Abstract
This article considers ways in which solidarity across social locations might play a role in fostering resistance to vulnerability. My case study consists of the interplay between writer George Ryga’s 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and Okanagan Syilx writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 novel Slash. While these important and compelling texts have received considerable critical attention, the relationship between them is less known. I am interested in the ways in which these works both hail and offer critique to one another. In the contemporary moment, in which questions of appropriation of voice have gained renewed urgency within Indigenous literary circles in Canada and beyond, the relationship between these texts speaks to a historical instance of appropriation, but also of complicated processes of alliance-building. These texts demonstrate how agency resides across multiple locations. I read Ryga’s Ecstasy in the context of Jeannette Armstrong’s engagement with the play within her novel Slash in order to witness the ways in which Ryga’s text, in the first instance, appropriates Indigenous voices into an anti-capitalist critique. In the second instance, I read these works in order to witness how they might simultaneously provide a compelling analysis of the vulnerability of the people who are the subject of both works. I compare the interplay between Armstrong and Ryga’s texts to contemporary debates around appropriation in order to argue for the historical and ongoing importance of these two works as precursors to the crucial interventions made by contemporary Indigenous critics and writers.
Keywords
This contribution to the special issue on vulnerable times takes an historical approach in order to consider ways in which solidarity across social locations might play a role in fostering resistance to vulnerability. My case study consists of the interplay between two well-known texts by two cultural figures who have worked in Canada: settler writer George Ryga’s 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and Okanagan Syilx writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 novel Slash. While these important and compelling texts have received considerable critical attention, the relationship between them is less known. I am interested, in particular, in the ways in which these writers’ published works both hail and offer critique to one another, producing what I see as a call-and-response interaction when read carefully alongside each other. In the contemporary moment, in which questions of appropriation of voice have gained renewed urgency within Indigenous literary circles in Canada and beyond, the relationship between these texts can speak to a historical instance of appropriation, but also of complicated processes of alliance-building. These texts, responding to the initial call for this issue, demonstrate the ways in which agency resides across multiple locations, and there is tremendous resistant potential in critically interrogating who speaks for whom.
In this article, then, I read Ryga’s Ecstasy in the context of Jeannette Armstrong’s engagement with the play within her novel Slash in order to witness the ways in which Ryga’s text, in the first instance, appropriates Indigenous voices into an anti-capitalist critique. In the second instance, I read these works in order to witness how they might simultaneously provide a compelling analysis of the vulnerability of the people who are the subject of both works, and subsequently to challenge depictions of vulnerability, voice, and agency. In order to do so, I provide background information on these writers before turning to the interplay between their works. This background is tied to my own rationale for interest in their works, as I come from a family that settled in the same territory as Ryga’s family did, and I was deeply informed by Armstrong’s Slash when I encountered it early in my post-secondary studies. I compare the interplay between Armstrong and Ryga’s texts to contemporary debates around appropriation in order to argue for the historical and ongoing importance of these two works as precursors to the crucial interventions made by Indigenous critics and writers in the present century.
Contemporary debates
Indigenous literary writing — and Indigenous arts more generally — are undergoing a flourishing in contemporary Canada, and, indeed, internationally — Canada itself already having many Indigenous nations within its geopolitical borders. This flourishing context can help to understand why the more historical intertextual links between Ryga and Armstrong’s works remain important today. It can also demonstrate the ways in which Indigenous writing in Canada has increasingly sought to exercise agency, or what many Indigenous critics might term sovereignty. In a Canadian context, Wolastoqiyik musician and tenor Jeremy Dutcher recently and impactfully characterized Canada as being “in the midst of an Indigenous renaissance” in a speech to accept a Polaris Prize for his musical achievements (CBC Radio, 2018b). His use of the term “renaissance” is not unique, and many critics have noted the tremendous recent growth in popular and academic interest in the field of Indigenous studies, characterized in literary contexts by the establishment of the new Indigenous Voices Awards (IVAs, which have thrice been awarded as of this writing) and the new Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA), founded in 2013 as a standalone scholarly organization dedicated to the study of Indigenous literatures. Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice, in his book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018), is able to focus on a range of lesser-known works in part because, by now, an emerging body of established Indigenous literary works is furnishing readers and scholars with an extremely strong corpus of texts.
These recent landmarks, however, come on the heels of many struggles, struggles that also remain, in important and poignant ways, ongoing. Ryga’s play predates what might be seen as the early works of the Indigenous literary renaissance, which begins perhaps with Métis writer Maria Campbell’s landmark autobiography, Halfbreed, first published in 1973 (and republished in a restored edition in 2019). The publication of early Indigenous literary works was a challenge. For instance, Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle notes in interview that she had many struggles with publishers over the years, working with small presses in financially precarious positions and even being sent out on a book tour without a printed book to distribute (Maracle, 2013: 55). The dedicated perseverance of a committed group of writers and publishers has led to a current generation of flourishing writers from coast to coast to coast within the colonial nation-state of Canada; particularly noteworthy is the establishment of Indigenous-owned and operated publishers like Kegedonce (in Wiarton, Ontario) and Theytus (in Penticton, British Columbia; Theytus is the publisher of Slash).
Yet the struggles with which contemporary writers contend in many ways mirror those of earlier writers. One of the key recent struggles has been the re-emergence of a debate about cultural appropriation, which has been identified as one of Canadian literatures’ many “dumpster fires” by Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott (2017). In an editorial preface to an issue of the literary journal Write, a magazine published by the Writers’ Union of Canada, then-Editor Hal Niedzviecki proposed what he termed an “Appropriation Prize”. Apparently intended as tongue-in-cheek “Swiftian” satire — as Niedzviecki later stated in an interview in the National Post (qtd. in Leck, 2017) — the editorial proposed the establishment of a prize to be awarded to any writer who successfully wrote from the position of another person marked by cultural difference from the writer. The proposal, however, marked as it was by the lightning rod term “appropriation”, drew immediate censure online and in print (Lederman and Medley, 2017). Some people — journalists like Kenneth Whyte and Anne Marie Owens (Leck, 2017) — wrote to support the prize and even pledged funds for it. Many, many more people, however, noted the impropriety of such a prize and condemned Niedzviecki for the tactless editorial in an issue of a magazine that was devoted to emerging Indigenous voices (see Taylor, 2017). Oji-Cree writer Joshua Whitehead, for instance — a writer whose work was included in the issue — wrote a lengthy response, in which he noted the ways in which appropriation is an uneven process in a literary marketplace in which Indigenous writers witness ongoing acts of appropriation taking place all around them. He writes that he is “deeply troubled and upset” by Niedzviecki’s move, seeing it as being of a piece in the ongoing settler-colonial history of what is now known as Canada. “Indigenous stories emerge from the ash” of what remains of such a colonial literary practice, he goes on to argue (Whitehead, 2017).
This particular instance of debate came to an at least partially satisfactory conclusion, although this outcome in no way erases the harm that was already done. Hal Niedzviecki resigned as the Editor of Write and the Writers’ Union of Canada issued an apology (CBC, 2017). More significantly, though, and partly in response to those who argued in favour of the award, an online campaign crowd-funded an alternative award, one to promote Indigenous writers’ works. After a very brief online campaign, the campaign surpassed its initial goal of raising $10,000 CAD, ending up with well over $100,000 CAD (Lederman, 2017). Now funded, the award was established, and the IVAs are currently administered by ILSA. Many discussions of this debacle and its outcome were posted online and these events are now beginning to be assessed in scholarly work.
Although for some the establishment of the IVAs on the heels of the Writers’ Union’s apology has appeared to settle the debate against cultural appropriation in literary works, especially in Indigenous contexts, the debate seems certain to continue as writers endeavour to grapple with Canada’s colonial legacy. Non-Indigenous writers seeking to make settler–Indigenous relations important to their works grapple with how to include these concerns in their works and will be judged accordingly. Writer Angie Abdou, for instance, experienced significant backlash for writing about the Ktunaxa community — a community with which she does not have an immediate personal connection — in her 2017 book In Case I Go (CBC Radio, 2018a; Sebastian, 2018).
These struggles, moreover, echo and in many ways reproduce the struggles around cultural appropriation that occurred during the earlier establishment of Indigenous literatures in Canada. In part in response to the works of settler writer W. P. Kinsella, whose short stories set in Hobbema (Mascwacis), Alberta, deliberately caricature Indigenous people for comic effect, Chippewas of Nawash writer Lenore Keeshig-Tobias wrote in 1990 against cultural appropriation, penning a well-known key editorial in the newspaper The Globe and Mail under the title “Stop stealing native stories”. Keeshig-Tobias notes a lengthy history of settler writers seeking to write about Indigenous people, and argues that such representations not only distort images of Indigenous people, but also prevent Indigenous people themselves from being able to articulate their own perspectives. In her words, such appropriative works “amount to culture theft, the theft of voice” (Keeshig-Tobias, 1990). When the “Appropriation Prize” debacle occurred, writers were quick to identify the close correlation between this debate of the 1990s and that of the 2010s, with many expressing grief over the fact that so little change appeared to have been effected. Anishinaabe writer and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, for instance, found Keeshig-Tobias’ article “heart-breakingly familiar” for the ways in which the arguments that she made in 1990 needed to be repeated almost 30 years later (Akiwenzie-Damm, 2017).
That these debates around appropriation erupted anew in the late 2010s was, in some ways, related to broader socio-political shifts. Keeshig-Tobias’ editorial and the response that it drew came during a period of ongoing Indigenous activist movements — like the Oka resistance that came to a head in 1990 — which played a role in bringing Indigenous issues into mainstream Canadian consciousness. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, launched in 1991 and with its report tabled in 1996, was a major intervention into Canadian policy writing, even if many of its recommendations have to this day not been implemented. These movements and moments were, in effect, building on the activist histories that are recorded throughout Armstrong’s Slash. In turn, the 2010s were marked by the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 and the Commission into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which tabled its report in 2019. Mass political mobilization took place through the activist network Idle No More as Indigenous people insisted on more equitable treatment. As settler Canadian publics were confronted with the legacies of colonization, in other words, individual acts of appropriation or backlash prompted renewed resolve from within Indigenous communities to ensure that their voices be heard.
Ryga and Armstrong: Historical context
In her 2017 analysis of its 40 years of impact on the Canadian theatre, Moira Day notes that the “compelling, frustrating play” The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (2017: 12) retains an important role in critiquing institutions such as mass education systems for their treatment of Indigenous peoples. Far from uncontroversial, Ryga’s play, read from a contemporary perspective, is deeply troubling for its depictions of Indigenous people as well as the institutions that they encounter. Its historical impact, moreover, suggests ways in which theatre and reading publics have shifted in their expectations. Although this play is not often read alongside Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash, these two texts maintain an important intertextual relationship when the latter responds to the former. Armstrong’s novel, in turn, is a complicated one that began as a project to educate high school students about Indigenous legacies across North America / Turtle Island. It remains a book that is both read and taught and it has helped to spark the marked increase in Indigenous literary production that followed it. In order to understand what is at stake with these texts, however, it is first necessary to understand the two respective writers under examination in this piece. While both George Ryga and Jeannette Armstrong are well-known writers within particular literary contexts, they are insufficiently known within broader circles of literary studies.
George Ryga was born in the rural community of Richmond Park in northern Alberta in 1932; he was likely delivered by my own great-grandmother, who served as the local midwife. His family had migrated to northern Alberta from Ukraine, and his father was one of the original settlers in the district. James Hoffman, Ryga’s biographer, describes the land on which Ryga grew up in negative terms: the “dispiriting” environment was made up of “heavy clayey soil, littered with stones”, partially “unusable”, which led to “subsistence living” on a “short growing season”, all contributing to the “spectre of mounting debts and financial ruin” (Hoffman, 1995: 21). Hoffman’s accounts mirror Ryga’s own in his works about the land on which he grew up. Ryga eventually left for Edmonton, first to work for the radio, and then to engage in the theatre. Travels in Europe followed in the 1950s and then his settlement in Summerland, in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. His thinking flirted with the communism then more prevalent on the left, yet he remained combative in his approach, finding it difficult to align himself with any particular set of dogmas. By Canada’s centennial year of 1967, Ryga had gained sufficient writerly stature to have been commissioned to write the Ecstasy by Vancouver’s Playhouse Theatre for production as part of that year’s celebrations. While the drafts, in Hoffman’s view, vacillate “between the competing demands of documentary and drama” (1995: 160), and while Ryga had earlier attempted a novel on the themes of the play (1995: 165), the play eventually settled into the script form in which it was produced and published. While the play remains the key text in Ryga’s career, it was preceded and followed by plays and novels that documented and analysed the struggles of people in various circumstances. Ryga’s work is hailed as foundational to the development of Canadian theatre. He lived in Summerland until his death in 1987. Until 2012, his former home was retained as the George Ryga Centre; the nearby Okanagan College has published a journal called Ryga: A Journal of Provocations; Summerland hosts an annual Ryga Arts Festival; and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature is given out annually at the B. C. Book Awards in that same province. His legacy, then, has proven to be lasting, and while he is less recognized in the province of his birth, Alberta, there is reason to note his ongoing influence on the creation and dissemination of progressive literary work.
Jeannette Armstrong, meanwhile, was born in 1948 and grew up on the Penticton Indian Reserve; she is Syilx Okanagan. Armstrong is associated with the development of the En’owkin Centre in Penticton, a space for Indigenous education and arts. Today, she is Canada Research Chair in Okanagan Indigenous Knowledge and Philosophy at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Slash, published in 1985, is heralded as one of the first novels — if not the first — to be written by an Indigenous woman in Canada. It has a lengthy critical history that surrounds it, and it has led not only to further publications, like her second novel, Whispering in Shadows (2000), but also to Armstrong becoming an important community leader. Her groundbreaking 1993 anthology Looking at the Words of Our People has had a major influence in the development of Indigenous literary studies. She remains an important advocate for Indigenous and environmental issues; essays like her text “Land Speaking” have sought to bring together these concerns, all while retaining a significant focus on Okanagan land, story, and language. Her influence in Indigenous conversations is broad, international in scope, and she was awarded the 2016 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for her services to literature, a major award given as part of the B. C. Book Awards.
Both Ryga and Armstrong, then, are authors and thinkers who have been recognized within the specific contexts to which they have contributed. Their works exist in dialogue with one another, as I will show in the following section. Their work provides an important opportunity to analyse contemporary tensions in literary communities around questions of representation, appropriation, and the ways in which alliances might be formed across social locations.
Ryga and Armstrong: Dialogues in their work
George Ryga and Jeannette Armstrong maintain, through their work, a dialogue with each other’s writing and ideas. Tracing this dialogue allows readers to unpack what might be at stake in settler–Indigenous relations for those writers between the late 1960s and the middle of the 1980s — and, by extension, to bring this dialogue to the heated contemporary debates about these same relations in Canada since the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015. I work here in chronological order, first discussing Ryga’s Ecstasy of Rita Joe before discussing Armstrong’s Slash, and then finally turning to Ryga’s foreword to Armstrong’s novel.
Ryga’s Ecstasy has a lengthy stage history and has been performed continually since it was first brought to the stage during Canada’s 1967 centennial celebrations. Its initial performance in Vancouver, British Columbia, was followed by a run in the capital, Ottawa, Ontario, which then led to publication and ongoing performances. A small but seemingly steady academic interest has followed the work, and the play was recently revived by Algonquin / Irish playwright Yvette Nolan. That performance was one that, critic Peter Dickinson argues, goes some way to reclaiming the problematic elements of the original script. 1 I focus, however, upon the initial versions of the play and the published script of the text. Ryga’s play centres around Rita Joe (who was played by white settler actress Frances Hyland in its initial run). Rita Joe is an Indigenous woman who has come to Vancouver to live, but who then runs afoul of white, colonial institutions and authorities. She is continually on trial throughout the play, with an increasingly frustrated Magistrate trying her in court at first for things like theft and vagrancy, and then later for prostitution, a charge that the play demonstrates is clearly set up by the police. 2 Rita and her love interest Jamie struggle against the urban institutions that would control and patronize them, like the benevolent Priest and Mr Homer, the latter of whom runs the drop-in centre where Rita and Jamie go for support. All the while, three shadowy Murderers lurk in the background. The play runs in compressed time, with Rita’s multiple visits to the courtroom overlapping and intersecting with the events that have brought her there, which are staged as flashbacks. Her father (who was first played by Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George) attempts to bring her home, but Jamie compels her to remain in the city, claiming that there is little for her to return to on her reserve. As these events unfold, on one side of the stage a folk musician plays music that seems to mirror the events onstage, chorus-like, except that the music has a sort of white-washed, uncomprehending ethos that captures the sentiments of while liberal benevolence that are, in large part, the object of Ryga’s critique. Events escalate until eventually the Murderers circle in on Rita Joe, brutally assaulting and murdering her.
While I find internal tensions within the play make it insurmountably problematic from a contemporary perspective, audiences at the time responded positively to the play overall. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was a decisive step in Ryga’s career, allowing him to continue to write for the stage, for radio for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and to work as a novelist from the Okanagan Valley community of Summerland, to which he moved as an adult, and in which he would reside until his death. In retrospect, some Indigenous writers have hailed the play as a major opening, an opportunity to begin to see themselves reflected sympathetically in literary works. Ojibway playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, for instance, claimed that the play was “a milestone in Canadian theatre in offering more accurate representations of the urban Indian experience” (1998: 226; qtd. in Pell, 2006: 247). While such a perspective is not by any means universal, the play had a widespread impact.
Yet The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is not an easy play. While Rita is not a voiceless Indigenous woman, as in some stereotypical depictions, she often comes across in the script as uncomprehending, buffeted against her will by colonial institutions — and she seldom seems to have much of a sense of her own will, either. The “ecstasy” of the title appears to be a religious one linked to her eventual martyrdom. She is, in effect, a sacrifice designed to bring white audiences to consciousness. The audience is repeatedly addressed in the play, and it is assumed to be composed of settlers with little awareness of Indigenous issues, something that audiences of the 1960s seemed to find appropriate to the play. In this formulation, Rita Joe is a spectacle for white audiences, and her death is an instrument to bring about their awareness. While Hoffman, in his biography of Ryga, strives to validate the ways in which Rita’s story becomes something that is more than just a representation of a life lost, and instead comes to represent “immense cultural loss that goes beyond class or ethnicity” (1995: 180), I find it difficult to be so generous. Rita Joe is in my view portrayed as a victim with little agency, and the play ends with the body of a(nother) brutally assaulted Indigenous woman onstage, a dynamic that contemporary Canadian discourses are much more frequently critiquing than they might have in the past (see Hargreaves, 2017, on this note).
It is important to observe how Ryga’s play appears, although it is not explicitly named, in Jeannette Armstrong’s novel Slash. That novel follows Thomas Kelasket, also known as Slash, as he grows up in the Okanagan, heads out on the road to the cities, moves into activist circles that take him across Turtle Island / North America, and then later returns to his home community. The novel is written from his perspective. His movements allow him to record the political events of the time, from the Occupation of Alcatraz between 1969 and 1971, to the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan to Washington, DC, in 1972, and to the Wounded Knee incident one year later — and beyond. Slash is, as a result, an important social as well as literary document because of how it records these key events in Indigenous activism; it can serve a pedagogical function of introducing younger readers to the social movements that came before them, as it has done when I have taught the novel. Early in the book, and, time-wise, during what is the late 1960s, Slash attends a staging of what could only be Ryga’s play.
3
The event is recorded in a single paragraph, as follows:
Around the same time a play came out about Indians in the city. While we were in Vancouver some of the chicks were pretty excited about seeing it. They got some tickets for a few of us, for free, and we went. I guess I didn’t think too much of going to see a play. The only kind I seen were at school and they were silly. This was different. It was a play, sure, but it was like real, too, by what it does show. It talked about what happens to Indians like us. It kind of looked inside us, I guess. At that time, it seemed like everybody was interested in us Indians, in one way or another. Few of them were as honest as that play. (1985: 54)
Slash, then, somewhat grudgingly gives the play recognition for being more honest than other depictions and treatments of Indigenous people. Slash uses expressions like “I guess I didn’t think too much of going to see a play” and that past plays “were silly” in order to indicate an ambivalent stance about participating in theatre-going, thereby demonstrating a resistant form of agency to having Indigenous stories told by a non-Indigenous playwright. He thus ambivalently situates the play itself as one written by an outsider who is nonetheless able to provide insight into Indigenous circumstances, and he situates it as a unique work worthy of note because of its honesty. While dismissively saying that “it was a play, sure” and again hedging with the expression “I guess”, Slash nonetheless shows some agreement with what the play depicts. As the novel progresses to discuss the events of the 1969 White Paper — a notorious proposal for Indigenous assimilation that was widely rejected — and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s concept of Canada as a “just society” — a concept radically critiqued by Cree writer, lawyer, and leader Harold Cardinal in his book The Unjust Society — settler institutions and depictions continually come under fire from Slash and his contemporaries. Ryga’s play, however, is recognized by Slash in Armstrong’s novel for being “as honest” as it could be.
That Ryga, in turn, writes the foreword to Armstrong’s novel provides further insight into the relationship between these authors’ texts and thinking. From the outset, Ryga’s foreword is recognizably an example of an Indigenous writer’s narrative being “authorized” or given credence by an established settler voice. 4 Ryga is seemingly torn in his analysis of the novel between a full-fledged recognition of Indigenous issues and a Marxist determinism that wants to reduce the issues in Armstrong’s writing to an economic core. He writes in his foreword that Slash is “a story of colonialism in Canada and the rest of this continent”, a story that pushes toward “an emerging will for liberation and self-determination” (1985: 9). In Ryga’s view Slash is also, however, a book that is about how the capitalism that was “introduced into North America was merciless in its quest to secure resources” (1985: 10), leaving “the lives and cultures” of Indigenous people “frozen into permanent patronage under the auspices of the public sector” (1985: 10). Ryga is seemingly, on the one hand, interested in the revolutionary desire for Indigenous self-determination, but also in how “modern capitalism” leads to the “exploitation of all disinherited people — be they black, poor whites, women, youths or the aboriginal civilizations” (1985: 11). Coming himself from a poor white background — one that was ethnically marked as distinct from the norm in Northern Alberta — this may be a gesture of solidarity on Ryga’s part. In his analysis, as a result, Indigenous issues are not only particular to the forms of colonization that have occurred (and are occurring) on Turtle Island, but they might also be subsumed into a Marxist argument for a counter-capitalist revolution.
I see in this tension between the particularity of Indigenous struggle and economic reductionism some of the same challenges that face The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. On the one hand, Rita’s challenges are particular to Indigenous people leaving reserves to move into the city (perhaps especially those who move to Vancouver, as depicted by more contemporary writers like Haisla novelist Eden Robinson). At the same time, that Ryga makes Rita Joe into a sacrifice in order to expose the injustices of settler society suggests that her own fate is for the playwright part of something “larger”, perhaps the faults of the capitalist system and the churches and charities that Ryga satirizes, as well as the well-meaning liberalism that he pillories. This tension between specificity and abstraction — between one particular life story and an allegory for capitalism — remains as unsolved in the play as it does in his foreword to Slash. Armstrong’s novel, in turn, demonstrates an awareness of the limits of Ryga’s critique; the ways in which the novel’s protagonist distances himself from the play at the same time as he recognizes its “honest[y]” shows that this attempted alliance between settler and Indigenous perspectives remains fraught.
Conclusion
The interplay between Ryga and Armstrong’s texts occurs well before the events just discussed in the first section, above. The more recent events that have occurred in Canada around cultural appropriation may provide, nonetheless, a lens through which to understand what is at stake in these texts, their interrelation and questions of agency in the context of vulnerability. When Ryga writes a play that focuses on an Indigenous character, he commits what can readily be perceived by contemporary standards as an act of cultural appropriation. Of this I have no doubt as a critic and reader. That The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was so readily received by largely settler audiences in the late 1960s speaks, at least in large part, to a lack of mainstream access to Indigenous texts by Indigenous authors at that time. When Armstrong responds to Ryga’s play in Slash, her protagonist’s ambivalence over the play marks not only a grudging acceptance that the play might be socially useful at a time when “everybody was interested in” Indigenous people, but also a concern that this representation is one that comes from outside of the community about which it is written. As such, it risks acting as a representative text that speaks for people who are perfectly able to speak for and represent themselves when given the opportunity to do so (as well as access to the literary means of production). Ryga’s foreword to Slash, in turn, redoubles this ambivalent relationship: on the one hand, Ryga recognizes that Indigenous struggles are key ones against colonial powers, thereby acknowledging the distinctiveness of what Anishinaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson terms Indigenous resurgence (especially in As We Have Always Done, 2017). At the same time, Ryga, in his subsumption of Indigenous activism into a larger anti-capitalist framework, not only performs a classic act of Marxist economic reductionism; he also appropriates Indigenous activism into his own particular brand of social struggle.
The interplay between Ryga and Armstrong, then, marks one iteration of the frequently tenuous nature of settler–Indigenous politics. While endeavouring to support a mutual resistance to vulnerability at the hands of colonial and capitalist powers, Armstrong and Ryga each perceive the other’s work in different registers. Armstrong critiques Ryga’s outsider stance, while Ryga endeavours to subsume Armstrong’s struggles under a broader banner. Even if his gesture is intended as an inclusive one, Ryga’s act can be, from a contemporary perspective, recognized as an appropriative one. The back-and-forth that I have analysed between these works emphasizes the necessity of attending to Indigenous voices, as well as the difficult, awkward, and ongoing work necessary to ensure that these voices are respected and understood by settler audiences of Indigenous literary texts. Examining the intertextual relationships between these texts allows for a discussion of social issues that often appear irresolvable in isolation in Canada / Turtle Island, and highlight the continuing tension in settler–Indigenous relations.
