CHAPTER I

HALFBREED :

THE QUE&T FOR CULTUDAL DOOT^>

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Chapter I

Halfbreedi The Quest for Cultural Roots

Campbell's angry autobiography, Halfbreed, recounts her life as a prairie

Metis child, near Prince Albert National Park at northern Saskatchewan. Her

strong family and community were once dominated by the Roman Catholic

Church. Her community was crippled by poverty, racism, alcohol, and vio­

lence. Before attaining political consciousness, she was leading a life of drug

addiction and prostitution. The Native spiritual traditions and healing power of

her Native ancestors transformed her life. Maria, the protagonist of the novel

primarily opposes the patriarchal, White and Eurocentric nature of Canadian

society, which determines itself to be dominant. Campbell makes her inten­

tion clear in the very beginning. She addresses this narrative to White Euro-

Canadian readership : "I write this for all of you, to tell you what it is like to be

a Half-breed woman in our country. I want to tell you about the joys and sor­

rows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and dreams". (2)

Her literary quest for a feminist self identity motivates an exploration

of the Native woman's legitimate history. The first part offers anecdotes

about local people and places. Campbell narrates her childhood, history, and

the folklore of the Metis in a discrete chronological pattern. Campbell's

Halfbreed becomes a model for other Native women as a justification for her

own life story being presented to the world. She exhibits extreme sensitivity to

the cruel discrimination based both on race and sex. As Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak and Barbara Smith observed, lives of women, particularly Native Indi-

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ans and Blacks, are in a 'double-bind' in most cultures. Maria, in her quest for

identity, undergoes a double dispossession in Native Canadian society. Maria's

predicament is that she is a racially abused Native woman. The text also

weaves itself around the world of Maria's grandmother Cheechum and even­

tually becomes a communal text designed to create racial identity.

Campbell's recreation of her own history and heritage is a problematization of

master narrative forms. It brings forth an entirely different form of identity for

Campbell.

The words "halfbreed" and "half-people" ironically suggests the '"half

status" of marginalized in multicultural Canadian society. The figure of the

Metis women is made to contain the racial ideology of mixed-blood

(Ojibway / French, Cree/Scottish). In Campbell, the Metis figure as the "dream

tropes of postcolonial discourse" (Emberley 158). They are torn asunder from

both paternal and maternal origin. They are also known as "Road Allowance

People", people who become squatters on their lands and are driven out by

the new owners to live on the sides of roads. Kate Vangen reads Half-breed

as a reclaiming of a third cultural worlds of the Indian' or the 'White':

Historically, the term 'half-breed has been used (rather sloppily) to

refer to almost any kind of racial mixture. In other contexts, the term

'half- breed' typically suggests those between two worlds.

The "economic middlemen , intercultural brokers, and interpreters

... To the non-Native, then, the person who is said to be caught

'between two worlds' is illegitimate to both. To the Native people, on

the other hand, to people like Campbell's Cree relatives half-breeds

are simply allowed half-status" (qtd. in Emberly 158).

Due to their half-caste background, racial interbreeding and cultural

degeneration, Metis women have been ill-treated and seen as objects of sexual

release for White men. Beaver has described Metis women as capricious and

mischievous designers. Only very few critics have noted the deep sense of

humour of the halfbreeds. Unlike the other mixed-blood people of various

countries, the Metis and the Indians are very humorous and frivolous fun-

lovers. Campbell gives a broad sketch of the Metis in Halfbreed. She also

writes how her people came to be as they are, by explaining their poverty,

ancestry, historical rebellion and the fight for equality. Metis is an important

minority group of Canada. The Metis of Alberta and the Indians of Canada

have their identity legislated. According to the Alberta Metis Population

Betterment Act of 1937, a half-breed is a person who has 1/4 Indian blood.

The Indians have their identity defined by a Federal piece of legislation, The

Indian Act says that historically, the Metis were the product of marriages

between Indians and Whites in this country. They have developed their

own lifestyle and culture. According to A.S.Lussier:

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Adapting from their two cultural ancestors, the Indians and Euro­

peans, the Metis, with the help of their Indian savvy and White tech­

nology, became a dominant force in the opening of the Canadian

West. Their roles as traders, freighters, merchants, politicians, cart

drivers, and translators have been documented in the many histori­

cal and sociological writings that now stand on the shelves of

many libraries. But now that reputation has passed them by be­

cause of their role in the two Western Canadian insurrections of

1870 and 1885(1).

The main reason why the Metis renounce their identity is their integra­

tion or assimilation with the French Canadians. Metis people are unique in

that they choose to identify with the dominant mainstream culture in any pos­

sible way Lussier continues: "A renowned Canadian historian once has asked

me, 'When is a Metis no longer a Metis?' I have answered, 'When he/she no

longer considers himself/herself as such'" (4).

Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April

Raintreetake up this problem of Metis identity, the problem which was statisti­

cally analyzed by Lussier. Self-articulation or self-definition of a Metis seems

to be more important than any other issue for the Metis problem. The degrading

thing for Native people in Canada was to refer to the blood of Riel. "Riel was 1/

8 Indian blood" (Lussier 2). Language also plays a significant role to determine

the group with which identification is to be made. Contemporarily some French

Metis will not recognise a Cree-speaking Metis because he/she speaks an Indian

language. Lussier points out that the Cree-Metis looks upon the French-

Metis as a French-Canadian. This division should not exist within the Metis

group- Maria Campbell's frequent use of Cree sentences in Halfbreed is the best

example to show how language determines the Metis identity. As Lussier said

language, religion, blood line, etc. could all have a bearing on whether or not

that person is acceptable" (2).

Campbell also writes how her people came to be as they are by

explaining their poverty, ancestry, historical rebellion and the fight for equality.

The autobiographical fiction Half-breed devotes much of its concentration on

the general life of the Half-breed people. It brings out the derogatory stereotypes

and its associated meaning in the dominant discourse. Delineating the history

of the Metis, Campbell at the other side demonstrates that they are a unique group,

distinct from White Canadians, -« and "Completely different from" their "Indian

relatives" (25). "Half-breeds are" Quick-tempered - quick to fight, but quick to

forgive and forget" (25). "Treaty Indian women don't express their opinions,

Half-breed women do" (26). " Half-breeds are very superstitious people . They

believe in ghosts , spirits and any other kind of spook" (35). Falf-breeds are

"noisy" boisterous, and gay" (111), and they love weddings"(120)." No one can

play the fiddle and guitar like a Half- breed. They can make these

instruments come alive - laugh , cry and shout " (115) . At funerals, Half-

breeds grieve, "but in a different way. The women (cry), but they (accept) death

meeting it with great strength " and keeping "their grief inside as they (do) with

so many other things"(67). Campbell through Stan Daniels (a half breed from St.

Paul, Alberta) asserts that her "people have always been very political" (72), she

says:

He could sit down at his table with authority, wife and children

around him, and the room full of noisy, shouting people. He would

eat up food as if there would be none tomorrow, slurping up coffee,

belching,, children climbing all over him, shrieking and laughing.

The whole room would revolve around him and there would always

be lots of music (69).

Thus, Campbell brings out the political awareness of Native people through

Stan Daniels in this passage. Though she refers to many other Metis activists

such as, Jim Brady, Malcolm Norris, Jack Bellerole, Eugene,-Steinhauer, Harold

Cardinal (182), She gives importance only to Stan Daniels whose reference is made

even at the introduction "Thank you Stan Daniels for making me angry enough

to write it" (i). The act of becoming angry is the basic characteristic of any

doubly marginalized people's artistic creation Writers such as Elizabeth

Cook-Lynn [crow-creek sioux] and Carter Revard (osage) express their angry

nature in ar£ form. Halfbreed does not conclude with the inscription of a new

totality of identity. In an attempt to save her from utter loss at self, Maria began

to understand the pain and horrible experiences of other Native women who

endured so much ugliness. She joins the Alcoholics Anonymous and meet other

Metis and got involved in the Native Movement. The final paragraph of the novel

reveals how the writer finally reaches the deeper levels of spiritual awakening

and healing faith: The ending of the text brings a note of optimism and

solidarity to the Native people. Campbell says : "Loneliness and pain are over for

me. Cheechum said," You will find yourself , and You'll find brothers and

sisters ". I have brothers and sisters. I no longer need my blanket to survive"

(184).

By dismantling the cultural, racial and sexual boundaries Maria in­

scribes in the above passage a demassification of the problematic of 'differ­

ence', which would imply an apparent de -dramatization of the ' fight to

death' between rival groups and thus between the sexes (Emberley 163).

The ending of Halfbreed is highly remarkable in the sense that the text

authenticates the power of the Native culture with the sound words and the end

has been designed to create a sense of Native communal solidarity. The text

at the end brims with a note of self-confidence and self-consciousness. Talking

about the contrary nature of men and women autobiographies, Jelinek

observes :

The proclivity of men toward embellishing their autobiogra­

phies results in the projection of a self-image of confidence, no

matter what difficulties the may have encountered. This is con-

trary to the self-image projected in women's; autobiographies what

their life string reveal is a self-consciousness and a need to sift

through their lives for explanation and understanding. The

autobiographical intention is often powered by motive to convene

readily of their self-worth, to clarify, to affirm, and to authen­

ticate heir sel f - image. Thus, the idealization or aggran­

dizement found in male autobiographies is not typical of the

female mode (15).

The passage strongly supports the Native autobiography of the women

writers a total new vision to re - read them with a different connotation.

Some of the Native literary qualities found in the Half-breed are the very

brief retelling of the history (19th and 20th centuries ) of Metis people, the anec­

dote - based humour , the ironical description of White's discourses , the

understatement and the apparent mixture of Cree oral tradition. Challenging

Eurocentric rules of genre, a sense of connectedness to all things, of personallife

flow infeequential episodes relating to theme alone, subverting hegemony of the

White discourse (for example, local story, our area etc ) , disregard for

chronology , and emphasizing commonality instead of difference. Campbell

destablizes White readers' preconceptions about the Native Other. Decolonization

also operates in the text. Campbell interrupts the linear history to create a new

history- making for the Natives.

Campbell's retelling of Native history in a revolutionary vein is a reread­

ing of the hegemonic writing of the Metis history. Campbell in the first chapter of

her autobiography records very brief Metis history and struggles and family

history in an encapsulated form . Red River Rebellion of 1869 and the

consequent escape of Louis Riel to the United States in 1870 after establishing a

provisional government at Fort Garm, Manitoba and the Battle of Duck Lake are

the important events described in this chapter. The Halfbreeds after losing their

leaders and lands fled to the areas south of Prince Albert, and established the self

elements of Kuck Lake, Batoche, St. Louis and St. Laurent. People lived

happily under the presidentship of Gabriel Dumont of Prince Albert in

Saskatchewan. But the White settlement and the railroad threatened the Metis

/ and encroached on the lands. The Metis leader sent many petitions and

resolutions to the Canadian Government. But it was ignored case of Ontario

and Manitaba. Finally, in 1884, Dumont and three of his councillors rode

to Montana to be Louis Riel who was living in exile. Though Riel represented

the matter, there was no reply. Dumont believed in an armed rebellion and

gathered a party of armed Halfbreeds and Indians. They approached the Fort

and the North West Mounted Police's (N W M P) officer Crozier for the

settlement. However, on seeing Dumont's party, Crozier decided, very

foolishly, to take his inexperienced fledglings troops out against Dumont's

skilled sharp shooters. This war the Battle of Duck Lake and it was a victory

for the Halfbreeds. It has also been considered as the beginning of the Riel

Rebellion. This move resulted in a solidarity among the people Campbell

herself describes :

The majority of White settlers didn't want violence and

withdrew their support after Duck Lake, but the treaty

Indians , who were starving because of Ottawa's broken

promises,supported Dumont and Riel. Poundmaker and Big

Bear,chiefs renowned as warriors and respected throughout

the Territories , brought their warriors to join forces with the

Half-breeds (5).

After the Battle of Duck Lake, the grievances were examined and solved

the matter to make split among the Halfbreeds. Secretly, the eastern troops

under General Middleton were being sent to Saskatchewan. Eight thousand troops

'five hundred NWMP and White volunteers arrived to stop Riel, Dumont and one

hundred and fifty Half breeds (6). Campbell very sadly laments that the history

books say that the Halfbreeds were defeated at Batoche in 184 and Campbell

goes on giving the following particular about the Metis' struggle for existence :

Louis Riel was hanged in November of 1885.

Charge: high treason.

Gabriel Dumont and a handful of men escaped

To Montana.

Poundmaker and Big Bear surrendered, were

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Charged with treason, and sentenced to jail for three years.

The other Halfbreeds escaped to the empty pockets of North

Saskatchewan.

The total cost to the federal government to

stop the Rebellion was $5,000,000 (6).

The loss of the Metis leader Louis Riel caused a great damage to the psyche

of the Metis people. After this incident, the people fled to spring River which is

fifty miles north- west of Prince Albert. Campbell refers to some of the names of

the Metis, such as, Chartrand, Isbister, Campbell, Arcand and Vandal (7) who

arrived here . The Metis choose this place, spring River because of its lakes,

rocky hills and dense bush. This kind of geographical region would help them for

hunting and trapping. The threat for this land also came in 1920's with the home-

steading and immigrants. The Metis paid the amount which was ten dollar for

a quarter section. The saddest part of Metis homesteading was that the home­

steads were reclaimed by the authorities and offered to the immigrants. One by

one they drifted back to the road lines and crown lands where ihey built

cabins and bams. Campbell says that this led to address the Metis as "Road

Allowance (Crown land on either side of road lines and roads) People" (8).

Half-breed is a literary hybridization of oral and written modes of

discourses.There is also a nexus between ethnography and autobiography, a rare

mixture of a Native person. The text is an explication of the blurring of Native

fiction and the Europe - American rules of genres such as autobiography and

fiction . In addition to rewriting the Europe-American belief of "blood" as the

determinant of superior race , Campbell also inverses the European genre of

a autobiography. She does not begin her fiction as the European wi ;ters do in their

autobiographical mode. The Post- Enlightenment model and a European

concept of self-narration are invested in Maria Campbell's autobiography

The European autobiographical model according to Brumble :

Wil l , generally, lead the reader from the protagonist's formative

years of childhood and youth, through adult- hood, and into old

age. At some point there will be a climatic turning point in the light

of which all subsequent actions can be explained (15).

The above form is distorted in Half-breed. There is a distortion between

the source and the inal product and between the "objectivity" or "accuracy "

and the printed coherence - of narrativity. The opening chapter of Half-breed

describes briefly the history of Metis people and the leader Louis Riel. Chapter II

talks about her childhood games before recording her own birth at the beginning

of chapter Three-Campbell also moves metonymically from a mention of her

mother's books - by "Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and Long-fellow" - to

a description of the "Roman Empire" game , which involved play acting Caesar,

Mark Antony and Cleopatra (14). Campbell here undertakes a double

opposition of disregarding chronology and inversing the sequential narration

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of European autobiography. This is the best example to show how writers like

Campbell try to bring out her own literary talents using the European genre and

language.

Campbell challenges Eurocentric standards in the rules of genres. Origi­

nally, the form of Native women's autobiography is hybrid drawing on traditions of

Native orature and on the written tradition of Euro-American autobiography . As

Bataillle and Sands note , autobiography of a Native person shares with oral

forms some basic characteristics : emphasis on event, attention to the sacred-

ness of language , concern with landscape, affirmation of cultural values and tribal

solidarity values and tribal solidarity (3). The genre has been syncretized as their

culture itself, as most of Indian women's autobiography convey a sense of "the

connectedness of all things, of personal life flow and in/sequential episodes with

a relation to main theme . Campbell in this text redefines "Half-breed" in the

process of rediscovering her real self.

Campbell creates a Native history in the process of writing her own story .

As a bio- mythography, Campbell finds her story in the myth of her Metis race. In

a positivist terms , Campbell identifies a new meaning to "Half-breed" by

deconstructing the racist stereotypes. Throughout the book, Campbell tries to blur

the mainstream concepts of Metis as derogatory stereotypes. Campbell says

that her family members "were a real mixture of Scottish, French, Cree, English

and Irish . We spoke a language completely different from the others. We were

a combination of everything : "hunters, trappers, and ak-ee-top farmers". (23-24).

In The Book of Jessica, Campbell says:

My people have walked behind other cultures picking up things

their parents discarded forgenerations : moral traditions, sacred

things,songs, prayers, everything ... a way of tying ascarf, a jig

step. When you look at what we have as mixed-blood people you

see all these things woven into something that became a new

nation (86).

The act of looking her people with a new vision of nation-making for Metis

characterize a cartographic creation of history. For this purpose, Campbell also

uses the form of autobiography to subvert the master narrative of White

imperialist history . She uses at the beginning, conciseness as a form of

understatement to recount critical events for the Metis in the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. Campbell demonstrates the impact of colonization

and racism on her people. She explodes the image of lazy, dirty Half-breeds

promulgated by White sources (3-9). As Lundgren says :

Campbell modestly undercuts this exposition by saying, "But I am

ahead of myself" (9), as though this causal analysis had been a

mere digression, an error in chronology. It is precisely this sort of

interruption of linear history which makes Half-breed an act of

decolonization" (72).

In this context, Barbara Godard's views are more important. She says :

Narrative is a way of exploring history and questioning the

historical narratives of the colonizer which have violently

interposed themselves in place of the history of the colonized.

Experimentation, especially with structures of chronology , is

part of this challenge, a radical questioning of historiographical

versions of the past as developed in the "master narratives ",

in order to rewrite the historical ending (180).

Native life /self-writing assumes a new mode of discourse by disrupting

the conventions. Along-with the creation of Native history in the method of Foucault's

archaeological retracing of the vertical structure, the linearity of mainstream his­

tory is challenged. In addition to this issue, the land issue is richly discussed in

Half - breed. Campbell is of the view that the land is the people and the people are

the land.

Unlike the postmodern parody , Native parody and humour are event

-based or anecdote- based. They primarily imitate the White culture and subvert

them. The intratextual stories in Half -breed evoke parodic subversions to main­

stream cultural differences between Native and White, or Indian and Metis .

Humour needs to be subversive a s well as empowering. In contrast to the

German and Swedish immigrants, the Half-breeds 'laughed', 'cried', 'danced', and

'fought and shared everthing' (27). Kate Vangen suggests that it is Campbell's use

of humour that retrieves Half-breed as an exemplary text which surpassed

the discursive antagonies of biculturalism . The following story from Half-breed

is an additional example, to those Vangen calls attention of 'making faces'. The

story goes as the following :

When I was still quite young, a priest came to hold masses in

the various homes. How I despised that man ! He was about

forty-five, very fat and greedy. He always arrived when it was

mealtime and we all had to wait and let him eat first ... my

brother Robbie and I decided one day to punish him. We took

Daddy's rabit wire and strung it across two small green trees

on either side of the footpath. The wire was tight as a

fiddle string ... It was almost dusk. Soon the Father came

striding down the path, tripped on the first wire and fell to

the ground moaning. He scrambled up, only to hit the second

wire and crash head first to ground again. There was silence

for a few seconds and then he started to curse ... Years later,

Daddy told us that Mom has prayed for a week afterwards be­

cause she had laughed so much. The Father never dropped by

again to eat our Sunday dinners and we left the strawberry

patch to God (Campbell, HB 29-30).

Similar to this story one may find the stories of 'Hightuned Polly' and

'Uncle Tommy Hawks' in Jeannette Armstrong's Slash. Talking about the

mimicry of White culture ( by the Native ) through the display of hybridity, Homi

Bhabha writes: "The display of hybridity, its peculiar "replication" terrorizes author­

ity with the rule of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery'(Qtd in Emberley 161).

The stories that make faces 'at the dominant culture, that mock the repre­

sentations of the Indian or Metis as 'lazy', passive, drunker" etc, become in

Bhabha's words, 'not metaphorical substitutions' but 'metonymies of presence'.

The aim of colonial violence Fanon writes, is rather a continued agony than a

total disappearance of the culture ( as qtd in Bhabha ). Bhabha's notion of

hybridity permits the possibility of reading textual agonism as a mode of

resistance to the unifying pressures of colonial subject effacenent and

constitution ( qtd in Emberly 161).

Layering of stories - within- stories is a Native mode to mock at the White

cultural experiences. Campbell uses a lot of experiential stories of beet fields ,

barnyards, community rituals, hunting, trapping and songssinging to bring out

the Native life's beauty and peace which has not been contaminated by the White

technology. Much of Campbell's humour takes the form of anecdotes . When

the Metis parents were all called to the school for inoculations, she recalls : "Alex

Vandal, the village joker, was at his best that day. He told Daddy that he was going

tc act retarded because the Whites thought we were any way. (Campbell, HB 35).

As Grant says that the joke here is not Alex Vandal's antics but the fact the

teacher took him seriously, thereby hugely entertaining the assembled Metis. Humour

in this book does much more than just entertain. Kate Vangen points out:

Indigenous peoples have undoubtedly been using Humour for cen­

turies to "make faces" at their colonizers without the 'atter being

able to retaliate; however, Native humour has escaped most histori­

cal and literary accounts because the recorder did not perceive the

gesture as humourous or because he did not appreciate the humour

(88).

Campbell's use of the humour and irony are very effective in pointing out to

the readers both the White and the Native that indeed, Maria is right.

Counter discourses have been created at many levels especially in main­

taining the nuances of the Native language like Cree. One may find the mixture of

Cree in this text while bringing out the "accuracy " of Campbell's life experiences.

Campbell valorizes the cultural identity of Half-breed and challenges the Euro-Ameri­

can belief that "blood" is the determinant of characters and experience. If offers a

challenge to racist discourse more radical than a mere inversion of terms would

have been. As Jodi Lundgren points out : "Discourses of race divide people by

suggesting that their differences are genetically entrenched. Cultural syncretism,

conversely emphasizes hybridity and the Metis identity has always been syncretic"

(67). ^ U H ^ ^ |372>

The hybridization of Native and graphic modes assumes a tactic to parody

the master discourses. The use of the first person Narrative is yet another tactic. As

Belsey says : "The form of narration has traditionally worked to "suppress the role of

language in the construction of the subject, and its own role in the interpellation of

the subject, and to present the individual as a free, unified, autonomous subjectivity"

(192).

Closely related to oral tradition is the power of the word and the ways of the

Native medicine. Halfbreed describes the various medicine ways along with hunt­

ing and trapping. The power of the word may also refer to the advice given by the

elders, ancestors and grand people to the younger Natives McGrath and Petrone

also portray :

Central to the oral tradition was the power of the word, whether

spoken, chanted or sung. It carried the power to make things

happen: medicine to heal, plants to grow, animals to be caught,

and human beings to enter the spiritual realms. Through this sa­

cred power, the Indians and Inuit sought to shape and control the

cosmic forces that governed their lives (309).

Maria's- Cheechum, hunted and trapped planted a garden (ii) and Maria's

Daddy and his brothers' trapped, hunted and sold game and home made whisky to

the White farmers in the nearby settlements'(12). ' Daddy used to hunt a lot when

he was home'(59). Maria agrees that her Daddy 'taught me to set traps, shoot a rifle

... Mom did her best to turn me into a lady, showing me how to cook, sew and knit,

while Cheechum, my best friend and confidante, tried to teach me all she knew

about living (16). Campbell dedicates Halfbreed, "to my Cheechum's children". As

Godard says "At ninety-six , Cheechum is Maria's haven , alternately professor of

Metaphysics and instructor in housekeeping" (Godard 1987 : 152) Maria also refers

to a Cree medicine man, he was 'Ha - shoo' meaning crow. 'Ha shoo loved to chant

and play the drum' (28) .Maria's Mom also was a ' terrible hunter' (61).

Native people's knowledge of medicinal ways and the related herbs to cure

the diseases are closely associated with the oral tradition. In Canada, Montreal

Lake is known for Native's practice of medicine. Maria refers to it as follows :

There was one thing that was special about Montreal lake and that

was the medicine. I had often heard the old people talk about

Montreal Lake and the strength of the people there... Many

Native people practised medicine but Montreal Lake was re­

nowned for its bad medicine ... They used it on each other some­

times, after fights and they could catch any man or woman they

wanted with special love spells (Campbell, HB 44).

Apart from oral traditional ways such as hunting, trapping and medicine

ways, storytelling is a well knit factor closely linked with ancestral tradition of orature.

Many elders, grand people and ancestors are good story tellers. Campbell here

brings her Grannie :

Grannie was a combination of a very strict Catholic and a supersti­

tious Indian, which made her the greatest storyteller in the world.

Every evening, after work was done, she made each of us a cup

of cocoa and some popcorn, and then gathered us around her and

told stories of the northern lights (ghost dancers), of Almighty Voice,

Poundermaker and other famous Indians. We heard many spine-

chilling tales, but we asked for one story in particular, over and

over again (Maracle, HB 91).

The above oral features such as hunting, trapping, medicine practicing and

storytelling have a connection to the inner world of humanity. This type of philo­

sophical base of the positive representations of natural orality found throughout

twentieth-century literature is found in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy:

The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally

consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least

unconsciously with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken,

sounded, and hence power - driven (32).

Oral Native traditions help the writers to rewrite the master narratives and

genres, Campbell enriches the Native oral traditions by fusing with graphic modes

with a transformative energy. In this sense, the text in Althusser's terms "interpel­

late" or "hail" the Native subject, "always-already" a subject of the dominant dis­

course on behalf of the counter discourse. As Belsey said this Native counter dis-

course "constitutes a discourse which breaks with the specific ideology of the con­

temporary social information" (195).

Unlike the revisionary rewriting of postmodern writers, Campbell rewrites

the master discourse with an ironic flavour to dehegemonize the supremacy of mas­

ter discourses. In the process of deconstructing the idea of the Whites on the Na­

tives life, one of Maria's employers (White) says that" Indians " are good for two

things-working and fucking". She makes "jokes about hot bucks and hot squaws "as

though the Metis were "animals in the barnyard" (109). Campbell undermines the

employer's stereotyped discourse by informing the reader that whenever this woman

"got a chance she'd go to dances in nearby Native communities and sneak off into

the bush with the men. I know she made countless passes at Dad". She adds: "This

was common in our area : the White man were crazy about our worr.^n and the

White women, although they were not as open and forward about it, were the same

towards our men" (Campbell, HB 108).

Campbell here reveals the animalistic attitude of the Whites and subverts

the hegemony of the universalist White discourse.

Campbell's fusion of oral, written and colloquial conversational tone for

accuracy is also a form of counter discursive strategy to assert the Native experi­

ence. As Emberley says : "Half-breed and In Search of April Raintree reclaim the

derogatory connotations in terms of biological fears of 'interbreeding', 'miscegena­

tion' and racial interbreeding against the hegemonic imperial ideologies" (152). Thus,

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Campbell's Half-breed poses to be an effective experimentation of Native counter

discourse against the dominant White narratives.

The Book of Jessica (1989) is a docudrama and it has been co-authored by

Linda Griffiths with Maria Campbell based on the autobiography, Halfbreed. The

text largely makes use of Canadian history and the appropriation of lands and

language. It is a cross cultural revision of Native culture and history. The book

crosses many boundaries. Egan observes :

It crosses a number of significant boundaries: between life and art,

between context and text in autobiographical genres, between cer­

emonies of religion and oftheatre, between oral and written narra­

tives, and between two women, one Metis and one White (10).

The relationship between this play and the autobiography is that both have

been written by Campbell, they deal with the same theme and problems of the

Native life. The play grew out of the collaboration with the Theatre Passe Muraille

in the fall of 1976. This theatre has been called "mobile guerrilla theatre" (Egan

11). It has also produced Almighty Voice and The West Show. This theatre pro­

motes the Native drama through their ventures. Linda Griffiths role in the play as an

actress helped her tremendously to understand the Metis life. Campbell became

complicit with her acceptance of Linda Griffiths for performance and with her intro­

duction of Griffiths into the Naive Community and into their spiritual practices.

Campbell frequently corrected Griffiths' assumptions about her role and challenges

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her to use experience. As Egan remarks :

I think the empire speaks back throughout this text in unexpected

ways that inform the final product beyond anything Griffiths could

have controlled if she had wanted to, and in ways that should affect

our thinking about gender, genre, and voice (12).

The collaborative dimension in this play attains a new vision to look at the

Native cultural experience in a different way. Gender, genre and voice of the

Nation and the White are interfused to suit the Native stage.

In Jessica, autobiography and theatrical techniques create a new mode of

literary expression. They took effort to stage the real Metis life experience to the

audience. In "Mimesis: The Dramatic Lineage of Auto/Biography", Evelyn Hinz

has argued thoroughly and convincingly, on historical and theoretical grounds, for

w the close relationship of drama and autobiography in the Western literary tradition

(195-212). In this case Egan suggests: "Campbell's choice and use of drama

developed out of ancient and ongoing Metis and First Nations traditions" (13). One

can find the nexus between the ethnographer and the autobiographer in The Book

of Jessica. Hinz also refers to the European as individual and the Native North

American as a member of community in her brief analvsis of the role of autobioara-

phy in self-interpretations :

Perhaps ... the reason auto/biographical documents are rare in

primitive societies has to do with the fact that virtual performs a

self-exorcising role for their membership and perhaps the rea­

son auto/biographical documents are so abundant in the West­

ern tradition has to do with the extent to which they provide a sense

of the communal that we lack (208).

Campbell even in Halfbreed brings out this sense of community, land and

people. This is a recurring theme in all the Native drama, autobiography and poetry.

It is a kind of reflection of oral culture. The play seems to be a mixture of two oppos­

ing elements. As Lionnet describes: "relational patterns over autonomous ones,

interconnectedness over independence., opacity over transparency" (Qtd in Egan

18), Both Campbell and Griffiths link the Native and the White in cultural/textual

Mettissage with an emphasis on "transcultural rethinking of identity" (Egan18).