English

"Are We Also Here For That"? Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit - Traditional Knowledge or Critical Theory?

This work discusses Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit6 (IQ), or Inuit traditional knowledge, a set of teachings on practical truisms about society, human nature and experience passed on orally (traditionally) from one generation to the next. 

Exposing the Poison, Staunching the Wound: Applying Aboriginal Healthy Theory to Literary Analysis

Native literature is not merely an aesthetic "" game"—though it can appear to be—but a strategy, a gesture, for imparting knowledge and tradition, or, conversely, for upsetting and challenging the status quo (read colonizer). What I propose is to untie Indigenous literature from the "post" by using a methodology that is grounded in a Native way of knowing, and if not freeing it completely from western theory and rhetoric, then at least illustrating that traditional methodologies can provide an analysis which by its nature and function, serves to clarify rather than obfuscate. 

Hiding in Plain Sight: A New Narrative for Canadian Literary History

This essay imagines a new genealogy for Canadian Prairie writing, arguing that the development of a limited Prairie literary canon has led to two related critical perceptions: first, that early Prairie writing is of little value; and second, that there is little engagement with questions of colonial contact and intercultural relations between settler and Aboriginal cultures in early Prairie writing. While canonical Prairie texts generally depict the Prairie as agricultural space from which Aboriginal inhabitants have already been removed, lesser-known texts often engage with and frequently re-enact the process of that removal. 

"Going Native": Indigenizing Ethnographic Research 

This article focuses on the possibilities for shaping Indigenous approaches to ethnographic research, including literary analysis. It examines what Indigenous researchers are asking of themselves as they devise their research methodologies. Based on a review of literature on Indigenous research methods, it assembles a collection of elements to characterize an Indigenizing approach to ethnography: elements such as respecting distinct cultures and nations; rooting method in culture; understanding the importance of story, language, place, and relationality; and committing to ethics and reciprocity.

The Decolonization of Print, Digital, and Oral Spaces in Jordan Abel's Injun

I have come to recognize Jordan Abel's Injun as a work of resistance and decolonization that confronts three distinct but interconnected spaces that are subject to settler colonialism's structure of ongoing erasure, elimination, and violence-print space, digital space, and oral space. I argue that Injun is a project of literary decolonization that uses digital technology to resist and dismantle the colonial language that, within print literary space, digital cyberspace, and oral space, has been used to violently define and disempower Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous Modernism: Dehabituating Reading Practices

This paper examines the necessity of a different kind of dissent, specifically a more capacious form of literary critique that interrogates the problems of holding a discourse in common and the specific needs of anti-colonial work. As a pedagogical exercise that models the benefits of failure, I suggest that this intervention requires us to think about how we represent truth through critique.

Beyond Comparison: Reading Relations Between Indigenous Nations

I am searching for methods that prevent different texts and contexts from being "plac[ed] together" in ways that are determined arbitrarily by the critic. I am interested in considering how modes of reading Indigenous-Indigenous interactions might do more to actively incorporate the principles of Native literary nationalism. 

Tobacco Ties: The Relationship of the Sacred to Research

This article aspires to raise consciousness of the spiritual power of tobacco in a modern context and the responsibility of using tobacco ties as a research methodology. There is also a good example of the author situating themselves as a researcher.