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CHAPTER 1
A Rebel with a Community, Not Just a Cause
Revising YA Power Dynamics and Uniquely Representing Indigenous Sovereignty in Jeannette Armstrong's Slash
An epic coming-of-age story that explicitly explores the meaning of Indigenous self-determination in the Red Power and post–Red Power era, Jeannette Armstrong's 1985 novel Slash provides a fruitful starting point for examining ways that Indigenous young adult texts imagine sovereignty and reimagine the possibilities of the YA genre. Slash negotiates YA genre expectations and contemporary understandings of Indigenous self-determination in ways that reverberate across much Indigenous YA literature.
Highlighting Armstrong's Canadian context, Craig Womack characterizes Slash as "a 'Red Power novel' about the sixties and seventies" and finds it "striking" that no equivalent text emerged in the United States ("Theorizing American Indian Experience" 400–401). Slash indeed provides a detailed and, at times, politically ambivalent treatment of Red Power and its aftermath through the lens of its protagonist/narrator, Tommy "Slash" Kelasket. Tommy describes his involvement in Red Power initiatives across Canada and the United States. Having left his Okanagan (Syilx) childhood home for Vancouver as a restless teenager, Tommy begins dealing drugs in the city, leading to a knife fight in a bar that earns him a stint in prison along with his nickname, "Slash." While recovering from the fight, he meets Mardi, a volunteer with the Indian Friendship Center and the Red Patrol who guides his initiation into Red Power. Like the patrols in Minneapolis that fostered the broader American Indian Movement, the Red Patrol in Vancouver monitored police treatment of Indigenous people while helping Indigenous individuals living on the streets. Inspired by Mardi and other activists who, as Mardi puts it, make a "third choice" outside the colonial assimilate-or-get-lost paradigm by pursing Indian pride and empowerment, Tommy participates in the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan, which ended with the occupation of the Washington, DC, Bureau of Indian Affairs building, and the 1974 Native Peoples' Caravan across Canada, along with a host of lesser-known protests, occupations, and meetings.
Tommy's personal development parallels historical shifts in sovereignty activism as he moves from a position based in confronting colonial institutions to one based in internal community-building. Having earlier been estranged from his Okanagan community, in the second part of the novel he experiences an intense spiritual, cultural, and relational reintegration. This reintegration, coupled with numerous conversations with other Indigenous individuals, leads Tommy to part ways with some activists, including his own wife, Maeg, who, in the early 1980s, advocated for Aboriginal peoples' inclusion in talks surrounding the formation of Canada's new constitution. Instead, Tommy takes a position of total Indigenous autonomy and seeks to direct attention towards the renewing of his Okanagan community from within.
While I agree with Craig Womack that scholars — especially those based in the United States — ought to give Slash greater attention as a groundbreaking movement novel, I contend that the novel's equally groundbreaking young-adult status likewise merits more consideration (Womack, personal conversation). Armstrong created Slash as part of the Okanagan Indian Curriculum Project (OICP) for use in British Columbia high school history courses, and has frequently discussed her goal of reaching an adolescent audience with the novel. In an interview with Hartmut Lutz, she describes Slash emerging from her and her OICP colleagues' desire for "a tool to use in education" that could "give not just the historical documentation of that time" leading up to and during the Red Power movement, but that could also give readers, especially Indigenous young people, a sense of "what the people were feeling, what they dreamed, and what their pain and joy were during that time" (Armstrong, interview with Lutz 14–15). Slash went through ten printings between 1985 and 2008, reaching a large general audience in addition to many high school and college students in both literature and history courses (Armstrong, "Image" 145). Despite the novel's explicit targeting of teen readers and its engagement with YA genre conventions, previous scholarship has failed even to acknowledge Slash as a YA text. Virginie Alba, Clare Bradford, Noel Elizabeth Currie, Matthew Green, and Katja Sarkowsky are among those scholars who overlook Slash's youth audience and curricular context. Barbara Hodne and Manina Jones criticize these scholars for ignoring Slash's didactic aims toward its juvenile audience, but even they do not identify Slash specifically as young adult literature or discuss it in relation to the genre. Reading Slash as a young adult text enables us to appreciate its revisionary engagement with YA conventions, especially those concerning power dynamics, and to examine the impact of that engagement on the novel's portrayal of Indigenous self-determination.
Slash's Revisionary Engagement with the Power Dynamics of YA Literature
Like most YA texts, Slash focuses on power dynamics at play between a young protagonist and the social institutions that impact his life. The novel follows one of the most common conventions of YA literature as it traces a character's movement from estrangement to reintegration with his community. Slash stands apart, however, through its representation of Tommy as being personally empowered rather than disempowered through his reintegration with his Okanagan community. The novel also dramatically diverges from many other YA works by depicting this reintegration not as marking the end or the taming of rebellion, but rather as invigorating an entire community's rebellion against colonialism. In addition to complicating the power dynamics typically represented within YA texts, through an Indigenous narrative voice that is simultaneously self-questioning and strong, fallible and privileged, Slash troubles the common understanding in YA literary studies that the oppressive power dynamics at play between authoritative writers and vulnerable readers can only be countered via multiplicity and relativism.
In terms of his Okanagan community, Tommy largely follows the pattern characteristic of YA protagonists as he moves from selfishness, rebellion, and estrangement to responsibility, reconciliation, and reintegration (Trites, Disturbing 20). He initially rejects the institutions of his Okanagan community not just by physically moving away but also by engaging in activities that disregard Okanagan values: recklessly using drugs, having a chauvinistic attitude about his involvement with Red Power, and refusing to participate in Okanagan spiritual practices. As a result, he feels "lonely and left out," "like a stranger" to his family and home community, until he realizes his need to learn "what [he] really was, as an Indian" (179–80, 196–99).
Tommy's turning point from estrangement to reintegration comes during his stay at a camp dedicated to reconnecting Indian young people with traditional spirituality. His camp experience, coupled with his dialogue with other Indigenous people, leads Tommy to reinvest in his Okanagan community. He describes his revelation at the camp: "I learned that, being an Indian, I could never be a person only to myself. I was part of all the rest of the people. I was responsible to that" (202–3). Tommy returns home and immediately feels more connected to his family, community, and homeland than he has since childhood. "I knew I was home, really home," he writes, "and my land welcomed me" (206). Tommy's portrayal of his "home" here contrasts with the conflation of home with both nation and private property in dominant Canadian discourse, aligning instead with a tendency that Mavis Reimer identifies in Canadian Aboriginal children's/YA literature of configuring "home as intergenerational connectedness, access to land, and political protest" (Reimer xvi). The Okanagan have a deep understanding of their land as Mother: source of their language and their life. Tommy feels welcomed not only by his immediate family but also by this Mother of his entire Okanagan nation and the Okanagan people who have lived on the land across generations. Tommy's renewed sense of connection also entails a new approach to political action and a new sense of responsibility, which Tommy practices first by helping his father heal after a heart attack and then by throwing himself into work with his local community (206–8). To employ the term Roberta Trites uses in her discussion of typical YA plot progressions, by the end of the novel, Tommy has fully "reconciled" himself to the traditional institutions of his Okanagan society (Trites, Disturbing 20).
While Tommy follows a common YA pattern of reintegration, the fact that he experiences personal empowerment through his reintegration cuts against the grain of most YA texts as well as scholarly discussions of power in the genre. In Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction, Robyn McCallum observes that "adolescent fiction, and many of the discussions which surround it, typically assume and valorize humanistic concepts of individual agency, that is the capacity to act independently of social restraint" (McCallum 7). Yet, a certain kind of "social restraint" actually bolsters Tommy's individual agency. By accepting the restraints of his community and his responsibilities toward it, Tommy claims greater personal agency over choices regarding his everyday actions and political commitments. In his chapter on self-determination in Power and Place, Daniel Wildcat attests that it may sound like a contradiction to members of dominant Western societies, but "the more attentive one is to their community, the more self-determining they can be; the less attentive, the more selfish and self-destructing they will be" (Deloria and Wildcat 149). This is certainly true for Tommy. As he reflects on learning about responsibility at the camp, Tommy writes, "I saw then that each one of us who faltered was irreplaceable and a loss to all. In that way, I learned how important and how precious my existence was. I was necessary" (203). It is precisely by accepting his place in his community that Tommy finds value as an individual. He writes of this time of returning home, settling on his family's ancestral lands, and beginning to serve his people, "I had never felt so strong in all my life" (230). He feels strong as an individual because of his participation in his community.
That Tommy and his community are mutually empowered via his reintegration demonstrates the resistive and restorative nature of Okanagan interdependence. Traditionally, Okanagan children are raised by an extended family network, carefully attended to as individuals, and taught the laws of the people that center on the law "to learn to live and work in harmony with everyone and share with everyone in the community" (Armstrong et al. 14–15). In the first part of Slash, Tommy becomes divided from his Okanagan community through colonial schooling, his internalized sense of inferiority, his misdirected anger, and his buying into colonial attempts to weaken Indians with drugs and alcohol. His attempt to fight against colonialism as an individual estranged from his Okanagan community is not only unhealthy for him personally but also inherently ineffective because, the novel shows, colonialism itself has caused his isolation. In Native Hubs, Renya Ramirez contends that "Indigenous peoples sharing their past and contemporary experiences is a process of bringing back together or re-membering (a term recuperated by Guillermo Delgado-P, an Indigenous scholar) the Native social body that has been torn apart by colonization" (Ramirez 9). In reintegrating with his Okanagan community, Tommy joins them in remembering the community's interdependent way of life before colonization, the divisive trauma of colonization, and the resources they have within their own culture for healing from that trauma and moving forward. Through this reintegration and remembering, Tommy's Okanagan community is able to re-member itself in a vibrant form that colonization was meant to destroy.
It is not new to the Okanagan (or many other Indigenous communities) to understand individuals as being empowered through connection to community, but this notion contrasts sharply with the repressive characterization of reintegration typical of mainstream YA literature (Trites, Disturbing 7–8, 34, 52; McCallum 71). In Slash, Tommy's reintegration into his Indigenous society not only empowers him personally but also bolsters his and his community's rebellion against colonialism. Returning home after his extensive travels, he recalls the way his Uncle Joe and Old Pra-cwa "talked about protecting our land and our ways," and, he writes, "I finally understood how that tied into the problems of our people" (206). He remembers that during his childhood days, his Uncle Joe had stressed the importance of maintaining cultural and spiritual traditions, and Pra-cwa had declared that "we are a people" with "rights [that] come from the Creator" (191, 209–10). In reconciling with the traditionalists in his Okanagan community, Tommy comes to accept their vision for sovereignty — based in a stance of complete autonomy from the Canadian government and a commitment to strengthening the people by investing in their traditional practices and homelands — and to freshly articulate that vision for young people in the community. The novel suggests that Tommy and his community most effectively resist colonialism when they focus on revitalizing Okanagan traditions, a move that challenges the "assimilate or get lost" colonialist policies that threaten their inherent right to self-determination (70, 208–54).
In depicting an entire Indigenous community fighting for self-determination against dominant colonial powers, Slash presents an additional layer of rebellion not found in most mainstream texts and not acknowledged by scholars of YA literature. Trites writes, "Power is a force that operates within the subject and upon the subject in adolescent literature; teenagers are repressed as well as liberated by their own power and by the power of the social forces that surround them in these books. Much of the genre is thus dedicated to depicting how potentially out-of-control adolescents can learn to exist within institutional structures" (Disturbing 7). Tommy becomes deeply dedicated to the institutions of his Okanagan and intertribal communities even as he works with others to further develop those institutions. However, Trites's conceptualization of power does not apply at all to Tommy's relationship with colonial institutions. By no means does Tommy "learn to exist" within colonial institutional structures. Instead, his reintegration with his Okanagan community prompts him to distance himself from those structures. As he and others in his community commit themselves to a holistic pursuit of sovereignty, they refuse to accept the blueprint for Indigenous communities given by colonial institutions. Not just in Slash but in all of the YA texts in this study, when Indigenous adolescent protagonists reconcile with their local communities, they become more deeply involved in their communities' resistance to colonial domination. Despite their awareness of the pervasiveness of colonial power, their grounding in their Indigenous communities gives them hope that they can resist that power and build their own power from within their communities.
Even the adolescent reform–novel tradition — the strand of YA literature that most stridently challenges dominant social norms (albeit while often simultaneously implicitly reinscribing those norms) — fails to account for the type of interdependent Indigenous empowerment found in Slash. As Trites explains in Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel, this tradition began with nineteenth-century works by the likes of Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott, and it continues with many contemporary YA titles. In these texts, Trites observes:
The protagonist is an ethical character who transcends his or her society by some form of self-reliance. ... If the protagonist experiences growth — and s/he usually does — that growth provides a commentary as to how the society itself might also "grow" (i.e., improve). And the character's growth is a sign that the society can, indeed, potentially change. ... These texts share a romantic faith in the ability of youth to improve the future. The message to readers is, invariably, "with self-improvement, you can improve the world." (143–44)
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Excerpted from "Self-Determined Stories"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Mandy Suhr-Sytsma.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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