Balancing discourse and silence : an approach to First Nations women’s writing ...

• Main Author: Seaton, Dorothy
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2008
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0086408; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0086408

This thesis considers the critical implications of a cross-cultural reading of First Nations women’s writing in this time of sensitivity to the issues of appropriation and power inequities between dominant and minority cultures. A genre-based study, it is written from a deliberately split perspective: reading as both a white academic implicated in the dominant culture's production of meaning and value, and as a lesbian alienated from these same processes, I both propose and perform several modes of response to First Nations texts. Interspersed with a conventional commentary is a secondary, personal commentary that questions and qualifies the claims of the critical. Then, another level of response, in the form of fiction and poetry based on my own experiences growing up with my Assiniboine sister, also proposes the appropriateness, in this critical power dynamic, of a third response of simply answering story with story. Chapter One examines the construction of individual identity and responsibility in Maria ...