“I Know Who I Am and What I Represent”: Asserting Indigenous Labrador Identity

Abstract

The following essay is an interdisciplinary engagement with the life writing of Doris Saunders, founding editor of Them Days magazine. Using postcolonial and decolonial life writing theories, it argues that Saunders asserted an Indigenous Labrador identity through her personal essays, speeches and letters by negotiating boundaries of colonial ideologies present in the settler state and a local Indigenous organization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Alana Kamalalawalu Faagai, “Ruffled Native Feathers,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 3 (2016): 433, doi:10.1080/08989575.2016.1183340.

2 This contrasts, of course, with larger Canadian–North American discourse in which European colonists and their descendants are known as “settlers.” Today, the term “Settler” is used less frequently because most people who have mixed Indigenous and European heritage in Labrador now use the term Southern Inuit or Inuit Metis. This kind of changing nomenclature is not unusual in the context of settler colonialism. Kim Anderson points to this when she says, “I currently define myself as a Cree/Métis woman. I am not sure if I will rest with this label indefinitely as identity language is complex and constantly changing for Native peoples. Because of our past, naming is politically and emotionally loaded.” A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2016), 3.

3 Linda McDowell refers to this phenomenon as the ways that places are continually “constituted and maintained by social relations of power and exclusion.” Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4. This text sparked my interdisciplinary link with feminist human geography and continues to inform my thinking about place and identity.

4 I use this term with knowledge of its implications, especially as it concerns what Gillian Whitlock calls “the closure of belonging” in non-Indigenous witnessing narratives. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000), 42.

5 Of the three, letters are perhaps the least clearly defined as a genre, or as being either fully public or private. According to Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley, letters are “paradoxical” in that they clearly conform to certain generic conventions, such as having an addressee and a signatory, while at the same time being eclectic in their styles, presentations, and content. “Letters as/not a Genre,” Life Writing 2, no. 2 (2005): 91–118.

6 Jeanne Perreault and Marlene Kadar, “Tracing the Autobiographical: Unlikely Documents, Unexpected Places,” in Tracing the Autobiographical, ed. Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, Linda Warley, and Susanna Egan (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2005), 3.

7 Evidence of this exists in texts such as the otherwise very good piece by Robin McGrath on Inuit women’s autobiographies that I quote later in this essay. While McGrath makes many wise observations, she also describes the women as writing “to us from behind a window that is clouded by the restrictions on speaking directly of self.” This does two things: it assumes that all Inuit cultures have the same strictures on speaking of the self, and it assumes the “us,” or the intended audience, is non-Inuit. I think it is safer to assume that the audience includes Inuit peoples and that the window is clouded by settler myopia. “Circumventing the Taboos: Inuit Women’s Autobiographies,” in Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, ed. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 233.

8 Kristina Fagan, “‘Well Done Old Half-Breed Woman’: Lydia Campbell and the Labrador Literary Tradition,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 48, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 49–76.

9 Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds., Theorizing Native Studies (Durham: Duke UP, 2014), 9.

10 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader, ed. Alison Jagger (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008), 348.

11 I discuss in detail the methodology I use for my larger project on reading Saunders’s life narratives and Them Days magazine in “Reading (for) Decolonization: Engaging with Life Writing in Labrador’s Them Days Magazine,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 18, no. 5 (2018): 326–338.

12 Grace Ouellette and Josephine M. Wuttunee, The Fourth World: An Indigenous Perspective on Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Activism (Halifax: Fernwood, 2002), 31.

13 Inuit-Metis is written without the é, as it would be for the Métis of Central and Western Canada. While it sometimes varies in the Labrador context, the predominant spelling is Inuit-Metis.

14 David MacKenzie, “The Indian Act and the Aboriginal Peoples of Newfoundland at the Time of Confederation,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 177.

15 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2^nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 14.

16 K. Tsianina Lomawaima, “A Principle of Relativity through Indigenous Biography,” Biography 39, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 266.

17 David A. Chang, “Indigenous Biography, Genealogy, and Webs of Relations,” Biography 39, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 248–269.

18 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 388.

19 Marlene Kadar, “An Epistolary Constellation: Trotsky, Khalo, Birney,” in Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents, ed. Helen Buss and Marlene Kadar (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2001), 111.

20 Linda Warley, “Flucht und Vertreibung and the Difficult Work of Memory,” Life Writing 10, no. 3 (2013): 329.

21 Andrea Smith, “Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham: Duke UP, 2014), 214.

22 Leonor Arfuch, “Subjects in the Margins,” in The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, ed. Ricia Chansky and Emily Hipchen (New York: Routledge, 2016), 272.

23 Arfuch, “Subjects,” 272.

24 Mishuana R. Goeman, “Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham: Duke UP, 2014), 236.

25 Doreen Massey’s questions about space are foundational to Goeman’s work. Massey asks, “What if space is the sphere not of a discrete multiplicity of inert things, even one which is thoroughly interrelated? What if, instead, it presents us with a heterogeneity of practices and processes? Then it will not be an already-interconnected whole but an ongoing product of interconnections and not. Then it will always be unfinished and open.” For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 107.

26 I am not removed from the narratives with which I respectfully engage, because my own story as a white, settler Newfoundlander working in the “academic industrial complex” is part of the larger stories and spaces of settler colonialism as well (for the phrase “academic industrial complex,” see Andrea Smith, “Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith [Durham: Duke University Press, 2014], 214).

27 Mishuana R. Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 3.

28 Goeman, Mark My Words, 3.

29 Arnold Krupat, “Reflections of a Reluctant Anthologist,” in The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, ed. Ricia Chansky and Emily Hipchen (New York: Routledge, 2016), 68.

30 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 161.

31 Quoted in Wally McLean, “‘Dr. Dot,’ an Appreciation,” Them Days 30, no. 3 (2006): 30.

32 Doris Saunders Collection, APL 103, File 103/16, Them Days Archives, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL.

33 Bina Toledo Freiwald, “Gender, Nation, and Self-Narration,” in Tracing the Autobiographical, ed. Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005), 166.

34 Quoted in Lynne D. Fitzhugh, The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain (St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books, 1999), x.

35 Fitzhugh, The Labradorians, 15.

36 Innu elder Elizabeth Penashue says this about the land around the Lower Churchill River, where the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric development is being built: “It’s hard to believe it will all be under water. So many people hunt and fish and trap there…. It’s not a playground. It’s a spiritual land for the Innu, a place for our traditional performances.” Elizabeth Penashue (Tshaukuesh), “Miam Euauiat Tshekuan (It’s Like a Circle),” in Despite This Loss: Essays on Culture, Memory and Identity in Newfoundland and Labrador, ed. Ursula A. Kelly and Elizabeth Yeoman (St. John’s, NL: ISER Books, 2010), 250.

37 Alec C. McEwan, “Labrador Boundary Dispute,” The Canadian Encyclopaedia, February 7, 2006, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/labrador-boundary-dispute.

38 Speech to the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, “Women in Labrador,” 1979, Doris Saunders Collection APL 103, File 1, Them Days Archives.

39 The Newfoundland and Labrador provincial government website attests to the veracity of Saunders’s estimate but also exhibits a map that inaccurately represents this size differential. Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, “Land Area,” last updated November 20, 2018, https://www.gov.nl.ca/aboutnl/area.html.

40 See the following article for a succinct description of Mercator projections and links to how they impact our perceptions of the world, Donald Houston, “Five Maps That Will Change How You See the World,” The Conversation, March 22, 2017, http://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-will-change-how-you-see-the-world-74967.

41 Doris Saunders Collection, APL 103, File 28.

42 The phrasing “disappearance of the Beothuk” is used deliberately here to show how language can reinscribe colonial practices while denying colonizers’ responsibility. It is the phrasing most commonly used in referring to the mass death of the Beothuk in Newfoundland. This does the rhetorical work of eliminating any notion of colonial causality—specifically the introduction of foreign disease, seizure of land and fishing territory, and deliberate murder by settlers.

43 Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians: The Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 2 (1992): 144.

44 Goeman, “Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar,” 1.

45 Doris Saunders collection, APL 103, File 1.

46 The history of this nomenclature is complex, and while I will discuss it briefly below, a comprehensive overview can be found in John C. Kennedy, ed., History and Renewal of Labrador’s Inuit-Métis (St. John’s, NL: ISER Books, 2014).

47 Doris Saunders collection, APL 103, File 1.

48 “Women in Labrador,” Doris Saunders collection, APL 103, File 1.

49 Margaret Baikie, Labrador Memories: Reflections at Mulligan (Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL: Them Days, 1973).

50 Elizabeth Goudie, Woman of Labrador (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1973).

51 Initially published in thirteen short installments, Sketches of Labrador Life by a Labrador Woman would be reprinted as a book entitled Sketches of Labrador Life in 2000 by Them Days and Killick Press, under the editorial guidance of Doris Saunders. Campbell’s text, and life, have been discussed in numerous academic studies, including most recently by Marianne P. Stopp, “‘I, Old Lydia Campbell’: A Labrador Woman of National Historic Significance,” in History and Renewal of Labrador’s Inuit-Métis, ed. John C. Kennedy (St. John’s, NL: ISER Books, 2014), 155–179.

52 Fagan, “Well Done,” 51.

53 Fagan, “Well Done,” 52.

54 Thomas King, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” World Literature Written in English 30, no. 2 (1990): 1.

55 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 4.

56 Julie Rak, Keavy Martin, and Norma Dunning, “Life after Life among the Qallunaat,” in Life among the Qallunaat by Mini Aodla Freeman. Edited by Rak, Martin, and Dunning. (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015), 261.

57 McGrath, “Circumventing the Taboos,” 224.

58 Robin McGrath, “The History of Inuit Literacy in Labrador,” Newfoundland Quarterly 87, no. 1 (Fall 1991–Winter 1992): 37.

59 Quoted in Fitzhugh, The Labradorians, x-xi.

60 Simpson and Smith, Theorizing Native Studies, 16.

61 Lisa Rankin, Matthew Beaudoin, and Natalie Brewster, “Southern Exposure: The Inuit of Sandwich Bay, Labrador,” in Settlement, Subsistence, and Change among the Labrador Inuit: The Nunatsiavummiut Experience, ed. David. C. Natcher, Lawrence Felt, and Andrea Procter (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012), 68.

62 Roberta Buchanan, “Autobiography as History: The Autobiographies of Three Labrador Women—Lydia Campbell, Margaret Baikie, and Elizabeth Goudie,” in Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador, A Collage, ed. Carmelita McGrath, Barb Neis, and Marilyn Porter (St. John’s, NL: Killick Press, 1995), 67.

63 Quoted in Buchanan, “Autobiography as History,” 67. According to Marianne Stopp, “Many articles published in Them Days and other Labrador publications follow Campbell’s informal, unstructured style, and use autobiography as a way of documenting the past.” Stopp, “I, Old Lydia Campbell,” 165. Also see CBC News, “Them Days, iconic Labrador magazine, celebrates 40 years of storytelling,” March 15, 2015, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/them-days-iconic-labrador-magazine-celebrates-40-years-of-storytelling-1.2993785.

64 Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: Anansi, 2003), 2.

65 Aman Sium and Eric Ritskes, “Speaking Truth to Power: Indigenous Storytelling as an Act of Living Resistance,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): i.

66 Doris Saunders collection, APL 103, File 6.

67 Them Days, “About,” https://www.themdays.com/?page_id=440.

68 Gillian Saunders, “Dr. Doris Jean Saunders’ Eulogy,” Them Days 30, no. 3 (2006): 6.

69 Lydia Campbell, Sketches of Labrador Life (St. John’s, NL: Them Days and Killick Press, 2000), 13.

70 Stopp, “I, Old Lydia Campbell,” 166.

71 Buchanan, “Autobiography as History,” 73.

72 Doris Saunders, “A Daughter of Labrador,” Canadian Women’s Studies 2, no. 1 (1980): 105.

73 See Ouellette and Wuttunee, The Fourth World; Gloria Bird, “Breaking the Silence: Writing as ‘Witness,’” in Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, ed. Simon J. Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 26–48; Kim Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2016); and Simpson and Smith, eds., Theorizing Native Studies.

74 Martha Flaherty, “Inuit Women: Equality and Leadership,” Canadian Women’s Studies 14, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 7.

75 Patricia Monture-Angus, Journeying Forward: Dreaming First Nations’ Independence (Halifax: Fernwood, 1999), 35–36.

76 McLean, “‘Dr. Dot,’ an Appreciation,” 26.

77 Nunatsiavut Government, “Labrador Inuit: The Pride of Nunatsiavut,” http://www.nunatsiavut.com/visitors/labrador-inuit/.

78 Nunatsiavut Government, “Labrador Inuit: The Pride of Nunatsiavut,” http://www.nunatsiavut.com/visitors/labrador-inuit/.

79 John C. Kennedy, “Southern Inuit of NunatuKavut: The Historical Background,” Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, last updated May 2016, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/aboriginal/southern-inuit.php; NunatuKavut, “Who We Are,” http://www.nunatukavut.ca/home/who_we_are.htm.

80 Doris Saunders to Board of Directors, Labrador Inuit Association, 25 May 1991, Doris Saunders collection, APL 103, File 32.

81 Doris Saunders to Tom Sidon, 14 June 1991, Doris Saunders collection, APL 103, File 32.

82 This discussion is not mean to denigrate the important work of the Labrador Inuit Association in forming a self-governing Inuit territory in Northern Labrador. Now formally known as the Nunatsiavut government, it serves the cultural, spiritual, and political needs of the community well and has been crucial in revitalizing the Inuktitut language, among many other initiatives, with the goal of complete Inuit sovereignty in the region.

83 John C. Kennedy, “Understanding Labrador Metis History” (paper presented at the National Judicial Institute Seminar on Aboriginal Law, St. John’s, NL, April 21, 2005), 2.

84 This quotation comes from Fagan’s section of this roundtable, in which she discusses being from Labrador and the complex politics there. Kristina Fagan, Keavy Martin, Deanna Reder, Daniel Heath Justice, Sam McKegney, and Niigonwedom James Sinclair, “Canadian Indian Literary Nationalism? Critical Approaches in Canadian Indigenous Contexts—A Collaborative Interlogue,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29, no. 1–2 (2009): 35–36.

85 Bird, “Breaking the Silence,” 27.

86 Doris Saunders collection, APL 103, File 28.

87 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 101.

88 Lorraine Code, “How Do We Know? Questions of Method in Feminist Practice,” in Changing Methods: Feminists Transforming Practice, ed. Sandra Burt and Lorraine Code (Toronto: Broadview Press, 1995), 13–44.

89 Whitlock, The Intimate Empire, 34.

90 Goeman. “Disrupting,” 236.