Law, literature, location: Contemporary aboriginal/indigenous women's writing and the politics of identity

This dissertation examines the importance of legal and legislative texts to an analysis of aboriginal/indigenous women's literary production. It juxtaposes law, legislation, and literature to argue that an important grounding for reading social and cultural texts by aboriginal/indigenous women writers emerges not only through the literature's expression of "nativeness," that is, through its commitment to a community constituted through various identity discourse, but also by investigating the social and political contexts that emerge for these writers in legal and legislative texts. Its central question asks: how often is it the case that the conditions of production which inform aboriginal/indigenous women's writing are related to matters before the courts? This question serves as the organizing framework within which contemporary writing by aboriginal/indigenous women from Canada and the United States is explored.;The study begins by discussing the problematics of representation for aboriginal/indigenous peoples who have sought access to legal intervention through the courts. It explores how court cases assert a raced subjectivity for aboriginal/indigenous people that informs the logic of the court's decision-making process. Next, it analyses how this legal context impinges on literary/critical debates about the politics of aboriginal/indigenous women's writing to illustrate how literature critiques state-imposed categories of race and gender subjectivity so as to assert cross-cultural community affiliations.;Chapter One examines Maria Campbell's Half-breed for its engagement with the problem of community affiliation articulated by the reinstatement claims of Jeannette Lavell and Yvonne Bedard, two Native women who were disenfranchised from their Native communities following their marriages to non-Native men. Chapter Two turns to the problem of social justice raised by Leonard Peltier's trial and conviction so as to illuminate how Jeannette Armstrong's novel, Slash, critiques progressive political movements for perpetuating conventional gender politics. Chapter Three reads the Zah Zay case for its imposition of colonial identity categories to settle a land claim dispute on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Northern Minnesota. Winona LaDuke's Last Standing Woman and Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife are read as providing a counter discursive space through indigenous feminist community to the polemical identity narratives imposed by the law and Congress.