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49 Yvonne Johnson is a woman of Cree and mixed blood serving twenty-five years to life in a Canadian prison. Convicted of first-degree murder in 1991 for the death of a Wetaskiwin man, she has served time at the Kingston Prison for Women (P4W), the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in Saskatchewan, and, more recently, the Edmonton Institute for Women. She was an inmate at P4W when she contacted Rudy Wiebe in 1992. Moved by his novel The Temptations of Big Bear (1973)—his historiographic work about the Plains Cree leader who Johnson claims is her great-great-grandfather —she wrote a letter to the him revealing her genealogy and asking him to share the knowledge he had gained from his vigorous research. Wiebe admitted his mutual interest in “this self-aware, storytelling descendant of the historical Big Bear” (Wiebe and Johnson 14), and subsequently agreed to help Johnson write her story, undertaking a five-year collaboration that culminated in the publication of Stolen Life. Johnson’s imprisonment prompted her appeal to Wiebe to help her write her life story. The process of writing it reflected the way in which the law continues to restrict her agency. As a convicted prisoner, Johnson writes from a position of assumed culpability; as an author of this text, she does not start off on neutral footing with the reader. Her enlisting of Wiebe’s editorial assistance suggests the challenges for self-representation THREE Auto/biographical Jurisdictions Collaboration, Self-Representation, and the Law in Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman that exist for an author who has been publicly condemned. Johnson was already writing before she met Wiebe, compiling the materials of her “lifestory book” (40). Wiebe’s presence in Stolen Life is not only as an editor and author, but also as Johnson’s “representative.” He moves from collaborator to advocate in the text, framing her account in a way that prepares the reader for a certain telling and, at times, doing the telling himself. In addition to examining the legalistic framework surrounding Johnson’s testimony , then, I will also examine the effects of joint authorship on her self-representation. What narrative strategies does Wiebe deploy to generate confidence in Johnson’s testimony? How is the reader called upon to adjudicate? As I examine the various discursive contexts in which Johnson testifies in Stolen Life, I will draw on a number of relevant concepts— collaboration, limit-cases, trauma, and witnessing—to explore their effect on the process of representation. Yvonne Johnson did not testify at her trial for the murder of Leonard Charles Skwarok. Where her account might have intervened in the court’s presentation of her, there is a silence, a crucial void in the testimonies and proceedings that indict her for first-degree murder.1 Johnson’s absent testimony is significant for a number of reasons. Most obvious, perhaps, is that she left herself to be represented by others—by her lawyer, by the prosecutor, and by other witnesses whose criminal sentences were reduced by their implication of her. Johnson maintains that she was represented before a word was spoken. Before an all-White, predominantly male jury, her presence, she interprets, was reduced to “an Indian face to judge and sneer at” (318). But Johnson’s forfeited testimony can also be seen as a refusal to give voice in this specific context. Her silence retains the possibility of setting aright the public record, of testifying in a different medium. Stolen Life enters where this silence leaves off, filling in for the testimony not given in the courtroom. Testimony is a term that has appeared with increasing frequency in recent literary discussions. What are the generic and discursive contours of testimony, and why, as Shoshana Felman asks, has it become “at once so central and so omnipresent in our recent cultural accounts of ourselves ?” (“Education and Crisis” 6). Definitions of testimony centre on a constative process of verifying a statement or fact with written or spoken evidence. Among the more or less uniform definitions that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, two usages are particularly evocative in understanding Stolen Life’s function as testimony. The first is an “open attestation or acknowledgment; confession, profession.” Implicit in this definition is the submission to an external authority, possibly an admission of culpability . Johnson’s confession to her involvement in the murder closely adheres to this understanding of testimony. Immediately following this 50 • Genre in the Institutional Setting of the Prison [3...

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