Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine processes of collaboration in told-to narratives by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal interlocutors. Historically, non-Aboriginal collectors maintained editorial control while obscuring their role in making the authentic ‘Native voice.’ Since 1969, following First Nations' resistance to the White Paper, the relations of authority in told-to narratives have changed. With greater participation of First Nations collaborators, and changes in relations of authority between mediators, contemporary told-to narratives can break from historical roots of salvage anthropology.

In Chapter 1, I introduce dominant historical trends in told-to narrative. I show how the process of recording First Nations' oral texts is steeped in culturally determined and hierarchically arranged ideas of literacy and orality. Aboriginal writers have disassociated themselves from ethnographic traditions and have drawn attention to multiple forms of appropriation. These challenges have helped create the necessary conditions for establishing more reciprocal relations of collaboration.

In Chapter 2, I examine Thomas Berger's pipeline inquiry and Hugh Brody's ethnographies. While both Berger and Brody were instrumental in shifting First Nations discourse from ‘assimilation’ to ‘self-government,’ they overlook more complex interrelationships in cross-cultural dialogue.

In Chapter 3, I analyse ‘twice-told’ Aboriginal life narratives. Here, Aboriginal narrators re-appropriate the narrative and spin the told-to interaction to different political effect. Recent examples of the collective life story push the recorder's role into the background and highlight the role of the mediator in oral modes of storytelling (i.e., Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples; Bussidor and Bilgen-Reinart).

Chapter 4 examines the role of oral traditions in struggles for Aboriginal rights. While recording oral traditions has new, politically transformative potential, especially following the 1997 Delgamuukw decision, problems of translation (cultural and linguistic) remain. Life Lived Like a Story, in exploring the ethical, material and artistic implications of collaboration, offers a way to rethink the relation between contested stories and territories.

In the Conclusion, I further explore my argument that transformations in told-to narrative since 1969 are tied to broader changes in Aboriginal/Canadian relations. Following Frantz Fanon, I argue that “dying colonialisms” and social change provide new contexts of interaction that create the possibility of cross-cultural collaboration.