My first book, The Homing Place (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017), considered the contexts in which settler Canadians most often understand themselves and others — where those contexts come from and how they interfere with settlers’ ability to be transformed by information from or about Indigenous peoples. While there is much talk today in academic circles about the importance of listening to Indigenous peoples, I discussed the amount of work and self-reflection that settlers will need to do just to get to a place from which they will be able to listen or to be transformed. And I called that place the homing place — the place of listening across the epistemological barriers and interruptions that were built into northeastern settler societies and worldviews across centuries.
The Homing Place was shortlisted for the Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing and awarded the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Award for Non-Fiction. This award transformed my understanding of my audience and communities — a process that you can read more about, if you like, in this interview with The Miramichi Reader. The judge for the NB Book Award, Andrew Westoll, had this to say about the book:
“Great nonfiction often challenges the reader to reconsider their place in the world, and that is exactly what Bryant has achieved with The Homing Place. Exhaustively researched, deeply informed by literary criticism, and written with the force of an impassioned thinker who has seen behind the veil of reconciliation in Canada, The Homing Place delivers a series of uncomfortable truths about the indigenous and settler relationship. A humanistic treatment that rewards, and deserves, deep engagement.”
Selected Academic Articles:
- “The Last of the Wabanakis: Absolution Writing in Atlantic Canada” (Settler Colonial Studies, 2020)
- “The Grammar of Inanimacy: Frances Brooke and the Production of North American Settler States” (Firsting in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 2019)
- “Kinshipwrecking: John Smith’s Adoption and the Pocahontas Myth in Settler Ontologies” (AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 2018)
- “Honey from the Rock: John Gyles and the Northeastern North American Search for Anglo Indigeneity” (University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016)
- “Cartographic Dissonance: Between Geographies in Douglas Glover’s Elle” (Canadian Literature, 2014)
- “Imaginary Lines: Transcending the St. Croix Legacy in the Northeast Borderlands” (NAIS, 2014)
- “Toward the Desertion of Sycorax’s Island: Challenging the Colonial Contract” (English Studies in Canada, 2013)
Reviews and Features:
- A review of The Homing Place by Andrea Beverly (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2020)
- A review of The Homing Place by Peter Thompson (University of Toronto Quarterly, 2020)
- Featured by Andrea Eidinger in the Unwritten Histories “Best New Articles from October 2018”
- A review of The Homing Place by Terrence Craig (Canadian Historical Review, 2018) [Paywall]
- A review of The Homing Place by Jennifer Henderson (Canadian Literature, 2018)
- A review of The Homing Place by Siobhan Senier (Transmotion, 2018)
- A review of The Homing Place by Patty Musgrave (Atlantic Books Today, 2018)
- “The Rachel Bryant Interview” (The Miramichi Reader, 2018)
- A review of The Homing Place by James Fisher (The Miramichi Reader, 2018)
Selected Other Work:
- “Saint John History Should Reflect More than a Colonial Space” on CBC’s Information Morning – Saint John with Julia Wright
- “The Frontier on Film” on Historia Nostra with Erin Isaac
- “Yes, Canada Did Burn Down the White House in the War of 1812” in Unwritten Histories: The Unwritten Rules of History
- “Canadian Exceptionalism is about Land and Resources” in Borealia: Early Canadian History
Rachel Bryant 