Northern Identities: Rereading Woman of Labrador

Elizabeth Goudie, author of Woman of Labrador, in 1977. Photo: Them Days

The Arctic Institute Queering the Arctic Series 2023

• The Arctic Institute’s Queering the Arctic Series 2023: Introduction
• Mapping the Landscape of LGBTQ+ Hope Spots: An Arctic Equality Map
• Tromsø as a “Safe Space”: LGBTQ+ Inclusivity through Arts in the Arctic Gateway
• Geographical Problems: Interview with Artist Justin Levesque
• Northern Identities: Rereading Woman of Labrador
• The Arctic Institute’s Queering the Arctic Series 2023: Conclusion

Labrador is a subarctic region of Canada with its own distinctive arts, cultures, and northern identities. Within Labrador letters, Indigenous women Elizabeth Goudie and Doris Saunders are two giants of the twentieth century, possibly the most significant writers the region has yet produced. Goudie’s most enduring legacy is her articulation of an iconic female Labradorian identity in her 1973 memoir Woman of Labrador, the first ever published book by a Labradorian.¹⁾Goudie E (1973) Woman of Labrador. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates. She also directly influenced and worked with Saunders, her younger kinswoman, who was the founding editor of the local oral history magazine Them Days.

The magazine has been published quarterly for nearly 50 years—an astonishing testament to its cultural importance. Many hands have been responsible for Them Days, but Saunders was at its helm for a quarter century, during which time, in the words of eulogist Wally McLean, she ‘taught us how to be Labradorian’.²⁾McLean W (2006) Dr. Dot: An Appreciation. Them Days 30(1): 22-31. Both Goudie and Saunders are widely revered for their literary work, including within the academy. Each received an honorary doctorate in her lifetime, and each has earned the attention of Indigenous and settler scholars alike, from Dale Blake³⁾Blake D (1996) Women of Labrador: Realigning North from the Site(s) of Metissage. Essays on Canadian Writing 59: 164-181. to Roberta Buchanan⁴⁾Buchanan R (1995) ‘Autobiography as History: The Autobiographies of Three Labrador Women’. McGrath C, Neis B, & Porter M Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John’s: Killick Press, 67-74. and Vicki Hallett.⁵⁾Hallett V (2019) ‘I Know Who I Am and What I Represent: Asserting Indigenous Labrador Identity’. Auto/Biography Studies 34(2): 271-301.

It goes without saying here—but I’ll say it anyway—that there is more than one kind of woman in Labrador, and there is more than one way to be Labradorian. There can only be one Elizabeth Goudie, after all. Each of the nine thousand or so Labrador women alive today⁶⁾Statistics Canada (2021) Census of Population, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/index-eng.cfm differs from the Woman of Labrador rhetorical prototype in her own ways. Queerness is one dimension of such difference. Scholars are increasingly queering Labrador’s cultural past, including through the Inuit Queer History Project of the NL Queer Research Initiative,⁷⁾NL Queer Research Initiative, https://www.nlqueerresearch.com/research and in archaeologist Meghan Walley’s innovative efforts to make theoretical and discursive space ‘for diverse narratives around gender’.⁸⁾Walley M (2020) Incorporating Nonbinary Gender into Inuit Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Rereading and retelling our histories and pre-histories is important work. At the same time, a unifying story may remain valid even after being found incomplete. It is easy enough to denounce superannuated nationalist literary ideas in 2023, but in this fiftieth anniversary year of Woman of Labrador (and with an obligatory, albeit non-specific nod to the rampant populism in contemporary geopolitics), it is also worth revisiting the aspects of twentieth-century nationalism that remain compelling to so many people, with the aim of expanding them towards inclusiveness. Goudie writes that to her mind, Labrador means ‘peace’, and her most heartfelt exhortation to the young people of Labrador is to further their education.⁹⁾Goudie E (1973) Woman of Labrador. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 162. Perhaps, without knowing the specific future that was to come, she may even have wanted us to become who and what we are now, at least insofar as she endorsed the processes of empowerment and self-discovery.

As a queer, transgender woman and relative newcomer with only sixteen years’ service in the territory—as the old Hudson’s Bay Company trappers would have put it—I empathize with the dilemma faced by researchers like Meredith LaValley, who feels that she ‘will never truly be an insider in the Arctic’.¹⁰⁾LaValley M (2019) An Arctic Imposter’s Journey to Belong. The Arctic Institute, 8 January,https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-imposter-journey/. I might not be the most obvious candidate to find my own life story echoing that of Goudie, a proudly self-described trapper’s wife who lamented the onset of modernity and the loss of a difficult but autonomous, familiar, and holistically comprehensible way of life. Then again, neither was Auntie Pitt (Epitacia Bruce), the late matriarch of central Labrador’s Filipino population, who was also a central figure in the 2018 documentary Becoming Labrador.¹¹⁾Fernando R, Segura T & Simms J (2018) Becoming Labrador. National Film Board of Canada. Neither is Tshaukuesh, the respected Innu Elder who forwards herself as a cultural model in much the same way as Goudie, through her 2019 memoir Nitinikiau Innusi.¹²⁾Tshaukuesh (2019) Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Goudie’s life writing does not much evoke the femininity embodied in Inuk artist and scholar Heather Igloliorte’s celebrated 2003 painting, Becoming Sedna. From a queer perspective, there is no obvious echo of Woman of Labrador in the words of Cecilia Rich, who describes her experience coming out as a lesbian in the 2000 collection It’s Like the Legend: Innu Women’s Voices.¹³⁾Rich C (2000) Life on a Roller Coaster. Byrne N & Fouillard C, eds It’s Like the Legend: Innu Women’s Voices. Toronto: Gynergy, 205-216. In the music of Jacinda Beals, who founded the Labrador Lesbian and Gay Society—also in 2000—the clearest resonance with Goudie is in moments like ‘all I hear is laughter’ and ‘all the people here love to see you happy,’ both lines of her most well-known song, ‘Labrador to the Core’.¹⁴⁾Beals J (2002) Labrador to the Core. Slip Into My Skin. The Labrador of this music is not defined by trapping or traditional lifeways, but by the deeper subject matter, shared by Goudie, of peace and togetherness. We are all women of Labrador, walking the same ground that Goudie did, and Woman of Labrador addresses all of us. ‘Most of us were alike,’ she writes, but also, in the next sentence, ‘We were honest with each other’;¹⁵⁾Goudie E (1973) Woman of Labrador. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 161. and the book’s final words are, ‘I hope I can be a friend to people. We should all strive to live in peace with one another. That’s the only way to live right’.¹⁶⁾Goudie E (1973) Woman of Labrador. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 163.

It is true that Woman of Labrador and Them Days both focus on the Labradorian equivalent of narrowly imagined ‘Old Stock Canadians’—a phrase with sufficiently colourful political history to merit its own Wikipedia page—but in this case, anti-immigrant racism is not a central theme, and Indigenous peoples are not ignored, but are actually the primary speakers. Goudie begins her book with substantial emphasis on hybridity, celebrating her mixed heritage and noting her children’s pride in their even wider array of cultural and genealogical admixtures, including European, Inuit, and First Nations forebears.¹⁷⁾Goudie E (1973) Woman of Labrador. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 4. Them Days, too, is dedicated to ‘preserving the “old ways and early days”’,¹⁸⁾Them Days (n.d.) Our Mission Statement, https://www.themdays.com/?page_id=60054. but its defining characteristic is actually multivocality, in pursuit of comprehensiveness and maximum breadth of appeal. A ballpark estimate puts the number of different voices published by the magazine somewhere around 2,000 (a quantitative study is ongoing), and editorial policy leans heavily towards a maximalist understanding of Labrador cultural history: new angles and avenues of access to the past are viewed as material for the magazine’s pages, not challenges to its orthodoxy.

Within Canadian literary studies, Shane Neilson has described a tension between the categorical delimiter of nationality and a ‘nation-hostile, programmatic’ critical focus on diversity.¹⁹⁾Neilson S (2021) Return of Thematic: Diversity as the New Survival in Canadian Literature. American Review of Canadian Studies 51(2): 272-288. He regards the latter as a retrenchment of twentieth-century thematic criticism, which once fixed survival as the defining obsession of the Canadian creative psyche. Considering the many wars of the decades leading up to Margaret Atwood’s Survival²⁰⁾Atwood M (1972) Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi. and the globalization of trade ever since, it’s easy enough to explain this shift in popular terms as one from seeing a world full of perils to seeing a world full of potential partnerships.

At least this oversimplification of mine is better than the nihilisms of the time between dominant thematics, when all theory was ‘post’ something else, and our primary aim was to differentiate ourselves from whatever ideas we had most recently overturned. The real value of revisiting iconic national narratives, even of gendered identity, does not lie in denouncing celebrations of diversity, which are ubiquitous and cliché precisely because they are so necessary and effective. Instead, it is worthwhile to revive the tension between nationalism’s insistence on solidarity and a ‘nation-hostile’ insistence on diversity. Without that tension, differentiating oneself from others is simply waywardness.

The tension is an instance of the same double-edged question that informs all self-discovery: how am I like others in my community, and how am I different? It is no coincidence that ‘queer’ also means ‘strange’; we are queer only in relation to heteronormativity—on our own terms, we are just ourselves. Heteronormative stories like that of the proud Labrador trapper’s wife can actually provide a context for us to understand and express our queerness, provided that we have reimagined those stories and that they are not weaponized against us. Woman of Labrador in its original form is not anti-queer; queerness is not mentioned. Thus we are able to acknowledge all the dimensions of our identities that the textdoes affirm, while also finding accommodation for queerness in Goudie’s celebration of learning, peace, and social harmony.

For better or worse, Goudie’s portrait of the iconic (heterosexual and in many other ways over-determined) Labrador woman is clear, compelling, and memorable. Among the most prominent cultural responses to this portrait is a 2004 song by British Columbian folk musician Andy Vine, written 22 years after Goudie’s death.²¹⁾Vine A (2004) Woman of Labrador. Making Waves. CD Baby. The song is widely beloved and much-covered by Labrador musician. The lyric, ‘Woman of Labrador, those days are here no more’ also makes clear the thematic continuity with Them Days. However, the song, its singers, and its listeners have all evolved over the intervening years, in much the same way that I argue we must evolve as readers of Goudie’s words.

A 2021 music video by the Silver Wolf Band unselfconsciously provides one model for how we can reread and re-interpret Goudie’s work today.²²⁾Silver Wolf Band (2020) Woman of Labrador. Music video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBo6-kznvW4. The band sets a performance of Vine’s ‘Woman of Labrador’ to a montage of historical and contemporary portraits of Labrador women and girls. In so doing, they acknowledge the passage of ‘those days’, but also the continuity of the past with the present. The inclusion of many different faces expands the meaning of ‘woman of Labrador’, so that the video pays tribute more to Labrador women in general than to Goudie in particular. Goudie, too, offered her personal memoir as public commentary. When she speaks to the ‘Labrador people’, she also addresses—or can be understood to address—people whom she never imagined during her lifetime. Woman of Labrador defines a category of person, but as the Silver Wolf Band music video makes clear, we are free to populate that category ourselves, however we choose.

We can certainly discard Woman of Labrador as a unifying story—no cultural symbol is ever eternally definitive—but we would lose something by doing so. Some old stories must be replaced, whether because they are discriminatory or violent, or because social values have simply changed, or for other reasons, but Goudie’s core themes of peace, togetherness, humility, hard work, and self-improvement are as relevant in 2023 as they were in 1973. The danger lies in believing that those themes only apply to a certain kind of Labradorian, or to a certain kind of woman. Instead, I see no reason why any Labrador woman cannot assert her belonging within the story, even if she does not already see herself represented there.

Morgen Mills co-owns publishing and consulting company Brack and Brine, and she is completing her PhD dissertation on Labrador life writing at Memorial University.