Native writing, like Native activism, is now a force to be reckoned with IN A CRITICAL article on Alexander Mackenzie first published in a double issue of Canadian Literature and now reprinted as part of Native Writers and Canadian Writing, Parker Duchemin describes how the knowledge accumulated by explorers such as Mackenzie functioned as "an essential element in the domination of the `subject races` by the European imperial powers!` Then, as now, knowledge was an instrument of power, and writing was very clearly an act of containment, of control. By writing about the Natives, Mackenzie demonstrated, at least to himself, his superiority over them. Who knows how the Natives read this white man writing, for their voices were not allowed a place in his narrative. Mackenzie wrote as white man for other male white readers. This textual strategy of domination may trouble a white middle-class guilt-ridden writer in 1991, but that does not necessarily mean that we write/read for other reasons today. We may think we do, but the power of the institution we write from (after all why was 1, a non-Native, asked to review these books?) very much controls what we can say and what we notice. Alexander Mackenzie was not the last person whose "ideology colour[ed] perception" The best explanation for re/viewing seems to be that expressed by Margery Fee in her essay on Jeanette Armstrong and Beatrice Culleton. Fee acknowledges the issue central to the white academic critic publishing/benefiting from Native writing: "it is worth pondering the extent to which any account of these novels published in a journal called Canadian Literature is in itself an act of colonization!` What does it mean when Canadian Literature, a journal that sees itself as "Canada`s foremost literary journal," publishes a double issue, Native Writers and Canadian Writing, and thereby declares that Native writers are academically respectable? W. H. New`s editorial is quite frank: "Margins have a way of speaking back from the edges of power ... If they are not recognized for the creativity of the differences they bring to bear on cultural perception, margins also have a way of making the centre irrelevant!` Fee proposes that Native writers may work within two models: "Sometimes the struggle will be to enter the Canadian literature that is published, read, reviewed, canonized, taught; sometimes the struggle will be to fight it, to rewrite it, to undermine the very assumption that such a simplistic concept can survive at all!` Fee does not draw grand generalizations in her essay; instead she shows that the grand generalizations academic critics construct are of questionable value when dealing with Native discourse. One example that she offers is Armstrong and Culleton`s use of the first-person narrator, a technique that the dominant discourse has come to view as. suspect for its "illusion of a coherent and unproblematic subject." Fee argues that the first-person narrator can be "a primary tactic used against the dominant discourse." It allows the Native, traditionally constructed by white writers as Other, to speak as Self: "This may not be a subversive tactic in the classic realist text or in the popular novel, but it is within the literary discourse of Canada!` The critic cannot speak without asking herself why she speaks. What is the point? If language controls and appropriates, how can she avoid colonizing: Given the depressing record of past writing about Native peoples and the power of the dominant discourse, this article is despite my best intentions at least as likely to oppress as to liberate. So why am 1 writing? The answer lies in the admission that silence can oppress too, can erase, as the traditional construction of "Canadian!` literature has erased Native voices. The reason for reviewing is Fee`s reason for writing: "And because of my institutional subject position and the audience of this journal, I can hope to shift the institutional discourse a little! I have spent so long on Fee`s essay because it deals With one of the central issues examined in Native Writers and Canadian Writing. Who is speaking about Native writing and why? The collection contains no notes on contributors, an omission that first irritates but then strangely works, for as I read the different critical essays I became acutely aware of which writers identify themselves and question their motives for writing, an which do not. The traditional academic discourse claiming objectivity while thoughtlessly pushing its own ends cannot be used here so another voice, a very self-critical one, is sought. Repeatedly essayists refer to "guilt feelings of twentieth century readers"; to lost opportunities for understanding and learning; to laments that no one now can read numerous Native languages; to questions about the possible value of their very writing. D. M. R. Bentley ends his essay on the depiction of Native peoples in early long poems by challenging postmodern critics: "How much better is it to be described as an indigene rather than a savage?" What difference does it make to the actual lives of Natives? The questions themselves ironically point to a major contrast between Natives and whites that Robin McGrath stresses when she discusses the Inuit belief in the practical efficacy of poetry: it is easy for whites who have power to discredit the power of language. The debate of the different voices in Native Writers and Canadian Writing foregrounds the relationship of power and language for Native writing that makes this an essential book to anyone interested in the current redefinition of Canadian literature. Penny Petrone`s Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present approaches the subject in a much more traditional and, to a certain extent, less satisfactory manner. Seeing herself as a pioneer, she writes a chronological survey of Native writing (excluding Inuit and most Native writing in French). The result is an overwhelming list of names, a useful bibliography, many brief excerpts, and both too little surface analysis and too much that is hidden. In her introduction, she briefly summarizes five reasons for the neglect of Native writing including "the purist attitude of Western literary critics towards literature that does not conform totally to their aesthetic criteria." She mentions that her selections have been influenced by her Native students and that her approach is primarily historical rather than aesthetic. However, although in discussing oral literature she notes that European classifications are inadequate, when she gets to more contemporary literature, her own biases go unexamined. Too much is left unsaid. What governs her choice of excerpts and authors? Whom do her students tell her to omit? In the rush to move from our sordid past to a more hopeful future, too much is not dealt with. For example, the chapter on oral literatures concludes by brushing aside "those who have challenged the authenticity of many of these Indian speeches and who claim that generalizing about their content and style is problematic at best." Petrone`s questionable defence is to say that the content and style of the reported speeches "are wholly consistent . " Not only is her defence logically questionable, but she assumes that her intended reader isn`t interested in who the challengers are. This intended reader appears to be white (references to our Canadian literature abound), non-academic, and keen to learn about Native writing so long as it is presented in a reassuring tone. The chapter on the 1970s states that Canadian publishers were suddenly "eager to publish, and even to seek out, native authors." There is no reference to the politics of such publishing, to the silencing of unacceptable voices that Native writers themselves speak to. The following chapter on the 1980s is even more upbeat as Petrone generalizes: "Native writers all across the country have been imbued with a feeling of optimism and dedication." It is in the brief conclusion that Petrone`s unexamined critical assumptions are evident as she indicates her preference for writers who "mov[e] beyond the worst excesses of emotion and diction that marred much earlier protest writing." Throughout the book, she reveals a clear discomfort with "bitterness,` "shrill revolutionary rhetoric," voices too angry to be "objective." She anticipates a bright future, taking for granted that the anger of Native writers will and must be "exorcised." Her final sentence suggests that the prime purpose to her survey is to demonstrate that the white definition of Canadian literature is incomplete; but her falling back upon aesthetic premises derived from New Criticism (the best writing is controlled, detached) indicates how difficult it is to recognize our own assumptions and how much need there is for white readers to read Native writers and self-consciously, painfully challenge our assumptions about the nature of writing in Canada.