ILSA 2025 Annual Gathering,
in Tkaronto at George Brown College from Jun. 2-4, 2025

Re-Visiting

Conference Abstracts

*Please note this page does not include the full conference schedule; it only lists the panels with presenter abstracts since these abstracts are not available in the physical program. Changes may be made to the schedule. Last updated on May 8th, 2025.

DAY ONE: JUNE 2

10:45 - 12:00 Panel Session 1

1.1 Space, Place, Territories, Cities

WFL-337 Chair: Jennifer Hardwick

Élise Couture-Grondin, Reframing connections between autobiographies by Indigenous women in what we know as Quebec

In the introduction to the Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2023), the co-authors affirm, « If we want to know more about who we are, why we are here, and what it means to think about our lives, the study of auto/biography is an excellent place to start” (Boon et al. 2). This presentation proposes to examine understudied autobiographies by Indigenous women to revisit the field of Indigenous literatures in what we now know as Quebec with a new outlook. Using the cases of Margaret Sam-Cromarty (Cree), Éléonore Sioui (Wendat), and Anahareo (Kanien’keha:ka), I inquiry how these works challenges expectations about Indigenous literatures in the province, expectations which have been greatly influenced by how the field was institutionalized starting in the 1990s and in the 2000s. Each of these texts require much more critical attention. For this presentation I aim at situating each of them within a web of relations in the field, and connect them to other authors which have benefited from some recognition, namely Joséphine Bacon (Innue), Pierrot Ross-Tremblay (Innu), and Rita Mestokosho (Innue). The idea with these connections between several autobiographical works is to create new lines of thought and images for the study of Indigenous literatures in Quebec. 

Tina Munroe, Re-visiting Mama’s stories: Cariou’s “Terristory” as urban Indigenous resurgent praxis

Flowing in the intellectual streams of Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong and Rocky Cree Elder William Dumas who write respectively that “language is given to us by the land we live within,” and that “the land tells us the stories,” Métis writer Warren Cariou offers the neologism “terristory” to conceptualize the unity of land and story. He writes that terristory can be understood as the “ground of culture,” and as the “living, nurturing, relational medium in which Indigenous communities flourish” (2). The linking of oral story with the ground is a “mode of survivance” that has implications beyond the metaphorical.

Many of us first-generation city-bound Indigenous folx are not familiar with the homelands that “spoke” to our ancestors, or with the languages and stories that bloomed in those places. Late Apache philosopher Viola Cordova writes that “[l]anguage is a window that frames a particular view of the world,” and that “[e]ven when the window disappears, the view that it framed remains” (76). For Cordova, this view or “context to being “Indian”” persists through “pattern systems,” or attitudes and ways of being in the world that can be taught in the absence of native languages. This paper considers how we might inherit unique modes of listening to, or reading urban land that are grounded in the ontologies of our caregivers’ homelands. Reaching to my own mother’s stories, I imagine translational praxis that re-visits her methods and patterns of fusing homeland visions with urban land as those which nurtured a material “ground of belonging” (Cariou 2) and language of being (Hogan in Cordova ix) for us both.

Lois Boody, An Analysis of Eden Robinson’s Trickster trilogy: Finding Homeplace for Liberatory Futures

In this presentation, I will (re)visit Eden Robinson’s Trickster trilogy through the lens of homeplace, to reflect on (1) ways the novels serve as calls to justice for ethical settler-Indigenous relationships and liberatory futures, and (2) ways that the trilogy can be taken up in the classroom to foster Land-centred, antiracist education.

bell hooks (2007), speaking to the experience of Black women, describes homeplace as “a site of resistance and liberation” that exists “in the midst of an oppressive and dominating social reality” (p.103). Indeed, Robinson, in Trickster Drift, makes a reference to hooks herself, with Mave asking Jared’s ex, Sarah, about what she is reading, to which Sarah responds with Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, among other texts. Mave replies, “hooks, good, good” (p. 255). Moreover, Robinson’s epigraph in the second book is a quote from Lee Maracle’s poem, “I’m home again,” signalling towards the liberatory feminist orientation of her writing.

Kanien’kehá:ka scholar Jennifer Brant (2023) too draws upon hooks' and Maracle’s legacies to theorize an Indigenous perspective of homeplace and the way that it shows up in Indigenous literatures. Brant describes homeplace as “a space for all learners to express their whole selves and work to advance sociopolitical justice within the communities we call home” (p.57) and points to its role in Indigenous literatures as “liberatory praxis for antiracist education” (p.46). I therefore analyze four of its related themes, as theorized by Brant (2023): “memories of home, longing for home, disruptions of home, and visions for recreating the home” (p. 59), in order to reflect on thematic reflections for the classroom. Through Robinson’s centring of Indigenous perspectives of homeplace in her text, I suggest that readers of all backgrounds are invited into reflections on Land, and towards imagining and enacting more compassionate and loving worlds.

Cara Schwartz, “‘home is like a dandelion’: Indigenous and Diasporic Co-Existence on the Prairies

This presentation re-visits the relationship between indigeneity and diaspora, investigating the potential to connect the Black and Indigenous fields through a literary analysis of place. Sophie McCall, Christine Kim, and Melina Baum Singer’s 2012 collection, Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, considers “tensions within and between concepts of Indigeneity and diaspora” while also exploring how these “tensions transform concepts of the nation.” In thinking of the similar histories of displacement and forced movement within Indigenous and diasporic communities, I wish to continue McCall, Kim, and Singer’s potential to connect these vibrant fields, examining Indigenous- and Black-authored texts that are set on the prairies. While this presentation may not include all of the following due to time constraints, I explore Black Canadian author Bertrand Bickersteth’s 2020 poetry collection The Response of Weeds, Red River Métis author Katherena Vermette’s 2012 poetry collection North End Love Songs, and Oji-Cree author Joshua Whitehead’s 2018 novel Jonny Appleseed. While all set on the Canadian prairies, my pairing of these texts is also predicated on their similar imagery, each depicting wildflowers, dandelions, and weeds as pesky growths that the settler-state wishes to eradicate but which keep spreading, growing, and pollinating through the wind. These texts individually assert Indigenous or Black prairie presences without being limited by (im)mobility. Whitehead’s text asserts, for example, that “an NDN home is like a dandelion...full of hope and ghosts.” Analyzing these spatial relations, I explore questions of movement, collaboration, and home with the hope of better understanding how Black and Indigenous communities can co-exist in the shared space of Turtle Island (North America).

1.2 Possibilities and Poetics

WFL-238 Chair: TBD

Rob Jackson, Refusal | Opacity | Mediation

Just over ten years ago, when I was beginning my graduate studies, Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard released two field shifting works: Mohawk Interruptus (2014) and Red Skin White Masks (2014). The emphasis these two books placed on the politics of refusal and recognition really influenced the way I thought about methods of reading and interpretation as an early graduate student. Now, a decade later, I’d like to revisit those concepts, unpacking the methodological assumptions and reassessing the confidence of my earlier positions. That is, I am interested in revisiting questions of how we ought to read the transit between political thought and literary practice. How do literary works stylize the critical postures of Indigenous critical theory in ways that do not subordinate aesthetic practice to the theoretical charisma? 

In this paper I will revisit the core insights of Simpson and Coulthard’s work on refusal and the politics of recognition. In particular, I will revisit my own tendency to apply the framework of refusal to the work of Indigenous poetics: an application that risks reducing the literary complexity of literary works to exegesis. Instead, I’d like to ask how the critical posture of refusal might shift and be modified when we begin with questions of aesthetics and representation. Specifically, I want to explore how the figure of opacity has emerged in Indigenous literatures and its relationship to the politics of refusal at the level of literary form. Ultimately, I’m interested in thinking about how texts like Purcell’s ʔbédayine, Abel’s Empty Spaces mobilize opacity as an aesthetic figure by drawing attention to their own textual-ness, and therefore questions of social mediation.

Mackenzie Ground, Language Experiments: Reading Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

I see resonances between Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but I have wondered about the practice of comparing Indigenous literatures to canonical texts of Western literature. For what purpose should I make the comparison and what should I take into consideration? As an experimental poet, I feel drawn to Modernist and experimental works, and many courses in my undergraduate degree were about global and non-Indigenous texts. I have wondered what to do with this knowledge. Considering this year’s conference theme, I am curious about framing this work as revisiting. What could it mean to revisit canonical works that were a part of one’s required university coursework? What possibilities exist in revising my reading practices and my practices of study and experimental, scholarly work? I propose to listen and to read both Abel’s Empty Spaces and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and to write a creative scholarly piece with poetic interventions. Doing this, I hope to open a new way to read these two texts together to experiment with a poetic critique. Through these works, I will reflect on new experimental Indigenous works to consider, as an experimental Indigenous writer myself, what such radical departures, inventions, and interventions, world-building, etc. do for Indigenous writers and potentially where to go next.

Isabela Agosa and Ryan D. Fong, Singing Our Ancestors’ Songs, Together: Revisiting the Lyric and Becoming Kin  (presenting via Zoom)

For this presentation, our interwoven pair of papers uses lyric forms of prose and poetry to performatively theorize and collaboratively enact ways of becoming kin. Writing as an Odawa and Chicana poet and a mixed-race Chinese-American settler scholar and as colleagues and co-teachers at Kalamazoo College, which was founded in 1833 on the reserve lands that were taken from Bodéwadmi ogimaa Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish and his people, our papers strive use our words as medicine by bringing forward the philosophies and poetic practices of our ancestors and placing them in a reciprocal conversation.

The presentation begins with each of us sharing how the work of Bodéwadmi writers Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kyle Whyte have helped us re-visit the possibilities of the lyric mode. More specifically, we articulate how their concepts of “animacy” and “collective continuance” helps envision lyric relations that recognize the full sovereignty of our diverse human and other-than-human kin that disrupt the distance between speakerly subject and poetic object so prominent in the Western tradition. After braiding together our thoughts in this critical vein, we then shift to presenting a series of individually-written poems that draw on the Anishinaabe Medicine Wheel (for Isabela) and the Chinese system of the Wuxing or Five Elements (for Ryan). By embracing the tools that our ancestors developed to understand and live in balance with the natural world, the poems pay respects to our ancestors, elders, and to plants, land, and water. We then close with a collaboratively written poem, taken from lines of our previous poems, that addresses and imagines a collective future where all life is kin. Throughout, our shared goal is to lyrically enact the commitment to good relations that undergirds our friendship and working relationship and our shared effort to revisit and resist the settler colonial conditions that brought us together.

 1.3 Revisiting Place South of the Medicine Line

WFL-638 Chair: TBD

Bernadette V. Russo, Redefining the West and the Western: Stephen Graham Jones’s Indian Lake Trilogy (presenting via Zoom)

In a narrative that subtly parallels the resistance, resurgence, and healing of the land and the Indigenous female body from the effects of settler colonial oppression and the consequent intergenerational trauma, Stephen Graham Jones subverts the western genre to (re)inscribe the West in a frame of Indigenous resistance, resurgence, and healing through his Indian Lake Trilogy. Re-visiting the settler colonial western genre, which includes western geographic locations, lone wolf heterosexual male cowboy hero protagonists, damsels in distress, hapless Indians, and/or savage savages, the Indian Lake Trilogy transmotes these essentials of the western genre. Through resistance by land of setter locations such as Terra Nova and by queering of the western through the Indigenous female body of Jada Daniels, a crossblood Indigenous queer woman, who serves as the lone wolf hero protagonist, engaging in a homoerotic romantic arc spanning a series of dangerous encounters with a consistent stream of villainous characters born of settler colonial conditions and recues that rival the likes of any Louis L’Amour character.

The focus of my argument is that Jones mobilizes the slasher genre to rend free truths, hopes, and healing of Indigenous experiences of this hegemonic embodiment of settler colonial oppression otherwise known as the western. While there are many ways in which he does this, for this discussion, I contend that the two edges of his slasher sickle are what Cherokee scholars Sean Kiccumah Teuton refers to as geoidentity and Scott Andrew’s neologism jouissistance. Through a paralleled narrative of resistance, resurgence, and healing by land and by women of the abuses against the land and the female body, Jones eviscerates one of the pillars of North American settler colonialism: the western.

Corrina Richards, “The Land Was Still the Same:” The Return to Land in Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper and Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse (presenting via Zoom)

Oftentimes, it is presumed that beings refuse to return to places which caused hurt and pain to protect themselves; yet, Diane Wilson’s (Dakhóta) The Seed Keeper and Richard Wagamese’s (Ojibwe) Indian Horse present characters who venture back to places of trauma to remember and come to terms with what they have lost, forgotten, and left behind. Wilson’s Rosalie experiences severe separation as a child from all familial ties to land and humans, returning to her childhood home to rekindle her remaining memories of adolescence and find her biological family. Wagamese’s Saul experiences sexual and emotional abuse in a residential school, which leads to his subsequent alcoholism and behavioral issues to cope with his trauma, causing him to return to the residential school land to heal, remember, and reckon with his wounds. Engaging with scholarly work from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagig a Nishnaabeg), Glen Coulthard (Dene), Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), and others, alongside these novels, I explore how Rosalie and Saul depict ways that land functions as a healer and protector for enduring wounds and how in their return to sites of trauma, the two are able to reconcile with the abuses they have experienced. In applying Simpson and Coulthard’s definitions of grounded normativity and resurgence and Vizenor’s postindian and survivance, I create connections between Rosalie and Saul’s reinvestigations of their trauma sites. I found that in returning to these spaces, Rosalie and Saul dismantle and reconstruct their identities, becoming closer to their communities, both human and land-based, and creating hope for both characters.

Jenna Hunnef, Re-Visiting Modernism in Tommy Orange’s There There

This presentation suggests that There There (2018) by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes) invites a critical reframing of scholarly considerations of modernism and modernity from an Indigenous perspective and at a temporal remove from the period most associated with the aesthetic and political preoccupations of modernism (arguably ca. 1890-1940). Beginning with its invocation of Gertrude Stein and Bertolt Brecht in its title and epigraph, respectively, There There reanimates modernist spectres in a distinctively twenty-first-century setting marked by the presence of unmanned aerial vehicles, 3-D printing technology, text messaging, social media platforms, and a mass shooting. Drawing on Nimi:pu: scholar Beth Piatote’s analysis of There There as an echo of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, I argue that Orange’s novel revisits and reframes the terms and conditions of modernity, revising them in a twenty-first-century Indigenous context and thereby complicating the conflation of Indigenous experiences of modernity with capital-M literary Modernism as it continues to be theorized by Western intellectuals. To borrow from the language of this year’s call for proposals, this is a novel that “re-members and re-collects” the co-constitutive origin of modernity and coloniality, per Walter Mignolo, and “move[s] us backward and forward in time” to recast Indigenous people not as the belated heirs of a passé modernity, but rather as its unwilling bedfellows. There There’s re-visiting of modernism’s arguable requisites, such as rejecting the past and jettisoning tradition, reveals the colonial logic that undergirds modernist aesthetics and principles, while simultaneously (re)framing Indigenous people’s experience of modernity as both long-historical pain and future-oriented possibility.

14:00-15:15 Panel Session 2

2.1 Theorizing Resistance and Solidarity 

WFL-337 Chair: Marie-Ève Bradette 

Aries Farrington, White Alice Language Games: Using Decolonizing Language to Re/Visit White Alice Sites in Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Dark Traffic

Currently, there has been little scholarly research or publication on Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poetry and the multifaceted ways she uses language to subvert settler colonial ideologies. Most publications on Kane have been literature reviews and the few scholarly papers have focused on themes in her earlier works Hyperboreal and Milk Black Carbon. This presentation, with the goal of spurring more scholarly research and discussions of her work, will use trickster hermeneutics to explore the ways Kane, a King Island Inupiaq poet and scholar from Alaska, combines English and Inupiaq as a way to re-visit colonized places in order to reframe our perceptions and relationship to it while also disrupting dominant settler colonial narratives. Particular attention will be paid to Kane’s poems “White Alice Gone to Hell” and “White Alice Goes to Hell” from her collection Dark Traffic (2021) in which she re/visits the White Alice communication sites across Alaska. In these two poems she first presents the White Alice sites under their colonial military acronyms before using language to demilitarize the locations and showcase the human-nonhuman interactions, history, and environmental effects of chemical contamination these misnomers hide. By revealing what settler colonialism obscures, Kane works to decolonize the Alaskan landscape and renew our relationship with these spaces.

Ana Kancepolsky Teichmann, Revisiter l’œuvre de Kapesh à travers la traduction

An Antane Kapesh est aujourd’hui une figure emblématique au sein des études littéraires autochtones au Québec. Son ouvrage Eukuan nin matshi manitu innuskueu/Je suis une maudite sauvagesse est le premier livre à être publié, en 1976, en innu-aimun et en français par une maison d’éditions québécoise. En effet, Kapesh écrit dans sa langue innue et son récit est traduit vers le français par l’anthropologue et linguiste québécoise José Mailhot. Ainsi, l’histoire de ce livre est liée à la traduction dès ses origines. Toutefois, il aura fallu attendre plus de quarante ans pour voir l’ouvrage traduit et publié dans d’autres langues et autres territoires : en 2020, une version en anglais traduite par Sarah Henzi est publiée au Canada par Wilfried Laurier University Press, et en 2023, une version en espagnol traduite par Violeta Percia est publiée en Argentine par Espacio Hudson Ediciones.

Ces traductions « revisitent » le texte de Kapesh et lui conférent un caractère nouveau, lié aux contextes de publication de l’ouvrage en traduction. Notamment, l’édition argentine situe la voix de Kapesh parmi celle d’autres auteur·ices autochtones d’Amérique latine. En même temps, les traductions produisent plusieurs transformations significatives sur le texte original des années 1970. Si l’objectif principal de l’autrice était de raconter son histoire tout en dénonçant les politiques coloniales et ses conséquences sur sa communauté, les versions traduites élargissent la portée de ce discours vers d’autres horizons et à une autre époque. Dès lors, il est possible de se demander : comment la traduction peut-elle aider à démanteler les logiques coloniales tout en proposant une recontextualisation des propos originaux de l’autrice? Pour répondre à cette interrogation, je proposerai une analyse des traductions en anglais et en espagnol de l’ouvrage de Kapesh qui lie les stratégies employées par les autrices aux contextes de publication de chaque version.

Ko Eun Nancy Um, Re-visiter le monde. Le mot « décolonisation » en français et en anglais

Au Canada, le mot « décolonisation », selon qu’il s’exprime en français ou en anglais, évoque des perspectives distinctes, mais connexes sur l’équité sociale et la réconciliation. En français, le terme conserve des racines historiques et politiques souvent liées aux luttes identitaires francophones et des colonies de la France. En anglais, « decolonization » est souvent lié au démantèlement des structures colonisatrices actuelles, en particulier dans le contexte de la réconciliation avec les communautés autochtones. Toutefois, pour Eve Tuck et K. Wayne Yang dans l’article « Decolonization is Not a Metaphor », la décolonisation consiste d’abord et avant tout en la restitution des terres et des existences autochtones. Leur analyse critique met en lumière les dérives fréquentes où la décolonisation est instrumentalisée par des initiatives éducatives ou sociales, où elle est utilisée comme un terme générique visant à « décoloniser » des méthodes, des espaces ou des pensées, tout en évitant les transformations structurelles nécessaires pour reconnaître et restaurer la souveraineté autochtone.

Cette présentation s’appuie sur cette critique, tout en croisant les perspectives de Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, Leanne Simpson et Dalie Giroux. Elle explore comment les discours sur la décolonisation varient selon la langue et comment, dans certains cas, ils peuvent mettre en place des « settler moves to innocence » (Tuck et Yang), c’est-à-dire des gestes qui renforcent les structures coloniales existantes.

De ce fait, en croisant ces perspectives, cette présentation explorera comment la langue et les pratiques culturelles influencent la manière dont la décolonisation est conceptualisée et mise en œuvre. Elle vise à enrichir le débat savant sur la justice sociale et à encourager des approches plurilingues et intersectionnelles de la réconciliation.

2.2 Entanglements

WFL-238 Chair: Sarah Henzi

Jennifer Hardwick, “as messy and beautiful and real as our bodyminds”: Disability Justice and Indigenous Literature

In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, “When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability.” Despite being prevalent in Indigenous literature, disability and settler colonial ableism remain under-explored in Indigenous Literary Studies.

This presentation is an attempt to explore and address that gap. Placing an analysis of disability in the works of Cherie Dimaline, Alicia Elliott, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in conversation with my experiences as a disabled settler scholar who teaches Indigenous literature in inclusive pathways programs for students with disabilities, I will examine how Indigenous literature can depict decolonial disability justice and foster solidarity. I will pay particular attention to how texts illustrate “carewebs” and disabled futurity (as outlined by Piepzna-Samarasinha) and articulate Indigenous understandings of “disability as a colonial construct” (as outlined by Nicole Ineese-Nash). Additionally, I will share how students in my courses come to see ableism and settler colonialism as separate but interconnected systems of oppression that can be challenged through solidarity. Ultimately, I hope to show that interdisciplinary engagement between Indigenous Literary Studies and Critical Disability Studies can deepen and complicate understandings of disability and colonial ableism and provide frameworks for disability justice grounded in communal care (rather than colonial practices of accommodation).

Peggy Fournier, Le territoire souffrant. Ecoféminisme et écopoétique chez Rita Mestokosho et Joséphine Bacon

 Je propose une lecture écopoétique du territoire à partir de deux recueils de Rita Mestokosho, Née de la pluie et de la terre, et Atik Utei. Le cœur du caribou de Rita Mestokosho ainsi que d'Un thé dans la Toundra. Nipishapuinnete mushuat de Joséphine Bacon. Il s’agit de voir en quoi les femmes poètes innues vont ici plus loin qu’une réappropriation de leur terre et en appellent à une protection écologique qui relève de l’ésotérisme. En effet, la poétique du Nutshimit participe d’une vision qui engage une ontologie animiste comme proposition agissante au nom de la vie. Ainsi Rita Mestokosho prend la parole pour « un peuple sans terre » (NPT, p 85) ; que « les hommes-machines auront dévorée les premiers / Pour en faire une nouvelle cité. » Plus que la spoliation des terres amérindiennes par les colons, la poète alerte quant à la déprédation galopante des territoires par ces derniers.

 Dans chaque recueil, la guérison se trouve dans le soin porté à la terre ; guérison du corps, de l’âme ou d’un peuple. L’attention portée aux frontières, aux limites en même temps qu’aux brèches du territoire participe certes d’un care mais aussi d’une dénonciation ; la douceur s’alliant ici à des prises de position politiques de résurgence écoféministes, dans la lignée des chercheuses autochtones comme Léanne Bétasamosaké Simpson. 

Krista Collier-Jarvis, “The shining deep green chant of her blood”: Lichenthropy in Green Fuse Burning

In Tiffany Morris’ (Mi’kmaw/L’nu) novella Green Fuse Burning (2023), protagonist Rita works through the death of her father, her history of suicide, and her disconnection from her Mi’kmaw heritage during a painting residency in an isolated cabin in the forest. Ultimately, Rita’s “rebirth” stems from an entangled, seemingly near-death experience with a figure called Lichen Woman, who, I argue, presents Rita with the possibility of engaging in “lichenthropy.” Elsewhere, I have theorized lichenthropy as an Indigenous-informed approach to climate entanglements; it is a process of making kin whereby characters may shift their ecological thinking into ecological being. For instance, Lutzoni and Miadlikowska have argued that lichen is an “ecological success” because it/they are two species whose mutualistic symbiosis is so seamless that it/they is/are often talked about as a singular species. As ultimate agents of “reterritorialization,” lichen, and thus Lichen Woman, are symbols of resilience, relationality, and interconnection that demonstrate how no space is ever truly isolated (there is no terra nullius) and how making kin through a process of storying oneself back into the land can function as a way of healing—both contemporary and past, intergenerational traumas. Lichen Woman, for Rita, represents what Haraway would call a “collective knowing and doing” that always already cultivates response-ability. Response-ability, for Rita, is to oneself, to her father’s memory, and to her Mi’kmaw community more broadly.

2.3 “And I can picture ‘it’, after all these days”: Reading Romance Novels through a Decolonial Feminist Lens

WFL-638 Chair: Tianne Jensen-DesJardins

Preformed Panel

On August 6, 2024 The Truth According to Ember by Danica Nava was published—the first romance novel by and about an Indigenous woman to be published by Berkley Press, the leading branch of commercial and genre fiction for Penguin. Indigenous romance novels are not only under-published, but understudied and underrepresented in the field of Indigenous literary studies. Nava’s novel is the only traditionally published romance novel by an Indigenous author that has reached commercial success; indeed, it was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards and Nava is due for her second romance novel Love is a War Song on July 22, 2025. Our panel will be rooted/theoretically oriented around romance novels, Indigenous joy, and women’s pleasure and also what Tenille Campbell's calls "it" in Nedi Nezu Good Medicine, when she says "we're taking it / making it / visibly / undeniably / irrevocably / Indigenous" (60)— however, these papers position Campbell’s “it” as romance novels. Just as Tanja Grubnic reads Campbell’s poetry collection as an example of “how healthy sex and eroticism can be a political and decolonial movement of resurgence, taking land back, and advocating for Indigenous sovereignty in a desire-centred way” (138), we read Nava’s novel for its decolonial feminist potential. Thus, these three papers will explore how romance novels by and for Indigenous people disrupt settler expectations of the romance genre by prioritizing Indigenous joy and pleasure over, say, Indigenous fetishization. This panel reorients these texts away from the white male gaze and towards a capacious conception of the romance genre that centres the female perspective. After we present our papers, this panel would like to invite audience participation to create a comprehensive list of Indigenous romance novels.

Tianne Jensen-DesJardins

Like The Truth About Ember, Jen Ferguson’s The Summer of Bitter and Sweet features Indigenous romance and joy, though notably, Ferguson’s novel arrives at a place of joy without physical pleasure. As an asexual character, Lou (the central character in Ferguson’s narrative) navigates romance amidst pressures to find pleasure through sex. Only when Lou is given language to describe her perspective on relationships and sex does she begin to accept herself. This paper aims to delve into Indigenous intimacy—both physical and non-physical—and how queer perspectives on romance may indeed queer the very idea of romance. To undertake this work, I plan to engage with the scholarly works of Joshua Whitehead (Indigiqueer theory), Ezra Prybylo (Asexual theory), and Jennifer McKnight-Trontz (romance theory). Ultimately, I aim to explore how intimacy is approached in straight and queer Indigenous romance models to better understand the range of representation for Indigenous intimacy—always with the intention to imagine futures where Indigenous intimacy does not need to conform to certain ideals to be accepted.

Julianna Wagar

Scholarly research on contemporary romance novels began in the mid-twentieth century and stems from second-wave feminist ideologies that were keen to dismiss women’s enjoyment of romance novels. Most of the research on romance novels, by Janice Radway and Pamela Regis, lacks an intersectional, inclusive understanding of the importance of romance novels in relation to women’s pleasures and joys. This paper seeks to apply Indigenous/decolonial feminist theory to the field of romance studies by analyzing the works of Dancia Nava, Molly Cross-Blanchard, and Tenille Campbell. I will use the poetry of Cross-Blanchard and Campbell, which discusses sexuality and pleasure, to analyze the romantic relationship that is formed between Ember and Danuwoa through their shared Indigenous identity in Nava’s The Truth According to Ember. My paper will discuss their sexual relationship that is rooted in mutual trust. Indeed, Nava crafts a consensual relationship that provides herself and other Indigenous women the opportunity to read and enjoy stories of Indigenous love that are tender, caring, and supportive that end in a happily-ever-after. Ultimately, this paper will highlight the joys and pleasures of Indigenous romance novels, and engage with the field of romance studies through an Indigenous/decolonial feminist lens.

Rebekah Stuive

In direct opposition to The Truth About Ember, Janette Oke’s Drums of Change is an evangelical romance fraught with loss, Indigenous fetishization, and colonial perspectives. Set in the late 19th century, the novel follows Running Fawn as she grapples with a changing social, political, and spiritual world, and concludes with the realization that Indigenous ways of thinking, living, and believing are ways of the past. As a work of evangelical fiction, Drums of Change allows us to consider how evangelical representations of Indigeneity, and in particular, representations of Indigenous relationships and romance, all too often become narratives of erasure. In putting Drums of Change into conversation with The Truth According to Ember, this paper seeks to illuminate how romance novels by Indigenous authors such as Nava can not only disrupt settler—and in particular, evangelical— expectations of what constitutes romance, but also provide an outlet for celebrating Indigenous joy and vitality.

DAY TWO: JUNE 3

10:45 - 12:00 Panel Session 3

 3.1 Rethinking the Past, Revisiting the Archive, Reframing the Present

WFL-337 Chair: Malou Brouwer

Jody Mason, "Books for Development: Fourth-World Challenges to Settler-Canadian Exceptionalism"

In my larger research project, I argue that between 1945 and the end of the 1970s, the book, which came to function as a key representative of settler-Canadian exceptionalism, was used within the context of the development paradigm to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations; to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership in the new international order; and to consolidate settler liberal rule at home.

Like other forms of developmentalism, book development influenced and was in turn influenced by domestic policy, including federal policy directed at Indigenous Peoples. This paper begins by gesturing to the late twentieth-century entanglement of externally oriented development with domestic policy, considering how developmentalist ideologies shaped Indian Affairs priorities and programs from the early 1960s. The paper then examines how Indigenous activists Marie Smallface Marule (Kainai) and George Manuel (Secwépemc), drawing on their own experiences with the development paradigm as it was unfolding in decolonizing African nations, responded to, reframed, and sometimes rejected outright developmentalist ideology, especially as it related to literacy, books, and education. The paper concludes with a discussion of Syilx Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong’s novel Slash (1985), demonstrating that both the history of its production and its narrative structure might be read as instances of the kind of anti-developmental thinking––or, framed positively, what Glen Coulthard (Dene) calls the “grounded normativity”––present in Smallface Marule’s and Manuel’s writings. 

Matthew Tétreault, “soldiers … poets and dreamers”: On the Exigencies of Kinship in Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge

Marketed as a “frenetic, propulsive crime thriller,” Conor Kerr’s 2024 novel, Prairie Edge, is anything but boilerplate genre fiction. Ostensibly centred around the surreptitious rustling of a bison herd in Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan river valley, Kerr’s novel reflects upon the ecocide of the northern plains even as a character-driven narrative and dual protagonists tease out the multifarious complexities of the “#land back” movement and Indigenous experiences with ongoing settler-colonialism. Although the novel vacillates between hope and tragedy, critical threads of humour and satire juxtapose and draw attention to discordant classicism and political activism within Indigenous communities in ways that, I argue, resonate with historical Métis political organizing in Alberta and across the Prairies. With echoes of the formation of the Alberta Métis Settlements in the 1930s, to the cautions of Howard Adams toward “cultural nationalism” articulated in the 1970s, Kerr’s novel evokes historical complexities, tensions, and disunity in Indigenous communities. In this paper, I read Kerr’s novel through such histories to reflect upon the exigencies of kinship across human and other-than-human worlds and consider how they shape contemporary struggles against settler-colonialism.

Marie-Ève Bradette, Re-visiting Indigenous Literary History in Québec through Archival Material: The Autobiographical Writings of Francis Noel Annance and Prosper Vincent 

Over the past thirty years, the idea that Indigenous literary writing in Québec only emerged in the 1970s (with An Antane Kapesh’s work) has been repeatedly conveyed. Along with this idea is the notion of a literature, and thus of a literary history, predominantly written in French and sometimes in/or including Indigenous languages (Boudreau 1993; Gatti 2003; Janssen 2018; St-Gelais 2023). This double historical error is methodological and opens a series of questions: Is it accurate to claim that Indigenous literatures in Québec are only written in French and Indigenous languages? What about texts written in English (Willis 1973; Sam-Cromarthy 1992; Cheechoo 1993; McBride 2019) in the province? And do these writings limit themselves to institutionalized literary production, thus necessarily published works? What if we were to imagine otherwise?

In this paper, I aim to challenge the convention that a literary history is written in a single language (Leclerc and Simon 2005), while also revisiting historical traces of Indigenous writing by examining archival material. I will focus on two distinct trajectories—those of Abenaki writer Francis Noel Annance and Wendat author Prosper Vincent, two writers whose works date back to the 19th century (Annance) and the early 20th century (Vincent). The study and re-inscription of Annance’s travel writing and romantic correspondence, as well as Vincent’s diaries, clerical notes, letters and poetry, will, in my view, provide an opportunity to revisit common assumptions within studies of Indigenous literatures in Québec.

Annance’s unique academic journey at the Dartmouth College in the United States (Barman 2016; Peace 2017), urges us to reconsider the writing of literary history beyond the linguistic and geographical boundaries imposed by Québec nationalism, while Vincent’s trajectory challenges us to rethink the formation of a literary body of work outside the networks of the book and publishing industry in Québec and well before the 1970s. Therefore, I argue that archival research is today necessary and essential in the process of rewriting and re-visiting the literary history of the First Nations in Québec at the crossroads of languages, territories, and historical periods. This work should no longer be the exclusive domain of historians; it also falls to scholars of Indigenous literary studies in order to bring to light texts otherwise obscured, and to reconsider them from a perspective that is not only historical or sociological (treating the texts as historical or ethnographical documents) but also literary (considering the texts as engaged literary discourses situated at the intersection of the intimate and the political, thus enabling a deeper understanding of contemporary literary production).

Exploratory in nature, this paper aims to introduce relatively unknown textual materials and reflect on how they open new research questions for Indigenous literary studies. It also seeks to highlight the historical depth of Indigenous literary writing as part of a long-standing intellectual tradition, notably an autobiographical one (Reder 2022) along with oral narratives. By the end of this exploration, and in a speculative manner, I also hope to open questions and a discussion about ways to envisions literary history beyond the coloniality and even patriarchy of such a discipline, while reflecting on the place of Indigenous women in this long literary history, for it must be acknowledged that the further we go back in time, the more women are erased not only from historiography, but also from the written archives themselves.

3.2 Restorying Transformation

WFL-238 Chair: Aubrey Hanson

Danielle Marie Bitz & Michelle Porter, Of Women, Wolves, and Words: Revisiting "Rou Garous" (30 mins)

At the first Mawachihitotaak Métis Studies Symposium (online, May of 2022) Danielle led a session in which she read aloud the short story “Rou Garous” from Stories of the Road Allowance People, presented a short paper, and facilitated a discussion on the role of subtext and narrative digressions in Métis storytelling. Michelle attended that session and has integrated ideas from those discussions into her teaching and practice. At Mawachihitotaak 2024 (Winnipeg, September) both Danielle and Michelle attended a session in which Warren Cariou gave a paper on Joe Welsh’s short story collection Jackrabbit Street in which he discussed the structures and subtleties of Métis storytelling. Following, and inspired by Cariou’s talk, we (Danielle & Michelle) spent some time visiting, talking about stories and about how we talk about stories (at conferences, in classrooms, with family and friends).

In this session, we would revisit and continue those discussions. Using a conversational format we would begin by introducing ourselves, our relationship to story, narrative and literatures, and how these relationships affect and are integrated into our practice as academics—as a professor (Michelle), as a librarian (Danielle).

Throughout the session we would consider different questions including:

• What literacies does a reader/scholar require to fully appreciate Indigenous storytelling (generally) and Métis stories (specifically)?

• How do stories and the way that we talk about them aid us in cultural preservation and reclamation?

• How do cyclical/circular or iterative pedagogies affect the work we do and our participation in knowledge creation?

This session would invite participants to join in generative conversation, and to reconsider the effects that literatures and critical conversations have in their lives, their practice as scholars and/or artists, and community members.

Kaitlyn Purcell, The Clown Ups (30 mins)

“I need to become a human again.” These are the words I tell myself after each time grief meets me on a random afternoon or evening. I’ve cried on stages in classrooms, lecture halls, and theatres from coast to coast. In one class a professor told me I should laugh more like Eden Robinson instead of crying. Since then, I completed nearly a decade of graduate studies, defying the stigma gifted by my perpetual sadness. In a meeting with Eden Robinson, I shared the story of me crying in a class and the professor’s advice. She laughed and told me I will probably have to wait until menopause before I stop caring and crying—or at least that’s what changed her. But I still had 10 or 20 years before menopause would save me. So instead I went on several journeys, publishing ʔbédayine, finally quitting drinking, and completing my PhD. In the end of it all, I came back to my question of how does one cope with this overwhelming grief? In a conversation with my aunty, I was pointed to the direction of the clown and suddenly it all seemed to make sense even though it didn’t at all. From there I revisited the work of Marvin Francis and his long poem, city treaty, and could finally understand his conversation between poet and clown. This thread of the clown led me on another series of explorations and failures. I just want to be a happy clown—not a sad one. I will be reading some of my creative work comprised of stories and cut up poetry—or what I sometimes call clown ups. I will also share a short performance of my clown.

3.3 Zombies, Bodies, and Other Monsters: Re-Visiting Indigenous Horror

WFL-203 Chair: TBD

Laura Hall, Bloodied Bodies: Indigenous Scholarship on Horror

In my book, I revisit a number of classic horror films that would benefit from a deeper settler colonial studies analysis. For example, I look at constructions and explorations of civilization and savagery in horror, including in The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). I also argue that Jason Voorhees is a reference to older Hollywood forms of monstrous Indians, and that Friday the 13th (1980) exposes the always crumbling white-settler homestead. Settler colonialism is daily horror and the Inquiry revealed not only the meanings of that horror, but the strategies—rooted in land and cultural renewal—that the elders and community members who speak in the Inquiry’s findings, are strategies to combat horror. After the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission each released their findings, I retreated into horror scholarship, not as escape but as deep-dive, earthy digging. What was within myself that needed to be unearthed? What meanings did I need to return to? Pop culture always feels like friend and foe during these moments of deep and wet and earthy storytelling. Settler colonialism feels like it is a system that is about layers of overtaking or subsuming, in taken-for-granted, daily acts and ideologies; the structure of this kind of oppression means that intersectionality becomes subsumed beneath white-settler interpretations of gender and sexuality, for example.  My book therefore also delves into the concept of settler colonialism as it needs to root and re-route studies of gender, sexuality, ableism and sanism. I revisit the Halloween (1978-2022) franchise and Scream (1996-) to look at the ways that intersectional oppressions inform the monster/s in these films. Finally, I cover some aspect of land and environment in horror, and the ways that settler colonialism and the monstrous, romanticized and even heroic (constructed) Indian shows up. The Final Girl goes savage, I argue, by going mad or losing the protections of heteronormativity and civility.

Alice Salion, Reframing prospective co-existence by re-visiting the zombie trope in Jeff Barnaby's Blood Quantum

Since its genesis, mainstream Hollywood sci-fi and horror cinematography has perpetuated historical or apocalyptic scenarios in which the white male hero engages in battling the Other, the alien monster infesting his living space and freedom of agency. The question is: what happens when this narrative is decolonized and thus subverted by the Indigenous gaze?

Presented to audiences at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, Blood Quantum is the highest-budgeted Native-directed and starring film in the history of Canadian filmography. Mi'kmaq director and screenwriter Jeff Barnaby (1976-2022) was moved by the vision of portraying a new perspective on the depiction of Indigenous peoples to deconstruct dehumanizing narratives intended to assuage colonial guilt. Based on the principle that colonialism and capitalism are devouring and inglobing pandemic phenomena, his work morphs settlers into zombies.

The subversive feature of the film lies in the realization that only the Indigenous population turns out to be immune to a global pandemic: this perspective is “a re-framing” of the history of colonization of the continent through “a re-visiting” of the biological warfare perpetrated against Aboriginal peoples that calls into appeal ancient and current resulting issues such as the MMIWG crisis, pipeline protests, residential schools, and treaty rights. Following French philosopher Michel Foucault's theory of biopower, such zombie biopolitics embodies the “domain of life over which power has taken control”. In this sense, the perception of an individual's existence as an absolute danger whose biophysical elimination reinforces another's potential for life and security is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty that can be reenvisioned to engender a “togetherness” in which to speculate about new coexistence among human, nonhuman animals, land and consequently, politics.

Nathaniel Harrington, Other people's monsters: "Monster Culture" and Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler's Wrist

In this paper I return to two texts: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s classic essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” and Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler’s horror fantasy novel Wrist. I have taught Cohen’s essay multiple times, and Wrist is a major component of my current research, but I have only recently begun to consider the two texts together. In this paper, I ask: are all monsters the same? In particular, taking Wrist as my starting point, I suggest that Adler points us to a gap in Cohen’s “method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender” (1996, 3). By juxtaposing the wiindigoo — a monster engendered by Anishinaabe culture — with the vampire — a decidedly Western European monster encoding, in its most iconic form, Victorian fears about sexuality and the Orientalized Eastern European Other, Wrist raises the question: what happens when a marginalized community, in this case an Anishinaabe community subject to the violence of settler colonialism, encounters the dominant community’s monsters? In this encounter, I suggest that most of Cohen’s “set of breakable postulates” (4) do, in fact, break and that the cultural function of Wrist’s settler monsters is markedly different from the function of its Anishinaabe monsters. This juxtaposition opens other possibilities for thinking about the relationships between monstrosity, Otherness, and power.

13:30 - 14:45 Panel Session 4

 4.1 Outrageous Kindnesses

WFL-337 Chair: Pauline Wakeham

Albert McLeod, Outrageous: Two-Spirit Re-emergence in 1978 (30 mins)

Indigenous people around the world are decolonizing their histories and adapting their social constructs to include 2Spirit/Indigenous LGBTQI+ people who were previously erased by settler society. In January 2020, Dr. Alison Green and Dr. Leonie Pihama, (eds.), set out to create a manuscript about 2Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQI+ stories from around the world. The anthology, Honouring our ancestors: Takatāpui, Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQI+ Wellbeing, Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, was published in 2023. Three chapters in the book are by Canadian authors, Dr. Alex Wilson, Dr. Randy Jackson, and me. I will read various excerpts from my chapter which is about my coming out as a gay man in Winnipeg beginning in 1978. Being a Cree 2Spirit person living in the city at that time was very confusing and exciting. My straight friends, with white Mennonite heritage, followed me as I navigated the cusp of Canada's foray into the disco era and drag scene as well as meeting Ojibwe 2Spirit people who lived in the city. My seminal moment of transformation occurs at the Park Royal Theatre on Osborne St., where we watched the Canadian 1977 movie, Outrageous!, starring the late drag performer Craig Russell. The narrative takes me to Vancouver to the centre of the gay scene and the beginning of the global AIDS pandemic.

Jamie Paris, Jocelyn Thorpe, Hanako Teranishi, Pedagogical Kindness: On Teaching Soft BIPOC Masculinities (30 mins)

There can be a tendency in our culture to speak of Black, Asian, Indigenous, queer and “soft” masculinities in terms of lacks and deficiencies. This logic presumes the hegemony of heterosexual white masculinity, even though such men represent a global minority. In the fall of 2024, we co-taught a class that was cross listed between English and Women’s and Gender Studies entitled Love, Joy, and Masculinity. Our goal was to center queer and soft BIPOC masculinities to see what BIPOC poets, novelists, creative non-fiction writers, and filmmakers could teach us about living lives filled with love and joy. This class was made possible by a grant from the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, and this grant enabled us to spend months working with a research assistant to craft a syllabus and to establish a shared pedagogy, which included the creation of low-stakes, short writing assignments. The class used an ungrading method and did not have a formal final exam, which encouraged students to engage in ongoing conversations about masculinity, joy, and love rather than trying to get good marks. Thus, we aimed to implement and reinforce an alignment between our readings, our pedagogy, and the classroom environment that saw kindness as a rigorous form of academic engagement. What came out of this class, we will argue, is an understanding that kindness is a key tool in creating a brave space to discuss systems of oppression in a university classroom, and that creating a class that privileges kindness takes time, effort, and, frankly, financial resources that university instructors all too often do not have.

4.2 Orality, Community, and Place

WFL-238 Chair: Élise Couture-Grondin

Raphaela Pavlakos, Indigenous Theatre in Toronto: Native Earth Performing Arts and the Burgeoning Indigenous Theatre Scene of the 80s and early 90s

Cree playwright, Tomson Highway, sees Indigenous Theatre as being the most applicable genre to tell Indigenous stories, as Indigenous “oral tradition translates most easily and most effectively into a three dimensional medium . . . taking the ‘stage’ that lives inside the mind, the imagination, and transposing it . . . onto the stage in a theatre” (Highway 22). This proposed conference presentation will look at the opening of Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA), the oldest professional Indigenous theatre company in Canada and the first Indigenous Theatre company in Toronto, and the subsequent community engagement that was made possible through NEPA. This is work traces Indigenous theatre as a genre, which has been traditionally underrepresented in a Canadian context, and specifically looks at Indigenous plays that have been excluded from the canon of Canadian drama. There was a seismic cultural shift in the late 80s and early 90s in Toronto with the development of Indigenous artistic networks, particularly in response to Indigenous activism movements, like that seen in the Kanesatake Resistance of 1990. Indigenous Theatre became a space where political conversations and activism could ‘safely’ be played out on the stage in ways that were not accepted in everyday life.

Using an ethical methodological practice I am designed as part of my dissertation work, Critical Dispositioning, I will use community-specific frameworks to contextualize this work as a settler researcher in order to elevate Indigenous voices and decentre colonial frameworks. Some questions I will consider while parsing through this work are: How is Toronto particularly suited to make this work possible? In what ways is the work that NEPA did, and continues to do, necessary? And lastly, in what ways is NEPA directly responsible for the creation of Indigenous theatre in this particular time and place.

Doe O'Brien Teengs, (Re)Awakening Oral Storytelling with Omushkego Elders in Northern Ontario

My dissertation project was born out of a pervasive silence of Omushkego stories and personal histories which was the result of Residential School experiences in my family. The fallout of these experiences then included changes from living on the land to living in towns and urban areas where Canadian culture became the template for the participants’ lives. I did not know what stories they would tell, and they did not know how much they would remember about storytelling in their lives. What was revealed was that the participants’ experiences ranged from growing up on the trapline and visiting the Winisk village two months of the year (1930s) to the last participant spending most of their early years in the Winisk village and going on short trips to the Hudson Bay, or to the trapline on the Shagamee River (1950s). Each of the three participants shared and sometimes unknowingly demonstrated the pedagogy of storytelling: stories told for a purpose (moral lesson); stories to teach culture (we were all in the same space and learned by watching); storyteller choosing to tell a story with a purpose (I’m going to tell you this to show how our parents brought us up: they gave commands); and the listener reflecting and searching for meaning in each story shared. This presentation will share some of these stories and the lessons learned about (re)awakening Omushkego storytelling practices when they have gone silent.

Alec Mahoney, Retour à la communauté : Exploration du lien communautaire et des relations interpersonnelles à travers l'écriture d'un Bildungsroman

Dans un esprit de dialogue entre différents systèmes de connaissances, je propose d’envisager le thème de ce rassemblement, Re-visiting, comme une lentille pour réfléchir sur mon processus créatif, qui consiste à opérer un retour à la communauté par l’entremise de l’écriture fictionnelle. Mon mémoire en recherche-création s’intéresse au lien entre littérature et communauté autochtone, qui est d’ailleurs défendu par le chercheur cri Neal McLeod dans l’essai « Coming Home Through Stories » (1998). Dans la partie création, en tant qu’Ilnu de Mashteuiatsh, je répondrai à l’appel lancé par McLeod – « each generation has the responsibility of breathing new life into the stories » (p. 64) – en explorant une forme romanesque qui se prête à la perspective de mon personnage-narrateur, un orphelin autochtone, écrivain en herbe, ayant vécu hors réserve : le Bildungsroman.

Bien que le Bildungsroman appartienne à la tradition occidentale, la spécialiste des littératures autochtones Renate Eigenbrod propose que son paradigme « allows for a reading that considers Indigenous notions of place and connectedness as part of the formation of a re-membering character and of a text » (2000, p. 93). Les structures narratives associées au Bildungsroman concordent-elles avec des notions et des manières d’être autochtones? Ma communication visera à réfléchir à ce questionnement, à y apporter quelques pistes de réponse. En suivant la trajectoire de mon personnage-narrateur, je poserai avec lui les questions qui émergent de sa recherche d’identité et du choc des cultures auquel il est confronté. Que gagne-t-on à raconter des histoires à l’oral plutôt qu’à l’écrit? Qu’est-ce qui fait rire les Innus? À quoi reconnaît-on un Innu? Ses liens de filiation (le sang)? Sa langue? Ou bien son statut dépend-il d’une initiation?

4.3 Reading through our Nations and Knowledges

WFL-203 Chair: Matthew Tétreault

Alexa Manuel, Revisiting Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash on its 40th Anniversary

Forty years after its first publication, 'Slash' by Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx Okanagan) maintains its relevancy to the Indigenous literary landscape due to its predominant themes of Indigenous activism and historical discourse. First published in 1985, 'Slash' still captures the ongoing frustration and anger of Indigenous peoples as we fight for basic human rights and recognition, while also capturing the beauty in belonging to a community and the joys of knowing one’s connections and responsibilities to the land and to one’s relations.

In this paper I analyze 'Slash' through the Syilx-specific knowledges in which it was written, exploring the aspects of the novel that make it a uniquely Syilx experience, one that is centred in the land and in the relationships of the main character. Since its initial release, scholars have analyzed a variety of topics within 'Slash', including trauma, assimilation, the colonial gaze, and decolonization, but there has yet to be any literary criticism that has explored the novel as one rooted in Syilx intellect and culture – mainly because it hadn’t yet been approached by a Syilx scholar. This paper is comprised from a chapter of my dissertation on Syilx literatures titled 'Stories of Lands, Bodies and Dreams: A tmixʷcentric Literary Theory'.

Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, Yarihwahkwanh : Lire la résurgence wendat dans la poésie d’Andrée Levesque Sioui

Dans l’introduction de son ouvrage fondateur Red on Red : Native American Literary Separatism (1999), Craig S. Womack déplore le manque d’intérêt des Autochtones envers la critique et la théorie littéraires. À ses yeux, les porteurs de traditions des communautés autochtones semblent les mieux outillés pour analyser le corpus littéraire de leur nation respective. Dans le cadre cette communication, je propose donc de répondre à cette invitation afin de voir comment mon double positionnement de littéraire et de porteur de traditions wendat peut m’aider à mieux comprendre et faire parler une œuvre du corpus littéraire de ma nation.

Sur la quatrième de couverture du premier recueil de poèmes de l’artiste multidisciplinaire wendat Andrée Levesque Sioui, Chant(s), l’éditeur affirme qu’elle « trace ici ce qui, du passé et du présent, demande à retrouver une voix et un souffle ». Inspiré par le concept de biskaabiiyang de l’autrice nishnaabeg Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2018), je tenterai de démontrer, par la microlecture, comment on peut lire la poésie d’Andrée Levesque Sioui, ses thèmes et stratégies, comme une mise en scène et un acte de résurgence wendat. Ce faisant, je me questionnerai sur les propositions conceptuelles qui pourraient émerger de sa poésie afin d’entamer une réflexion sur ce que pourrait constituer une conception wendat de la résurgence ancrée dans la culture et la langue.

Tara Million, Responding to wetiko crime: Understanding Harold Johnson's Backtrack through the Indigenous Literary Analysis Model (ILAM) 

Backtrack (2005), by Cree author Harold Johnson, draws on Cree Oral Traditions and Cree legal traditions to create a contemporary story about the wetiko, a human transformed into a cannibal monster who murders people, and the Cree laws and legal processes that are used to respond to wetiko crimes (Friedland, 2018). The Indigenous Literary Analysis Model (ILAM) is a method I developed for critically engaging with Indigenous literatures. In this presentation, the ILAM is applied to an example of Indigenous crime fiction to expand the existing body of scholarly literature, as Indigenous crime fiction in Canada is not widely studied. Analysis of Backtrack identifies that while this novel demonstrates some continuity with Canadian crime fiction genre conventions, it also challenges and rewrites those conventions. Ultimately, through the ILAM, analysis of Backtrack determines that by incorporating and subverting elements of Western crime fiction conventions into a work that remains firmly within the Indigenous literary canon, Backtrack transcends Western literary genre conventions and can be understood as a cultural knowledge text. With Backtrack, Johnson provides a legal roadmap for how to get along with others in miyo-wicehtowin (good relationships). He was a Cree person doing storytelling and Backtrack is a valid source of contemporary knowledge about living Cree laws.

15:00 - 16:15 Panel Session 5 

5.1 Re-Visiting Greg Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style

WFL-337 Chair: Sophie McCall

Preformed Panel featuring Warren Cariou, Deanna Reder, Jordan Abel, Sarah Henzi

In 2018, Opaskwayak Cree editor and author Greg Younging published the much-awaited first edition of Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples, the first published guide to common questions and issues of writing, style, and process when working with Indigenous works, peoples, and communities. Very quickly, Elements became an indispensable and valuable go-to for writers, academics, journalists, publishers, and students. In her review of the book, Georgian Bay Métis writer Cherie Dimaline wrote, “Elements of Indigenous Style is a beautiful beginning, a gathering place and a cultivator of both discussion and growth. Younging’s work clears the ground, drafts the blueprints and starts the framing out on the house that we need for our stories” (Brush Education, 2018). Upon its publication, Younging shared that he already had thought of things that would need adjusting, updating, and integrating, as the field develops, while also taking into account the different contextual knowledges across Turtle Island. As such, it was meant to be a beginning, a first draft, a pedagogical tool that would grow and flow – not a definitive arrival. It was, and still is, an invitation.

Following his very sudden passing in May 2019, many of us gathered together to talk about Younging’s vision and legacy. One thing stood out: time. Time was needed. We all needed time. In his own words: “Take the necessary time. [Collaboration] takes time. Do your best to take the time” (31). Over the next few years, many conversations took place – with Brush Education, the original publishers of Elements, as well as with family, and community members. In 2022, lead editor Warren Cariou assembled a team of scholars, including Deanna Reder, Lorena Sekwan Fontaine, and Jordan Abel, to re-visit the guide as a means to continue and expand collaborations, account for new voices and, last but not least, celebrate Younging’s influence on our own work and fields.

In this roundtable/discussion panel, we would like to share with the ILSA community the different stories, processes, queries, and challenges of taking on this important project, both with regards to the new English edition, and the upcoming French translation.

5.2 Echoes of Ephemera: Literary Legacies of Periodicals, Newspapers, and Indigenous Theatre

WFL-238 Chair: Jasmine Rice

Maxime Poirier-Lemelin, La production littéraire autochtone dans les périodiques au Québec

Dans la visée de produire une œuvre de référence des œuvres et auteurices autochtones de ce qu’on appelle communément le Québec, il apparaît crucial de se pencher sur la production de périodiques autochtones et la contribution d’auteurices autochtones à des périodiques sur le territoire. L’objectif de ce projet de la Chaire de leadership en enseignement sur les littératures autochtones au Québec est de recenser les textes littéraires autochtones parus dans des périodiques (magazines, revues, journaux) afin de remettre en circulation des textes qui seraient tombés dans l’oubli, des communautés autochtones comme de la recherche universitaire. Ce projet contribuera à évaluer l’ampleur de la production littéraire autochtone dans des périodiques et l’apport d’auteurices souvent méconnu.e.s au champ des littératures autochtones au Québec. Nous serons ainsi mieux à même de les faire connaître et de les mettre en valeur.

Cette communication a pour but de présenter les résultats du dépouillement de trois périodiques, soit TAWOW (1970-1981), Kanatha (1974‑1977) et Sur le dos de la tortue (1989-2000). Je présenterai d'abord la méthodologie, les choix que j’ai dû faire et les problèmes que j’ai rencontrés. À partir des données recueillies, je pourrai observer si certaines tendances se démarquent. Par exemple : Est-ce que certaines nations ou communautés sont plus ou moins représentées? Est-ce que certaines formes ou genres littéraires sont davantage adopté.e.s? Est-ce que certain.e.s auteurices se démarquent en termes de quantité ou de diversité de production littéraire?

Cette recherche initiera ce qui pourrait éventuellement devenir une histoire des littératures autochtones dans les périodiques. La présentation permettra de sensibiliser le milieu de la recherche au manque auquel tente de pallier ce projet. J’espère ainsi démarrer des conversations et, idéalement, recueillir les noms d’autres périodiques afin d’enrichir le projet.

Isabella Huberman, “Welcome to the Nation”: a Cree magazine’s role in building community literature

For this year’s gathering, I propose to share research in its early stages on the The Nation magazine, a periodical which presents itself as the “only independent Indigenous news source serving the Cree of James Bay” (nationnews.ca). Since publishing its first issue in December 1993, the magazine has continued to publish twice a month for nearly thirty years, producing a significant body of print, and eventually, digital work. The magazine is distributed for free in Eeyou Istchee and found in locations such as cultural centres and the seat pockets of Air Creebec planes. The magazine contains interviews with Eeyou leaders, political announcements from the Grand Council of the Crees, as well as poetry, stories from Elders, and editorials from community members.

In this talk, I aim to first, contextualize how The Nation came to be as a periodical within the new administrative structure that emerged in Eeyou Istchee after the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975). I will then present examples of the variety of materials published, with particular attention to the way the magazine disseminates current news and politics, alongside poetry and editorials from community members across Eeyou Istchee. Lastly, I will look at the specific case of the contributions of Chisasibi poet Margaret Sam-Cromarty, who published in the very first issue and had a regular column, titled “Cromarty,” reserved for her poems throughout the 1990s. Through study of Sam-Cromarty’s work, I will explore how a local magazine such as The Nation has been instrumental in contributing to traditions of community literature in Eeyou Istchee.

Feather Maracle, Brendan Edwards, & Jane Griffith, Newspaper Clippings: Rematriation from the Royal Ontario Museum

The Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) Library and Archives currently houses 63 binders of clippings—short articles spanning 1964 to 1974—from Ontario newspapers. This largely unknown collection, unaccessioned and largely unacknowledged by the museum, showing its wear after over 50 years of dust, tape, and glue, is a product of the ROM’s commissioning of the Canadian Press Clipping Service, a common way in the twentieth century for institutions to be kept informed on a particular topic. In this case, the volumes housed at the ROM all centred around one keyword supplied to the clipping agency: “Indian.” By hand, those at the clipping service for ten years manually clipped any article with this term from Ontario newspapers such as the Kingston Whig Standard, the Port Credit Weekly, and the Sudbury Star—a wide-ranging roster of newspapers, many of which do not exist today. The ROM’s binders would originally have been a working resource for creating "ethnology" exhibits, but now serve as an important artefact in their own right.

The articles stored in these binders vary in topic: from female Indigenous artist profiles to healthcare; from anti-Indigenous discriminatory practices at a motel to a delegation from Six Nations to the United Nations; from museum repatriation to racism in school textbooks. The 10-year period of articles records both the major and the day-to-day of Indigenous life from the perspective of settler colonial media during a particular important period of Indigenous political action and art.

Yet the clippings also include Indigenous-authored writings in the form of columns, articles, letters-to-the-editor, and quotes.

Though the ROM's keyword sought to delimit, surveil, and imagine public history in the form of a provincial museum, our project seeks to make these writings accessible given these community newspapers were largely not digitized and connect them to Indigenous communities represented today.

Our presentation will share this digitial rematriation project, with digitizing taking place by Six Nations Public Library. We will begin describing how we understand clippings as pre-internet methods of organizing information and containing chaos on the page and then share examples from this collection of Indigenous-authored writings and this project's focus on returning them, against a larger backdrop on the history of Indigenous journalism within what the museum understood as the borders of Ontario as well as museums and settler colonialism.

5.3 The Resonances of Walking

WFL-203 Chair: TBD 

Christine Campana, Indigenous Women Walking Together Through Time: Reflecting on Forms of Walking in Chrystos’ “I Walk in the History of My People” and Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow

Although they are from different nations, Menominee writer Chrystos and Cree poet Louise Bernice Halfe (Skydancer) both reflect on women walking together as one way of creating community across generations. By revisiting and expanding upon my doctoral project, this paper examines Halfe’s 2004 edition of Blue Marrow alongside Chrystos’ “I Walk in the History of My People” from her 1988 Not Vanishing as exemplary of how their poetics of Indigenous travel can be a mode of decolonization. Through attending to the poets’ representations of women walking together in history and the present, I consider how their particular forms of movement embody resistance and resurgence. In analyzing the form of movement she imagines, I attend to Halfe’s rhythms and imagery, as well as her use of the Cree language. She defines the Cree word “wahkotowin,” for example, as meaning both “I walk with you in a bent-over manner” and involving a “relationship with our communities, our land, [and] the universe”” (“A Conversation with Louise Bernice Halfe,” 3rd ed, 101), suggesting a form of walking that unites the land with Indigenous peoples. Chrystos’ title, use of the English language, and subject matter invoke a “history” of “women” who are “locked” in the speaker’s “joints” (7). Her repeated emphasis on the body, including her marrow and “wounded” knee (7), convey a history of colonial abuse of Indigenous women’s bodies and how using their bodies in particular ways can also be a form of resistance. Through attending to the poets’ rejection of Western temporalities in favour of timelines more akin to Indigenous resurgence, and the relationality they imagine with their human and more-than-human kin who are part of their journeys, this paper considers what the poets’ representations of movement suggest about walking with and visiting Indigenous peoples and lands.

Emilie S. Caravecchia, Re-visiting the multidimensional identity of Sindy Ruperthouse. Analysis of the conversational poetics in Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau, Poetry Marching for Sindy

In her 2018 poetry collection, Poésie en marche pour Sindy, Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau (Eeyou & Anishinaabekwe) revisits Indigenous womanhood through an elegy to Sindy Ruperthouse, an Anishnaabekwe who disappeared from Val d’Or, QC, in 2014. More specifically, Pesemapeo Bordeleau seeks to revisit the multidimensional identity of Sindy: while she offers to rethink the identities of murdered and missing Indigenous women, at the same time, she calls forth their identities as living Indigenous women – those stand by, who resist, who are walking with and for all their sisters (Henzi 2021). In other words, Pesemapeo Bordeleau offers a poetic place from which to speak, to be heard, to be believed (Wylde 2024) – beyond statistics, and beyond the stereotypical images of the “'Indian' princess […] and the easy squaw” (Acoose 2016: 31). It is a space that is built on, and resonates with, decolonial love (Simpson 2015), for and by Indigenous women.

In this paper, through an analysis of her conversational poetics– in which the “I,” the “you,” and the “we” are all in relation – as well as the land-based walking performance that accompanied the collection’s first release, I explore how Pesemapeo Bordeleau proposes a multidimensional description of Indigenous women (Sterritt 2023), by calling out for Sindy, with her family and her relations, and by talking and walking with all the other Indigenous women who still fight, who are unbroken, who are not tragic (Maracle, in Simpson 2013).

Keighlagh Donovan, “What to Do When You’re Done and You No Longer See the Value in Migration, Your Peers, the Formation and Being a Goose”: Visiting as Trans/Formation with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

Reading representations of formations that abound in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies—from constellations and migrations, poetry and prose, to kinship networks and intergenerational forms of ritual and ceremony—I consider how the narrative deprioritizes individualism and confronts colonial teachings.Visiting with the many characters in Noopiming, described collectively by Dionne Brand, as underlining “the indivisibility of beings,” I have spent the last four+ years nourishing the imaginative possibility that there is a way of “thinking about birds but not in the usual way humans think about birds, more in the way birds think of themselves” (Simpson). Guided by Dwayne Donald’s relational walking prompt from the 2021 ILSA Gathering and Donald’s framing elsewhere of walking as “an intrinsically relational activity that carefully attunes mind, body, and spirit to surrounding life energies,” I follow “the walker [who] repeatedly recognizes the self as intricately interwoven with the surroundings.” Owing to writers like Karyn Recollet, Daniel Heath Justice, Chelsea Vowel and many more, I have come to understand visiting as an expansive reading mode that unsettles colonial methods of extractive research. Nourishing a reading/walking practice that mimics a visit with a friend, as per Warren Cariou’s advice, means to show up “without an agenda . . . opening ourselves to the story in a humble way.” And so, I situate my ongoing visits as an act of imagining otherwise in-progress as Noopiming’s formations actively disrupt colonial neuropathways and prompt a reconnecting with formations of self and ideas of whiteness and civility—what I think Simpson gestures toward as the titular disease of “White Ladies.” 

DAY THREE: JUNE 4

9:00 - 10:15 Panel Session 6

6.1 Flipping the Script

WF-004,005 Chair: Cara Schwartz

Emily Franzo, Social Control and Medical Racism: Revisiting Apocalyptic Pregnancies in Indigenous Women's Writing 

In "Counting by Stars," the sequel to Cherie Dimaline’s (Georgian Bay Métis) young adult novel "The Marrow Thieves," Dimaline revisits the character of Wab, one of the older young adult characters in the book, who is now pregnant. While still on the run from recruiters, Wab is forced into extreme protection despite wanting to counsel her younger family members. Wab’s apocalyptic pregnancy is made even further complicated when she is found by a group of settlers wanting to control her pregnancy based on colonial methods of medical racism. Wab’s experience is not far off from that of Louise Erdrich’s (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians) main character, Cedar, in her novel "Future Home of the Living God." My paper analyzes the representation of pregnancy in these two novels through the colonial weaponization of hope in a dystopic environment.

I argue that the life-giving power that these two women hold in their novels is used against them by the totalitarian governments in which they are both on the run from. By seeing bearing children as a representation of hope in worlds overrun by epidemics and environmental decay, these governments disguise social control by forcing Indigenous women into incredibly surveilled environments in an effort to police their pregnancies and force their children to continue to participate in the colonial system. As the theme of this year’s gathering is “Revisiting,” I consider how these two Indigenous woman writers revisit the topic of pregnancy in dystopic writing by adding into their novels connections to the real-life epidemics of violence against Indigenous women and girls within the medical system. My paper thus will examine the origins of the topic of pregnancy within dystopia novels, but will consider how Indigenous women address colonization as the central disease of the apocalypse that prohibits Indigenous women from having safe pregnancies.

Kali Simmons, The Colonial Uncanny in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House

This presentation revisits Louise Erdrich’s widely taught and celebrated novel, The Round House (2013), attending specifically to Erdrich’s uses of the uncanny as a literary device within the next. In Erdrich’s novel the Coutts family is torn apart after its matriarch, Geraldine, is violently raped. Under the legal conditions of the novel’s geographic and temporal setting – an unnamed Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in the year 1988 – Geraldine and her family are deeply constrained by US legal precedence which have dramatically limited their tribes’ abilities to exercise their sovereignty. In their search for justice, peace, and answers, the Coutts’ are confronted with a litany of uncanny and unsettling figures: identical robot twins, a Wendigo doppelganger, seemingly inanimate objects that speak, and unnerving instances of déjà vu. All the while, the space of the Coutts’ home is transformed from a comforting site of safety to a cold, haunted, and deeply unheimlich space.

In this presentation I want to think through the utility of Erdrich’s deployment of the uncanny as a tool of portraying how colonialism estranges Indigenous Peoples from their homelands and structures of governance, transforming traditional territories into strange and unfamiliar sites of abuse. My remarks will be guided by the following questions: How does the text model an Ojibwe reading of, or perhaps even a transformation of, Freud’s concept? In what ways are the novel’s readings of western psychology and media a display the “density” (Chris Andersen, 2009) of Indigenous critical thought? How might the framework of the uncanny allow us a different way to think about the broader psychic and material effects of settler colonialism? And in what ways does the notion of the uncanny resonate with and diverge from Indigenous philosophical thought?

Laura M. Furlan, The Docupoetics of Abigail Chabitnoy's How to Dress a Fish (presenting via Zoom)

Abigail Chabitnoy’s (Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village) first poetry collection How to Dress a Fish (2019) re-visits her great-grandfather Michael’s student records from the Carlisle Indian School, now amassed in the Carlisle Indian School Digital Research Center (CISDRC)—a project that compiles documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), making them much more accessible to descendants and researchers. Chabitnoy’s poems engage with these archival documents, which include student information cards, photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and postcards—some of these in Michael’s handwriting—as she thinks about what is contained and what is not contained in this file. In this paper, I consider Chabitnoy’s work in terms of docupoetics as well as Natalie Harkin’s concept of “archival-poetics,” which asks us think about the ways in which poetry may be written in response to the violence of, the sometimes fragmentary nature of, the sometimes overwhelming material of, the surveillance of, the power structures at work in, the colonial archive. I am interested in the way Chabitnoy interacts with and speaks back to these sources in her poetry, as citation—sometimes by visually marking them with redactions that do not quite obscure the text underneath—and in the way she responds to the archival record. Chabitnoy calls attention to the lacunae of the archive by filling in some of the gaps with family stories and photographs, in addition to Alutiiq stories that she would have heard if she had grown up in Alaska. In an interview with Mvskoke poet Jennifer Foerster, Chabitnoy describes her poetics as a process of accretion, which becomes a useful dialectic for thinking about the layers in this book—a book that enacts a kind of archival assemblage.

6.2 Refractions and Returns

WFL-238 Chair: Marie-Ève Bradette

Jean Sébastien, Kuessipan, livre et film: blessures migratoires et solidarités féminines réparatrices

Deux œuvres liées entre elles s’intitulent Kuessipan, le premier livre de Naomi Fontaine (2011) et un film de Myriam Verreault (2019) coscénarisé avec Fontaine. Plutôt que d’aborder ces deux œuvres sous l’angle de l’adaptation du livre au cinéma – et d’ailleurs, Verreault avait déjà des pistes pour un récit se déroulant à Uashat avec des gens de la communauté avant de rencontrer Fontaine –, je m’intéresse aux particularités de l’une et l’autre œuvre au moins autant qu’à leurs recoupements.

Les Autochtones constituent un groupe social dans lequel les individus migrent beaucoup. Une étude publiée en 2015 établit à la moitié des jeunes des communautés celles et ceux qui ont quitté pour une grande ville ou une autre communauté et, dans la moitié qui vit dans sa communauté d’origine, 2 sur 5 y sont de retour après une période à l’extérieur (Côté et al 2015). Le livre de Fontaine, par touches successives, fait bien ressortir les inquiétudes à rester/revenir dans la communauté et l’espoir d’y trouver un socle. Des enjeux intergénérationnels, teintés de substrats de traumatismes, sont au cœur des enjeux du livre de Fontaine (Papillon 2016). Ce balancement entre deux pôles est présent dans le titre Kuessipan / À toi dans la mesure où l’on peut se demander qui est ce toi à qui s’adresse la voix narrative (le lectorat, l’amoureux allochtone mentionné à plusieurs reprises, ou le fils puisque le titre de la dernière section est justement le mot « fils » en innu-aimun, Nikuss (Capriotti 2021).

Le film fait ressortir ces deux pôles, mais dans un récit où le contraste est construit dans un récit entre deux amies d’enfance. Verreault fait, avec Fontaine, un film respectueux de la nation innue, mais dans lequel elle donne une plus grande place à la solidarité féminine.

Rachel Stubbs, Why Are These Books So Beautiful? The Aesthetics of Indigenous Storytelling in Children’s Picturebooks

This paper argues that with the last five years, there has been an influx of Indigenous picturebooks that focuses on the aesthetics of storytelling wherein the visuals often speak as loudly as the text, which in turn functions to facilitate the possibilities of Indigenous futurity. Within the last five years, Michaela Goade’s Berry Song (2022), Remember (2023), Richard Wagamese and Bridget George’s The Animal People Choose a Leader (2024), Leona Prince, Gabrielle Prince, and Carla Joseph’s Be a Good Ancestor (2022), and Julie Flett’s We All Play (2021) offer stories that center an aesthetic experience integral to a narrative wherein one cannot exist wholly without the other. In his seminal text, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, Daniel Heath Justice states that “we must acknowledge the inevitable limits of the literary, while also acknowledging the diverse ways that story, community, and belonging continue in both oral inscribed forms” (26). In this sense, storytelling through picturebooks moves beyond the limits of literary traditions as a form of orality and written literature. The illustrations in these books foreground this flux, as their form naturally lends itself to a form of oral storytelling.

Furthermore, I argue that by extending Richard Scott Lyons' 2000 article, "Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?", where he emphasizes that "The ability to speak both—indeed, to speak at all—is the right and the theory and the practice and the poetry of rhetorical sovereignty. Ningiigid, nindinawe: I speak, I speak like the people with whom I live” (466-467), the aesthetics of Indigenous picture books can be seen as a form of rhetorical sovereignty. In this context, the illustrations in these books actively imagine and shape a future. That is, these texts function beyond the page in that they weave together past traditions, contemporary culture, and ongoing processes of renewal and Indigenous continuity. These recent careful choices of colour, vibrancy, and nation-specific art allow illustrators and writers to engage with a newform of storytelling for Indigenous artists that honours tradition while also allowing for literatures to evolve alongside their peoples.

Sarah Agou, La réversibilité des structures coloniales : trajectoires de restitutions à la communauté dans le film Bootlegger de Caroline Monnet (2021)/The Reversibility of Colonial Structures: Ways of Returning to the Community in Caroline Monnet’s film Bootlegger (2021)

How does reversal become a tool to break colonial structures of oppression, and opens a space for what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Anishinaabe) calls “radical resurgence” (2017)? Bootlegger (2021), a film directed by Caroline Monnet (Anishnaabe and French), follows a young female protagonist, Mani (Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs), and her relation to her community as she returns to Kitigan Zibi at the end of her studies in Montréal. Following the thread of alcohol sales on the reserve, Bootlegger works to reverse ingrained commonplace of colonial legacies, imperial debts, and historical misrepresentations of Indigenous communities in Canada. I turn to decolonial feminist readings of debts for my analysis of Bootlegger: philosophers Verónica Gago, Lucía Cavellero and Rocío Zambrano provocatively ask, “Who owns what to whom?” and thus affirm the reversible character of colonial debt structures (Gago and Cavallero, 78; Zambrano, 84). In this context, the refusal to pay a debt is rooted in its reproved legitimacy. Questioning established debt as just and unescapable, Monnet’s protagonist returns with critics against inequalities justified by Canadian law and economics, but also against some of the Western and capitalist orientation of her community’s economical structures that perpetuate coloniality. I expand the notion of reversal to analyze the specificities of Bootlegger, as this reversal opens a space to weave a complex community on screen, exploring intergenerational ties of reciprocal trust and teachings. Moreover, the cinematic medium allows multilingual approaches, through subtitles, a possibility more limited in written texts in which using a major language (such as English or French) is strongly encouraged to reach more readership. Bootlegger is trilingual and gives a central role to Anishinaabemowin, thus going against its political and social minorization to participate in its revalorization. Bootlegger undoes settler colonial logics of exploitation and weaves togetherness by following Mani’s many returns to her community.

6.3 Listening, Creating, Relating

WFL-203 Chair: TBD

Bren McKay, Resurgence Through Indigitization: Indigenization Of and Through Digital Worlds

Throughout speculative fiction, digital worlds are often portrayed as distinct from the “real” world through a clear demarcation between the virtual and the physical. Through a close reading of Blake Hausman’s "Riding the Trail of Tears", and Wab Kinew’s "Walking in Two Worlds" — two Indigenous speculative fiction novels that feature immersive virtual worlds— informed by concepts of vibrant materiality and Indigenous metaphysics, that demonstrates the ways in which readers are forced to reconsider the distinction between the real and the digital through a relational process of Indigenization of and through digital worlds that I call Indigitization. This process of Indigitization is facilitated through a re/framing of digital worlds as belonging to the larger network of relationships within the “real” world as part of aki—the anishinaabe conception of land that encompasses not only the land and all that the land gives life to, but also the spirits, energies, and networks that connect the living and the non/living alike—that draws from Indigenous epistemologies and the works of Leanne Simpson, Kim Tallbear, and Jane Bennett. This process and way of relating with/in digital worlds in speculative fiction stories reveals the ways in which our interactions with/in the contemporary digital worlds of video games and virtual reality can lead us towards a future-oriented resurgent practice that extends both into the digital world and outward from it through the reciprocity of indigitization.

Jason Purcell, Settler Listening and Friendship Lessons with Cree & D

Cree & D is a podcast by siblings Jessica and Ben Johns, nehiyaw writers with English-Irish ancestry, featuring a cast of characters voiced by their closest friends, that takes the form of a narrative Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It follows three cousins as they “work to preserve the hard won [sic] and tenuous peace treaty between the six nations” in a story of “love, family, and … adventure” that, to my mind, is a project that, at the levels of conception and production as well as the level of content, is entirely predicated on joy (Cree & D). This project’s depiction of treaty agreements can model for the listener ways of navigating good relations. While the podcast positions me as a listener through the narrator’s mode of address and through the medium itself, I also arrive to this story from the outside, bringing to this project a set of ears that can only pick up certain frequencies: I am a settler listener. While the creators and performers of Cree & D are close friends who have welcomed me into their lives and who have taught me tremendous amounts about kinship— not unlike some of those lessons that the characters in the episode learn from one another—their project remains a productive space of incommensurability; though we have agreed to enter into a set of relations, there are still places I cannot and should go. These friendships, as with the knowledge I can access, have boundaries. These friendships, like this podcast project, teach me a kind of listening. By visiting the podcast à la Cariou and witnessing the creators’ “red reading” (Scott Andrews) of D&D and the “irreconcilable space” (David Garneau) that they create with it, I learn what I can from this project and friendship without extracting what’s not mine.

Tavleen Purewal, Revisiting Settler Self-Location with Deanna Reder's Critical âcimisowina

This paper revisits the practice of self-location in light of Cree-Métis scholar Deanna Reder’s work on critical âcimisowina. Reder argues that within the leaves of critical writing, “including one’s story is not a way to take centre stage as much as to share and visit together” (Autobiography 9). In a forum on Reder’s work, Juliane Okot Bitek responds to Reder’s critical autobiography. Okot Bitek feels inspired to orient her “family and community history [from northern Uganda] all the way to our life on Turtle Island, three decades later.” Okot Bitek finds in Reder’s theory an ethics of relation through which racialized people may embody their responsibilities to Indigenous communities and the land they occupy.

As a settler scholar of Punjabi descent writing a monograph on Indigenous and Black literary relations, I am currently grappling with a preface about my self-location that can uphold, according to Reder, Indigenous art as a site “to share and visit together” (9). Self-location may not even be a useful term. Self-location in settler scholarship has become a brief, hollow, and self-absolving inventory of the troubling aspects of one’s social identity. Instead, I will consider how Indigenous protocols for guests to introduce themselves—to explain their relations and purpose—can offer a more generative framework for critical self-storying. Reder’s culturally grounded practice of critical âcimisowina suggests non-Indigenous ethics of relation cannot be articulated through personal storytelling in parallel tradition to Indigenous forms of storytelling.

Thinking with Reder, Okot Bitek, and others, I explore how non-Indigenous self-locations need to narrate the complicated ties between the critic, their communities, and the racialized and Indigenous communities evoked in their study. Importantly, I ask how self-storying can re-articulate the critical project at hand for its role in repairing injuries. I will speak to my own task of articulating my positionality as a Punjabi settler who grew up on Coast Salish territories, a region that for more than a century has nourished Punjabi immigrants and their descendants whose caste-based labour as farmers and claims to civility have allowed for varying degrees of economic integration into the colonial capitalism of B.C.

13:00 - 14:15 Panel Session 7 

7.1 Teaching Pre-21st-Century Texts (Workshop)

WF-004,005 Chair: Deanna Reder

Preformed Panel featuring Deanna Reder and Susan Glover

While there is great enthusiasm for the study of texts published in the twenty-first century, we would like to call together colleagues interested in research and teaching of neglected works produced before the year 2000. This proposal responds to Congress’s call to rethink our roles and responsibilities re “ever-evolving technologies”—online texts and digital humanities research more broadly--and more specifically to ILSA’s call to explore various forms of “re-visiting,” reframing, and reading anew.

We would begin by sharing Glover's extensive bibliography of over 500 works (print and manuscript) by Indigenous authors/creators composed before 1870, as part of the Voices of Ancestors (VoA) project; we would also share Reder's work on thepeopleandthetext.ca (housed in the Alliance-hosted platform CWRC) that includes not just the materials that she and her team have compiled as part of TPatT but also the additions contributed by a host of other researchers (e.g. Christine Bold; Keavy Martin & Julie Rak) looking for a stable digital repository that is accessible and accountable not just to academics but also to Indigenous communities.

We will use this workshop to share lesser known works that can broaden coverage in research and teaching, and offer tangible supports to colleagues who are interested adding neglected Indigenous texts to new courses. We will assess online repositories of texts such as Canadiana.org to identify barriers to and potential for their inclusion in research and teaching. We will also explore with participants the challenges to teaching this time period along with a discussion of its rich benefits.

Finally, we would then guide discussion with participants of ways we could create a regular (annual or monthly) venue to consider the establishment of an ILSA subcommittee to promote Pre-1951 research and teaching.

7.2 Resistance and Resurgence

WFL-238 Chair: TBD

Justine Pinault : Writing as Resistance in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s This Accident of Being Lost and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World

In “Indigenous Queer Normativity,” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains a cognitive dissonance she witnesses within Indigenous communities—to her, queer- and transphobia are nonsensical and unacceptable within the ethical frameworks of Nishnaabeg grounded normativity (As We Have Always Done 120). She argues that Indigenous people have a collective responsibility to make their spirituality relevant to all, and to interpret and live their practices in ways that do not replicate colonial systems of oppression such as homophobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, and heteropatriarchy (122). I would argue that works like Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, and Simpson’s collection of stories and songs, This Accident of Being Lost, are important examples of modes of resistance to these systems.

In my presentation, I wish to analyze the above texts and highlight how both writers use their own definitions of poetry and short fiction to tell stories that resist dominant colonial narratives, identities, and binaries. I will also demonstrate these authors’ ability to play with form and genre while exploring the connections they weave between gender, sexuality and Indigeneity. I will ground my analysis of these texts in some of Simpson and Belcourt’s theoretical works, as well as theories brought forth by Channette Romero in “Centering Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Futurisms,” (Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms), in which she discusses how re-centering Two-spirit and Indigiqueer narratives is “essential to transforming the questions we ask about futurism and to redefining the boundaries of the movement, … while reinvigorating our collective imaginings of potential Indigenous futures” (87–88). I believe Belcourt and Simpson’s works are prime examples of radically resurgent, powerful texts that embody Romero’s theory on the importance of queer Indigenous narratives in redefining the boundaries of what Indigenous futurisms have the potential to be.

Gage Karahkwi:io Diabo, Revisiting Skywoman with Alicia Elliott’s And Then She Fell

Mohawk author Alicia Elliott’s 2023 horror novel And Then She Fell revisits multiple histories, often ones of Indigenous women’s pain and isolation. It revisits the Haudenosaunee Creation Story of Skywoman’s descent from Sky World to Turtle Island with an ear toward her motivations, desires, and fears – details that are less discussed in more traditional renditions of the story. It revisits the representation of Indigenous women in settler media via the introduction of a haunted DVD copy of Disney’s Pocahontas. It also revisits aspects of the author’s personal history, namely her experiences as a young mother and as an Indigenous woman who felt unsupported by her community and surrounding institutions during a recent mental health crisis.

In short, the novel critically revisits the ways in which we, as witnesses hailing from and beyond the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, attend to the voices of the women in our lives. Why, Elliott asks, is it still so easy not to listen to Indigenous women, especially when they are deemed mentally unwell and therefore unreliable as narrators of their own (hi)stories?

In this paper, I will return to a line of inquiry that has motivated much of my previous research – how does Indigenous literature teach us to listen better? – with a renewed focus on the vectors of mental illness, institutional alienation, and matrilineal identity that Elliott’s novel foregrounds for us. The novel’s various nested retellings and echoes of Skywoman’s journey provide an opportunity to root the discussion in Haudenosaunee oral tradition, but also to think critically and speculatively with Elliott about the violence that the traditional story directs at Skywoman and her kin. I argue that the violence of being unheard is central to Elliott’s contemporary reimagining of Skywoman’s descent, and that the novel’s answer to this problem consists in the act of revisiting.

Jasmine Rice, Indigenous Literatures as Sites of Language Reclamation: An Analysis of And Then She Fell

With most Indigenous languages in Canada being critically endangered, the dominant focus of stakeholders in revitalization and education work is the urgent generation of new, fluent speakers. Often absent from these efforts, however, is concern for the well-being of the communities from which these languages derive. Frameworks of language reclamation (Chew, 2019; Leonard, 2017; Shulist & Pedri-Spade, 2022) emphasize this distinction and instead, promote the focus of Indigenous language work as a site of spiritual, cultural, identity, and community healing. In practice, language reclamation looks like shifting away from aiming for a mastery of a language’s grammar and vocabulary, to enhancing one’s understanding of the culture embedded and reclaiming one’s identity.

Drawing from Chew’s (2019) framework on language reclamation through a finger weaving metaphor, this presentation presents Alicia Elliott’s (2023) And Then She Fell as an example of the power of Indigenous literatures to represent the power and complexities of language and identity reclamation. The novel follows a Mohawk woman who has recently become a mother and moved away from her community, Six Nations of a Grand River, to Toronto. The protagonist’s struggle to be grounded in her identity is deeply impacted by her relationship to her language, which is often fraught with shame and feelings of inadequacy. Such is the experience of so many Indigenous language learners – highlighting the need for these narratives to serve as imaginings for Indigenous liberation and resurgence (Hanson, 2017).

7.3 Why Indigenous Literatures are Important: A Conversation Between Two Indigenous Librarians

WFL-203 Chair: Deborah Lee

Preformed Panel featuring Deborah Lee and Trish Beamsley

Re-visiting the work of Daniel Heath Justice, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Jo-Ann Episkenew and others, and drawing on our professional and personal lives, Māori and Cree-Métis librarians (Trish Beamsley and Deborah Lee) will discuss, via interview format, the importance, potential and power of Indigenous literatures for healing communities. We will explore the impact of Indigenous authors’ reclaiming and retelling of our histories and traditional stories in a contemporary context and the ways in which this literature contributes to the Indigenisation, empowerment and resilience of our Peoples as we face the challenges of the next seven generations.

Focusing on the work of established and emerging Māori and First Nations, Métis and Inuit storytellers, we will consider how this work has both mushroomed in quantity and format and served to build stronger Indigenous identities, especially for those generations who were adopted or raised outside of community and especially for our precious youth. Our work with Indigenous communities (as librarians) will also inform this conversation.

The similarities and differences between what is happening for Indigenous literature in Aotearoa and the wide range of Nations across what is now known as Canada will demonstrate the health of Indigenous writing and publishing across the waters. Thanks to increased opportunities in graduate-level Creative Writing, mentorship, and residency programs that have evolved over the last ten to fifteen years, more Indigenous writers are coming to the forefront of national literature scenes. Strong voices in futuristic and dystopic Indigenous literatures are taking centre stage everywhere, challenging and resisting long-standing colonial and elitist norms in literature to imagine other, more diverse, courageous, and thought-provoking worlds.

14:30 - 15:45 Panel Session 8

8.1 Living the Dream: Grief, Rescue, Recovery and Alicia Elliott's And Then She Fell

WF-004,005 Chair: Rick Monture

Preformed Panel featuring Rick Monture, Alicia Elliott, Alexis Andrade, Stacy DeBerner, Emily Rafuse and Tiffany Saddler

This panel will explore and celebrate Mohawk author Alicia Elliot's And Then She Fell (2023). A story of grief, family, motherhood, postpartum depression, micro aggressions, and cultural empowerment, Elliot's Amazon First Novel Award winning novel tackles real world issues while continually returning to the narrative foundations of the Haudenosaunee Creation Story and the experience of Sky Woman. Set at Six Nations and in Toronto, And Then She Fell is narrated by Alice, an early twenty-something Rez Girl who has found herself in a relationship with an aspiring white Anthropology Professor who speaks better Mohawk than her. They soon have a house in the Annex neighbourhood of the city and a baby girl is born. While Alice loves her daughter, she does not feel connected to her and soon life begins to take many twists and turns, both real and all too real. Everyday reality starts to fall away from Alice as she struggles to re-write an account of the Creation Story for the 21st century, and she soon realizes that the story of Sky Woman contains many eternal truths far greater than simply explaining "how this world came to be." This panel will be made up of Alicia Elliott (author), Rick Monture (professor), Alexis Andrade (graduate student), Tiffany Saddler (graduate student), Stacy deBerner (graduate student), and Emily Rafuse (graduate student). Rick will introduce the panel (5 min), followed by the students giving short 10 minute presentations each (40 min), Alicia will respond to their critical commentary (5 min), followed by Rick interviewing Alicia for the last 20 minutes on the challenges and triumphs of writing a story about Haudenosanuee motherhood in the early 21st century. This will be followed by audience Q and A, time permitting.

8.2 How We Do What We Do: Re-Visiting Research, Teaching, and Conferences

WFL-238 Chair: Jocelyn Thorpe

Stephanie Erickson, Collaboration, Creation, and Reconsideration: A Story of Teaching Indigenous Literatures in Post-Secondary with Richard Van Camp

Abstract forthcoming.

Malou Brouwer, Re-visiting my Dissertation: On Author Interviews as Community-Engaged Research in Indigenous Literary Studies     

In 2015, at the Foire du Livre in Brussels, I spoke with Indigenous authors from Quebec, including Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau. Inspired, I hoped to include author interviews in my master’s thesis, but this was discouraged due to practical concerns and a belief that text and author should remain separate—lest the author’s perspective influence my interpretation. I have since grappled with the question if that’s necessarily a bad thing. In my presentation , reflecting on my dissertation research, I will address to what extent author interviews might serve as a community-engaged approach to Indigenous Literary Studies (ILS). The interviews I conducted with Naomi McIlwraith and Tenille Campbell for my PhD research not only amplify the authors’ voices but also enrich my poetry analysis by engaging community members and providing a holistic, context-informed interpretation.

As I continue to study Indigenous literatures, I take questions of community-engagement seriously, viewing author interviews as a way to move beyond extractive literary interpretation. Given the history of interviews as sites of extractive research and power imbalances (Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies 27), how can scholars in ILS engage author conversations ethically, relationally, and in culturally appropriate ways? In my presentation, I revisit my interview process with critical humility—embracing a less certain critical stance (McKegney 11)— to critically reflect on the potential and limitations of author interviews as community engagement and to explore how author interviews can enable both researcher and author, in distinct ways, to re-approach poetry and its analysis. Building on Maracle’s assertion that questions of author intent are considered invasive in many Indigenous cultures (“Oratory on Oratory” 55) and on Indigenous literary nationalism’s emphasis on the relation between Indigenous literatures and their context, I argue that author interviews should not aim to “discover” intent but instead provide space for contextualization and engagement. Author interviews can be part of and provide that context and might also serve as spaces where authors can communicate the needs of their community.

Kristina Bidwell, A Call for Re-visiting the Academic Conference

My presentation will call on ILSA to “re-visit” the traditional conference format and to imagine forms for our gatherings that are more integrated with Indigenous ways of knowing and working together.

In 2025, the Federation says, it “aim[s] to open a collaborative space that bridges different ways of learning and producing knowledge” (“Congress 2025”). I have been working, with Sophie McCall, on researching “collaborative spaces” in Indigenous literary studies and we have heard from many that collaborative processes are vulnerable, uncertain, and messy. And this messiness is part of research more generally; as Thomas Mullaney, an author of Where Research Begins, commented, “We need to make being lost an explicit part of the [research] process because every experienced researcher knows that it is” (Roache). This need to acknowledge uncertainty aligns with Warren Cariou’s recognition that “[h]umility is a fundamental teaching in every Indigenous culture [he is] aware of” (3) as well as the acceptance, in ILSA’s CFP this year, that “[s]ometimes we need to re-visit our own work, the way we have done things before.”

And yet, at ILSA gatherings, we still often rely on standard conference papers that present polished and seemingly finalized arguments. How does our acceptance of this format prioritize academic products, while potentially neglecting the processes and values of humility, collaboration, and community-building? Who is excluded by this format? How might the yearly planning of a formal conference drain energy from our scholarly community? I have had inspiring discussions with ILSA members about other possible formats, such as writing retreats or “summer camps,” where we gather to create things together. In the spirit of re-visiting our own practices as an association, what other possibilities might we imagine together? This presentation will be part of my work on an essay for a proposed collection on the Post-Pandemic University.

 8.3 Global Connections

WFL-203 Chair: TBD

Benjamin Connor, Trans-Pacific Indigenous Connections: Anishinaabe and Ainu Encounters in Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (presenting via Zoom)

In 1848, Ranald MacDonald (Chinook/Scottish) intentionally capsized his boat off the coast of Rishiri Island in northern Japan and was rescued by the Ainu people. Gerald Vizenor’s (Anishinaabe) 2003 novel Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 both revisits and reimagines MacDonald’s encounter with the Ainu people through his trickster main character, Ronin, to articulate overlapping connections across Anishinaabe and Ainu teachings. As the son of an Anishinaabe solider, who was part of the post-war American occupation of Japan, and a local Japanese woman with suggested Ainu ancestry, Vizenor’s character offers, as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw) articulates, a “radical fluidity that remains grounded in embodied histories and traditions” (212). However, while scholars have touched upon Vizenor’s representation of the Ainu people (Byrd; Feith; Huang), Hiroshima Bugi and its critical reception have lacked engagement with existing literature written by the Ainu people. Therefore, the novel presents a potentially ungrounded depiction of Ainu culture. To more rigorously contextualize these Anishinaabe and Ainu connections, I draw from Chadwick Allen’s (Chickasaw) method of “juxtaposition,” which places diverse texts together to potentially contribute to an “Indigenous intellectual and artistic sovereignty global in its scope” (xviii). Specifically, I will juxtapose Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi with Ainu texts and scholarship, including Kayano Shigeru’s (Ainu) 1994 Our Land was a Forest. Ultimately, in enriching Hiroshima Bugi’s trans-Pacific Indigenous consciousness, my research seeks to consider co-existing sites of rootedness that facilitate trans-Pacific anti-colonial solidarities beyond the geopolitical boundaries of empire.

Kirsty Dunn, "Whāia te Taniwha (Follow the Taniwha): Revisiting Ancestral Narratives to Navigate the Now"

In the vast and vibrant waters of Māori literature - our stories, songs, carvings, poems, paintings, ancestral narratives and beyond - taniwha feature as powerful, boundary-defying whanaunga (relatives) whose movements are forever recorded in the landscape of Aotearoa (New Zealand). These shape-shifters are often framed in Western literature as “mythical” “scary” “supernatural beasts” whose relevance has been relegated to the past. For Māori though, taniwha are our kin who are very much present in the now and their many representations within Māori creative forms provide vital ways to explain the intricacies of the environment we live in and relate to. From within the literary waterways that house these slippery, intriguing relations, I seek to ask “who” rather than “what” are taniwha? And what kinds of knowledge are embedded in these narratives? Inspired and buoyed by the work of our storytellers, artists, and knowledge-holders who contemporise the stories of taniwha, I intend to highlight and celebrate the valuable teachings stored within these portrayals, retellings, and reimaginings and elucidate their continuing relevance in both local and global contexts; I pay particular attention to the ways that these representations can help us navigate the climate crisis and environmental devastation as a result of the ongoing colonial and capitalist project.

Taniwha are capable of being kaitiaki (guardians), tohu (signs or messengers), atua (deities), and tupuna (ancestors); these conceptualisations are not mutually exclusive. It is their tenaciousness, and mystery and the ways in which they often “slip” between forms, as well as their ongoing relationships with humans (storied, metaphorical, and otherwise) that are perhaps their most interesting qualities. The ability of taniwha to challenge us in multiple ways offer various avenues for considering our whakapapa - our relationships with each other and the world around us - and in doing so, remind us of the importance of maintaining and enacting responsibilities and obligations to all our relations, both human and nonhuman alike.

Vanessa Evans, Corrina Richards, & Vin Gattuso: Resurgence Revisited (Corrina presenting via Zoom)

As literary scholars, we are particularly concerned with the distinct role literature has played in disconnecting Indigenous Peoples from their communities, knowledges, and selves. Rather than focusing on what separates, however, our presentation will center “what brings people together across colonial, tribal, and hemispheric divides” (McGlennen, Creative Alliances 183). In this paper, graduate students Corrina Richards and Vin Gattuso join me in revisiting the work we began together in our spring 2024 course on trans-Indigenous resurgence. As such, our presentation juxtaposes Indigenous North American and South Asian contexts, constellating Eden Robinson’s (Haisla/Heiltsuk) Monkey Beach, Diane Wilson’s (Dakota) The Seed Keeper, and Mamang Dai’s (Adi) The Black Hill to reveal the wider story told by their interrelation. With a renewed focus, we reconsider what representations of resurgence in these seemingly disparate novels continue to tell us about how different Indigenous (con)texts are (re)imagining Indigenous worlds. We ask: how can this re-visiting reveal further cross-cultural connections that theorize resistance to settler logics? What might we see, or see differently, by reframing our previous interventions one year later?