Awards
- Winner of Finalist for the 2015 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism.
Overview
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 that document the breaking of British promises to Indigenous nations. She provides a close reading of Louis Riel's addresses to the court at the end of his trial in 1885, showing that his vision for sharing the land derives from the Indigenous value of respect. 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. Fee concludes that despite support in social media for Theresa Spence's hunger strike, Idle No More, and the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the story about """"savage Indians"""" and """"civilized Canadians"""" and the latter group's superior claim to """"develop"""" the lands and resources of Canada still circulates widely. If the land is to be respected and shared as it should be, literary studies needs a new critical narrative, one that engages with the ideas of Indigenous writers and intellectuals.
Full Product Details
Author: Margery Fee
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.550kg
ISBN: 9781771121194
ISBN 10: 177112119
Pages: 326
Publication Date: 30 September 2015
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Fee argues for a deeper appreciation of the function of literature as the ground of the ethics necessary to authorize all other discourses such as commission reports, policy documents, research papers, contracts, laws, business plans, instruction manuals too often given primacy in the academy and in culture. A valuable resource for those interested in literature, politics, colonialism, native peoples, and identity formation. --M. F. McClure, Virginia State University Summing Up: Highly recommended.
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 Literary Land Claims is an extremely important contribution to conversations about literature in Canada. ... At a time when universities across Canada are endeavouring to heed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action, Fee points readers toward a goal of consensus building, one that is predicated on muddying the binary and hierarchical logics through which we have tended to understand identity and, indeed, colonialism itself. She opens up an engaging and necessary conversation, offering a model for rich, ethical scholarly engagement with a literary landscape that is extends far beyond this book, and beyond the confines of Canlit. -- Sarah Krotz -- English Studies in Canada ... Literary Land Claims is timely reading. ... a rich and thoughtful book which will appeal to anyone writing or teaching in fields relating to settler-colonial, Canadian, and Indigenous studies. Historians in particular will find Fee's chapters a valuable complement to the original texts she discusses. -- Megan Harvey -- BC Studies, 2017 Fee's argument is a compelling reframing of Indigenous literatures and Canadian cultural nationalism. Her case that literature and storytelling are powerful decolonial tools arrives at a crucial time for Indigenous literature and theory as well as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to decolonize the academy and public school systems, both of which are bound up within Canada's literary canon. Thus, I wholeheartedly endorse Fee's text as an important addition to our decolonial theoretical toolkit. -- Joshua Whitehead -- ariel, 2018
Author Information
Margery Fee is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where she has taught Indigenous literature since 1996. Her most recent articles in that field appeared in What's to Eat? Entrees in Canadian Foodways, edited by Nathalie Cooke, and Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations, edited by Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra. She co-authored the Guide to Canadian English Usage.
