-
3. White Imaginings
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Notes to chapter 3 on pages 237–40. 71 …our [Indigenous] subjectivites, our aspirations, our ways of seeing and our languages have largely been excluded from the equation, as the colonising culture plays with itself. It is as if we have been ushered on to a stage to play in a drama where the parts have already been written. —Michael Dodson, “The End in the Beginning” 3 White Imaginings The fact that most representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures in settler societies have been and continue to be produced by non-Indigenous writers and artists is readily explained by the fact that in these nations it is white, Eurocentric cultures whose practices, perspectives, and narrative traditions dominate literary production and representational modes. I do not want to suggest that non-Indigenous people should not or cannot represent Indigenous people and cultures, although I make a distinction between works of fiction that thematize Indigenous cultures and characters, and retellings of Indigenous narratives. I have argued in chapter 2 that texts in the latter category are best retold by people from whose traditions they derive, and in forms that respect cultural practices. Works of fiction present a different set of issues, enmeshed within the complex politics of representational and discursive practices. As the Canadian scholar Linda Alcoff notes in her essay “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” it is difficult to “distinguish speaking about from speaking for in all cases,”1 since representation does not work as a simple operation whereby an author delivers the truth of others, but incorporates advocacy and judgements and acts of valuing as well as information. Alcoff concludes that those speaking for others should be cognizant of the power relations embodied in discursive practices and should interrogate the positions from which they speak, that they should take responsibility for what they say, and that they should “analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context.”2 Applied to fiction for children, these principles suggest that non-Indigenous authors should recognize the privileges they enjoy as members of majority cultures, and (crucially) the subject positions they construct for Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers. Alcoff’s recommendations to those who speak for others imply a high level of self-awareness on the part of speakers; but symbolic systems are informed by naturalized assumptions and expectations, which exist in most cases below the level of conscious thought. Discussing representations of Native American historical figures, Hilary Wyss notes that, “Euro-American definitions of Native Americans have long been rooted in specific genres of written discourse—the captivity narrative, the travel narrative, European eyewitness accounts of ‘authentic’ Native communities—diverse forms that nevertheless complement each other in their attempts to explain Native Americans to a Euro-American audience.”3 Unless representations of Native American people and cultures accord with the narrative and discoursal features of these genres, Wyss argues, they are regarded as inauthentic or erroneous, since they disrupt constructions of racial hierarchies embedded in national mythologies. In a similar vein, Michael Dodson, the Australian Aboriginal academic and activist, observes that Aboriginality is generally de- fined within Australian culture in terms of its relations with the dominant culture , with the result that, “our [Aboriginal] subjectivities, our aspirations, our ways of seeing and our languages have largely been excluded from the equation, as the colonising culture plays with itself. It is as if we have been ushered on to a stage to play in a drama where the parts have already been written. Choose from the part of the ancient noble spirit, the lost soul estranged from her true nature, or the aggressive drunkard, alternately sucking and living off the system. No other parts are available for ‘real Aborigines.’”4 Wyss’s argument that Native American cultures are depicted within specific genres and Dodson’s sense that Australian Aborigines are “ushered on to a stage to play in a drama where the parts have already been written” are borne out by an examination of children’s texts by non-Indigenous authors. In the main, these texts represent Indigeneity within a narrow range of character types, such as sage figures, political activists, and alienated young people caught between cultures. The predominant narrative patterns cluster around a small number of possibilities: stories in which white children befriend Indigenous characters, thereby enhancing their own growth as individuals; problem novels featuring the identity formation of Indigenous characters; and a substantial body of historical novels, many of which...