$40 OR $25 for students/underemployedA 2-hour bus tour of Métis historical sites in Winnipeg led by the Louis Riel Institute (affiliate of the Manitoba Métis Federation). This tour reveals the events that led up to the Red River Resistance and the Birth of Manitoba in 1870. Participants will be picked up from the Inn at the Forks.**Limited space! Reserve a ticket via registration portal or by emailing IndigenousLSA@gmail.com

$40 OR $25 for students/underemployedA 2-hour walking tour of The Forks, the site of Nestawa’ya, a permanent Indigenous city that was in existence for thousands of years, led by Indigenous curator of the Forks, Niigaan Sinclair and his daughter Sarah. This was the site of the 1285 treaty, which featured hundreds of Indigenous nations who came together to share space and resources during a massive continent-wide drought and a 1785 smallpox epidemic which gutted the city and opened the way for a century later of Canadian expansion. This was the site of treaty, city, and now is ground zero of reconciliation in today’s modern Canada. Participants will be picked up from the Inn at the Forks.*NOTE: must be mobile and have suitable walking attire.**Limited space! Reserve a ticket via registration portal or by emailing IndigenousLSA@gmail.com

Featuring drummer and singer Ray “Coco” Stevenson and Winnipeg poet laureate Duncan Mercredi

Light refreshments and food provided

Limited seating reserved for Elders and those who need it

Featuring DJ Brent Phillips

Cash bar and food/drink available for purchase on the 1st Floor

Please feel welcome to relax and visit in this room.

Contact Patrizia for access

Welcome to Territory - Albert McLeod

Performance by the Norman Chief Memorial Dancers

In Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, Daniel Heath Justice introduces the term “wonderworks,” a genre that “is neither strictly ‘fantasy’ nor ‘realism,’ but maybe both at once, or something else entirely” (154). For critics of Indigenous literature, at least, Justice’s intervention may offer a way out of the theoretical morass that critics have been caught in for generations: how and when to draw the distinction between terms like fantasy, science fiction, horror, and speculative fiction. However wonderworks relate to those other categories, Justice also argues that they “insist on possibilities beyond cynicism and despair” (154). In this presentation, I will read recent novels by Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache) and Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe) through the lens of wonderworks, illustrating how Justice’s theoretical approach allows us to cross generic borders and build new relationships between seemingly disparate texts.

Jared Martin, the endearing protagonist of Eden Robinson’s Trickster Trilogy, has a lot to (un)learn. Specifically, the distinctions he assumes exist between ‘reality’ and ‘magic’ prove faulty. Across Son of a Trickster (2017), Trickster Drift (2018), and Return of the Trickster (2021), Jared ping-pongs between the material realism of his life in contemporary British Columbia and what Daniel Heath Justice characterizes in “Indigenous Wonderworks and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary” as those “[w]ondrous things [that]….remind us that other worlds exist; other realities abide alongside and within our own” (n.p.). Justice offers the aesthetic-cum-relational category of wonderworks as an alternative to dualistic distinctions between realism and fantasy, one that is “more in keeping with [Indigenous] epistemologies, politics, and relationships” (n.p.).

I am interested in wonderworks’ aesthetics on two fronts: first, at the level of the Trickster trilogy, reading these novels as wonderworks opens interpretative possibilities that the generic codes of ‘fantasy’ foreclose. It is possible, as some reviews on goodreads demonstrate, to read Robinson’s novels—particularly their representations of alcohol, drugs, and self-harm—only as evidence of Indigenous trauma and damage. Approaching these novels as wonderworks moves away from readings rooted in deficit models; all subjects’ perception of the ‘real’ is embodied, Robinson demonstrates, and transmuted by plants, chemicals, and pain.

Second, at the level of decolonial literary studies, wonderworks dismantle settler-colonial logic’s authoritative notions of ‘the real.’ Parsing reality from all things fantastical grants authority to those who ‘know’ via rationality. Settler logics push other-than-human worlds into the realm of the un-rational, the primitive. Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” and Max Liboiron’s definition of Indigenous science encourage similar relational alternatives to realist materialism. Read together, Justice’s concept of wonderworks and Robinson’s Trickster trilogy contradict settler logic’s “arrogant certainty over what is real and unreal, true and false, legitimate and delusional” (Justice n.p.).

In his review of nêhiyaw (Cree from Sucker Lake First Nation in Treaty 8 territory) writer Jessica Johns’ 2023 debut novel Bad Cree, Anishinaabe author Drew Hayden Taylor notes it “might just make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and leave you afraid to fall asleep. Simply put: It can be scary. Some may consider it Stephen King meets Eden Robinson (neither of whom, I feel necessary to point out, is Cree).” I was also struck by the echoes to Eden Robinson’s (Haisla / Heiltsuk) 2000 novel Monkey Beach in Johns’ novel. I was intrigued by both authors’ use of creatures from their territories, b’gwus (a sasquatch-like creature or wild man of the woods) and the wihtikow (Johns spells it phonetically as wheetigo) of the northern Prairies to explore how horror films and novels, according to settler scholar David Gaertner, “with careful reading, can be unexpected sites of colonial resistance that generates space for Indigenous voices” (50). Both novels use the horror genre to work through grief centred in their author’s Haisla and Cree ways of knowing to emphasize the importance of family and community. Both Robinson and Johns, albeit in very different ways, use unreliable and scary creatures to lead their main characters to an acceptance of their gifts that link them with the other-than-human world. Monkey Beach was one of the first novels in so-called Canada to expose intergenerational trauma stemming from residential schools while Bad Cree shows the devastating effects of the northern Albertan tar sands on Indigenous peoples. Both Robinson and Johns situate family as key to overcoming these horrors even as kinship relations are complicated.

Complementary dualism serves as a foundational element of Chickasaw culture, and within this duality, queerness occupies a unique space. This presentation will analyze Jenny L. Davis’ (Chickasaw Nation) poetry collection Trickster Academy, with a specific focus on “Abookoshi’ Hapi Oshi (Little Salt Creek)” and “Submergence,” to articulate a Queer Mississippian methodology, shedding light on the complementary duality in Chickasaw culture and how this duality gives rise to a queer space that exists “in between.” Analyzing Davis’ poetry through the lens of a Mississippian methodology, I will delve into Mississippian cosmological beliefs, which encompass three worlds: the Above World, characterized by governance and order; the Below World, characterized by change, disorder, and fertility; and the Middle World, the realm of human existence. Davis’ poetic expressions illustrate these distinctions, particularly through the figure of the crawfish, a pivotal figure in the Chickasaw creation story. Drawing from Cherokee Nation scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s insights in Queer Indigenous Studies, I will map the Mississippian cosmos onto queerness in Southeastern Indigenous communities. The Mississippian anomaly, embodying the power to cross boundaries and live between worlds, resonates with the figure of the crawfish in Davis’ poetry. In this exploration, I will highlight the anomaly’s refusal to conform to predefined categories, showcasing its queer qualities. Specifically, my presentation will trace the patterns of complementary duality in Davis’ poetry to propose a Queer Mississippian literary methodology. By applying this methodology to Chickasaw literature, I will uncover the enduring presence of queerness in Chickasaw tradition, a facet often overlooked in historical narratives. This presentation aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the intersections between cultural duality, queerness, and literary expression in the Eastern Woodlands context.

In North America, Hollywood films have played a major part in forming the public's perception and understanding of Indigenous history, culture, and social structures. In most, if not all instances, these representations are racist, uninformed, and are built on pan-Indigenous stereotypes. This session will explore the early years of the Hollywood studio era and their influence on creating a unique American culture based on colonial ideals, religion, and heteronormativity. The presence of 2SLGBTQI+ actors, writers, and producers in this era will also be examined. The Indigenous contributions to the Hollywood culture will also be addressed with a focus on 2Spirit-specific identities and films. The presentation will conclude with a review of current 2Spirit artists in the field.

In Haudenosaunee society, epic narratives such as the Great Law of Peace are socio-cultural teachers containing layered meanings that we onkwehonwe, as inheritors, are meant to decipher through embodied living. Part of the interpretive process of this intergenerational knowledge transmission asks us to question which parts of our knowledge might be maladaptive (i.e., in reaction to colonialism) and might need turning over or polishing. In the 1892 J.N.B. Hewitt version of the Great Law, “The Legend of the Founding of the League,” the pacification of the evil sorcerer/cannibal Atotarho is described in, what I argue are, homoerotic terms: a group of chiefs gathered by the Peacemaker collectively "rub down" Atotarho’s body until it is no longer crooked, they comb snakes from his hair, sing him songs, and lastly “that with which he is trussed, his membrum virile” they “reduce to its proper length and size… six thumb widths in length” (139). Through the archetype of Atotarho and his transformation from evil sorcerer to confederacy chief, this paper considers how the Great Law presents queer bodily interconnection (read: always already border crossing) as method for moving through grief and trauma toward good mindedness and peace.

I seek to explore sites of Indigenous resistance, colonial repetition, and setter colonial rupture in relation to conflicts of temporality. In opposition to notions of a universal and linear conception of time against which all events can be measured, literary scholar Mark Rifkin (2017) articulates a multiplicity of sovereign Indigenous temporal formations. These formations exist in tension with setter colonial time that facilitates Indigenous marginalization and land dispossession (e.g., positioning Indigenous nations as “out of time” or “pre-modern”). The entanglement of Indigenous temporal formations (which, for Rifkin, often orient themselves towards land, survival, community, and decolonization) with the violences of settler colonialism causes conflicts to emerge within the project of temporal decolonization. To explore this space of conflict, I make visible how Indigenous literary works engage with ongoing, and repetitions of, settler colonial violence through their characterizations, negotiations, and critiques of linear settler time. Specifically, I close read Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones’ novella Mapping the Interior (2017) to illustrate how he collapses separations between past, present, and future as a method to demonstrate the trans-temporal impact of colonization. Ultimately, examining the cacophonous temporalities of Jones’ novella may allow us to imagine forms of temporal decolonization that extend beyond, cross, and confuse, the borders of the “past,” “present,” and “future.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Karyn Recollet’s discussion on the panel at ILSA last year about “falling in love with the fall” and landing as a process of falling into place rather than claiming space. In an article with Jon Johnson, they describe “slipstreams” as a quality of time and space within Indigenous thought; it is a black hole, a glitch, but one that evades the singularity towards the creative production of a multi-verse… Slipstream can be thought of as a space of generous Indigenous desire, which is not a form of consumptive desire. It is a desire that invokes an erotics of land and land relationality, where land is expansive and sentient, and our relationships become activated through deep listening, care, and attentiveness” (181).

Indigenous Futurisms imagine the many ways in which our people might exist in the near or far-off future; our changing values, traditions, stories, and ways of living and relating with the world around us. What “practical” applications does reframing Indigenous knowledge as scientific or “futuristic” have for us in the present that we inhabit at this time? Us as learners and teachers, but also as settlers or Indigenous people.

I have used storytelling and the Indigenous brilliance shared from my community to survive and to resist the colonialism and ideologies that built the walls of the ivory tower that I now take up space in. It is my aim to paint the ivory tower red with Indigenous stories. I would like to talk about my practice as a scholar and poet, and how engaging with poetry in academic spaces has ultimately helped me survive in institutions like the University of Alberta, and The University of British Columbia, which are not often safe places for scholars who look and think like me. Ultimately, poetry has the power to create common ground between Indigenous scholars from all walks of life, especially when we gather and share space and creation, and I want to create a space to share what I have learned with other scholars, writers, thinkers, and artists like myself.

Purcell will be sharing a visual/poetic story of her experiences working with Nêhiyaw artist Tamara Cardinal on a papermaking and cut-up writing poetry workshop. They held this workshop twice in 2023 in Mohkinstis/Calgary, once at Poetry in Voice FutureVerse and the second at the Esker Foundation. Through this storywork, Purcell will also pay homage to the various collaborative research/arts spaces that helped her find her way—from her late sister’s experiences in iHuman, to the Writing Revolution in Place creative research collective, and her fellowship working with the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and the Esker Foundation.

I will think through a gathering as both a poetic method in Indigenous literature and a useful way to think about the what Fred Moten, Stephano Harney, and – more recently – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson refer to as Indigenous literary study: the ongoing practice of coming to gather and getting together to think through world making in joyful, fugitive, and hospitable ways. I’ll locate this thinking in my relationship to the pêhonân of the Rossdale flats and Treaty 6 territory. Situating myself in this way helps me think about the question: what can practices of gathering teach me about treaty as way of renewing our habits of assembly? Specifically, I’ll reflect on how my time as a harm reduction / field medic with Camp Pekiwewin, an Indigenous led prayer and relief camp has taught me about treaty, gathering, reading, poetics, and study.

To teach contemporary Indigenous literature, we need to know about traditional stories. Here I will focus on some issues raised by three stories published by Leonard Bloomfield in Sacred Stories of the Sweetgrass Cree (1930). The stories are âtayôhkân, stories of Animal-People, often starring a hero called, circumspectly, Elder Brother. These three derive from post-invasion times and reflect the impact of new technologies and new social, political and economic situations. Boas would have revised or excluded them as inauthentic. But storytellers from many nations use this traditional genre for new rhetorical purposes. And some pointedly criticize settlers and their bizarre preoccupations. Of these Cree stories, one satirizes priests for poisoning the minds of the people, one explains how Elder Brother was inducted into clock time and literacy, and one smushes “Aladdin’s Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” together, the teller naming it, nonetheless, a “sacred story.”

Abjection is a useful concept for discussing the Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed (1996). The concept is useful for understanding the narrator’s perception of himself and his internal conflict: the trauma resulting from his father’s sexual abuse. It is useful for discussing the generational trauma of First Nations people resulting from residential school experiences, and it is useful for discussing the political and social subject positions of First Nations people in Canada. Although abjection is most often associated with psychological theorist Julia Kristeva, I think we can turn to a Tlicho story, “The Woman and the Pups,” for some ideas about it. This is a story mentioned toward the novel’s conclusion, but the version told by the protagonist’s father figure has some important differences from the version available from a Tlicho tribal resource. I hope to explore the implication of those differences.

This presentation will weave my experiences as an Anihahinaabe Inwewin Instructor, Creative Writer, Sessional Lecturer at University of Guelph, and Assistant Professor at University Toronto. It will be a contrapuntal look at the relationships between land and language through a lens of intertextuality of legends and teachings. Using the works of Basil Johnston, Jeanette Armstrong, Vine Deloria jr., and select stories from This Place: 150 Years Retold, I hope to investigate how engagement with, and teaching of Oral Traditions provides an essential grounding for understanding and including Indigenous Storywork in mainstream media and literature.

My contribution to this panel considers how writing in Indigenous languages, especially Cree and Anishinaabemowin but also Innu, Inuktitut, and others, forms a unique branch of Indigenous literature that is intimately interconnected with Indigenous literature in dominant languages but also distinct from it. Drawing on my own literary inspirations, I discuss some of the politics and reasoning for writing in languages which few people can read but which offer often radically different windows onto the world from English, French, or Spanish. Some questions: How are we as Indigenous writers engaged with community-level efforts to revitalize Indigenous languages? Can written literature help with this project? What might a future with a thriving literary community in Indigenous languages look like?

This paper considers both aesthetic and linguistic challenges in the translation of selections from Pyle’s 2020 poetry collection AANAWI GO into English and into Scottish Gaelic. I first consider the grammatical differences between Anishinaabemowin, English, and Gaelic and some of the approaches I have used to address these differences in my English and Gaelic translations, some conventional and some more experimental. Drawing together scholarship in translation studies (Venuti 1995, Des Rochers 2023), Gaelic studies (Whyte 2000, Gorman 2011), and Indigenous studies (Osorio 2021), I consider both the possibilities offered by translation as a tool for directing readers towards Indigenous-language texts and for building connections between denied languages and some of the risks of translation in a denied-language context.

The work of Kai Minosh Pyle, both academic and creative, exemplifies one of the most exciting directions in which Indigenous literatures are heading, namely the increasing presence of Indigenous languages in contemporary texts. One only needs to open INAWENDAASO: A Queer Trans & Two-Spirit Anishinaabe Zine, which Pyle edited in 2021, to notice that – to varying degrees – most contributors use Anishinaabemowin. Or we could look at the work of Joshua Whitehead, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Smokii Sumac, or Emily Riddle. Pyle’s own sustained use of Anishinaabemowin, Michif, and, most recently, nêhiyâwewin shows the boundless potential of Indigenous language reclamation through literary text and story while raising questions about how to navigate accessibility for readers, especially Indigenous readers, with differing levels of familiarity with these languages. In their 2020 poetry collection aanawi go, Pyle reclaims and celebrates Anishinaabemowin, Michif, and Indigenous multilingualism while offering readers the guidance of a fifteen-page glossary. While putting Pyle’s work into conversation with other Indigenous writers, my reflections on aanawi go will be informed by my reading experience as a white settler scholar who started to learn Anishinaabemowin on the shores of gichigami in 2016 and whose language journey is indebted to Pyle’s work.

As Indigenous writers, we come at literature through kitchen tables, oratory, the literary canon and beyond. The winding stories from an Auntie or an Uncle (both identities that can shift over time and don’t rely solely on gender) are just as important to invoke in literature as a traditional Western narrative. In curating Kai Minosh Pyle’s work for The Ex-Puritan, their thoughtful and intentional use of a colloquial language and cadence showed great technical and literary skill. These skills are often ignored by the academy unless they can be commodified or tokenized. As an Indigenous editor who edited all Indigenous writers for the Indigenous Storytelling Issue of The Ex-Puritan, I immediately identified Pyle’s work as an act of deep care for community and kin. Whether we as Indigenous people are writing literary, genre or experimental work, I believe care must be deeply rooted in our writing practices. Pyle exemplifies this belief.

Despite widespread First Nations opposition, Bill C-53, the “Recognition of Certain Métis Governments in Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan and Métis Self-Government Act,” is winding its way through Canada’s legislative process. Rather than speaking to the legal and constitutional intricacies of legislating Metis self-government agreements, I hope to tend to the fraught relationships that legislature like Bill C-53 represents. In the spirit of Leanne Simpson and Glen Coulthard, I hope to learn from the ways that our other-than-human kin relate to and navigate settler-colonial infrastructure.

more on this soon!

Iapi debwewin aansaamb, a University of Manitoba and SSHRC-funded co-lab (2022-2024), critically reads existing Iron Alliance historiographies with the shared objective to animate gendered inter-Indigenous networks, to strengthen collaborative possibilities, and to expand creative understandings of Critical Borderland Studies. Our proposed collaborative presentation for ILSA 2024 seeks to engage closely with Paddle Lake Alberta Métis Elder, Elmer Ghostkeeper, who affirms a "three-world universe" (3) in Spirit Gifting as it includes the "spirit world, this world, and the evil world" (6). We consider whether haunting might occur when aspects of spirit, mind, emotion, and body are no longer in harmony or balance (7); perhaps in part because settlers/colonizers have failed to maintain ongoing reciprocal gift exchanges with plants and animals.

If haunting, according to Eve Tuck and C. Ree's "A Glossary of Haunting," is "the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society's assurances of innocence and reconciliation" (642), this collaborative presentation proposes engaging with haunting from our varied Métis, Anishinaabe, and Dakota perspectives. Inspired by our poly-kinetic literary engagements with Jessica Johns' Bad Cree, Joshua Whitehead's Making Love With the Land, Katłı̨̀ą's Land-Water-Sky / Ndè-Tı-Yat’a, and Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Turning Leaves, we propose interrogating the overlapping and locally-specific ways in which Indigenous Peoples and more-than-human kin are persistently terrorized by settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We challenge these enduring conditions of haunting through attunement to other forms (ie. registars) of land-based haunting which solidify "the impossibility of forgiveness, the inescapability of retribution" and "the refusal to stop" (Tuck and Ree 642).

Our presentation asks: how might settlers/colonizers be compelled to act differently, more urgently, were they to heed the Red River threatening to flood the Plains every Spring as a form of land-based haunting?

Terraforming has long been one of the most popular tropes in SF and space colonization discourses to think about territorial changes on other planets to make them habitable for human life. However, this is not merely a technology of an imagined future: colonial-capitalist structures have already changed planet earth with devastating effects for humans, the more-than-human and the land. Anne Stewart conceptualizes the legacy of colonial modernity more precisely with the term ‘colonial terraforming’ – a praxis which transforms places to make them habitable for settlers by creating “breathing room for these lifeforms to flourish” (16). Current techno-utopian discourses translate this logic to outer space: the crossing of the last border – the “final frontier” – seems unthinkable without the progress-oriented narrative of extractive capitalism. By taking resources and terraforming other planets without considering any lifeforms other than the white settler, these imagined futures are inextricably entwined with colonial logics of domination and extraction.

In Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity, Laura Harjo (Muscogee Nation citizen) describes futurity as challenging “a conventional reckoning of time” as it “pushes us to create right now—in the present moment—that which our ancestors, we and our future relatives desire” (4). In my presentation, I read the 2023 YA novel Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley (enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) in relation to Harjo’s and others’ understandings of Indigenous futurity. Boulley’s novel, a follow up to her best-selling Firekeeper’s Daughter, focuses on a feisty present-day Black/Ojibwe teenager Perry Keep Birch, including her experiences being impacted by and fighting against the murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits crisis, and joining efforts to uphold NAGPRA and reclaim stolen ancestors and cultural items. Over the course of the novel, Perry forms an especially strong bond with a particular ancestor called Warrior Girl. She meets her early in the novel in the basement of the local college museum after a NAGPRA meeting and feels a strong pull to help bring her home. Warrior Girl often appears to Perry in visions and dreams, challenging conventional temporal boundaries. She provides strength, comfort, and insight to Perry as Perry struggles to determine the best way to bring ancestors home and as she faces great peril during the novel’s climax. A very independent spirit, Perry grows in this novel by coming to appreciate the reinvigorating support that flows across the constellation of what Laura Harjo terms “kin-space-time envelopes” in her community of both living and ancestor relatives.

My presentation builds upon research conducted as part of the design of my first course, “Decolonization in Canadian and Indigenous Science Fiction,” delivered in Winter 2023 at Queen’s University. Film critic Peter Lev asserts that science fiction “is a privileged vehicle for the presentation of ideology.” More specifically, literary critic John Rieder contends that the genre’s recurring tropes of conquest, alternative histories, and radical encounters with the ‘other’ “represent ideological ways of grasping the social consequences of colonialism.” In the course, we tested these claims by examining the recurring motifs of Canadian and Indigenous science fiction and situating them within the larger history of colonial expansion. By applying interdisciplinary criticism to genre-specific readings of Drew Hayden Taylor’s (Ojibwe) sci-fi collection Take Us To You Chief (2016), students confronted the main concern of the course: can science fiction – a genre whose emergence is inextricable from the colonial project – participate in decolonization?

Hosted by David McLeod

With katherena vermette, Rosanna Deerchild, David A. Robertson, and featuring Inuit throat singers Nikki Komaksiutiksak & daughters Caramello and Chasity Swan

Tenille K. Campbell

Jordan Abel

Joshua Whitehead

Pizza and beverages provided! Hosted by Leah Alfred-Olmedo and Olivia (Liv) Abram

Our joint paper offers an examination of how contemporary Indigenous texts for young people work to decolonize the representation of Indigenous girlhood. Our paper opens a conversation between two different stories of girlhood: one portraying a young girl’s life within a traditional land-based community prior to contact, and the other depicting that of a young adult navigating a contemporary urban environment. In William Dumas's picturebook Amō's Sapotawan, decolonization is conceptualized as the journey back to “mithāwayāwin,” a positive state of being. The story follows Amō, a young Rocky Cree girl in the 17th century, and is accompanied by teachings the of Asiniskaw Īthiniwak Knowledge Keepers. Our paper demonstrates how the interplay of story and teachings is designed to guide readers toward fostering mithāwayāwin. In Katherena Vermette's novel The Break, the theme of girlhood is peripherally intertwined with decolonization. The story follows multiple narratives in the fallout of a young girl's violent attack in Winnipeg's North End. Using a framework of resurgence coined by renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, this paper explores the connection between the construction of Indigenous girlhood, decolonization and resurgence.

Treaty Words: For as long as the rivers flow by Aimée Craft (2021), with illustrations by Luke Swinson, offers an Anishinaabe perspective on relationships to the land and to one another. On a beautiful spring day, a young girl recounts the teachings she learns from her grandfather, Mishomis, who teaches her to value, respect and listen to the land. As they share a beautiful day together by the river, listening to the silence and to the calming sounds of spring, the young girl learns from Mishomis the Anishinaabe perspective on treaty and responsibilities to the land. Within an educational context, this story opens up the possibility to learn and reflect on the “agreement to act in relationship, and toward mino-bimaadiiziwin, that collective and reciprocal sense of well-being” (Craft, 2021, p. 33).

This paper, borne from my dissertation on Indigenous prairie women writers of girlhood from 1890-1939, argues that contrary to (mis)representations of Indigenous childhood as a period of savagery in the literature of Saskatchewan settler writer Kate Simpson Hayes, Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Šá (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Red Bird), demonstrates that girlhood is praxis in the testing of skills and relationships: “[My mother] made me feel strongly responsibly and dependent upon my own judgement. She treated me as a dignified little individual” (“The Beadwork” American Indian Stories). However, Non-Indigenous writers, such as Kate Simpson Hayes (Prairie Pot-Pourri 1895), portray Indigenous girls as savage until they receive a Christian education: “[Tannis’]hair, neatly braided, hung down her back, and nothing, save her language when she spoke in the English tongue, would betray her better training” (55). While Simpson Hayes weaponizes her idealized picture of Indigenous girlhood as a means of Christian conversion, evident in Zitkála Šá’s writing is a sense of childhood preservation and of testing skills. Remarkably, Zitkála Šá writes girlhood as existing outside of the patriarchal pressures of settler ideologies, perhaps in an effort to protect this sensitive season of life in which girls are encouraged to learn through investigation and practice. Perhaps most importantly, Zitkála Šá portrays this adolescence as a stage in which to enact proper girlhood is to be a good relation. In reading these texts together, I see both authors as preoccupied with “correct” behaviour of Indigenous girls and a cross-boundary need to define girlhood as a space of “good” training. Yet, importantly, Zitkála Šá’s depictions confront, reject, and speak back to colonizing literatures like Simpson Hayes.

This presentation explores how Indigenous literary works can flow into classroom practice by sharing a web-based resource called Books to Build On: Indigenous Literatures for Learning. The website hosts a searchable collection of Indigenous literary texts for young people, with highlights for educators such as lesson plans and curriculum links. Educators across K-12, post-secondary, and community education settings have been called to engage more deeply with Indigenous knowledges, peoples, and contexts. Our collaborative team knows that story is a pathway into this deeper engagement, because, in Indigenous knowledge systems, stories build relationships and mutual responsibilities. In this context, we offer support to teachers to connect with Indigenous literatures, trusting that these connections will flow into broader classroom transformations and community relationships. In this presentation we explore these hopes and visions in balance with some of our questions about ensuring classroom connections are decolonial, relational, and reciprocal. We will bring these considerations to fruition through an exploration of Tlingit/Haida author Michaela Goade’s picturebook Berry Song, highlighting how curious, relational engagement with this text can flow into meaning-making around Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing.

My paper will explore the tensions and power of Indigenous-made Westerns. Westerns have historically been guilty of disseminating false stereotypes and also providing employment for Natives far from home. The genre’s historic influence makes it especially rich for appropriation by Indigenous filmmakers. I will argue that Westerns made by Indigenous North Americans appropriate the community-building function of the Western while critiquing the genre’s racialized and gendered narratives of conquest. In particular, I will explore the ways that Indigenous-made Westerns disrupt the narrative that “Americans” are white males whose heroism is realized through their dominance over weaker, racialized “Others.” Examining Inuit filmmakers Zacharias Kunuk and Natar Ungalaaq’s "Maliglutit" (2016), an Inuit-language remake of John Ford’s 1956 film "The Searchers," alongside Diné filmmaker Ramona Emerson’s "Opal" (2012), and Diné filmmaker Raven Chacon and Cristobal Martinez’s "A Song Often Played on the Radio" (2019), I show how Indigenous North American Westerns reveal and obstruct the genre’s hyper-masculine tropes. In contrast to settler Westerns, Indigenous-made Westerns present all-Native casts and powerful heroines who overcome burdens themselves. These films embrace the regenerative function of Westerns, where communities emerge from hardship even stronger, while rejecting the belief that hardship is primarily the result of gendered and racialized “Others.” Indigenous Westerns strategically intervene in a genre that justified systemic violence against Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous women. While these films’ complex portrayals of Natives resist the stereotypical Hollywood “Injun,” their cinematography reveals the difficulty of using the genre for decolonial work. My paper will show how these films’ continuation of Westerns’ cinematography—the long-established metaphoric link between the camera and the gun through shot/reverse-shot editing—creates a tension at odds with their film’s female-forward content. My paper will explore Indigenous filmmakers’ strained, yet innovative efforts to provide an alternative to Westerns’ imperial gaze.

Ten years after its debut, Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls continues to be an influential film for its spotlighting of the history of residential schools in Canada as well as for its adept repurposing of popular genre conventions. In a 2014 interview, Barnaby reflects on his refusal to portray “drum and feather Indians”: “I am more interested in the Indian after the ceremony […] I am interested in what those guys do when they go home.” Throughout the film, home is a space where community and colonisation collide. The film examines how the spaces Indigenous people inhabit—the fictitious Mi’kmaq Red Crow Reservation and St. Dymphna’s Residential School—are codified, controlled, and surveilled by colonial powers. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on bio-politics and Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of space, this paper explores the impact that space has on bodies, psyches, and spirits in Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Throughout the film, Aila, the protagonist, and the characters that surround her, must navigate spaces that are heavily regulated and that threaten to negate them both physically and spiritually. The film illustrates the complexities of the reservation system; they are simultaneously colonial constructions and places of community and belonging, places at once destructive and generative. Barnaby’s use of cinematic space in placing St. Dymphna’s on the hill, always visible from the reservation, visually connects the impact of the residential school system on the community. Throughout the film, the legacy of the residential school system infiltrates both public and private spaces. This paper explores the various ways that characters resist, reinscribe, and reclaim space and reflects on the relationship between the body and decolonizing space.

“You are our tomorrow,” is an empowering statement that January Spears (Michelle Thrush, Cree) says to her on-screen daughter, Aline (Grace Dove, Secwépemc) in the recent theatrical release of Bones of Crows (2022) by Dene/Métis auteur Marie Clements. I propose to use a Diné-lens and analytic to argue that visual storytelling directly benefits the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities. Bones of Crows is the most recent feature-length historical-fiction film about Indian Residential Schools (IRS), and its ongoing effects (Turtle Island “education” is known as residential schools north of the Medicine Line and as boarding schools, south of the Medicine Line). The movie extrapolates almost a century of Indigenous-centred resistance to genocidal legislation (including the starvation policy and the Indian Act) through heartwarming and heartbreaking lived experiences that transcend borders. Clements’s film showcases a Cree-speaking survivor, from her childhood through adulthood to Elderhood. Aline’s life story epitomises thrivance, which according to the journal by the same name, is “Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing.” Though I pay homage to key conversations in critical Indigenous film studies, I expand upon my recent deployment of a Diné analytic, which is grounded in Diné language and philosophy. The Dene and Diné are linguistic relatives, yet our kinship ties were severed over time. However, using thrivance to ground the work, I will demonstrate how—despite ongoing adversity— the daily tenants of striving to live a life of wellness and balance (as taught to contemporary Dene and Diné) intersect with onscreen Indigenous presence which culminates in a moving and beautiful rendering of restoration: both personal and communal. Clements’ Indigenous film aesthetics highlight music, languages, and resilience, which exemplify Dene storytelling autonomy to reflect vibrant Indigenous tomorrows.

Lors de la parution de Shuni (2019) l’autrice Innue, Naomi Fontaine, affirmait qu’elle avait voulu écrire un essai « à la manière innue ». Elle soutenait alors que son essai correspondait à sa propre vision Innue de que ce qu’était ce genre littéraire et qu’il devait être lu en relation avec Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (1976) de Kapesh (Innue), car c’est dans la lignée de celui de cette femme forte, de sa nation, que son essai s’inscrit. Pourtant, bien que Fontaine ait publiquement énoncé le genre littéraire de Shuni, les institutions littéraires, québécoises et canadiennes – notamment le Prix littéraire des collégien·ne·s 2020 et le Prix littéraire du Gouverneur général 2020 – ont inclus l’œuvre dans les catégories « roman » et/ou « récit ».

En constatant ce décalage entre les intentions littéraires de l’autrice et la réception des institutions, je me suis interrogée sur la manière dont les conceptions littéraires occidentales avaient failli à comprendre la volonté de Fontaine qui floutait les frontières des genres littéraires coloniaux.

Ainsi, pour cette communication, je propose de réfléchir – en m’appuyant sur les méthodologies de recherche autochtones – à la manière dont Naomi Fontaine investit le genre de l’essai en revendiquant une appartenance forte à la tradition littéraire Innue dont elle est issue, une tradition fortement ancrée dans les relations intergénérationnelles féminines. Pour mettre en lumière les intentions de Fontaine et sa filiation aux voix de « femmes fortes » (Shuni: 113) de sa nation, je considèrerai que les œuvres de Fontaine et de Kapesh détiennent la majorité des clés permettant de comprendre ce qu’est un essai Innu pour Fontaine. Dans le même sens, je ferai dialoguer leur voix avec celles d’autres autrices des Premières Nations, notamment avec celles de Bacon (Innue), LaRoque (Métis) et Maracle (Stó:lō).

Joséphine Bacon is an Innu woman who grew up in the residential school system in the 1950s. She is best known in Quebec as a poet who has published collections such as Bâtons à message / Tshissinuatshitakana (2005), Un thé dans la toundra / Nipishapui nete mushuat (2013), Uiesh / Quelque part (2018), and Kau Minuat / Une fois de plus (2023). In recent years, Joséphine Bacon has taken a greater interest in other media by starring in a documentary film by Kim O’Bomsawin, Je m’appelle humain (2020). She is also co-author and performer of the theatrical events Kiciweok: lexique de 13 mots autochtones qui donnent un sens (Monnet 2019) and Neecheemus (Monnet 2023). Due to their recent creation, no study has yet been made of Joséphine Bacon’s presence in film and theatre. By referring to Henry Jenkins’ (2006) theory of “transmedia storytelling” as it has been applied to Indigenous cultures by Donna Hancox (2021), I will show how Bacon share her culture and traditions on different genres or media such as poetry, film and theatre. I will explore how Bacon’s transmedia work is coherent in terms of the I (“Je” in French) that emerges from it, and the relationships this I establishes with the world. Bacon conveys a strong message about the importance of nature and animals, but also that of an elder like herself, who can still tell us the story of the land.

In his introduction to Stories of Our People (2008), Darren Préfontaine writes “The difficulty is to tell the stories without deviating from their original intent… In an Indigenous context, it is vital to show respect for the storytellers and stories themselves and not deviate from the original intent or appropriate voice” (v). Although Préfontaine is referring to the translation from word to image, I find these cautionary words applicable to the art of linguistic translation as well, and specifically when working in between colonial languages. In 2004, when Maurizio Gatti published the first edition of his anthology of Indigenous literatures in French, he purposefully did not include the works of An Antane Kapesh, despite her being the first Indigenous woman to publish a book in French: “To read Je suis une maudite sauvagesse in French is to read An Antane Kapesh through the translator José Mailhot… linguistic adaptations and changes are inevitable” (18-19). As the English translator of Kapesh, twenty years later, I still think about Gatti’s position and decision. However, the study of Indigenous literatures has been for too long separated/segregated into the colonial linguistic niches of production. These need to be transcended and addressed, as do the particular contextual histories of colonialism that are not one and the same across the country, but distinctly and significantly different.

Translation, I argue, is a pedagogical and conversational tool that has the potential to allow for more meaningful conversations between communities, as well as offer a more expansive understanding of how literature has mapped and territorialized the interdisciplinary fields of study in which we work. In this presentation, I would like to share both theory and story on translating An Antane Kapesh’s Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, Emanuelle Dufour’s C’est le Québec qui est né dans mon pays! – and, hopefully, a third example, the details of which I cannot at present yet reveal. In doing so, I hope to offer both methodological and practical considerations for an ethical translation and reading practice, as well as an invitation to think about the responsibility that translation carries, both aesthetically and politically.

Works Cited

Dufour, Emanuelle. ‘C’est le Québec qui est né dans mon pays!’ Carnet de rencontres, d’Ani Kuni à Kiuna. Écosociété, 2021.

Gatti, Maurizio. Littérature amérindienne du Québec. Hurtubise, 2004.

Kapesh, An Antane. Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu / Je suis une maudite sauvagesse. Leméac, 1976.

Préfontaine, Darren. “Introduction.” Stories of Our People / Lii zistwayr di la naasyoon di Michif. Fleury, Norman; Pelletier, Gilbert; Pelletier, Jeanne; Welsh, Joe; Welsh, Norma; & DePeel, Janice (eds.) Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2008: i-xii.

In her introduction to the science fiction anthology Walking the Clouds, Dr. Grace Dillon’s (Anishinaabe) introduces the concept of “Indigenous Futurism” (Dillon). Indigenous Futurism offers a way for looking at the genre of speculative fiction by using traditional knowledge practices; including oracular storytelling, and by destabilizing Western ideas of linear time. Furthermore, Dillon contends that the term “Native slipstream” can be used to describe speculative fiction that “views time as past, presents and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream” (3). For my own methodology, I prefer to use the term Indigenous slipstream. Indigenous slipstream informs Indigenous Futurism as a movement aimed at reworking speculative fiction as known in a Western context. Dr. Dillon’s scholarship around Indigenous Futurism is a critical focal point that reveals how the genre of speculative fiction contributes directly to a resurgence of Indigenous communities.

My paper mobilizes Dillon’s reflections on Indigenous Futurism as a genre informed by the concept of Indigenous slipstream. I read Dillon’s theorizations alongside Cherie Dimaline’s (Georgian Bay Métis) 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves. I consider how Dimaline’s careful integration of the past and present throughout her text shows Indigenous slipstream in practice. Such integration is illuminated by the position of “coming to” stories in the text, which weave characters’ past histories with their present. While Dimaline’s text represents a near future replicating years of genocide, the intertwining of time separates her text from Western speculative fictions that more singularly focus on putting the past behind and moving towards a more prosperous future. In contrast, I argue that Indigenous Futurism consciously uses Indigenous slipstream to show that the past, present and future form a symbiotic relationship, and that it is only in contending with the past that we can begin to think about hopeful futures.

In Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice’s imagined Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, Canada finds itself isolated due to an unknown event that cuts off power. As the community deals with these challenges, we witness a return to traditional practices of living in community, providing a unique perspective on post-apocalyptic scenarios through the lens of Indigenous culture and experience. Considered a post-apocalyptic novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow contributes to what Gib Prettyman calls narrative sense-making through exploring a future world that is completely changed (207). Prettyman’s “Apocalyptic Visions” focuses on apocalypse and utopia as functions of narrative sense-making, and that the convergence of these fictions work to understand societies following catastrophic changes to the Earth. However, Prettyman gives attention to theorists who are arguing that the post-apocalyptic return to the pastoral is primitive, simple and lacks progression– which, I note, belittles Indigenous diaspora, small community lifestyles, and dystopic pasts and presents as identified by Indigenous scholars. Turning to scholars such as Grace Dillon, Leanne Simpson, and Kyle Whyte, I consider how Rice’s novel addresses the critique and counters the notion that a post-apocalyptic return to the pastoral lacks progression. How do we challenge the “pastoral” when reading Indigenous authored novels? How does the novel use the post-apocalyptic genre and narrative sense-making to explore themes of Indigenous culture, experience, and resilience? Through these questions, I argue for a nuanced understanding and fresh perspective of post-apocalyptic narratives through Indigenous literature, challenging the notion that a return to the pastoral “are examples of “historical regression and the attempt to return to a past that no longer exists” (Jameson cited by Prettyman 209). By reading Moon of the Crusted Snow, I highlight the resilience and adaptability of Indigenous communities, and their ability to find peace in apocalypse through traditional practices.

When I asked my grandmother about our ancestors as a child, she showed me garments her late mother had made to teach me about her. Having now inherited family items, I continue to visit them with an inquisitive attitude: What can my grandmothers’ tablecloths, aprons, figurines and blankets tell me about my Métis family history? What stories were being embroidered, knit and sewn into place and about place? What can be learnt through visiting with our relatives’ visual creations and aesthetic choices? This poster presentation draws from the work of LaRocque (2010) as well as Sinclair and Cariou (2011) that show how various writings, visual arts and graphics, such as craft manuals, petroforms and hooked rugs, are Indigenous literary forms that convey understandings of place and have the capacity to generate discourse about our experiences as Indigenous peoples. From a Critical Indigenous Studies framework that views indigeneity as persistent relationships with the land that supersede colonialism (Moreton-Robinson 2015), this poster shows how definitions of Indigenous literature developed by prairie Indigenous scholars can be used to narrate Red River Métis history and our endurance. By including images of and examining inherited sewn, crotched, and decorative items from my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother in relation to their geographies, my poster shows that these literatures reflect my family’s relationships to Métis homelands in Manitoba and persistence as Indigenous peoples through the items’ aesthetic representations of prairie landscapes and designs that reflect nuances of the places they inhabited. I emphasize that the women in my family have creative and adaptive ways of theorizing their immediacy as Métis people and in such, I illustrate the density of Métis literatures and their ability to communicate historical and geographical knowledge (Andersen 2009).

Since 2017, the Indigenous Voices Awards (IVAs) has supported and nurtured emerging Indigenous writers. Its support has elevated and championed upcoming Indigenous writers furthering Indigenous literary production in its award money and its opportunities for mentorship, professionalization, and creative collaboration. It has recently published an anthology of shortlisted works Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology.

In this poster presentation, the impact of the IVAs is further detailed with data visualizations in the program Tableau. As a research assistant for Dr. Deanna Reder, I have analyzed shortlisted finalists of the IVAs since its beginning for overarching trends, gaps, and strengths. Such data analysis and visualizations can aid in finding better ways to continue supporting Indigenous writers and to find areas in need of outreach and growth. Additionally, because the awards aim to resist the individuality of prize culture and to honour the sovereignty of Indigenous creative voices, mapping data on settler colonial map markings and doing respectful data analysis within the limitations of the mapping program created difficult and provoking questions and challenges.

In addition to the poster, I could be present for the session to speak to the poster and research and to aid interaction with the data visualizations made possible through the program Tableau which provides real-time interactivity with the data visualizations for its viewer.

Staring is often associated with its potential for subordination, stigmatization or Othering and oppression. However, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (settler) defines staring as “an intense visual exchange that makes meaning” (9); she insists, too, that it “sets in motion an interpersonal relationship” (3). If, as Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) states, “relationship is the central ethos of Indigenous literature” and key to Indigenous-settler co-existence (158), staring might provide a way to build ethical Indigenous-settler relations.

Jen Storm (Ojibway) and Natasha Donovan’s (Métis) “Red Clouds” provides numerous demonstrations of and opportunities for relational staring. “Red Clouds” reproduces the “productive discomfort [that] visual mutual presence can generate” (Garland-Thomson 194). Kichi Kakapetikwe and her intertwined Windigo consistently break the fourth wall, calling the reader/viewer into an unsettling visual exchange. The absence of pupils in the Windigo’s eyes, in particular, holds the reader’s stare. The ambiguity of the reader/viewer’s role, as starer or staree, promotes reflection on positionality, something central to relationship building. “Red Clouds” demonstrates how a reconsideration of staring, and its application as critical literary methodology, can promote the ethical Indigenous-settler relations Justice calls for.

This paper refutes problematic practices of individualized settler-colonial recognition often associated with the gaze, which maintain “patterns of domination [and] inequality that typify asymmetrical relations” (Coulthard 29). Instead, it hopes to address the “ocular complacency” (35) that Garland-Thomson identifies as a barrier to starer-staree relationship. This stands as an alternative to the unethical settler adoption of “the fantasy of irreducible distance—a release from [what Plains Cree Métis scholar Emma LaRocque calls the] ‘extraordinary mandate to know’ and engage with Indigenous critical protocols” (Hargreaves 110). My presentation hopes to encourage settler readers to reflect critically on their own reading and viewing practices as well as propose a reading method inspired by the relationship-building stare.

In From the Roots Up, writer Tasha Spillet (Cree/Trinidadian) and illustrator Natasha Donovan (Métis) follow up their award-winning first graphic novel, Surviving the City, vol. 1: which engaged #MMIWG2S (Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people) through the friendship of two female-identified protagonists, Miikwan and Dez. From the Roots Up builds on and expands that foundation with its focus on Des’s acknowledgement of their Two-Spirit identity and their embrace of a male identification. This paper reads the graphic novel as a pedagogical project that teaches readers healthy ways to engage the intersections of queerness and Indigeneity. On one hand, Spillet and Donovon explicitly teach Two-Spirit histories and illustrate productive approaches to queer Indigenous presents, while on another, they directly critique the ways in which conservative understandings of “tradition” can be used as anti-queer hegemonic tools within Indigenous communities. As a pedagogical project, From the Roots Up, deploys the format and possibilities of the graphic novel to address settler colonial gender strictures, introduce gender expansive traditions, and boldly question certain forms of gatekeeping.

In this talk, I explore the writing and drawing of the Indigenous cartoonist and surrealist Alootook Ipellie (1951-2007). I contextualize Ipellie’s work within the history of the federal production of an Inuit arts industry as a form of “vernacular art.” Some define vernacular art as art produced by outsider or untrained artists. Instead, I approach vernacular art as a way of talking about art produced by Indigenous artists (trained, mentored, or self-taught) that appears outside of mainstream professional, institutional, or market settings and whose mediums and methods run against the grain of trends within the arts. Working within an Indigenous modernist genealogy, I suggest that Ipellie tracks his community’s experiences of biopolitical subjection through an interdisciplinary practice that drawings writing and art together to insist on the modernity of Inuit peoples while also critiquing the nation state’s “subject making” practices.

From smallpox in 1862 to the Tŝilhqot’in War two years later to the Indian Act and residential school, Tŝilhqot’ins have been impacted by colonialism, decimating the population, and doing catastrophic damage to the people, the language, the culture, and the land. To this day, we continue to fight to keep logging and mining out of our land in spite of the decisions of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA, 2011, 2013) against the proposed mine at Teẑtan Biny Fish Lake. In this presentation, I will talk about the events leading up to the Title case, including our five years at trial, and I will talk about the importance of the Title case win at the Supreme Court of Canada in June 2014 and the upcoming tenth anniversary of that decision.

Lha Yudit’ih – We Always Find a Way is collaboratively authored by Lorraine Weir with Chief Roger William, but it is clear that the collaborative process went far beyond just two people. In this response I want to unpack some of the many layers of collaborative process behind this dual authorship and explore the ways in which land and story are intimately connected. I also want to consider how a notion of “collaboration” or working together is conceived and carried out within Tŝilhqot’in language and cultural practices. What is vividly apparent in reading the book is the collective force of many voices in enacting and practising Land Title. Through a rich layering of over 40 contributors from many walks of life within the Xeni Gwet’in community of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation, an archive or web of community-held oral histories emerges. In reading this book I became especially interested in women’s roles in writing, practicing, and asserting Land Title through everyday acts of making and gifting. When the Title case was won, Premier Christy Clark came to Xeni to sign the Letter of Understanding. But signing mere pieces of flimsy paper is only one way to recognize and formalize an agreement. Chief Roger tells the story of how his mother, Elder Eileen Sammy William made a buckskin bag, embroidered it with a map of the Tŝilhqot’in Title Land, placed a handful of Tŝilhqot’in earth in it, and presented it as a gift to Premier Clark. This gift did not have a negative overtone of boasting over the win, nor was it a gesture of reconciliation. Rather, it is a declaration of title in material and matrilineal form. Ultimately, the bag says, in Chief Roger’s words, “This is Title Land, protected by our culture and tradition.”

In the epigraph to Lha Yudit’ih, Chief Roger William refers to “stories that you live in,” and this phrase resonates for me as a scholar who studies the role of orality as a ground for Indigenous identity and belonging. In this paper I will discuss some of the stories that Métis people live in, particularly the oral stories that forge living connections to important events in Métis history. My aim is to show how certain Métis oral stories, and their written counterparts, function as agents of community cohesion and political awareness. I will discuss transcribed oral memoirs by Gabriel Dumont and Norbert Welsh as well as the traditional narratives Maria Campbell collected in Stories of the Road Allowance People. I argue that these stories have been touchstones for Métis identity and political action, from the diasporic period after 1885 to the contemporary era of Métis self-determination as exemplified by MMF v Canada (2013) and ongoing treaty negotiations with Canada.

This paper examines the history of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (RP) in Canadian jurisprudence. It reviews the manner in which the St Catherine’s Milling (1888) case performed a deliberate colonial misreading of the document that constrained all future readings. It turns to the largely ignored discussion of the RP in Re: Eskimos (SCC 1939), and its later use by Justice Sissons in defense of Inuit hunting rights. The paper interprets the famously contested readings in Calder (SCC 1973), and the manner in which Guerin (SCC 1984), van der Peet (SCC 1996), Delgamuukw (SCC 1997), Manitoba Metis Federation (SCC 2013) and Tŝilhqot’in (SCC 2014) position the RP in relation to the doctrine of Aboriginal title and rights. Although the RP can in no way be seen as the final horizon for the concept of Aboriginal rights, Canada has been forced to violate the RP’s most basic articulations of Aboriginal land stewardship and the nature of political jurisdiction in order to engage in the ‘primitive accumulation’ intrinsic to advancing the settler colonial project.

Although Justice David Vickers made a principled effort to hear oral history evidence in Tŝilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia (BCSC 2007), he was hamstrung by linguistic and cultural translation issues on one hand and by the settler court’s customary privileging of print documents and conventions of literacy at the expense of Indigenous legal and epistemological practices. Working with the teachings on gwenɨg story shared in Lha Yudit’ih, this paper will outline what the court could have heard from many of the Tŝilhqot’in witnesses at trial and what Plaintiff’s counsel could have learned during "fieldwork" in the community. The result is a micro-analysis of discrimination based on the unquestioned and unexplored imposition of literacy bias in court cases where testimony about Indigenous histories is deemed necessary.

Reading Indigenous Young Adult Literature (IYAL) as Indigenous Peoples brings new possibilities and perspectives to Indigenous-authored texts. These texts often carry crucial implications for the Indigenous reader, the articulation of which can help educators to support learners in comprehending IYAL. The life experiences portrayed by Indigenous authors in IYAL are crucial in their centering of the diversity of Indigeneity, as they bear witness to the particularities of distinct Indigenous Nations and communities, while also demonstrating universal human experiences. Poet, novelist and scholar Joshua Whitehead (Ojibwe-Cree) notes the process of reparative reading that can occur for Indigenous readers engaging texts that center Indigeneity, rather than treating it as peripheral to the experiences of dominant social identities. As Whitehead points out, the power of IYAL for Indigenous readers is in the ways that its stories and text can help readers see themselves, and possibly heal. Whitehead’s reflections are ones that many Indigenous authors and readers can relate to, and demonstrate the ways that IYAL is beautiful literature and a powerful tool for representation and reflection.

This presentation will offer insights on both the reading of IYAL through the lens of two Indigenous educators and scholars, through our respective Indigenous identities to explore interpretations and understandings of IYAL. This presentation will also describe the development of our process for discussing, analyzing and writing our thoughts in a collaborative, Indigenous based effort. Highlighting our process and findings here can help readers to consider how Indigenous Peoples engage with IYAL, what IYAL can do for Indigenous Peoples’ understanding of self, and others.

As an educator in first-year English survey classes, I love teaching poetry by Indigenous women that fiercely articulates complex and sometimes tragic incidents and situations in verse. A fear I have, however, is that some of my students may confuse Indigenous women writing about tragic events with the idea that there is something tragic about being an Indigenous woman. In discussing her reasons for writing the poem “Blind Justice” in My Conversations with Canadians, Stó:lo author Lee Maracle said that too many Canadians see Indigenous people as “Canada’s national tragedy,” and she wanted to distinguish between the tragic things that happen to Indigenous peoples as a result of settler-colonial violence and the idea that there is something inherently tragic about Indigenous people. As the speaker of her poem notes, while she has endured tragedy and is “a witness” to tragic events that have occurred to other members of her community, she is “not tragic.” In this paper, I will discuss teaching Métis poet Marilyn Dumont’s “Helen Betty Osborne,” Okanagan poet Jeannette Armstrong’s “History Lesson,” and Duckwater Shoshone poet Tanaya Winder’s “Love Lessons In a Time of Settler Colonialism” as resistant witnesses to tragedy. These Indigenous poets, I will argue, discuss tragedy in ways that show love and care for Indigenous women while making settler violence visible and open to criticism.

“Biidaaban,” is a visual storywork collaboration built from interweaving four stories by Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg writer and land-based educator Leanne Simpson into Metis stop motion animation by Michif film-maker Amanda Strong and her creative team. The film invites viewers along on Biidaaban’s journey of reanimating the maple sugar bush harvest in a Southern Ontario settler city on Indigenous terms terms. The central question my paper asks is how does the teaching offered in this beautiful gem of a short film enact and invite land-based learning on Anishinaabe relational, seasonal, and temporal terms? What are the implications of Indigenous animation of land-based practices during early spring maple sap gathering in an urban sugar bush? The young non-binary Anishinaabeg protagonist is accompanied on their journey of urban sugar bush reclamation by a 1000 year-old ancestor from the oral tradition, Sabe, and by the spirit presences of caribou and wolf relatives who instruct and protect Biidaaban. Amanda Strong’s stop motion magic enables the visual creation of intergenerational and multi-species renewal between spiritual mentors, ancestors, animal relatives, and an Indigenous young adult--all co-present in Indigenous space-time--in a way that some might call speculative fiction, but Daniel Heath Justice proposes may be best identified as a “wonderwork” where other worlds are proposed in the project of reworlding (Maynard/Simpson). This urban maple sap harvest further challenges the violent norms of property law in the settler city that have forcibly displaced Indigenous presence. In so doing this visual storywork teaches Anishinaabe relational laws (John Borrows) and asserts “Land Back” principles (Yellowhead Institute).

Chief Roger William (Xeni Gwet'in) with Lorraine Weir

Film screening of Tautuktavuk (What We See), directed by Carol Kunnuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk, followed by discussion. ILSA conference attendees are invited, no cost for ILSA members.

Location: 2 km from Inn at the Forks, ~30 minute walk (see p.11 for map). For urban safety we recommend walking together in groups and staying on Broadway or St Mary. If you require assistance with transportation please contact a council member.

Content warning: film contains portrayals of domestic violence, the use of alcohol, tobacco products, vapour products or cannabis, and triggering historical trauma.

In this paper, we conceptualize Indigenous literatures as integral tools for supporting teachers on their journeys toward truth and reconciliation. We intentionally offer our work as a pedagogical guide for introducing Indigenous YA literatures in secondary level English courses, asserting that delivery of such works must be taught in ways that align with anti-racist praxis, acknowledge varied experiences of racism, sexism, and gender-based violences, and promote liberatory thinking. Our paper will be guided by the following questions:

1) What are the pedagogical possibilities of introducing Indigenous literatures as educational tools for imagining and restoring healthier, reciprocal social order both within our communities and across differences.

2) How are these pedagogical possibilities highlighted through the relationship between anti-colonial literacies and Indigenous futurities in the works of Katherena Vermette.

To illustrate these possibilities, we engage in a critical textual analysis of the works by Winnipeg based, Métis YA author, Katherena Vermette, specifically within her novels The Break (2016), The Strangers (2021) and The Circle (2023).

As an ethical and relational encounter, our presentation will showcase the value of anticolonial literacies, as advanced by Sabzalian (2019), and Hanson’s (2019) work on resurgent frameworks as strength-based approaches, for teaching YA Indigenous literatures to promote Indigenous cultural safety. Through thematic textual analysis we document core literary themes: survivance, intergenerational resilience, and cultural identity theories to identify promising practices for anticolonial literacy. In the spirit of truth and reconciliation, our presentation intentionally considers the varied pedagogical opportunities that such literary engagement creates for teachers and students to develop a greater understanding of the power of storied lives. Finally, our literary engagement extends the legacy of Vermette’s work to support teachers on their journey toward anti-colonial readings of Indigenous worlds that support meaningful engagements with texts in ways that honour the spirit and intent of Indigenous literatures.

In response to ILSA’s invitation to consider literature and literary production in its multiple contexts and expansive dimensions, I am proposing a conference paper that will discuss how Indigenous literatures may invite us to rethink pedagogical frameworks for teaching and learning European languages used daily by Indigenous peoples. This is part of my work on an online language course I created and taught at Queen’s University, with the dual aim of improving the students’ level of French (intermediate) and raising awareness about Indigenous contexts. This course brings students on a series of encounters with a diverse range of Indigenous artists through carefully curated excerpts of written, audiovisual, and visual works in an immersive environment, with a focus on the French-speaking Indigenous contexts. Its development has given rise to a series of questions, including: How to find the right words to speak of Indigenous contexts in French? What words do Indigenous peoples use in French to express themselves? How to negotiate contrasts between Indigenous methodologies and European pedagogical frameworks? How to support language learning through Indigenous stories? How can multimedia platforms be used to foster sustained online conversations? I hope to examine how Indigenous stories, aesthetics, and methodologies may impact on language learning and decolonization.

This presentation explores ways that English educators can examine and challenge hegemony of Dominant American English. Using Indigenous Young Adult Literature, the presenter will demonstrate approaches to teaching deeper understandings of English language ideology, with an eye towards critically examining hierarchies of language, and moving towards celebrating diverse expressions of language.

This work comes at a confluence of collaborative projects and approaches. A year-long co-created chapter on collaboration from the perspective of grad students and early career scholars is nearing completion, while a long-term collaboration with my father has just begun. At this juncture between projects, I aim to explore the correlations between the two approaches and the ways in which work with a relative requires unique processes. I will consider how the expansion of academic approaches to accommodate the familial offers both exceptional possibility and complicated limitations. I will attempt to navigate the ways in which including my own family within the frame of the academy may involve an imbrication of and disagreement between two streams of priorities, ethics, and responsibilities. Specifically, I will take up the wealth of exemplary collaborative works in Indigenous literatures (such as those by Deanna Reder and Sophie McCall, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard, and Eve Tuck and C. Ree) to explore the ways in which collaborative work with family both conforms to existent methods and necessitates its own approach. While at this early stage of the project, I ultimately aim to create a scaffolding of best practices that will support not only my own ongoing work, but also other works which similarly attempt collaboration with kin.

I’m proposing a creative presentation on the topic of losing my mother to cancer three years ago. I began working on Métis literary studies as a way for me to connect and build community, to find recognition in the texts as characters grappled with feelings of displacement, cultural curiosity and connection, and homecomings. Since my mother’s death, my interest in Métis storytelling and literatures has shifted. This interest comes from losing her and reflecting on her life as framed by her removal from family and our Métis community in 1963 after her birth. Although relinquished, my mother’s maternal grandmother came to reclaim her but was told that the infant was now a ward of the state and not eligible to return home. Though she eventually reconnected with Métis kinship relations before she died, her life was marred by the feeling of loss and being lost. Though we rarely discussed this while she was alive, as I grow in my understanding and research, I can see how the early experiences of her apprehension drastically affected her sense of identity, connection and emotional attachments, and ways of being in the world.

This reading will be from a work in progress of creative nonfiction essays that explore the loss and grief of my mother while thinking through her life as a displaced Indigenous person. The essays, which are sketched out in eight non-linear temporal sections, focus on different aspects of my life with my mother. Within these, conversations are woven on separation and dislocation, identity, reconnecting to kinship ties, mother and child relationships, homeland and homemaking, Métis âcimisowina (“personal stories,” nêhiyawak, Reader 2022), grief and healing, memory and ancestors, and culture and ceremonies.

In keeping with the theme of ILSA 2024, we offer a fluid coming-together of narrative, memory, land, and collective selfhood. Crossing provincial boundaries and the boundaries shored up by colonial histories, we have been traveling to (re)story who we are as Métis women. In June of 2022, we, two cousins (and Métis scholars), attended the day trip to Batoche offered within the ILSA gathering in Saskatoon. This trip offered us two key moments, which we will reflect on. In the first, we were moved by the keynote given by Gregory Scofield, in which he described being brought home to his Métis people and to Batoche. This got us thinking about what it means to story ourselves home. In the second, we stood together in front of the mass grave that is the final resting place of nine Métis soldiers who fell at Batoche, discussing an ancestor buried there (John Swain was the brother of our Great-Great-Great-grandfather, Charles Swain). These moments were a confluence of story for us, bringing together our family stories and their relationship to the Métis Nation. The land was also a teacher for us in this place that is both iconically Métis and brutally emblematic of our forceful removal from the land. To explore our own process of (re)storying across this disconnection, inspired by our moments at Batoche, we share a series of vignettes that speak to stories by Métis authors, including Scofield, that have called us home and helped us to learn, reclaim, and remember who we are. We share how it is both the written stories and the embodied, kinetic experience of being in storied places on the land that help us to (re)collect ourselves, to connect to and reclaim who we are in relation with our family.

As Métis artist and academic Warren Cariou contends, Indigenous poetics is well known to “[infiltrate] . . . colonial aesthetic categories” (Indigenous Poetics 31). Tsalagi Aniyunwiya poet Gloria Alvernaz Mulcahy’s Borderlands & Bloodlines flows past Western genre categories not only via her poetics, but through her use of typographical elements, shapes, and indents. With these visual components, Mulcahy’s text, which perpetuates the illusion of movement, illustrates her theme of travel across land, water, and air via space on the page. In this paper, I attend to several of Mulcahy’s poems that feature the movements of other-than-human beings (including non-human animals and spiritual beings) to consider how the cyclic and spatial placement of the words lends itself to a way of moving that engenders kinship between the land, other-than-human beings, and Indigenous peoples.

As Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice states in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, artforms including poetry can “serve to remind us of our connections to one another, human and other-than-human alike,” and teach what it means to be “good kin” (87). Mulcahy illustrates such a kinship in her contemplation about her own movement on the lands of other Indigenous nations, including the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Chonnonton peoples in London, Ontario, and reflections on non-human animal migration. In her poems, migrating whales and butterflies convey a relationality not only with other travellers, but with the water and sky, which mirror Indigenous understandings of kinship in travel, and oppose colonial dislocations such as the Trail of Tears. With attention to the visual elements of her poetics, the use of the plural pronoun “we” (which encompasses the perspective of other-than-human beings in concert with Indigenous peoples), and use of Indigenous languages, including Anishnaabemowin, I analyze Mulcahy’s depiction of beings who move through and with the land and waters.

Drawing inspiration from ILSA’s conference focus on gathering places, my presentation will reflect upon Indigenous stories about the watershed along which I live as a settler in southwestern Ontario. Like Nestawaya in Winipêk, the place that Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada John Graves Simcoe re-named as London in 1793 is anchored upon a site of convergence where land meets water—a place Simcoe called the Forks of the Thames River. However, before Simcoe arrived and long since, the Anishinaabek have and continue to refer to the river as the Deshkan Ziibi. Today, in an era of land acknowledgments, this Anishinaabemowin name is increasingly being used by settler institutions. While growing attention to Indigenous names and relations to this land is vital, what might get missed in the process is the fact that the Deshkan Ziibi flows through the lands of multiple Indigenous nations—the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Chonnonton peoples. How might the re-claiming of a single Indigenous name for the river risk becoming co-opted by a too-simplistic settler narrative that flattens the history of colonial dispossession and displacement that has brought multiple Indigenous peoples to this river’s shores? How might Indigenous literature narrate more complex stories of belonging and relationality in this watershed? To think through these questions, I turn to Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg author Leanne Simpson’s “Leaning In” and multiple works by Lenape author D.A. Lockhart. While Simpson and Lockhart write from different cultural locations, what their writing about the Deshkan Ziibi shares is a similar genre-fluid style that positions their travel along the river as a journey through personal and collective memory to the place where Shawnee Chief Tecumseh died during “The Battle of the Thames” in 1813. As an embodiment of what Simpson calls “Indigenous internationalism,” Tecumseh sought to unite diverse Indigenous nations in a confederacy to ensure their survival amidst colonial invasion. By engaging with these stories of Tecumseh and his significance to more than one Indigenous nation and the lands they call home, I hope to contribute to more nuanced ways of honouring Indigenous internationalism in this region.

Tiffany Lethabo King, a Black scholar who examines the Black/Indigenous intersection in her 2019 collection The Black Shoals, creates a methodological approach based on the recurring metaphors that are seen in each of the two fields in her concept of the shoal. She bases this approach on the frequent connections between Indigenous studies and land, and Black studies and water. My research asks, if land is equated with Indigenous studies, and water with Black studies, how does Black Canadian author Wayde Compton depict contact between these forces in his 2014 collection The Outer Harbour, especially considering his intertextual references to E. Pauline Johnson's (Mohawk) short story "The Lost Island"? What is the context of this contact, and what does this contact produce?

In examining the setting of Compton’s and Johnson’s stories in the specific region of the volcanic Burrard Inlet in British Columbia, I explore the proximity, the interactions, and the contact of land and water--of Indigenous and Black elements. I complicate Mary Louise Pratt’s seminal concept of the contact zone to investigate how these two intersecting fields can rupture the “asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” that Pratt explains acts as a backdrop to this contact (34). My presentation explores how this eruptive dismantling occurs via chaos in what I call the chaos zone, a paradoxical process that complicates the contact zone. I propose, through an analysis of Compton’s and Johnson’s texts, that the chaos zone is capable of producing a shared, relational, and sometimes painful continuance between these forces—of land/water, and Indigenous/Black.

In Red Skins, White Masks (2014), Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard demonstrates how contemporary governmental practices of recognition and accommodation adopted by settler-colonial states such as Canada, the USA, and Australia towards Indigenous peoples can be perceived as continuation of a settler-colonial land acquisitive and project that began with genocide, removal, and bio-cultural assimilation strategies (1 ̶ 17). This paper presents a trans-Indigenous reading of Taboo (2018) by Kim Scott (Aboriginal/ Noongar) and There There (2018) by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) in order to explore the formal and aesthetics techniques mobilised by these authors in order to create narratives of resistance against and rejection of contemporary settler-colonial patterns of recognition in what is now known as the US and Australia. Specifically, it endeavours to demonstrate the ways in which Tommy Orange’s There There and Kim Scott’s Taboo embody the subversive and corrective frameworks associated with urban Native narratives and post-Mabo sovereignty novels, respectively. Within the conference theme of “Crossing Genres, Crossing Borders,” this paper presents itself as an intervention in the growing field of trans-Indigenous literary studies which, as Chadwick Allen (Chickasaw descent) puts it, aims to “privilege reading across, through, and beyond tribally and nationally specific Indigenous texts and contexts” in order to create “the possibility of literary scholarship that is Indigenous-centered on a global scale” (“Decolonizing Comparison” 378).

Through a discursive and dynamic articulation of trans-Indigenous methodology, I consider this current moment of genocide in Palestine through the poetry of protest and resistance that continues and creates resurgent solidarities with Turtle Island poets and activists. In some ways, I create a comparative, diachronic study that focuses on the historic collaborations that have been undertaken in both occupied regions – including work that dates back to artistic outputs by Russel Means and Mahmoud Darwish and Blue Cloud and Adnan and Adonis – but I move on to consider current texts by Mosab Abu Toha and Asmaa Azaizeh and Layli Long Soldier and Leanne Simpson and more. I consider works primarily in English language but equally consider large-scale earthworks like Hedge Coke’s as well as Suheir Hammad’s lessons in social media based ephemerality. Rather than focussing on the story of the colonization, dispossession and extermination of Indigenous people in both contexts, I consider the poetry of protest as opportunities to create ideological (ex)changes so deeply entwined with raised consciousness that the exchanges becomes belonging and enact Indigenous and Palestinian construction and settlement. Most of my work centers on locating the wind and breath in these written and performed poems so I would like to end my talk (paper delivery) with a short workshop that I have conducted previously to locate these things within the given spaces and bodies of active participants.

On August 16, 2023, a group of Indigenous Studies students assembled at the Edmonton Institution for Women, a federal prison in Alberta, Canada, to launch The Conditional Release, the first newsletter to be produced at the institution since 2008. Created as the final project for a Walls to Bridges university class (Pollack & Mayor 2023), which I taught at the prison in the winter of 2023, The Conditional Release contains visual art, political commentary, poetry, beading, and more, themed around “Sisterhood” and solidarity. In my presentation, I contextualize this multi-genre storytelling project in the context of the rich history of Indigenous prison newsletters in Canada and consider the important role of such publications in the Native Sisterhood and Brotherhood, prisoner-led advocacy groups that existed in Canada from the 1960s to the 1990s (Adema 2016). I consider the colonial conditions through (and despite) which Indigenous prison newsletters are produced, and argue for their centrality in Indigenous prisoner-led organizing.

The Native Sisterhood/Brotherhood was the political voice of Indigenous prisoners in Canada (Waldram 2003; Pawis 1996). As a grassroots network, it connected people inside prison with Indigenous communities both inside and out, thus crossing the colonial boundaries of the prison that separate Indigenous peoples from their lands, cultures, and kin. The network raised awareness about Indigenous rights; demanded access to and facilitated spiritual and cultural practices in prison; and offered community supports to their members. Each chapter had a newsletter, which served as their main mode of communication and outreach, a platform for community organizing, and a venue for creative expression. While the current climate of censorship and the suppression of the Sisterhood/Brotherhood (Ewert 2021) has in many ways compromised prison newsletters as a mode of Indigenous political critique, The Conditional Release is a tribute to and continuation of this powerful legacy.

In keeping with this gathering’s theme of crossing borders, I propose to share with the ILSA community a new collaborative project that connects diverse urban Indigenous communities, Indigenous organizations, and artistic and scholarly communities.

This project, entitled “‘We’re Still Here’: Amplifying Urban Indigenous Stories in Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and St. John’s through Indigenous-led Partnerships,” has the overall goal of amplifying stories of urban Indigenous communities that have been excluded from processes of reconciliation. We will focus on the challenge of understanding what reconciliation means for the Métis of the prairies and for Newfoundland and Labrador Indigenous peoples, both of whom were formally left out of federal processes of reconciliation and are not fully included in national reconciliation discussions. Both have called to be considered within reconciliation, not only through government recognition, but through an expansive reconciliation grounded in Indigenous voices, knowledges, and stories. Responding to these calls, we will show how a practice centred on Indigenous storytelling can transform settler-centred narratives of belonging, ownership, and reconciliation. This project will be carried out by a broad Indigenous-led network that includes: 4 Indigenous Community Organizations; 2 Indigenous-led arts organizations; 2 universities; and a group of 17 scholars, students, and Indigenous writers and storytellers.

This 5-year project has recently received funding and is in its earliest stages. Therefore, the purpose of this presentation is not to present research results, but to share how this project was collaboratively envisioned and what our plans are. I hope that this will be of interest as an example of how Indigenous literary studies can engage in larger-scale collaborative and community-led projects. As the Project Director, I will lead this presentation, joined by Ph.D. candidate Olivia Abram, who is one of the student collaborators.

Generative Artificial Intelligence and large language models, powered by sophisticated algorithms like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), are significantly altering our relationship to writing. Platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and others leverage deep learning techniques and vast datasets to function simultaneously as authors, analysts, copyeditors, literary consultants, and collaborators. These AI systems are capable of generating diverse content, including essays, emails, blog posts, news articles, and even poetry, with surprising coherence and relevance.

Creative potential aside, the ongoing technological encroachment into writing, currently facilitated by AI, contrasts sharply with the deeply relational and material practices of writing highlighted in Indigenous literary studies. For instance, Scott Lyons' concept of "rhetorical sovereignty" underscores the imperative for Indigenous peoples to reclaim the written word, using it as a tool a counter to its historical use as a colonial weapon. While AI can mimic forms of writing, it cannot replicate the depth of human experience or the deliberate exertion of sovereignty through language that Lyons calls for. Another example is the materiality of language and its inseparable connection to the land, articulated by Jeannette Armstrong and echoed in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. The notion of "land speaking" and the material practice of writing with the land starkly contrast the virtual landscapes “black box” of information and algorithms that inform AI writing.

In the spirit of ILSA’s 10th annual gathering, this presentation will further illustrate some the ways in which Indigenous literary studies crosses boundaries with generative AI and highlight where better borders are necessary. It will do so, however, in the context of Indigenous new media. Instead of presuming AI to be inherently exploitative, AI will be interrogated alongside the possibility of "making kin with machines," a proposition advanced by Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite. As such, this presentation aims to spark a conversation on how scholars, educators, and students can use AI tools safely and productively within Indigenous literary studies.

“I can’t write a nature poem” is the dominant refrain in Tommy Pico’s long poem Nature Poem (2017). Literary critic Stephanie Burt states, “the book overall is what rhetoricians call apophasis: Pico writes a ‘nature poem’ by showing us why ‘he can’t write a nature poem,’ being (in his words) ‘a weirdo NDN faggot,’ a gay Kumeyaay man from California triply out of place in hipster Brooklyn, and as a man who feels in place in an avowedly unnatural, supposedly un-Indian, urban space.” This paper investigates how the possibilities and preclusions of form constructing Nature Poem—and throughout Pico’s Teebs tetralogy—reach beyond identity matters to involve aesthetic as well as ideological concerns that also shape Pico’s poetry into what it becomes and what it “can’t.” In these poems, formal multiplicity is the rule, not the exception. What prompts this experimental/innovative impulse? What does it answer, and what does it anticipate? What are the broader implications for the study of literary form in Native American literatures? These are the main questions I consider in this paper.

In 2023, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibited a collection titled “Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures” that challenged viewers to reconsider their definitions of paper. As curators Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer argue, a definition of paper as thin sheets fashioned from fibrous pulp tends to privilege settler colonial conceptions and techniques. What might paper be, they offer, if its definitions were not limited by legacies of cultural genocide and colonialism but instead included Indigenous understandings of paper and papermaking such as birchbark, papyrus, tapa, and amatl? My presentation unsettles previous historiographies of paper and promotes the inclusion of Indigenous varieties of paper in global history. Additionally, I address the histories of the paper industry (currently the fifth largest industry in the world) that fail to account for the exploitation of Indigenous geographical resources—trees, water, and land—used in paper manufacturing. By revising historiographies of paper that center Anglophone definitions, production, and writing, I argue for an unfinished and ongoing historiography of paper that encompasses both its structural racisms and its global, Indigenous materiality.

Bíiluuke (Our Side) (2020) by Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star is a series of photographs of heritage objects (most of them at NMAI) in Red Star’s hand. The trappings of the museum are visible in some of the images—identifying tags, a direct reference to the collecting and ownership of the belongings. They are being touched and visited (and here I am thinking about what Tanya Linklater said about her rain gut parka performance piece: “Specifically, I am interested in singing, sounding, and dancing these objects – which is what we did in the old days. . . . Our knowledges were activated physically, sonically, in relation to these belongings, to our families, to the land, to the universe”). I want to think about Red Star’s presence in this way, her hands in these images, along with what it means for these objects to be in her hands. Ultimately, I am interested in how Red Star’s work signifies on material culture collections, archival access, the caretaking of Indigenous belongings, and how it visually gestures toward future repatriations.

While overseeing the imprisonment of Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Comanche warriors at Fort Marion, Florida 1875-1878, Captain Richard Pratt commissioned a removal and imprisonment narrative from a Kiowa captive named Etahdleuh Doanmoe. Once it was complete, Pratt personally disassembled the ledger to add captions and gave it to his son Mason, who would reassemble the piece and title it A Kiowa’s Odyssey. Much of the archival story of this ledger is known—there is literally an entire book on it, a book that includes commentary on how the book’s erroneous archiving impacted our ability to access and understand it. I will be thinking about this book more theoretically in the context of curation, archival work, and academia’s understanding and treatment of ledger narratives. This presentation considers Pratt as a real-time curator and archivist. Pratt is enacting curation and archiving almost from the moment of this narrative’s creation. He can control the Indigenous narrative and how it is recognized, read, and categorized precisely because he has literal, physical control over Doanmoe’s body. Working through the meanings of curation and archiving as embodied by this text can help us understand why ledger art is so appealing to academics as a metaphor for colonial curation, archiving, and accessing of Indigenous narratives.

I want to introduce the Red River Jig Family Network project an emerging research collaboration between Dr. Michelle Porter (Métis, research-creation scholar, English professor, writer), Dr. Suzanne Steele (librettist, musician, research-creation scholar, Métis) and Dr. Monique Giroux (ethnomusicologist, music professor, non-Indigenous). In this presentation we'd like to tell stories about a year of preliminary research collecting stories related top Metis music and dance. In this approach we view music and dance as storied texts. Recognizing that most research on Métis music has been conducted by non-Métis researchers operating outside Métis contexts, we ask what can a Métis-led and Métis-centred research project about Métis music and dance look like? And more specifically, what does the Red River Jig teach us about Métis approaches to research with and about Métis people and/or practices? In so doing, we are adding to a growing body of research that examines what it means to do research from a Metis perspective. We’ve selected the Red River Jig fiddle tune and dance as a starting place to explore possibilities for new ways of understanding our music, dance and story. Instead of findings, we want to share early observations related to methodologies and share what our next research steps will look like. In this way this article acts as a wayfinding tool rather than a map, an experiential story for others who would like to find the path to the Métis-specific methodologies that fit their own research.

Defending form poetry, Molly Peacock writes, “as the lyrical mind works to answer [formal limitations], the unconscious is freed to experience its most playful and most dangerous feelings” (13). Is this assertion—form’s ability to both safely and dangerously articulate the poet’s unconscious—true for all writers, and is this “safe place in which we can be most volatile” (13) available to Indigenous poets? My hybrid paper will consider the challenges and opportunities of Indigenous form poetry, especially: the unique Indigenous quality of dangerous expressions produced by form; how formal limitations can help illuminate Indigenous experience; and how closed forms open new creative spaces for Indigenous writers.

Métis writers Marilyn Dumont and R.P. LaRose have recently used closed forms to discuss issues of identity, colonial history, and creative and cultural spaces. In The Pemmican Eaters, Dumont uses a combination of both fixed and free verse to (re)examine the Riel Resistance. In a reflective essay on the collection, she describes how fixed forms connect to the rhythms, cadence, and sounds of language, and how she found in the sestina form, for instance, the “steady cadence of the fiddle” and Métis step-dancing (Dumont 85). By contrast, Daniel David Moses has expressed a distrust towards Western prosody and its connection to the rigid structures inherent to colonial institutions, describing the rhythms and metres of Western form as qualities reducing poetry to a “kind of math” rather than “emotive or moral truth” (132). LaRose deconstructs and reclaims the sonnet as a vehicle for Métis expression in Wolf Sonnets, illustrating a subversive approach to form. As I analyze this material, I will discuss it in relation to my own experiments in formal poetry, illustrating through a villanelle, a sestina, and lipograms how formal constraints have helped me poetically articulate the trauma surrounding Indigenous language loss.

Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel, "The Marrow Thieves," was a landmark for Indigenous futurism literature in Canada. Seamlessly in her writing style throughout the novel, Dimaline presents the concept of Coming-To stories. My research idea looks at how the adoption of this framing of self-location work as Coming-To stories centers Indigenous ways of being in the world and approaching new environments and communities. This work is heavily inspired by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s scholarship on grounded normativity and reciprocal recognition. When put into practice in scholarly or community-engaged projects, this concept is both a creative intervention in traditional scholarly academia that models new ways for coming together from our many backgrounds and histories, and a welcoming for others to do the same.

To share this idea, I propose to lead a short (30-45 mins? I’m open to discuss timing further) workshop in which I will begin by sharing my own Coming-To story, framed within my history, ancestry, and relationship with Winnipeg and the ILSA. I will then present on Dimaline’s Coming-To stories, supplemented with theoretical underpinnings for context, and read a brief section from the novel. Following this, most of the workshop will consist of my leading participants through creative writing exercises that engage aspects of their histories that might inform the way they self-story, and ultimately guiding participants with a series of writing prompts to craft their own unique Coming-To stories that they can take with them on their journeys after the gathering. This workshop will be an interactive reflection on our journeys that draws on our spirituality, relationships, and land-based practices.

Founded in May of 2016, Virago Nation is an all-Indigenous burlesque collective of women/femme/two-spirited artists that seeks to reclaim Indigenous sexuality from the toxic effects of colonization by representing positive, diverse expressions of Indigenous sexuality on stage and through outreach programs and workshops. Virago Nation entered into a collaboration with settler scholar Dr. Jennifer Hardwick in the Fall of 2018, and together they have explored how Indigenous burlesque engages and enacts Indigenous knowledges and experiences, builds relationships between communities, fosters awareness of historical and ongoing colonization, and promotes Indigenous peoples’ (and Indigenous women’s specifically) sovereign rights to their own bodies, sexualities, and gender identities.

Drawing on lessons from our 5 year-long collaboration, this session will explore the importance of relationships, authenticity, and joy in fostering collaborative creative and scholarly communities. We will begin with a spoken word burlesque performance* by Virago Nation convening member Shane Sable, which will focus on embodiment, right relationship, and reciprocity. Building on the themes of the spoken word — and using examples from performances, workshops, literary texts, educational initiatives, and scholarly writing — Shane and Jen will engage is a dialogue about how they have sought to collaboratively and ethically share stories with the goal of building intersectional, decolonial futures grounded in care.

*Please note this performance will include nudity

Agenda:

Welcome and territorial acknowledgement

Thanking the Current Council

President’s Report

Treasurer’s Report

Call for nominations

Discussion Item for Membership (on responding to political situations)

ILSA 2025

Other Business

More coming soon!

Buffet dinner provided

Stories & Reflections on 10 Years of ILSA

Featuring DJ Brent Phillips

Fundraising raffle draw

Doors open at 7:00 PM, event begins at 8pm.

Closing words by Albert McLeod

A performance by Indigenous drag performers The Bannock Babes, ft. a reading by Tenille K. Campbell

Cash bar available (beer, wine, and non-alcoholic options)

McNally Robinson book table on site