2012 Aboriginal Studies - UBC Press

ABORIGINAL & MÉTIS HISTORY
First Person Plural
Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship
Sophie McCall
SOPHIE McCALL teaches in the
English Department at Simon
Fraser University.
2011
978-0-7748-1979-4 HC $85.00
January 2012
978-0-7748-1980-0 PB $32.95
268 pages, 6 x 9 "
Aboriginal Studies , Social
& Cultural Anthropology ,
Canadian Literature
6 order online: www.ubcpress.ca
Sophie McCall’s splendid First Person Plural enlarges
the genre of works purporting to be collaborative.
Beyond writing, she includes land claims negotiations,
commissioners’ reports, media representations,
and fi lm. She traces the rise of Indigenous
voice in Canada through the fi nal decades of the
twentieth century. Students, scholars, and anyone
interested in First Nations and Native American
literature will welcome this book.
– Julie Cruikshank, author of Do Glaciers Listen?
Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social
Imagination
In this innovative exploration, told-to narratives,
or collaboratively produced texts by Aboriginal
storytellers and (usually) non-Aboriginal writers,
are not romanticized as unmediated translations
of oral documents, nor are they dismissed as corruptions
of original works. Rather, the approach
emphasizes the interpenetration of authorship
and collaboration. Focused on the 1990s, when
debates over voice and representation were particularly
explosive, this captivating study examines a
range of told-to narratives in conjunction with key
political events that have shaped the struggle for
Aboriginal rights to reveal how these narratives
impact larger debates about Indigenous voice and
literary and political sovereignty.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Collaboration and Authorship in Told-to
Narratives
1 “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”: Appropriations
and Subversions of the ‘Native Voice’
2 Coming to Voice the North: The Mackenzie Valley
Pipeline Inquiry and the Works of Hugh Brody
3 “There Is a Time Bomb in Canada”: The Legacy of the
Oka Crisis
4 “My Story Is a Gift”: The Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples and the Politics of Reconciliation
5 “What The Map Cuts Up, the Story Cuts Across”:
Translating Oral Traditions and Aboriginal Land
Title
6 “I Can Only Sing This Song to Someone Who
Understands It”: Community Filmmaking and the
Politics of Partial Translation
Conclusion: Collaborative Authorship and Literary
Sovereignty
Notes; Works Cited; Index