From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing

8. Autobiography as Containment: Jane Willis’s Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood

115 Published in 1973, the same year as Métis author Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed—an autobiography that would become a seminal text in Aboriginal-Canadian literature—Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood spans Willis’s childhood, from on a remote island in James Bay to her ten-anda -half years at residential schools in Fort George, Quebec, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Her narrative combines the naive and humorous reflections of a young “Geniesh”—an adored and indulged child of an extended family—with her sad and bitter coming of age in residential schools. In these institutions she is taught to renounce her shameful, dirty, and savage inheritance. Writing in the vein of boarding school autobiography—a tradition that reaches back to the American “Carlisle Success Story” and the “civilizing” fervour to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man!”—Willis plays back the prejudices that she was led to internalize in the process of showing “what Indians can accomplish” (Willis 132). “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” was the motto of the Carlisle Indian School’s founder, General Richard Henry Pratt. Touted as “the Father of Indian Education,” Pratt opened the first Carlisle school in Pennsylvania in 1879 (Brumble 138). Twenty-four more schools opened in the United States over the next twenty years (Bensen 9). The boarding school narrative emerged from campaigning efforts to convince parents to send their EIGHT Autobiography as Containment Jane Willis’s Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood children to these “away schools.” Fictionalized propaganda by non-indigenous writers, as well as autobiographies by former students, were published and circulated throughout indigenous communities. The very title of Willis’s work invites comparison with earlier indigenous life-narratives such as Zitkala-Sa’s (Yankton Sioux) Impressions of an Indian Girlhood (1900), Charles Eastman’s (Santee Sioux) Indian Boyhood (1902), and Luther Standing Bear’s (Oglala Sioux) My Indian Boyhood (1931). Willis’s narrative moves from an idyllic childhood in the remote, natural environment of her home community to her acculturation in the “civilizing” institution of the residential school to a final stage in which she regains her sense of personal integrity. Eastman, who went on to receive a medical degree following his Carlisle schooling, describes his education as a process in which “I had most of my savage gentleness and native refinement knocked out of me” (in Murray 79).1 In similar strain, Willis looks back on her residential schooling as an attempt “to educate the savage out of us” (120; italics in original). As David Murray remarks of Eastman’s autobiography,2 the narrative is double-voiced, affirming his success in the white world while also critiquing the “civilizing ” institutions that brought about the rupture in his personal and cultural identity. Similar tensions, I want to propose, run through Willis’s text. Underlying this autobiography is an experience of alienation and disidentification, an autobiographical subject who defines herself by her difference from others. The book’s contradictory impulse to raise up Willis’s story as representative of an entire culture and at the same time to assert her difference, her disconnection from her cultural origins, results in an uncertain text. It is primarily in the figuration of the autobiographical subject, a subject set apart from her family and social matrix by her desire for upward mobility, that Willis seems to remain within the rigid parameters of traditional Western autobiography. Even though her story relates to a larger, historical struggle of Native people to maintain their cultural sovereignty in the face of regulatory institutions such as the residential school, this autobiography is individualized in focus. The narrator views herself as distinct from her family and community from the beginning of the narrative. Her first mark of difference is that she is born of a White father, whom her mother refuses to marry because of the church’s scorn for mixed marriages. Geniesh, or Janie, is raised by her grandparents when her mother later marries an Aboriginal man from another village. Janie’s mixed blood separates her from her maternal family, who regard her less desirable traits as the outcome of miscegenation: “It was my white-tainted blood that made me so stubborn, so curious, so pesky, so contrary—all the traits a good, obedient, and pliant little Indian was not 116 • Genre in the Institutional Setting of the Residential School supposed to have. I had heard people say it often enough” (10–11). As a child, she sensitively...