Distinguished Visitor
Women's Studies
Google Search www.uwindsor.ca
AskUWindsor Go



Distinguished Visitor in Women's Studies 2007
Lee Maracle


Click here to download Lee Maracle's biography


Lee Maracle is a leader in personal and cultural reclamation and international expert on Canadian First Nations culture and history.

"In my part of the world, women are the keepers of the internal world, of social relations. So today, that's about being a feminist."

Lee Maracle is a Native Canadian writer whose work is unparalleled in its creativity and scope.  Through novels, poetry, drama, performance art and storytelling, she exposes and explores the experience of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.  Her work re-imagines centuries-old myth and tradition for future generations, and reflects her antipathy toward sexism, racism and white cultural domination.

Maracle is of Salish and Cree ancestry and a member of the Stó:lō Nation.  She grew up in a poor neighborhood in North Vancouver and was one of the first aboriginal people to go to public school.  Feeling isolated from her own culture as well as an outsider in Canadian culture, she dropped out of school and later drifted from western Canada to California to Toronto, supporting herself by working in construction, hospital laundry, nightclubs, film production, adult education, theatre, radio, stand-up comedy, aboriginal arts and crafts, and traditional healing.  Eventually, she became politically active and remains active in the Native struggle against racism, sexism and economic oppression.

Maracle wrote her first poem the day she learned to read and knew at the age of 10 that she wanted to recreate myths.  Writing has helped her “create a new place of belonging” by going back to aboriginal stories and re-creating them in a modern, personal context.

Her work has an intensity reflective of her spiritual approach to life and writing.  She strives to integrate European literary styles and Native oral storytelling forms, while confronting the cultural rifts between aboriginal and white society and the resulting problems for individual identity.  Her first book, Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel is an autobiography that focuses on growing up as a member of an oppressed minority.  Her influential non-fiction work, I Am Woman, (1988), probes Maracle’s “personal struggle with womanhood, culture, traditional spiritual beliefs and political sovereignty.”

In 1989, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Maracle, a mother of four, took her children to the B.C. coast to assist in the wildlife clean up.  This marked a turning point in her life.  Maracle recalls, “My kids and I went to the West Coast to wash off the ducks.  And we had to trek through the mountains that were stripped bald of trees to get to those ducks.  After that I was a die-hard environmentalist.” 

In Maracle’s world view, intimate and integral connections bind women and the environment.  “Feminism begins with considering the earth our Mother.  All violence against earth is violence to us.”  The passing on of “women’s knowledge” is essential to the healing of people and the environment, she believes.

Maracle sees “reclaiming ourselves” as the central project for Aboriginal peoples in the twenty-first century.  “I think we have to find a way to live as Aboriginal people and as Canadians, which means dealing with patriarchy and misogyny at the personal level.”  In this process of cultural reclamation, addressing such issues as violence against women and children and the rape of the environment are essential.  Maracle describes the understanding of the interdependence of gender, environment and race as “the gift of Aboriginal people in this time.”

Among the most prolific Aboriginal writers in Canada today, Maracle has published more than ten works in all, including novels, poetry, short story collections and collaborative anthologies.  In 2000, Maracle received the J.T. Stewart Voices of Change Award.  A collaborative work, First Fish, First People, earned an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

A graduate of Simon Fraser University, Maracle has held numerous distinguished academic posts, including the Stanley Knowles Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at the University of Waterloo, the Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University, and Writer in Residence at the University of Guelph.  She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Writer in Residence for the university’s Aboriginal Studies Programme, and Traditional Cultural Director for the Indigenous Theatre School.

Sources:
Cooper, Rachelle.  “Storyteller Lives Between Fiction and Myth.”  News at Guelph (January 2007).  01 June 2007
<www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/07-01-17/news.shtml>.
Witalec, Janet, et al, eds.  Native North American Literature.  Detroit, MI:  Thomson Gale, 1994, 396-402.

QUOTES --

On the role of the Arts:

“I think the arts has great potential to create citizens.  Citizenship is about the direction your imagination travels.  We can’t plan or calculate or examine citizenship; it’s an imagined thing.  Community is an imagined thing.  And if your imagination isn’t working – and, of course, in oppressed people that’s the first thing that goes – you can’t imagine anything better.  Once you can imagine something different, something better, then you’re on your way.”

On Aboriginal languages and healing:

“Aboriginal people are picking up our languages again, and we’re finding out that there are quirks about our language, for example, we have no word for ‘exclusion.’  And we have to deal with that.  We’re forced to heal.  We’re forced to deal with our resentments and overcome them.”

On the relationship between Aboriginal culture and feminism:

“When I teach Aboriginal thought, I’m really teaching from our matriarchal beginning, our medicine tradition, our handling of social relations and, of course, the recent feminism.  So it’s largely the women’s knowledge that gets passed on.”

On the rape of the Earth:

“We had the biggest trees in the world where I come from – not very long ago – and when I think about that I just want to cry my eyes out.  I can’t think about it without being enraged.”
On her own writing:

“People say, ‘there’s something here, but I don’t get it.’  But then it starts to become clear toward the end.  My  writing is a spiraling journey down to a moment of peace and recognition and spiraling back out.  I can’t do it any other way . . . that’s part of me.”

From I Am Woman:

“Embodied in my truth is the brilliance of hundreds of Native women who faced the worst that CanAmerica had to offer and dealt with it.  Embodied in my brilliance is the great sea of  knowledge that it took to overcome the paralysis of the colonized mind.  I did not come to this clearing alone.  Hundreds walked alongside me – Black, Asian and Native women whose tide of knowledge was bestowed upon me are the key to every CanAmerican’s emancipation.”

“Sojourner Truth told you already, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’  She asked the white feminist movement on our behalf, a hundred years ago, and the white women of North America have yet to face the answer.  She served up the question; we need do no more.”

Any questions or comments, please contact us at wsvisitor@uwindsor.ca or (519) 253-3000 ext. 3727.