His initial position is a variation on a familiar and powerful argument for fiction: that its very purpose is empathy – that together the writer and reader imagine what it feels like to be somebody else. But Niedzviecki's case illustrates how that journey becomes hurtful. Niedzviecki, who has since apologized on Facebook and told The Globe and Mail that his editorial was 'tone-deaf,' promptly resigned, while the Writers' Union apologized profusely.Īrtists often argue they have the right to the contents of their own imaginations, wherever that may take them. Critics, including contributors to that issue, quickly pointed out that Niedzviecki was actually encouraging white writers to appropriate Indigenous stories when he was supposed to be celebrating Indigenous voices. In a weirdly counterintuitive introduction to an issue devoted to Indigenous writing, Niedzviecki argued that Canadian writing was too white and middle-class and that writers should spend more time imagining different perspectives or adopting different voices. Toronto writer and editor Hal Niedzviecki certainly proved that this week when he flippantly called for an 'Appropriation Prize' in an editorial in Write magazine, a publication of the Writers' Union of Canada. The issues surrounding cultural appropriation remain as relevant, and difficult, as ever. On the other hand, the objections to them – including Lenore Keeshig-Tobias's classic essay 'Stop Stealing Native Stories,' published in these pages in 1990 – read as if they were written yesterday.

You can still buy The Fencepost Chronicles and The Moccasin Telegraph, but I doubt any Canadian publisher would touch those stories today, the source of their humour so obviously insulting and dated.

1 in the case against appropriation of voice. Kinsella, the popular author best known for Shoeless Joe, had fought back, defending his right to tell any story and create any character he pleased, but at the time he and Silas were exhibit No. Critics, both white and Indigenous, had objected vociferously to Kinsella's 'Indian' stories, in which the writer used a first-person narrator, Silas Ermineskin, to tell funny tales of reserve life that included bumbling white bureaucrats and native tricksters. Kinsella died last year at the age of 81, many of the laudatory obituaries also politely noted that he had been the subject of some controversy involving cultural appropriation in the 1980s.

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