Claiming Voice, Writing Difference: A Compartative Analysis of Indigenous Women's Life Writing in Australia and North America

Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D.

Doctoral thesis

Abstract:

This dissertation titled Claiming Voice, Writing Difference: A Comparative Analysis of Indigenous Women’s Life Writing in Australia and North America analyzes six life writing narratives of contemporary Indigenous women writers. In the first chapter I compare Sister Girl by Jackie Huggins, I Am Woman by Lee Maracle and The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen. These texts have been chosen for their significant engagement in critical responses to Western mainstream feminism and for their re-writing of the representations of Indigenous womanhood, motherhood and sisterhood. Although each of them reflects a particular Indigenous woman’s experience in her time and space, together the narratives offer an insight into the ways Indigenous women writers creatively inscribe their difference. In Sister Girl, Jackie Huggins draws attention to the complicity of white Australian women in the labour exploitation of Aboriginal women, in the system of separating Aboriginal children from their families, and in the denial of Indigenous motherhood. Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman represents a stream in Native North American feminist thought which points to the issue of sexism within Native communities and challenges the often proclaimed view that sexism is not a primary issue in Indigenous women’s struggles. Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop in turn calls for a re-construction of strong tribal womanhood, making a connection between the colonization and disempowerment of Indigenous women. As I argue in the chapter, through their alternative narrative techniques and thematic innovations the three texts re-write the stereotypical images of Indigenous female agency and subjectivity, initiating the empowerment of Indigenous women’s voices. In the second chapter, I read Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Shirley Sterling’s My Name Is Seepeetza and Anna Lee Walters’ Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing as counter-histories that disrupt the homogeneity of mainstream Australian and North American historiography and that recover previously subjugated Indigenous knowledges. In her account, Pilkington celebrates an act of active resistance in the form of a seemingly impossible escape from the Moore River Native Settlement and records the symbolic journey home. Her alternative (hi)story consists in interweaving the pre-contact/early-contact Indigenous history and the nationally accepted history of European settlement in Australia, as well as in appropriating official archival materials and creating a counter-archive of traditional Aboriginal knowledge. Similarly, Sterling’s narrator asserts her cultural identity through a series of juxtaposed contrasts between the abusive residential school regime and the harmonious, functional family environment at home. These contrasts bring to the foreground the memories of times spent with the extended family, the daily activities ensuring the survival of the community, and generally the happy moments outside the range of state intervention. Walters, through restoring her tribal background in the form of recollecting local histories of her peoples counterbalances in her narrative the invisibility of Indigenous people in the USA constructed by the mainstream imaginary. Together, the three narratives, by incorporating multiple voices and constructing collective and dialogic selves, defy the conventional notion of monologic representation of the individual self in Western auto/biographies. Thus in this chapter I argue that the analysed Indigenous women’s life narratives problematize mainstream histories by highlighting the authors’ own and their relatives’ traumatic experiences following the forced separation from their families, and by revealing the often “unspeakable” repressed memories in a form that I call “scriptotherapy.” In the conclusion I draw attention to future directions of Indigenous women’s life writing narratives and I use another text, Jackie and Rita Hug

Abstract:

gins’ auto/biographical narrative Auntie Rita (1994) as a particular example that helps me point out new strategies and formal innovations that, in one way or another, strengthen, further develop and/or transgress some of the textual characteristics examined in the preceding chapters. The potential of this and similar texts to perform the dialogic forms of the selves, as well as employ a very introspective writing style which foregrounds multiple voices rather than individual, monologic voice, is especially noteworthy. Thus Auntie Rita serves as a bridge between the conclusions I draw from the comparative analysis of the six Indigenous women’s life writing narratives at the centre of this dissertation and my suggestions as far as the future potential of the genre of Indigenous women’s life writing is concerned.

Keywords

Indigenous women writers, life writing, Australia, North America, Indigenous feminism, Stolen Generation narratives, boarding and residential schools narratives, Jackie Huggins, Lee Maracle, Paula Gunn Allen, Doris Pilkington, Shirley Sterling, Anna Lee Walters

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 8. 6. 2007

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 22. 6. 2007
• Supervisor: Mgr. et Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, M.A.
• Reader: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., Dr. Jürgen Martini

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Doctoral programme / field:
Philology / Literature Comparatistics