Category Indigenous Literature
Indigenous Digital Poetics: 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 […]
Strategic Plans for the Apocalypse: Critical Engagement with Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
Groups of 4-5 Assignment Framework Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves ends with a new beginning. While capitalist-driven climate change is leading to the decimation of settler nation states (and the rapid decline of the settler population), French and his family are full of hope for the futures of Indigenous peoples—particularly now that Isaac, who holds […]
Strategic Plans for the Apocalypse: Teaching the Marrow Thieves
This is a creative group assignment for teaching Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Students collaborate to write and format a “strategic plan” for the university proposed at the end of the novel.
ENGL 373: Indigenous Speculative Fiction
Note: In the early marketing materials for this class I used a creative commons image of Marina Bay Sand and the Gardens by the Bay supertrees in Singapore. Using this image for a course like this erases Singapore’s own colonial history and the oppression of the Indigenous Malays. I have removed the image, but it may […]
Repression and the Settler Gothic
The horror novel ‘says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight… it offers us a chance to exercise… emotions which society demands we keep closely at hand.’ —Stephen King In the British Gothic tradition, what returns from the repressed is that which has been subjugated by Enlightenment sensibility: […]
Review: Katherena Vermette, river woman
Toronto: Anansi, 2018. Pp. 118. Softcover, $19.95. I need to hear the stories of the river about when she was young and her brown water clean loved -Katherena Vermette, “riverstory” The Red River, the focus of Katherena Vermette’s second book of poetry, river woman, begins its journey north at the confluence of the rivers Bois […]
Review of Katherena Vermette’s river woman
The Red River, the focus of Katherena Vermette’s second book of poetry, river woman, begins its journey north at the confluence of the rivers Bois de Sioux and Otter Trails.
Reconciliation: “Like an Echo Turned Inside Out”
On the penultimate page of her 2017 dystopian speculative fiction novel, The Marrow Thieves, Métis author and editor Cherie Dimaline evokes the sound of an echo as a means elucidate the reunification of two residential school surviours: The scene is significant for a number of reasons, not least of all because it contains the only […]
Reconciliation and The Marrow Thieves: “Like an Echo Turned Inside Out”
Reading reconciliation through Dimaline’s dystopic novel, The Marrow Thieves
Submit to Novel Alliances
All too often we write papers, hand them in or deliver them at a poorly attended conference, and then leave them to collect digital dust on our laptops. Novel Alliances began as a space to honour the labour we, as students and teachers, put into research and pedagogy. We invite submissions on Indigenous issues circulating around […]
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