Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

Indigenous Studies Series

THE INDIGENOUS STUDIES SERIES builds on the successes of the past and is inspired by recent critical conversations about Indigenous epistemological frameworks. Recognizing the need to encourage burgeoning scholarship, the series welcomes manuscripts drawing upon Indigenous intellectual traditions and philosophies, particularly in discussions situated within the Humanities.

Series Editor

Dr. Deanna Reder (Cree-Metis)

Associate Professor, First Nations Studies and English, Simon Fraser University

Advisory Board

Dr. Jo-ann Archibald (Stó:lō)

Professor Emeritus, Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia

Dr. Kristina Bidwell (NunatuKavut)

Associate Dean of Aboriginal Affairs, College of Arts and Science, Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan

Dr. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation)

Professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies/English and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture, University of British Columbia

Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn (Piikani)

Associate Professor, First Nations Studies, Simon Fraser University

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Justice, Daniel Heath, 1975–, author

Why Indigenous literatures matter / Daniel Heath Justice.

(Indigenous studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978–1–77112–176–7 (softcover).—ISBN 978–1–77112–178–1 (EPUB).—

ISBN 978–1–77112–177–4 (PDF)

1. American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature—Native authors—History and criticism. 3. Indians in literature. 4. Native peoples in literature. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. Canadian literature—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Indigenous studies series

PS153.I52J878 2018            810.9’897            C2017-905582-8

C2017-905583-6

Cover and text design by Lime Design Inc. Front cover image by Joseph Erb, www.josepherb.com.

© 2018 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca, or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

This book is gratefully dedicated to my mother, Deanna Kathline Justice, who taught me to read and encouraged my dreams, even when they took me far from home.

These are stories worth following home.

Our bodies, like compasses, still know the way.

—DEBORAH MIRANDA (ESSELEN), BAD INDIANS

gidigaa bizhiw is a strategist and a warrior. the strategist sits with the pain. or maybe she sits beside the pain. maybe the warrior, the one that carries the burden of peace also carries the burden of love—of embracing connection in the face of utter disconnection. maybe there is no limit on love.

—LEANNE SIMPSON (MICHI SAAGIIG NISHNAABEG), CAGED

Contents

Acknowledgements

Those who have shown me intellectual and personal generosity in the course of writing this book are far too many in number to list here, and I apologize to anyone I may miss in these thanks. Among the most immediate are these: to Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith, former student and an impressive multi-genre writer in her own right, who first sparked the idea for this project when she asked me to write on the topic for her blog; to the stalwart Lisa Quinn, who was unfailingly encouraging even when I’d pushed well past any reasonable expectation of patience with the manuscript’s lateness; and to Siobhan McMenemy, former University of Toronto Press colleague and now Wilfrid Laurier University Press editor extraordinaire, whose good guidance helped smooth out the rough edges of the project and encouraged me to be clearer, bolder, and more expansive in my revisions; to Deanna Reder, Margery Fee, Sophie McCall, and June Scudeler, who never ceased to believe in the project or me, even when I was often doubtful about the merit of one or the other; and to David Gaertner, whose early enthusiasm for the first chapters gave me the kick-start I needed to keep with it. Special thanks to Mark Rifkin and my two anonymous reviewers, all of whom gave such excellent and generous suggestions for revision; I’m hopeful the final version of the work meets with your approval. And mahalo to ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui for the incredibly helpful response to my reading of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s writing. Thanks, as well, to all the writers and publishers who provided permission to reprint work in this volume.

Wado to Joseph Erb for the evocative cover art that so powerfully speaks to the book’s concerns (incidentally, it’s the first Cherokee art that’s ever graced one of my book covers), and to Lara Minja and the team at Wilfrid Laurier University Press for creating a book design I wanted to honour with equally fine content; to my research assistant, Sol Diana, who helped get the messy appendix into tip-top shape; to my students and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, who continue to inform, inspire, and expand my world and its possibilities; to my fellow members of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association for their vital work in support of Indigenous writing and literary criticism, especially to the much-missed co-founders, Renate Eigenbrod and Jo-Ann Episkenew.

I want to extend my deepest gratitude to the many friends, acquaintances, and strangers who supported the year of #HonouringIndigenousWriters with their comments, recommendations, and critiques; it was definitely made possible through an engaged community of care. And to my friend and colleague Sarah Hunt, who, early on, recommended the social media platform Hootsuite, which enabled me to preprogram a few weeks’ worth of tweets so I wouldn’t miss any days—I’m not sure I could have sustained it otherwise!

Love and big thanks to Michelle St. John, who, in addition to being an exquisite actor, director, producer, writer, and all-around great person, is also a kindred spirit in the love of Indigenous literature; to Shelagh Rogers, for keeping the fire so fiercely for Indigenous writers; to James Cox, Domino Perez, and Ewan Cox, for being kin beyond blood; to Nancy Fromm, Dell Nutter, and the other small-town librarians in Cripple Creek and Victor who opened so many doors for this little mountain bookworm, and to all the librarians out there doing the same for so many of us, in spite of the rising tide of anti-intellectual spite and incuriosity; and to my parents, Kathy and Jim Justice, for always supporting me with so much enthusiasm and love. And of course, I owe a huge personal and professional note of appreciation to all the incredible Indigenous writers who do so much, often with far too little recognition or support, to make the world better and more beautiful with your words. Biggest thanks of all, as always, go to my husband, Kent Dunn, for supporting me in every possible way, while also gently teasing me about the book cover and ISBN that existed before the book did, and whose belief in me made it possible to realize this and so many other dreams.

My work and my life are better for your generosity. Thank you, all.

Preface

Notes for the Long Rebellion

. . . our stories are unending connections to past, present, and future. And, even if worse comes to worst and our people forget where we left our stories, the birds will remember and bring them back to us.

—LEANNE HOWE (CHOCTAW NATION),

THE STORY OF AMERICA: A TRIBALOGRAPHY

This is a book about stories and some of the ways they matter. It’s about the many kinds of stories Indigenous peoples tell, and the stories others tell about us. It’s about how these diverse stories can strengthen, wound, or utterly erase our humanity and connections, and how our stories are expressed or repressed, shared or isolated, recognized or dismissed. It’s about the ways we understand that vexed and vexing idea of literature, and how assumptions about what is or is not literary are used to privilege some voices and ignore others. It’s also about how, in spite of various challenges and catastrophes, Indigenous writers, scholars, storytellers, and knowledge keepers have, since our earliest ancestors emerged as distinct peoples, worked to articulate lived truths and imaginative possibilities through spoken, written, and inscribed forms and project them into a meaningful future.

More specifically, this is a book about Indigenous peoples’ diverse literatures and why they are (or should be) important to Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike, although perhaps for different reasons. The arguments here begin with that fundamental premise: that Indigenous literatures matter. The why and the how of that claim will be tested against a range of literary works produced in territories now claimed by Canada and the United States, with occasional relevant forays among the writings of other Indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world. And these will, in turn, be placed into the larger historical, political, and social context of colonialism in North America and elsewhere. Context is vital to understanding these matters, especially given how colonial government policies have combined with widespread popular stereotypes and everyday enacted practice to degrade and attempt to entirely eliminate Indigenous peoples and our cultural, artistic, and intellectual productions. Colonialism is as much about the symbolic diminishment of Indigenous peoples as the displacement of our physical presence. If there are no more people there can be no more stories; without our stories, we’re reduced as peoples and as individuals. Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinaabe) says it most powerfully in reflecting on one of her own motivations for writing:

I have my mother to thank for her spirit of resistance. I remember my mother and others talking about running away from residential school. I have talked to others about inheriting the anger and rage of our mothers. Her generation was silenced. I cannot help but consider a need to document and bear witness to the treatment of First Nations women which comes from what I see as the blood price paid for any of our cultural productions to have survived the onslaught of 500 years of domination and attempts to wipe out our spirituality, our land base and oral literature/language.

Our literatures are just one more vital way that we have countered those forces of erasure and given shape to our own ways of being in the world. Our mindful stories, in all their forms and functions—and whether vocalized, embodied, or inscribed—honour the sacrifices of those who came before us and who made it possible for us to continue the struggle today as specific peoples in relation with the world. They help us bridge the gap of human imagination between one another, between other human communities, and between us and other-than-human beings. Fundamentally, they affirm Indigenous presence—and our present. That our nations do indeed have a vibrant present gives us hope that we’ll have a future, too.

Yet while Indigenous writers have confronted that oppressive context and created a richly expansive literary tradition that engages with colonialism, these traditions are in no way determined by colonialism. Indigenous texts are by and large responsive, not reactive. They are at least as concerned with developing or articulating relationships with, among, and between Indigenous readers as they are with communicating our humanity to colonial society, if not more so. Indeed, I’d go so far as to argue that relationship is the driving impetus behind the vast majority of texts by Indigenous writers—relationship to the land, to human community, to self, to the other-than-human world, to the ancestors and our descendants, to our histories and our futures, as well as to colonizers and their literal and ideological heirs—and that these literary works offer us insight and sometimes helpful pathways for maintaining, rebuilding, or even simply establishing these meaningful connections.

This book is avowedly political, in that it affirms the fundamental rights of Indigenous peoples to the responsible exercise and expression of our political, intellectual, geographic, and artistic self-determination. It’s part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural and family history, and part literary polemic, and asserts the vital significance of our literatures to healthy decolonization efforts and just expressions of community resurgence. Politics without art moves quickly toward efficient dehumanization and intellectual myopia; art without politics descends swiftly into self-referential irrelevance. I look to the formidable Menominee poet Chrystos for guidance here: I assert that poetry without politics is narcissistic & not useful to us. I also believe that everything is political—there is no neutral, safe place we can hide out in waiting for the brutality to go away. To argue for and produce Indigenous writing as such is necessarily to engage in political struggle and to challenge centuries of representational oppression. This book is just one of many volleys in that long rebellion.

A more accurate title for this volume would perhaps be A Few Reasons Why I Believe Indigenous Literatures Matter Based on My Own Subject Position and Idiosyncratic History and Relationships. This project doesn’t try for comprehensiveness, nor distanced objectivity, although my perspective is, I hope, supported and informed by extensive personal experience as well as professional practice. It comes from the entirety of a professional career learning, studying, teaching, and writing in the field of Indigenous literary studies in Canada and the US, as well as a lifetime of trying to understand the stories that have shaped and influenced me, my family, and my various communities of affiliation and kinship. Other writers and scholars have different ideas about these matters, some complementary, some not; this book is only one of many equally relevant ways of approaching these works. I hope the book helps to expand and complicate these conversations, and that it might inspire readers to take up deeper study in the field, as we are always in need of smart, courageous, and committed thinkers to push our understandings further in challenging and compassionate ways. I very well might come to different conclusions about these works in the future based on new experiences and further research, but for now, this book with have to work with these particular concerns and considerations.

Many of the arguments in this book won’t be particularly controversial to most readers, but others are more provocative. I take full responsibility for both. Ultimately, this book is intended to prompt meaningful discussion and even some debate, but with the larger goal of expanding the circle of welcome and making our ongoing relationships stronger, more honest, and more just. Challenge is not the same thing as rejection or dismissal; we can and must have the hard conversations if we have any hope of a better future. We can have sharp, even contentious arguments, but still return to the conversation and to our relationships when we’re done; in other words, we can hold each other to account as we hold each other up—they needn’t be mutually exclusive practices. We are sorely in need of more accountable kindness in our critical work as well as in our relationships, and it’s my fervent hope that this book holds that principle firmly at its centre.

But kindness shouldn’t be mistaken for docility. It’s not a kind act to allow problematic or even destructive ideas to pass unchallenged, but we can do so with generosity and empathy, even in the fiercest argument. Sometimes the hardest struggles are with those we love and respect the most. And even when we do struggle, even when we debate and challenge and tussle, we can still love them. It’s not and shouldn’t be the approach all Indigenous writers take, and it hasn’t always been mine, but this is where I hope my contribution might now be most meaningful.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the writers, students, teachers, family members, friends, elders, community members, and mentors who have shared their knowledge over the years, who taught, argued, challenged, and struggled with and alongside me through so many conversations, in person, on the page, and on the screen. Whatever strengths are present in this book are here as a result of their generosity; I take full responsibility for any errors, omissions, or misunderstandings.

Introduction

Stories That Wound, Stories That Heal

I have never forgotten a speech that was made by one of the heads of the Department [of Indian Affairs and Northern Development] when he arrived at the settlement. The Inuit had expected to hear something fantastic since he had come such a long way especially to talk to them. The speech went something like this: I am very glad to be here and enjoyed my visit to your homes. I am very pleased to see that they are so clean. One old woman came over to me and asked if he was really the head of the Department, and if so, why he did not have the intelligence to tell us something that we do not know, instead of telling us what our houses looked like. We lived in them every day and we knew what they were like. How could I tell my elder that he did not think the Inuit have intelligence?

—MINI AODLA FREEMAN (INUIT), LIFE AMONG THE QALLUNAAT

There are many stories about Indigenous peoples alive in the world today. Some of these stories are our own. They give shape, substance, and purpose to our existence and help us understand how to uphold our responsibilities to one another and the rest of creation, especially in places and times so deeply affected by colonial fragmentation. Sometimes they’re in our Indigenous mother tongues; sometimes they’re in English, or Spanish, or French, or other colonial languages. But they’re still our good stories—not always happy, not always gentle, but good ones nonetheless, because they tell the truths of our presence in the world today, in days past, and in days to come.

Other stories are not so good. These are imposed upon us from outside. They belong to the colonizing populations that claim and dominate our homelands—populations from which many of us are also descended and with which we must navigate our complex relations as well. These stories are sometimes told with good intent. More often they’re not. Sometimes they’re incomplete rather than wrong, partial rather than pernicious. But sometimes the stories are noxious, bad medicine, and even when told with the best of motivations, they can’t help but poison both the speaker and the listener.

Many of the stories about Indigenous peoples are toxic, and to my mind the most corrosive of all is the story of Indigenous deficiency. We’ve all heard this story, in one form or another. According to this story, Indigenous peoples are in a state of constant lack: in morals, laws, culture, restraint, language, ambition, hygiene, desire, love. This story presumes that we’re all broken by addiction, or dangerously promiscuous according to pleasure-hating, Puritanical concepts of bodily propriety. It insists that we have a lack of responsibility, lack of self-control, lack of dignity; it claims that we can’t take care of our children or families or selves because of constitutional absences in our character, or biology, or intellect. And it goes even further. Rather than see lower life expectancy, employment, and education rates, and higher rates of homelessness, substance abuse, and suicide as being rooted in generations of sustained and intentional colonial assaults on all aspects of our lives and identities, we’re blamed for our supposed lack of basic human decency. Depressed? In despair? Can’t be due to centuries of sustained oppressive social structures and racism—must be our supposed lack of mental fitness. Come from a supportive and generally stable family without many of the overt effects of wounding? Don’t assume that it has anything to do with your family’s good luck or the strength of your traditions or your particular capacity to overcome major obstacles—no, it must be due to successful assimilation and a gradual diminishment of pure Indigenous influence. In this poisonous story, every stumble is seen as evidence of innate deficiency, while any success is read as proof of Indigenous diminishment. In a particularly cruel twist, even our strengths are presented as evidence of our inadequacy.

There are all kinds of ways this story seeps into our bones and eats away at our spirits, undermining our potential, eroding our capacity to hold one another up and build affirming relationships through and across difference. It hurts all of us, Indigenous and settler alike, but it’s particularly damaging for Indigenous peoples, for whom this unyielding stereotype of deficiency becomes the solid object against which we’re so often slammed, the supposed truth claim against which all our experiences are measured—and inevitably found wanting.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t profound and challenging social and political problems. Indigenous peoples are vastly overrepresented in all negative social indicators in Canada, the US, and other settler states, and grossly underrepresented in the positive ones. But acknowledging these problems and their impacts is not the same thing as insisting that they are a result of who we are. We can’t acknowledge these problems without also directly acknowledging the colonial violence in which they’re imbedded. Again, contexts matter, and it’s these contexts that anti-Indigenous commentators so often refuse to engage or even acknowledge. There’s a huge difference between the experience of deprivation as a result of social, economic, and political oppression and having an essential defect in one’s humanity that leads inevitably to second-class status—and, not coincidentally, absolves the settler population of any accountability for the conditions they’ve created. Having a clear and unromantic perspective about the many challenges that face Indigenous peoples is not the same thing as seeing those challenges as an innate expression of our very nature.

The story of Indigenous deficiency seems to me an externalization of settler colonial guilt and shame, and is all the more powerful because of the broader society’s refusal to take real responsibility for the story’s devastating effects. The story wasn’t of our making, but we’re part of it now. Perhaps the most wounding way in which this story of Indigenous deficiency works is in how it displaces our other stories, the stories of complexity, hope, and possibility. If the simplistic deficiency accounts are all we see, all we hear, and all that’s expected of us, it’s hard to find room for the more nourishing stories of significance.

So how do we find the strength and the trust to tell different kinds of stories? Stories that are truthful about who we are, stories that connect us to the world, one another, and even ourselves? On this point, my colleague David Gaertner reminded me of a line in Blue Marrow, by Cree poet Louise Halfe, where she refers to stories as wîhkês, or med-sins in English, agents of both harm and healing. Stories can be bad, bitter medicine and inspire people to bad actions; they can be used to separate us, fragment us into pieces, leave us bleeding and alone. Disconnection is cause and consequence of much of this world’s suffering. We are disconnected from one another, from the plants and animals and elements upon which our survival depends, from ourselves and our histories and our legacies. When we don’t recognize or respect our interdependencies, we don’t have the full context that’s necessary for healthy or effective action.

Yet stories can be good medicine, too. They can drive out the poison, heal the spirit as well as the body, remind us of the greatness of where we came from as well as the greatness of who we’re meant to be, so that we’re not determined by the colonial narrative of deficiency. We’re far more than that—though sometimes we need to be reminded, for Indigenous people internalize the bad stories, too. I’ve long been inspired by something my friend Alice Te Punga Somerville, a Māori literature scholar in Aotearoa, used to tell her all-Māori literature class at the start of the term: Remember that you are the descendants of gods. Often when I tell this story I get a bit choked up, for it’s a beautiful summation of a kind of certainty in presence that’s sorely needed and far too rare. As I understand it, Alice’s statement wasn’t primarily meant to build her students’ self-esteem, although it no doubt did that; rather, it was a clear reminder that they were an essential part of something great, something dignified and strong, and worthy of reverence and respect. It was a fundamental expectation that they would hold themselves and one another to the highest possible standards. And they did.

Today’s Indigenous people in North America are the descendants of those who survived the colonizing apocalypse that started in 1492 and continues today. We are more than just of descent from those initial survivors, however—we’re survivors, too, every one of us. According to the settler stories of Indigenous deficiency, our peoples