Maria Campbell: Essays On Her Works

By Guernica

Born near Park Valley, Saskatchewan, on Crown land, often referred to by locals as a road allowance community, Maria Campbell is the oldest of 8 children. Much of her early years are revealed in Halfbreed, the book which would ultimately ensure that Campbell's life would take a path as a writer, an artist, a community worker and social rights advocate. Campbell has received four honorary doctorates, the Order of Canada, is a Trudeau Mentor, and has garnered numerous awards for her contribution to Métis and Aboriginal people's and women's rights in Canada, and for her efforts to preserve traditional knowledge, as well as promote the practice of indigenous knowledge. In addition to writing, Campbell has produced plays, film, television and radio shows, all dedicated to promoting Métis and Aboriginal culture. Contributors to this book include Melissa Lam, Michael Lahey, Helen Hoy, and Dylan A.T. Miner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781550716498

Book preview

ESSENTIAL WRITERS SERIES 36

Edited by Jolene Armstrong

GUERNICA

TORONTO – BUFFALO – BERKELEY – LANCASTER (U.K.)

2012

Maria Campbell 

essays on her works

∎ Contents

Introduction

Jolene Armstrong

One Small Medicine:

An Interview with Maria Campbell

Susan Gingell

Blunt Constructions: Métis Literature in Canada 35 Melissa Lam

Joseph you know him he don trus dah Anglais – Or: English

as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films

Kerstin Knopf, Universität Greifswald

What’s Been Missing: Fragile Resolutions in

Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell’s play Jessica

Michael Lahey

When You Admit You’re a Thief: Maria Campbell

and Linda Griffiths’ The Book of Jessica

Helen Hoy

Economies of Experience in The Book of Jessica

Laura J. Murray, Queen’s University

Halfbreed Theory: Maria Campbell’s Storytelling

as Indigenous Knowledge and Une Petite Michin

Dylan A.T. Miner

Biography

Jolene Armstrong

Bibliography

Jolene Armstrong

Contributors

∎ Introduction

Jolene Armstrong

When I first read Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed , I was a young university student hungry for radical literature; the writings of Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Nelson Mandela and others partially satisfied this craving. Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, bell hooks and Susan Brownmiller, to name but a few feminist authors, fed my desire for more. I didn’t possess any particular political allegiance or agenda beyond wanting to learn more about what was really going on in the world. I knew I was against injustice, for equality, but I needed to really understand what that meant – how injustice functioned, how a people became dispossessed, what radicals were saying could be done about it. Profound as many of these authors’ works are, none kicked me in the gut the way Campbell’s Halfbreed did. For months, I carried my careworn library copy of her autobiography, afraid to put it down in case I needed to read some part of it again, also fearing that I might forget some important detail if I didn’t have physical access to the book any more. I felt outraged that this book had not yet reached the level of recognition that other radical political and feminist writers had achieved. I adored the book’s cover photo of this intelligent, angry, beautiful woman. I felt protective of the story contained within that small book, not wanting it to fall into the wrong hands. It had awakened something in me.

Campbell is a feminist, an activist, a visionary, an artist, a mother, a grandmother, and an elder. And she is also local. Part of my connection to the book comes as a result of Campbell’s stories coming from so close to home – Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia – the hinterland to the world of political activism – not chic, not urban, not exotic. But that locality was what made Campbell’s book so urgent and important to me. This was not the story of some far-away urban woman, writing from the American East Coast, from California, or South Africa. This was a woman who came from the same part of the world as I did. Someone who has walked the same small Canadian city streets as I walked, breathed the same prairie air, listened to the same bird song, and weirdly, shared the same official national history as me. This locality mattered to me. This was accessible, and it mattered to me that the world should know this story; that the world should consider, study, rectify these pointless injustices. Although hailing from different ethnicities, I could identify the overt and covert racism Campbell experienced that in my own family’s experience as a minority culture was found to boil under the surface of polite Canadian citizenry, but was never mentioned in school lessons or pamphlets promoting multiculturalism. I realized that the often unacknowledged problems Cana-dians face here at home, on the prairies, outside of major American urban centres were important – just as important as the issues that are faced by people in Jamaica, the barrios of Los Angeles, the slums of Detroit, the (then) apartheid of Johannesburg. These sorts of problems, injustices, discriminations were being witnessed, tolerated and enacted by my neighbours, my fellow citizenry. Campbell’s book made my own observations legitimate. I felt sick. This was a profound awakening for an eighteen-year-old girl.

As an adult scholar, I can say honestly that Campbell’s writing continues to move the spirit of those who have long since lost their social and political naïveté. The story that Campbell tells in Halfbreed is not merely an autobiography. It is an important history – a counter-narrative to the official histories of the Métis people in Canada, generally written by non-Métis people. It is a powerful account of the way in which history has managed to silence certain groups of individuals, rewrite itself to exclude, marginalize those who were already made marginal, excluded, and often poor as a result of the forces of history, colonialism and racism. Halfbreed is an important literary work for its candid writing style, for its refusal to mince words, for its rich and vivid detail of Métis life in the 20th century, for its confrontation with state sanctioned forces of racism and discrimination. It is also an important work in the oeuvre of Campbell’s own body of writing, for it sets tone, defines a style and method of speaking out against official histories of suppression, oppression and exclusion, themes and issues that Campbell will ultimately dedicate her writing and activist career to.

The risk that Campbell took in writing this book – indeed in beginning her journey as a writer, teacher and artist with this book – is worthy of pause and reflection. Campbell exposes all of the details of her life to that point – her childhood, her adulthood, her joy, her pain, her experience with drug addiction and prostitution – at great risk to her own family life and to her own person. She doesn’t apologize for these experiences, nor does she make excuses. She shows readers how people find themselves in dangerous, often deadly situations as a process of marginalization and discrimination, as a result of processes designed by institutions that are meant to protect, as a result of institutionalized racism.

Campbell gives readers this story in an act of incredible self-less generosity in order to put an end to these horrors. Halfbreed clears the way for healing to begin to take place through learning, through affirmation of identity and through the work that Campbell will continue to offer. At a time when indigenous women continue to experience sexual exploitation, Campbell’s work is even more important than ever. Halfbreed speaks on behalf of these women, Jessica traces the descent and ascent of a sexually exploited woman, and Campbell’s other literary works offer readers a grounding in traditional knowledge, lessons in Métis history and culture which effectively offer tools for resisting and countering such abuse and exploitation, and ultimately healing.

This collection seeks to bring together scholars who in their own experiences as teachers, writers, and scholars have also encountered and been profoundly affected by Campbell’s powerful writing. Dylan Miner in his essay "Halfbreed Theory: Maria Campbell’s storytelling as indigenous knowledge and une petite Michin identifies in Campbell’s work a Halfbreed Theory," a way of structuring indigenous knowledge in opposition to hegemonic structures of knowledge gathering and knowledge legitimization. Miner’s essay investigates the anti-colonial qualities of Campbell’s work and argues for recognition of both oral and written knowledge forms as being equally important to Aboriginal epistemologies. His essay uses a Bahktinian framework to read Campbell’s work as dialogical; Miner’s approach integrates this theory with Aboriginal schema so that indigenous knowledge bases and ways of knowing are privileged. The dialogical approach that Miner uses draws out the way in which Campbell’s autobiography engages in conversations with other texts such as history, law and systemic racism. Most importantly, Miner demonstrates how Campbell’s text re-inscribes Métis history and experience as a site of resistance against European oppression and presumed superiority. For Miner, Halfbreed becomes an important act of decolonization.

Melissa Lam in her essay entitled Blunt Constructions: Métis Literature in Canada situates Campbell’s use of autobiography in a larger tradition in which women’s autobiographies are used as devices to respond to and even counter repressive histories. According to Lam, this genre of writing enables a collective and personal reconstruction of identity that counteracts the destructive stereotypes imposed by the larger hegemonic society on Métis and First Nations people. Lam draws upon both Spivak and Bhabha to demonstrate the way in which subaltern women have effectively used the autobiographical genre to speak against colonial discourses of oppression.

Michael Lahey’s essay, "‘What’s Been Missing’: Fragile Resolutions in Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell’s play Jessica," examines the psychosexual ramifications of the play The Book of Jessica. He offers a close reading of the play text and offers insight into the transformation of the woman, as she struggles with various demons, real, imagined, and mythological in order to transcend the forces of abuse, oppression and racism that exploit her.

Helen Hoy’s essay, "‘When you Admit That You Are a Thief, Then You Can Be Honourable’: Native/Non-Native Collaboration in The Book of Jessica," originally published in 1993, addresses not only the issue of authorship of the troubled publication of The Book of Jessica, but also more importantly the continuing practice of textual violence that is enacted upon native texts. Drawing upon Spivak, Hoy points to the continued practice of epistemic violence of imperialism. In her complicated essay, Hoy struggles with her own relationship vis-à-vis Campbell’s work as she realizes through an assessment of Griffiths’ own intellectual colonialism that she is adding another layer of imperial discourse to an already colonized area of study. Overall, Hoy argues that The Book of Jessica reproduces the inequitable power of the original collaboration. Hoy’s article deconstructs the collaborative process that Campbell and Griffiths’ experience as they create the play Jessica. Through this deconstruction, Hoy demonstrates the way in which colonial assumptions and imperialist power overwrote the relationship between Campbell and Griffiths.

Laura J. Murray, in her essay entitled "Economies of Experience in The Book of Jessica," originally published in 1999, approaches The Book of Jessica by interrogating the creative relationship amongst Campbell, Griffiths and director Paul Thompson. By deconstructing Griffiths’ editing of the process of creating the play Jessica, Murray seeks not only to reinstate the role of Thompson in the creative process, but also to disentangle the various contributions of the three artists. Murray reads Griffiths’ process as a fable of rapport. Murray focuses on the importance of names, and naming as a key to understanding and disentangling the play and the book which describes the process of the play’s creation. Additionally, Murray examines the importance and centrality of the continued tradition of trade to that process. However, Murray points to the complicated, perhaps even convoluted nature of this trade in which Griffiths appears to be giving and taking the story of Jessica, which is in effect Campbell’s story. Nevertheless, Murray concludes that the exchanges that took place amongst the creators of the play necessarily slid from being exchanges, fair trade into stealing, and that the pattern from which this evolved was always pre-determined as a consequence of history – the original exchanges of furs, women, and land in nineteenth century western Canada.

Kerstin Knopf’s essay, ‘Joseph you know him he don trus dah Anglais’ – Or: English as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films, examines the anti-colonial strategies employed in the film version of the Story of the Road Allowance People. In this essay, Knopf focuses on the way in which language is employed as a decolonizing strategy and way of reclaiming self-identity and the way in which outsiders then recognize and identify the cultural group in question. Knopf sees these strategies as ways in which filmmakers are able to resist and counter stereotypes, as well as overturn continued practices of misrepresentation and oppression of cultural groups such as the Métis and Indigenous groups in mainstream film. Knopf examines film strategies that seek to effect a different kind of portrayal of Indigenous peoples according to Indigenous values and tradition, including the incorporation of oral storytelling techniques as cinematic technique.

∎ One Small Medicine:

An Interview with Maria Campbell

Susan Gingell

Susan Gingell interviewed Maria Campbell, principally about Stories of the Road Allowance People , on 10 September 2003 at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Both subsequently participated in augmenting and editing their respective parts of the interview.

SUSAN: Maria, what made you decide to try to put the Road Allowance people’s stories on paper?

MARIA: Well, there were many reasons, but the one that comes to mind is my father telling me a story and my daughter walking in and wanting to know what was so funny. I remember thinking after I’d translated for her that my children would never hear these stories. I think that was the first time I thought I should be translating and publishing stories. But there is always so much to do, and so I put it off until a few years later when the elders I was working with suggested – well, not all of them, because some of them were really against translating, much less publishing; however, two of them believed that working on translating stories would help me to better understand my own language. I was working on something else at the time and finding it very difficult to articulate Cree concepts in English. Peter, one of the elders, said the reason I was having problems was because the English language was the boss of me, and if I understood my own language and was comfortable in it then English would not be such a problem. He also said something else I’ve never forgotten, and that was the English language lost its mother a long time ago, and if you’re going to work with it then you have to put the mother back. He said that was not possible if I wasn’t grounded in my own place and understood that my language