Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies

Kiskisitotaso, Don’t Forget Yourself: Indigenous Resurgence in David A. Robertson’s Barren Grounds

2025-01-22T17:13:15+01:00

David A. Robertson’s (Norway House Cree) children’s novel The Barren Grounds (2020) intervenes in Canada’s historical and ongoing child welfare systems’ impacts on Indigenous children and youth. This article argues that Indigenous children’s literature could significantly contribute to the ongoing efforts towards reconciliation in Canada. Robertson, as a specific example of this, presents a decolonized version of foster care that is rooted in Indigenous resurgence and grounded normativity. This representation encourages young readers to reconsider entrenched settler-colonial structures that, potentially, advance the projects of reconciliation and decolonization in Canada. Barren Grounds considers alternatives to current foster care structures that are predicated on Indigenous foster children and youth being directly reconnected with Indigenous peoples, lands, and knowledge systems. This reconnection transmits grounded normative ethics and builds Indigenous resurgence—both of which Robertson demonstrates are key in combating settler-induced disconnection and dispossession.

Re-Creation, Re-Membrance, and Resurgence: Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse

2025-01-22T17:13:18+01:00

This article examines the novel Indian Horse (2012), written by Ojibwe Wabaseemoong Independent Nations member Richard Wagamese (1955-2017) at the height of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission era. Wagamese finds inspiration in the testimonies and experiences of hundreds of victims of Canada’s residential school system, including those of his own family members. The article contextualizes the novel in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission era and explores Saul’s narrative journey to recover his suppressed memories of personal and collective abuse at St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School through the lens of Indigenous resurgence and grounded normativity. Thus, the paper draws on Michi Saagiig scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s writings on Indigenous radical resurgence to explore the retrieval of Indigenous ways of existing in the world as the way towards decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. The paper argues that Saul is able to overcome his trauma-induced amnesia, born from the necessity to endure and adapt, and to escape the spiral of shame, isolation, and self-destruction in which he engages only after he embraces discursive Indigenous ways of healing. Wagamese therefore constructs a narrative in which the protagonist’s development mirrors the ideal that the author sets for Canada, in which reconciliation with Indigenous truth will not take place unless the whole story is acknowledged.

Indigenous Environmental Activism and Media Depiction

2025-01-22T17:13:25+01:00

Media bias is a reality of the infoglut we are bombarded with every day. However, we often consider bias to be consigned to the textual realm of information. I argue that anything human-mediated holds bias, including photographs. Because of this, I propose reading the performance of Indigenous-led environmental activism through media representation, specifically photographs used in media coverage of Indigenous environmental activism. This paper considers open-access media photographs of Indigenous-led environmental protests, such as the Kanehsatake Resistance (1990) and Wet’suwet’en Blockade (2020), as springboards for practicing ethical reading. As a settler-scholar, this work is mostly geared towards a settler-scholar or non-Indigenous audience interested in Indigenous literary studies, as a way to find tools to engage in this scholarship. The purpose of this article is to elucidate media bias as a way of informing our individual teaching and learning practice, as well as shaping how we engage with and talk about Indigenous issues. While all public activism engages with some levels of performance, the performance itself and larger narrative being told by the activists is filtered through who is able to tell the story. Here, I use a methodology that I am developing as part of my ongoing dissertation work, Critical Dispositioning, which is an ethical reading praxis designed for settlers to use when engaging with Indigenous literatures. Critical Dispositioning requires community-specific reading of Indigenous materials and rejects settler imposition or appropriation of Indigenous voices and texts. This work is essential in building anti-racist practices and equity, diversity, and inclusion into the classroom space, as well as a tool for consideration when building syllabi.

Everyday Magic or Winter Haunting? Kevin Sullivan’s Supernatural Re-Visioning of L. M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill

2025-01-22T17:13:09+01:00

L. M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill employs the natural magic of “Jane Victoria” Stuart’s environment to convey psychological changes and healing for the main character in what appears to be an immersive fantasy comprised of a Prince Edward Island that provides a magical setting for Jane’s emotional and social development. In contrast Kevin Sullivan’s film adaptation, Lantern Hill, employs the magic of the supernatural to achieve those same psychological impacts on Victoria Jane in something akin to an intrusion fantasy, in which ghosts and haunting dreams propel both Jane and the viewer into an almost-Gothic Prince Edward Island. This article explores the impact of those changes and suggests that the magic of Montgomery’s story, which can be revealed over time through beautiful imagery and language in the novel, must be conveyed quickly through highly visual and auditory means in the film, raising questions about the gaps created between natural and supernatural magic and how those gaps change the meaning or outcome of the story.

From Villainess to Gilead’s Nemesis: The (Un)easy Rehabilitation of Aunt Lydia

2025-01-22T17:13:12+01:00

The article takes under scrutiny the evolution of the key antagonist from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, namely, Aunt Lydia. In the sequel to her most popular novel, that is, The Testaments, the author boldly rewrote the villainous Aunt as Gilead’s undercover agent, forcing the reader to reconsider their own perception and reception of this character retrospectively. Predictably, many critics and fans found the said transformation implausible. Taking The Testaments as a point of departure, the article rereads the original tale, which, astonishingly, discloses a number of equivocal passages that in fact might provide credibility to Atwood’s audacious refashioning of Aunt Lydia as a Mayday spy. The article offers a reevaluation of Aunt Lydia’s villainy in The Handmaid’s Tale through the lens of her undercover identity, revealed in The Testaments. Firstly, it dissects the techniques and ploys the author used in the sequel to breed readers’ empathy for hitherto despised Aunt Lydia. It focuses on the overlap between the transformation of her character and the shift from the original novel’s criticism of second wave feminism towards the sequel’s embrace of the fourth wave. Finally, and most importantly, it discusses a selection of equivocal fragments from The Handmaid’s Tale that specifically pertain to Aunt Lydia.

Presence and Absence in Margaret Atwood’s Dearly

2025-01-22T17:13:07+01:00

In Morning in the Burned House (1995), Margaret Atwood includes a sequence of elegiac poems mourning the process of her father’s illness and death. Her subsequent collection, The Door (2007), while not explicitly elegiac, explores topics such as memory, aging, death, loss, and decay. These subjects are often central to both traditional and contemporary elegies. Other poems in this volume deal with writing and poetry, examining their capacity to offer consolation in the face of death, a key aspect of elegy. Drawing on critical studies of elegy in contemporary English-language poetry and on the role of elegy in Atwood’s poetry, this essay analyses the elegiac dimension of Dearly (2020), Atwood’s most recent poetry collection. Many of these poems are dedicated to her partner Graeme Gibson, who was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2017 and passed away in 2019. Through close readings and formal analysis, I aim to demonstrate how these elegiac poems articulate a psychic landscape of mourning where separation after death is rejected and an alternative space for reunion with the deceased is created. Atwood moves beyond simple lamentation, exploring the liminal space between life and death, presence and absence.

Assembling Reading and Writing in the Face of Loss: Christa Couture’s How to Lose Everything and Dakshana Bascaramurty’s This Is Not the End of Me

2025-01-22T17:13:22+01:00

Through nonfictional texts dealing with complicated and traumatic experiences related to loss, readers and writers seem to become more intricately entangled. Following Rita Felski, reading is said to ignite a process of “recognition” (23) which might be paralleled to the self-discovery process which writing may achieve. Sympathy and mutual identification arise and bring readers’ and writers’ identities closer, creating an intersubjective space where health and illness assemble their relations. This analysis of Christa Couture’s How to Lose Everything and Dakshana Bascaramurty’s This is Not the End of Me: Lessons on Living from a Dying Man will attempt to show that there is a tight link between reader and writer through nonfiction which transcends the literary text. In addition, the healing nature of this connection will be highlighted, which supports the idea of using reading and writing techniques as therapeutical strategies in the coping with emotional turmoil and distress.

The Edible I in Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy

2025-01-22T17:13:27+01:00

This article explores Kim Fu’s 2014 For Today I Am a Boy through the lens of critical eating studies. In this novel’s portrayal of Peter (see note 3), the trans woman protagonist, images of food and acts of eating (or the denial of these acts) are deployed as a meditation on the navigation of body, hence of self. This paper positions the act of eating as representing more than just a physical, biological process, but rather a placing of people in relationship with the edible matter and all the conditions of its production, including its socio-cultural/familial meanings. In interpreting Peter’s experiences of self in continuum with the experiences of both Peter’s mother and Mrs. Becker (the mistress of Peter’s father), this paper observes characters figured not only as hungry, but also as edible due in part to their battered subject positions but even more so due to the forced repression and denial of these identities.

We Are Already Ghosts: Reflections on Composition

2025-01-22T17:13:04+01:00

In this piece, author and critic Kit Dobson discusses and analyzes the composition of his debut novel, We Are Already Ghosts (University of Calgary Press, 2024). He analyzes the novel along at least three axes: first, as a novel that can be classified as a character-driven “summer read”; second, as a work of experimental fiction; and, third, as a text that analyzes and interrogates the spaces that make up the Canadian province of Alberta. Dobson notes influences on the novel from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; to the poetics of bpNichol; to the tension between settler and Indigenous understandings of land, territory, haunting, and presence. Throughout, Dobson notes that the time in which the novel is set, between 1996 and 2011, marks a period of transition for the Briscoe-MacDougall family members who populate the book, and for the world and society that these characters represent.

Building Bridges through Writing: An Interview with Rohini Bannerjee

2025-01-22T17:13:01+01:00

Rohini Bannerjee, the daughter of immigrant Settlers from Himachal Pradesh, India, was born and raised in unceded Mi’kmaki territory, on the Dartmouth side of the great harbour of Kjipuktuk. A scholar, translator and creative writer, Bannerjee’s primary research focuses on the literatures and cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean. Her short stories and poetry—written in both French and English—explore themes of belonging, identity and body image. This interview took place on March 14, 2023, at the University of Salamanca, when Rohini Bannerjee led the seminar “W/Righting Trajectories of Diaspora,” organized by Dr. Jorge Diego Sánchez. It was finished in an on-line chatroom on November 14, 2023. In this interview, Rohini Bannerjee offers her perspective on issues such as identity, social rejection and body shaming. She also reflects on how her personal experiences have shaped her writing and underlines the crucial role of writers and educators in contemporary society.