Talking about Ourselves: The Literary Productions of Native Women of Canada

Janet MacArthur was a freelance writer in Calgary.

In her study of the oral literary productions of native Canadian women, Barbara Godard finds evidence to support an extension of the traditional concept of the text. The text can no longer be seen as something stable and fixed, but must accommodate dynamic works in the nature of event or performance, like many of the oral texts of native women. Godard not only uses feminist critical theory, which calls for a redefinition of the canon and of the forms accepted as literature, but she also garners support for her position from recent critical insistence on communication as contextual. The native aesthetic, she finds, is collaborative in nature; interaction between performer and audience is assumed. Native cultural productions also offer a challenge to the proprietary Euro-american concepts of author and authority which privilege the inspired, individual vision. For native women, authority is generally vested in an elderly woman who is a transmitter of values and information rather than an author with a copyright. Both young and old native women see themselves as culture brokers whose personal stake in any story is minimal.

Godard is careful to underscore the differences in cultural perspective between white and native women and to point out the loss that occurs when white women transcribe or try to “make sense” (indeed, something Godard does here) of native cultural productions. One of the criticisms one could direct toward this study, I would argue, is that its author, while decrying the traditional privileging of written over oral narrative, employs the evaluative strategies used on written texts to evaluate oral ones. Furthermore, she examines the work of native women from the contemporary critical perspective of the socio-culturally dominant group and delivers her findings in a discursive academic terms, while promoting the abandonment of “our preconceived grids and questions that “have made us blind to what is really here.”

Nevertheless, that feminist concerns with otherness, marginalization, and authority can be fruitfully applied to an investigation of native women’s cultural productions is ultimately proved by this study. Godard addresses the very real problems of translating, interviewing, providing resumes on recapitulations of rituals, and, most importantly, of the native woman as a creation of the white female imagination or of scientific investigation. She also offers the interesting observation that the native oral text may be a paradigm for the “woman’s text” because it is one of the most dynamic marginalized forms of female cultural activity. This is an interesting thesis warranting further investigation.Overall, Barbara Godard’s essay provides a thoroughgoing introduction to work of this nature concerning the rich artistic production of women whose special role as custodians of legends, sacred beliefs, and rituals has long been recognized within their own cultural community.