Sophie McCall. First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship

Sophie McCall. First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. 254 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.95 sc. In the last few decades, there has been a growing dialogue about the appropriation of Indigenous in Canada and beyond. First Person Plural offers an important contribution to this discourse by examining collaborative work in various arenas: in literature and film, land claims, court cases, public inquiries, commissions, ethnographies and the making of history. How have Indigenous peoples been able to voice their truths and be heard? What has changed since Indigenous peoples began to challenge the colonial act of being spoken for? First Person Plural explores the successes and challenges of multi-voiced storytelling with Indigenous peoples. Literary scholar Sophie McCall invites us to consider moving beyond parallel voices where speaker and author represent binaries; to explore, rather, that in-between space where voices-in-dialogue can help to articulate evolving expressions of Indigenous sovereignty. McCall begins by connecting the call for Indigenous voice to the birth of modern Indigenous sovereignty in Canada in the early 1970s. She explores the efforts of Chief Justice Thomas Berger and anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody to use Dene testimonial in work associated with the McKenzie Valley Pipeline hearings (1973-1975). McCall argues that these efforts were well intentioned and innovative at the time, but fell somewhat short of self-reflective analysis and translating Indigenous ways of knowing to the Canadian public. She then shifts to an examination of how Abenaki film-maker and Stodo writer Lee Maracle incorporated the multiple voices of Mohawk and other Indigenous people in storytelling about the resistance at Oka and, in Maracle's case, in telling Indigenous women's stories, including her own. In a later chapter, McCall examines how Inuit filmmakers use a multiplicity of Indigenous voices in their storytelling. She compares the collaborative and community based work on the film, Atanarjuat (2007) with the essentialist and static 1922 film, Nanook of the North, linking the timing and approaches of Atanarjuat to the birth of Nunavut (1999) as expressions of Inuit sovereignty. Other chapters invite us to consider the state's use of testimonial in comparison to how oral is employed in exemplary Indigenous and non-Indigenous coauthored books. Chapter Four examines how the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) missed the opportunity to elicit the active participation of witnesses in the remaking of a shared history (110). McCall contrasts this with the presented in the 1997 book Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene, co-authored by former Dene Chief Ila Bussidor and journalist Ustun Bilgen-Reinart and narrated by thirteen other Dene spokespeople. …

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