- When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990
What constitutes Native resistance writing, and why do Native writers engage in resistance? Emma LaRocque argues that Native peoples have been so debased and misrepresented, both historically and in today's popular culture, that the most productive forms of literary resistance attempt to restore the humanity of Native peoples [End Page 77] (65). LaRocque is Cree-Métis from northern Alberta and professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. She contends that the Canadian experience of colonization has differed from that of the United States, and When the Other Is Me represents an attempt to treat Canadian literature on its own terms (10). LaRocque also remains theoretically engaged throughout her book, expanding on postcolonial theory even as she challenges its applicability to Native peoples in settler states. LaRocque makes a conscious effort to avoid the abstract when she deals with theory, and she frequently references her own subjectivity by writing in the first person. Confrontational and even angry at times, LaRocque's theoretical contributions are as important as her sweeping treatment of Native Canadian texts.
LaRocque spends the first two chapters of the book demonstrating that Native peoples have been and continue to be profoundly dehumanized in scholarship and popular culture. She refers to the Native experience of academia to argue that discourses of bias and objectivity reflect "a tool in the politics of power." In other words, the Western voice in mainstream intellectual thought is subterraneous or absent, and this voice serves to discredit Native authors who are often accused of bias (28). LaRocque offers several "vignettes" of her own life experience to illustrate how the debasement of Native peoples has become institutionalized in Canadian education. LaRocque then goes on to show how colonial writers systematically dehumanized Native peoples through what she calls the "civ/sav dichotomy." The idea that Native peoples represented the lowest level of human development informed encounters between Euro-Canadians and Natives throughout the early stages of colonization (39).
LaRocque argues that rather than embrace colonial literature that reinforces the civ/sav dichotomy, the Canadian educational system should recognize literary sources like John Richardson's Wacousta as hate literature (55, 62). Furthermore, LaRocque contends that non- Native scholars who have tried to contextualize the racial ideologies that pervade exploration literature have effectively legitimized racism (60). She identifies strains of this racism in Hollywood movies, textbooks, and the reception of Native resistance writers as oppositional [End Page 78] or "bitter" (70). Although LaRocque generally employs secondary sources to make her claims, she draws a convincing connection between the mainstream acceptance of blatantly racist material and the tendency for non-Native scholars to overlook or discredit Native authors.
LaRocque's middle chapters address the Native literature of the mid-nineteenth century, especially the widely published works by Pauline Johnson and George Copway, and Native literature from the 1970s and 1980s. LaRocque addresses Aboriginal authors who challenged Euro-Canadian invasion and their own systematic dehumanization. In the excerpts from Native authors that LaRocque chooses, one can always identify a claim of humanity, as when Shinguaconse writes to Lord Elgin in 1849 that "we are men like you, we have the limbs of men, we have the hearts of men" (79). LaRocque argues that Native peoples have responded to dehumanization in two different ways, either by arguing that "we are civilized" or by revealing the ways in which whites are savage (100). LaRocque is careful to explain that these moves represent satirical forms of resistance and should not be read as "reverse racism." For example, Native authors have pointed out that Europeans practiced scalping as much or perhaps more so than Native peoples. But this represents a counterdiscourse that acts against the widespread links between Indian scalping and savagery. It is not racism against whites.
LaRocque goes on to deal with several theoretical challenges concerning Native literature. She discusses how white audiences have demanded stereotypical performances by Natives, which helps explain the costumes and rhetorical devices...