CONTEMPORARY NATIVE WOMEN'S VOICES IN LITERATURE

WOMEN S VOICESdifficulty that Native voices experience in being heard and being taken seriouslyis best expressed by Maracle in the following poem :It is hard not to protest —not to address CanAmerican Europewhen you are not just surrounded,but buried beneath the urban giant;reduced to a muffled voiceby the twang and clang of machines.It is hard not to cry out to thosenext you 'come together . . . push upon the giant. .. bite his heels'It is easier to cry out to the unseen,deaf ears above for help. 30NOTES1 Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native AmericanWriters, eds. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,1987), 57·2 Ibid., 83.3 This concept has been thoroughly explored in Leslie Monkman, A Native Heritage:Images of the Indian in English Canadian Literature (Toronto: Univ. of TorontoPress, 1981).4 Paula Gunn Allen, "The Sacred Hoop : A Contemporary Perspective in AmericanIndian Literature" in Studies in American Indian Literature (New York: ModernLanguage Association of America, 1983), 3.5 Swann and Krupat explore this concept in greater detail in the introduction to/ Tell You Now.6 For a more detailed discussion on this dilemma see the introduction to Thomas King,ed., Canadian Fiction Magazine No. 60 (1987).7 Maria Campbell, Half breed (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973), 8.8 Ibid, 13.D Ibid, 24.10 Ibid, 132.11 Ibid.12 Ibid, 45·13 Kate Vangen, The Native in Literature : Canadian and Comparative Perspectives,eds. Thomas King, Cheryl Calver, and Helen Hoy (Oakville: ECW Press, 1987),188.14 Campbell, 18.15 Beatrice Culleton, In Search of April Raintree (Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1983), 9.16 Ibid, 142.17 Beatrice Culleton in a video produced by the Manitoba Action Committee on theStatus of Women, n.d.