Critical Literacy: Who Speaks for Whom? Representation in Canadian Poetry

Hook: who holds the pen?

Imagine two descriptions of you. One is written by a stranger who watched you for a few minutes at a bus stop. The other is written by you. Which one would you trust? Which one would you want printed in a school textbook for a hundred years?

For a long time, many of the poems and stories about First Nations, Métis and Inuit people that Canadian students read were written by outsiders. Some of those outsiders also held real power over the people they wrote about. Critical literacy asks us to notice that, and to seek out the voices of people speaking for themselves.

Text A: an outsider's portrait

Duncan Campbell Scott (1862 to 1947) was a well-known Canadian poet, one of the group sometimes called the Confederation Poets. He also spent his whole working life in the federal Department of Indian Affairs. As deputy superintendent general, its top official, he led the department from 1913 to 1932, and in 1920 the Indian Act was amended to make residential school attendance compulsory for First Nations children aged 7 to 15. He is often quoted as saying, in 1920, that he wanted to get rid of the Indian problem.

His sonnet The Onondaga Madonna was published in his collection Labor and the Angel in 1898 (it is sometimes dated 1894, when it may have been written). It begins:

She stands full-throated and with careless pose, This woman of a weird and waning race, The tragic savage lurking in her face, Where all her pagan passion burns and glows;

The poem goes on to describe the baby she holds as a sign of her nation's doom.

(The Onondaga Nation is one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and Onondaga people continue to live in their communities today, in Ontario and New York State.)

Reading it critically

• Whose voice? Only the speaker's. The woman never speaks. The speaker claims to read her inner life (pagan passion burns and glows) from her face.
• What words? Weird, savage, pagan: labels that mark her as strange, uncivilized and non-Christian. Waning race: the idea that her people are fading away.
• What belief is behind it? The "vanishing Indian" myth, common at the time: the belief that Indigenous peoples were bound to disappear. This belief was false. About 1.8 million people identified as Indigenous in Canada's 2021 census, and the population is growing.
• Who benefits? If a people is believed to be vanishing, policies that take away their land, languages and children can be presented as natural or even kind. Scott's poem and his policies came from the same worldview.
• Is it skilful? Yes: it is a carefully made sonnet with vivid images. Critical literacy doesn't deny the craft. It asks what that craft was used for.

Text B: a self-representation

E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), whom you met in Lesson 4, wrote A Cry from an Indian Wife in 1885, during the North-West Resistance, when Métis and First Nations people in what is now Saskatchewan fought Canadian troops. It was later included in her collection The White Wampum (1895).

The speaker is an Indigenous woman whose husband is leaving to fight. She does not name her Nation. At first she says farewell; then she argues. She reminds the reader whose land this was:

They but forget we Indians owned the land From ocean unto ocean; that they stand Upon a soil that centuries agone Was our sole kingdom and our right alone.

(agone = ago.) The poem ends:

Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men's hands, By right, by birth we Indians own these lands, Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation low . . . Perhaps the white man's God has willed it so.

A note on language: the poem's opening uses words such as Red-skin and Brave, which were common in the 1880s and are offensive today. Johnson wrote for mostly non-Indigenous audiences in their own vocabulary, and turned that vocabulary toward a claim they did not expect: this land is ours by right.

Self-representation today

First Nations, Métis and Inuit poets continue to write powerful work in many styles. Look for these at your library (they are under copyright, so read the books themselves):

• Louise Bernice Halfe (Sky Dancer), Cree, from Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, who served as Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate: Burning in This Midnight Dream (2016), poems about residential schools and their effects on families.
• Marilyn Dumont, Métis: A Really Good Brown Girl (1996), poems about identity and growing up Métis.
• Jordan Abel, Nisga'a: Injun (2016), which builds poems from the language of old western novels to expose how they represented Indigenous people.

Notice how Abel's book does exactly what this lesson does: it puts old outsider language under a critical light.

Note: there is no "Just for fun" block in this lesson, because it deals with residential schools and the harm done to First Nations children and families.