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This paper tells the story of a conflict in my research and teaching. I identify myself as a post-colonial academic, with an interest in First Nations Canadian literatures. When I approach a text by a First Nations author, it is usually in an academic context, and I often find myself reading through the lens of various post-colonial theories. These theories give me a framework in which to read, and they seem to fit the literature very well. However, many of my Native students, my colleagues who specialize in Native literature, and even the Native writers that I read in a post-colonial context argue against the very idea of postcolonialism . They find the term and its theories neocolonial and repressive . My initial reaction to such attacks on a body of theory that I find so useful was a defensive one: “They just don’t understand post-colonial theory or what it is trying to do,” I said to myself. Then I argued that they were getting caught up in semantics and throwing away useful theories because scholars have never been able to come up with a better term for the theories labelled “post-colonial.” The very plurality of post-colonial theory also gave me an escape hatch: “Okay, some theorists do come up with homogenizing models to explain the interaction between the colonizer and the colonized, but I always try to be culturally specific. They don’t mean me.” In short, I saw the conflict as a problem in communication: “They don’t hear what I am saying.” I conceive of post-colonialism as a process, an ongoing attempt to find means of cross-cultural communication that escape the repressive hierarchies of colonial encounters. This urge includes everything from academic and philosophical analysis of the colonial processes (for only 111 J U D I T H L E G G A T T Native Writing, Academic Theory: Post-colonialism across the Cultural Divide by understanding colonialism can we move beyond it); to explicit discussions of possible methods of decolonization; to artistic attempts to express the traditions of cultures such as Hindu, Cree, Maori, or Yoruba in new languages, such as English, and new forms, such as the novel; to attempts to understand the implications of these artistic endeavors for the cultures, languages, and media, all of which have undergone a process of translation. Since I see post-colonialism as an attempt to move beyond hierarchies, the defensive, exclusive, hierarchical nature of my initial responses to critiques of the theory leads me to an unsettling of my own certainties. When First Nations creative writers and academic post-colonial theorists are commenting on each other’s ideas, it seems unlikely that the latter are the ones with all the knowledge. To make such an assumption smacks of the very ethnocentrism and hierarchical reasoning against which most post-colonial theories argue. If Native writers do not accept that post-colonial theories are applicable to their work, there is as good a chance that the post-colonial readers are misinterpreting the literature as there is that the Native writers are misinterpreting the interpretations. This paper investigates the meeting of two different types of writers —creative writers and post-colonial critics—from two different cultures —First Nations and academic. This meeting is complicated by the fact that all of these groups overlap. Many creative writers are also academics and critics, and academic culture contains members of many different ethnic groups. However, even post-colonial theorists who critique Western imperialism and who might be members of marginalized cultures have to adopt at least some of the cultural norms of Western academia in order to function in the academic setting. To focus my exploration of the borderlands between the two cultures and modes of expression, I examine my defenses of post-colonialism through a close reading of “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” by Thomas King and “The ‘PostColonial ’ Imagination” by Lee Maracle. Each is a critical article about post-colonialism, with academics as the implied audience, written by a First Nations creative writer. Therefore, each is situated on two boundaries : that between fiction and theory, and that between First Nations and academic cultures. While both articles seem to embody my own definition of post-colonialism, both also argue against the use of the term and the theories it describes. King argues that post-colonialism is not applicable to Native literature, and that the label itself reinscribes many of the ideas of colonialism. Maracle sees post-colonialism...

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