2 July 1950 - 11 November 2021
Lee Maracle is a Stó:lō writer, cultural critic, and activist. She has published many novels, poems, an autobiography, and several books of creative nonfiction, which reflect on many of the complex and often controversial topics discussed in the talks she has delivered nationally and internationally. Throughout her career, she has been honoured with several awards and has been actively involved with numerous universities across Canada.
Maracle was born on 2 July 1950 in Vancouver, B.C., and is of Métis and Coast Salish ancestry. She grew up with her seven siblings in a relatively poor neighbourhood known as the “mud flats” in North Vancouver.[1] When she was five, her father left the family to find work in the North and was often gone for months at a time. As a single parent, Maracle’s mother struggled to make ends meet while fostering in her children a sense of culture, stories, and traditions. As a child, Maracle often accompanied her mother on visits to family members and to prominent Elders and intellectuals, experiences that instilled in her a sense of pride, social conscience, fairness, and a deep respect for thinking.
Maracle attended local schools and, as a teenager, went to Argyle Secondary School in North Vancouver. She maintains, however, that she did not obtain her education from B.C.’s mainstream school system but from her Elders and from books and dictionaries. Although Maracle did not experience segregation in the same ways residential school survivors did, she recalls having trouble fitting in with other students and found herself disgruntled and disillusioned within a school system shaped by colonial, and, to varying degrees, racist, perspectives on literature, history, and Indigenous peoples.[2] She struggled with school not because she found it difficult, but because she found it boring, useless, and socially ostracizing.
Maracle remained in B.C.’s public school system until 1966, when she dropped out and travelled to California as an itinerant farmworker. She spent the next few years moving between California, Vancouver, Toronto, and the Canadian prairies, where she moved within hippie, Black Panther, Red Power, and other activist circles, read widely across revolutionary theory, and experimented with stand-up comedy and film production to support herself financially. Her autobiography, Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (1975), is based largely on her experiences during this period. By her own account, involvement with movements such as the Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) and the American Indian Movement (AIM) deepened her analysis of colonialism, racism, gender, and class, while also teaching her about the politics (and limits) of revolutionary theories that had not significantly changed social conditions for Indigenous people in Canada. Over time, her involvement in Red Power organizing faded, shaped both by shifting momentum within the movement and by government intervention and internal dissent over its direction and structure.[3]
After settling back in Vancouver, she enrolled at Simon Fraser University, where she began work on Bobbi Lee under the guidance of Don Barnett, who edited and encouraged her to publish it.[4] Like contemporaries such as Maria Campbell and Jeannette Armstrong, Maracle found herself largely excluded from the Canadian literary scene and fought to be taken seriously alongside non-Indigenous writers. She attended conferences whether or not she was formally invited, sparked difficult, necessary conversations, and challenged the conventions of the publishing industry.[5] Over time, and alongside the broader groundswell of Indigenous writing in the 1970s and 1980s, Maracle’s work helped shift public and scholarly perceptions of Indigenous texts beyond reductive ethnographic framings.
Initially, Maracle was surprised by, and at times unprepared for, the demands of a public writing life. While she valued the recognition she received, she found the authority her words carried (and the expectations placed on her) difficult to bear.[6] By the late 1980s, however, she recommitted to writing with renewed force. She published I Am Woman (1988), Oratory: Coming to Theory (1990), Sojourner’s Truth (1990), and later her first novel, Sundogs (1992), which situates a young First Nations family within the political and social tensions of the period, including the Meech Lake context and the Oka standoff of 1990. She went on to publish major novels including Ravensong (1993), Daughters Are Forever (2002), Will’s Garden (2002), and Celia’s Song (2014). Her later creative nonfiction includes First Wives Club: Coast Salish Style (2010), Memory Serves: Oratories (2015), and My Conversations with Canadians (2017). She also published poetry collections such as Bent Box (2000) and Talking to the Diaspora (2015), and contributed to, and helped shape, many critical anthologies.
Maracle received the J.T. Stewart Voices of Change Award (2000), an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (2000), and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from St. Thomas University (2009). Her involvement in academic and community institutions was equally significant. She worked closely with Jeannette Armstrong and was involved with the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, B.C.; worked at the Barrie Native Friendship Centre in Ontario; performed and taught at the University of Toronto; and held positions at the University of Waterloo, Western Washington University, and the University of Guelph.
Later in her career, Maracle lived in Toronto, where she taught at the University of Toronto’s First Nations House and served as Elder-in-Residence, while also working with institutions such as the University of Waterloo and the University of Guelph. In September 2021, she joined Kwantlen Polytechnic University as a faculty member in Indigenous Studies in Surrey, British Columbia. She passed away at Surrey Memorial Hospital on 11 November 2021.
Selected Readings:
Maracle, Lee. Bent Box. Theytus Books, 2000.
---. Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel. Recorded and Edited by Don Barnett and Rick Sterling, LSM Press, 1975.
---. Daughters are Forever. Polestar, 2002.
---. First Wives Club: Coast Salish Style, Short Stories. Theytus Books, 2010.
---. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Press Gang, 1996.
---. Memory Serves and Other Essays. Edited by Smaro Kamboureli, Newest Press, 2015.
---. My Conversations with Canadians. Book *hug, 2017.
---. Ravensong: A Novel. Press Gang, 1993.
---. Sojourner’s Truth and Other Stories. Press Gang, 1990.
---. Sundogs. Theytus Books, 1992.
---. Talking to the Diaspora. ARP Books, 2015.
---. Will’s Garden. Theytus Books, 2002.
Works Cited:
Kelly, Jennifer. “Coming out of the House: A Conversation with Lee Maracle.” Ariel, vol. 25, no.1, 1994, pp.73-88.
Maracle, Lee. Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel. Recorded and Edited by Don Barnett and Rick Sterling, LSM Press, 1975.
---. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Press Gang, 1996.
---. “Looking Back at Bobbi Lee.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 429-430.
---. My Conversations with Canadians. Book *hug, 2017.
Warley, Linda. “Reviewing Past and Future: Postcolonial Canadian Autobiography and Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel.” Essays on Canadian Writing, issue 60, 1996, pp. 59-77.
Endnotes:
[1] The opening pages of Maracle’s autobiography, Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, portray, in more detail, the neighbourhood in which Maracle’s family lived. Although some of the events and names in her book are fictionalized, her description of the North Shore’s mud flats and its community members offers a vivid rendering of the type of atmosphere she grew up in until she was eleven.
[2] For more on Maracle’s views regarding Canada’s education system, see the following chapters in I Am Woman: chapter seven, “Black Robes,” on the history of residential schools and their effects on Maracle’s Elders (pp. 62-70); chapter eight, “The 1950s,” on how the colonial education system persisted throughout the mid-twentieth century (pp. 71-78); chapters nine and ten, “Heartless Teachers” and “L’ilwat Child,” on the role and responsibility of educators as individuals perpetuating the existing racial biases and ideological goals of Canada’s education system (pp.79-88); and chapter eleven, “Education,” on how the current schooling system, as an “ideological processing plant,” might effectively be decolonized (pp. 89-92).
[3] For more information on the Red Power movement and Lee Maracle’s disillusionment with the AIM, see pp. 96-107 of I Am Woman.
[4] Initially, Maracle recorded Bobbi Lee as part of a course on oral life histories but wasn’t intending to publish it. She also disagreed with editor Don Barnett over a number of editorial changes he suggested, but was eventually persuaded to publish her autobiography and promote it on a book tour in 1976, at age 26. For more information on the context out of which Bobbi Lee arose, see Maracle’s reflection on the subject in “Looking Back at Bobbi Lee.” For more information on the differences between the different editions of Bobbi Lee, see Linda Warley’s “Reviewing Past and
Future: Postcolonial Canadian Autobiography and Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel.”
[5] In 1988, Maracle asked to attend the Vancouver Writers Festival to launch I Am Woman but was denied an invitation. Maracle attended anyways, got up on stage, and read from her book to a horrified, but respectfully silent, audience. She also garnered quite a bit of attention at the Third International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal when she asked the feminist movement to “move over” and stop stealing the stories Indigenous women were entitled to tell. For more information on the latter controversy, see Maracle’s comments on the matter in chapter ten of My Conversations with Canadians, pp. 99-122.
[6] Maracle’s “Looking Back at Bobbi Lee” discusses her mixed feelings regarding the publication and reception of Bobbi Lee in more detail.
Lee Maracle entry by Lara Estlin, September 2018. Lara is a former SFU student who completed her English Honours project on Indigenous authors William Apess (Pequot) and George Copway (Anishinaabe). After completing her BA at Simon Fraser University, she then completed her MA in the Department of English at UBC. She worked as a research assistant for The People and the Text from 2018 to 2020.
Entry edits by Margery Fee, April 2024. Margery Fee is Professor Emerita at UBC in the Department of English.
Updated by Eli Davidovici in April 2024. Eli completed his M.Mus. at McGill
University in June 2024.
Updated by Kayla MacInnis in November 2025. Kayla is an MA student in English Literature at Simon Fraser University and a research assistant with The People and the Text.
Please contact Deanna Reder at dhr@sfu.ca regarding any comments or corrections at dhr@sfu.ca.