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| Lee Maracle (Source:Wikipedia) |
As
a young Indigenous girl growing up in the Northern British Columbia, she
witnessed, experienced, and endured the systemic as well as individual racial
discrimination and atrocities. These experiences, she says in an interview with
Margery Fee in 2004, transformed her into a different person who made a
determination to change how Natives are treated and perceived. Though she was
one of the lucky girls of her generation for not having to attend the
Residential Schools, her experience of the normal state schools was not
pleasant. The indigenous students were not treated equally in the school
because they were ‘Indians’. These experiences were some of the early
influences in her life that inspired her to enter the world of words: “Whatever
comes from writing comes from those first nine years” (Maracle, From
Discomfort to Enlightenment: An Interview with Lee Maracle). In the same interview she mentions that she
wanted to write when she was five when she first endured racial discrimination
but she “had no power then” (Maracle) but now she has, which is called “a pen”
(Maracle).
The
period before 1968 when the human rights legislation was promulgated, the life
of Indigenous people was terrible. Maracle recalls how she spent countless days
without food. Her mother had a craft business, but companies encouraged people
not to buy Indian goods. People were discouraged from buying fish from Indians.
Fishing itself was outlawed later. Those difficult days taught her how to live
a life amidst adversity. She started writing from her early age and her parents
greatly encouraged that precocity, and her early writings are greatly informed
with stories of her Wolf clan and my thmaking.
The
systemic racism (state endorsed racism in many forms) compelled Maracle’s
family to leave their village and move to Lynn Valley where she got access to a
library for the first time because her own community did not have one. In the
same interview with Margery Fee, she says that government in those days did not
give money to build libraries in the native communities. The native children
were indoctrinated than taught. The government, she contends, had a plan
to “eliminate Indigenous people culturally and intellectually in every possible
ways” (“Maracle). At one point, Maracle became so frustrated with the things
she was being taught, she dropped out of the school and go to California. Those
pre-1968 days in her community had become claustrophobic for her and the
California days provided her with a vantage point from which she could analyse
her community and ponder over the condition of Natives in Canada.
After
returning from California, she studied at Simon Fraser University, British
Columbia. Those university days became formative years in her life as a writer
and she became one of the first Indigenous writers to publish the work from
publication house. She published her autobiography Bobbie Lee- Indian Rebel (1975) at the age of 26 which became one
of the Native texts to get published in Canada. She has published numerous
books of different genre among which Ravensong:
A Novel (1993), Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures (1990), Sundogs:
A Novel (1992), Daughters are Forever (2002) and so on. For her
contributions as a writer, an academician and a social critic, she has been
honored with different awards. She was awarded with an honorary doctorate
degree by St. Thomas University in 2009. She received J.T Steward Voices of
Change Award in 2000 for her contribution in the First Nations communities. She
won American Book Award in 2000.
Through
her publications and the lectures, she delivered in different universities and
institutions, she has criticized the entire education system which was
Eurocentric and insensitive to the Indigenous issues. She is one of the ardent
critics of the knowledge system (which she calls western knowledge system), and
of (mis) representation of native issues in the mainstream writing and the
institutions. In an interview she says: “most of our knowledge was expropriated
and distorted, bowdlerized, and sold back to us in transformed form […] and we
had to purchase our own knowledge” (Maracle). She is equally critical of the
ways native literature and art is analysed in the academia and even outside the
institutions. She sees a need of a separate and unique indigenous literary
criticism to study and analyze the native literature and culture because the
mainstream literary criticism, which she claims, is Eurocentric and also lacks the
tools to make a neutral appreciation of the native texts. She believes that a
separate theory needs to be developed that emerges from Indigenous culture’s
own literary paradigm which other critical theories have not been able to
provide (Maracle, An Interview with Lee
Maracle).
Maracle
is equally critical of western mainstream feminist movements and feminist
literary criticism which, she claims, is very limited in scope. Mainstream
Feminist theories look at the marginalized position of women in the literary
texts and this is suitable to study the Western literature and culture. Women
in Indigenous communities had decisive role and the community, and the western
dichotomy of masculinity-femininity is not valid there. Thus, she sees a need
of Indigenous Literary Criticism which can provide an appropriate lens to look
at Indigenous texts and culture not only in North American but in other
indigenous communities as well.
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