Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women's Writings, Postcolonial Theory

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

Thresholds of Difference “sets out to examine a series of
articulations among feminist theories, postcolonial criticisms, and
Native women’s writings in Canada.” In its own way, this is a
brilliant theoretical book, if somewhat segmented in its three sectional
divisions, which are entitled, respectively, A Feminist/Neo-Colonial
Encounter, Native Women and Anglo-American Feminism, and The Cultural
Politics of Representation. The book, which was originally a thesis,
suffers to some extent from the conventions demanded of an academic
treatise (e.g., highly specialized languages for each discipline, and
even cross-disciplines). The language here is politically correct, and
no reference or authority is left out that can give critical weight and
breadth to the arguments. Cultural critics will be happy with such
familiar language as “signifiers,” “textual sites,”
“valorize,” “production of knowledge,” and so forth.

One of the real strengths of the book is the author’s research into
the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, her consideration of the history of
Native and settler relations, and the explication of “Native”
narrative within this context. Specifically, she discusses the story of
“Slave Woman,” told by Governor James Knight as a “popular
signifier in the historical literature about Native women in Canada.”
The author is also sensitive to the paradoxes of constructing a
“Native literary tradition,” as well as to the relationship between
Eurocentric feminism and Native women’s writing. She has some useful
and thoughtful observations on oral traditions and storytelling, and
manages to discuss in Part 3 some actual writings by Native women
without imposing a critical apparatus on works that don’t deserve to
be so encumbered. Jeanette Armstrong’s “Slash,” Maria Campbell’s
“Halfbreed,” Beatrice Culleton’s “In Search of April
Raintree,” and Minnie Freeman’s “Life Among the Qallunaat” are
the literary writings in question.