1. Parejo Vadillo discusses three works by Aboriginal Canadian authors in her essay. What are some o

 1. Parejo Vadillo discusses three works by Aboriginal Canadian authors in her essay. What are some of Parejo Vadilloâ€s key points about how all three of these books have been effective in giving voice to the Native female subjects of these stories? What is this important?2. How does Parejo Vadillo describe these three literary works (include their titles and authors) as being part of their authors†attempts to heal? What are these authors working to heal from? Give one specific example of this healing project in relation to Maria Campbell and Halfbreed.3. What does Parejo Vadillo explain about the relationships between Native womenâ€s autobiographies and the construction of identity? How is literature important in this process?4. Outline Parejo Vadilloâ€s claims about the ways Native womenâ€s stories generally, and Campbellâ€s autobiography specifically, confront colonialism, racism, and/or sexism.5. Why does Parejo Vadillo believe it is significant that these women write from within community and Native storytelling traditions? How does that shape their written stories and their expression to readers?6. How does Parejo Vadillo perceive that in the case of these Native womenâ€s autobiographies, the “personal becomes politicalâ€? Why does she feel this is important?• Your opinion: Has reading this essay in any way enhanced your understanding of, or response to, Maria Campbellâ€s autobiography? If so, explain how. If not, explain why notTitle: Native Women and Resistance LiteratureAuthor(s): Ana I. Parejo VadilloPublication Details: Tricks with a Glass: Writing Ethnicity in Canada. Ed. Rocio G. Davis and Rosalia Baena. Amsterdam:Rodopi, 2000. p229-250.Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 238. Detroit: Gale. From LiteratureResource Center.Document Type: Critical essayFull Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage LearningFull Text:[(essay date 2000) In the following essay, Vadillo explores the search for identity and subjectivity in the semiautobiographical fiction of Native Canadian women writers.]It is the practice of writers to fictionalize reality and prostitute the product of their licentious fantasies. “Artisticlicense,” they call it. (Whoever ‘they’ are.) Being not different, I have taken both the stories of my life, thestories of other’s lives and some pure fabrications of my imagination and re-written them as my own.Thefantasy of these stories lies less in the distortion of the facts of them, than in their presentation. They arepresented as I saw them from my own emotional, spiritual and visual perspective. To be faithful to my view Iput myself as the central figure in all the lives recounted here. If I was not really there, it does not matter. Ihave eyes and I can see.1Whose Story Is It Anyway?For Barbara Godard, This question–involving “who is speaking, to whom, on whose behalf, in what context?”2–is themajor issue in Canadian literature; one that addresses matters of authority, property and appropriation ‘in’ and ‘by’ theCanadian canon. Furthermore, the question is re-inscribed on the theoretical assumption of a pre-existent constitutive’subject,’ whose story has somehow been appropriated, while showing willingness on the part of the reader to name thesubject or subjects producing the text. The epigraph of the present essay asks precisely that: who is speaking? Or,alternatively, who is going to speak in Maracle’s book? To whom is she speaking? Is she speaking to the people sherepresents? Is she speaking for these people? Or, are these people speaking through her voice placing themselves in theposition of a speaking voice? Lee Maracle does not deny any of these questions. Her autobiographical text I Am Womanwrites Maracle-as-text, inscribing in such a discourse the multiple voices of the subaltern.Maracle’s remarks introduce the main issue to be discussed here. First, I will consider the question of Native women’sautobiography3 in the Canadian literary context and its aesthetic hybridity (narratives in the “as-told-by” tradition). Theseautobiographies consolidate the formation of the writer’s identity as a Native/Indian woman.4 The created ‘I’ subverts theideological Subject by becoming the speaking subject of the text and not the discourse of the Other. Both narrativestrategies confront the literary white Canadian canon by constructing an Indian/Native identity and positioning the (white)subject as the Other. Secondly, this essay will analyze the relationship between the female autobiographer and her readersin terms of ‘identity’ and/or ‘representation,’ demonstrating how this leads to the creation of a collective subject or voicewhich transforms history and historiography. History functions as an aesthetic and political element, particularly in theemphasis on its difference from its representation in the white Canadian literary canon. Thirdly, this essay willconsequently examine how Native women’s autobiographies construct a communal mode of power deconstructing colon-Ization and ‘history.’ I will conclude by reading autobiography as a form of resistance literature where the subaltern takes uppolitical positions. It is in this sense that the personal will become the political, when ‘history’ and ‘story’ overlap and the’personal’ is ‘political’ and vice versa. Last but not least, I will read collective autobiography as the inverted discourse of apatriarchal-cum-imperialistic imposed silence.Proceeding from these premisses, this essay will analyze Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman and Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel, Mariafile:///Users/haladay/Downloads/Download%20Document-3.htmlPage 1 of 15Download Document10/1/13 8:46 PMCampbell’s Halfbreed, Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree, and Isabelle Knockwood’s Out of the Depths. I shallexamine how the (ethnic) subject (the Native woman), speaking from historical time and space, disrupts history andideology by occupying the ‘I’ and erasing its distinction from collectivity.Native Women’s Autobiography: Becoming a SubjectSilvera: Was the novel autobiographical?Culleton: In a general way. I grew up in foster homes. My familywere alcoholics, there were suicides in my family, I was raped, and, of course, I had the thing with theidentity.Culleton: I decided to go with reality.5In recent decades, Canada has witnessed a proliferation of Native writers who have revolutionized literary studies byoffering personal and innovative analyses of the decolonizing process. Their writings question the white literaryestablishment itself and the canonical rules by which the different publishing companies have determined what is literature(understood as white) and what is not. Writings by women are of special importance in this respect, as they offer ananalytical study of class, race and gender de/colonization, thereby producing a transformation in poetic language in terms ofgenre- and subject-positions. One of the first of these texts was Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed, written in 1973. In 1975, LeeMaracle published her autobiography, Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel. However, it was in the 1980s and early 1990s that Nativewomen’s writing underwent its most dramatic expansion. In 1983, Beatrice Culleton published In Search of April Raintree,while Jeannette Armstrong’s controversial book Slash appeared in 1985, the same year as Ruby Slipperjack’s Honour theSun. Further books included Beth Cuthand’s Horse Dance to Emerald Mountain (1987) and Rita Joe’s Song of Eskasom(1988). Also in 1988, Maracle published I am Woman in the new Write-On Press, founded by Lee and Dennis Maracle.Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell’s The Book of Jessica, Beth Cuthand’s Voices in the Waterfall and Joan Crate’sBreathing Water all appeared in 1989. Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel was republished in 1990 by the Women’s Press, the sameyear that Maracle’s Sojourner’s Truth and Other Stories appeared. In 1992, Isabelle Knockwood published Out of theDepths.The origin of these autobiographies is, in most cases, an attempt by the authors to heal themselves. At times, they start inthe form of a letter that the author is writing to herself, as in the case of Maria Campbell. Others, as with Beatrice Culleton,try to come to terms with their lives by writing. Writing becomes the healing. Campbell, in an interview with Hartmut Lutz,explains the origin of Halfbreed. With no money or food, about to be kicked out of her house, she was on the verge ofgoing back to the street. She was very angry and frustrated. One night, she went out to a bar, “I always carry paper in mybag, and I started writing a letter because I had to have somebody to talk to, and there was nobody to talk to. And that washow I wrote Halfbreed.”6 The original manuscript was about two thousand pages long. Isabelle Knockwood’s Out of theDepths was also written with the idea of exposing what residential schools had meant to the Native population. In herintroduction, Knockwood says that at first she wanted to search out stories about her mother; then she met Betsey Paul andtaped two interviews, and both ended up “spending almost all the time talking about what we could remember of theschool.”7 Writing it became both a personal and a communal healing process for all those who had spent their childhood inresidential schools. When asked by Makeda Silvera what she felt about the book’s being used in schools and universities,she answered that “that’s all I wanted, for the word to get out.”8 Similarly, Beatrice Culleton decided to write In Search ofApril Raintree in response to the suicides of her two older sisters, to “try to figure out why all that stuff happened to myfamily,”9 while Lee Maracle defines I Am Woman as “a search for meaning to us, to me, personally, and to the people in mylife, and a search for what happened in my life that is universal to us.”10The Native autobiographical mode thus becomes the means of both a search for personal selfhood and a reconstruction oflost Native/Indian identity. Colonialism misconstrued this identity; the Native woman or Other was merely the ‘squaw.’Because Native autobiography manipulates the images, myths and discourses that white cultural categories had transposedonto the Native, this genre enables the Native woman to consolidate her own identity. Within colonial ideology, the(mis)naming played an important role in the construction of the Native as Other. In order to understand how identity andsubjectivity are constructed in the autobiographies that I am analyzing, I must turn to Althusser’s theory of ideology andideological state apparatuses in order to comprehend the extent to which the (mis)naming forces an individual to(mis)recognize him/herself in the process of defining personal identity. Althusser explains that identity and subjectivitywork by ‘recognition’ or, conversely, by ‘misrecognition.’11 Identity is formed in the placing/recognizing of oneself in afile:///Users/haladay/Downloads/Download%20Document-3.htmlPage 2 of 15Download Document10/1/13 8:46 PMsubject-position which ideology offers.: ie, it is ideology that constructs identity and subjectivity. Ideology is “a system ofrepresentations (discourses, images, myths) concerning the real relations in which people live.”12 These representations arereproduced in what Althusser calls “ideological state apparatuses,” within which he includes literature and the educationalsystem. These apparatuses exist to guarantee the reproduction of the “myths and beliefs necessary to enable people to workwithin the existing social formation.”13 Following these premisses, it is obvious that, first, these apparatuses work tosupport colonial ideology, upholding the Native as the Other, as ‘squaw,’ “good-for-nothing Halfbreed.” Behind all ideologyis the idea of the individual in society, and the construction of this individual as subject:I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add thatthe category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology in so far as all ideology has the function (whichdefines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.14As a result, Belsey, following Althusser’s theory, argues that “people recognize” (misrecognize) themselves in the way inwhich ideology “interpellates”15 them or, in other words, addresses them as subjects, calls them by their names and, in turn,”recognize[s] their autonomy,”16 adopting the different subject-positions which ideology offers them so that they may existin society. The subject-position that the ideology of the West has offered the Native individual is the position of the Other,that is, the one who is not-‘I.’ This ‘non-I-dentity’ is what Native women’s autobiographies deconstruct, using differentstrategies. Jodi Lundgren analyzes these strategies in the work of Beatrice Culleton and Maria Campbell. According toLundgren, Campbell “redefines ‘Halfbreed’ in positivist terms but deconstructs racist stereotypes.”17 She offers as anexample her deconstruction of the image of the Indian as “only good for two things–working and fucking”; Campbell”undermines the employer’s stereotyped discourse by informing the reader” that this same person used to “go to dances innearby Native communities and sneak off into the bush with the men,” putting this statement into context by explaining that”this was common in our area.”18 The reader is then made aware of how ‘naming’ works. The same strategy is used byCulleton in her In Search of April Raintree, whose main characters, April and Cheryl, represent the social and economicdispossession of the Natives. The colour of their skin makes them different, though: April is fairer, and this will allow herto enter the middle class. The discourse of colour is present in April’s views on other children and on herself: “They didn’tcare to play with Cheryl and me. They called us names and bullied us.”19 Only when these characters deconstruct thoseimposed images (while unlearning the racist discourse) and accept their origins, are they producing their ownrepresentations, myths and discourses.Lee Maracle’s deconstructive technique differs from those of Campbell and Culleton. Maracle’s two autobiographical textsare a combination of theory, poetry, storytelling and politics. Describing I Am Woman, she maintains that “it’s theorycoming through story […] Colonization, decolonization, very, very simply.”20 This is also true of Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel,where European political theory, especially Marx, is used in combination with the story of her life to de/construct thecolonizing process in the Native community. Nonetheless, she also understands that only by changing the myths implantedby colonialism can Natives regain their lost identity:I used to consider myself a liberated woman. I woke up at the bottom of the mine shaft one morning, darknessabove me, screaming; “I’m not like the rest […] I’m not an alcoholic […] a skid row bum […] a stupid Native,”ad nauseum. Each time I confronted white colonial society I had to convince them of my validity as a humanbeing. It was the attempt to convince them that made me realize that I was still a slave.21In the same way, Maracle describes how “racist ideology had defined womanhood for the Native woman as non-existent.”And again, she creates the identity of the Native woman by using different discourses; poetry: “Fish-Wife”; prose, “I wantto look across my kitchen table at the women of color that share my life and see the genius of their minds, uncluttered bywhite opinion”; and theory:the dictates of patriarchy demand that beneath Native man, comes the female Native. The dictates of racism arethus that Native men are beneath white women and Native females are not fit to be referred to as women.22Isabelle Knockwood also constructs identity by showing how the educational system–one of the ideological apparatusesfile:///Users/haladay/Downloads/Download%20Document-3.htmlPage 3 of 15Download Document10/1/13 8:46 PMwhich “reproduces the conditions of production”–deprives the Natives of their Indian culture, in this sense robbing them oftheir “collective identity.” It does so, for example, by eliminating their vernacular (the students are not allowed to speakMi’kmaw or any other Indian language); by replacing Indian beliefs with the Catholic faith; and also by depriving them oftheir “individual identities,” for “often the nuns would arbitrarily change a child’s name.”23 Knockwood quotes from a letterin which Imelda Brooks describes these experiences:I remember those horrifying years as if it were yesterday. There was one nun, Sister Gilberta, she alwayspassed out the punishment. Every day, she would take me into the bathroom and lock the door. She would thenproceed to beat me thirty times on each hand, three times a day, with a strap. She would count to thirty, outloud, each time she hit me. It’s an awful way to learn to count to thirty. My older sister, Grace, learned to countto fifty. I never understood why I had those beatings, but at the age of 37, I realized it had to be because Ispoke my language. To this day, I can’t speak my language very well. But I do understand when I am spoken toin Micmac.Why was our culture and language such a threat that it had to be taken away from us with such avengeance?24Fredric Jameson has claimed that genres are “literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specificpublic.”25 As such, Native women’s autobiography is a genre in which the writer and the public can search for their identityas Natives. The autobiographical genre is thus especially powerful because it subverts the hegemony of white-colonialdiscourse by attacking its very basis: ie, the construction of the Other as non-I. Autobiography constructs the ‘I’ in discourseand in history, and subjectivity is formed in the discourse and history of the Other, which confronts, by its very nature,white colonial history.I established earlier that the indigene woman writes in order to come to terms with colonialism and its effects. Further,these autobiographies share two very important features that make them different both contextually and formally fromWestern autobiographies by women: these women write for the community,26 and Native women’s autobiography is ahybrid form of writing which fuses the oral to the Western written tradition. Maria Campbell, Beatrice Culleton, IsabelleKnockwood and Lee Maracle all admit that they write within the storytelling tradition. In most cases, this is done byintroducing various intratextual stories which captivate and entertain the reader. Also, orality is achieved through language.Maria Campbell explains that her choice of what she calls “broken English” reflects the way she spoke when she was athome. She writes in this manner because, as she argues, “I can also express my community better than I can in ‘good’English. It’s more like oral tradition, and I am able to work as a storyteller with that.”27 Similarly, Maracle explains that, forNatives, “words and meaning are more important than structure”; English syntax offers no meaning in the stories becausefor them “’syntax’ is even bigger than in a sentence. It’s in our life, in our conduct of being.”28 She also agrees that the waythey speak English is different, and she tries to capture that ‘essence’ when she writes. As a result, these autobiographiesmove from theory through poetry to history, incorporating in them their own traditions and stories, as is done in thestorytelling process. Knockwood included in Out of the Depths the tradition of the Talking Stick in Mi’kmaw culture. Itrepresents the “power of speech” and was used to “guarantee that everyone who wanted to speak would be allowed to takeas long as they needed to say what was on their minds,” before the stick was passed to the next person in the circle,following the direction of the sun: “The Talking Stick goes around until it returns to the person with the problem or issue,who then acknowledges everyone present and what they have said.”29 Knockwood presents her autobiography in this wayto make the reader aware that what follows is a “Talking Stick” ceremony in which different people from the communityare going to speak. Orality and the storytelling tradition empower Native identity and “combat the Eurocentric attitude thatthe written word is the universal register of meaning as truth.”30This hybridity does not imply, as Emberley claims, a “utopian projection of an unprecedented overlay of ‘traditions’.”31 Onthe contrary, it is a form of resistance to that tradition that has kept them silent. By writing these autobiographies, theyreach larger audiences. Hence, they use an imperialistic form to confront the ideology that disempowered them. Further:in making use of realist and autobiographical genres, implicitly [they] produce a confrontation between theirre-presentations of a mode of life and the readings of the intellectual, who, by proxy, claims an institutionalresponsibility in representing their political interests.32file:///Users/haladay/Downloads/Download%20Document-3.htmlPage 4 of 15Download Document10/1/13 8:46 PMFrom this angle, autobiography challenges both the literary canon and colonial ideology. Barbara Godard, developingSpivak’s ideas on the subaltern and the possibility of breaking the silence to which colonialism has consigned “the ThirdWorld Woman,” concludes that resistance literature in general, but particularly in Canada, produces a discourse that”interpellates individuals as subjects of this discourse.”33 Resistance literature, Godard argues, is defined by three mainthings: first, it is “a political and politicized activity” engaged with “formal experimentation,” although she makes clear thatthis is not a formalist project. Secondly, experimentation leads to the “exploration of the formal limitations of the literarycodes” imposing “historical demands and responsibilities on a reader.”34 The last characteristic of resistance literature isthat it is produced within the struggle for decolonization. Native women’s autobiography is, in this sense, a counterhegemonic mode of writing, following both the oral and the written tradition. As resistance literature, its final aim is toachieve de-colon-I-zation,35 by constructing a Native identity. Once identity has been achieved, the subject is empoweredby the word.The Subject That Embraces the Community: The Collective VoiceFor us, thinking is a complete and total process. In a sweat, or the Big House or wherever, around the pipe, youharness all your energy, physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual, and you retreat into solitude to workout the nature of your particular solidarity with creation. And you retreat into lineage, as well, because thefarther backward in time you travel, the more grandmothers you have, the farther forward, the moregrandchildren! You actually represent an infinite number of people, and the only physical manifestation isyourself.36Acknowledging, first, that ideology constructs individuals as subjects and that the subject is constructed and produced inideology; and secondly, that Native women’s autobiography effectively reverses the imposed colonial ideology byconstructing I-dentity; and finally, that this genre is a resistance mode which “interpellates the individual as subjects,” it canbe proposed that Native women’s autobiography offers the colonized reader a subject-position from which she can speak,hence the possibility of de/colon-I-zation. Further, it can be said that the ‘I’ in Native women’s autobiography representsboth the writer and her community. The symbolic use of the “Talking Stick,” for instance, is transformed into politicalacquisition of subjectivity, where the community can speak out.Gayatri Spivak, in a critique of Deleuze, analyzes the problems faced by the intellectual in representing the subaltern, theoppressed, or the colonized.37 For Spivak, ‘representation’ has two senses or meanings, “’representation’ as ‘speaking for,’ asin politics, and representation as ‘representation,’ as in art or philosophy.”38 There is yet another important meaning:this third inflection of representation signifies something represented to, addressed to areader/viewer/consumer and foregrounds the relations of seer and seen to the economic and political networkswhich constitute the ‘outside.’39Spivak rejects the possibility of representation in the case of the Western/European intellectual, who shows him/herself as’transparent’ because of totalizing concepts of power and desire. Lee Maracle agrees with this view. In I Am Woman sheargues that intellectuals gave Natives the power to dream, but rendered themselves invisible when political, economic andsocial action was required;they preferred polite discussion about abstract ideas and not the challenge that characterized our old ways.They preferred peace–at any price–to the inevitable consequences of social resistance. They feared the wrathof the State.40Nonetheless, the problem of representation changes if the ‘speaker’ is the Other and not the European intellectual.Representation works precisely because these women are the Other. To examine the nature of representation in Nativewomen’s autobiography, we must first understand the process of transmission of Native culture, the collective nature of thestory in the oral tradition, and its influence in Native written texts.Maria Campbell includes her writings as part of her work within and with the community, as do Beatrice Culleton, Ritafile:///Users/haladay/Downloads/Download%20Document-3.htmlPage 5 of 15Download Document10/1/13 8:46 PMJoe, Jeannette Armstrong and the majority, if not all, of…