| This study examines how Aboriginal women's lifestorytelling in Canada and Australia engages in the processes of decolonization and how its potential for transformation can be realized through anti-racist feminist criticism and pedagogy. Chapters One through Three locate Aboriginal women's lifestorytelling practices within the processes of white nation-building. I explore the marginalization of Aboriginal women's lifestorytelling in postcolonial and Australian-Canadian literary studies as an effect of an unexamined investment in nationalism. I analyze how the operations of race and nation inflect upon the categories of "Aboriginality," gender, class, and autobiography (particularly in terms of "truth" and referentiality) and influence how Aboriginal women's lifestories are produced and enter visibility, in popular readerships and university practices.;While Aboriginal women's lifestorytelling can productively be read as pedagogical in a politics of decolonization, it does not teach or transform material relations by itself. In Chapter Four I analyze how the operations of white nationalism are reproduced in the university classroom and, drawing on my experiences of teaching a university course in Aboriginal Literatures, I explore how an anti-racist pedagogy can transform the university classroom and whiteness. This is followed by detailed analyses of five Aboriginal women's lifestories: Australian Monica Clare's Karobran: The Story of An Aboriginal Girl (1978), Mi'kmaq Rita Joe's Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet (1996), Lardil Elsie Roughsey's (Labumore's) An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New (1984), Cree Emma Minde's kwayask e-ki-pe-kiskinowapahtihicik: Their Example Showed Me the Way, A Cree Woman's Life Shaped by Two Cultures , as told to Freda Ahenakew (1997), and Aboriginal Australian Rita Huggins's and daughter Jackie Huggins's collaborative Auntie Rita (1994). My readings highlight how these lifestories articulate the processes of white nationalism in producing a gendered, racialized, dispossessed labouring class and how, in mapping personal and collective histories, they theorize and imagine alternative discourses of history, place, nation, gender, and Aboriginality. And as these lifestorytellers imagine a different Canada and Australia, they also imagine a different white national subjectivity---an invitation and a challenge to white feminist/postcolonial critics to re-examine and transform our own subjectivities, locations, and practices. |
