From Out of Canada - Indigenous Literature

 I get an email newsletter from the Canadian magazine The Walrus. It is interesting to see what's going on around the world - a better use for the internet than Facebook - and Canada is particularly interesting, so American and so much not American.

The following comes from Fifty Years of Halfbreed: How the Memoir Opened Up Indigenous Literature by Michelle Cyca:

“All kinds of people have written books about half-breeds before,” said Maria Campbell in a 1973 interview with the Leader-Post, “but nobody who is a half-breed has written a book before.” Half a century ago, there were very few books published in Canada written by Indigenous authors. Aside from the work of Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson, most Canadians had likely read about Indigenous people only through the words of settlers.

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What made Halfbreed so powerful, then and now, was not just that Campbell’s life held as much drama and tragedy as a Hollywood script. It was her unwavering clarity and knowledge of her own value: as a Halfbreed, as a woman, as a leader. Her generation was haunted by two defining tragedies for the Métis people: the defeat of the North-West Resistance and the confiscation of their land. “I only want to say: this is what it was like; this is what it is still like,” she wrote in the book. “I know poverty is not ours alone. Your people have had it too, but in those earlier days you at least had dreams, you had a tomorrow. My parents and I never shared any aspirations for a future.” And yet Campbell did imagine a future for herself and her people, and she wrote it into existence.

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