Rewriting history, post-coloniality and feminismLee Maracle's autobiographical works

Abstract

Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman (1988) and Bobbi Lee. Indian Rebel (1990) are autobiographical works that rewrite the conventions of representing the Native in the context of Canadian history and society. Through her autobiographical “I”, Maracle narrates herself as politicalrepresentative for women and for the Métis. This essay aims to investigate Maracle’s political displacement of conventional representational practices. The importance of IAW&BLIR to revisionary historiography is that both works document the struggle of Natives today within a history of resistance. Writing from a position of “cultural siege”, “under occupation”, Maracle analyzes her position as a Native woman within an active struggle of decolonialization. Hers is a new history and historiography different from both white writing on the Native and traditional Native “historical”, oral narratives. It is the history of struggle in the 1960s and 1970s in a hybrid narrative mode. As we shall argue, this is history as narrating, as telling, in traditional native fashion, but within recognizable dates and events and the conventions of “colonial” history.