Eden Robinson

Like the protagonist of her debut novel, Eden Robinson is a member of the Haisla First Nation, whose reserve is located in the Kitimat district at British Columbia's coastline. While Robinson's novel was published sixteen years ago, the issue of environmental pollution is even more pressing and prevalent today. Referring to ecological damages, this article will examine to what extent non-sustainable thinking, outdated government plans and pipeline projects affect British Columbia's environment nowadays. By placing nature above human and especially by highlighting the power of water, Robinson's fiction almost gains a foreboding character. The water spirituality of the Haisla Nation, as it is represented in Monkey Beach, has an essential position that must not be neglected or underestimated. Connecting the water symbolism with present environmental activism offers a new perspective on contemporary Indigenous environmentalism. This article analyzes how Robinson's novel raises the awareness of Indigenous ways of understanding, living with, and respecting water and the environment as something—at least—equal. Contemporary environmental activism aims at both raising awareness and changing public policy to a more sustainable as well as preservative attitude while Robinson's fiction joins this site of resistance.

Although Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach were written by authors of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, the two novels share a common theme of ancestral languages that are lost to the texts’ protagonists. In Chorus of Mushrooms, the Japanese immigrant parents of Muriel, or Murasaki, have built the identities of their entire family on the rejection of the Japanese language and culture; in Monkey Beach, the First Nations Haisla community of Kitamaat, in which the protagonist, Lisamarie Hill, lives with her family, is almost thoroughly westernized, and hardly anyone speaks Haisla. Remarkably, in both novels the ancestral language may be seen as medium of accessing the true identity of the protagonists, as the translation of tradition into English turns out to be but an approximation, far from sufficient to convey all intricacies of the respective non-white cultures.

in: TransCanadiana. Polish Journal of Canadian Studies, 6.2013, Ed. Agnieszka Rzepa & Ewelina Bujnowska

The fundamental characteristic of magical realism is its duality, which enables alternative representations of society and history. Its specific narrative devices make magical realism a viable form for rendering traumatic experience and memories. Monkey Beach (2000) by Eden Robinson, a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations in Canada, is a repository of memories, triggered and fuelled by trauma. Fragmented temporality, mixing of discourses, shifts in focalization, wordplays, repetition, and the magical are some of the devices the novel uses to address the complex landscape of trauma and memory. By unveiling personal memories, Monkey Beach gives way to the unconscious to enter the narrative structure, gradually revealing a much
larger issue of the mistreatment of the Haisla people in Canada—and the resulting collective trauma. As trauma cannot be integrated into the narrative, it can only be uncovered indirectly and through a double distancing: firstly through the techniques of magical realism, and secondly, through the seemingly detached point of view of the narrator, who ultimately realises that her life is also encumbered with the dark stain of colonialism.

This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson’s The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway’s A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers and address crucial issues related to contemporary Indigeneity. Both narratives are claimed to convey a fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival — a negotiation which is related theoretically to Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability, precarity, and resistance, particularly to her premise that vulnerability and resistance do not have to be opposed and/or mutually exclusive but rather work in intricate relationships. The article shows that while Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk) combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to both the precarity and resilience of Haisla cultural and ecological survival, Highway (Cree) presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to unsettle his audience through combining humor and confrontation. I ultimately argue that, if Indigenous writing has always expressed this duality of exposing vulnerability as well as inscribing resistance, then, it may serve as a model for transcending the binary structure powerful/powerless, a move that Butler sees as fundamental to her redefinition of vulnerability. In other words, through this optic the history of Indigenous writing is indeed a history of exploring the ways in which vulnerability and resistance relate and interweave, rather than stand in opposition.