I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

159 Pages·2002·2.05 MB·English

by  Lee Maracle

I A M W O M A N
OTHER BOOKS BY LEE MARACLE
Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel
Sojourner's Truth and Other Stories
Sundogs
Ravensong
Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures (co-editor)
Sojourners and Sundogs
Bent Box
Daughters are Forever
I AM WOMAN
A NATIVE PERSPECTIVE
ON SOCIOLOGY
AND FEMINISM
LEE MARACLE
Y
PRESS GANG
AN IMPRINT OF RAINCOAST BOOKS
Copyright © 1996 by Lee Maracle
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of Canada through The Canada Council for the Arts and the Book Publishing
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British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.
Design by Vai Speidel
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Maracle, Lee 1950-
I am woman
ISBN 0-88974-059-3
Maracle, Lee 1950- 2. Indian women — British Columbia — Biography
Indian women — British Columbia — Social conditions. I. Title.
E78.B9M36 1996 305.4'88970711 C96-9102191-7
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10 9 8 7 6 5
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION / VII
1. I Want to Write / 3
2. I Am Woman / 14
3. Isn't Love a Given? / 20
4. My Love / 31
5. Law, Politics and Tradition / 36
6. Rusty / 43
7. Black Robes / 62
8. The 1950s / 71
9. Heartless Teachers / 7 9
10. L’ilwat Child / 83
11. Education / 88
12. The Rebel / 93
13. Party Down! / 105
14. Another Side of Me / 108
15. Pork Chops and Applesauce / 118
16. Normal vs. Natural / 127
17. The Women's Movement / 137
18. Flowers / 141
LAST WORDS / 1 43

Preface to the Second Edition
T his book has been out of print for some years now.
However, many people still seek it out, and eight years
after its original publication it remains relevant. It is
reproduced here under new cover and with some revisions,
more to fill in gaps than to alter the original. I Am Woman repre-
sents my personal struggle with womanhood, culture, traditional
spiritual beliefs and political sovereignty, written during a time
when this struggle was not over. I had settled on very little when
I first wrote I Am Woman, except this: I and other Native women
ought to come by our perceptions of spirituality, culture, wom-
anhood and sovereignty from a place free of sexist and racist in-
fluence. My point of view is presented in poetry and stories, and
couched not so carefully in essays. My original intention was
to empower Native women to take to heart their own personal
struggle for Native feminist being. The changes to the text are
to clarify meaning; they do not alter its original intention. It still
remains my attempt to present a Native womans sociological
perspective on the impacts of colonialism on us, as women, and
on myself personally.
VIII PREFACE
I Am Woman was intended to release me from the chains with
which I bound myself, chains which were welded to me by a
history neither I nor my ancestors created. Bondage is paralyz-
ing and removing chains is painful. When the chains are bound
to you by internal attitudes and beliefs created by external world
conditions, removing them is both painful and humbling. The
text is an emotional one, free of the humour and joy that punc-
tuated the struggle for being which this book represents. I do
not apologize for that.
I am still humbled by my youthful enthusiasm which was
crushed by the realization of the depth and extent of racial, sex-
ist and nationalist oppression visited upon Native women. I am
humbled by the absolute heroism required of the young mother
that I was, wrestling with the conditions into which I was born.
We are an internally colonized people. I am amazed at the num-
ber of victories I achieved under appalling conditions.
I was born during the 1950s to a mother who struggled
relentlessly to feed, clothe and house eight children, instill in
them some fundamental principles of culture, educate them in
our original sense of logic and story and ensure they would still
be able to function in the larger world. Although she was not
entirely successful at feeding us on a regular basis, nor was she
successful at mothering us consistently in the way that children
need, she managed to re-create in me a deep sense of hope for
the future, as well as national pride, social conscience, fairness
and a tenacious will. Our mother insisted that those who eat
must work, those who work are entitled to participate in the
general management of the family and those who participate
must be prepared to make intelligent choices about their life and
family context. I matured early, worked hard my entire life and
was granted access to some of the most intelligent people.
I trotted about with my mother to the homes of great intel-
lectuals among the Squamish people, the nation from which my
father hails. Among them were Andy Pauli, a statesman and
British Columbia’s first constitutional lawyer, and his son, Percy,
Preface IX
both now deceased, who came by their knowledge against the
will of the state, which precluded our being educated in the
institutions reserved for white people and disenfranchised
“Indians”; Khatsalano, the first Native to create a province-wide
organization to represent the decolonizing aspirations of Indige-
nous people; Ta’a, my great-grandmother, whose eyes spoke
love, discipline and wisdom when words failed, and a host of
elders. Our circuit of visits to these people when I was a small
child created in me an outlook which defied everything that
existed in the outside world.
Among the elders I visited in the first ten years of my life,
there was a quiet and deep respect for thinking which extended
to men, women and children. I was shocked as a twenty-year-
old by concepts of sexism coming from the mouths of young
Native men; no one would have dared doubt the intelligence of
women ten years earlier. At the time, the alternative to this sex-
ism was a feminist movement which objected to the role played
by women in the home and the inequities between men and
women in child-rearing and work. Sexism, racism and the total
dismissal of Native womens experiences has little to do with
who does dishes and who minds babies. These oppressions
result from the accumulation of hurt sustained by our people
over a long period of time. Our communities are reduced to a
sub-standard definition of normal, which leads to a sensibility of
defeat, which in turn calls the victim to the table of lateral vio-
lence and ultimately changes the beliefs and corrodes the system
from within. On this table of lateral violence sit the violence of
men and women against children and the violence of men
toward women. The “healing movement” of the 1980s and ’90s,
spearheaded by women, is the struggle to clear the table of
violence.
What we have not been able to do is remove the table of
hurtful oppression and besiegement which spawned the lateral
violence. Generation to generation the hurt of defeat accumu-
lates in the consciousness of the colonized, until defeat itself