Literary analysis of An Antane Kapesh's (Innu) and Mini Aodla Freeman's (Inuk) lifewriting.

What is it about?

The significance of Kapesh’s and of Aodla Freeman’s contributions to the field of Indigenous women’s writing is unquestionable. An Antane Kapesh’s Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu/Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse [I Am a Damn Savage] (1976) is a version of Québec’s colonial history from the perspective of an Innu woman who had lived it. Her book, written in Innu-aimun and translated into French, denounced the colonial expansion and exploitation of the Innu traditional territory, a process that had greatly intensified in the 1950s. In her memoir, My Life Among the Qallunaat (1978), Mini Aodla Freeman recounts her adaptation to her new environment in Ottawa where she went to work for the federal government, at a time when her community in Nunaaluk was facing forced relocation further north to Kuujjuarapik, Nunavik (Great Whale). She links the discrimination she experienced in the south to the devastating effects of colonial administration in the north. Kapesh and Aodla Freeman both describe drastic changes that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century—not so long ago—when the province of Québec suddenly showed a strong interest in its northern territories. Of interest, the authors address the relationship between the Innu and the white people, the Inuit and the qallunaat, respectively. Both accounts express weariness, largely due to the impossibility of practising traditional ways in a time of forced deculturation while, at the same time, affirming Innu and Inuit knowledge production and transmission.

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Why is it important?

The genre that they both chose to adopt – testimonial life writing – matters, and warrants further investigation. Specifically, I am interested in looking at how life writing perpetuates and contributes to traditional Innu and Inuit epistemologies. Also, because of my position, how to, and why, read these texts as a settler feminist? My reading of these texts is itself situated in my own learning process. In the first part, I elaborate on how life stories are inscribed in Indigenous epistemologies and anti-oppressive politics and, in the second part, I describe what I have learned from my relationship with these texts.