ESC: English Studies in Canada

Introduction

This essay examines how, as part of a wider pleasure-humiliation discourse in Canadian society, settlers are able to enjoy narratives of pain and suffering by racialized minorities and enjoy these narratives, masochistically; following the work of Amber Jamilla Musser, this masochistic enjoyment is dependent on knowing that the pain and suffering of Black and Indigenous bodies is actual, not imagined. Moreover, this enjoyment is contingent upon the reader’s ability to disavow and distance herself/himself/ themselves from the racist ideas underlying the fantasy. The racist fantasy of Indigeneity means that Canadians do not have to consciously believe Indigenous people are subhuman or that Indigenous women are “squaws”; instead, Canadians can believe that someone else out there believes it and there is a safe space of removal from the racist fantasy for their masochistic enjoyment to function. While there are many literary examples of this at work in the Canadian canon, the most extreme form of this enjoyment is the masochistic fantasy of becoming Indian which plays out in the phenomena of pretendianism. [End Page 55]

A critique of “Indigenous” literature

Indigenous critiques of the way Indigenous peoples and, more specifically, Indigenous women are portrayed by settler writers have existed for at least one-hundred-and-thirty years. In 1892, Mohawk performance artist and writer E. Pauline Johnson published her essay “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” in the Toronto Sunday Globe. In it, she takes issues with the way Indigenous women are portrayed in settler literature. Johnson observes the literary Indigenous woman is represented as a two-dimensional caricature who suffers the loss of her humanity, the loss of any affiliation with a real nation, and, finally, the loss of her life. Johnson writes: “[S]he must not be one of womankind at large, neither must she have an originality, a singularity that is not definitely ‘Indian.’ I quote ‘Indian’ as there seems to be an impression among authors that such a thing as tribal distinction does not exist among the North American aborigines” (2).

Based on her own experience as a Mohawk woman from Six Nations, Johnson makes the point that not only is the Indigenous woman in literature a caricature, but she is completely stripped of her femininity and appears to merely serve as a hollow plot device: the heroines in these settler stories are never uniquely recognizable as Mohawk, Ojibwe, or one of any other unique cultures but are what would now be referred to as pan-Indigenous.

Johnson goes on to discuss specific examples of such pan-Indigenous female characters from Canadian literature and describes the fate of the generic “Wanda” (the name she finds all Indigenous literary women are ascribed) in G. Mercer Adam and A. Ethelwyn Wetherald’s An Algonquin Maiden:

Poor little Wanda! not only is she non-descript and ill-starred, but as usual the authors take away her love, her life, and last and most terrible of all, her reputation; for they permit a crowd of men-friends of the hero to call her a “squaw,” and neither hero nor authors deny that she is a “squaw.” It is almost too sad when so much prejudice exists against the Indians, that any one should write an Indian heroine with such glaring accusations against her virtue, and no contradictory statements either from writer, hero, or circumstance.

(4–5)

The way Indigenous women were dehumanized and treated as stereotypes in Canada in Johnson’s time continues one-hundred-and-thirty years after the publication of her essay. Her argument that the fictional Indigenous [End Page 56] woman’s reputation is more terrible to lose than even losing her life in some horrible way such as drowning is an interesting one. These types of stereotypes about Indigenous women are severely damaging, and the disposability of life apparent in the abuse and murder of Indigenous women may be seen as inherently linked to these stereotypes.

These same issues are raised by Lee Maracle in her groundbreaking sociological book I am Woman. Although published almost a hundred years after Johnson’s essay, Maracle’s...