Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The question of identity for the Indigenous communities in contact with colonial and Imperial forces relates to the understanding of collective memory as opposed to the ‘organised forgetting’ devised by the power structure. The transcultural reality within the colonial space negotiates with the discourses created by the ‘dominant’ culture. The struggle to ‘re-member’ the indigenous self at the face of cultural amnesia is palpable in the works of contemporary Indigenous writers writing in English. The contemporary writers can be located at the crossroads between the inherited stories (memory) of the indigenous self and an overarching sense of imposed “universalism”, leading to a discursive field marked by a tension between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, the individual and the community. The paper locates indigenous worldviews as palpable in contemporary literatures that portray the possibilities of receiving the English language and ‘re-membering’ the indigenous identity using the same. The study focuses on the quest for identity in the Sto:lo and Pueblo communities through the writings of the contemporary Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko and Canadian English author Lee Maracle. The paper traces the role of collective memory in re-visiting and re-claiming the English speaking transcultural ‘Indigenous Self’ where the simple act of storytelling becomes an act of resistance; where identity is shaped and claimed through memory.