Between vulnerability and resistance: Rhetorical strategies in Indigenous Canadian nonfiction

Introduction: Indigenous intellectual tradition through nonfiction writing

In his book People and the Word (2005) as well as in the chapter titled “Indigenous Nonfiction” in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (2014), Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior makes a strong point about the dominance of Indigenous nonfiction in the period preceding the efflorescence of Indigenous fiction in the 1960 and 1970s. He argues for the centrality of this genre in constituting an Indigenous intellectual milieu, claiming that “[n]onfiction expression had been for more than two centuries a primary means through which Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere have articulated their experience of modernity” (Warrior, 2014: 188). Warrior unfolds the rich history of Indigenous journalism, letter writing, constitution documents, and speech transcriptions as a means of conveying a sense of community: “Newspapers and founding documents can be the lifeblood of a community — in need of context, surely, but also reflective of communal life in a way that novels and poems often are not” (2014: 190). ¹ Warrior calls for a deeper appreciation of the archive of Indigenous nonfiction because it redefines not only how we look at Indigenous fiction but also how Indigenous criticism developed (2014: 189). The study of contemporary Indigenous nonfiction reveals a particular style combining fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism. While Warrior gives examples of Craig Womack (Oklahoma Cree/Cherokee) and Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) as illustrative examples of this tradition, his description of the form can be extended to a number of prominent First Nations authors who have been practising this hybridized genre throughout the 1990s in Canada, among them Beth Brant, Lee Maracle, Patricia Monture Angus, Emma LaRoque, and Gerald Taiaiake Alfred.

Generally, Indigenous nonfiction has been used as a vehicle for theorizing philosophical concepts, critical knowledges, and research methodologies. Its strategies often differ from those conventionally used in non-Indigenous nonfiction. Some authors rely on personalized storytelling (rather than on abstract theories), narrating the life experience of extended families and the wisdom of their ancestors, while others have synthesized traditional Indigenous philosophies with Western theories. Be it Lee Maracle’s concept of oratory (see Maracle, 1994 and 2015), Craig Womack’s literary separatism (see Womack, 1999), Paula Gunn Allen’s gynosophy (see Allen, 1998), or Gerald Vizenor’s survivance (see Vizenor, 1994) and postindian (see Vizenor, 1998), most of these well-known conceptual manifestos have emerged from a long, intriguingly hybridized literary tradition which seems to have always moved between discourses of history, sociology, philosophy, and criticism, as well as between traditional storytelling, personal recollections, and autobiographical fragments interwoven with poems and fictionalized stories. In my previous research on Indigenous women’s personal nonfiction and life writing, I have called this style “threshold writing”, a term adapted from Ana Louise Keating’s notion of threshold theories which “cross genres and mix codes, combining language with action, activism with aesthetics, and individual identity formation with collective cultural change” (Keating, 1996: 15). ² It is this mode of hybrid writing in Indigenous nonfiction that frames my textual analysis in the present study — a mode which has finally been recognized as significant in formulating key principles of Indigenous worldviews.

In this article, the possibilities of “threshold writing” are explored in two Henry Kreisel Lectures by Indigenous authors: ³ Eden Robinson’s The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols and Modern Storytelling (2011/2010) and Tomson Highway’s A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2015/2014). ⁴ The lectures were delivered as part of the Henry Kreisel Lecture Series organized since 2007 by the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, which also publishes the lectures in written form. ⁵ I claim that while each of the authors opts for a different rhetorical strategy in order to engage cross-cultural readers and address a variety of issues related to contemporary Indigeneity, both of them also convey a fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival — a negotiation which will be related theoretically to Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability, precarity, and resistance. Thus, Haisla writer Eden Robinson combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to both precarity and resilience of Haisla cultural and ecological survival. In turn, Cree writer, performer, and musician Tomson Highway presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to unsettle his audience through combining humour and confrontation, while exposing the ultimate paradox of cultural superiority of his ancestors on the one hand, and the ongoing vulnerability of contemporary Indigenous existence, represented by references to the missing and murdered Indigenous women, on the other. These strategies will be shown as corresponding to Judith Butler’s basic premise that vulnerability and resistance do not have to be opposed and/or mutually exclusive but rather work in intricate relationships (Butler et al., 2016: 1).

Vulnerability, precarity, resistance

Like Indigenous fiction, Indigenous nonfiction thematizes, among other things, both the vulnerability (physical, material, and cultural as well as ontological) and the resilience of Indigenous cultures through the principle of duality, in which stories of grief, loss, and displacement are inextricably interwoven with those of survival, healing, and continuance. In this design, writing is a tool empowering marginalized communities precisely in its capacity for commemorating the losses, bearing witness to grieving and redressing dispossession, while also working through the transgenerational trauma of colonization and envisioning a future existence. Indigenous writers creatively employ rhetorical strategies to communicate their sense of “intricate relationships” between vulnerability and resistance, through which they not only educate and share their insights but also unsettle, challenge, and confront, with various degrees of subtlety, a non-Indigenous public, appealing to their ethical responsibilities. I therefore argue that if Indigenous writing has always expressed this duality of exposing vulnerability as well as inscribing resistance, then it may well serve as a model for transcending the binary structure powerful/powerless, which Butler sees as fundamental. In other words, through this optic the history of Indigenous writing is indeed a history of exploring the ways in which vulnerability and resistance relate and interweave, rather than stand in opposition.

Judith Butler’s continuing theoretical interest in the relatedness of precariousness, precarity, vulnerability, and resistance has produced a useful framework for critical approaches to Indigenous cultural production. The basic distinction that Butler draws between precariousness and precarity is important for recognizing historical fragility and the vulnerability of Indigenous cultures — always under the threat of policies aimed at either exterminating or assimilating them. Butler explains that while all lives are precarious (in other words, vulnerable and dependent on others as they can be obliterated at any moment by disease, accident, or an act of will), precarity, by contrast, points to a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler, 2010: 25). Precarity, therefore, can be understood as an unequally distributed form of vulnerability or precariousness imposed on disempowered populations. Vulnerability can also be perceived in both ways: it may indicate a general condition of all human lives but also a “deliberate exposure to power” (Butler, 2016: 22). In her chapter “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance”, Butler describes precarity and vulnerability as follows: “I wish to point out that even as public resistance leads to vulnerability and vulnerability (the sense of ‘exposure’ implied by precarity) leads to resistance, vulnerability is not exactly overcome by resistance, but becomes a potentially effective mobilizing force in political mobilizations” (2016: 14). This intricate web of relatedness (of precarity, vulnerability, and resistance) is helpful in theorizing Indigenous discourse which, as noted above, tends to demonstrate a productive duality in interweaving vulnerability (of Indigenous material existence as well as cultural and intellectual milieu) with resistance (either openly political or more subtly through cultural production and intellectual engagement).

Another pertinent point in Butler’s theorization of precarity and vulnerability is her reflection in Precarious Life on the mechanisms behind the public recognition of some lives — lives that are, in Butler’s context of post-9/11 discourse, worth grieving and mourning, while others are deemed invisible or framed as not worth national recognition (or grieving and mourning). Butler’s crucial question here is: “what counts as a livable life and grievable death?” (2004: xv). Historically, Indigenous lives have been almost always framed as existing on the periphery of the category of “livable lives and grievable deaths”. Today this is most visibly present in the case of missing and murdered Indigenous women, whose lives have, indeed, been constructed as “disposable” in the logic of neoliberal capitalism and (as Butler argues about Muslim and Arab lives) cannot be mourned because they are not deemed lives at all (2004: 12). In this sense, Indigenous lives are continuously characterized as vulnerable. Lorenzo Veracini argues that one of the consequences of this ‘predisposed’ vulnerability of Indigenous lives in settler colonies is the need for settler benevolence and generosity (Veracini, 2010: 108). This is a historical and deeply-embedded issue pervading settler–Indigenous relationships in settler colonies such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, where settler paternalism has been for a long time ingrained in state-sanctioned policies of assimilationism.

On the other hand, Indigenous nonfiction also attests to sheer survival, both physical and cultural, and to the resilience of Indigenous intellectual thought and sustainability of critical methodologies founded on different principles than Western theories. It is worth examining what happens when both loss and continuance, or vulnerability and resistance, are communicated at the same time. Does one preclude, rhetorically, the other? Do Indigenous authors’ demands for our affective and ethical response get diminished (even made counterproductive) by their placing emphasis on the survival, continuance, and hope for their people’s future? As my analysis reveals, the selected strategies are deliberately crafted by Indigenous authors to balance on the edge of raising pity (as a vulnerable victim) and fear (as a subject demanding sovereignty and an ethical response). They may take the form of simultaneously inviting readers to empathize and identify with Indigenous subjects while confronting them with the history of colonial violence in settler colonies; or they may offer a gesture of sharing and reconciliation while also demanding cultural and political sovereignty. Whichever the case, such negotiation of the tension between the two directions is almost always a productive and inseparable part of contemporary Indigenous writing.

Auto/biographical imperative

Eden Robinson’s Henry Kreisel Lecture titled Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols and Modern Storytelling provides a nonfictional counterpart to her critically acclaimed novel Monkey Beach. Like the novel, it combines anthropological and ethnographic passages which foreground the complexity and sophistication of Haisla cultural life with contemporary storytelling of mainstream Canada. Robinson’s lecture offers three different stories: one about a trip with her mother to Graceland in the US, one about a fishing trip with her father, and the last about her own writing process and re-connecting with Haisla traditions. The first story contemplates Robinson’s consistent interest in “cross-pollination of cultures” ⁶ — namely the Indigenous/Haisla culture of British Columbia and the popular culture of mainstream Canada/North America. This part begins with what I call an “auto/biographical imperative”, which demands that Indigenous storytellers, writers, and artists position themselves in relation to place and community. Generally, Indigenous personal nonfiction and life writing almost invariably start with what has become a conventional trope of foregrounding one’s claim to Indigeneity. Where one comes from, what their tribal or clan affiliation is, who one’s parents and grandparents are, and how one relates to a larger community are not just simple markers of identity politics. Nor is this an uncomplicated rhetorical strategy of reaching out to the audience via personalizing one’s account. Rather, the insistence on the unambiguous articulation of one’s personal background is a political statement: it is an act of resistance which attests to the collective cultural survival in the face of state-sanctioned policies of surveillance and assimilation in the postcolonizing nation-state. ⁷ Therefore the auto/biographical imperative is a gesture which is meant to position the narrative voice into a relationship. Such a relationship, Daniel Heath Justice claims, is the “driving impetus behind the vast majority of texts by Indigenous writers — relationship to the land, to human community, to self, to the other-than-human world, to the ancestors and our descendants, to our histories and our futures, as well as to colonizers and their literal and ideological heirs […]” (2018: xix). ⁸ The sense of relationality which permeates Heath Justice’s explication above is, eventually, embedded not only in Indigenous writing and storytelling but in Indigenous philosophies and worldviews as such.

The auto/biographical imperative in her opening allows Robinson to position herself unambiguously within a web of her extended family relationships and also in relation to a place: she introduces herself and her parents, relating them to a particular group and location. Then family anecdotes combine with imparting knowledge of certain Haisla concepts, such as receiving clan names or giving feasts (2011/2010: 4–5). ⁹ This prepares the ground for Robinson’s point which only makes sense at the end of the first section. Since both sides of her family are matrilineal, her and her sibling’s clan names should have come from her mother’s family. This tradition, however, is not respected and ten-year-old Robinson is given a clan name by her father’s family. While the rest describes a seemingly banal, humorous story of organizing a spontaneous trip with her mother to Graceland to visit Elvis’s museum and his “Manor”, the very last few sentences reveal the main point of this fable: through nusa (the traditional way of imparting Haisla protocols to children), Robinson’s mother teaches her something important about storytelling and remembering, as well as about the mother–daughter relationship (11–12). This is a very subtle way of honouring the power of matrilineality running in the kinship ties, which, although not respected for the sake of convenience, is nevertheless still relevant to contemporary Haisla culture. As has become characteristic of Robinson’s narration, this happens in the context of modernity and popular culture, in this case through her mother’s obsession with the King’s lore (and one wonders whether Robinson wrote this episode deliberately as a counter-narrative to the “museumification” of Indigeneity). At the same time, this simple story indicates a strategy present in Robinson’s as well as Highway’s lectures. These are small, deeply personal stories which, however, provide an alternative worldview which attests to the authority of Indigenous knowledge sustained for thousands of years. Deanna Reder, writing about the “autobiographical archive” (2009: 155) of an early tradition of literary expression of Indigenous lives, relates this gravitation towards the auto/biographical in Indigenous writing to a much older and larger stream of thought, arguing that “an understudied reason […] to describe yourself and your family and where you come from, follows Indigenous protocols that are part of an intellectual tradition” (2009: 160). By referring directly to nusa, Robinson seems to be following precisely this tradition.

The second part of Robinson’s lecture focuses on the precarity of Haisla existence, both cultural and ecological. Again, it begins with a relation, this time a spatial one, as Robinson maps traditional Haisla territory in northern British Columbia, spelling out all important place names in Haisla topography. Simultaneously, she recounts Haisla mythology (presumably that which can be shared), including the legend of a sasquatch, and enlightens her audience/readers on the significance of oolichans ¹⁰ for the Haisla diet as well as for their cultural life. Robinson draws attention to the decreasing numbers of oolichans due to the aluminum smelter industry in the town of Kitimat which pollutes the water and endangers the fish: “We hadn’t had a decent oolichan run in five years, which was worrying many people, especially the elders. Of course the fish are a concern, but it’s the traditions that go with the fish that are in real trouble” (22). What Robinson depicts here is an illustration of Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence which he defines as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011: 2). Nixon’s idea imparts a sense of environmental precarity; analogically to Butler’s reflection on the lives which are more liveable than others — lives worth grieving, recognizing, and “storying” — there are also places and ecosystems, which are deemed more preserveable in neoliberal “turbo-capitalism” (Nixon, 2011: 4), while others are more vulnerable to resource exploitation, more disposable. This ecological and human disposability is what can be seen as pertinent to many Indigenous realities.

Robinson proceeds to personalize this ethnographic lesson by telling a story of another family trip, this time with her father, to an oolichan run. Similarly to the story of her trip with her mother, this account functions as an allegory which is supposed to pass on important knowledge. Because the oolichans are scarce now, Robinson and her father have to drive out of Haisla territory to find the right place for dip net fishing. They are unsuccessful and end up trading a “bucket of less than fresh oolichans” (23) for cigarettes off someone else. In a twist of irony, oolichans, which have always been a trade currency among traditional Haisla, are now goods in short supply subjected to the rules of capitalist economy. So this story complements the previous illustration of cultural and ecological precarity, as Robinson emphasizes at the end of this section: “I hate to think of thousands of years of tradition dying with my generation. If the oolichans don’t return to our rivers, we lose more than a species. We lose a connection with our history, a thread of tradition that ties us to this particular piece of the Earth, that ties our ancestors to our children” (23). Such precarity, however, is interwoven with resistance, however small in scale. Robinson’s father, after arriving home with the purchased oolichans, sets to putting the fish up in the smokehouse in the traditional Haisla way his mother used to do, only in much larger numbers. Robinson herself admits that she is “re-learning” some of the cultural traditions (32–33), practicing the nusa on herself. The method of “storying up” this knowledge through family anecdotes comes close, in my view, to Lee Maracle’s concept of oratory, of passing on Indigenous knowledges.

In the final part, Robinson begins with a paratextual commentary on writing her novel Monkey Beach, switching into a literary critical mode while also reflecting on her education and the beginnings of her own writing career. Writing the novel has been an empowering experience for Robinson’s personal and communal belonging: for example, a major dilemma when composing the novel was how to shape the stories involving Haisla community life and follow Haisla protocols at the same time. Robinson resolves this dilemma by consulting with family and community elders (31). Another empowering experience was Robinson’s participation in the Haisla culture-immersion Rediscovery Camp which, as she admits, “heavily influenced the structure and content of Monkey Beach” (33). Her efforts to re-learn traditional Haisla knowledge and stories that accompany this knowledge also include her hope to see a Sasquatch, stories of which, passed down the generations, she has been hearing since her childhood (36). She finally decides to make the speedboat trip to the Monkey Beach (just like the main character in her novel) with her father, trying to be inspired by the journey. However, when they arrive, she is disappointed by the “tiny cove” (38) as the reality seems to intervene in her constructed, literary image of the place. Even as Robinson retells the traditional tale of Sasquatch, making a point about family storytelling and memory (as her father is presented as having expert knowledge of local history and mythology), she does so with a modernized twist (39). It could be argued that Robinson has managed to reconcile “traditional protocols and modern storytelling” (the subtitle of her lecture) by taking over stories embedded in Haisla mythology which the family and/or community agree on presenting to the public, and turning them into modern Haisla storytelling which is, nonetheless, intertwined with contemporary, mainstream popular culture. The very final line, with which her father responds to Robinson’s playful disappointment about the absence of “hungry Sasquatches” (41), can be read as a metaphor about the survival of Haisla culture in modern Canada: “‘They [Sasquatches] must be at home,’ Dad says with a smile, ‘writing’” (41). This is the ultimate balancing act of Robinson’s text — aware of the vulnerability of Haisla culture, she becomes an avatar of Sasquatch herself, keeping particular traditions alive but adapting them to the twenty-first century. Such an ending attests to Robinson’s interest in the creative expression of Haisla agency and resilience as a way of overcoming cultural vulnerability.

Unsettling the audience

Tomson Highway’s lecture, captured in the published form in A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism is, in fact, not a lecture but rather a multimodal performance and this performative character translates into the written text. Not only does Highway move effortlessly between several languages, English, French, and Cree included, but he also switches between storytelling and playing music on the piano present on the stage, and even includes what could be described as elements of stand-up comedy. His performance covers a spectrum of discourses, namely music, linguistics, philosophy, history, and cultural geography, while wrapping it neatly within the multiple layers of his autobiographical narrative as well as his characteristic humour. Using humour as well as confrontation, Highway insinuates the cultural superiority of his ancestors, while at the same time denouncing the ongoing material precarity of Indigenous lives, particularly those of the missing and murdered Indigenous women. Highway’s text is notable for three rhetorical strategies which are activated to expose a certain paradox. These strategies which are unpacked below are the following: first is the use of Highway’s autobiographical story to convey an illusion of connecting with the cross-cultural, presumably non-Indigenous audience or readers through familiarity, identification, and empathy, while in fact it communicates cultural difference through defamiliarization. The second strategy concerns the way in which Highway offers to share knowledge through a kind of school lessons, namely in geography, linguistics, ethnography, and music, and playfully positions himself as a teacher, a figure of authority, a knowing subject, while his audience or readership is deliberately positioned as an unknowing subject in need of educating. Finally, the third strategy involves the use of Highway’s trademark humour and seemingly innocent jokes to allude to a fantasy of cross-cultural and cross-racial reconciliation, while in fact he challenges, confronts, and even subtly ridicules his audience or readers. This moment of offering connection and sympathy while simultaneously confronting the audience and readers with the history of violent colonization creates an ambivalence which communicates the resilience of First Nations discourses but also ultimately precludes a redemptive healing or an easy closure.

Similarly to Robinson, Highway also employs the auto/biographical imperative in his introduction: his very first sentence starts with “I was born at Four Corners [in Northern Manitoba]”. What follows is a half-fictionalized explication of the geography of the place which is “so far north” (reiterated several times) that not only did European languages not arrive there yet (2015/2014: 5) ¹¹ but the land was unknown even “to the most adventurous of Europeans, whether fur trader, missionary, prospector, cartographer, or Avon saleswoman” (6). Highway’s emphasis on his family coming from the “northern” and “nomadic people” who crisscrossed the Dene territory “by dogsled in winter, canoe in summer” (5) is ironically juxtaposed to the cherished myth of Canadian national identity as being defined by the North. Even though Highway graciously disclaims his own earlier comment about having been born in a snow bank as half-fictive by playfully correcting it to having been born “in a tent pitched in a snow bank” (9), it becomes clear that his claim to Northernness and settler Canadians’ claim to Northernness are two very different things. As if this was not clear enough, Highway goes on to emphasize the multilingual and multicultural environment of his childhood. He and his siblings spoke fluently three Aboriginal languages when they were growing up (namely Dene, Cree, and Inuktituk). Only at school did Highway learn European languages, paradoxically Latin before English and French — a clear allusion to Highway’s attendance of a residential school. This can be read as a moment of defamiliarization and insistence on cultural difference. On the one hand, Highway bears witness to pre-colonial Indigenous cultural superiority (and also provides a counter-narrative to the legitimization of European colonization), but simultaneously he describes how this cultural superiority means very little to the dominating power — it does not prevent Highway from being sent to the residential school. It could be said that his life, in Butler’s sense of precarity, is not deemed of being recognized and valued; it is not “livable” (Butler, 2004: x). When Highway, perhaps surprisingly, claims that attending the residence school was a “positive experience for [him]” (20), his statement is immediately undermined by the following ironic comment which further disorients the audience/readers: “Because of the practicality of Jesuit-style regimented education that I got in that school, for one thing, I enjoy a thriving international career” (20). ¹² Thus Highway complicates dominant culture’s expectations of an Indigenous life story: having grown up in what he calls the northern “lost paradise” (20), later educated in classical music and Latin, a residence school survivor, successful in his career and openly gay, Highway deliberately evades all attempts to project stereotypical images of Indigeneity. In this sense, his autobiographical framing resists the commodification of his story.

A similar goal is achieved by integrating a series of quasi-lessons in which Highway presents himself as a teacher educating his audience. His lessons include an introduction to basic Aboriginal linguistics and the diversity of Indigenous languages (8); an extensive commentary on the construction of Cree and Dene cultural and gender identities (15–16); an explication of certain aspects of the Cree universe (17–18); and even a lesson in music. Highway tests, teases, and taunts his audience with a series of Cree sounds and syllables, with conjugating several Cree verbs, as if challenging his audience to step out of their comfort zones, to imitate his pronunciation, to taste the linguistic difference — put differently, to try to imagine multilingualism (the subtitle of his lecture). This is multilingualism not in the usual sense of Anglophone and Francophone Canada but in terms of the linguistic history of Canada’s First Nations. Judith Butler gives an example of illegal immigrants in the US signing American anthem in both English and Spanish to argue that “to sing the anthem in Spanish is also to call attention to the cultural presence of the Spanish language” (2004: v). It can be suggested that Highway, by insisting on using Cree in this public space, does what Butler describes as the right “to assert the multi-lingual reality of the public sphere, and to refuse those privatization strategies that require English in the public, and relegate other languages to the home, regarded of course as a pre-political sphere” (2004: v).

These lessons, and there are many more of them, relate intimately to how Highway uses double-edged humour to entertain and enlighten as well as confront and challenge. For example, he uses his cheeky humour to lure his audience into sharing a cross-cultural moment when he jokes about a Hail Mary contest in Cree. The purpose is to demonstrate the comicality of Cree as “the world’s funniest language” (11) because it “comes from the laughter of a cosmic clown, as he/she has been called, a merry-maker called the Trickster” (11). But, in the same breath, Highway also gently unsettles the audience after speaking in Cree for a while: “You see, you don’t even know what I’m saying but you’re laughing already” (13), as if mocking their ignorance, laughing at them rather than with them. When Highway explicates some aspects of the Cree universe, he concludes with a powerful appeal, again addressing his audience directly: “without speaking other languages, you would never know these facts. You would never know such a vision of life, one so different from yours, existed” (19; emphasis in original). Through such statements, Highway positions Western epistemology as rather rigid and narrow-minded, while an Indigenous worldview is presented as a valuable, credible, and legitimate source of knowledge.

The sternest critique, and certainly the most confrontational moment for non-Indigenous audience, comes after Highway explains in detail the absence of gender hierarchy in most Aboriginal languages, stressing the centrality of women in most Indigenous belief systems which leave “plenty of room for the notion of God as Female” (17). The contrast between what he calls a “phallic superstructure” of some European languages and the “yonic superstructure” of Aboriginal worldview serves him to bring up the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women:

Just to avoid another case of our late Cree sister, Helen Osbourne, who was murdered by being stabbed in the vagina fifty-six times with a screwdriver, to avoid another case of Robert Pickton and his twenty-nine victims, to avoid another Prince-George-to-Prince-Rupert Highway of Tears where dozens of Native women continue to be murdered in cold blood, we need fifty-six genders, to my way of thinking, if only to honor those fifty-six legendary screwdriver stabs. (17)

This is a very chilling and unadorned warning that stands out among Highway’s moments of confrontation in his performance. In theoretical terms, it could be argued that Highway’s drawing attention to gendered violence alludes to Butler’s notion of “corporeal vulnerability” in relation to Indigenous (women’s) bodies: “This vulnerability [to the other that is part of our bodily life], however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, especially those in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited” (2004: 29). The question this discussion wants to pose is whether Indigenous intellectual tradition present in contemporary nonfiction may be thought of as having the task, in Butler’s words, of “maintaining grief” (2004: 30) — in other words of bringing up, again and again, the lives, the cultures, the ecosystems of Indigenous knowledges, making them visible, recognizable, and, indeed, “mournable”.

Conclusion

In her article “Who Said ‘Vulnerable’? Literature, Canada, Precarity, Affect”, Eva Darias-Beautell argues that discussions of vulnerability and precarity are particularly relevant for Canadian contexts because in Canada, “the experiences of settlement, migration, national or cultural belonging […] have always been tied to forms of dispossession as well as the expression (or the denial) of identities and basic rights” (2019: 7). Indigenous nonfiction can be instrumental in shedding light on this inseparable entanglement of settler colonial possession and Indigenous dispossession as well as the intricate relationship between vulnerability and resistance, relationship in which, as theorists such as Judith Butler and Marianne Hirsch have shown, a deliberate exposure to power also encompasses spaces of agency, (political) resistance, and responsiveness (Butler, 2016: 22; Hirsch, 2016: 80).

This article has demonstrated how two selected Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson and Tomson Highway, who may be seen as representing two different genders, two different generations and two different cultural backgrounds, relate to the precarity of contemporary Indigenous lives and cultures; and how they creatively turn vulnerability into a powerful tool through which they can “interpolate” their audiences and readers, calling for an ethical response. Interpolation, defined by Bill Ashcroft as the process “by which colonized subjects may resist the forces designed to shape them as ‘other’” (2001: 47), is informed by the “capacity to interpose, to intervene, to interject a wide range of counter-discursive tactics into the dominant discourse without asserting a unified anti-imperial intention, or a separate oppositional unity” (Ashcroft, 2001: 47). In this sense the analysis of the two Henry Kreisel Lectures reveals how particular rhetorical strategies can be mobilized “to interpose, to intervene, to interject” in the dominant society’s construction of Indigeneity as vulnerable and precarious. Highway’s strategy is to at first seduce cross-cultural audience and readers with playfulness and humour, only to unsettle and confront them with the nation-state’s continuing gendered violence. Robinson’s strategy combines the traditional Haisla and modern Canadian ways of telling stories in order to illuminate what Gerald Vizenor calls the “survivance” of many contemporary Indigenous cultures. In this sense the two authors depict vulnerability as something which is important to communicate but which can also be transformed into an empowering tool.

The analytical part has also emphasized the double-edged nature of the above-mentioned strategies. On the one hand, the two authors emphasize the richness, sophistication, and complexity of cultural expression of their respective communities, demanding that this cultural expression be recognized, valued, and integrated in the foundational narratives of the nation. On the other hand, they also display the precarity of contemporary Indigeneity and Indigenous belonging — Robinson does that by subtly pointing to ecological and cultural precarity of the Haisla which is susceptible to neoliberal capitalist economy, while Highway keeps the visibility of the residential school legacy and continuing gendered violence in Canada in public spaces. Interestingly, these unsettling truths are often enveloped in playfulness, humour, and personal anecdotes, which may be interpreted superficially as an invitation to share, cross-culturally, our humanity. However, at the bottom there is always a sense of cultural and, indeed, ontological incommensurability. ¹³ Thus the two Henry Kreisel Lectures serve as good illustrations of a particular style of Indigenous nonfiction which combines exposing vulnerability with inscribing agency and simultaneously contributes to the diverse ways of constructing as well as problematizing representations of Indigeneity in Canada.