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Writing the Talking Stick: Alphabetic Literacy as Colonial Technology and PostcolonialAppropriationAuthor(s): Laura E. DonaldsonSource: American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1/2, (Winter - Spring, 1998), pp. 46-62Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185107Accessed: 07/05/2008 10:49

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Writing the Talking Stick Alphabetic Literacy as Colonial Technology

and Postcolonial Appropriation

Laura E. Donaldson

God hath added herein a further grace, that as Men by the former

[speech and reason] exceed Beasts, so hereby one man may excell another, and amongst Men, some are counted Civil, and more both Sociable and Religious, by the Use of letters and Writing, which others

wanting are esteemed Brutish, Savage, Barbarous. (Samuel Purchas, A Discourse of the diversity of Letters)

Our host has filled many notebooks with the sayings of our fathers as

they came down to us. This is the way of his people; they set great store upon writing; always there is a paper.... Whenever white people come together, there is writing.... The white people must think paper has some mysterious power to help them on in the world. The Indian needs no writing. Words that are true sink deep into his heart where

they remain. He never forgets them. On the other hand, if the white man loses his paper, he is helpless. (Four Guns, Oglala Lakota, at an 1891 dinner given by anthropologist Clark Wissler)

Not even the alphabet is without infinite relations to everything else. (William Holmes McGuffey, creator, McGuffey'sReaders)

I would like to begin this essay by telling a story-or more accurately, retelling one from Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich's novel about family and tribal relationships on the Turtle Mountain reserve in South Dakota. In this story, Albertine Kashpaw narrates an anecdote about her great-grandmother Margaret (Rushes Bear) and the beginning of compulsory Indian education in the late 19th century. When white authorities threatened to take both of Rushes Bear's sons, she allowed "the government [to] put Nector in school, but hid Eli, the one she couldn't part with, in the root cellar dug beneath her floor. In that way she gained a son on either side of the line. Nector came home from school knowing white reading and writing, while Eli knew the woods. Now, these many years later, hard to tell why or how, my Great-uncle Eli was still

Laura E. Donaldson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Women's Studies and American Indian/Native Studies at the University of Iowa.

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sharp, while Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wary and wild" (Erdrich 1993, 19). The respective fates of Eli and Nector exactly reverse the plot of the West's master narrative concerning literacy: in the normative tale, the "illiterate "Eli would suffer egregiously from his inability to read and write while Nector, who "wrote letters after five winters, each word formed as perfectly as the nuns shaped theirs "(Erdrich 1988, 39), would overcome virtually any obstacle in his journey toward success. Like other master narratives-of America as originally a "wilderness "or a "melting pot," for example-the myth of literacy as a salvific force mystifies not only the material and symbolic violence encoded in Eli and Nector's story, but also cloaks the crucial role of English alphabetic writing in facilitating the conquest of Turtle Island.

On the other hand, Erdrich's ironic assignment of Rushes Bear's memory to Albertine-a thoroughly urbanized woman pursuing a nursing degree precisely through "white reading and writing"-dramatically recounts another widely cir- culated story of literacy: one in which the passage from oral to literate creates an inescapable and downward spiralling vortex of power, corruption and loss (Clifford 118). Although this story unfortunately describes the experience of all too many American Indians, it also perpetuates the view that Native North Americans were always only victims of Western literacy and fails to ask how formerly oral societies, "far from being passively transformed by literacy, instead actively and creatively apply literate skills to suit their own purposes and needs" (Kulick and Stroud 31). Transcending these monolithic perceptions of alpha- betic literacy as either triumphalist comedy or tragic fall requires that we recon- struct its historically specific materials and cultural contexts and, in so doing, address the following questions: "how, when, where, why, and to whom the literacy was transmitted; the meanings that were assigned to it; the uses to which it was put ... and the real and symbolic differences that emanated from the social condition of literacy among the population" (Graff 4). Or, to paraphrase J. Elspeth Stuckey, we must relocate discussions about literacy within dicussions about communication and society the same way discussions of bricks and mud must imply issues of access to housing, unequal conditions of living and whether one can afford the cost of heating bills (83).

These are especially important questions for American Indians because in contemporary Western societies, English alphabetic writing has become so thoroughly naturalized that its function as a colonial technology has remained obscure. As a technology, the act of writing necessitates the use of tools and other equipment such as "styli or brushes or pens, carefully pre- pared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood, as well as inks or paints, and much more" (Ong 82); as a colonial technology, it assumed a prominent place alongside other complex and mobile technologies of power, including navigational instruments, ships, warhorses, attack dogs, and effective armor (Greenblatt 9). Writing worked alongside these more overt weapons of conquest to re-configure aboriginal cultures and bodies in

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ways functional for Euramerican imperialism. In his book Marvelous Possessions, Stephen Greenblatt observes that the

Europeans' perception of their "litterall advantage" united with their conviction of an absolute religious truth to spawn an overwhelming sense of superiority toward the peoples they encountered: "The key to 'the litterall advantage' is the fact that speech ... is limited to the present moment and the present auditors.... Those who possess writing have a past, a history, that those without access to letters necessarily lack. And since God 'speaks to all' through writing [the Bible], unlet- tered cultures (as distinct from illiterate individuals) are virtually excluded by definition from the human community" (10). In the possession of writing perpetu- ated notions of cultural superiority, its imposition upon these "unlettered cultures" also became a crucial part of the Euramerican colonial agenda.

I will attempt to excavate the contradictory characters of writing through a reading of Out Of The Depths, Isabelle Knockwood's memoir of the nine years (1936 to 1947) she spent at Shubenacadie, a Catholic Residential School in Nova Scotia. This instructional partnership between the Catholic Church and the Canadian government lasted from February 1930 to June 1967 and included a mandate to educate "underprivileged" Mi'kmaw children-a notoriously arbi- trary term designating those who were orphaned, neglected or lived at too far a distance to permit attendance at any day school (Paul 266). Since her own family life was evidently very warm and secure, Knockwood clearly fell into the latter category. In collaboration with Knockwood's text, I will consider not only the subjugating effects of English alphabetic literacy, but also how contempo- rary Native people have appropriated this writing for their own purposes and within their own thought systems-in Knockwood's case, through the Mi'kmaw epistemology of the Talking Stick. With this in mind, then, we can now examine the "litterall" advantage and the disciplines of writing.

The Discipline of Writing

An' the school teacher he learn 'im how to read an shade 'is letters when he write, but didn't teach 'im how to make two blades o' grass grow out o' one .. . Everything like that make the Injin no count, except give jobs to government clerks.

(Hotgun, aka Alexander Posey, Fus Fixico Letters)

Scholars have made a number of claims about English literacy's impact upon predominately oral societies, ranging from broad (and, I believe, largely insupportable) philosophical claims about writing's inevitably alienating and objectifying ontology to the more genuine problem of how it bypasses tradi- tional learning processes. Rather than resort to this often problematic and essentialist debate, however, I prefer to speak in terms of writing's modes of production and the institutional-ideological dynamics undergirding its prac-

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tices. As Daniel McLaughlin notes in his important research on written Navajo, the meaning of literacy exists as an effect of power, i.e., the "convergence of innumerable tactics immanent in the specifics of time and place and con- structive of negative and positive moments" (163). Unfortunately, the colonial implementation of English alphabetic writing engendered mainly negative moments for America's first peoples, and was primarily used to develop a new political anatomy of the aboriginal body. One glimpses an exceptionally revealing example of what this new anatomy implies in a passage from Out Of The Depths, Knockwood's moving autobiography:

When I was first raising my children they always asked for stories. As I put them to bed, I would tell them-some fairy stories, some Bible stories-but mostly stories I'd made up about plants, animals and the earth. After they were asleep and I was alone, I would begin to scribble down everything I could remember about my own childhood-trying through these other stories to make sense of everything that was wrong about my life at the time. Much of what I wrote down in that secret scribbler dwelt on things that had happened while I was a student at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie. They even took the form of assignment presentations I'd done at the school-my name and address neatly written at the top. As soon as each story was finished, I would rip it up so that no one could see it. (9)

The experience at Shubenacadie affected her profoundly, and even as a mature wife and mother, she still exhibited the deeply ordered regimentation of her Westernized schooling. However, that her stories initially assumed the form of assignment presentations suggests much more than the rigid pedagogical views of the nuns who taught her.

The above vision of Knockwood precisely printing her name at the top of each page evokes another, more historic, signifier of Native literacy-the silhouette of a boy holding a pen with which Battiste Good ended his Wan'iyetu wo'wapi, or winter count. Like this figure for the final "Sent-the- boys-and-girls-to-school-winter (1880), "Knockwood's self-image functions as a poignantly stark reminder of the culturecidal forces that alphabetic writ- ing unleashed upon the Dakotah, the Mi'kmaq and other Indian peoples. I put writing within the context of culturecide because the ideology motivat- ing its teaching demanded nothing less than the disappearance of distinct American Indian cultures. Lt. Richard H. Pratt, custodian of the Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne prisoners at Fort Marion, Florida and subsequent founder of the Carlisle Indian School, succinctly and chillingly summarizes this goal when, in an 1892 address delivered to the Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, he notes: "A great general [Philip Sheridan] has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. ... In a sense, I agree with the

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sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man" (Prucha 260-261).

Shubenacadie's program for killing the Indian and saving the man (or woman) involved forcibly disconnecting students "from everything our par- ents and elders had taught us, and teaching them "everything new ... in an atmosphere of fear" (Knockwood 50). One might define the Shubenacadie method, which was also adopted by a majority of Indian boarding schools in Canada and the United States, as the coercive inculcation of a Westernized habitus, i.e., a set of structured and durable dispositions that incline agents to act and react in certain Eurocentric ways (Thompson, Editor's Introduc- tion, in Bourdieu 12). John Sargeant, an early missionary to the Housatonic people, concretely illuminates the meaning of this statement for Native North Americans in a letter he wrote proposing the establishment of "a Charity- House for the instruction of our Indian children." The good Reverend declared that the goal of this institution would be nothing less than changing the Indian's "whole habit of thinking and acting "(Axtell: 199). In this state- ment, one of the first architects of mission education unwittingly articulates the nature of the habitus and its inseparability from "ways of looking, sitting, standing, keeping silent, or even of speaking" (Bourdieu 51).

According to the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, such behaviors are full of injunctions that are hard to resist precisely because they are silent and insidious, insistent and insinuating" (51), and because we acquire them through a gradual process in which early childhood experiences become par- ticularly important. Indeed, he argues, the habitus of any individual becomes "second nature" through an infinite variety of mundane training and learning mechanisms (e.g., the teaching and learning of table manners). As one of many such mechanisms, English alphabetic writing performs a discrete but crucial task in transforming the habitus of its American Indian learners, and in replacing a Native symbolic literacy with a Western sequential one.

In her important essay, "Micmac Literacy and Cognitive Assimilation," Marie Battiste (Mi'kmaq) describes symbolic literacy as an embodiment of tribal epis- temologies that interacts with and depends upon a collective oral tradition. Aboriginal texts such as winter counts, wampum, petroglyphs and pictographs use "ideographic symbolization of concepts and ideas... Indians supplemented the oral tradition with ideological categories which helped to record and store valuable knowledge, information, and records on available natural materials such as birchbark, rocks and shells" (Battiste 25). In almost all Native North American cultures, symbolic literacy displayed an "awareness of a highly con- crete ideal implicit in the reality of nature. It knew no distinction between is and ought or between theory and practice" (Battiste 27). It was this kind of con- sciousness that the teaching of sequential literacy sought to eradicate.

One very characteristic example of inculcating a Western sense of sequence emerges from the bell schedules that organized most residential

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schools. As Knockwood sardonically notes, "my institutionalized education began with bells" (48). In his own memoirs of St. Peter Claver's School (another Canadian Catholic institution), Basil Johnston (Anishnabe) calls this tactic "sound management":

Bells and whistles, gongs and clappers represent everything connected with sound management-order, authority, discipline, efficiency, system, organization, schedule, regimentation, conformity-and may in themselves be necessary and desirable. But they also symbolize conditions, har- mony and states that must be established in order to have efficient man- agement: obedience, conformity, dependence, subser- vience, unifor- mity, docility, surrender. (43)

At Shubenacadie, for example, a precisely orchestrated bell schedule "sound-managed" the lives of its Mi'kmaw students from morning until night. Early in the morning, bells called the Sisters to prayer; at 9:00 A.M., they called the students to class; at noon, the dinner bell sounded, and another rang at 1:00 P.M. to announce the beginning of afternoon classes; at 3:00 P.M. bells closed classes. According to Knockwood, the eighth bell of the day "was the supper one which had a different sound because it was smaller and finally, the bell calling us to Benediction. Nine bells in each day" (48). Residential schools mobilized their bell schedules to control activity through an increasingly minute division of time and to indoctrinate Indian students with a decidedly Westernized sequential consciousness. However, as Michel Foucault notes, the precision and application of the bell schedule/time-table "are not the newest thing" about such strategies, which Foucault calls "disciplines" (151). To perceive their more genuine innovations, one need only understand how disciplines such as bell schedules or alphabetic writ- ing, established a whole new set of body-object articulations and, in so doing, transformed the Native production of knowledge.

"Much of what I wrote down in that secret scribbler dwelt on things that had happened while I was a student at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie. They even took the form of assignment presentations I'd done at the school-my name and address neatly written at the top" (Knockwood 9). Knockwood's adult writing of her name and address neatly at the top of the page-inspired by thousands of repetitions during her school years-embodies exactly such a discipline, or that intimate power of "attentive 'malevolence' which is also a political anatomy of detail" (139). Although Foucault's discussions of power have been much revised and re-visited over the last decade, his concept of "discipline" still gives us an extremely helpful vehicle for thinking through the impact of writing not only upon Knockwood, but also upon all American Indians. In Discipline And Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault observes that in the 19th Century, methods of coercion

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acting upon and regulating the body assumed a new importance: 'These methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called 'disciplines"' (137).

While disciplines emerged from many different sites, the Indian residential school demonstrated a unique capacity for producing "methods of coercion" to contain their pupils-among them the bell schedules previously discussed. K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Creek) documents how the immersion of young Indian women in residential school kitchens, and sewing and laundry work, func- tioned as a "training in dispossession under the guise of domesticity, developing a habitus shaped by messages about subservience and one's proper place" (231).' According to Lomawaima, these gender-specific disciplines produced a new image of the female Indian body, which was molded by the dictates of Victorian decency and the cult of True Womanhood (228). Yet another discipli- nary site surfaced in the way many residential schools clothed and identified Indian children. As Knockwood relates, Shubenacadie issued all its students uniforms with black and white vertical stripes, which she later discovered were virtually identical to prison garb at the time. Students were also given numbers for names: "I was 58 and Rosie [her sister] was 57" (Knockwood 28). Such sterile regimentation stripped students of their culturally distinct identities, thereby clear- ing the way for a new, Europeanized sense of self. The curriculum of teaching the English alphabet served a similar purpose.

Most of us are able to read (or write) essays such as this one because at some point we successfully negotiated basic graphological skills. I use the word "skill," i.e., a practice coded with positive value, advisedly because disciplinary technologies do not usually operate through explicit subjugation; rather, they produce new categories of subjects and objects (for example, writers and writing), incite and channel desires (making us want to learn writing), and generate techniques for monitoring and controlling bodily movements, processes, and capaci- ties (institutionalizing the teaching of "proper" writing).2 Even under the best circumstances, learning to manipulate those peculiar marks on the page known as "letters" can be a trying task. In order to properly evaluate this experience, literate adults need to remember their own struggle to master both the intellectual challenges of writing and its physical demands: the ability to sit still, to perform intricate feats of hand-eye coordination and to hold a pencil for what seems like hours on end. Indeed, according to Foucault, the result of successfully deploying the skill of good handwriting is the development of an entire gymnastics, or "a whole routine whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the index finger" (152).

Under the regime of 19th Century Euramerican graphology, both Native and non-Native students practiced endless drills that enabled them, for ex-

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ample, to leave exactly two-fingers' width between their bodies and the table as well as to keep their right arms three fingers' width from the body and five fingers from the writing surface (Foucault 152). These minute body- object articulations illustrate how disciplinary technologies do not simply take power away but instead invest it by developing positive competencies (Sawicki 64). Here, the positive ability to wield the pen in such meticulous ways not only produces proper writing; it also trains students' bodies in the very attributes (docility, obedience, usefulness) crucial for the successful reproduction of bureaucratic, capitalist and imperialist social structures.3 While most 19th century students were subjected to this regime, American Indian students experienced the gymnastics of alphabetic writing in a context of epistemic and physical violence.

Joe Julian, a contemporary of Knockwood's at Shubenacadie, vividly remembers how such symbolic and material brutality became inseparably intertwined:

I got tired of getting hit over the head so I thought I better stop talking Indian and learn English. I don't know what they were. Were they prejudiced or sadists? They liked to inflict pain. They thought that we were savages from the wild and it took me a long while to find myself. I used to work with white people sailing on the great sea but still I can't trust them. I still don't, that's just the way I feel. (Knockwood 97)

Knockwood herself recalls the dread students felt when the Sister said "take out your readers": "We all knew someone was going to get beaten because it took at least four or five years to get rid of our accents and some people never did" (49-50). At Shubenacadie, as well as Carlisle and many other boarding schools, the acquisition of literacy was saturated with this atmos- phere of fear. When combined with the coercive methods often used to effect compulsory education-deceit, forced removal of children from their parents, and even kidnapping-the positive and seemingly benign skill of writing becomes part of a much more malevolent history.

Alphabetic disciplines also threaten the interactive oral communication so characteristic of aboriginal cultures-an interaction beautifully conveyed by Out Of The Depths. In Mi'kmaw culture, communication is practiced according to the principle, Mukkpetteskuaw (literally, "Don't walk in front of people who are talking"), which originated in the ages-old belief that "everyone is a spirit and a conversation between people is a spiritual experience because they are also exchanging their most valuable possession, their word" (Knockwood 14). It is this deep connection between speakers and hearers that English writing's modes of production threaten to disrupt. In the Westernized context of Shubenacadie (and other boarding schools), communal acts of writing were discouraged by the use of single desks, seating patterns

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designed to enforce each student's isolation, the labelling of cooperative writing efforts as "copying" or "cheating," and single student homework assignments. Because it was taught through such practices, alphabetic literacy segregated individual Native students from their siblings, friends and other members of their tribe. The enforced speaking of English through the suppression of Native languages reinforced this segregation. As Knockwood relates:

The ruthless banning of Mi'kmaw in the school drove a wedge between family members. Freda Simon, for example, remembers that when she arrived at the school two years after her older sister they were com- pletely unable to communicate with each other since Freda spoke only Mi'kmaw and her sister spoke only English. The punishment for speak- ing Mi'kmaw began on our first day of school, but the punishment has continued all our lives as we try to piece together who we are and what the world means to us with a language many of us have had to re-learn as adults. (98)

The individualist ideology of all these educational acts encourages ways of know- ing that are potentially destructive to traditional aboriginal pedagogical systems. While every Native culture possesses its own system for transmitting knowl- edge, one can detect a general pattern in spite of these particularities. Helen Sekaquaptewa (Hopi) characterizes traditional tribal education as on-the-job- training, or learning in the "day-to-day school of experience": "Girls leamed from their mothers to grind corn, prepare the food, and care for the household. Men and boys met in the kiva in winter time for lessons in history, religion, and traditions-all taught in story and song."4 Observation, explanation, and imita- tion each have a part in this process, which some have called the "watch, then do" model of education. For example, if a person wished to know how to make baskets, they would go to a basket maker and watch them work. If that person were patient and watched long enough, "eventually the basket maker may ask you to do something-to hold onto this coil of sweet grass here, to help salve down that strip of ash. If you return the next day, and the next and the next, then one day you discover that you, too, know how to make a basket" (Bruchac 104). That this approach is still overwhelmingly preferred by American Indian and First Nations cultures is corroborated by the research of Carmen Rodriquez and Don Sawyer in their Native Literacy Research Report.

Prepared in 1990 for British Columbia's Ministry of Advanced Education, Training and Technology, the Native Literacy Research Report reveals that 95% of the aboriginal learners surveyed (adults on British Columbia reserves who were not enrolled in any adult education programs) describe their own educational process as "one-to-one teaching from experienced people. Watch- ing and doing with explanations along the way" (42). "Watch then do" stresses learning through seeing and understanding the entire process rather than just

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disconnected bits and pieces of it (Rodriquez and Sawyer 76). It also fore- grounds the role of elders, since neglecting their counsel possesses only negative consequences for aboriginal learners. The words elders speak constitute the major source of cultural information and represent the most important way of finding out about the past (Goody 150).

In his research on orality and literacy, Jack Goody observes that, while books increase a culture's capacity to store knowledge, they can also pro- duce significant modifications in how this knowledge is transmitted. Under the increasing dominance of English as a print commodity, the source of authority for both pupil and teacher now becomes the book, whose con- tents are memorized "the night before the lesson, the week before the exam" (Goody 163): "The whole process of literate education becomes a matter of absorbing abstracted knowledge through mediators, either directly from books or indirectly from teachers" (158). Consequently, it is not even necessary for the authority to make his own contribution to knowledge since he becomes the recognized mediator (Goody 163). Even if this mediation retains a significant oral component-reading aloud, teacher's lectures, singing, etc.-the fact remains that English alphabetic literacy displaces the traditional "watch, then do" modality of aboriginal learning. The term "elder" comes to mark those whom knowledge has by-passed rather than those who embody a tribe's wisdom; they become attached to the old instead of the new (Goody: 164). Through such pejorative processes as these, the disciplines of writing indel- ibly mark its Native practitioners with a colonial imprimatur. I use the word "imprimatur" because its connotation of official approval to print or publish, especially under conditions of censorship aptly characterizes the material production of English literacy in Native North America.5

I restrict this affirmation to English literacy because some very interesting studies have shown that creating syllabaries for aboriginal languages does not necessarily jeopardize the core values of those cultures. In one such study, J. W. Berry and J. A. Bennett investigated both the knowledge about, and usage of, the Cree alphabet by over 400 adults in Northern Ontario communities.6 Their research demonstrates that, in contrast to English reading and writing, Cree literacy entailed few social stratifications: there appeared to be little restriction of access to written materials, no monopolization of the script by particular groups or segments of society, no stress on the intervention of specialized mediators, and no emphasis placed on the difficulty of learning (Berry and Bennett 6). Even more importantly, the use of Cree script seemed to have enhanced rather than weakened tribal and familial ties. It functioned as a conduit for communication (letters), personal expression (written histories and family genealogies), and community news. As the authors note, the Cree made their syllabary an "essential" and "vibrant" element in their daily lives.

Berry and Bennett further observe that the intellectual requirements of ecological engagement, i.e., subsistence hunting, agriculture and their atten-

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dant practices, instead of the spread of literacy might account for the Cree's strong spatial-perceptual and cognitive-analytic abilities: "It is quite possible, then, that already developed spatial and analytic abilities permitted the rapid spread of syllabic literacy historically, and facilitates the apparent ease of individual adult acquisition of syllabics at this time" (8). Although this extremely important research raises provocative questions about the alleged "alphabet effect," its importance for our context is its differentiation of English from indigenous alphabetic literacies, and its attention to the specific utilizations of writing by particular groups. It suggests that the most destruc- tive element of English alphabetic literacy was its mode of production within aboriginal cultures rather than its intrinsic properties as a system of discourse. Along with narratives like Knockwood's, it corroborates Stuckey's contention in The Violence Of Literacy that "the violence of literacy is the violence of the milieu it comes from, promises, recapitulates. It is attached inextricably to the world of food, shelter, and human equaity" (94). In other words, how alphabetic literacy is taught and why it is used answers the question of its violence, and not any alleged qualities of the alphabet itself.

Yet, even under the most negative circumstances surrounding the imple- mentation of English writing, the relationship between material conditions and writing subjects is not one of inevitable determination, since this nexus can also engender conflict and contradiction. Disciplinary technologies do not only subjugate; they also produce possibilities for resistance (Sawicki 64). Indeed, within the story of cognitive imperialism that I have told, one discov- ers the possibility of resistance through the movement of graphematic tech- nology into an aboriginal epistemological frame. Out Of The Depths once again provides a dramatic example of this process in its metamorphosis of the writer's pen into a Mi'kmaw Talking Stick.

The Pen as Talking Stick

I said, waving the pen, "I am your worst nightmare: I am an Indian with a pen."

(Lucie Evers in Betty Louise Bell's Faces In The Moon)

Knockwood indirectly alludes to this contradictory joining of pen and Talking Stick when she affirms that "I am holding the Talking Stick. I have been talking about the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie for many years, and I still don't understand why the hurt and shame of seeing and hearing the cries of abused Mi'kmaw children, many of them orphans, does not go away or heal. I hope that the act of writing it down will help me and others to come up with some answers" (7). This pen, however, does not engender the literate debilita- tion suffered by Love Medicine's Nector; it instead displaces writing from its colonial framework and appropriates it within a Mi'kmaw system of knowledge.

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My rhetoric of displacement and appropriation in the previous statement is meant to suggest a geo-critical territory somewhere between relentless victimi- zation and outright confiscation. In Out Of The Depths, this territory appears when the pen-perhaps the paradigmatic signifier of colonial assimilation- becomes mapped with the topographies of Mi'kmaw culture.

In contrast to the isolation produced by English writing's modes of pro- duction, the pen as Talking Stick invokes the deep connections of Mi'kmaw oral and social traditions:

Our Mi'kmaw ancestors used the Talking Stick to guarantee that every- one who wanted to speak would have a chance to be heard and that they would be allowed to take as long as they needed to say what was on their minds without fear of being interrupted with questions, criti- cisms, lectures or scoldings, or even of being presented with solutions to their problems. An ordinary stick of any kind or size is used . . . The person who has a problem or issue holds the Talking Stick and relates everything pertaining to it especially everything they have done to solve it. After they are through, they pass the stick to the person on their left, following the sun's direction. The next person, Nekm, states everything they know about the problem without repeating anything that was already said . . . The Talking Stick goes around until it returns to the person with the problem or issue, who then acknowledges everyone present and what they have said. (7-8)

Just as an extended family pulls many disparate members within its nurtur- ing circle, the passing of the stick weaves a word net enmeshing each speaker within its strong yet unseen threads. This interaction clearly embodies the ethic of respect and loving attention so characteristic of this culture. In fact, early European visitors were greatly surprised and confused by the fact that the Mi'kmaqs not only honored their enemies' food caches and supply depots (Dickason 107),7 but also frequently feigned conversion to Christian- ity in order to avoid behaving discourteously to their guests. According to Daniel N. Paul (Mi'kmaq), "the truth is that the entire community considered themselves to be members of one extended family and, as such, used salu- tations towards one another that would have led an outsider to believe they were all blood related" (7). The importance of this spiritual and physical bond cannot be underestimated for it testifies to even more ancient affilia- tions: one of the stories told by Knockwood's mother explains that the Mi'kmaw language itself evolved from the sounds of the land, the winds and the waterfalls (Knockwood 15). The connective attributes of the pen as Talk- ing Stick also contravene Western autobiography's predominant emphasis on the "monologic" self by inscribing multiple lives and voices.

In The Voice In The Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon,

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Arnold Krupat distinguishes between the monologic Euramerican self, whose distinctive, special voice usually articulates a dominant discourse or order. This voice not only separates itself from others, but also allows only "a single voice to sound" (141). In contrast to this monologism, Krupat con- tends that American Indian autobiography (and the Native self) is character- ized by dialogism since it stems from "historically specifiable dialogues between two persons from different cultures"-Isabelle Knockwood's partner- ship with Gillian Thomas, for example-or "by one person alone who has had significant experience of two different cultures"-e.g., highly educated, bi- cultural writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko (141). The dialogic aboriginal subject is thus constituted "by the achievement of a particular placement in relation to the many voices without which it could not exist" (133). Knockwood's "particular placement" would certainly include her relation- ship to Mi'kmaw tribal voices as well the repressive intonations of Shubenacadie and the silent vocalization of English literacy.

However, this construction of Native autobiography and Native selves through a monologic versus dialogic dichotomy is misleading on several accounts. First, the hermetic seal that Krupat places around the "monologist" voice originates in an Enlightenment notion of autonomy that many would insist has never really existed. Every self-Euramerican, Indian or otherwise-is embedded within a constellation of social relationships: a point seemingly confirmed by Krupat's ad- mission that "the single voice on which the monologist settles is never his or her alone, but is derived from a social hegemony, as the many voices that the dialo- gist might represent are always the voices of social others" (Krupat 160). Second, while the dialogic might help to thematize the difference between Euramerican and aboriginal articulations of the self, it also suffers from a lack of connection with Native semiotic practices. That is, it imposes upon an extremely diverse body of texts and attitudes the useful, but often overused, theoretical framework of Mikhail Bakhtin, who actually developed the schema of monologism/dialogism to account for the semantic qualities of the modern European novel. I am not trying to argue that non-Native theories have no place in analyzing American Indian and First Nation experiences, histories and cultures. Quite the contrary, since I hope this essay has shown that, properly contextualized, they have much to offer. However, my reading of Knockwood's narrative reinforces my commitment to Native categories of cultural production.

In place of dialogism, whose abstractness fails to illuminate specific tribal traditions, I would offer the narrative staging of Out Of The Depths as a Talking Stick Ceremony. In this specifically Mi'kmaw mode, the person with the problem (in this case, Knockwood) relates everything that pertains to it and then passes the stick to the next person, who states everything they know without repeating what has already been said. A microcosm of this larger pro- cess occurs when Knockwood details her early adjustments to the school's numerous deprivations. After regaling us with stories about how she and her

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sister Rosie coped with the punishments for speaking Mi'kmaq and for deviat- ing from the school's extremely austere behavioral codes, she passes the Talk- ing Stick, i.e., creates the space for other residents of the school to speak. The inclusion of lengthy, non-paraphrased excerpts from the accounts of fellow students allows them to clarify Knockwood's experience while simultaneously addressing their own problems. As Krupat notes, "to present many voices in one's text has the result of legitimating those voices; to present one language alone is to send a warning to all other languages to beware" (161).

For example, Peter Julian relates how neither he and nor his sister could "speak a word of English because at home we had spoken Indian-our native tongue. So they started off with an interpreter who was one of the older kids who told me if I was caught talking Indian again I was to be beaten and that sort of put a fright into me ... When I got out in '47, I knew very little of my native tongue"(Knockwood: 34). Contemporary Mi'kmaw poet Rita Joe brilliantly captures this contradiction in "I Lost My Talk," which renders her own experience of Shubenacadie:

I lost my talk The talk you took away When I was a little girl at Shubenacadie school.

You snatched it away: I speak like you I think like you I create like you The scrambled ballad, about my word.

Two ways I talk Both ways I say, Your way is more powerful. So gently I offer my hand and ask, Let me find my talk So I can teach you about me.

In what can only be construed as poetic justice, it is the discipline of writing that enables Joe-and Knockwood, for that matter-to retrieve this experi- ence from the silence of its previous suppression, and thereby begin its healing. Although the voices inscribed by the pen as Talking Stick cannot erase the harm already done, they can help to overcome the shame felt in "talking Indian" and create more vibrant voices from the ashes of the past (it is striking in this regard that the photograph on the cover of Out Of The Depths shows the school burning to the ground in 1985).

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But where, one might ask, does this leave us? Is Knockwood's narrative- or the larger narrative of English literacy-a story of how writing disciplined and negatively transformed her Mi'kmaw heritage, or how she and other of its victims triumphed over their adversity? "Neither and both" would be my somewhat cryptic reply. Like the Anishnabe Slave WomanJulia Emberley writes about in Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women's Writings, Postcolonial Theory, Isabelle Knockwood is neither "the unresisting victim of colonial expansion nor the ideal heroine, in control of the construction of her own historical subjectivity .. ." (123). Indeed, Emberley cautions, "both of these positions construct History as a fixed script in which the drama of coer- cive imperialist expansion is accepted a inevitable, entirely successful in its aims, and ultimately undefeatable in its logical and consistent unfolding along the path of progress" (123). Although Knockwood's loss of control over the construction of her Mi'kmaw subjectivity remains beyond doubt, what has often seemed less clear are the possibilities for resistance within this loss. In this respect, Out Of The Depths, as well as the tale of Native literacy, refuses the simplistically binary plot of either triumph or fall.

For those of us with deep roots in Native American cultures, the pen as Talking Stick cannot rewrite the past: as both colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation, it will always engrave a double-edged mark. Knockwood's pen records a message that, although we are subject to colonial history, we have not been totally subjected by it. And perhaps, in the not too distant future, this qualified appropriation might lead to full-fledged liberation.

Notes

1. I use the term "diaspora" deliberately since, in virtually all American Indian societies, the sense of being a distinct people is inseparable from particular geo-cultural areas. For the Navajo, one cannot replace Beautiful Mountain with another mountain or another sort of terrain. Thus, even though they might stay within what the dominant world recognizes as a discrete geographical area ("The United States," e.g.), the removal of a people from their ancestral lands does indeed constitute a diaspora, or scattering away from the mother country.

2. In saying this, I am not agreeing with Tzvetan Todorov's position in The Conquest of America that the lack of a written language was the single most important factor in Cortez's conquest of Montezuma. While writing parallels guns and armour in its technological status, it does not parallel them in its ability to enforce historical change upon a people. Writing played an auxiliary and not a central role in the success of the Conquest. It is a gross distortion of the actual history of colonialism to suggest otherwise.

3. After I had written this chapter, I had the good fortune to meet Professor Lomawaima and become acquainted with her work. For a more extended discussion, I would refer readers to her book, They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of the Chiloco Indian School (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

4. Sawicki is summarizing the insights of feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky in this pas- sage. See Sawicki, p. 83.

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5. Lomawaima details a similar regime of docile body-object articulations that emerged in teaching girls and young women the domestic arts of sewing. According to Lomawaima, "fe- male students were drilled not only in the correct motion of the arm in taking stitches but also in marching, breathing, calisthenics, and games" (233). Women were also taught to sit in an erect position and never to rest any part of the arm on the desk.

6. As quoted in Coleman, Children, p. 15. See Sekaquaptewa, Me and Mine: TheLife Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969).

7. This definition is from the American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition.

8. The Mi'kmaq continuously occupied much of eastern Canada and even northern Maine for at least 10,000 years. Although they were traditionally hunters of marine mammals-seal, walrus and small whales-they quickly adapted to forest hunting after European contact. After contact, their numbers eventually dropped from a population which some have estimated was as high as 35,000 to 3,000. See Dickason, Canada's First Nations.

9. I do not mean to create a straw monolith in summoning "the Western autobiographical tradition." After all, even as early as the medieval period, Julian of Norwich was articulating her life as an abbess in terms radically different from St. Augustine's paradigmatic model of the Christian self in the Confessions. A large body of both feminist and gay/lesbian scholarship over the last 20 years has persuasively argued that straight and lesbian white women and women of color as well as gay men have been forced to invent new forms in order to write their own lives-including strategies very similar to Krupat's American Indian "dialogism."

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