Her own childhood was relatively happy until the death of her mother, but then, after she had failed in her attempts to take care of her younger siblings, her family was cut apart by the social services, with sisters and brothers being forcefully separated from each other. Growing up in a Métis community in Saskatchewan, Maria Campbell relates how she faced the community’s poverty and racism, along with the society’s institutional violence and the destruction of families. Indeed, Halfbreed thus participated in the process of establishing Métisness as a legally valid ethnic category in Canada, finally leading to the inclusion of the Métis as one of Canada´s aboriginal people in the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982. The term Métis has thus gained content and context, and become a reference point for other individuals of mixed (Métis) heritage. Halfbreed establishes Métisness as a socially acceptable ethnic-cultural category, replacing a sense of nothingness, of being neither Native nor white, of being only half-breed. In Halfbreed, Campbell documents both the shame that she felt as a troubled young woman, as well as her growing sense of empowerment as she comes to embrace her Métis identity. Indeed, Campbell, later followed by other Métis writers, has defined and re-defined the terms half-breed and Métis in her writing, thus taking possession of those terms. But instead of accepting the half-breed identity imposed on her and “her people” by the colonial state, Maria Campbell takes it into her own hands to define Métisness as she experiences it. In this way, Campbell operates within the framework of the colonial society, which, as Benedict Anderson (1991:165) has put it, has a “(confusedly) classifying mind” that imagines identities, instead of relating to ethnicity as the people themselves experience it. Rather than describing the people who are identified as Métis, or the culture of those people, the term Métis has responded to the needs created by the larger society to define and classify people. However, as suggested by Bonita Lawrence (2004:82-3), communities of non-status Native people in western Canada have been created “by arbitrarily externalizing from Indianness an entire category of Indigenous people, designated ‘half-breeds’ and now called ‘Métis.’”Ĭampbell, while essentialising race in a non-revisionist way, at the same time introduces a political sense of Métisness as a legitimate identity category within the context of the Canadian multicultural society. She contrasts whites with Natives, and status Indians with Métis (“half-breeds,” or non-status Native people) in a way that seems essentialist, presenting Métis identity as something real, something definable. Campbell describes her own life, tells her own story, but her tone is openly political, her approach revisionist, and her style provocative. Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed (first published in 1973) is a classic account of a young Native woman’s struggle to survive, to come to terms with the past and to find a way of building a better future in a climate of social oppression and violence. Instead, shame and anger are revealed as transformative forces that, when managed through the act of autobiographical storytelling, accommodate a drive to fight back, resulting in both individual and collective survival and the possibility of political change. In Halfbreed, the shame and anger resulting from the degrading, traumatic experiences are in the end not portrayed as debilitating feelings. At the same time, as her story proceeds, Campbell develops a growing sense of empowerment as she takes it into her own hands to define Métisness and introduces a politicized notion of the Métis as a legitimate identity category within the context of Canadian multiculturalism. She describes the consequences of such racial thinking on Metís individuals (half-breeds or non-status Natives), the humiliating situations visibly Métis or Native people have experienced in their everyday lives, and the consequent, debilitating sense of shame shared by many of them. Campbell brings attention to the way in which race in the Canadian multicultural society has been seen as real and definable. Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed is a story of survival, and of overcoming a sense of shame related to ethnic identity. The Electronic Journal of the Department of EnglishĮmotional Representation in Maria Campbell’s Half-breed
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