My friend Drew Lopenzina has been making the rounds in support of his brilliant new book on William Apess (including a stop at the Newberry Library last month). So far I have missed out on every single one of these exciting events, which has been devastating, but Drew has made it easier for people like me to cope with these cool t-shirts. He will send you one for $20 USD and all proceeds will go toward putting up a commemorative sign to mark William Apess’s birth in the town of Colrain, Massachusetts. Look Drew up and send him an e-mail.
Weighing in on “Canadian exceptionalism”
I really love the group blog and #twitterstorians movements in History, and I wish we were similarly motivated in literary studies. Historians know how to generate energy online.
And it finally occurred to me to contribute something. This week’s Borealia post is mine, drawn from material that is developed further in my forthcoming book. In the post, I discuss exceptionalism as a deeply ingrained and inescapable part of Settler Canadian identity, exploring its contemporaneous presence in political, religious, and nationalist discourses.
I’m grateful to Keith Grant and Denis McKim for allowing me to hang out with the historians for the week. Click through to their site to read the whole piece.
Three Canada (should) Reads
Through an engaging, and sometimes enraging, look at the relationships between Canada and Indigenous nations, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada explains what it means to be Settler and argues that accepting this identity is an important first step towards changing those relationships. Being Settler means understanding that Canada is deeply entangled in the violence of colonialism, and that this colonialism and pervasive violence continue to define contemporary political, economic and cultural life in Canada. It also means accepting our responsibility to struggle for change. Settler offers important ways forward — ways to decolonize relationships between Settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples — so that we can find new ways of being on the land, together.
Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada by Chelsea Vowel (HighWater 2016)
In 31 essays, Chelsea Vowel explores the Indigenous experience from the time of contact to the present, through five categories – Terminology of Relationships; Culture and Identity; Myth-Busting; State Violence; and Land, Learning, Law, and Treaties. She answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed 2013)
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
New work on Archive (In)digitization
I’m always excited to see new work from Siobhan Senier at the University of New Hampshire — like this fantastic new piece on early Indigenous digital collections, which highlights some of the best digital repositories for early Indigenous literatures around.
I hope many of my colleagues here in Atlantic Canada are following what Siobhan is doing. This is a fascinating and tricky area of the digital humanities. Over the course of the last few years, libraries and archives in both Canada and the US have been rushing to digitize their holdings to promote their collections and to improve public access. With the official launch of the Digital Public Library of America in April of 2013, US-based humanities scholars were thrust into ongoing high-level debates about information management. Suddenly, scholars who had never given digitization much thought were seeing their research topics as important cogs in worldwide discussions about how cultural materials are preserved, protected, and disseminated. This is perhaps especially true in the realm of Indigenous Studies, which has always been concerned with the preservation of culture and heritage.
And so a small cohort of scholars began to engage in essential conversations about which Indigenous materials “want to be free,” about what should be restricted, and about how those controls should function. Siobhan’s work in this area introduced me to important debates about digital rights management and about how culturally-specific ethical concerns can be productively incorporated into collective notions of information freedom.
I also generally come away from Siobhan’s work with valuable new avenues for research and teaching. The Kim-Wait Eisenberg Collection at Amherst College looks especially useful for anyone putting together a syllabus on early Indigenous literatures.
Rachel Bryant 