From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing

Conclusion

125 The question posed at the beginning of this study of what carceral writing is leads us to consider, rather, what this literature does. Its performative function is more distinct than that of literature in general. It is socially engaged art, but its engagement is at least partly involuntary— it cannot help but be shaped by the conditions and exigencies of its creation . The writing of a convicted author often serves as a second hearing—one that rebuts representations by legal, judicial, and penal institutions and makes a plea to a wider audience. For authors writing about their residential schooling, their works serve as important rebuttals to the historical record. Both bodies of literature offer a valuable window onto how social contexts affect the use of form. Often pushing the conventions of genre, these authors call attention to the representational capacities of the literary forms they engage. The incarcerated authors in Part One draw on conventions of prison writing such as the confession, the apology, or the metaphor of the afterlife . Many of them, however, go beyond the traditional applications of the genres they employ. Leonard Peltier describes the prison as an unearthly space, but the conversion experience depicted in his work substitutes an Anishnabe-Lakota cosmology for a Christian one. Yvonne Johnson, too, turns to discursive forms familiar to prison writing such as confession and Conclusion apology, yet her telling spills into other genres to articulate the full weight of her story. These writers demonstrate through their writing their non-neutral position before the law, before a non-Aboriginal readership, and even in relation to the political ideologies embedded in the genres they take up. All diverse examples of life writing, these works show how incarcerated Aboriginal writers use the autobiographical act as a means to resist an identity conferred on them by the legal-judicial system. Similar expansions of form emerge in writings about the residential school featured in Part Two of this book. The authors appearing in these chapters take existing forms and modes such as the memoir, the elegy, and the topographical poem—genres that have a distinct cultural tradition— and reinflect them with their unique experiences. In “I Lost My Talk” Rita Joe envisions the potential to represent herself through an imposed language and received literary forms. Emblematic of other residential school writing examined in this section, Joe’s poem self-reflexively ponders the author’s ability to make the form her own. The writing featured in both Part One and Part Two invites consideration of how the use of form can be a personal as well as a political act. A number of the works featured in this examination have had a significant impact on public dialogues outside of their immediate publication contexts. The proliferation of residential school accounts in the 1990s played a crucial role in adjusting public perceptions of these institutions. So numerous became these accounts that they drew the question as to whether a normative telling was beginning to emerge. Basil Johnston’s representation of his time at “Spanish” provides a corrective to the scripted narrative that Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, for instance, criticize in their discussion of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) hearings. Other residential school accounts, such as those of Rita Joe and Isabelle Knockwood, have provided a context for a collective healing and affirmation. These works join the outpouring of testimony in other global contexts. As Gillian Whitlock points out in her examination of Stolen Generation testimony in Australia, the recent emergence of truth and reconciliation commissions in Australia, Canada, and South Africa has provided an outlet for working through colonial legacies and for sending out calls for reform. While shaped by global politics, these testimonies have taken different local expressions, Whitlock points out, and have opened up important intercultural dialogue. Signifying an alternative public hearing , residential school works like the ones highlighted in this book have provided an impetus for a broader national community to confront the more blighted parts of Canadian history. Some of the writing in this book has led to interventions in the legaljudicial system. Following the publication of Stolen Life, the Assembly of First 126 • Conclusion Nations petitioned the federal Minister of Justice for Yvonne Johnson’s case to be reviewed.1 These developments point to the afterlife of texts—that is, to their engagement with legislative structures, judicial institutions, and public perceptions in ways that exceed the...