08 May Question 1. Parejo Vadillo discusses three works by Aboriginal Canadia
Question
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 women’s autobiographies and the construction of identity? How is literature important in this process?
4. Outline Parejo Vadillo’s claims about the ways Native women’s stories generally, and Campbell’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 women’s autobiographies, the “personal becomes political”? Why does she feel this is important?
• Your opinion: Has reading this essay in any way enhanced your understanding of, or response to, Maria Campbell’s autobiography? If so, explain how. If not, explain why not
Author(s): Ana I. Parejo Vadillo
Publication 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 Literature
Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full 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. "Artistic
license," they call it. (Whoever ‘they’ are.) Being not different, I have taken both the stories of my life, the
stories of other’s lives and some pure fabrications of my imagination and re-written them as my own.The
fantasy of these stories lies less in the distortion of the facts of them, than in their presentation. They are
presented as I saw them from my own emotional, spiritual and visual perspective. To be faithful to my view I
put myself as the central figure in all the lives recounted here. If I was not really there, it does not matter. I
have eyes and I can see.1
Whose Story Is It Anyway?
For Barbara Godard, This question–involving "who is speaking, to whom, on whose behalf, in what context?"2–is the
major issue in Canadian literature; one that addresses matters of authority, property and appropriation ‘in’ and ‘by’ the
Canadian 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 the
subject 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 she
represents? Is she speaking for these people? Or, are these people speaking through her voice placing themselves in the
position of a speaking voice? Lee Maracle does not deny any of these questions. Her autobiographical text I Am Woman
writes 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’s
autobiography3 in the Canadian literary context and its aesthetic hybridity (narratives in the "as-told-by" tradition). These
autobiographies consolidate the formation of the writer’s identity as a Native/Indian woman.4 The created ‘I’ subverts the
ideological Subject by becoming the speaking subject of the text and not the discourse of the Other. Both narrative
strategies 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 readers
in terms of ‘identity’ and/or ‘representation,’ demonstrating how this leads to the creation of a collective subject or voice
which transforms history and historiography. History functions as an aesthetic and political element, particularly in the
emphasis on its difference from its representation in the white Canadian literary canon. Thirdly, this essay will
consequently 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 up
political 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 a
patriarchal-cum-imperialistic imposed silence.
Proceeding from these premisses, this essay will analyze Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman and Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel, Maria
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