ENOUGH IS ENOUGH:
Aboriginal Women Speak Out

Janet Silman (recorder). Toronto: Women's Press, 1987.

Julia Emberley

On 28 June 1985, a piece of federal legislation known as Bill C-3l was passed by the Canadian government stipulating that those sections of the 1869 Enfranchisement Act and the 1876 Indian Act which discriminated against Native women in general, and prohibited Native women who married non-Natives from maintaining their native rights and associations, be removed. Academic writers and journalists have told this story. They tell an official story that records the historical and political events involving large organizations such as Indian Rights for Indian Women, the Native Women's Association for Canada and the National Action Committee for the Advisory Council on the Status of Women, all of which brought significant pressure to I bear on the federal government to change its policy. But as official stories go, they fail to tell of the personal struggle and resistance carried out by Native women - on a daily basis to change the conditions of their life. The success of this piece of s legislative reform owes a great deal to Native women across Canada who worked hard on a grass roots level to politicize both the Canadian public and Native bands about the need for change. Enough is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out is one book that tells the story of a group of Native women, the Tobique women on the East coast, who were instrumental in bringing about the legislative reform.

The Tobique Women's Group have "written" their personal stories of resistance - those "unofficial" histories of political transformation in our everyday lives - in a special way. I put "written" in quotation marks because the book is actually a collection of taped recordings that have been transcribed. Rather than providing the reader with a managed, written account which follows a well worn narrative logic, this book becomes an event in which a group of Native women tell you, the reader, about their daily lives, their political commitment and their resistance to oppression, in their own way, in their own voice. You can hear the texture of the women's voices as they tell about the pain, anger, racism and classism they have suffered living in a country that has been taken from them by a historical imperialism and an on-going colonialism. You can hear their joy when they speak of their children, their humour, their frustration as well as their commitment and strength to struggle and resist oppression.

When we look at the cover of books, we are used to seeing below the title a name or names signifying the conventions of authorship or editorship. On the cover of Enough is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out, we find something very different: "As told to Janet Silman." Silman has written a good and brief introduction to the book, providing an outline of the history of Bill C-31 and generally contextualizing the stories that follow. For the most part, however, Silman has acted as a cultural mediator, using her education and skills in the service of the Tobique women and at their request. As Glenna Perley, a Tobique woman says:

We have been thinking about a book we do ourselves, with you to help us. Journalists and others have come in to do stories and films about us, but they leave and we never see them again. A book really telling our story would offer different things to different people. Indian women who read it would see, "Why, if they could do that - accomplish that - then we can, too." To white women and others, it would be an education: they would see what life on a reserve is like for women. They would see what all our protesting has been about.

A lot of careful thought has gone into the production of this book by the Tobique Women's Group and Janet Silman. They have organized the book along chronological lines and divided the larger story into six chapters. Thirteen women testify to their individual battles, their growing political and collective awareness and grassroots action that eventually culminates in a march from the Oka reserve outside Montreal to Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and their after thoughts on achieving victory but with a steady eye on the work that must still be done.

It is important to tell our stories in our own way, with our own voice(s) and to read and listen to each other's stories. But telling our own stories "in our own way" is partially misleading and it represents a structure of oppression that actively contains those ways for Native women; I am referring here to the predominance of the use of the English language in shaping their voices. And the Tobique women are keenly aware of the limits of the English language as a vehicle for expressing certain aspects of their experience: as Bet-Te Paul says, "The culture is in the language so much." It is not difficult to hear the frustration in the voices of the women telling Janet Silman their stories when they want to say it in their Native language, Maliseet: "There is so much more I could tell you in my own language, but it's impossible to translate" (Eva Gookum Saulis); "I wish I could sit here and talk to you in Indian because the meaning comes out so much better, so much stronger" (Mavis Goeres); "They don't teach culture in the school here, only beading. They don't teach language and Maliseet should be the first language in that school" (Juanita Perley, 221); "We'd say in Indian - well, it's really hard to translate into English - 'Here we go, our heads bouncing off to Ottawa again! '" (Karen Perley). And if she had said it, what would it have looked like on the printed page (if Maliseet has a script -? -) or sounded like to a non-Native, such as myself, illiterate in Native languages?

When we speak of literacy and illiteracy we immediately imply the existence of a model language that regulates the production of a standard to which other forms or uses are compared and placed in a hierarchical relation to it. But what is also suggested by this form of social regulation is the predominance of "one" language as the principle language of exchange authorized by the state and its educational institutions. Which is to say that the concept of literacy and illiteracy has an internal as well as external ideology; internally, in that a model form of a language is ideally constructed and externally, in that one particular language is chosen to represent the model. One has only to think of the struggle in Quebec to maintain the teaching and usage of the French language, as well as the recent struggle of Native people to preserve their languages, to realize the political and cultural power contained by the use of the English language in Canada - there are of course global implications particularly in the arena of commerce. Beth Cuthand, in her essay "Transmitting our Identity as Indian Writers" (In the Feminine: Women and Words /Les Femmes et les Mots,1985: 53-54) recognizes this power; at the same time she sees a possibility for a strategic intervention in Native people making use of the English language. Cuthand has the following to say about the use of English as a vehicle for Native writers:

I think it's crucial that we develop our skills in the English language because there are many Indian nations in Canada and many languages. Maybe one of the most valuable gifts the colonizers gave us was the English language so that we could communicate with each other. I fully believe that we can use English words to Indian advantage and that as Indian writers it's our responsibility to do so.

While Cuthand's subversive underwriting of the colonizer's "gift" is strategically useful, particularly for Native people within the professional and educational institutions, it does not address a majority of Native people who are excluded or marginalized from this particular class. For those Native people dispossessed by the colonial system, the English language is an instrument of oppression: "I lived in Oxbow, Maine," writes Mavis Goeres, a Tobique woman,

for seventeen years and then in Brockton, Massachusetts. You know, the man I married was white and he wouldn't let me speak my Native language or teach my children the Native language, so when I go away from him didn't I ever talk Maliseet. (laughs) My youngest daughter, Susan is the only one that can really speak Maliseet. The others know just little words, bits and pieces, but Susan can speak it when she wants to. It's a shame, though, she doesn't because the other kids don't speak it; we're losing our language.