First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship by Sophie McCall (review)

In the last few decades, there has been a growing dialogue about the appropriation of Indigenous “voice” in Canada and beyond. First Person Plural offers an important contribution to this discourse by examining collaborative work in various arenas: in literature and film, land claims, court cases, public inquiries, commissions, ethnographies and the making of history. How have Indigenous peoples been able to voice their truths and be heard? What has changed since Indigenous peoples began to challenge the colonial act of being spoken for? First Person Plural explores the successes and challenges of “multi-voiced” storytelling with Indigenous peoples. Literary scholar Sophie McCall invites us to consider moving beyond “parallel” voices where speaker and author represent binaries; to explore, rather, that in-between space where “voices-in-dialogue” can help to articulate evolving expressions of Indigenous sovereignty.

McCall begins by connecting the call for Indigenous voice to the birth of modern Indigenous sovereignty in Canada in the early 1970s. She explores the efforts of Chief Justice Thomas Berger and anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody to use Dene testimonial in work associated with the McKenzie Valley Pipeline hearings (1973-1975). McCall argues that these efforts were well intentioned and innovative at the time, but fell somewhat short of self-reflective analysis and translating Indigenous ways of knowing to the Canadian public. She then shifts to an examination of how Abenaki film-maker and Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle incorporated the multiple voices of Mohawk and other Indigenous people in storytelling about the resistance at “Oka” and, in Maracle’s case, in telling Indigenous women’s stories, including her own. In a later chapter, McCall examines how Inuit filmmakers use a multiplicity of Indigenous voices in their storytelling. She compares the collaborative and community based work on the film, Atanarjuat (2007) with the essentialist and static 1922 film, Nanook of the North, linking the timing and approaches of Atanarjuat to the birth of Nunavut (1999) as expressions of Inuit sovereignty.

Other chapters invite us to consider the state’s use of testimonial in comparison to how oral history is employed in exemplary Indigenous and non-Indigenous coauthored books. Chapter Four examines how the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) missed the opportunity to “elicit the active participation of witnesses in the remaking of a shared history” (110). McCall contrasts this with the history presented in the 1997 book Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene, co-authored by former Dene Chief Ila Bussidor and journalist Üstün Bilgen-Reinart and narrated by thirteen other Dene spokespeople. Chapter Five looks at the limitations of the court to “hear” the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en oral history that was admitted as evidence in the 1997 Delgamuukw land claim case. McCall revisits this case alongside anthropologist Julie Cruikshank’s collaborative work with Yukon Elders Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned (Life Lived Like a Story, 1990) and anthropologist Wendy Wickware’s collaboration with Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson (Write it on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller, 1989). She points out that, unlike those charged with “hearing” the Delgamuukw evidence, the non-Indigenous collaborators for these books learned to revisit their “responseabilities” in working with Indigenous storytellers.

I found the chapter on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) particularly interesting as it provides an analysis of how Indigenous voice was used in what McCall describes as the “narrative of progress” offered by RCAP; a narrative that sets up a politics of reconciliation aimed at assuaging settler guilt and complicity. As McCall points out, this narrative produces “an illusory sense of resolution that conveniently brackets ongoing colonial injustices” (111). McCall’s analysis is timely, given the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and is but one example of how she blends issues of voice, narrative, collaborative work, Indigenous-settler relations, decolonization, sovereignty and healing in her book.

As an Indigenous scholar...