Violence, relation and beauty in Toni Jensen’s “Women in the Fracklands”

Abstract

In this article I offer a culture-specific and narrative-focused contribution to the current theory of resilience – which is gaining relevance in Indigenous studies in general and Native American studies in particular – based on an analysis of “Women in the Fracklands”, by Métis US writer and professor Toni Jensen. * This autobiographical essay, originally published in 2017, became the starting piece of Carry: A Memoir of Stolen Land (2020), a memoir-in-essays composed of sixteen sections which weave personal narrative with history to draw a map of violence in Ameri-ca. It is mostly focused on contemporary gun violence, but also includes family and workplace violence, mass shootings, women’s rape, trafficking and murder, as well as the ongoing history of exploitation of Indigenous peoples and lands. The author, born and raised in rural Iowa, mentions her Irish descent and identifies as Métis through her paternal line (2020, 175). On interview, she has vindicated the presence of Métis people in the US, where she grew without literary role models until she read Louise Erdrich in her twenties (Smith 2021). The situation of the Métis people, or the mixture of an Indigenous tribe with French – sometimes Irish or Scots Irish – trappers and traders, is very different in Canada – her family is originally from Al-berta (Smith 2021) – where they have been a government recognized Indigenous group since 1982. Although she embraces a positive cultural connection to her late grandmother and the memory of her care, songs and stories, the narrator’s relation to her parents – especially her violent Métis father – is complicated, to say the least. Jensen’s identification as Indigenous