Rewriting History, Post-Coloniality and Feminism: Lee Maracle's Autobiographical Works
Fecha
1994Resumen
Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman (1988) and Bobbi Lee. Indian Rebel
(1990) are autobiographical works that rewrite the conventions of representing
the Native in the context of Canadian history and society.
Through her autobiographical “I”, Maracle narrates herself as
politicalrepresentative for women and for the Métis.
This essay aims to investigate Maracle’s political displacement of
conventional representational practices. The importance of IAW&BLIR
to revisionary historiography is that both works document the struggle
of Natives today within a history of resistance. Writing from a position
of “cultural siege”, “under occupation”, Maracle analyzes her position
as a Native woman within an active struggle of decolonialization. Hers
is a new history and historiography different from both white writing
on the Native and traditional Native “historical”, oral narratives. It is
the history of struggle in the 1960s and 1970s in a hybrid narrative
mode. As we shall argue, this is history as narrating, as telling, in traditional
native fashion, but within recognizable dates and events and the
conventions of “colonial” history.