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.