Literary Land Claims
The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat
La description
Literature not only represents Canada as “our home and native land” but has been used as evidence of the civilization needed to claim and rule that land. Indigenous people have long been represented as roaming “savages” without land title and without literature. Literary Land Claims: From Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat analyzes works produced between 1832 and the late 1970s by writers who resisted these dominant notions. Margery Fee examines John Richardson’s novels about Pontiac’s War and the War of 1812. She provides a close reading of Louis Riel’s addresses to the court at the end of his trial in 1885. Fee argues that both Grey Owl and E. Pauline Johnson’s visions are obscured by challenges to their authenticity. Finally, she shows how storyteller Harry Robinson uses a contemporary Okanagan framework to explain how white refusal to share the land meant that Coyote himself had to make a deal with the King of England.
Récompenses
- Short-listed, Finalist for the 2015 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism 2015
Reviews
Fee contributes to the decolonization of literary studies in Canada and readers will benefit from Fee's contextualization of Indigenous notions of land rights and language. ... scholars interested in issues related to decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty will find this work especially useful
- Lianne Leddy, H-Envirnoment, 2016