first nations

The title of the poem signals the particular connection between Treaty 8 and settlement and resource extraction. Treaty 8 covers much of northern Alberta and parts of northeastern British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories. As Dennis F. K. Madill reports, The overriding factor of the government’s decision to negotiate Treaty Eight involved economic considerations, […]

Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s poem, “The silhouette of a pole on the shore of the Nass River,” copies and then re-writes an entry by the Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau (1883–1969) from the second volume of his work Totem Poles (1950). Ethnography is a branch of anthropology involving the close observation of cultural groups. While ethnographic […]

In Canadian Literature’s groundbreaking 1990 special issue, Native Writers & Canadian Writing, W. H. New argues in his editorial that “Power declares; it doesn’t readily listen” (4). At the time, Canadian Literature still represented the power of the Canadian literary establishment, but for this issue the journal attempted to critically listen and engage with Indigenous […]

Respectful critical engagement with literary works necessitates being aware of our own assumptions tied to our social and cultural position, and to work across the boundaries that seem to divide different groups, knowledges, and experiences. Assumptions about differences often support essentialist thinking that reduces people and their experiences to stereotypes and singular characteristics. Non-indigenous critics, […]

Indigenous literatures in Canada emerge from a long history of colonization, a history that mainstream Canadian society has only just begun to understand. Throughout this colonization process, Indigenous communities were segregated, languages were eradicated, and traditions were outlawed. Despite these seemingly prohibitive obstacles, Indigenous writers published important works in the nineteenth century. The non-fictional conversion […]

The Indigenous Guide assumes that the issues and conflicts addressed in academic conversations around Indigenous literature and culture, questions of history, politics, language, representation, and colonialism, are issues that need introduction if students are to give them sufficient attention. The aim of this guide, then, is to give students the tools to be the kinds […]

In his “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” Northrop Frye famously observes, “that Canadian sensibility … is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’” (253). The question “where is here?” reflects the position of the explorer and the settler moving through unknown territories. Indigenous […]

Multiculturalism itself is not a settled concept—even though it is legislated in Canada—and it continues to be developed or contested in various ways. Neil Bissoondath argues in Selling Illusions (1994) that multiculturalism leads to ethnic and cultural segregation and the ghettoization of cultural groups rather than to an integrated community (see similar comments also by […]

Canadian Historical Overview The development of cultures and nation states is characterized by migration (see Diamond and Wolf). With the advent of new technologies to connect people all over the world, such as airplanes and the Internet, this slow migration accelerated in the twentieth century, and continues to gather speed. This phenomena, also known as […]

How do you learn to write academically? How do you join the scholarly conversation? Pla(y)giarism, as it is often celebrated in poeming of the visual arts, is another form of stealing bases. Writing is an infinite series of translations. And translation finds the language of icon and image growing into worded language and back again. […]