indigenous writing

POSTHUMOUS POWER

Alison Ravenscroft

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Josie Douglas (eds)
Skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing
Jukurrpa Books, $27.40pb, 177pp
1 86465 032 X

THE IDEA FOR AN anthology of indigenous writing first came to Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Josie Douglas in 1997 during the course of a long bus ride from Alice Springs to an Aboriginal community. They went on to produce this stunning collection of contemporary American Indian, Inuit, First Nations, Australian Aboriginal and Maori writings. In part the book's importance arises from the circumstances of its inception and later production. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation in south western Ontario. Josie Douglas is of Wardaman descent; her grandmother's country is in the Northern Territory just south of Katherine. As Josie Douglas points out in her preface, Aboriginal literature 'has always been defined for us'. Here is an anthology of indigenous writing conceived, compiled, and edited by indigenous women which resists efforts at definitions and the limits they imply.
      Non-indigenous reviewers have played their own part in producing definitions of 'good' and 'authentic' indigenous writing and reproducing in turn the western colonising impulses which indigenous writings point out and critique. However sophisticated and self-reflexive literary criticism seeks to make itself, the racialised nature of its practice is unavoidable. How then might a non-indigenous reviewer approach indigenous writing when the ethics of cross-cultural literary criticism remain so thorny and unresolved?
      Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm's introductory comments on indigenous writing offer a starting point. She argues that, despite the cultural and historical differences between indigenous writers:

what all the writers share is our connection to our homelands, our histories of colonization, genocide, and displacement, and our will to survive and pass our treasures of our cultures to future generations. Most of us believe our creative work expresses the values and aesthetics of our people and connects us to them and to our ancestors and future generations. It is a form of sharing, of giving back, of reaffirming kinship, of connecting the sacredness of creation.
Here Akiwenzie-Damm proposes that indigenous writing 'story' be read as cultural practice, carrying relations between people over time and conveying collective knowledge. As Akiwenzie-Damm says, 'Most of us believe our creative work has a function well beyond self-expression'.The writing emanates from and is produced for community.
      Skins opens with 'Dah Teef' by Metis writer Maria Campbell, where stories are all that remain of a life. They are what can be passed on, the treasures of which Akiwenzie-Damm speaks:
An dah stories you know
dats dah bes treasure of
all to leave your family.
Everyting else on dis eart
he gets los or wore out.
But dah stories dey last forever.
In 'Dora-Rouge's bones' by Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, story and song are carried in bodies 'in blood, bone and breath' and they are carried too in material objects: an old fur coat for instance that gives to its wearer the facility of long-forgotten song.
Dora-Rouge, from the next room, called out, 'Say, where did you hear that song?'
'I heard it inside this coat.'
'I've heard it before,' said Dora-Rouge. 'I remember it. It's the one that calls lost things out of hiding and brings them back. But it's from before your time.'
'It's the coat, Mother. I've told you that.'
     When no one looked I would touch the fur and put my ear against it and listen. It was old, with no shining left to it, and silent. At least with me, when I listened.
For me, this story holds a strange beauty, the meaning of which as a 'white' woman I can only guess at, and so I read it from within my own knowledge, for how else to make meaning? And I do want to make meaning; it's hard to let the strangeness be. So I associate the story with American and European modernists Marcel Proust and Djuna Barnes and their preoccupations with history and the past carried in the relic, the ancient object, where the past is taken to be not 'passed' but submerged. Because of the way in which the story is strange to me I find myself desiring to make what meaning of it I can, which is to say to give it meanings shaped by my own whiteness even while I know that the story is not this at all. I am confronted with its difference and my desire to make it the same.
      But if some parts of each story remain hidden from me, others are more accessible, for these writers do not only speak to the indigenous reader. They also speak to and of the non-indigenous, holding a mirror to western culture and its colonising impulses, inviting self-examination. They ask: what fears and desires propel the coloniser? Bruce Pascoe explores this question in 'Tired Sailor'. The story opens with the white invasion of a place known as Weeaproinah and then as Tired Sailor. Craypot Frazer ties an Aboriginal boy to the bottom of his craypot as bait and sends him to his death 'still kicking and waving his arms.'

Incomplete:
Alison Ravenscroft teaches in English and Women's Studies at La Trobe University.

Your comments are invited: email them in a letter toAustralian Book Review
Return to Australian Book Review /December 2000/January 2001