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From the earliest settler policies to deal with the “Indian problem,” to contemporary government-run programs ostensibly designed to help Indigenous people, public policy has played a major role in creating the historical trauma that so greatly impacts the lives of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. Taking Back Our Spirits traces the link between Canadian public policies, the injuries they have inflicted on Indigenous people, and Indigenous literature’s ability to heal individuals and communities. Episkenew examines contemporary autobiography, fiction, and drama to reveal how these texts respond to and critique public policy, and how literature functions as “medicine” to help cure the colonial contagion.
George Kenny is an Anishinaabe poet and playwright who learned traditional ways from his parents before being sent to residential school in 1958. When Kenny published his first book, 1982’s Indians Don’t Cry, he joined the ranks of Indigenous writers such as Maria Campbell, Basil Johnston, and Rita Joe whose work melded art and political action. Hailed as a landmark in the history of Indigenous literature in Canada, this new edition is expected to inspire a new generation of Anishinaabe writers with poems and stories that depict the challenges of Indigenous people confronting and finding ways to live within urban settler society. Indians Don’t Cry: Gaawin Mawisiiwag Anishinaabeg is the second book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or underappreciated texts by Indigenous artists. This new bi-lingual edition includes a translation of Kenny’s poems and stories into Anishinaabemowin by Pat Ningewance and an afterword by literary scholar Renate Eigenbrod.
Western culture may have enshrined North as a touchstone by which all other directions are defined, but the North is not one but a number of Netherlands; like all frontiers, the North is, in its essence, imaginative, magicked out of ice and snow, muskeg and tundra. Storytelling is its generative principle, the activity through which the North and Northerners call themselves into being. In essays on topics ranging from the Aboriginal justice system in Canada to the search for the Northwest Passage to the cultural paradigms of medieval Iceland, The Fictional North examines stereotypes and iconic images of the North, the relationship of North to South, and ethnographic and fictional models of “Northerness.” This diversity of subjects and methodologies not only introduces readers to the diversity found above the 53rd Parallel, but also reflects the catholicity of the North itself. Interdisciplinary and timely, The Fictional North offers insights into the North’s past as well as its present to those interested in circumpolar issues and the areas of culture, literature, history, film, sociology, and education.
Address to the Reader: In reading these pages may there be kindled the hope of your own imagination; may your own ingenuity never fail to impress upon you service or credit to your mind. Judge the nature of your work as original knowing the boundless nature of change. Think, dream, envision and master the skills to create.
The essays collected in this volume address a wide spectrum of issues connected to traumatic events and experiences, be they of personal, collective, national or global scale. They are complemented by poetic contemplations on trauma, which set the tone for the following scholarly investigations. The thematic scope of the collection encompasses psychological, sociological and political approaches to trauma, examples of ethnic and indigenous traumatizations, literary, cultural and visual manifestations of trauma or the medialization of trauma in the museum. As a result of the comparative, and in some cases cross-hermeneutic, design of the volume with German scholars looking at Canadian and Can...
Literatures, Communities, and Learning: Conversations with Indigenous Writers gathers nine conversations with Indigenous writers about the relationship between Indigenous literatures and learning, and how their writing relates to communities. Relevant, reflexive, and critical, these conversations explore the pressing topic of Indigenous writings and its importance to the well-being of Indigenous Peoples and to Canadian education. It offers readers a chance to listen to authors’ perspectives in their own words. This book presents conversations shared with nine Indigenous writers in what is now Canada: Tenille Campbell, Warren Cariou, Marilyn Dumont, Daniel Heath Justice, Lee Maracle, Sharro...
In the context of de/colonization, the boundary between an Aboriginal text and the analysis by a non-Aboriginal outsider poses particular challenges often constructed as unbridgeable. Eigenbrod argues that politically correct silence is not the answer but instead does a disservice to the literature that, like all literature, depends on being read, taught, and disseminated in various ways. In Travelling Knowledges, Eigenbrod suggests decolonizing strategies when approaching Aboriginal texts as an outsider and challenges conventional notions of expertise. She concludes that literatures of colonized peoples have to be read ethically, not only without colonial impositions of labels but also with the responsibility to read beyond the text or, in Lee Maracle’s words, to become “the architect of great social transformation.” Features the works of: Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan), Louise Halfe (Cree), Margo Kane (Saulteaux/Cree), Maurice Kenny (Mohawk), Thomas King (Cherokee, living in Canada), Emma LaRocque (Cree/Metis), Lee Maracle (Sto:lo/Metis), Ruby Slipperjack (Anishnaabe), Lorne Simon (Miíkmaq), Richard Wagamese (Anishnaabe), and Emma Lee Warrior (Peigan).