Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada

Beverly Rasporich is an associate professor in the Faculty of General
Studies, University of Calgary, and the author of Dance of the Sexes:
Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

This anthology of Native female writing was initiated primarily to give
Native women the opportunity to speak and the larger society the chance
to hear those voices in our culture that have been most silenced. Since
for aboriginal culture the circle represents the journey of human
existence—with no beginning or end, with connections to both past and
future—these Native women are writing the circle; they are connecting
their heritage and themselves to what is and what will be.

The editors have made no attempt to define “Nativeness” or racial
categories or to place restrictions on the writing; the writers
themselves (54 of whom, with diverse experiences, are represented here)
have defined their own identities and have chosen their own literary
forms and content.

The result is an amazingly rich compilation of difference, yet
singularity, of commmunal wholeness that nevertheless allows for the
appreciation of each person’s experience and vision. While, for
example, Vicki English-Currie, a graduate student, writes a fine
rhetorical piece, “The Need for Re-evaluation in Native Education,”
a number of Native women of varying educational backgrounds write
poems—about dreams and nature, about ancestral memory, about protest
and despair. They are writing not always for “art’s sake” but, as
Gayle Weenie explains, to “do something positive with some of [their]
pent-up negative energy,” or as Marilyn Dumont comments, “for
[their] own sanity.” The oral tradition of Native culture—which, as
Emma Laroque explains, does not separate the word from the self—is
strongly felt in this volume. Authors write for the pure pleasure of
storytelling, for the love of the word, and for the self-fulfillment of
speaking in self-voice.

This is a forward-looking and ground-breaking text, one that exposes
the unvarnished realities of the lives of Native women and that
challenges, from feminist and aboriginal perspectives, paternalistic
literacy conventions and genres and the standards of “objectivity”
that inform them. In Laroque’s words, “there is ample evidence in
the study of justification literature for the argument that objectivity
can be a self-serving tool of those accustomed to managing history.”