Another Tobique woman, Juanita Perley, writes with anger:

When people went shopping, they never got money to buy the groceries; the Indian agent would write up a purchase order at his own store - McPhail's store. I can remember how they ridiculed the Indian people who came in there and even as a little kid I resented it. But you had to go in there with this little piece of paper that said you could have, say, $10 worth of food, or whatever struck his fancy at the time. They'd be making fun of the Indian people that came in - they called us ‘gimmes’ - like ‘gimme this,’ ‘gimme that.’

The way we talk, you never say, ‘Please,’ in our language because nobody was ever made to beg. So when Indian people said something in English they translate it literally from the way we speak and it sounded like a demand. I always resented the way the white people treated us and even today I resent it - I don't like them one bit, and I don't care if that is printed in the book, either!

Teaching languages, teaching children the languages of the world, is perhaps one of the most estranged and unacknowledged aspects of women's work. For Native women, Native languages can not be separated from the preservation of a Native cultural identity. Women are producing their own spheres of exchange, their own terms of mediations and negotiations between men and women within their communities, between the Canadian State (the force of legal denominations) and the many forms of Native self-determination (the force of legal counterdenominations). In the past, Native women who married non-Natives were forced to assimilate to a non-Native culture. Divorced and cut off from their own culture, they bear the scars of dispossession; they could not acknowledge their cultural heritage and they remained unacknowledged persons, with a non-Native culture. In struggling to achieve a Native women self-determination, Native women are ensuring that any collective effort to achieve Native self-government will only succeed when the equality of Native women has also been acknowledged.

I have tried to show what is valuable about the way this book has been produced and what I have learned from it about the need to preserve Native language. The production of this book, however, raises an economic and political problem. Produced by a mainstream women's press, with the help of a non-Native, under the liberal mandate of cultural diversity, the process of decision making that controls who or what gets published ultimately lies with non-Native women. As non-Native women, we must remind ourselves of those Native presses such as Theytus Books, P.O. Box 218, Penticton, B.C. and Write-on Press, Box 86606, North Vancouver, B.C., which are struggling and succeeding in publishing work by, for and about Native people. While it is important for Native women's voices to be heard in mainstream presses, it is just as important, if not more, to support, to buy, to read books published by Native presses in order that they may continue to publish Native writings.

Glenna Perley anticipated that the readership of Enough is Enough would be doubly directed towards both Natives and non-Natives. And she envisioned that the experience of those readers might also be different. I can only speak as a non-Native woman, who has learned a great deal from this book and from writing this commentary. For the non-Native reader, unfamiliar with the struggle of Native women in this country, this book is a place to begin listening to Native women or for the already initiated reader, familiar with Native women's writings, poetry, novels, essays and criticism, another book that will engage you in the struggle. To Native women readers, I look forward to listening to your commentary.