler

knowledge play a role in legitimizing the continuing dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the

refusal to give back land, autonomy and sovereignty rights.

In her exchange with Joan Pawnee-Parent, Andrée A. Michaud explains how she became

aware of the violence of colonialism. In the text “I remember” [Je me souviens], she writes,

I’ve seen the words Abénaquis, Algonquin, Huron, and Iroquois in [history textbooks],

but there was never any mention of what had been done to these peoples, or any

explanation of their decimation, or of how their lands were plundered and their beliefs

scorned. Only later, when I thought I was at home here, did I learn I was walking on the

blood of your ancestors. (Ai 189)435

Michaud understands the “duty of memory” (Ibid.) as her responsibility to remember what has

been done to the Indigenous peoples, a series of injustices that, for her, now mark her home. She

continues recounting the shock that she felt when reading Les Indiens du Canada (1980) written

by ethnologist and sociologist Sabine Hargous and Pieds nus sur la terre sacrée [Touch the

Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence] (1971) compiled by anthropologist T.C. McLuhan.

435 “J’ai découvert les mots Abénaquis, Algonquin, Huron, et Iroquois dans [les manuels d’histoire], mais on n’y décrivait pas ce qu’on avait fait à ces peuples, pas plus qu’on y expliquait la décimation dont ils avaient été victimes ni comment on avait pillé leurs terres et bafoué leurs croyances. Ce n’est que plus tard, quand je pensais être ici chez moi, que j’ai appris que je marchais sur le sang de tes ancêtres.”

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Michaud writes, “Telling you that I feel guilty would be an understatement, but I do not intend to

go down that path, or fall into pathos or say my mea culpa, it would lead us nowhere and it

would be deathly boring” (Ai 189).436 This passage is steeped in affects and yet the author

wishes to take distance from these emotional responses. She feels uneasiness with the feeling of

guilt, but also, it seems to me, with finding ways of embodying her position as a settler who has

become “aware.” It seems easier to take distance from the figure of the settler who embodies

colonial reiteration than to become accountable for the position of the settler who wants to do

right without knowing how.

The coming out of ignorance experience does not only entail relearning history, but a

change in the structures of subjectivity: the realization that the structures of colonial violence

continue to mark us now. According to Dian Million, ignorance is in fact felt knowledge: forms

of colonial domination feel right to the settlers. Said differently, colonial habits—the way

colonialism perpetuates itself—are not only blatant forms of discrimination and violence, but

also subtle ways of thinking and acting that pervade our views of what is right and just. Colonial

habits mark the ways in which settlers envision justice: the desire to repair, to reconcile, to all be

equal, to be antiracist, to decolonize and to live in a world that is no longer based upon this

violence. The “duty of memory,” in this context, becomes the capacity to recognize the forms

that colonialism takes in the present time and the decolonial possibilities that have been long

enacted inside and outside the settler system of (reparatory) justice.

436 “Te dire que je file cheap serait peu dire, mais je n’ai pas l’intention de m’engager dans cette voie, de tomber dans le pathos ni de faire mon mea culpa, ça ne nous mènerait nulle part et ce serait probablement d’un ennui mortel.”

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In this thesis, How to read is a performative question that makes me/us, critics,

responsible for the analysis that we produce when reading Indigenous texts, questioning what

feels right, what is unsettling, and how we can respond/be responsible. When we feel indignation,

that injustices are identified, and that we want to listen, what forms of colonial dynamics

continue to feel right? Texts like Menchú’s, Kapesh’s and Aodla Freeman’s and like the

epistolary exchanges provide no answer about what settlers can do, but they problematize the

issues of cross-national encounters in the literary field and of incommensurable visions of

justice. I have been looking for visions of justice in the text, not to circumscribe them or

understand them, but rather to open a field of contestation to engage discourses about

decolonization, reconciliation, justice, ethical research and relationships between Indigenous and

non-Indigenous peoples.

Directions for Affirmative Readings

The ethical preoccupations that have directed my work unfold in the field of Literary

Studies, while resonating with research protocols’ principles. The First Nations in Quebec and

Labrador’s Research Protocol points to the types of relationship that research involves:

Since the 1990’s [sic], Aboriginal peoples from Quebec, Canada and throughout the

world have been openly criticizing the methods used in research projects about them.

They complain about the fact that “[...] research projects are a one-way street and,

overall, they are more beneficial to researchers and universities than to the populations

who make the effort to participate and give their time.” (Gentelet 2009: 143, in Assembly

of First Nations Quebec-Labrador 2)

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Research protocols come as a response to the persistent colonial dynamics of research

methodologies.437 They insist on collaboration and on Indigenous subjects as participants rather

than as objects of study. Considering literary relationships, I have proposed to see the texts as

participating in current debates, and to see reading as a practice of thinking with them/through

them in a collaborative way.

In chapter one, I have proposed the idea of text-based relationships to conceive of literary

texts as places of interaction, attached to preoccupations regarding discourses, creativity,

aesthetics and stories, and to reflect on the ethical and methodological responsibility of the

readers who meet the authors on their literary terrain. Indigenous literary texts are Indigenous

spaces. I believe the texts themselves often provide tips about how to read that can be

“consulted” by readers. However, the nature of the community’s implication in this consultation

remains indirect, if not ambiguous. In texts written by Menchú, Kapesh, Aodla Freeman, there is

no doubt about the fact that their writing is embedded in their relationships with their families

and communities. The decision to write is well thought out and, although there is some

opposition from family or community members in the case of Menchú and Kapesh, the authors

envision a role for their literary projects. Menchú and Kapesh refuse to provide details about

their culture to distant settler readers. Through their silence about these aspects, they ask the

readers to keep distant. I believe that, in this case, it is not my role, as a literary critic, to inquire

into cultural meanings and anthropological contexts. Rather, I was attentive to how these silences

occupy a function in the relationship with settler readers who might actually want to know these

437 There are multiple research protocols, among others, the First Nations Ethics Guide on Research and Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge produced by the Assembly of First Nations, and the Lignes directrices en matière de recherche avec les femmes autochtones produced by Suzy Basile for Quebec Native Women (2012).

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details. I also focused on the authors’ own views about what their literary project can achieve,

respecting the facts that they offer the readers a narrative and not a direct transparent access on

their experience of colonial injustice or to their cultural life. Moreover, I situated these texts in

relation to the field of Literary Studies and to the community of writers, scholars and community

members that constitute this field.438 I argued that the texts bring readers to think and prioritize

otherwise. Menchú’s testimony challenged me to theorize and practise incommensurability, but

also, even when she claims that she did not learn from books, to be attentive to the text she offers

to readers. As research protocols can provide some directions for settler criticism, I believe that

“thinking with” the texts—engaging as much as possible in methodological creativity that really

implicates the texts in the process of thinking—contributes to developing ethical principles of

research.

In order to engage ethically with the texts, I have proposed an affirmative reading of my

corpus, focusing on what the texts can do, what they create. On the one hand, based on Rosi

Braidotti’s feminist theory, I have explained, particularly in chapter one and three, that

affirmative readings follow a non-oppositional logic in which difference is taken as

incommensurable singularity, instead of conceiving of Indigenous difference in a binary

opposition to white settlers’. While being aware of my own position and of my relationships to

feminist and antiracist theorists like Braidotti and Chandra Tapalde Mohanty, I proposed to

engage the authors’ views of difference. Through this methodology, Menchú’s text, the Aimititau

authors’ reference to nature, and Mestokosho, Bacon and Kanapé Fontaine’s engagement in

438 See Robert Appleford for his discussion about the link between writer and community, and the idea of the community of writers. We can think of Menchú, Kapesh and Aodla Freeman, not only in relation to their communities (nation, village or reserves), but also to the community of Indigenous writers and of Indigenous women writers.

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friendship have pushed me to analyze tensions, contradictions and difficulties in the interactions

between incommensurable conceptions of cultural integrity, colonial difference, and justice.

One the other hand, my understanding of affirmative readings resonates with Eve Tuck’s

“desire-based research frameworks,” which “are concerned with understanding complexity,

contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives" (“Suspending” 416). For her, such

frameworks are “intent on depathologizing the experiences of dispossessed and disenfranchised

communities so that people are seen as more than broken and conquered” (Ibid.). She adds that

to focus on damage presents an “incomplete story,” and performs “an act of aggression”

(Ibid.).439 Tuck speaks of research produced in Social Sciences, but the aim of depathologizing

can also direct the focus of literary criticism of Indigenous texts. Affirmative readings of these

texts mean, according to me, that the main focus is not on what settlers have done to Indigenous

peoples—developing discourses on colonial injustices and the damages—but rather on both what

we know that the texts do to readers, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous readers, and what we

cannot know that correspond to the incommensurable within the text. Imagining that the texts’

scope of action as broader than what a single reader witnesses contributes in avoiding

reproducing another “act of aggression” that would suppose that the reader knows what the text

is about and how it participates in one’s own project of justice. I have argued that writing on “the

things I know about how it affects me” is a pertinent angle for literary criticism.440 In chapter

439 Tuck situates her critique in the present time and acknowledges that “there was a time and place for damage-centered research” (“Suspending” 415) but that these “are no longer sufficient” (“Suspending” 416). 440 This formulation comes from Jeannette Armstrong’s explanation for the term naw’qinwixw which I refer to in chapter 4. She writes, “I want you to tell me how you feel about it, how it affects you, the things you know about how it affects you. Then we’ll have a better understanding; we’ll have a chance at a better understanding of what it is we need to do” (Armstrong 8-9, in Million, Therapeutic 27, my emphasis).

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two, I addressed how colonial ways of imagining the land and the relationships between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples mark exchanges between them/us, and how reading

these tensions (rather than blaming the Quebecois’ failure to “decolonize” their approach) opens

to accepting the failures of projects for justice. In chapter four, I shifted the focus of my writing

(how I engage in knowledge production) to the difficulties that I confronted while working with

Kapesh and Aodla Freeman’s texts from my position as a feminist settler scholar. This way, I

engaged the dynamics that literary criticism engenders.

In chapter four, my process led me to the idea of reading as reciprocity, that is, a way for

literary criticism of “giving back” that would be worthy of the literary projects. Kapesh and

Aodla Freeman’s first-person narratives challenged me to write on what was truly disturbing for

me, what I could not write on: the anxieties behind the analysis of the texts. It made me question

the effects of reading Indigenous texts, particularly non-fiction which features the author’s

experience, in a perspective of decolonial justice, in a detached way. I have not argued that

scholars/readers have to speak about themselves, their experiences, their affects, but that being

aware of one’s own position, in terms of one’s own relationships and embodied experiences

when reading and writing on the texts, might enable reciprocal exchanges in the literary field.

According to the First Nations in Quebec and Labrador’s Research Protocol, reciprocity,

together with respect and equity, is one of the “three fundamental values to implement a

collaborative research project between a First Nations community and researchers” (Assembly of

First Nations Quebec-Labrador III). The research protocol indicates, “There is a reciprocity

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relationship when the team of researchers and the First Nation community involved give as much

as they receive” (Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador 6). Two aspects of reciprocity are

“co-building,” which means that “researchers shar[e] their perspectives with the First Nations, in

order to develop new knowledge” (Ibid.) and “two-eyes seeing,” which comes as an

acknowledgement and respect of the incommensurability of settlers’ and Indigenous peoples’

visions when developing knowledge. These concepts can be theorized and practised in

Indigenous literary studies. Each of the texts of my corpus deploys these ideas of sharing

perspectives while respecting incommensurability, in ways that counter the mechanisms of

cognitive imperialism and appropriation/elimination.

In chapter three, I have shown that Indigenous literary spaces are rich and diverse and

encompass different “Indigenous projects” (Tuhiwai Smith) that may go beyond, and unsettle,

the critics’ expectations. I have explored what the concept of friendship can do and the result was

a very productive understanding of the limits of my critical positions and of the dynamics

between deconstruction and reconstruction in the quest to reinvent new types of relationships.

These dynamics between deconstruction and reconstruction appear in each of the chapters.

Although we often attach the project of deconstruction to settlers, I think that they/we also need

to engage in methodological creativity in order to break the cycle of colonial reproduction. I have

insisted that no positioning is protected from reproducing colonial habits. It matters to me to

acknowledge how we are marked by contradictions, not to move toward innocence, but to

envision a shared accountability and to give particular attention to the complexity of

engagements. I insist on the political, situated and multifaceted positions of the writers to

underline how they act as agents of change, rather than considering their subjectivity as static.

Moreover, working from one’s own contradictions, failures and limitations should not bring us

(me) to disengage or evade responsibility. Rather I see it as a motivation to be more creative,

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more compassionate (Womack),441 and to learn to deal with the failures of communication,

actions and theories. I understand being more compassionate through the idea of “‘our’ being in

this together” (Braidotti): acknowledging that we are all marked by colonial dynamics and

recognizing the work of other Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and writers in creating

decolonial possibilities. The point of underlining the multiplicity of shifting positions is not to

celebrate the indeterminacy of justice and of what constitutes an ethical research, but to

appreciate decolonial justice as a micro-politics happening now, whose failures and

contradictions are constitutive of its operation, and as deployed in relationships that unsettle and

transform colonial dynamics.

***

The different propositions for affirmative readings let me/us imagine difference otherwise

than through oppositional logics while attending carefully to positionality, relationality and

embodiment. The ethical reach of the literary texts goes beyond raising awareness about

injustices or educating, by communicating a desire for transformation that does not put the settler

at the centre of visions of Indigenous futurity while inviting settlers to respond to the literary

projects. The texts make justice by offering alternative views of relationships and by enacting

different types of relationships in the literary field in which readers can engage. For the

Indigenous writers of my corpus, relationships entail not only their connections to their

communities and the dynamics with settlers, but their ways of living on the land, their memories,

their links to animals, to Spring in the North, to the plant realm, to the spiritual realm, to the

441 Craig S. Womack talks about a “compassionate criticism” which he sees as “a creative and life-affirming

scholarship ever opening itself up to new ideas instead of closing them out” (357). He adds, “A harmony ethic is not

a weakness but a fully realized engagement with the world and the consequences of one’s actions” (Ibid.).

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river, to trees. Several images in my corpus contribute in decentring the focus from the

relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and broaden our vision of

reparatory justice in the post-TRC context. The visions that the Indigenous women writers of my

corpus offer us of peace, non-hierarchical relationships, exchanges, friendship, ethics, truth and

justice ask for profound transformations.

I have come to think of the practice of reading my corpus in concrete material terms as

reinscribing my body within the land I occupy as narrated by Indigenous women writers. In the

end, I have not so much reimagined the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous in

the field of Canadian politics, from above or from the outside, but worked at understanding how

we are all marked by ongoing colonial dynamics and how these dynamics play a role in literary

criticism. My thesis has sought to theorize the relationships in a horizon of knowledge

production whose focus does not have to be on the relationships between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous peoples, but engagements in reciprocal, respectful, and creative engagements in

thinking together about the world we live in. I have aimed at not only listening/reading, but also

offering in return my engagement in producing another discourse, in collaboration with the

literary texts, on our current context, and our present time.

Tiohtià:ke, February 2018

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