The postcolonial theme of “home” in literature of “indigenous” communities.

Milan Khungur Narzary

Centre for Candian Studies, Jadavpur

2020
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Home – Postcolonial – Indigenous. What is the connection between these 3 words and their

relevance in both Canada and India as a Global North or Global South country respectively?

The terms Global North and Global South draws a generalized border across the globe dividing

it into two halves, where one claims to have better living conditions than the other. The

indicators used to scale this disparity has socio-economical basis which emphasizes that

because the Global North are economical richer they can provide better living conditions, but

better living conditions to whom? How equally is it distributed amongst a diverse population?

And what’s the situation of indigenous communities in the more developed nations in

comparison to a less developed nation? I will try to answer these questions by studying two

novels, one belongs to a developed and the second belongs to a developing nation and have a

close look at the types of narratives that come out from these communities that bind otherwise

distant lives together. The first novel is Ravensong by Lee Maracle. She is a First Nations

writer from Canada. Second is Mwihur written by Dhwrnidhwr Owary a Bodo writer from

India.

Home

What gave these two novels birth I believe has a close link to the idea of property. If we can

understand this link we should be able to find the explanation for the sudden spur of indigenous

literature since the early or mid-twentieth century. In consequence we shall also look briefly at

how these novels deal with the idea of property.

Land in the contemporary context has become private property that serves a man’s purpose.

These novels on the other hand depict a treatment of land in contrasting manner from the way

the larger nation or its government perceives as a proper and better way of land distribution.

Closely knitted to the idea of land is home, we need to unpack what land and home means to

indigenous identities.
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Postcolonial

Indigeneity is essentially a postcolonial identity, in the sense that the need to take protection

under the umbrella of indigenous identity for cultural preservation arises from colonialist

expansionism. The two communities that Owary and Maracle represent in their novel both

practiced oral traditions before coming in contact with the colonizers. The contact period

initiated a strand of writings on these lands, which some people already called home. Whereas

the indigenous writers found its forests and climate cozy and peaceful. How did the outsiders

see these new places?

Oliver Goldsmith in his poem The Rising Village writes, “How dark and dreary / did once our

desert woods appear / …Where solemn silence all the waste pervades, Height’ning the horror

of its gloomy shades.”1 The sense of isolation and horror that the colonizers experienced when

they “discovered” the new land finds a resonance with the accounts of a Mughal writer

Shihabuddin who accompanied Mir Jumlah to Assam, “Assam is a wild and dreadful country,

abounding in danger…though the climate agrees with the natives, it is rank poison to

foreigners… the trees of its hills and plains are exceedingly tall, thick and strong. Its streams

are deep and wide.”2

Indigenous

Being an indigenous or more generally tribal in the Canadian or Indian context respectively is

an identity etched by law. In Canada the Indian Act determines the Indian status and as a result

determines who will enjoy the provisions and rights of being a Native Indian. The Indian act

has its seed in the Gradual Assimilation Act of 1857 which later on became the Gradual

Enfranchisement Act.

1
Oliver Goldsmith, Creative Media Partners, LLC, 1794-1861.
2
Jadunath Sarkar, Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol 1, page 179.
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To quote John A Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada and a prominent leader of

Canadian Confederation, “The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal

system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the

Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.”3

When the colonizers had come to India they took control of several forest lands and exploited

it for commercial purpose. As a consequence deforestation came in, which have since then only

advocated soil erosion, landslides and floods which are taking thousands of lives annually. The

home of the tribal community was seen as an empty land that prompted the government to

exploit it. Therefore several tribal families were displaced, they were chased out of the forest

that was to become a government property.

India now provides provisions to these tribal communities by categorising them as the

Scheduled Tribes through various acts and also the Fifth and Sixth Schedule of the Indian

Constitution allows a few districts with tribal majority population an autonomy of

administration.

Thus it can be said that the identity of Native Indian in Canada or Schedule Tribe in India is an

identity recognised by law. Since these are government approved identities we have people in

Canada who were not given the Indian status because they could not fulfil the terms and

agreements of the legal clauses.4 Similarly even in India there are Bodo people who do not

have the status of Schedule Tribes even though they trace their ancestry as Bodo if they do not

fulfil certain legal requirements.5

3
. Erin Hanson, “The Indian Act,” indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca.
4
. Ibid.
5
. Premananda Mosahari, Political Identity Crisis of the Bodos and Their Bodoland Movement, N.L.
Publication, 2011.
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If we look at it from a second perspective we can say that certain historical conditions led the

government to formulate identities. These new identity in both Canada and India is related to

empty land, natural resources and most importantly a certain form of lifestyle which was not

considered civilised enough. These lifestyle are believed to be usually practised by tribes and

clans. Tribe and clan system is considered a primitive and less developed society and the people

are looked at as savages.

Deconstruction of “savage”

The term savage is used quite commonly to denote lack of civilisation therefore the people

who lived in the jungle or the wild became “junglee” in Hindi or just “wild” people in

English. The novels Ravensong and Mwihur represent such communities whose historical

struggle is linked to practising savage lifestyles, as Oliver Goldsmith wrote, “Behold! The

savage tribes, in wildest strain.” This line from The Rising Village contains all the three

words savage, tribe and wild. A few lines later he continues “…hideous yells announce the

murd’rous band, / whose bloddy footsteps desolate the land;” Goldsmith calls them

“barb’rous man” whose speech to him is an “appalling roar.”

Being an inhabitant of forest, living close to nature, befriending nature became traits of

savagery whereas mining natural resources, polluting rivers and living in isolated antisocial

boxes made a man civilised. Therefore an important aim of this paper will be reading the

novels of Maracle and Owary as a tool to deconstruct the identity of “savage” and recourse it

towards its right direction; by looking at how human interactions with nature or forest and its

resources are treated, the knowledge of a tribal community and a non-tribal community

regarding nature, and by looking at forest as a home and forest as a private property.

The narrator’s voice in Mwihur transforms into the Ravens’s song in Lee Maracle’s novel.

The Raven attempts to squeak several times at Stacey to catch her attention because she has
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an important message to convey for the sake of all of her people, who are also the Raven’s

people. Raven was considering plans to drive out the people of their village because she

wanted her people to interact with the white community and resolve problems with dialogue.

“Raven saw the future threatened by the parochial refusal of her own people to shape the

future of their homeland.”6

Trickster is a common element found in several oral literatures and Lee Maracle by

representing the trickster Raven automatically associates the ancestral heritage to the text and

when the Raven says her people and their land, the history and their ancestry gets directly

linked to the land evidencing the fact that their community have been inhabiting it for a long

time. The Bodo novel Mwihur on the other hand doesn’t use any trickster but directly uses

oral history to create a similar association. The narrator in Mwihur uses phrases like

“according to grandmother and grandfather” or “old men and women say” and what do they

say, “Barsi River is a flowing history. It runs down from the northern Gongar hills and till

date gathers the news of Hajowary Bodos along with it. In the old days Hajowary Bodos

fought against the Gongars. The commanders of Gongar army thought our lady Gambari was

a female ghost.”7 Space and history become amalgamated together in Mwihur.

Mwihur also depicts instances where characters exhibit knowledge of forest and its resources.

This knowledge is not metaphysical or spiritual but real practical skill. It is the protagonist,

Golo’s knowledge in geography of the land, animal’s daily moving patterns and their habits

that earn him a job as forest ranger. At the same time it is important to point out that this

novel is about the dislocation of people from the forest when the government took over the

area and declared it as the Manas National Park. Even post the restrictions set by the

government the “savage” girls in the novel trespass the boundaries of the National Park to

6
. Lee Maracle, Ravensong: A Novel, Raincoast Books, Press Gang Publishers, 2002, page 44.
7
. Dhwrnidhwr Owary, Mwihur, Barama Offset Printers, 1980, page 17.
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collect herbs, vegetable, and fruits from the forest which leads to them being persecuted by

the forest officials and the government. It is the knowledge of the nature that will become an

important tool for deconstruction of the word “savage.” In Lee Maracle’s Ravensong chapter

2, when Stacey sees that her white friend Carol’s mother is throwing away a particular

species of plant which the whites call “weed” she finds their action hilarious. Carol and her

mother are surprised when Stacey asks them if she could take the weeds home. Later in the

chapter Stacey and her mother both laugh at white people’s stupidity.

A documentary directed by Zacharis Kunuk and Ian Mauro named, Inuit Knowledge and

Climate Change talks about various indicators from the Inuits perspective that track global

warming. The warning signs are analysed from the repository of traditional oral knowledge

that has been passed on from generation to generation as practical skill for survival. These

knowledge didn’t find its way into the mainstream archive of scientific knowledge. The

documentary starts with the lines, “By observing the sky weather was predicted. Clouds

formation indicated wind direction. Now it is different, first they form one way then they

quickly change telling you a different story.” Another character quotes, “We were told to go

and observe the sky first thing in the morning. We were told to look outside. Once outside we

observed the environment.”8 Children today know nothing beyond turning on TV, ordering

food on Swiggy, or complaining about slow internet – all of the above mentioned activities

contribute to global warming. It is this closeness to nature that English gave the word

“savage” and in Hindi the word became “junglee.” Words that should have merely meant

“people that live inside the forest” became synonymous to being primitive, uncivilised, and

wild.

8
. Zacharis Kunuk, Ian Mauro, Inuit Knowledge and Climate change, Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc.,
Kunuk Cohn Productions, 2000.
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Stacey in Ravensong observes the garden at Carol’s house, “The plant life in her front yard

consisted of the odd bit of comfrey interspersed with dandelions and pigweed. Only mint was

cultivated by her mom – she carefully nurtured it…Everyone in white town ate store-bought

food, throwing away the grocery items that grew wild in their yards the same as in the hills

that rose above the town and the village. Aesthetic waste supplanted good sense and thrift in

the care of their yards.”9 Garden then becomes in the novel symbol for a miniature forest

under personal care of Carol’s mother as her private property. It is different from the open

forest whose mint are available for all that require it free of cost. The garden of the white

town is beautiful and decorative. The perspective on nature that allowed the developed

nations to look at it only as aesthetic spots for picnic is the reason why nature could find it’s

way to English Literature most of the times only through Romanticism and not in grounded

form, as an essential necessity of human existence.

Another very visible element in indigenous literature is womanhood and sexuality.

Ravensong is a very strong critic of white woman’s status and sexuality. In Mwihur the

woman characters are represented quite equally to the male figure. The protagonist, Golo

spends time in reminiscing about the era when the woman warrior Gambari Sikhla of Bodo

legends would have been alive. He dreams of her strength to fight off the colonizers. Later in

the novel when Golo confesses his poverty to the girl he loves (Dodere) and the struggles of

surviving as a hunter, Dodere informs him that she has sold a few hen and pigs along with the

clothes she could weave and recently purchased some land with it. She offers him her land to

practise agriculture and leave hunting animals. She also in exchange confesses her desire for

education, education for woman is not treated as a taboo in the novel. In Ravensong too it’s a

woman figure, Stacey who decides to pursue formal education and the whole village along

with the Raven relies on her to rescue them. Moreover, “Stacey could not understand why

9
. Lee Maracle, Ravensong: A Novel, Raincoast Books, Press Gang Publishers, 2002, page 32 – 33.
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Mrs. S had no more rank in her own house than the children.”10 Throughout the novel Stacey

is confused as she fails to understand the concept of suicide, when her classmate Poly kills

herself moreover due to the fact that a boy and a girl had sex. She says, “We have no illusions

that virginal behaviour is virtuous.”11

Conclusion

The mainstream community was isolated to the people that inhabited the forest lands due to

inaccessibility. Forest created a sense of dread and fear, but the same place was home to

people living in the forest. The outsiders looked at the people living there as they looked at

wild animals while they caressed the domestic pets on their lap. They used the word “savage”

to dehumanise a whole section of population. The word allowed them to associate the others

as primitive being lacking in any sense living in total ignorance. The democracy that Europe

is so proud of having invented was practised by the First Nations community long before they

were “discovered.”12 The Bodo tribes took the consensus of the whole village before they

elected the leader, who they call Gambra13. The village chief did not pass on the

responsibility to his son.

Lee Maracle comments in her novel comparing her school principal and her village elder

(Domnic), “the power Mr. Johnson wielded was illusory… it was the power to decide

people’s future but without the wisdom to guide them to their future realization…Dominic

had no authority to make decisions for anyone, yet no one made decisions without consulting

him.”14

10
. Ibid, page 35.
11
. Ibid, page 71.
12
. The Six Nations: Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth, radical.org.
13
. Also known as Gaubura. Gau – village, Bura – elderly.
14
. Lee Maracle, Ravensong: A Novel, Raincoast Books, Press Gang Publishers, 2002, page 67.
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“The world needs a combined wisdom, not just one knowledge or another, but all knowledge

should be joined. Human oneness, that’s our way.” 15

Bibliography

Goldsmith Oliver, Creative Media Partners, LLC, 1794-1861.

Hanson Erin, “The Indian Act,” indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca.

Kunuk Zacharis, Mauro Ian, Inuit Knowledge and Climate change, Igloolik Isuma
Productions Inc.,
Kunuk Cohn Productions, 2000.

Maracle Lee, Ravensong: A Novel, Raincoast Books, Press Gang Publishers, 2002.

Mosahari Premananda, Political Identity Crisis of the Bodos and Their Bodoland Movement,

N.L. Publication, 2011.

Owary Dhwnihdwr, Mwihur, Barama Offset Printers, 1980.

Sarkar Jadunath, Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol 1.

“The Six Nations: Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth”, radical.org.

15
. Ibid.
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