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

Editorial

2026-06-02T09:43:55+00:00

Editors' introduction to the special issue, Overburden: Reading/Imagining Extra-Canadian Ecologies

Beavers, Blockades, and Animal Capital In Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s A Short History of the Blockade and Sydney Hegele’s The Pump

2026-06-02T09:44:03+00:00

This paper explores the beaver as a symbol and resource for Canadian national identity. It brings together the fields of animal studies, Indigenous critical theory, and critical political economy to read Sydney Hegele’s Ontario Gothic short story collection The Pump and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s lecture A Short History of the Blockade zeroing on the representation of beavers as staging criticisms of a settler colonial politics of extraction within Canadian history and national literary archetypes.

Unreconciling the Summer Camp: Revisting the Assimilation Era Through the Architectures of Education for Indigenous and Settler Children, 1880-1950

2026-06-02T09:44:07+00:00

Through a comparative analysis of the architectures of two antithetical Ontario “educational” spaces–the summer camp for Settler children and the residential school for Indigenous children, this paper explains how both worked in parallel to privilege Canada’s settler-colonial agenda. Between 1880 and 1951 the Canadian government—following the recommendations of the 1879 Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half Breeds (The Davin Report)—committed to the development of a system of residential schools; that coincides with the founding of summer camps at the start of the twentieth century. Back-to-nature summer camps ensconced white settler children in bucolic wilderness settings “playing Indian” (Deloria) and bonding with the landscape as they learned to canoe, build fires, and live away from urban environments. Indigenous children, meanwhile, were torn from their families–who had inhabited those lands for millennia–and relocated to residential schools designed explicitly to “civilize,” Christianize, and sever their relationships with their languages, ways of life, and land. By focusing on how curricula orient children towards, or away from, land, I set parallel images from case studies operating in Ontario in overlapping years thus contributing to an alternative perspective on the intersection of white children playing Indian at summer camps with the targeting of Indigenous children for assimilation. I set location, landscape, and architectural design as key components to the consolidation of Settler possession and Indigenous dispossession. Recognizing the role that summer camps played in colonialism creates a mandate to reorient the sites as spaces for reconciliation–and perhaps decolonization, in the present.

Techno-Extractivism and Settler Circuits in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow

2026-06-02T09:44:01+00:00

This paper explores how the technological divide between Indigenous communities and metropolitan centers in Canada reflects underlying settler colonial assumptions about value, visibility, and futurity. National discourses that position Canada as a leader in green and technologically advanced development often rely on extractive systems (digital, ecological, and social). Corporate narratives of innovation and inclusion, particularly those centered on bridging the digital divide, tend to reproduce familiar hierarchies even as they promise connection and progress, revealing the unsustainable entanglement between settler identity and technological domination. Within this context, Moon of the Crusted Snow by Anishinaabe author Waubgeshig Rice offers a speculative space for rethinking technology, sustainability, and community. The novel’s depiction of grid collapse and systemic failure invites reflection on the dependencies embedded within Western infrastructures while highlighting Indigenous practices of kinship, land-based knowledge, and adaptability as what I call forms of world-making. This paper considers how Rice’s work suggests alternative ways of imagining futurity in the digital age.

Extractive Equalities: Gender-Based Violence and Canadian Coloniality in the Feminist International Assistance Policy

2026-06-02T09:44:02+00:00

This paper explores the post-colonial relations of power of Canadian international development policies and programs. As a supposed leader on gender equality, Canada has implemented its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) to integrate gender equality concerns into its international development programs, and yet Canadian resource extraction companies operating abroad continue to be linked to cases of sexual violence with little accountability. I examine this contradiction through looking at how the FIAP serves to depoliticize and decontextualize sexual violence. I examine how the policy defines and conceptualizes sexual and gender-based violence as part of Canada’s efforts to take a so-called feminist approach to international development, and what work this conceptualization enables on behalf of the Canadian government. Drawing on interpretive and critical policy analysis, I show how this policy employs ideas of gender equality and individualized, depoliticized understandings of sexual violence that create a benevolent image of Canada, erasing the power dynamics that facilitate and enable sexual violence, as well as Canada’s role in perpetuating colonial global power inequalities.

Transculturality and Uneven Belonging in Multicultural Canada: Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness and Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby

2026-06-02T09:44:05+00:00

Set chiefly in the Canadian prairies’ Indigenous-settler contact zones, Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness and Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby illuminate how histories of colonial violence and trauma shape contemporary Canadian society and show the inadequacies of transcultural theory in capturing Canadian cultural formations. In the Canadian lifeworld depicted in these texts, cultures are imagined as distinct and separate, with asymmetrical power dynamics serving as the ideological bulwark of Canadian multiculturalism. While Forgiveness depicts the capacity of Canadian multiculturalism to pave the way for non-white migrants’ transculturation, Probably Ruby uses Ruby’s deracination from her Métis roots to portray how settler colonial histories affect Indigenous cultural lifeworlds, dictating Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the Canadian state. The structural erasure of Indigenous identities through historical acts of cultural genocide continues to hinder bidirectional settler-Indigenous cultural exchange and instead fosters the assimilation of Indigenous persons, such as the deracinated Ruby, into the dominant culture.

Undomesticating Political Ecologies in Miriam Pirbhai’s Outside People

2026-06-02T09:43:59+00:00

This essay reads Mariam Pirbhai’s 2017 short story collection, Outside People, as a narrative guide to the political ecology of Canadian bordering practices. Bordering describes the ways in which human and non-human beings get marked for inclusion or disposal, protection or exploitation. The essay focuses on the mode of bordering that Ghassan Hage calls “generalized domestication”: a practice of homemaking that is “paradoxically… also a mode of domination, control, extraction, and exploitation” (91). Outside People highlights the ways in which the selective domestication of the world outside Canadian borders works to support the settler-colonial good life. The collection depicts the lives of migrants navigating the environments of racial capitalism to forge connections across cultures, languages and species. The stories also highlight the spillover, through tourism, mining and international adoption, of extractive domestication practices beyond the borders of Canada. In addition to exposing the mechanisms of domination that underlie myths of Canadianness, Outside People tells stories that evade extractive and liberal-national capture and make alliances in support of alternative, undomesticated forms of inhabitation.

Canada, International Students, and Fragility: An Analysis of Òjà (The Talking Flute) As Counter-Narrative Project

2026-06-02T09:43:56+00:00

Canada expanded its cultural hegemony and increased its workforce through the invitation of international students, academics, and all kinds of skilled immigrants between 2014 and 2022. This invitation was part of a long history of romance with immigrants interspersed and sometimes overlapping with periods of intense hostility. Since 2023, international students have become a focal point of critique in political conversations and policies in Canada. This paper examines a counter-narrative that challenges the discourse of international students as invasive species. It focuses on Òjà (The Talking Flute) by Roland Samuel, highlighting international students’ complex ways of being and relating with Canada while critically raising awareness of the different ways that Canada and international students demonstrate fragility.

The Art of Sustainable Shelter-Making: Bakhtiari and Métis Craft Adaptation in Response to Environmental Change

2026-06-02T09:43:58+00:00

How can craftwork offer ethical approaches to homemaking amid environmental change? In this paper, craftwork is both the technical knowledge and the aesthetic expression of homemaking that brings together human and more-than-human relations into an ethico-political tension. This paper was shaped by a web of relations and responsibilities stemming from my Iranian-Bakhtiari ancestry and my diasporic positionality in so-called Canada. I follow the craft practices of Bakhtiari nomads of southwest Iran to redefine homemaking, not in terms of land ownership, resource accumulation, or the exclusion of others, but in terms of sheltering. Following Bakhtiari teachings, sheltering is the ongoing labour of sustaining ethical and incongruent relations with human and more-than-human communities through collective care and socio-ecological mutual orientation. By thinking with Bakhtiari and Métis textiles and contemporary art, such as Métis artist Christi Belcourt’s Water Song (2010-2011) and Bakhtiari artist Amin Roshan’s My Father’s Contract (2013), as shelter-making practices, I explore how these diverse crafts enact sustainable sheltering through mindful reorientations to place. Both Bakhtiari and Métis crafts enact forms of remembering and resistance that reveal the far-reaching and interrelated extractive violences of British imperialism across Indigenous lands. This paper argues that a transnational and cross-cultural comparative analysis of Indigenous crafts can help mediate the ethical and political tensions of diasporic disorientation to new environments—what I name as the ab-be-ab or water-to-water experience—refiguring this disorientation into a long-term, water-based pedagogy for learning with Indigenous peoples, watersheds, and creative works, to resist being comfortable with/in settler colonial societies.