Postcolonialism and First Nations in Canada
by Quentin Kayne
This essay will look at postcolonial literary theory in an aboriginal Canadian
context. The arguments of three major postcolonial theorists, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha
and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will be presented. Their work will be applied to various
elements of aboriginal Canadian literary criticism to demonstrate its applicability or lack
thereof. Critical work by Penny Pentrone and two volumes of Theytus Press’ Native
Canadian literary criticism which include recent essays by Debra Dudek, Kateri Damm,
Janice Acoose and others will be used. Finally, postcolonialism and its Canadian
aboriginal application will be considered from a radical perspective as articulated by
Aijaz Ahmad and borne out in the work of Tom King, Emma LaRocque and others.
The first major thrust of postcolonial literary theory comes in Edward Said’s
Orientalism. According to Selden et al., Said draws upon the ideas of Marx, Gramsci,
Adorno, and notably Foucault (224). He weaves together colonial interpretations,
academic paradigms, paternalism of empire, exoticness, etherealness, and the reflexive
relationship between the Occident and the Orient. This sets the foundation for an
examination based on discourse and power. As Said states, “My contention is that
without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possible understand the
enormous systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and
even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically,
scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period”(3). ‘Power’ thus
becomes the mediating force of Orientalism. It is Vico’s curt assertion that ‘men write
their own history’ coupled with Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and consent. The Orient
becomes a set of values and ideas conformed and inscribed by the Occident, but with a
consequent re-inscription of the Orient upon the Occident. Said emphasizes that
“…Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European – Atlantic power than
it is as veridic discourse about the Orient”(6).
The Orient becomes a forum for Orientalists to capture and inscribe knowledge of
the Orient. Said describes how “[t]he relationship between the Orient and the Orientalist
was essentially hermeneutical”(222). This evokes an image of the Orientalist standing
with a Rosetta stone between the Orient and the Occident. Yet the expert was not simply
the translational intermediary for imperial expansion; he shaped the colonized land to
create a systemic power relation. The Orientalist is stripped of his apparent distance and
becomes a willing (if unknowing) participant in the creation of an East for the West. The
European empires and their continual textualization change from an ‘accurate’ or
‘objective’ portrayal to a broad, multidiscipline exercise of power. This is control through
text. Military officers, bureaucrats, academics, and writers all became integrated into this
structure of incorporation by hermeneutics. As Said concludes, “the Orient, in short,
existed as a set of values attached not to modern realities, but to a series of valourized
contacts it had with a distant European past. This is a pure example of the textual
schematic attitude I have been referring to”(85).
The analogues between the colonized East Indians and West ‘Indians’ are great.
Yet their differences are great as well. Thus given, Said’s Orientalism seems to be
applicable to Canadian First Nations history and experience. The same regime of
“political, sociological, military, ideological, scientific, and imaginative” actors that was
involved in ‘structuring’ the Orient was involved with ‘structuring’ the New World. Yet
the New World did not share the exoticness of the Orient. It was viewed as a harsh and
savage world populated by a harsh and savage people. Penny Pentrone explains this
Renaissance distinction, “Indians were comprehended either in the negative and
unflattering image of ‘sauvage’ or in the romanticized image of primeval innocence – the
‘bon sauvage’, a Rousseauesque pure being” (2). Like the Orient, The ‘white man’s
burden’ and its accompanying Westlake’s International Law, obliged the enlightened race
to claim for European empire both the land and resources of the New World and the souls
of the savages. “…[R]egions of the earth designated as “uncivilized (a word carrying the
freight of Orientalist assumptions, among others), ought to be annexed or occupied by
advanced powers” (Said 206-207). Pentrone describes how “from the mid-nineteenth
century onward, Canadian politicians regarded the Indians in the settlement areas as
‘foreigners, to be civilized. Civilization was possible on through Christianity and
assimilation eventually into the dominant white mainstream”(2).
The Indian, historical ally and trading partner of empires, became a trope of
savage and ward. In a manner similar to Said’s bureaucrats and academics, the imperial
guardians of Canada turned to their ad hoc hermeneuticists. “The theme ‘lo the poor
Indian’ was expressed by poets, historians, and politicians alike” (Pentrone 2). This
fiction of Native peoples was enacted into legislation by the Indian Act (see Milloy). This
legislated the Indian directly into a savage, and reserved them away from the ‘civilized’
peoples. In effect, The Indian Act expropriated the definition of ‘Indian’ along with land
and rights. Additionally, The Indian Act appointed Guardians in the form of Indian
agents. These Indian agents dictated bounds of movement, commerce and custom for the
Natives and ensured their reservation. The agent himself became the interpreter and
constructer of Indian-White social interaction and consequently Indian social beings.
Emma LaRocque’s “The Métis in English Canadian Literature” is instructive for
showing the Métis not as a contested, conflicted space of identity, but a space to
demarcate savage Indian from civil white. From Ralph Connor’s The Foreigner (1909) to
Parker’s Pierre and his People (1894) to Allan’s Blue Pete: Rebel (1940), Métis are
treated as bivalent creatures, either white or Indian, never a combination of the two. The
Indian part is savage, bellicose, ruthless, and childlike. These literary Indian agents took
up the role of interpreter and translator, not for the ethnographic or linguistic duty, but for
a Saidian interpretation oriented towards power and oppression. “…[C]haracters [are] not
presented as people in their own right, but are literary inventions in the service of the
authors’ cultural myths” (LaRocque 1983: 240). Mid-century English-Canadian novels
also maintain this tack. She cites Forer’s The Hunchback (1969) and Wilson’s Andre Tom
MacGregor (1976). These novels are also used “…to convey the author’s messages. The
characters are usually steeped in squalor, despair and sexual promiscuity, presumably to
symbolize the cultural and contemporary death of the Indian…”(1983: 240). Even two
authors she evidently respects, Rudy Weibe and Margaret Laurence, employ this
civilized/savage dichotomy. They maintain a Eurocentric appropriation of Métis identity
and fall victim to a portrayal as “…the more passionate, more sexual and more
unrestrained peoples as opposed to the puritanical strictures of white society. This theme
is really a holdover from the civ/sav dichotomy” (1983: 242). Other contemporary
examples of this abound, including writers W.P. Kinsella and Farley Mowat. In his
seminal anthology All My Relations, Thomas King summarizes this relationship as “Most
Canadians have only seen Natives through the eyes of non-Native writers, and, while
many of these portrayals have been sympathetic, they have also been limited in their
variety of characters, themes, structures and images”(ix). It seems that Said’s mode of
fashioning a society for our own sake can be extracted from the tangle of literature,
history, and legislation between Canada and the First Nations. The traditions of land
appropriation and voice appropriation seem to be the twin forces of a power dynamic
underscoring the violent, entitling hermeneutics of imperial society.
Said has been criticized on several fronts. The most prevalent is the necessary
foundation of colonizer and colonized. The maintenance of First/Third world relations
require discrete conceptions of the first and third world (Selden et al. 224). This
maintains the perspective of adversarial forces, in this case the Occident and the Orient,
regardless of the degree of commingling. To abstract these elements from the
postcolonial space is at the least, chimerical. Shared history has become so intertwined
and dialectical that removing (or simply identifying) elements exclusive of the other is
likely impossible. A second criticism, articulated by Leela Gandhi, is that power rests in
its majority with the colonizing society. By configuring, for example, the Occident and its
cadre of Orientalists as able to fashion, present, refashion and represent the Orient as
“ours”, Said undermines the nascent voices arising from the postcolonial space. While
admittedly Said’s analysis of the relationship between Occident and Orient is complex,
the main power seems to rest within the Occident.
Homi Bhabha retains the colony as site of contestation. The Foucauldian power
relations of Said become, to him, semiotic relations. In “Signs taken for wonders”,
Bhabha forms the outlines for hybridity. “For it is in between the edict of Englishness and
the assault of the dark unruly spaces of the earth, through an act of repetition, that the
colonial text emerges uncertainly”(32). Hybridity is a place of resistance where the
colonized and the colonizer forge a new space inaccessible to either discrete group. It
becomes a site of semiotic interaction and an enabling instance (see Loomba: 122). The
two parties traditionally recognized as dominant and submissive interact in colonial
superposition. Signs or marks of power re-emerge, emptied and re-assigned within the
hybrid world. “It is not that the voice of authority is at a loss for words. It is, rather, that
the colonial discourse has reached that point, when, faced with the hybridity of its
objects, the presence of power is revealed as something other than what its rules of
recognition assert”(Bhabha 35). Bhabha also locates within the hybrid space
ambivalence, irresolution and conflict as a necessary condition. It is not simply a happy
third space arising from colonization, but a new, painful, unstable birth. Thus, Bhabha
argues that the locus of colonial writing, (in the case of “Signs taken for Wonders”,
Anund Messeh - Joseph Conrad – V.S. Naipaul) does not signify the classic colonizeroppressed colonial power relation, but creates something much different which can be
signified only by those participating in the relation.
Contemporary Canadian First Nations literature can be viewed with Bhabha’s
hybridity. There are central elements of Native literature which can support this. These
include themes ranging from the incorporation of oral tradition into the canon to urban
Indians and creation stories. Two aspects will be evaluated here. The first is a shift in the
semiotic significance of the Indian Act. The second is how some contemporary First
Nations authors place their experience within colonial apparatus as site of identity and
difference. A brief outline of these forces will show a nebulous (if far from
comprehensive) First Nations adherence to this reified middle ground. One point must be
clarified, though. Hybridity is not the explicit analysis of ‘racial’ ‘mestiza’
characterization of ‘mixed-blood’ such as ‘Métis’, ‘home-guard Cree’, or ‘halfbreed’. It
is the dialectical assumption and creation of a third space. This does not exclude
‘mestiza’ or ‘métis’ from the hybrid space. It is the amalgam of colonizer and colonized,
regardless of genealogy, to imbue power constructs with new semiotic properties.
The implication of The Indian Act within hybridity stems from the application of
a colonial distinction on to First Nations. From a Saidian perspective, The Indian Act is
the historical construct of bureaucrats and academics to reflect colonizing norms and
ensure European supremacy through (violent) textualization. If it is recast in light of
Bhabha’s semiotics, the Indian Act can become a touchstone for Indian distinction and a
symbol of identity. The identity of ‘Indian Act Indian’ has been used to re-appropriate
some power from the colonizer (see Dyck). It has also forced an introspective element
into identity. The simple categorization of ‘Canadian’ takes on different significance.
Kateri Damm describes it this way:
…In Canada, the Indian Act regulates who is and is not entitled to
government recognition of “Indian status”. This has a rather
complicated and confusing number of definitions of Native identity
…But what does this have to do with a discussion of literature?
Well, it forces us to consider some of the assumptions at the basis of
our readings and criticism of Indigenous writing and orality. It forces
us to examine our own positions vis a vis the text or story and the
writer or speaker as well as to consider the context in which both the
story composition and telling are done (12).
The Act is no longer seen exclusively as a tool spawned from the ‘White Man’s burden’.
Instead it compels the subject to consider elusive notions of texts and contexts. At this
level, a positive, (yet?) subversive, unstable third space creates out of a paternalistic,
marginalizing, racist stricture.
Like the Indian Act, traditional instruments of domination by Empire have worked
their way into poems and stories of (or recorded by) Native authors. In her essay “Begin
with the Text: Aboriginal Literatures and Postcolonial Theories”, Debra Dudek offers
examples from an upper level Contexts in Canadian Literature course. She mentions
three texts: Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, Bertha by Lee Maracle, and Blue Marrow by
Louise Bernice Halfe. She gives the latter special attention. This is a poem written
partially in Cree, partially in English, and partially in what Dudek calls ‘colloquialized
English’. She comments, “As a subversive strategy, [Halfe] uses English and Cree in her
poetry to represent her realities and to reject the political power of English. This rejection
both creates a new language and proves that the dominant language is not
unchangeable…Halfe demonstrates how both Cree and English transform as experiences,
time, and place change”(100). Without the legal-colonizing apparatus of empire, her
poem would not have its same strength. The banning of Native languages and social
customs with the Indian Act import a much greater weight to the work. This is not a
simple bi-lingual poem but one that semiotically challenges the power of language English or Cree exclusively there could not exist this strong symbiotic opposition.
This theme continues within recent Canadian First Nations literature. It is the
placement of the subject without the two societies but within the hybrid expression.
Experiences of reservations and residential schools, creation myths of Native and
European religion, and reliance upon and removal from the earth are some of the
archetypes that exist here. Works like King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and
Bright Water, Drew Taylor Hayden’s Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, and Lee
Maracle’s Bertha, are only a few examples of contemporary Native writing existing
within a third space. The recent critical and commercial success of Tomson Highway’s
Kiss of the Fur Queen exemplifies this. According to the dust jacket, the book
purportedly fuses “Native story telling techniques with European narratives to create an
engaging, funny, passionate and triumphant novel about the experience of being a
stranger in your own land”. It contains the hallmarks of ‘Native Literature’ mentioned
above, including a recurrence of the Trickster who is, in the words of Highway, “as
pivotal and important a figure in our world as Christ is in the realm of Christian
mythology”(iv). Once again, hybridity arises not simply as difference or definition but as
essential element. As Pentrone explains,
[Native writers] are different because form is only the expression of
the fabric of experience, and the experience of native writers has been
different. Like the archetypal figure of the trickster, native writers
easily adopt a multiplicity of styles and forms to suit their purposes.
And in so doing they are giving birth to a new literature… (184).
A foremost criticism of hybridity seems to be it’s a priori reliance upon
definitional opposites for its creation. As Gunew writes, “we should also note that there is
a suggestion in some recent criticism that such analyses in the name of hybridity are
dependent upon the very boundaries they seek to cross or blur”(37). This approach is
articulated forcefully in Annamarie Jagose’s “Slash and Suture: Post/colonialism in
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestisza”. She describes the hybrid mestiza
environment of Gloria Andalzua as tripartite – two spaces divided by a fence and a third
space created by it. This is the parturient slash and suture of the title. Yet, according to
Jagose, the fence perpetuates the exact colonizer-colonized relation it purports to
transcend. “Thus the border trope of the mestiza does not mark the end of the colonial
relationship; it represents its very condition” (214). To be fair, this tripartite relationship
of hybridity is as Andalzua constructs it, not Bhabha. Jagose recognizes the complexity
of Bhabha’s hybridity, and contends that Andalzua’s mestiza does not have his analytical
force. Nevertheless, the boundaries are a necessary element of hybridity.
Postcolonialism literary theory, having covered the colonized, the colonizer, and
the hybrid between them, leaves Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to call forth the ‘subaltern’.
Her basis is the epistemic violence of imperialism coupled with deconstructive
elucidation of ‘the other’. To those who cannot adhere to distinct categorizations,
questions of identity become not simply difficult but unintelligible. Like Said, she
invokes Foucault, but she uses his theory to describe how power relations are at work
concomitantly with taxonomic attempts to voice the voiceless (28). To define or to name
becomes an act of violence upon those who attempted to give voice to. As Selden et al
(attempt to) summarize, “…the oppressed and silenced cannot, by definition, speak or
achieve self-legitimation without ceasing to be that named subject under neocolonialism”(227). Definition of the subaltern is inherently self-defeating and Spivak
famously asks, “Can the subaltern speak?”. To approximate a subaltern for Canadian
First Nations is to commit the fault (and violence?) that Spivak speaks. The question is,
though, can the subaltern exist and speak as a deconstruction and self-reference?
Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed has become one of the most successful and
important works of Native literature. Ethnographer Noel Dyck refers to it as an
autobiography. Hartmut Lutz calls Halfbreed “a best seller and still… the most important
and seminal book authoured by a Native person from Canada” (as quoted in Acoose 29).
Janet Acoose describes how “Halfbreed established a new literary trend” (29). But for
Emma LaRocque, it is a story – her story.
Finally, you may ask, in exasperation, “What on earth are you looking
for? What do you consider to be authentic?” Authenticity is that
undefinable phenomenon in literature – you know it when it is there,
and you know it when it isn’t. I cannot define it…Maria told a story,
her story. She did not use the Métis as a vehicle for a worldview, a
doctrine or even a social protest. She simple told a story, and because
it is authentic, it is my story too (1983: 242).
Halfbreed has become the standard bearer for Native literature. It is the first work to
realize a degree of commercial success and seems to be one of the first works to give
voice to Natives in Canada. Yet it retains ‘subaltern’ traits (to use a paradoxical phrase)
of self-reference and autobiography. The subaltern aspect of Native literature blossoms
from this seed of Halfbreed. Acoose’s article is subtitled “Indigenous writers as authors
of their own realities”. This seems to be the ‘progression’ of Native literature. The Indian
is not a monolithic set of norms and experiences, but a realization of the creation of
individual worlds and realities. Perhaps, then, ‘Native Literature’ has become a
community of subalterns - a cobbling together of those necessary spiritually, culturally,
and physically displaced to renew and appropriate a voice. The taxonomic function of the
critic that Spivak speaks as inimical to voice the subaltern fades away. Identity
necessarily precludes classification, even classification based on the identification of
preclusions.
These three postcolonial critics – Said, Bhabha and Spivak, are elucidatory for
their views on the oppressed, colonized, and settled parts of the world. Yet their
postcolonial analysis suffers from a deficiency with respect to questions of emancipation.
At risk of overgeneralization, the ‘postcolonial’ critical environment rests necessarily on
the interaction between an imperial power and its unwilling subjects of Westlake’s
international law. Its wholehearted embrace of that which eschews essentialism
consequently undermines cues for those oppressed to appropriate power. By writing
hybridity or not writing subalternity into the lexicon of power relations, one removes an
identifying mark of oppression. A community of subalterns quickly obscures conditions
of difficult day-to-day life.
Peter Hallward lays out this case in his Absolutely Postcolonial. He states that
“…Marxist critics have assembled by far the most coherent and most powerful of the
several assaults on postcolonial theory”(41). He also points out the analogue between
postcolonialism and theories of globalization. Like the global capital flows which are
ostensibly benevolent, but which result in worldwide systemic class oppression, critics
contend that postcolonial literary theory is the theoretical absolution for patterns that
continue and reinforce oppression. At the vanguard of Marxist criticism of postcolonial
theory is Aijaz Ahmad. “He has little trouble in showing that dismissal of class and
nation and so many “essentialisms” logically leads toward an ethic of non-attachment as
the necessary condition of true understanding. This deracination of intellectual privilege,
coupled with new institutional affiliations to replace earlier, more ‘organic’ connections,
helps coordinate the academy with the prevailing international division of labour”
(Hallward 41). Ahmad’s “Literary Theory and Third World Literature”, in its description
of the changing face of twentieth century Western literary studies, advances this theme. It
analyzes the challenges by racial and cultural minorities faced by academia and its
response. He argues that the political has been separated from the critical in the
(postcolonial) halls of learning. The civil rights movement and the purported awakenings
of the 1960’s were merely the historical intersection of youth and a tenure-track position.
As Ahmad writes, “Radicalism has been for most of them, a state of mind, brought about
by an intellectual identification with the revolutionary wave that had gripped so much of
the world when they were truly young; of the day-to-day drudgeries of, say, a political
party or a trade union they had been (and were to remain) largely innocent”(151). He
reserves a specific polemic for Homi Bhabha. Ahmad describes him as an affluent
bourgeoisie recasting the violence perpetrated upon dark-skinned peoples as an optimistic
resource for a new gilded age. This is an ad hominem argument but that is essentially
Ahmad’s point. There can be no separation of the personal and political. Those that
pronounce a global emancipation of hybridity enforce the global division of labour. It is
the ignorance of this (literally) disempowering aspect of postcolonial theory that
represents its biggest deficit.
This issue of oppression and division permeates the analytical search for Native
Literature in Canada. The reclamation of a society in its essential(ist) form has lead to a
reflective and constant acknowledgement of being oppressed. The continuity between the
personal, the political and the critical is also at the forefront. In Emma LaRocque’s
“Teaching Aboriginal Literatures”, she describes recent pedagogy of Native Literature
and recent developments in Native Studies programs at Canadian universities. While
there is no explicit Marxist thrust to her study, it both echoes the concerns of Ahmad and
has a simmering radical tenor. “The recent post-colonial emphasis on “hybridity” (which
is not to be confused with Métis Nation cultures)…can serve to eclipse Aboriginal
cultural knowledges, experiences (both national and individual) and what may be called
the colonial experience”(2002: 222). She advocates recognition of Aboriginal heritage
and worldview without being nativist or essentialist. She also recognizes the apparatus of
western educational institutions, including their hegemonic positions, and wants
reconciliation with aboriginal experience.
…[W]e are creating a space from which to enter the mandates of
western thought and format without having to internalize its
coloniality or to defy our personal and cultural selves…On my part, I
have strived towards a personal and intellectual liberation which,
among other things, has entailed both ‘living’ and theorizing
decolonization, a ‘decolonization’ that would ultimately be free of
rigid paradigms, ideological or cultural formulas and fads or the jargon
that often comes with each of these respective methodological tools or
theories. (2002: 227).
In a broader context, the postcolonial act of theorizing-out radical themes is a
concern expressed by some First Nations critics. These include Linda Tuhiwahi Smith,
Kimberly M. Blooser and Thomas King (Dudek 93). Anne Marie Sewell’s takes the
postcolonial approach to its logical end of contemporary, hybrid categories:
Native Literature seems sometimes to have taken on the character of
the worst kind of reserve, where community are crushed into a cycle
of hopelessness, helplessness, and violation…the things “we” write
about are: Our oppression, Our experiences as drunks and druggies
and prostitutes, how we miraculously Found Our Culture and got
healed, and Eagles and/or Bears and/or Wolves…And if one doesn’t
write about these things? One hears that their work is not Native
enough… (20 – 21).
King’s “Godzilla vs. the Postcolonial” further articulates Sewell’s implications for
postcolonialism. These include the chronological reference to colonialism as the
starting point for meaningful First Nations literary development, the guardian-ward
relationship as the sole catalyst for Native literature, and that Native culture is
somehow ancillary when viewed through the lens of postcolonialism. In his words,
“And, worst of all, the idea of post-colonial writing effectively cuts us off from our
traditions, traditions that were in place before colonialism every became a question,
traditions which have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization,
and it supposes that contemporary Native writing is largely a construct of
oppression”(as quoted in Dudek: 93). This passage articulates the most salient critique
of postcolonialism in a First Nations context as well as necessarily sounding a resonant
chord to an actual Indian.
This short investigation has hoped to show postcolonialism in the context of
Canadian First Nations literature. While elements of postcolonial theory are insightful
and contribute to First Nations literature, it does not tell the whole story. Orientalist
hermeneutical dialectic, hybrid constructive interaction, and the subaltern all engage
different aspects of Indian literature and experience. Yet at its heart, the relationship of
colonizer and colonized is the defining relationship for postcolonialism. This leads to the
significant exclusion of those elements termed ‘radical’, but which to First Nations lie at
the heart of their identity and emancipation. Thus the voicing of Native literature
remains what it is, a complex interaction of creation and power, a canon of lives lived but
not necessarily written.
Copyright 2004 Quentin Kayne
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