ABSTRACT
Authenticity can be a slippery and limiting term when applied to Native literature for it suggests cultural and political boundaries past which we should not let our writing wander. The discussion on ‘authentic voice’, raised provocatively by the Women’s Press, initially spawned a hostile environment where protagonists and many within the larger feminist community took up polarized positions. As importantly, the debates on voice and authenticity have given rise to collective multi-racial action focused on questions of Native and minority writers’ access to the resources and infrastructure of literary production. There is considerable support for the idea that the tradition of English-language fiction in Canada is marked by prevailing racist and ethnocentric beliefs and myths. Policies which decree that the fictional depiction of groups or cultures other than one’s own is encroachment on ‘the Other’s’ territory will encourage writing by white writers solely about white characters and white culture, a consequence that is antithetical to any anti-racist objective.
