Jeannette Armstrong (1948-  )

Jeannette Armstrong was born and raised on the Penticton Indian Reserve, one of eight Syilx (Okanagan) reserves located in both Canada and the United States. She is a fluent speaker of the Syilx language, Nsyilxcn, and is a knowledge keeper of plant medicines, Syilx traditions, and cultural protocols. She is a writer, poet, teacher, and artist, and is a strong voice in Indigenous environmental ethics.

Armstrong has been writing since she was fifteen years old and has had many of her short stories and poems published in journals and anthologies. In 1986, Armstrong published her first novel, Slash – a story about a young Okanagan man finding his culture after a life of racism and violence. In 1991, Armstrong published a book of poetry titled Breath Tracks. She published her second novel, Whispering in Shadows, in 2000 – a story about an Okanagan woman navigating her cultural knowledges through colonial surroundings while also engaging in environmental activism across the continent.

In 1986, Armstrong became the executive director of the En’owkin Centre, a post-secondary institution which focuses on cultural, educational, and ecological arts and creative arts, and is operated solely by the six Syilx Canadian bands in partnership with the University of Victoria, the University of British Columbia Okanagan, and the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology. In 1989 she helped found the En’owkin School of International Writing, the first credit-giving creative writing program in Canada managed solely by and for Indigenous people.

Armstrong holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria and a PhD from the University of Greifswald, Germany. She was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2021. She is an associate professor and a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledge and Philosophy with the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences at UBC-Okanagan. As part of her work to research, document, categorize and analyze Okanagan Syilx oral literature in Nsyilxcn, UBC-Okanagan now offers a Bachelor degree in Nsyilxcn Language Fluency. 

Selected Readings:

Armstrong, Jeannette. Slash. Theytus, 1987; revised edition, 1998.

---.Whispering in Shadows. Theytus Books, 1999.

---.Breathtracks. Theytus, 1991.

---.Enwhisteetkwa; Walk in Water (for children). Theytus, 1982.

---.Neekna and Chemai (for children), illustrated by Barbara Marchand. Theytus, 1984.

--- and Douglas Cardinal. The Native Creative Process: A Collaborative Discourse. Theytus, 1992.

---, Lee Maracle, Greg Young-ing, Delphine Derickson.  We Get Our Living Like Milk from the Land: Okanagan Tribal History Book. Penticton, British Columbia, Theytus, 1993.

Additional Resources

For a comparative analysis of different 20^th century Indigenous texts, see:

Dobson, Kit. “Appropriation redux: Re-reading George Ryga through Jeannette Armstrong.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 56, no. 3, 29 Nov. 2020, pp. 404–415, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989420970995.

Abstract

This article considers ways in which solidarity across social locations might play a role in fostering resistance to vulnerability. My case study consists of the interplay between writer George Ryga’s 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and Okanagan Syilx writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 novel Slash. While these important and compelling texts have received considerable critical attention, the relationship between them is less known. I am interested in the ways in which these works both hail and offer critique to one another. In the contemporary moment, in which questions of appropriation of voice have gained renewed urgency within Indigenous literary circles in Canada and beyond, the relationship between these texts speaks to a historical instance of appropriation, but also of complicated processes of alliance-building. These texts demonstrate how agency resides across multiple locations. I read Ryga’s Ecstasy in the context of Jeannette Armstrong’s engagement with the play within her novel Slash in order to witness the ways in which Ryga’s text, in the first instance, appropriates Indigenous voices into an anti-capitalist critique. In the second instance, I read these works in order to witness how they might simultaneously provide a compelling analysis of the vulnerability of the people who are the subject of both works. I compare the interplay between Armstrong and Ryga’s texts to contemporary debates around appropriation in order to argue for the historical and ongoing importance of these two works as precursors to the crucial interventions made by contemporary Indigenous critics and writers.

For a discussion of what constitutes the human body when reconciled with Indigenous perspectives, see:

Van Oyen, Julie. “Nested bodies (or a small and careful spoonful).” Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group, 22 July 2021, https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0019.

Abstract

This short paper refers to a project involving the development of a material fermentation practice into a process-led research praxis, wherein themes of embodiment and the relational bodily self are explored through direct contact with nonhuman agents. Theory and concepts borrowed from an Okanagan perspective of the body, as related through its language by scholar and land speaker Jeannette Armstrong, as well as from interaction design and a rich lineage of embodied researchers and practitioners, contribute to a re-framing of the human as a body dependent on others in the life-making activities of preparing, feeding, and eating the ferments. This paper reflects on the service, uncertainty, and accountability taken on by drawing on these lineages and implicating the body in the work, and makes the case for allowing the final outcome to remain a process of ongoing relations and accountabilities.

For an analysis of Indigenous oral histories impacted by Colonization, see:

Sengupta, U. “‘Stories to Stay, Stories to Subvert’: The Role of Collective Communal Memory in the Native-Canadian Struggle for Resistance Against Colonization”. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 1, Dec. 2023, pp. 36-45, doi:10.35684/JLCI.2023.10104.

Abstract

The Indigenous communities of Canada have transmitted their traditional knowledge of survival from one generation to another through oral storytelling sessions since the pre-colonial times. This knowledge has remained encapsulated within their collective communal memory in the form of stories of ancestors, tales of tricksters, dream-vision narratives, ceremonial songs, and ritualistic recitals. But forces of Euro-Canadian colonization have encroached upon their right to autonomy through a coercive imposition of the colonizers' language (English) and the colonizers' medium of expression (writing) upon them. The starkly different consciousness of ‘history’ that governs the worldviews of the dominant and the dominated have only served to aggravate the imbalance of power even more. The late twentieth century has seen the literary productions of these communities’ strife to reclaim their cultural and thereby political autonomy by inscribing the ‘oral’ within the ‘written’ and reworking the semiotics of the foreign tongue, imposed upon them to incorporate the specific nuances of their traditional language-culture within it. By looking into Ravensong (1993) and Whispering in Shadows (2000) penned by writer-activists Lee Maracle (Salish) and Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) respectively, this paper aims to explore the subversive potential of this collective cultural memory in resisting the colonial atrocities, the erosion of identity and the political disempowerment that has plagued the Native-Canadian existence for centuries.

For a discussion of the role of the individual in carrying through creative acts from the past, see:

Vargas, Dominique Aurilla. "Contemporary Decolonial Temporalities: Generational and Transcontinental Kinship in Janet Campbell Hale’s Women on the Run and Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows." Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 33 no. 3, 2021, p. 76-97. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2021.0010.

Armstrong is quoted:

Jeannette Armstrong critiques the publishing industry’s (including feminist presses’) continued marginalization of Indigenous writers and for their solicitation of “Indigenous and racialized women’s voices” used to educate white interlocutors. These initiatives do nothing to transform the exclusionary practices of institutions, and actually uphold Indigenous knowledge as static and ultimately knowable (Hargreaves 25). This liberal multiculturalism relies on political identity representation that is ultimately domesticated by neoliberal capitalist imperatives (Chow 29). Many writers and critics have emphasized the danger of this kind of knowability, which can enact surveillance and violence. As in Hale’s and Armstrong’s texts, the power to counter this epistemic violence seems to lie in a “force of fugitive knowers” not bound by normative structures (Halberstam 8). This is not the elimination of settler- colonial institutions, but a rejection of their inevitability.” (Vargas 94)

For a discussion of how colonial barriers are created between different Indigenous groups, see:

Legault (Red River Métis), Gabrielle. “Revisiting the historic Métis-Syilx McDougall family in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, vol. 20, no. 1, Mar. 2024, pp. 123–133, https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801241235232.

Abstract

Contentions centering on rights claims on behalf of Métis, an Indigenous group descended from a distinct bicultural political nation in central Canada, continue within the traditional territory of the Syilx, a group Indigenous to the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada. This article revisits earlier work arguing that Métis in Kelowna pre-1900s were mostly absorbed into Syilx community, having no traditional territory within this region. Inclusion took place through marriage and common-law partnerships, but also through social and familial networks formed out of kin connections. Accounting for oral histories, genealogical records, and cultural inheritance and identity practices, Syilx philosophies of inheritance and Métis practices of relationality and matrilocality are cause for the McDougall family’s integration into Syilx communities, despite Canadian Government policies that dictated otherwise. Through decolonization and unlearning, this work acknowledges how colonial interference created and continues to reinforce divisions among First Nations and Métis peoples.

For an overview of Indigenous ways of knowing, see:

Knopf, Kerstin and Däwes, Birgit. "Indigenous Knowledges in North America: An Introduction" Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 68, no. 2, 2020, pp. 105-110. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2020-0013

Armstrong is quoted:

Jeannette  Armstrong  explains  that  in  the  Okanagan  [Syilx]  world  view,  human  beings  are  “intricately  woven  into  the  very  fabric  of  the  life  force  of  the  land”  (Armstrong  2007,  31).  This  is  demonstrated with the Syilx word for ‘land’ – ‘tmxwulaxw,’ translated as “from nothing,  the  life  force  spreading  outward”  “in  many  individual  strands,”  “here  in continuous cycles”; these strands – one of them humans – “are continuously being  bound  with  others  to  form  one  strong  thread  coiling  year  after  year  into  the future as the life force of the land” (Armstrong 2007, 30–31).” (Knopf 105)

For a discussion of the role of government and community in the creation and release of Indigenous literature, see:

Sarkowsky, Katja. “‘Dismissing Canada’? Alternative Citizenship and Indigenous Literatures.” Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature, 2018, pp. 67–100, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96935-0_3.

For a discussion of decolonization through the strategic use of Indigenous languages in literature, see:

Fachinger, Petra. “Anishinaabemowin in Indianland, The Marrow Thieves, and Crow Winter as a Key to Cultural and Political Resurgence.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 46, no. 2, 4 Aug. 2022, pp. 127–149, https://doi.org/10.7202/1091105ar.

The use of Indigenous languages in literary texts by Indigenous authors has attracted astonishingly little commentary from literary scholars. In his essay “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King refers to “interfusional” literature “to describe that part of Native Literature which is a blending of oral literature and written literature” (41). Author, literary scholar, and environmental activist Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx) discusses a similar technique in her essay “Land Speaking,” in which she describes “Rez English” as a form of North American colloquial English that facilitates “construct[ing] bridges” (192) between English and N̓syilxčn̓. She describes Okanagan Rez English as having “a structural quality syntactically and semantically closer to the way the Okanagan language is arranged” (193). Armstrong believes “that Rez English from any part of the country, if examined, will display the sound and syntax patterns of the indigenous language of that area and subsequently the sounds that the landscape speaks” (193).4’ (Fashinger 129)

For a similar discussion of the subversive effects of Indigenous language in poetry, see:

Ezenwa, Chinelo. “What Indigenous Literatures Have to Do with Decolonization: Selections from Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl (1996) and The Pemmican Eaters (2015).” Alternative francophone, vol. 3, no. 3, 2023, pp. 67–86. https://doi.org/10.29173/af29499

Armstrong is quoted:

In the aforementioned interview with Andrews, Dumont talks about the difficulties in attempting to express her Indigenous worldview in English. This is a common theme among other Indigenous writers such as Blaeser, as shown above, as well as Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong. Armstrong, in particular, argues that English (“standard” English) lacks “fluidity” (159) in terms of structure, tense meaning. The exception, according to her, is when the writer can transform English into an Indigenized version such as “Okanagan Rez English” (158). In her essay, she demonstrates such “deficiencies” by looking at the differences between the Okanagan word “Kekwep” (156) and its English equivalent “dog.” I am reluctant to use the word equivalent in this context because her main contention is that the reality of the Okanagan “Kekwep” (156) is quite different from the English word. To her, where the Okanagan “Kekwep” (156) recalls “an experience of a little furred life” (157), “the English word solicits an inanimate generic symbol for all dogs, independent of action and isolated from everything else (157). Ezenwa 77-78

For a discussion of how an Indigenous text works to resist colonial influence and framing, see:

Tibbits-Lamirande, Meghan. “‘Not enough raven’: Reading Lee Maracle’s Ravensong as counter-hegemonic ethnography.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 45, no. 1, 5 Mar. 2021, pp. 220–237, https://doi.org/10.7202/1075593ar.

Armstrong is quoted:

In “The Disempowerment of First North American Native Peoples and Empowerment through Their Writing,” Okanagan scholar and author Jeannette Armstrong argues “that it is systems and processors which we must attack” and not “a people we abhor” (241). As a primary system of colonial power and classification, traditional ethnography inscribes and naturalizes a genocidal relationship between settler-invaders and First Nations. Ethnographers speak from a position of culturally constructed authority, espousing Western anthropology as a regime of scientific truth. Tibbits-Lamirande 223

For a discussion of how Indigenous women can assert their agency within their own communities, see:

Caron, Fanny. “Liglav Awu, child of the ‘Double Country’: The Clarion Voice of Indigenous Women in Taiwan.” Sinophone and Taiwan Studies, 2023, pp. 135–149, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_10.

For an analysis of Indigenous epistemologies and how their significance as alternative to settler-colonial models, see:

Holmes , Amanda, and Sara Tolbert. “Relational Conscientization Through Indigenous Elder Praxis: Renewing, Restoring, and Re-storying.” Towards Critical Environmental Education, 3 Nov. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50609-4.

Abstract

The violence of settler-colonialism is a symptom of a deeply diseased epistemology, one that forms an organizing isolationist logic and a strategy of control through human disconnection from, and dismemberment of, the natural world. Indigenous alternatives to the epistemological violence of settler-colonialism cultivate and sustain solidarities among human and beyond-human worlds. Indigenous onto-epistemologies are grounded in a spiritual activism centering Indigenous connectedness among lands, languages, and traditional practices. Indigenous ways of knowing and being, restore and renew relationalities from deep within places, contexts, histories, and the narrative memories of the Land and her People. Restoring these Indigenous relational ways of knowing and being, (re)storying our connections, remembering the cyclical nature of their patterns, and the particular constellation of their relationships, is the how of Indigenous renewal and resurgence. This chapter highlights the practices of wisdom embodied within ancient philosophies and teachings that remain vibrant and alive today through the praxis of Indigenous Elders, the generations, and our still-living natural world. Indigenous Elders invigorate a vast web of interconnected fibers that hold on to the connections between us and our relatives of the living world and our collective, synergistic ways of being and knowing.

---

Jeannette Armstrong entry by Alexa Manuel, September 2018.  Alexa Manuel (Silyx) completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia in March 2024. She worked as a research assistant for The People and the Text from 2018-2020. 

Additional resources collected by Eli Davidovici in March 2024. Eli is an alumnus of McGill University, graduating with an M.Mus. in Jazz Performance in Summer 2024. 

Entry edits by Margery Fee, September 2018. Margery Fee is Professor Emerita at UBC in the Department of English.

Please contact Deanna Reder at dhr@sfu.ca with any comments or corrections.