First Nations

Abstract

Dreaming in one language and writing in another, translating across cultures, negotiating a position from which to speak of difference and identity: these are the distinctive features of contemporary Native writing in Canada, where a new generation of young writers brought up in Aboriginal communities and educated in white Canadian schools and colleges are engaged in the creative process of refiguring Aboriginal identities and redefining contemporary indigenous culture. In the opening of her first novel, Monkey Beach quoted above, Eden Robinson, a young woman writer who belongs to the Haisla nation of British Columbia, sketches out the inevitably ambiguous location of this new writing where the narrator caught between waking and dream finds herself inhabiting two different worlds at once. Like Beth in The Cure for Death by Lightning, Robinson’s narrator-protagonist Lisa Marie Michelle Hill has grown up under the dual influence of white and Aboriginal cultures, and her story of an adolescent girl’s quest to find her

Six crows sit in our greengage tree. Half-awake, I hear them speak to me in Haisla.

La’es, they say, La’es, la’es.

I push myself out of bed and go to the open window, but they launch themselves upward, cawing. Morning light slants over the mountains behind the reserve. A breeze coming down the channel makes my curtains flap limply. Ripples sparkle in the shallows as a seal bobs its dark head.

La’es—Go down to the bottom of the ocean. The word means something else, but I can’t remember what. I had too much coffee last night after the Coast Guard called with the news about Jimmy.

(Monkey Beach)¹