Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada

Diasporic Longings: (Re)Figurations of Home and Homelessness in Richard Wagamese’s Work

135 Being strangers in our own land is a sad story, but, if we can speak, we may turn this story around. —Rita Joe, Song of Rita Joe (14) We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves . Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined. —N. Scott Momaday, “The Man Made of Words” (103) in the first volume of the Diaspora journal, William Safran refines Walker Connor’s definition of diaspora as “that segment of a people living outside the homeland” and suggests that the term be a descriptor for different groups of peoples (qtd. in Safran 83). He lists six characteristics: the dispersal from an original “center”; “a collective memory … about their original homeland”; not being “fully accepted by their host society”; the view of “their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home”; a commitment to the “original homeland ,” and a continued relationship with that homeland which defines the “ethnocommunal consciousness” (83–94). In his comparative discussion of various diasporas in the body of his article, Safran does not include Indigenous communities. This is not surprising as indigeneity and diaspora are, or should be, seen as the opposite sides of a people’s expressions of belonging and home since “Indigenous” connotes a sense of home as living on the land you were born into, i.e., not displaced from, while the notion of diaspora originates in the description of the Jewish dispersion in Babylonian times and, as Ashcroft, Diasporic Longings (Re)Figurations of Home and Homelessness in Richard Wagamese’s Work Renate Eigenbrod 136 renate eigenbrod Griffiths, and Tiffin comment on the respective text in Deuteronomy 28, verse 25, means a scattering, an exile (“Introduction” 425). However, due to the colonial ideology of terra nullius at the time of contact, Indigenous peoples in settler states were pushed off their homelands as they were seen as less than human and as not truly inhabiting the land. In various stages and through different forms of dispossession, physical removal, and cultural alienation during colonization, Indigenous peoples in North America have become strangers in their own land, or, in other words, may also be seen as living in the diaspora— geographically, culturally, and ideologically away from home. In my understanding of diaspora I go beyond the postcolonial definition of “voluntary or forcible movements of peoples from their homelands into new regions” (Ashcroft , Griffiths, and Tiffin, Key Concepts 68) and, instead, align myself with Cree (Nêhiyaw) scholar Neal McLeod, who outlines two aspects of diaspora: spatial and ideological. “I define the removal of an Indigenous group, in this case the Nêhiyawak, from their land as spatial diaspora.… I call the alienation from one’s stories ideological diaspora: this alienation, the removal from the voices and echoes of the ancestors, is the attempt to destroy collective consciousness ” (19). In the following, I analyze the work of Richard Wagamese in relation to the dual diaspora caused by colonialism while also considering diasporic theories related to immigrant diasporas. Although diasporas like those formed by Asian Canadians and AfroCanadians are different from Indigenous communities because the displaced peoples have another home to reconnect with, whereas Indigenous peoples’ home is here and nowhere else, there are crossovers and similarities in their respective histories of oppression, displacement, racism, and marginalization . In recent years, authors like David Chariandy and Dionne Brand have integrated into their own narratives about immigrants, Soucouyant and What We All Long For, a recognition of Indigenous peoples as first peoples on this land; among the Indigenous authors in Canada, Wagamese is one of the few writers who acknowledges histories of displacement, other than those of his own peoples, in his work.1 In his first (autobiographical) novel, Keeper’n Me (1994), it is a Black family in Toronto with whom the Anishinaabe character finds a home for the first time in his life; in his third novel, Dream Wheels (2006), cross-cultural support is reversed: here, the Native people (a cowboy family) help a Black family. In each case, Wagamese reimagines the notion of being Native through the relationship with another marginalized and racialized group. In his first novel, foster care and the urban environment should have “killed the Indian,” according to the proponents of assimilation, but in diasporic longings 137 Wagamese’s story, the mingling of cultures...