Hybridity and Being Between Cultures
Jonathan Hart
University of Alberta
Hybridity has been about since long before Herodotus spoke about the mixing of the
Syths and the Amazons to form a new culture. Most people then and now, if they look
carefully at themselves and their culture, are between at least two cultural situations.
They are, no matter how much the discourse of purity was about in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, hybrids. It was precisely because there was no purity that
the rage for purity existed and with such deleterious effects. The culmination of this
notion of purity, in a Europe of mongrels, was the Nazi fantasy of Aryans and racial
purity. They even tried to purify their culture and in doing so made it a pale shadow
of its former self and weakened the position of the German language, literature and
culture in the world. But theirs was the most egregious form of the belief in racial and
cultural superiority amongst peoples of European descent. Those two centuries were
Europeans at their worst in terms of feelings of being pure and superior.
In Canada and the northern United States the English and the French came among
the Native peoples uninvited, something that happened when the Vikings or Norse
came in Greenland and Newfoundland hundreds of years before. This essay, taking
into consideration this earlier background, will concentrate most on hybridity in
North America, especially in terms of then and now, past and present. The present I
will discuss includes two contemporary Native poets and theories of hybridity, which
might very well become alienated from the context that I am discussing here, suggesting, perhaps, that theory cannot be applied to different cultures without humility,
modification and, sometimes, a sense of qualification and, at times, of shortcoming
or even failure. Hybridity may change over time, and its current theoretical manifestation is something that may be utopian in a globalized world of migration and
multiculturalism, but it also may be estranged form the vary contexts in earlier periods that had potential for this kind of mixing and openness.
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
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Besides expanding to the New World and beyond, the French and the English
performed internal colonization, trying to chase out languages other than their two
dominant national languages even though they both had significant populations that
did not speak the increasingly “official” mother tongues of the nation in the throes of
nation-building and nationalism. As nation and empire grew stronger as technology
in communication, industry and warfare increased, the governments in Paris and
London imposed French and English respectively. The French pushed back Breton,
Occitan and other tongues and the English tried to subdue Celtic tongues, including
their own language of the Celts in England-Cornish.
It is no surprise, then, that when England and France colonized Canada some
of these attitudes prevailed. Even though the French left Canada in 1763, they had
already been involved in facing hybridity and métissage. The English and then the
British were in Canada longer and actually had something to do with the foreign
policy of the state until the Statute of Westminster in 1931. My own approach is lit140 erary, historical and ethnological, and I wish to mention two examples from New
France that were, in retrospect, proleptic for hybridity in Canada, the one having to
do with Samuel de Champlain in the early seventeenth century and with Louis Riel
in the late nineteenth century. In the case of English Canada, I will use more contemporary examples. In this brief essay I will concentrate on Native-settler relations and
will do so largely in terms of historical and literary texts and two films.
Rather than start with the Vikings in Canada a thousand years ago or Columbus
in the New World in the fifteenth century, my discussion of European-Native contacts and the dialogue and conflict and possible hybridity begins in New France with
Champlain, the governor. He is, in many ways, part of the literature of French travel
and encounter narratives, but with the invention of Canadian literature, as with
that of American literature, he is also part of early Canadiana or at the beginnings
of French Canadian or Québécois literature. The present tends to read categories
back on the past because Champlain could not know there would be a Québec or
Canada any more than John Smith or William Bradford, who occupy similar roles in
American literature, could have dreamt of a nation called the United States. There are
similar figures in other colonies like New Zealand and Australia.
There is a myth that the French in Canada were and are comfortable with cultural
hybridity with the Natives. This forgets Jacques Cartier’s kidnapping of the Natives,
some of Champlain’s attitudes, the treatment of Louis Riel (who was handled as a
rebel after his second rebellion in the Northwest in 1885 and not entirely, though
largely, by the British settlers) and some recent conflicts between settlers and indigenous peoples. These stories have a contemporary life in the culture of Québec.
Étienne Brûlé lived among the Hurons (Ouendat) in the first part of the seventeenth century in New France and was involved in mediation between these two
cultures. He was the first among the French in New France or Canada to live with
the Natives. Samuel de Champlain says that in about 1610 Brûlé was sent among the
Huron in exchange for a young Huron. Brûlé left no accounts of his career, so that all
J onathan Hart | H ybridity and B eing B etween Cultures
we have are missionary reports. Their dislike for his Native way of life, as the model
for the coureur des bois, affects the rhetoric and content of their representations of
Brûlé.1 The representation of the relation between Native and European priests, writers and historians, is another form of mediation.
A source for the representation of Brûlé that I want to examine here is the works
of Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer who travelled in the Americas in the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and whose crowning achievement was
the founding of Québec in 1608. Champlain wrote about his third voyage in 1611,
where he spoke about the Natives returning his French youth or boy in indigenous
dress who was pleased with the Native customs and told what he had learned from
them over the winter (Champlain 188; cf. IV. 138). Champlain showed less anxiety
over this Native dress than Hernán Cortés does, but he, too, wanted intelligence of
the country and its inhabitants. Brûlé might also be the youth Champlain sent, not
against his will, to live among the Algonquin in order to learn their language and
customs (Champlain IV. 118). He may also have been the interpreter who begged
Champlain to allow him to go among the Natives (Champlain IV. 247). In 1618,
Champlain explained that Brûlé had spent eight years among the Natives to learn
about their language and way of life (Champlain III. 213). Brûlé became friends with
the Natives and a man who promised to make peace with the French who had been
making war on them (Champlain III. 213-26). Champlain’s narrative of Brûlé shows
him as flexible about his identity in order to survive. According to Champlain, the
Natives rushed Brûlé, then tortured him “contrary nevertheless to the wish of their
chief” (Champlain III. 221-22). The chief preferred talk to torture.
In 1623 Champlain described Brûlé, who had been among the Hurons or Ouendat,
in unflattering terms: “And the influence of example was very bad in sending out such
evil-livers, who ought instead to have been severely chastised; for this man was recognized as being very vicious in character, and much addicted to women” (Champlain
V. 132). Champlain’s representation depicts Brûlé as a traitor who can give the enemy
information, in this case the English in 1629, when Kirke takes Québec, claiming that
Brûlé “had placed himself at the service of the English” (Champlain VI. 99). Brûlé is
like a Native whose knowledge both the English and French prize and may be uneasy
in seeking. In the New World his knowledge of Native ways and lands is what makes
him valuable, but European governors and writers can occlude, vilify and even forget
what is Native. The indigenous person or the European who “goes Native” can be
part of a parody of mediation, a kind of excluded third who is blamed for the conflict.
Colonial governors could construe the White Indian as a traitor even as they needed
him or her to survive or thrive in the New World. Narratives then and now of hybridity can be a challenge, and Brûlé caught the attention of Champlain and a novelist in
the first decade of the twenty-first century.
A recent historical novel, François Dallaire’s Le Sauvage Blanc, which was published in the 5ième in Paris by L’Harmattan in 2003, represents this story. In 1610,
following the instructions of Samuel de Champlain, Etienne Brûlé, who was born
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about 1592, in Champigny-sur-Marne, east of Paris, is in the country of the Hurons
to encourage trade and to learn the customs of the Natives. Brûlé survives by taking
on the Native way of life and becomes in Dallaire’s terms “un sauvage blanc” or a
White Indian. In time Brûlé learns from the Native perspective and becomes critical of French views and ways of life. A little like the Natives in the work of Michel de
Montaigne and Jean de Léry, Brûlé becomes a way of criticizing European values.
Perhaps, then, it is not necessary to have an either/or between traditional nationalism in which people die in the streets because they are supposed to have a certain
identity and postmodern/postcolonial self-invention and hybridity. But I think the
crossing of boundaries and the flexibility of mediation can suggest one way to live in
the world and to respond to movements and mixing of culture in the global village.
This is where I wish to turn to Louis Riel, who lived in British North America, the
United States and Canada, a controversial figure in Canada and a key representative
of aboriginal and Métis history and culture.
In the United States, owing to conflicts over land between settlers and Natives,
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frontier wars were not uncommon, whereas in British North America then Canada
treaties were made in order to avoid conflict. Sometimes, as in the Northwest
Rebellions of 1869 and 1885, led by Louis Riel, the new Canadian government,
although it had made promises to the British Crown and government to do so, did
not set out treaties that avoided bloodshed. In the case of those rebellions, the Métis,
or people of mixed Native and European origin, felt their rights and lands were not
protected. This figure of the person between cultures is still with us. Louis Rielmediator, renegade, resistor-was Métis, part Cree, part French. In Canada, Riel led
the Northwest rebellions in 1869-70 and 1885. Riel was rebel and mystic, French and
Native (Flanagan 8; cf. 5-6). Riel’s mother told him stories about the French nobility
from which he was supposed to be descended, and later Riel identified with the Irish
and thought they, along with French Canadians, were victims of the British empire
(Flanagan 8; cf. 5-6).
Riel becomes like the figure of the hybrid.2 Hybrid or Métis discourse mixes
European and other cultures. In Riel there was a narrative of liberation but also the
eruption of the colonial and the feudal. Riel, who disrupted colonialism at the height
of the British empire, appealed to authority while calling and acting for freedom. In
Riel, there is yearning for the past life of the Plains Indians that was being destroyed
and for the lost grandeur of the French empire in America. Moreover, he was given to
American republicanism and he identified with subjected peoples. Riel had, in part,
a Utopian yearning. Riel was a liminal figure, someone between cultures, who, like
many before and after, found it difficult to resolve our own contradictions and those
of the cultures and nations that we inhabit. This hybridity may well suggest something beyond the time and place that Riel lived in, and despite historical difference
there may be a typology of the hybrid. Riel continues to be of interest more than 125
years after his death.
R iel has been represented in various arts since his death. For instance, in 1925,
J onathan Hart | H ybridity and B eing B etween Cultures
Maurice Constantin-Weyer, a French writer who lived in Manitoba between 1904 and
1914, published a fictionalized biography of Louis Riel, La Bourrasque. An English
translation/adaptation was published in 1930 as A Martyr’s Folly (Toronto, The
Macmillan Company). In 1954, The Half-Breed (New York, The Macaulay Company),
a new version, appeared. In 1967, an opera Louis Riel was put on as part of Canada’s
centennial celebrations. It was written by Harry Somers and had an English and
French libretto by Mavor Moore and Jacques Languirand. On 22 October 2003, CBC
Newsworld and Réseau de l’information staged a retrial of Riel. In giving a verdict,
the audience voted 87% not guilty. In Canada, Riel continues to be a leading figure
in the cultural and political worlds that occupy settlers, Natives and Métis in French
and English.
As Northrop Frye asked of Canadian culture so many years ago-is there any here
here?3 Post-structuralist and postmodernist notions of self or subject reveal a discomfort with Renaissance or modern claims for identity and individualism. But this
is a European view that is not accepted by all, let alone all Europeans, not even by 143
those who work in the rarefied world of critical theory. There are levels of qualification in views of the person and the state. For instance, Thomas King, an aboriginal
novelist, does not like the term “postcolonial” because it assumes that in relation to
native culture the time to begin is with the arrival of Europeans in North America.
Postcolonialism neglects Native traditions, which have survived colonization. For
King, Native writing is an alternative and not a construct of oppression, so that it
should not be held hostage to the nationalism that postcolonialism suggests for it
(King 11-14; cf. Hart). King sees Native writing as a counter-narrative or as a counterclassification. Riel may be a narrative and counter-narrative.
The conflicts between Native and settler continue despite a Canada that is supposed to be increasingly multicultural and hybrid. The description of a film of 2000,
Rocks at Whiskey Trench, directed by Alanis Obomsawin for the National Film Board
of Canada sums up an event related to the Oka Crisis of 1990 when the Mohawk and
the Canadian and Québec states faced each other:
On August 28, 1990, a convoy of 75 cars left the Mohawk community of Kahnawake
and crossed Montreal’s Mercier Bridge-straight into an angry mob that pelted the
vehicles with rocks. The targets of this violence were Mohawk women, children and
elders leaving Kahnawake, in fear of a possible advance by the Canadian army. In Rocks
at Whiskey Trench, Mohawks remember the terror as windows shattered around them.4
The practices of a society that officially encourages the mixing of cultures becomes
complicated over claims to land and resources and the politics of language and culture. Theory can evanesce in the face of ugly confrontation and bias. Theory may
be more necessary than ever as well as good and fair practices in order to provide a
critique of unthinking prejudice and ideologies.
Canada has been a place of conflict as much as hybridity. For residents of the United
States, it appears as a northern frontier. In the U.S. Frederick J. Turner developed the
frontier thesis, which expresses the view that there is a perennial social rebirth on
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the American frontier (Turner 2-3). Northrop Frye considered, among other topics
on the Canadian milieu, that Canada had gone from a nation to a post-nation. The
United States and Canada, owing to globalization, demographical changes and other
factors, continue to experience shifting cultural boundaries in the technological
revolution that are as expressions of a moving frontier in culture. Because Canada
is not a world power, its ideological grounding and expression are not as powerful as
there is less at stake globally and locally that a firm sense of ideology be buttressed
to support the political status quo. In the United States, the American dream, way of
life and sphere of influence throughout the world have traditionally been part of the
official political and social contract in which the nation is supposed to function. Both
countries, however, share many immigration patterns. Although both states have
also their share of injustices against Natives and Africans brought to the New World
against their will as slaves, Canada had less overt violence against the indigenous
populations and did not experience the same widespread planter society based on
144 slavery. The borders between Mexico and the United States as well as those between
Canada and the United States shifted or were indefinite even when these nations were
colonies. National identities can be problematic in terms of history. For instance,
large areas outside the centres had few Europeans in Mexico, the United States and
Canada until the nineteenth century. In 1846, the British gave up parts of British
North America that became the Oregon Territory to the United States. California,
for instance, had few Spaniards and few Anglos until the gold rush of 1849: a part of
Mexico became a part of the United States in the 1840s. The case of Florida, which
was under Spanish, British and American rule, is another example of fluidity of frontiers and identity. Hybridity can happen even when people stay within their group
and stand still. Heraclitus’ river is a river of hybridity. Rivers mix as peoples do, and
geography involves migration and change.
The Natives moved, as can be seen when the Thule and Vikings impinged on the
Dorset people before 1500 CE. The Thule called them Tuniit or Sivullirmiut (first
inhabitants) and the Vikings called the Dorset, Skræling, so the question of origin,
land and contested space are as much a part of the meeting of cultures as that of
mixing and hybridity. Between 1300 and 1500, the Thule displaced the Dorset in
the Arctic and the Norse or Vikings in Greenland. First Nations become hard to
define as the Thule supplanted the Dorset in northwestern Greenland and the Norse
in southern Greenland, and the Dorset and the Norse seem to have dwelt a great
distance from each other and opposite tips of this vast island, second only in size to
Australia as an island and between a quarter and a third the size. The Dorset were
there before the Norse, and the Norse before the Thule. Indigenous groups, including
the Dorset, were on the northern shore of Greenland for thousands of years before
the arrival of the Norse on the southern shore. In the thirteenth century Norway had
sovereignty over Greenland, at least from the Norwegian point of view, but they lost
the connection and it was only reestablished in the early eighteenth century, and less
than a hundred years later, Norway ceded that claim to Denmark. In the early 1950s,
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Denmark made Greenland an amt or administrative division of Denmark, and then
home rule came in 1979 and more autonomy still in 2008. All this is to say, from the
point of view of the people of Greenland looking back, their island has seen many
cultures and their story is successive but also fluid and hybrid.
Still more this history can be broken down largely through archeology and genetics. The early peoples of the Arctic, the last of which were the Dorset, seem to be
descended from the Chukchi, who were from Siberia, and who themselves might
have migrated from other parts of Asia. The origins of people appear to go back to
east Africa, and it is culture that distinguishes us from those origins, even those of
approximately the last 60,000 years when humans moved to a phase that served as
the basis for the various communities today in various parts of the globe.5 Culture
is more than archeology and genetics can say. Cultures tell their stories in what they
make and the tales they recount as well as the bones and traces they leave behind.
When the Thule and the Dorset met and when the Norse and the Thule encountered
one another, they may have been from the same ancestors in Africa, but by that time, 145
although probably recognizing the human form in the other, they spoke different
languages and had differences in the colour of skin, hair and eyes or the shape of
their faces, eyes and teeth. They would have different stories and points of view. The
archeological find at Saqqaq in Greenland may have provided valuable evidence, but
the living voices were long silent.
The Icelandic sagas, which are literary accounts a few centuries after events, provide a different point of view at a different time about Greenland. They are Norse
documents that, among much else, tell of Erik the Red (Eirīkr hinn rauði), that is
Eirik Thorvaldsson, and his son Leif.6 Memory becomes part of the shape of culture.
So much later, we reinterpret culture in terms of conflict, hybridity and other categories, but the interpretations of the same events change over time, even within the
culture, not to mention between cultures or in opposing cultures. Ignorance is the
human lot as people gain more knowledge, or change beliefs or assumptions, just as
the Norse did in Iceland during their conversion to Christianity from the pagan gods
in Iceland about 1000. Eirik is said to have been a pagan, Leif, a Christian. The meetings of the Thule, Dorset and Norse would have been very different to them than they
are to those now alive. The use of narrative and written sagas in Norse culture would
have been a literary way to make sense of the events. These sagas are not about the
possibilities of hybridity, but generally about the conflicts within the Norse community and their encounters with the environment and the indigenous peoples among
other topics. Hybridity may well be a sense of possibility in a mobile world that grew
out of these and later migrations such as those in the wake of Columbus.
In the northern part of North America, the meeting of cultures and even the
conflict between them is something that occurred involving indigenous peoples and
Europeans before Columbus. The literary representations and narratives of movement or travel accounts are instructive. Writing seems to fill some kind of need for
identity and can something express, occlude or erase the desire for myths of identity
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and a story of a people. The Norse appear to need to tell their tale to themselves about
what happened centuries before as perhaps a way to find some cultural coherence
or to explain their past to the present, themselves to themselves. There is a fracture
within cultures let alone faults between them. This sense of frontier continues to
this day and perhaps those on the outer edge are freer to express alternative views
or accounts than those at the centre. Canada, for instance, does not have to project
power and unity the way the United States does. Like Ireland, Canada shows anxiety
about its cultural identity, but part of that is the presence of two European languages
in one state as well as a multicultural and multilingual state in the lands of aboriginal peoples. Thus, any further analogy with the Austro-Hungarian empire, while
tempting and interesting, would be imperfect, given that Canada has never in itself
been an empire and given that its official languages are more limited than that of
the Habsburg realm. Marshall McLuhan explored the idea that Canada in the 1970s
was a borderline case and focused on location, for this state lacked a strong identity
146 like other places that were “bewildered by the growing perforation and porousness of
their identity image in this electronic age” (247). Perhaps, innovation and hybridity
can arise from a porous identity and allow for less border patrolling and insistence on
strong identification with the state and official ideology.
Sometimes Natives cross borders that European settlers drew across the land. The
movement of the poet refracts the poet on the land. Natives may not recognize borders. Buffy Sainte-Marie, for instance, is a Cree born in Saskatchewan but raised by
foster parents in Maine and Massachusetts (her foster mother was part Micmac).
Adopted at a Cree powwow when she was eighteen, Sainte-Marie appealed to peoples
of Native, European and other backgrounds in North America through her lyrics
and songs. In the 1960s, she wrote and sang about concerns that were central to the
debate on the Vietnam War (Moses & Goldie 175). Sainte-Marie became famous in
Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Her “Universal Soldier” tells of a world in
which abusive power and wars would not be possible without soldiers, and it gives
Canada, France and the United States as examples of the countries for which the soldier is fighting (qtd. in Moses & Goldie 175). “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re
Dying” satirizes American attitudes to and treaties with the Indians whose languages
are forbidden. This miseducation tries to force the American Indians “despise their
traditions” and mistakenly begins American history with Columbus while making
the conquering leeches out to be “the biggest and bravest and boldest and best!” (qtd.
in Moses & Goldie 176). Sainte-Marie’s “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” addresses
those who might have Indian grandfathers or great grandfathers and asks them to
recognize that losers in war, like the Germans, have got to keep their lands while the
Native is subject to continued loss. Here is an attempt to uncover hybridity and use it
as a means for political action and to turn those who can pass for white or who have
forgotten their backgrounds to stand up for the Native part of their past and present.
The end of the lyric asks the reader/hearer to act now because the buffalo are gone,
so it combines present political action with an elegiac nostalgia for the traditional
J onathan Hart | H ybridity and B eing B etween Cultures
life of the hunt (Moses & Goldie 177-78). Another Native poet who is concerned with
history is Jeannette C. Armstrong, an Okanagan from British Columbia. Her poem,
“History Lesson,” represents a parodic passage from Columbus to the present filled
with violence, junk food, pollution, disrespect for the dead and for Native culture:
this is a journey long and a search unholy, a kind of lost garden (Moses & Goldie
277). Both Sainte-Marie and Armstrong are fighting for Native voices to be heard
in the official history of their lands set out by writers and governments mostly in a
European tradition.
In the separation of Native and settler or even in their mixing, it is easy to obscure
Native rights and contributions and to continue the dispossession of their lands, heritage and culture. No one likes to be exiled in one’s own land. The legacy of Columbus
needs to be addressed, and Sainte-Marie and Armstrong call attention to it and, in
doing so, try to expose the wound to air partly to heal it. They are appealing to practice while others have recourse to theory.
Some theories of hybridity are suggestive, although not without their limitations as
they are often about situations less entrenched in the history of North American and
western Europe. Theory is a way of seeing, something hypothetical that can be tested
against experience or with experiment or evidence. Although theory can be imposed
deductively on texts, artifacts, and culture, it can also be heuristic and suggestive,
prompting areas and problems for exploration. For instance, David Goldstein, who
says that the genetic differences between different groups (he uses the word “races”)
are insignificant statistically, he sees race as a social construction that “means something only because we collectively believe, and behave as if, it means something”
(xvii; cf. xvi). In discussions of cultural hybridity, the mythology and actuality of
race or difference are key factors. May Joseph provides a context that gives a background to the reasons for examining expansion and colonial encounters, as I do in
this article and elsewhere in some of work in this field. In regard to hybridity, sovereignty and what she calls “pan-identities,” Joseph sees the discourse of hybridity as
emerging in the twentieth century beside “autochthonous nationalism” that was part
of the struggles for sovereignty, cultural and territorial, across Portuguese, Spanish,
French, Dutch and English colonies (1). Moreover, Joseph locates the foundation of
discourses of hybridity in “the anthropological and biological discourses of conquest
and colonization,” but notes that “the modern move to deploy hybridity as a disruptive democratic discourse of cultural citizenship is a distinctly anti-imperial and
antiauthoritarian development” (1). The tension between then and now, colonizer
and colonized finds itself in a liminal space of hybridity. Joseph calls attention to
“an intricate negotiation between colonial abjectness and modernity’s new historic
subjects, who are both colonizer and colonized” (1). Tensions occur in this situation
between the local and global, the national and the international, which were always
there in colonialism, imperialism, nationalism and discourses of hybridity as Joseph
recognizes. Points of view, and using similar ground for different or opposite purposes, are something that the theory and practice of the meeting of cultures and,
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later, ideas of hybridity employ.
Miscegenation and racial purity became hot topics in botany and zoology in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and could be used in theories of the human or
in racial theories to have interracial breeding to improve so-called degenerate races.
Benedict Anderson tells of how in the nineteenth century Pedro Fermin de Vargas,
a Colombian liberal, advocated reproduction between Spaniards and Natives as a
means of hispanizing the Indians and eliminating degenerate characteristics in them
(Anderson 21, qtd. in Coombs & Brah 3).7 In discussing the relation between hybridity and postcolonial studies, Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman examine the present state
of things and allude to Homi K. Bhabha’s use of the stairwell as an image of hybridity, a liminal space between up and down, black and white and an interstitial passage
between fixed identification and the possibility of cultural hybridity that is open to
difference without hierarchy (Bhabha 4, qtd. in Kuortti & Nyman 3). Hybridity, as
Kuortti and Nyman remind us, occurs in a world of migration across national bound148 aries and in a globalized culture, and they say that those who work on hybridity, such
as Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Arjun Appadurai, Néstor Garcia Canclani and Avtar Brah,
are interested in cultural contact and mixing while avoiding celebration and calling
attention to change, transformation, the dangers of essentialism, cultural appropriation, and diaspora. Kuortti and Nyman discuss R. Radhakrishnan, who sees
metropolitan theorists writing on difference in ways different from the way diasporic
peoples live it, and Gayatri Spivak, who warns of the co-opting of postcolonialism
and hybridity for neocolonialism (Kuortti & Nyman 3). As I have participated in
these debates elsewhere, I will not repeat myself, except to say that “hybridity” is a
contested term, and here I have also continued to ask questions of colonialism and
postcolonialism by appealing to the words and experience of the New World and of
the Natives there. Although sharing characteristics with other areas, North America
has its own local conditions as well.
Cross-cultural contact is a key to hybridity, a contested theoretical term, as
Marwan M. Kraidy has noted in a discussion of the cultural turn and its effect on
studies of the hybrid (5). Kraidy, who like me favours a comparative approach to
the topic at hand, emphasizes the connection of hybridity to power and its role in
international communication in regard to critical theory, cultural globalization
and international relations (12-13). In the context of her experience in Mauritius
and La Réunion, places of British and French colonialism, Anjali Prabhu questions
the seductive notion of hybridity as a theory in postcolonial studies that is a means
to a politics of liberation for subalterns. Moreover, Prabhu calls on theorists of the
Caribbean Creole, Édouard Glissant and Franz Fanon, in her exploration as a way of
criticizing newer theories of hybridity, which she sees as a colonial and racial concept,
that advocate agency without proper regard for contradiction and totality. Prabhu
discusses whether hybridity persists as in the colonial or whether it has been transformed and seeks to observe whether the new theories of the hybrid fail to explain
the difference between the “stark reality” of the lives of subalterns (xi, xiv-xv). This
J onathan Hart | H ybridity and B eing B etween Cultures
is the kind of role that Buffy Sainte-Marie, Thomas King and Jeannette Armstrong
play in stressing the plight of Native North Americans, even if they might refuse the
framework of postcolonialism. Some, as Peter Burke says, celebrate while others fear
hybridity (1). The controversy persists.
Theory and practice become important connections and disjunctions in the
framework of the hybrid, and some refuse that frame while others work within it.
In this article, I have attempted to examine French representations of relations with
the Natives in New France; mediators or go-betweens in Canada, such as Étienne
Brûlé and Louis Riel; Native artists in Canada like Alanis Obomsawin; the relations
between Norse and indigenous peoples in Greenland and the Arctic; and other topics
to suggest the some of the intricacies of hybridity or cultural mixing and how conflict
might play as much as, or more of, a role than a utopian hope for openness, peaceful coexistence and new cultural possibilities, no matter how much more appealing
those are to violence and war. Still, despite this qualification or caveat of realism, I
shall end on a hopeful and wishful note. The paradox is that we need to face the dark 149
side of a world into which hybridity gives us a glimpse in order to move forward. Past
and present are part of an intricate dialogue. Voice over, ventriloquy, and hectoring
the graves of the dead are not the best ways to hear the past and to speak or write
about it. To find a way to understand the traces, or to see the aspects, of something
now gone and absent is not easy task, and to embody the past in the present, in a
drama of meaning with practical and theoretical dimensions may be harder still.
Nonetheless, it is worth the effort: the alternatives are even more difficult and the
consequences dire.
This brief examination of hybridity could have also included a discussion of
Africans in Canada who had escaped slavery in the United States or who left the
Caribbean or the various mixings of culture in a multicultural society or something
more general about the Black Atlantic.8 Instead, I decided to focus on origins and
the suspicion and violence that comes with those threatened by the liminal state of
mediation or negotiation, the cultural inbetweenness of being mixed or Métis. Until
we understand, at practical and theoretical levels, the representational and actual
friction that hybridity effects in some people and systems, we shall be hostages to
baser instincts and possible repression. Fictions and history are both ways into contemporary questions in the actual world. These ways may not be simple and direct
but they are crucial.
Notes
1. See Hulme and Jaenen.
2. See Chamoiseau and Confiant, and Lang.
3. See During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?”, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism To-Day”, and
“Waiting for the Post”; also see Frye.
crcl june 2012 juin rclc
4. This description occurs on the National Film Board of Canada website at http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/
eng/collection/film/?id=33895.
5. See, for instance, Lewontin and Wells.
6. See e.g. Seaver; for the Icelandic sagas in translation, see Hreinsson and Jones.
7. On miscegenation and racial purity, see Coombes’ and Brah’s discussion on pages 3 and 4.
8. See, for example, Gilroy.
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