Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School

by Sam Mckegney, Basil Johnston (Foreword)

The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit) as well as in-depth critical studies of better known life writings by Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree). Magic Weapons examines the ways in which Indigenous survivors of residential school mobilize narrative in their struggles for personal and communal empowerment in the shadow of attempted cultural genocide. By treating Indigenous life-writings as carefully crafted aesthetic creations and interrogating their relationship to more overtly politicized historical discourses, Sam McKegney argues that Indigenous life-writings are culturally generative in ways that go beyond disclosure and recompense, re-envisioning what it means to live and write as Indigenous individuals in post-residential school Canada.

Genres: Indigenous

300 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2007

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Magic Weapons, Sam McKegney asserts two goals: “to examine how the residential school system has influenced Native literature; and, second, to examine how looking at Native literature alters our understandings of residential school history and the residential school legacy.”

It’s important work and much of McKegney’s analysis is astute. I found the way he incorporated historical information about diverse First Nations key in understanding how each were so uniquely and violently impacted by first contact, then residential schools, and the ongoing legacy of both.

The main offering are critical analyses of life-writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq), Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit), Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree).

However, I found some of his intentions at odds with his criticism. In Chapter 2, as a settler-scholar, McKegney asserts how problematic academic literary criticism of Indigenous texts is because of how it historically has been dominated by non-native academics within a colonial education system. He then outlines several important strategies for ethical academic engagement, such as clearing the way for young indigenous scholars, and “continu[ing] to respect and examine creative work as a means of empowerment and agency” (42). And then he overtly states that a non-Indigenous academic critic must understand their limits to avoid presumption. Unfortunately, by virtue of his analysis following these points he rejects some of his own suggestions. While he does incorporate the voices of contemporary Indigenous critics (at the time of writing which was 2007) and often defers to them, I would rather hear more from those voices.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful, affirmative, empowering - just the kind of book you need to deal with a subject as painful as the legacy of residential schools in Canada!

[Beary Into Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating 4