The Face Pullers: Photographing Native Canadians 1871–1939 by Brock V. Silversides (review)

208 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 reject Euro-American models of criticism, but she does insist that aboriginal people begin to develop their own critical techniques, even out of their creative literature. This 'literature as theory' strategy has been immensely successful and enabling within African-American literature, Chicana literature, and other non-mainstream spaces in North American writing. It is exciting to think of it happening increasingly with respect to aboriginal writing. An example, perhaps, would be Tomson Highway, Gerald Vizenor, and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias's use of 'the trickster' as a way of talking about not only spirituality, but also form, politics, and humour in aboriginal writing. Within this anthology, the clearest answer to Blaeser's call might be Armand Garnet Ruffo's article on Louise Erdrich 's Tracks. Ruffo's reading of Tracks is grounded in Anishnawbe traditional thought, its newest insight to me being that Pauline (Catholic and alienated though she is) still shares the assumptions of Anishnawbe culture that spiritual and material worlds interact; Tracks represents, then, not a kind of magical realism, in which visions and spirits operate as metaphors, but an unqualified realism in which visions operate as tangibly as material forces. 'For the outsider ... attempting to come to terms with Native people and their literature,' Ruffo advises, 'the problem is not one to be solved by merely attaining the necessary background, reading all the anthropological data that one can get one's hands on. Rather, for those who are serious, it is more a question of cultural initiation, of involvement and commitment, so that the culture and literature itself becomes more than a mere museum piece, dusty pages, something lifeless.' The articles in this anthology are written in an accessible style, and thus will be useful to undergraduates (in women's studies, literature, or aboriginal studies), to teachers, and to curious readers (Oamm's first article here would be an effective introduction to aboriginal writing for a non-native 'reading group,' but it would also help aboriginal readers and writers place themselves within a flexible but strengthening context), as well as to scholars. They represent a range of opinions, issues, and methods. One irony of this aboriginal authored and edited and published anthology, however, is that the implied audience of many pieces is white. Duane Niatum, for example, seems to set out to convince white readers that aboriginal poetry is worth reading. One hopes it will not be long before white readers know of the richness of aboriginal poetry, and aboriginal readers are included in the audience of critical writing, rendering this kind of defence unnecessary. (LAURA MURRAY) Brock V. Silversides. The Face Pullers: Photographing Native Canadians 1871-1939 Fifth House. 184. $29.95 cloth These photographs of aboriginal people - most posed, many unnamed, and some unwilling - reveal the violence of our figure of speech when we HUMANITIES 209 talk about photographers 'taking' and 'shooting' pictures. Photographers, whether scientists, tourists, government employees, or on-the-fly entrepreneurs with window-blind backdrops, participated in the colonial containment of aboriginal people, and most of the photographs Silversides presents in The Face Pullers helped to create and maintain stereotypes of noble and dying 'savages.' These images went into tourist scrapbooks , by and large, not native people's family albums. Nonetheless, what makes Silverside's book most striking is not its expose of exploitative misrepresentation, much of which is all too familiar, but the many photographs in which, despite the framing of the white photographer, the native subjects seem to elude photographic 'fixing.' One photograph, for example, was entitled by its maker 'Lo, the Poor Indian.' It shows four men in elaborate costume, looking, respectively, bemused, direct, macho, and bored. They certainly do not appear to be impoverished, in either material goods or morale. On another page, Jim Crow Flag and his daughter smile in delight at someone off-camera, while the younger sons smile shyly at the camera and their mother stares it down - the different attitudes, styles of clothing, and directions of vision suggesting varied responses to 1920s reservation life. The camera could not always'capture' its subjects: a boy in a photograph from a residential school is blurry with laughter about to explode. And surely...