Category Indigenous Literature
20 Must-Read Books about Reconciliation in Canada
20 books about reconciliation in Canada and how to engage it critically and meaningfully.
On Wonderworks and Indigenous World-Building: A Travel Guidebook Assignment for Darcy Little Badger’s Elatsoe
This in-class exercise is based on Darcy Little Badger’s novel Elatsoe and chapter four of Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter Indigenous wonderworks are neither strictly “fantasy” nor “realism,” but maybe both at once, or something else entirely, although they generally push against the expectations of rational materialism. They rooted in the specificities of […]
“How can I share this?”: Sky Dancer Louise Halfe and the Poetics of Residential Schools
Is it possible to represent residential schools in literature? What are the poetics of reconciliation? Louise Halfe’s work illustrates the labour and love of Indigenous poetry amongst the imposed silence of colonialism.
“A soul-deep desolation:” Reconciliation and the Vacuum of Unstoried Existence
Excerpted from The Theatre of Regret: Art, Literature, and the Politics of Reconciliation While it is intimately, and, perhaps, impossibly, entwined with Christian ideology and Western politics, the idea of reconciliation does not belong to the Western theory alone. Indigenous scholars such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Daniel Heath Justice, Hadley Friedland, Val Napoleon, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, […]
Forgiveness, “a thousand pound word”: the Literature of Forgiveness and Reconciliation
Richard Wagamese was one of the premier authors of forgiveness and reconciliation in Canada. What do his novels tell of about the TRC?
Theatre of Regret Now Available in Paperback
The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada is now available in paperback via UBC Press. Some of the chapters were developed out of writing that I first shared on this blog. For instance the post “Reconciliation: ‘Like an Echo Turned Inside Out’” is the basis of the book’s conclusion, […]
Theatre of Regret Now Available in Paperback
The Theatre of Regret is now available in paperback from UBC Press.
“How do I play these” (with your thumbs, asshole): Attending to the Indigenous structure of video games within the contexts of digitālis nullius
For me, the process of writing about Indigenous games begins with thinking about the relationship between gaming, code, and settler colonialism, as well as the ways in which I am complicit in what I call digitālis nullius, the erasure of Indigenous presence from technological spaces. As I hope to make evident as I progress through this blog post, code, narratology, and game mechanics are not abstract from larger conversations about settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty.
“How do I play these?” (with your thumbs, asshole): playing Indigenous Video Games
For me, the process of writing about Indigenous games begins with thinking about the relationship between gaming, code, and settler colonialism, as well as the ways in which I am complicit in what I call digitālis nullius, the erasure of Indigenous presence from technological spaces. As I hope to make evident as I progress through this blog post, code, narratology, and game mechanics are not abstract from larger conversations about settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty.
“the road to reconciliation is paved with g—dintentions”: Lack as Resistance in Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead’s inaugural book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer is a series of poems told through Zoa, a trickster figure rendered through the lens of technology. Whitehead combines the figures of the singularity, virus, and hacker into a narrator that inhabits and deconstructs the Western literary cannon and popular media culture by infiltrating and re-writing the […]
Novel Alliances 