13 Canadian Short Stories of the Indigenous Writers

Dr. Debashree Dattaray

Introduction:

A Native Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature (1981)1 is one of the first book-length studies to examine the “image of the Native in literature.” Discussing texts by English Canadian writers, Leslie Monkman showed how Native peoples were characterized as “savage” and “primitive” so as to treat “the Indian as a doomed figure of the past” through which to assert “a lost heroic vitality” and “cultural eleg[y] of the new world” 2. Portraying the Indian as the antithesis of “white culture,” these writers practiced the colonial fantasy of Native extinction by relegating the Indian to a literary-critical terrain generated through the “displacement, erosion, and death of indigenous cultures”3. Non-Native writers under various paradigmatic shifts in history have deployed “the Indian and his culture” either as a “stereotype” against which “to assert the values of his own culture” or as a site of culture and history appropriated “to concerns common to all cultures.” According to Monkman, Canada had neither “come to terms with the cultures of its Native peoples”4 nor avoided “exploiting the culture of a vanquished people”.

It is evident that there is a link between domination and representation. Domination by colonial powers led to mis-representation of indigenous peoples in art, culture, literature, politics, sociology. They have been viewed as artifacts, museum pieces to be dissected, diagnosed and interpreted. Like fictional characters such as Man Friday, Caliban or Queequeg, they have been taught, tamed and civilized as part of the white man’s burden. A Eurocentric perspective is forced upon cultural products, located in different specificities. Again, a sensitivity to ‘difference’, the primary tool of investigation per se, dissipates in the face of Elizabeth Spelman’s “boomerang perception”: “I look at you and come right back to myself.”

What concerns one more is not merely to ‘identify’ with aboriginal Canadian literatures in the contextualist trinity of “race, moment, milieu,” which relates literary creations to the external dispositions of national character, pressures of the natural environment, and periods of cultural development. In the context of aboriginal Canadian writings, Taine’s classical three- pronged approach to study forms of art could be reworked and therefore subverted if one asked: Which race? Which moment? Whose milieu? Because, this would then show how the history of ‘nation’, the makings of “natural” environment and the “influence” of “culture” narrate a painful story of colonization for the founding peoples of the Americas in the post- contact period. Post-contact/ postcolonialism is in itself a debatable term in the indigenous vocabulary as is best articulated by Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes, who asked at an academic conference on postcolonialism, “What? Postcolonialism? Have they left?” Moreover, in the Canadian context, the notion of ‘Canada’ itself is ambiguous. Sophie McCall explains:

The Canada – US border has long been considered a

soft border, more a state of mind than a physical presence.

However, for Aboriginal peoples, the border is a constant

reminder of colonial history. It is an enduring scar that not only

obscures the violent appropriation of Aboriginal territories over

the past four-hundred years but also effaces older maps of

Native North American nations.

Therefore, a reading into indigenous literatures becomes even more pertinent with the political significations of the 49th parallel. The 49th parallel is more than often ignored by aboriginal authors in North America as a superfluous identity, imposed by imperial administration. Within the Aboriginal Canadian context, it is not merely reflective of periods of transition, but also has become an effective tool which incorporates the oral in the written from a socio-political and principally Aboriginal perspective. Critics adhering to Eurocentric ideological credo vis-à-vis the novel have found the treatment of genre by indigenous writers to be problematic. Perhaps, a crucial difference between Aboriginal communities and non- Aboriginal communities is the significance of the individual with community. Aboriginal literature is pivoted on this particular relationship. Beth Brant writes: “We do not write as individuals communing with a muse. We write as members of an ancient, cultural conscience. Our muse is us.”8 There is therefore a relationship between all that is part of the living. This would include nature, land, people, and customs. For the Aboriginal, a holistic approach which would accommodate subjectivity, creativity, culture, language and environmental ethics and the ecosystem is an essential ingredient towards a respectful understanding of Aboriginal literatures. In this manner, interpretation of texts in Eurocentric ways is problematized and negative attitudes towards Native cultures are highlighted.

Negative attitudes towards Native Canadians functions on the assumption that it is the latter who require learning the ways of the world, who must acclimatize and assimilate themselves in the world of knowledge, science and reason. Missionaries, explorers, and colonialists have perpetuated the myth of the untamed Indian. Thomas King in his “Introduction” to The Native in Literature speaks of three visions of the Indian as “the dissipitated savage, the barbarous savage, and the heroic savage.”9 Margery Fee in her essay entitled “Romantic Nationalism and the Image of Native People in Contemporary English- Canadian Literature” examines how romantic nationalism has also shaped the image of the Native and how the limited but telling roles that Native characters have been allowed to assume reflect the need of non-Natives for a character who can represent “all that the modern person has lost” 10 Helen Hoy in her discussion on appropriation of Native culture and stereotypical projection of Native Canadians, adds “the urgent white-Canadian self-image of non-racist tolerance – often cited in contradistinction to US-American iniquity –with First Nations as the critical Canadian test case”11 to Fee’s theory of ‘romanticism’. One needs, therefore, to recognize what Vine Deloria, Jr., means when he says, “People can tell just by looking at us what we want, what should be done to help us, how we feel, and what a “real” Indian is really like. Indian life, as it relates to the real world, is a continuous attempt not to disappoint people who know us.” 12 The identity of the “Native” thus has undergone shifts pertaining not always to the socio-political realities of the indigene, but rather to legal, constitutional definitions of the “Indian” as present within a colonial and racist framework in the Canadian democracy. Kateri Damm observes:

There are status Indians, non-status Indians, Métis, Inuit. Dene,

Treaty Indians, urban Indians, on reserve Indians, off-reserve

Indians; there are Indians who are Band members and Indians

who are not Band members. There are First Nations peoples,

descendents of First Nations, Natives, Indigenous peoples,

Aboriginal peoples, mixed-bloods, mixed-breeds, half-breeds,

enfranchised Indians, Bill C-31 Indians. There are even women

without any First Nations ancestry who gained “Indian status”

by marriage. And these are just some of the labels we must

consider in identifying ourselves. There are also definitions

based on Tribal/First Nations affiliations, on language, on

blood quantum.But what does this have to do with a discussion

of literature?

The sociopolitical definitions labeled upon an aboriginal person in Canada are related to a prolonged history of colonial oppression. The innumerous ‘categories’ assigned by the Canadian government to its aboriginal populations epitomize the western imperial mind’s desire to fit the unknown into a readymade compartment. In the realm of literature, scholars who have received training in European critical traditions, work in tandem with different aesthetic assumptions and narrative structures. The tendency is to impose favourite literary theories on the indigenous text, without any prior knowledge of indigenous literatures. Therefore, an aboriginal writer in her works uses the medium of the written word to initiate the process of decolonization. Such a statuesque forces one to discuss positionality of author in relation to the text, a location predicated upon colonial definitions and impositions. This is true of contemporary writers who also are plagued by the western concept of individual voice in creativity. Duane Niatum explains

Songs in the old days were not called art. Art objects

such as poems, paintings, sculptures, pots and rugs were

considered expressions of the community as a whole, not as

personal egocentric works. To do the work of an artist was

simply an integral part of the normal routines of the tribe. Art,

work, play, religion and society, to name just a few of the

things we do as a group, were linked to each other as the tribe’s

single thread of experience.

However to expect such selfless portrayal of the work of art, without naming its creator can lead to other problems. The appropriation of the indigenous story has been an abiding issue. Indigenous writers have been indignant on being silenced and when plastic shamans have usurped their positions such as the legendary Grey Owl. Appropriation of knowledges and resources is a historical reality for indigenous peoples across the world. An understanding of the process of appropriation encapsulates the idea of decolonization. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith analyses,

It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can

assume to know all that is possible to know of us, on the basis

of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the

West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of

knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and

then simultaneously reject the people who created and

developed those ideas and seek to deny them further

opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own

nations.

The process charts out the map of appropriation. In the early contact with western explorers, appropriation was in the form of natural resources. Indigenous people’s early experiences with Western cultures were ones of exploitation where the natural resources were appropriated to fuel the economic growth of the Western world. The appropriation was of physical resources – metals, gems, herbs, spices, animals and land for agriculture and settlement. That which had economic value was plundered to the extent that few communities were able to enjoy the quality of life they had experienced before Western contact. Occurring simultaneously with this process has been the appropriation of wisdoms and knowledges in the uses of medicinal herbs, hunting animals, and obtaining of “local knowledge” of edible plants and animals to allow survival in environments alien to Western understanding. In the contemporary context, indigenous writers have asked non-Native writers to not borrow their stories. According to them, the process of appropriation deprived indigenous people, culturally and economically, since the stories were either misinterpreted or the profits from the same were not made available to aboriginal communities. In 1988 Lee Maracle asked Anne Cameron, author of best-selling novel Daughters of Copper Woman (1981), to stop using traditional Native stories in her work. In 1989, controversy broke out over the representation of minority Canadian writers at the PEN conference in Toronto. In 1990 the Canada Council set up an Advisory Committee for Racial Equality in the Arts; perhaps needless to say, its report was controversial. Finally, a conference called Writing Through Race which excluded those who were not members of an ethnic minority from most of its workshops was held in Vancouver in 1995. Hartmut Lutz’s collection of 18 conversations with Native Canadian authors in Contemporary Challenges has also dealt with this issue at length with a large group of Indigenous writers. Responding to the 1988 ‘Telling It’ conference to a question about learning without appropriating, Armstrong points out that

we do as Native writers suffer because of the kind of

cultural imperialism that’s taking place when non-Natives

speak about Native ceremony and Native thinking, Native

thought, Native life style, Native world view and speak as

though they know what they are speaking about. That’s

appropriation of culture because no one can experience and

know what I know and experience or what my grandmother

knows or what Lee [Maracle] knows and feels, and she can

speak with her own voice and so can I and so can my

grandmother.

Neither can postcolonialism be an answer to the reading of indigenous texts. There is also, amongst indigenous academics, the sneaking suspicion that the fashion of postcolonialism has become a strategy for reinscribing or reauthorizing the privileges of non-indigenous academics because the field of ‘post-colonial’ discourse has been defined in ways which can still leave out indigenous peoples, their ways of knowing and their current concerns. These stereotypes have ingrained themselves in the collective memories of the people, representing the full and limited range of Indian characters in literature. Métis writer Jordan Wheeler argues that the situation is further aggravated by the fact that the Native voice is often muted by the mainstream society where “a novel written by a non-Aboriginal writer [about Native people] sells millions of copies when it is riddled with stereotypes, racial attitudes, shallow, one dimensional characters and cultural inaccuracies. Tell a people they are poor and hopeless enough times and they will begin to believe it” 17 Native writers have thus become extremely wary about who represents the “Native voice”, or to further elaborate the point, what constitutes Native literature. After years of having their stories being stolen, appropriated and assimilated, Native writers have objected to non-Native writers writing from a ‘Native perspective’. Authors such as Lyn Andrews, Ruth Beebe Hill, Carlos Castaneda.

W.P. Kinsella, Ann Cameron, and Rudy Wiebe have been asked to clear the way for Native writers. (Armstrong “Words”; Baker “Stealing”; Keeshig Tobias “Stop Stealing”, Maracle, “Moving Over”). The assertion of the Native voice would ensure that the colonial past be revamped and renegotiated with and thus lead towards a positive change. Native authors have thus increasing through their writings attempted to outline the precontact history, the history of colonization and contemporary history. They have tried to develop three specific trajectories as follows:

1. The history of the specific Nation in terms of where they come from
2. The history of the specific Nation in terms of what happened to them
3. The present day history the specific Nation in terms of where they go from here.

For any attempt towards understanding indigenous literatures, it is important to be sensitive to the history of colonization of Native peoples from a Native perspective. In order to do justice to a reading in Native literatures, one must have a culturally specific knowledge of treaties and assimilation policies such as forcefully removing children from foster homes and residential schools, a perceptive familiarity with the Indian Act and its racist, imperial categories and legislations, and an awareness of epoch making events (symbolizing the extant colonial regime as well as modes of indigenous resistance to the same) in Native history such as Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, Oka , or the confrontation at Ipperwash and the death of Dudley George (who was shot by an Ontario Provincial Police Officer). When we think of the banning of Native languages in residential schools, the separation of children from their parents, the destruction of Native traditions by the missionary onslaught, the economic uprooting of Native communities, and the removal of many from their ancestral territories, we may begin to understand and lament the irreparable losses in the lives and lifestyles Native peoples and cultures have suffered.

A turning point in Native Canadian criticism occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s through a series of high-profile, public events involving Native writers that challenged the ideological containment of Native literature through its positioning within a generalized, cross-cultural, comparative framework. The establishment of the En’ Owkin School of Internation First Nations Writing in the Okanagan valley, Penticton, B.C., on September 12, 1989 marked the determination of Native authors to carry on the traditions of storytelling in the contemporary period, and simultaneously using all modern technologies and equipment. The Okanagan word ‘En’Owkin’ is a “conceptual metaphor” which according to the En’Owkin Centre’s website, embodies the Okanagan ideal of coming to consensus through a collaborative group process. Another collaborative effort was the formation of the Committee to Reestablish the Trickster, a Toronto-based group of Native writers founded by John McLeod, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, Tomson Highway, and Daniel David Moses, which organized workshops in Native cultural production and established publishing venues to “reclaim the Native voice”. The narrative as presented by the Aboriginal writer would in itself lead to the formulation of a theory of literature. Maracle elaborates:

“Words are not objects to be wasted. They represent the

accumulated knowledge, cultural values, the vision of an entire

people or peoples. We believe the proof of a thing or idea is in

the doing. Doing requires some form of social interaction and

thus, story is the most persuasive and sensible way to present

the accumulated thoughts and values of a people.”

The agency of ‘storytelling’ is a metaphor for a gesture which is simultaneously cultural, social and political. It asserts and affirms identity, resists artificially constructed binaries, and transmits and sustains alterNative historical truths. This gesture toward the establishment of a counter-tradition within which to locate Aboriginal writing has also fostered a historicization of the field that privileges the literature’s engagement with social and political contexts. Mohawk writer Beth Brant has suggested that “Our spirit, our sweat, our tears, our laughter, our love, our anger, our bodies are distilled into words that we bead together to make power.”19For both Maracle and Brant, the contemporary act of storytelling is a complicated one. It has a twofold function. Primarily, through its immediate role of ‘narration’ within a written format, it gives a sense of ‘being-told-to’ as in verbal storytelling. Secondly, it also gains significance as a written art preserved for posterity. At all junctions, ‘storytelling’ involves a complex process of expressing the significance of language through a narration of the events (plot) and also draws attention to multiple narrative strands across translucent borders of cultural paradigms.

In this module, we would look into selected short stories by Indigenous writers from Canada such as Lee Maracle, Thomas King, Beth Brant and Emma Lee Warrior.

Among the most prolific Aboriginal writers in Canada today, Maracle has published more than ten works in all, including novels, poetry, short story collections and collaborative anthologies. In 2000, Maracle received the J.T. Stewart Voices of Change Award. A collaborative work, First Fish, First People, earned an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A graduate in sociology and creative writing from Simon Fraser University, Maracle has held numerous distinguished academic posts, including the Stanley Knowles Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at the University of Waterloo, the Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University, and Writer in Residence at the University of Guelph. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Writer in Residence for the university’s Aboriginal Studies Programme, and Traditional Cultural Director for the Indigenous Theatre School. The significance of these achievements is manifold, given the fact, for Maracle and as for her other Aboriginal writers, English has been a foreign tongue, forcibly imposed upon them and to express the vivid orality inherent in indigenous languages is an arduous and daunting task. Matters are even more complicated when indigenous people encounter parents who are unable to teach them values imbibed in their languages since they too have been crippled by the colonizer’s tongue. In Maracle’s short story, ‘Charlie’20, the protagonist loses interest in the didactic system of western schooling because it involves learning without thinking or true understanding, at least from an indigenous point of view. For example, in Maracle’s short story, “Bertha”, the drunken old factory woman is unable to offer solace to her drunken co-factory worker, a girl from the younger generation. Bertha feels miserable as she is able to comfort or offer stories of sustenance to the young girl who in her turn is scared by the alien words which emanate from Bertha’s tongue.

Maracle points out, “The difficulty for me has been mastering a language different from my own, without having my own. Most of us learned English from parents who spoke English in translation. Many of our parents had been to residential schooling and thus did  not speak the old language any better than the average five-year-old speaks English.”21 Maracle  is well-read in the history of her own people. According to her, Canada is still a disconnected condition of “diaspora and chronic invasion.” While Canada no longer touts herself as a peaceful and neutral nation, she has also been allying herself to and participating in the United State’s aggression.22 With the publication of I Am Woman in 1988, Maracle developed a social treatise on feminism from an indigenous perspective and also offered a theory for indigenous literatures arising from orature. Maracle was brought up in the context of a clan system in which the central means of acquiring knowledge was “story”, the business of story- creation was a collective endeavor. Through it discipline was learned [or not], instructions were never given, they were shown various ways of seeing things, doing things and consequences and the discovery of impact of their personal behavior was always the desired outcome. This has been one of the major influences in her life. As a gifted speaker and storyteller, she has also received attention from Orators in her community, some of the finest speakers, stories and thinkers among the Salish people.

Cherokee author Thomas King has also been a significant writer from Indigenous Canada and has often challenged stereotypical definitions on the Native Canadian. In fact, in the short story “Borders”, King highlights the redundancy of post-contact political borders for Aboriginal communities. Thomas King has also explained that his apathy towards the term post-colonial as a label for Native literature arises from the Euro-American tendency to assume that the evil of colonialism has been overcome through a convenient process of evolution. Moreover, the term suggests that Aboriginal history is pivoted upon a singular event, the coming of the European colonists in North America. King states his preference for describing Native literature in terms of the tribal, the interfusional, the polemical and the associational. Tribal is the term for literature of one tribal community in its own Native language. The interfusional is the blending of oral and written literature. The polemical highlights the clash of Native and non-Native cultures, and the associational is concerned with neither plot nor individual exploits but rather with contemporary community experiences.24 To cite another powerful example, one may also refer to Thomas King’s satirical short story entitled “A Short History of Indians in Canada”. The title of the story alludes to colonialist gestures within European historiography which has often relegated the history of ‘Indians’ to a footnote or at most, a derogatory paragraph. Located in Toronto, the story describes how two city employees, specifically sweepers, clean the streets of the city of any flying/ dropping Indians. They are only seen as a tourist attraction and sometimes, it is a pity that people traveled through Toronto and “didn’t even see an Ojibway.”25 The cleaners, Bill and Rudy, can identify the tribal affiliations of the bodies by looking at the feathers categorized in a book. They also know that Ojibways are more common in the area than Navajos. While King’s text King through his story ridicules stereotypes of the “Indian” found in the education system, and offers an alterNative history for the Indigenous community. provides humour as the source of hope in Pandora’s Box, but it also narrates a story of blindness, arrogance and willful forgetfulness on the part of the colonizer.

For Mohawk writer, Beth Brant, “telling the truth of ourselves [is] a novel idea to be sure and one that is essential to the nurturance of new voices in our communities.”26 The urgency of such truth telling is related to the intimate relationship shared by contemporary ethnocide and genocide, to socio-political struggles, and apprehensions about the nature of colonial impulses. In her short stories, Brant foregrounds her Mohawk identity. In her collection of short stories entitled Food and Spirits, Brant begins her narrative with “This is History” – a rendition of Mohawk creation story. The story includes the archetypal images of Indigenous creation story such as earth being formed from a turtle’s back through a collaboration of eagle, turtle and muskrat. Further, it also stresses upon the role of nature within creation and the healing power of women within Indigenous communities. Brant insists that story is in fact “history” and crucial for an understanding of Indigenous philosophy and way of life. “Swimming Upstream” is a motivational short story by Brant which focuses on the relation between the ability to partake lessons from nature for life. The protagonist regains her will to live after watching salmon swim upstream. Therefore,  the story is a tale of resistance and fortitude.

Indigenous authors have also reflected upon the appropriation of Indigenous customs and stories. For example, Blackfoot writer, Emma Lee Warrior in the short story “Compatriots” reflects upon the Sun Dance and the issue of appropriation. It tells the story of a German anthropology student on a field trip to a Blackfoot Reserve. The student who represents  a  stereotypical  researcher  is  oblivious  to  the  real,  lived  experiences  of  the Blackfoot community and is only concerned about “excavating” information which actually highlights a straitjacketed notion of the community.

Emma Lee Warrior, (Blackfoot) writes “Yet though the sounds I hear back home are more English than Blackfoot, I find the stories told more from a Blackfoot-language perspective, be they legends, customs, or accounts of everyday happenings – they have a rich combination of awe for the power of our natural surroundings, a laughing at absurdity, and the pain of oppression…I’ve been advised to “look to the future,” but my head keeps turning around to the wisdom back there, away from 7-Elevens and twenty-four hour video stores.” 27 The ability to creatively transform and transcribe these worlds into their writings has often been an abiding goal for indigenous writers. Yet the demarcation between the two worlds might prove to be a painful one. Moreover, the two worlds are often in a lopsided transaction, whereby the more powerful white culture would rather subsume the indigenous one and not choose to ‘listen.’

Aboriginal Canadian writing attempts to challenge the romantic myths, satirize the stereotypes, illustrate profound gestures of love, and through humor and grace lend some insight into a magnificent yet greatly misunderstood culture. The traumatic experience of being alienated from family and friends, from a culturally familiar way of life has had grievous effects in the lives of thousands of indigenous peoples since the dominant white and male society has persistently refused to be sensitive to indigenous cultures and customs. Emma LaRocque interrogates non-indigenous society’s inability to step into her moccasins, I have been flung across the ages – and I have been the one to take the train, to ride the tides, to learn English, to cross the chasms. But who will know my world, my mother, my Cree?

According to Paula Gunn Allen, Native society allows for many different personal styles. The “organization of individuals into wide-ranging fields of allowable styles,” she says, “creates the greatest possible social stability because it includes and encourages variety of personal expression for the good of the group.”29 This reflects “the Indian concept of a circular, dynamic universe in which all things are related and are of one family.”30 Therefore, in the process, the individual is not an isolated island of perfection or imperfection, but is given value or ‘significance’ as a person from the community. This means the aboriginal person is almost always rooted to the community, and therefore, receives sustenance, healing and power from the same. The strong sense of cultural community emanates from the writings of all of the authors in focus. Indigenous Canadian writers use story empowerment for not only themselves but also for their own people. The point is to reclaim the ‘significant self’ which is only possible by focusing on the feminine within aboriginal thought and philosophy.

Reference 

• Adams, Howard. Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native point of view, (Toronto: new press, 1975)
• Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986)
• Armstrong, Jeannette. “Aboriginal Literatures: A Distinctive Genre within Canadian Literature,” in Hidden in Plain Sight: Contributions of Aboriginal Peoples to Canadian Identity and Culture. Ed. David Newhouse, Cora Voyageur, and Dan Beavon. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, 180 – 186) – “The Disempowerment of First North American Native Peoples and Empowerment through their Writing.” An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. Ed. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998, 242-245).
• Bell, Betty Louise, “Beat the drum slowly” in Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Women’s Writings of North America, ed. Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997, 75-82)
• Brant, Beth. A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women. (Ithaca: Firebrand, 1988) -“The Good Red Road: Journeys of Homecoming in Native Women’s Writing.” New Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Ed. Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee and J.R. Tim Struthers. (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997, 175-187)-Writing As Witness: essay and talk (1994) (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1998)
• Brask, Per and William Morgan. Ed. Aboriginal Voices: Amerindian, Inuit and Sami Theatre, (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1992
• Dickason, Olive Patricia. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2002)
• Maracle, Lee. “Fork in the Road: A Story of Native Youth.” Fuse 11.6 (1988): 42
• – “Afterword”. ‘Telling It Book Collective’ in Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures, ed. Sky Lee et al(Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1990), 173-175
• – “Just Get In Front of a Typewriter and Bleed” in Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures, ed. Sky Lee et al(Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1990, 37-42)
• – “Oratory: Coming to Theory.” In Give Back: First Nations Perspectives on Cultural Practice, ed. Maria Campbell et all, (Vancouver: Gallerie Publications, 1992, 85-93)