Maps of Misreading

The possibilities of misreading lurk at every corner when dealing with new literatures – for example, we could be seeking elaborate cultural contexts for texts by Aboriginal authors that do not explicitly use Aboriginal knowledges. This is a problem that every reader of culturally different texts faces. Native American scholar Louis Owens has questioned whether, in the face of the political inequality within colonized space, it is inevitable that when the Aboriginal text is read at the transcultural frontier what may result may be ‘mere surface appropriation only, a shadow borrowing and simulacrum of tribal culture.’ The question is relevant not only to non-Native readers within Australia and Canada, but also for us Indian readers working well outside the immediate political context in which the literature is produced. The frequent problem with working with area studies is that certain trajectories of research can perpetuate misreadings or appropriative readings of texts, because of the inadequate exposure the scholars in these countries have to new critical and cultural developments in the country or nation whose culture is being studied. I myself have encountered research done in India on Aboriginal Australian and Canadian writing that is several years behind the new directions taken in these countries, so that what is being done in India in many instances is derivative, or worse, culturally insensitive, vague research in area studies. Even when one’s research is a reflection of the guidance and directions provided by Aboriginal scholars or culturally knowledgeable scholars of Aboriginal studies, one must be self-reflexive, asking the questions that Arnold Krupat has asked of his own theoretical formulation of ‘ethnocriticism’ as a reading strategy for Native American cultures:

…inasmuch as the conceptual categories necessary to ethnocriticism - culture, history, imperialism, anthropology, literature, interdisciplinarity, even the frontier—are Western categories, the objection may be raised that ethnocriticism is itself no more than yet another form of imperialism, this time of a discursive and epistemological kind….

According to Elaine Jahner, critics need to be sensitive to the fact that conventional approaches and vocabulary are ‘as likely to obscure as to illuminate both the form and the content of Native literature, oral or written.’ Emma LaRocque sounds a warning note to cross-cultural researchers such as myself:

Even as a growing number of scholars are finally taking… (a) “cross-cultural” approach, Native peoples are in various phases of decolonizing. For many academics cross-cultural means their ‘academic’ right to use Native material in the advancement of (their) research and theory without that translating into bringing Aboriginal praxis in their pedagogy…. To Native peoples, cross-cultural means having the “inherent right” to practice and protect their Aboriginality. Decolonization demands having to define and protect more closely their identities (languages, literatures, among other things) and what is left of their lands and resources.

It is for this reason that one has to be constantly sensitive to the extent to which one’s reading frameworks are, or can be, appropriative, while at the same time one cannot be locked in a creative and intellectual paralysis, or a refusal to engage with texts because of one’s being a cultural ‘outsider’. The persistence of colonial power relationships in the production of academic knowledge prompts Patrick Wolfe to urge non-Aboriginal scholars to ‘speak when you’re spoken to.’ On the other hand, Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton has described the unwillingness of non-Aboriginal scholars to engage in critical dialogue as racist. Avoiding any engagement with Aboriginal literatures does not serve any purpose except to foreclose dialogue. As David Hollinsworth puts it, ‘to suggest an innocence earned by abstinence is naïve and probably hypocritical.’ Langton invites crosscultural dialogue by suggesting the idea of Aboriginality as:

a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people create ‘Aboriginalities’…in the infinite array of intercultural experiences.

Louis Owens, drawing on Bakhtinian notions of the dialogic, asks if theory can ‘illuminate transcultural zones in such a way that such “dialogically agitated space” becomes a matrix within which communication and comprehension are indeed multidirectional and multi-reflexive.’ The first chapter explores the issues of ‘essential difference,’ separatism and sovereignty as well as the possibilities of decolonizing readings of Aboriginal literature that locate the text, the critic, the author and his/her world within this field of intersubjectivity.

At a fundamental level, the issue of cross-cultural reading raises the question of how one culture perceives another, and how meanings are exchanged. In considering the problem of cross-cultural interpretation, Elaine Jahner observes that non-Native scholars or for that matter, all scholars have to rely on ethnological information at various times to interpret symbols and metaphors in Aboriginal texts in order to fully explore their relevance to the themes being explored. Emma LaRocque acknowledges that a balance needs to be maintained between ‘too much ethnographication’ and the erasing of ‘real cultural differences’, calling the process a convoluted negotiation between mercurial ‘siamese twins’.

Kristina Fagan of the Labrador Metis nation suggests five different ways in which an appropriate level of cultural specificity might be achieved in the context of Aboriginal writing. The first is an author-centric approach, involving an extensive study of the influences, styles, etc. of the authors. Fagan suggests that a study of native traditions and movements as well, and suggests that this be specific to the culture of specific peoples, such as the Cree culture for reading Cree texts. Also, she suggests taking into consideration new traditions that may be arising – e.g. in the Native writers’ community in Toronto. The third aspect is the study of the languages of the writers and how the language affects those texts. Fagan suggests that even when native writers do not know their languages, they are still informed politically and aesthetically by their ancestral links. The need to interact with communities as sources of theories and not objects needs to be done by scholars working to record forms of Indigenous knowledge. Finally, Fagan focuses on understanding reader reception as a key aspect of research, for example the differences in response between the literary critic and the general reader. In my research on Nyoongar and Ojibwe writing, I have tried to follow the guidelines set by Fagan, though for reasons stated earlier, I have not been able to focus on the languages of the writers apart from English.

In order to develop a culturally sensitive cross-cultural reading framework, Ojibwe scholar Armand Ruffo suggests a process of cultural immersion and engagement over a long period of time with the dynamic and changing cultural contexts out of which Aboriginal literature is written. In this, there is much that is common in terms of the approach adopted by the researcher in ethnography and in literary studies. But literary studies perhaps needs to develop a research ethics similar to the one being evolved in the post-colonial social sciences regarding Aboriginal studies. This might seem unusual since the autonomy of the printed/recorded text is considered important in the western academy. Unlike the human subject, once the printed text/performance text is published, it is available for anyone who reads/hears/sees it. In my own work, I was not sure, for instance, of how the retrieval of Aboriginal voices or acts of resistance from old colonial textual records might hold up from the point of view of research ethics. To what extent would the use of colonial texts as sources holding traces of the voices of informants, as it were, hold up to the concept of accountability to the community being studied? When certain knowledges and epistemologies are the intellectual property of communities, the approach suggested by Linda Tuhiwai Smith becomes a viable solution in the humanities as well: the development of collaborative research where possible, with the acknowledgement of Aboriginal intellectual leadership or guidance, and a shift in emphasis to the theoretical and critical writing of Aboriginal scholars.

To merely force narratives by Aboriginal authors into established reading frameworks would be to inflict epistemic violence upon them.

Understanding Settler Colonial Pasts

Left: The Native American Christ

It would be useful to discuss the general background and some historical aspects of the theme of land and belonging in settler colonies such as North America and Australia at this point. Differing attitudes to land were at the heart of the early conflicts between Aboriginal peoples and European settlers/invaders, and these differences also shaped the policies that were subsequently framed by settler states. Settlers from Europe brought with them their own ideas about the ownership of land and property that were closely linked to both the Protestant work ethic and capitalist desire.

By the time of the European Renaissance, the mythological associations of the land had become completely divorced from the understanding of it as space framed by political and scientific discourse. Both feudalism and the system of capitalism that gradually replaced it held that apart from certain specific sites (controlled by institutionalized religious structures) the only ‘power’ associated with place was the power of possession by its rightful owner. When the period of exploration and colonization began in Europe, the notion of the ownership of space, both private and corporate ownership, was firmly in place. It was common to ‘claim’ new territories in the name of one’s monarch and country on expeditions funded by emerging corporate bodies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company, the East India Company, and so on. In the period of ‘settlement’, the ownership of land and property in claimed areas, and the right to allocate parcels of land to newly-arrived; settlers was arbitrarily assumed by European states.

Apart from the private ownership of property, an idea that was influential in the shaping the attitudes of many early settlers moving out of Europe into the ‘New World’ was the idea of the ‘wilderness’. As the literature of early settlers in both Australia and Canada indicates, there was unease about the discrepancy between the highly urbanized cultural forms of Europe and the ‘alien’ of the ‘new land.’ However, the Biblical notion of the wilderness to which Adam and Eve were exiled and wherein they were to toil for their bread, strongly affected the way in which the land was viewed, and the non-Christian inhabitants the settlers encountered were seen as part of this wilderness that had to be tamed in accordance with the Protestant ethic. Thus the ‘garrison mentality’ of early Euro-Canadians meant a refusal to ‘learn from the land.’ Instead, settlers sought to impose their Eurocentric weltanschauung upon the land and its original inhabitants. The ‘terror’ of the wilderness, the binary of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ and the need to protect ‘private property’ led to the demonisation of Aboriginal peoples, so that even the slightest perception of threat led to over-reaction from the ‘garrison’. The idea of place as something to be owned and industriously ‘farmed’ for profit thus clashed with the Aboriginal idea of being of the land, being owned by place, and performing ceremonies for the land and the beings that inhabit it. Strongly rooted in their own types of emplacement, the early explorers and settlers did not know how to recognize or understand the economies or cultures of the peoples they came into contact with.

It is necessary to understand the historical context of settler attitudes to the land and the way in which these shaped the policy of governing Aboriginal peoples. In the different phases of Aboriginal policy in Australia and Canada mentioned earlier, the government of Aboriginal lands changed radically. In the period prior to 1860, the period of ‘early institutionalized contact,’ there was no recognition whatsoever of Aboriginal land use: the notion of terra nullius prevailed in Australia as lands were parceled out for settlers. During this phase in Canada, treaties were used to set the boundary between settler society and Aboriginal societies, pushing Aboriginal communities onto smaller and smaller portions of their own land. In the period between 1860 and 1920, marked by the apartheid-style ‘protection’ of the early phase of paternalism, limited land holdings were set aside in Australia for use by missions as ‘safe’ or ‘refuge’ areas where Aboriginals could be sent. In Canada, by this time, the federal government held the titles to reserve land, and the Department of Indian Affairs assumed the powers of a land owner in order to control the use of the land.

As the policy of paternalism gradually clarified itself as assimilationism from 1920 till roughly about 1960, state control over land consolidated itself. Thus, in Australia, land in Aboriginal communities was retained under state control, and the boundaries of these lands could be and were changed by regulation. However, some major areas were reserved by the state for use by Aboriginal communities. In Canada, land was allotted for use by the institutions meant for or run by Aboriginal peoples. At this stage, a record of the use of the land for agriculture was kept as an indicator of the ‘progress’ of Aboriginal communities. When integration became the policy of the state from the 1960s onwards, Australia extended general state services to Aboriginal peoples, but continued to make arbitrary changes in the boundaries of Aboriginal lands. While major reservation areas were created in the Northern Territory, the claims of other more dispersed peoples across Australia, many far more severely affected by colonization than the peoples of the Northern Territories were ignored.

In Canada, the move to ‘integrate’ Aboriginal people into the mainstream involved a suggestion to abolish all reserves, something that was rejected outright by all Aboriginal people across Canada. Provincial authority was now extended to reserves, and the three-tier system of governance was consolidated with the strengthening of band administration. In the phase of so-called ‘pluralism,’ continuing from about 1975, Land Councils were established in the Northern Territory of Australia. The increased judicial activism and legal awareness among Aboriginal peoples and subsequent pressure on the government has led to at least in some measure the recognition of Aboriginal communities and land leases. In Canada, the phase of pluralism saw the according of the status of a Canadian province to Nunavut, the traditional homelands of the Inuit peoples, as well as the recognition of some Aboriginal rights of self-government of Aboriginal land and resources.

It has been a continuous struggle for Aboriginal peoples to maintain the continuity of their relationship to the land in the face of harsh and unsympathetic state policies. It hard for us to truly understand how complex this relationship is. Not only are land-based knowledges specific to communities, they can be specific to a single site, or a single family network, and persist even after migration to cities.

The notion of 'land as history' has also evolved to incorporate post-contact ways of Aboriginal belonging to the land. Australian historian Heather Goodall suggests that while non-Aboriginal readers and researchers need not fully comprehend the ‘mythic significance’ of the country, they need to understand and acknowledge, in the wake of cultural genocide, the new emotional relationships to the land that Aboriginal people formed after invasion, welfare and settlement. According to Goodall, old and new relationships unite in an Indigenous culture no longer purely traditional, though equally valid. She cites the role of land as actor in contemporary situations as well. In an anecdote about the Aboriginal community with whom she was working, she recalls that after the death of an Aboriginal friend, the mourners went to the riverside to fish, as a way of coping with the event. Though the quiet barbecue and conversation that followed had nothing ‘ceremonial’ or ‘traditional’ about them, Goodall recognizes that ‘it was about getting something, … drawing something from the land, from the places which people knew, … a way of relating to each other which used the land in a really productive way… a sense of the land being an active participant in what you’re doing.’ Many Aboriginal texts deal with the contemporary and historical connections to the land that may (or may not) be related to older ways of ‘belonging’ to the land.

What is Aboriginal Identity? - A Culture-Specific Approach to Subaltern Studies

When we speak of categories such as 'First Nations Literature' we need to clarify what constituted the bases of these collective identities. In an informal discussion, Dr. Barbara Godard of York University had asked why I was referring to my work as an attempt to develop ‘nation-specific’ readings of Aboriginal writing . In the face of diversity and dispersal, what was the basis for this notion of collectivity? This question led me to scrutinize the basis of my understanding of the communities whose literature I sought to study. My original assumption, given my own bias of thinking in terms of nations in post-colonial studies, had been based upon the use of the term ‘Nations’ by a large number of Aboriginal communities in Canada to refer to themselves, but I later realized that even within the Ojibwe communities within a single geographically contiguous area, individual bands and reserves referred to themselves as separate ‘nations’ (as opposed to the Ojibwe being referred to as a single nation). The nomenclature of Aboriginal peoples as nations had a complex history and politics. Historically, there was a sense, during the signing of the treaties in North America, of Aboriginal peoples being sovereign ‘nations’ in the European sense of the word, signing agreements with other nations such as England. This was later replaced in the United States by the idea that the First Nations were dependent and internal nations, thus providing an excuse to the United States government for ignoring or abusing treaty obligations. In Canada, the dominant elite’s interpretation of the treaties also shifted in tone, so that from treaty signatory nations Aboriginal peoples began to be perceived as ‘wards of the state,’ who needed to be administered and controlled by the settler state. In the case of Australia and the Nyoongar people, the idea of ‘nationhood’ was not widely deployed by Nyoongar peoples themselves, though global interchange between various Indigenous groups has led to the increasing popularity of the term ‘First Nations’ in Australia as well.

The idea of nationhood was also problematic from the point of view of territoriality. The European idea of nationhood implied a land base, and in the case of the heavy displacement caused by colonization, the Aboriginal land base had been eroded in both continents. Except for cases where the nations still occupied their unceded lands in small pockets of their former territories, such as the case of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario whose literature I examine in the course of my research, displacement meant that the idea of the relationship of the collectivity to its territory had to be thought of in more complex ways. As many of the texts I discuss in the chapter on ‘Country and the City’ indicate, after the major displacement caused by colonization, there was widespread migration from the spaces of the reserve or settlement to urban areas, where Aboriginal people from various Nations mingled and formed an urban community of sorts different from that of communities living on the reserve. Thus, in cities located within traditional Nyoongar or Ojibwe territories, there is a large number of people who are Aboriginal but do not belong to these respective communities. However, their urban experience is similar to that of Nyoongar or Ojibwe inhabitants of the city. It becomes necessary in a thematic study focusing on land to acknowledge both traditional custodians and new Aboriginal people living on the land as in the case of many non-Nyoongar authors displaced onto Nyoongar territory and related to it only by marriage or residence. Their accounts of life on Nyoongar territory are important as well. However, most authors are careful to acknowledge their belonging/place in their writing. So while they provide an insight into contemporary Nyoongar culture, they are not strictly part of the corpus of Nyoongar writing.

A look at Native American writing south of the Canadian border shows that cultural continuity exists with reference to beliefs about the land, and that the U.S.-Canada border is an artificial construct for most Aboriginal people. In addition, there are other kinds of ‘border’ populations within Canada, in reserves and smaller towns where interactions with neighbouring cultures form hybrid or syncretic cultures, such as the Oji-Cree communities of Northern Ontario, where Ojibwe and Cree cultures were fused, and today even form the basis of political blocs . I realized that I had to clarify the constituencies with which my work deals if I was to speak of ‘Ojibwe-centric’ or ‘Nyoongar-centric’ readings. If these were not ‘nation’-centric readings, as I had simplistically assumed at the outset, then what was the nature of the collective identity? Most importantly, since I was endorsing a model wherein intellectual sovereignty was sought to be established by Aboriginal scholars in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities, what was the nature of the collective entity whose sovereignty I sought to support in my own research? As Anishnaabe author Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm observes,

There are status Indians, non-status Indians, on reserve Indians, off-reserve Indians; there are Indians who are Band members and Indians who are not Band members. There are First Nations peoples, descendants of First Nations…mixed-bloods, mixed-breeds, half-breeds, enfranchised Indians, Bill C-31 Indians…. 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.

She reminds us of the celebrated comment by Thomas King in the preface to All My Relations that there is no common racial denominator for the sheer variety of Aboriginal individuals and communities, and that there is no means of determining who a Native writer is or fixing the definition of native literature.

It is difficult enough to sift through the multiple definitions of Aboriginal identity at the level of the individual. The complexity of defining Aboriginal communities is compounded by the relocation of entire communities onto the territories of other peoples, and the numerous impositions of ‘identification markers’ (for example, ‘status’ and ‘non-status’ Indians) by the State. Marcia Langton in Well I Heard it on the Radio and Saw it on the Television cites legal scholar John McCorquordale as having located sixty seven definitions of Aboriginal people, mostly relating to their ‘official’ status as wards of the state and as criteria for their removal from their families to residential schools and missions. However, for most Aboriginal people, the deep-rooted relationship to the land or ‘country’ is the basis of one’s knowledge and identity, a fact iterated by the West Australian Aboriginal artist Nellie Green: ‘The notion of Aboriginality is inseparable from that of identity and identifying with the land we come from…. Aboriginality is not something that can be or should be classified or measured. Rather, it is an inherent identifying quality that cannot be dismissed or denied.’ The three features of Aboriginal identity repeatedly mentioned by Aboriginal scholars, are the community’s sanction, family links that can be proven, and ‘Aboriginal heritage’.

Defining collective identity is an equally complex task. The Cherokee novelist and scholar Dr. Daniel Justice of the University of Toronto suggested the use of the peoplehood matrix as a framework for the extension of sovereignty in American Indian studies. This might enable us to think of such diverse constituencies as a single collective entity, such as ‘Nyoongar’ or ‘Ojibwe’, and their cultural production as having certain forms of contiguity. It is necessary to briefly outline the idea of the peoplehood model in order to understand why I refer to my research on Aboriginal literature as people-specific rather than nation- specific. Many Indigenous scholars have indicated the need for a central core assumption allowing studies of collective bodies to be read as part of the sovereign discipline of Indigenous studies rather than as appendages of, or dependent on theoretical constructs of other disciplines. A comprehensive understanding of group identity was developed by Robert Thomas in the 1980s through the notion of peoplehood, not limited by the conventional ideas of nationhood, gender, statehood and ethnicity. He suggested four components of peoplehood – land, sacred history, religion and language. Tom Holm, J. Diane Pearson and Ben Chavis have asserted that this matrix is ‘universal to all Native American tribes and nations and could equally serve as the primary theoretical underpinning of Indigenous peoples studies.’ The structure of the peoplehood matrix is in itself, according to Tom Holm, J. Diane Pearson and Ben Chavis, a better reflection of the holistic ways in which Aboriginal people transmit and record knowledge, react and interact with their worlds .

Of the four factors, the land base is often seen as the basis of the other factors, as the specificities of the ecology shape the language, ceremonial cycles and sacred histories of the community. Land may be held as being of continuing symbolic importance even in the case of peoples who have been severely dislocated, but its importance as part of the idea of the group’s larger identity remains – the role of territory in shaping the socio-cultural, ecological and economic patterns of the Indigenous group is acknowledged as primary. The organic relationship to land is recorded and reflected in references to it in the sacred histories of the group. Thus, for example, creation and migration stories mark out some landmarks as particularly holy among the Nyoongar communities in Australia. Burial sites, as well as shrines are important ways of physically marking out sacred space. Certain spaces are allotted for sacred ceremonies, and there is always the possibility of the creation of new sacred spaces as the process of stories entering into the Dreaming continues. The theme of land, a central focus in my research, also allows one to enter into both the textual as well as political aspects of territorial belonging, as writers claim the past through writing about their land, as well as claim contemporary spaces through literary, legal and political means.

The theme of land or ‘country’ emerges in all the genres that we read/hear, and suggests itself as the very bedrock of the Indigenous experience across cultures and continents. The theme of land is closely linked with narrative, so that land becomes text, as it were, inscribed and re-inscribed over centuries with stories. What emerges from my reading is the sense of mutual creation: stories shaping Aboriginal relationships to the ecology, and the land and its inhabitants shaping the stories. A history of narratives about land is also a history of Aboriginal ways of looking at the past.

The emphasis on the local, material contexts of literature has been stressed by post-colonial scholars, but usually within the larger concept of post-colonial and emergent literatures. Since Aboriginal cultural production is neither ‘post’ colonial nor ‘emergent’, having been in existence long before contact, the theme of land is a point of entry into a closer understanding of the continuity of Aboriginal relationships with ‘country’ from pre-colonial times to the present. It also provides the basis for understanding the differences of weltanschauungen between the Nyoongar or the Anishnaabe and the British, as far as attitudes towards property and belonging are concerned. This leads to the emergence of common concerns in various Aboriginal literatures, even when the literatures deal with the state of ‘spatial and ideological diaspora’ and deterritorialisation.

The theme of land gives non-Aboriginal readers an insight into the bases of Aboriginal resistance, such as the reclaiming of the land as the basis of communal identity, both through imaginative literature/performance and the material reality of land claims and Native Title. Contemporary courts of law demand that communities give evidence of their continuing relationship with their land in land claims cases. This demand is often fulfilled through the presentation of Aboriginal narratives, mainly oral histories, of the land. Given the nature of contemporary democracies, where the individual or group’s perception of reality is altered by the utterances of a socio-politically sanctioned authority, the judiciary’s pronouncements on the nature of the minority group’s relationship to the land carries tremendous weight. Aboriginal perceptions of land and history, frequently represented in land claims cases, are reflected in the entire corpus of writing and orature of a community. Various kinds of narrative – historical, literary, (auto)ethnographic and paraliterary are examined in an effort to understand the articulation of land-based identity in the two cultures.

Australian and Canadian Policies towards Aboriginal Peoples

The social policies regarding the Aboriginal populations of Australia, Canada and New Zealand are similar in their objectives and the major policy periods.

Before the 1830s, relations with Aboriginal peoples were based on military and commercial interactions, and influenced by competition between European countries for colonial territory, with no regard to the actual socio-economic conditions of the peoples. By that time, military and civilian settlements, missions and trade had been established. In many ways, the 1837 British House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines was foundational in shaping subsequent policy in Australia and Canada. This was influenced by the patterns of institutionalized contact and domination, and in turn had a formative influence on paternalism and integration policies in these colonies. Such was the influence of the Committee that only in the present movement towards pluralism are the committee’s views finally being displaced. While the specific forms of this initial contact differed in Australia and Canada, the acquisitive, exploitative and proselytizing nature of the European invasion was visible in all the colonies.

In the early period, missionaries with their own ‘civilizing’ agenda traveled widely and translated between European and Aboriginal languages, and while many were ‘shocked’ at the ‘heathen’ ways of the peoples, they were often also shocked by the murder, rape and plunder carried out by their own countrymen. In the case of Australia, the European settlers had a genocidal intent towards Aboriginal peoples, and there were a number of ineffectual prescriptions made by British authorities for the protection of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. In the case of Canada, there was an early history of commercial and military relationships between settlers and First Nations. Since, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the need for alliances with First Nations had passed, and early commercial relations (for example, the fur trade) had given way to large-scale European settlements, the focus shifted to social policy.

In each of the countries, there had been Aboriginal resistance to the waves of settlers inundating Aboriginal lands. In Australia, the ‘frontier’ contact between Aboriginal peoples and settlers was brutal, based on notions of the racial inferiority of the Aborigines. They were dispossessed of their lands, without recognition or compensation, and the individual settler was aided by the police in enforcing his ‘rights’ to the land. Land was granted by the Crown to settlers without recognizing prior ownership by Aboriginal peoples. Those Aboriginal people who were not killed or starved became refugees in their own land. In Canada, First Nations people were believed to require ‘careful management’, after the transition from earlier interactions that at least partly recognized the First Nations as trading partners or allies, to a dominance forcing First Nations to yield established rights for a European future. There was a silent partnership between Canada and the United States in this matter. Genocide was more frequent on the American side, and this served as a constant reminder to Canadian First Nations regarding the nature of European domination. Treaties were used to confine First Nations people to reserves, and to establish the infrastructure to dominate them. The Select Committee had not recommended the treaties, but in Eastern Canada they were already in place. Thus, through domination, single societies based on gross inequalities between Aboriginal and European populations were established. The effectiveness of the Select Committee’s recommendations was dependent on the British government’s will to impose rule on the settler societies, and this diminished with the establishments of relatively independent settler governments with their own forms of dominance over Aboriginal peoples.

However, while the Crown’s influence diminished, the dominance of settler governments enabled the continuation of paternalistic policies. In Australia, these policies were enshrined in the ‘Protection of Aborigines’ statutes that were passed in the period between 1869 and 1909; in Canada, they were introduced within the framework of the Indian Act, 1876 and its many successors. Settlers, entrenched in their notion of racial superiority introduced these policies in the ‘best interests’ of Aboriginal peoples.

The paternalistic period lasted for over a century, and can be said to have occurred in two phases. In the first phase, the ‘protection’ of Aboriginal peoples was the purported aim, and in the second phase, assimilation was the main objective. The social policy in the colonies that reflected this thought assumed that the Aboriginal peoples were a ‘dying race’. All Aboriginal communities experienced a sharp population decline after the European invasion, and settler governments assumed that these declines would continue. Racial and eugenic theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was influenced by the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest. However, by the first two decades of the twentieth century, it was clear that the Aboriginal minorities were neither ‘dying out’ nor being absorbed, and in Australia and Canada, attention subsequently shifted from the idea of ‘protection’ and ‘smoothening the dying pillow’ to the idea of assimilation. It seemed to missionaries and administrators that a more rigorous application of the policy of assimilation was needed.

Assimilationist policies remained in effect until long after the Second World War. In Canada and Australia, there was a major policy shift from paternalism to the idea of integration in the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a hundred years since the inauguration of the assimilationist policy and nearly three decades after the start of a rigorous effort to achieve assimilation through social engineering. By the 1960s, general social services were full-fledged public services. These services provided each country with the opportunity to integrate Aboriginal social policy with mainstream social policy. Although the phrase that now had currency was ‘integration’ the main agenda remained the assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into the mainstream. In Australia the change was evident in the repeal of the various state Aboriginal protection statutes that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Aboriginal peoples were given citizenship rights in 1967 and incorporated into the census of Australia. In Canada, the Indian Act of 1951 provided the legal base for the extension of provincial social services to First Nations, and the services were expanded as funding agreements were reached between federal and provincial governments. First Nations peoples were also given the federal vote in 1967 without having to lose their status and rights as Indians through the process of enfranchisement.

The services that were extended to Aboriginal peoples did not recognize either their distinct cultures or the fact that Aboriginal peoples had endured over a century of paternalistic rule. The assumption of settler superiority was as much present in the policy of integration and the extension of common services to Aboriginal communities as it had been in the assimilationist period of separate services. In the 1960s, mainstream politicians and administrators assumed that Aboriginal peoples would welcome being ‘liberated’ from separate status. It was thought that Aboriginal peoples would soon become indistinguishable from settlers with regard to their use of public services, and that they would soon become one more piece in the general multicultural mosaic that comprised the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority and many ethnic/immigrant groups. Thus, assimilation would be achieved, and Aboriginal cultures would become invisible as far as public policy was concerned. These ideas of assimilation were never fulfilled.

The Aboriginal peoples resisted the policy of assimilation because it offered no solution to the issue of land rights and territory. Common services were designed to remove all recognition of special status within the state, including territorial recognition. There would be no need for special land tenure, social policy or institutions – racial origin and cultural difference would be ‘private’ matter. Thus, the Canadian First Nations rejected outright the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy. In Canada, Aboriginal peoples began to reverse the historical process of the loss of land to settlers as new claims were made based on either Aboriginal title or treaties negotiated during the first stages of the process of European encroachment and settlement. In Australia, opposition to the loss of Aboriginal land manifested itself in the Commonwealth government preventing Queensland from varying Aboriginal land boundaries in order to facilitate mining and in establishing Aboriginal Land Councils in the Northern Territory.

At the same time as actions were underway to maintain land under Aboriginal control, movements were also growing to establish separate social rights for Aboriginal peoples based on a separate legal status. The establishment of new rights for Aboriginal peoples marked the decline of assimilation and integration policies – whereas for over a century the objective of social policy had been to end Aboriginal status, it is now being directed at strengthening that status. Whereas for a century or more ‘progress’ was measured by the proportion of Aboriginal peoples who abandoned their traditions, progress is now measured by the proportion of Aboriginal peoples who are strengthening those traditions and governments acknowledging rights and obligations that had been set aside in earlier periods. Although a movement towards the acceptance of difference by the state has begun (pluralism as distinct from multiculturalism that places Aboriginal peoples on the same platform as other ethnic groups), the longstanding presence within government infrastructures of the policies of assimilation and integration constantly conflict with the move towards pluralism and relative autonomy.

While we look at the literature of two Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Canada as a continuity within which the colonial disruption is a phase, rather than a defining moment, the post-contact literature/orature often reflects the effects on the communities of these policies and their adaptations to these changes. The emphasis on cultural continuity and change both before and after contact is also important as it enables me to look at the cultural specificity of Nyoongar and Ojibwe cultural production, rather than only looking, in a very narrow focus, at how the pattern of colonization is mirrored in the two cultures - a trend of ‘fixing’ the Aboriginal communities in perpetual victimhood, with colonization as their distinctive trait, that I find repeated in most readings of Fourth World writing at most Indian seminars on Australian and Canadian writing. At the same time, it is necessary to engage with the strongly political nature of much of post-contact writing because it helps us to see the agency of the Nyoongar and Ojibwe communities in defining the nature of their own modernity.

Since we deliberately do not begin with any particular theoretical premise within which we try and ‘fit’ Ojibwe or Nyoongar literature, it is through focusing text-by-text on particular and local contexts that we can critique established theoretical frameworks for reading ‘new literatures,’ and move towards an understanding of the tensions between separatist and universalist, insider and outsider boundaries in the reading of Aboriginal narratives.

As long as an egalitarian situation in the academy is not realized, and until the imposition of dominant theoretical frameworks by mainstream academia does not give way to more people- or culture-specific readings, thematic readings of Aboriginal texts, informed by a clear socio-political understanding, remain my personal choice. My readings follow this pattern, and revolve around the theme of land and the relationships of the peoples to the land. There is a tendency to analyze work published by minority writers from the perspective of authenticity. Thus, readers see only the exotic nature of ‘otherness’ and the writer is reduced to the role of the informant providing a necessary degree of ethnographic accuracy. In this context, perhaps, thematic readings may be a less appropriative way of reading culturally ‘different’ texts.

Thoughts on Comparative Aboriginal Studies

…It is vital to consider the need for material presence of the ‘local’: so the research and training we carry out in the field of post-colonialism, whatever else it does, must always find ways to address the local, if only on the order of material applications. If we overlook the local, and the political implications of the research we produce, we risk turning the work of our field into the playful operations of an academic glass-bead game, whose project will remain at best a description of global relations, and not a script for their change...at the level of the local, at the level of material applications, post-colonialism must address the material exigencies of colonialism and neocolonialism, including the neocolonialism of Western academic institutions themselves.
- Stephen Slemon


Research itself has been termed a colonizing construct by Aboriginal writers, a formation that the Maori scholar Linda Smith summarized as ‘they came, they saw, they named, they claimed.’ Smith states that ‘from the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary’. Literary studies has not escaped its share of blame in this regard. Though the discipline deals mainly with written and performance texts, and not human subjects as in the social sciences, critical imperialism pervades the reading of texts from minority cultures such as Aboriginal cultures. The burgeoning industry of post-colonial studies, in particular, absorbs ‘new’ and ‘emergent’ literatures within its particular discourse. My research engages with this phenomenon, and questions if alternative or syncretic reading frameworks might instead be developed for these literatures. There have been numerous critical histories of Indian writing in English, or Canadian or Australian literature, where the idea of the ‘nation’ is paradigmatic. There have also been histories of minority literature, such as Penny Petrone’s Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present or Adam Shoemaker’s Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929 – 1988. These have generally adopted a pan-Aboriginal approach. The critical approaches have ranged from the teleological and historical (as in Petrone’s study) to the thematic and political (as in Shoemaker’s work). My aim in this work is to engage with the possibility of more culture-specific and location-specific histories of Aboriginal literatures in English, and explore theoretical frameworks that are not appropriative or homogenising, for the reading of these literatures.

On the surface of things, there are many reasons why Aboriginal literatures are too easily assumed to be part of the assortment of literatures termed ‘post-colonial.’ There are many aspects of cultural resistance and survival that are similar to patterns seen in former colonies such as India or various African states, and these parallels need to be scrutinized before moving on to the need for a separate aesthetics for Aboriginal peoples.

The preservation or revival of the mother tongue as a form of cultural self-assertiveness and an expression of a community’s nationalist ideology is a phenomenon common to most former colonies. It is also is seen in many Aboriginal communities today. In addition, postcolonial theory sees the appropriation of the colonizer’s language to make it bear the burden of one’s cultural experience as a manifestation the experience of hybridity in the wake of contact between the colonizer and the colonized. A characteristic of most formerly colonized societies is the development of hybrid or new englishes, where native grammar and vocabulary modifies the intruding language. Thus, a socially acceptable form of bilingualism develops within the (post)colonial community in which both the mother tongue and the colonizer’s tongue (if not one and the same) have an important function for the community. In Aboriginal cultures as in many African ones, the movement between orality and literacy in Aboriginal literatures is a crucial factor in the development of narratives, both fictional and ‘factual’, about the past and present of the people.

The colonial discourse entailed a clash of weltanschauungen or world views, and in all cases of colonization, linguistic imperialism involving the manipulation and dissemination of the written word was a major characteristic. The Europeans’ ‘litteral advantage’, to use the phrase of the 17th century travel writer Samuel Purchas, has been memorably analysed by Tzvetan Todorov in his book The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. The clash of oral and literate culture is seen in the actual loss of land and territory suffered by many Aboriginal peoples, through the signing of treaties and other forms of negotiation that equated written text and territory. Among Aboriginal peoples in North America, for instance, diplomatic agreements were traditionally concluded verbally and usually in the presence of those concerned and promises thus made in public became part of the collective memory of the community.

The disruptive potential of literacy is also evident in another common feature of colonialism, the drive to alter native religious beliefs. European missionaries were quick to identify the associations that colonized peoples made between technological advances and religious prowess, and contrasted the permanence of the printed biblical word with the supposed impermanence of oral narratives. However, many Aboriginal belief systems persisted, in whole or part, developing forms of syncretism and compartmentalization that preserved their faiths or allowed the subterranean persistence of Aboriginal practices within Christianity.

One factor that distinguishes settler societies from other former colonies is the minority status of the colonized, as opposed to colonies such as India where the colonized were numerically a majority. As a result, the perceived minority status of the community within the colonial state leads to two strands within the collective consciousness of the community. There are keepers of the community’s cultural heritage, for example elders, who emphasize tradition as a barrier against uncontrolled imitation. ‘Progressive’ elements on the other hand attempt to introduce changes that might be useful for the community to adapt to new situations. In the later stages of the colonial encounter traditionalists cannot completely isolate the traditions of their community from outside influences, and so the role of individuals who cross cultures, as well as cultural production that addresses or bridges opposed ‘worlds’, becomes crucial. This pattern can be seen to have similarities with developments in the national movements of other former colonies as well.

Thus, contemporary Fourth World cultures have many features that can allow them to be too easily subsumed within the rubric of post-colonial studies. One of the ways in which Euro-American cultural imperialism is exercised in the colonial context is by the creating of separate aesthetic standards for the reading of mainstream and ‘marginal’ literatures. On one hand, literature that adheres to Western standards is seen as classical or universal, while literature that deviates from this norm is sidelined as primitive, political, or regional. While the empowerment of the marginal voice as a function of post-colonial studies has become a given, the gradual ‘colonization’ of Aboriginal literature by post-colonial theory in the last decade or so demands that the notion of decolonization be stressed. Problematizing post-colonial theory can be useful for decolonizing research on Aboriginal writing. It is also necessary to engage theoretically with my own bias as a cultural outsider and an academic located in the ‘Third World’ and specializing in ‘post-colonial’ literature. It is too easy, with this bias, to seek similarities, using familiar theoretical vocabulary, between Aboriginal literature and the nebulous amalgamation called ‘postcolonial’ literature. Post-colonial literary studies has developed certain normative features that ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal writing into a set vocabulary of analysis, thus continuing the legacy of cultural imperialism even as it aspires to the status of an ideologically emancipatory set of reading frameworks. Thus, the first chapter engages with the problems of looking at Aboriginal writing through the lenses of post-colonial theory, and with the trend in post-colonial studies of ignoring the material and politico-legal contexts of narratives. These problems, I argue, must be understood and overcome.

Much of my discussion is motivated by the need to actively de-enter the Western academy as the exclusive locus of authorizing power and to emphasize the power of the so-called ‘margins.’ Given the fact that different cultures cognitively organize experiences in different ways, different frameworks are required to understand them, and the chapter attempts to highlight Aboriginal points of view in developing aesthetic and analytical frameworks for the reading of texts.

Rather than read Aboriginal writing in the context of other postcolonial writing, I choose to deconstruct the colonial category of ‘Aboriginal’ by focusing specifically on the cultural production of two First Peoples, the Nyoongar in Australia, and the Anishnaabe in Canada. Aboriginal experiences have been significantly different from those experiences of peoples loosely described as the Third World, and postcolonial studies have focused mainly on the latter. Fourth World literary studies is not an appendage of Third World studies. Aboriginal literatures, despite obvious cultural, geographical, political and linguistic differences, share certain distinctive features. Approaches that seek to establish lateral connections among the various Aboriginal literatures can be useful academically, culturally and politically. Admittedly this assumption is similar to the one that informs the field of postcolonial studies, which places literatures from vastly different countries together under the same umbrella. However, James Clifford observes in “Indigenous Articulations,” that to see chains of equivalence, such as pan-Indigenous, Indigenous Arctic or Fourth World coalitions, which necessarily and strategically emphasize commonality as opposed to difference as articulated phenomena, is not necessarily to see them as inauthentic, or merely political, invented or opportunistic. Linda Smith, James Youngblood Henderson and other Aboriginal scholars speak of a commonality of experience that allows for the framing of decolonization theory for the Fourth World. While Aboriginal literatures have gained considerable critical attention and respect in the last decade, critics have in the main been concerned with the pan-continental traditions rather than the very specific one-to-one approach that I adopt.

I chose to focus on Nyoongar and Ojibwe writing specifically in my course, just as earlier we have focused on Marathi Dalit literature in translation, as I feel that learning in depth about one community can help develop the reading and interpretive skills necessary for exploring the diversity of work that is available under the rubric of Subaltern Literatures. Nyoongar literature has a well-defined body of writing in English, and there have already been attempts to read that literature as a collective entity, for example, Robyn McCarron’s theorizing of a Nyoongar literature in English. As many of the Nyoongar writers that I spoke with informally opined, it would be possible to see Nyoongar writing as a distinct body of writing with a territorial and people-specific focus, as opposed to Koori or Murri writing, which do not refer to a single ethnic group. Ojibwe writing, too, could be similarly seen as a body of writing in English that had strong roots in a single land-based culture, however internally diverse it was. As Gerald Vizenor has commented, ‘Anishinaabe writers have been quite distinguished in the history of published material. I think among all tribal groups in America the Anishinaabe have probably the largest number of writers, going back to George Copway and William Warren, the first historian.’ The availability of material that would allow me to go beyond the fuzzy notions of ‘Aboriginal Literature’ prevalent in Indian academia today, and enable the exploration of the idea of literary studies based on culture-specific and people-centric readings encouraged me to choose Nyoongar and Ojibwe writing in English. Of course, these literatures have a vast body of orature and literature that is not in English, and ours is only a very partial study on account of our inability to engage with this part of their literatures.