Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: postcolonial literature in a changing historical frame
- 2 Postcolonial fictions of slavery
- 3 Postcolonialism and travel writing
- 4 Missionary writing and postcolonialism
- 5 Postcolonial auto/biography
- 6 Orality and the genres of African postcolonial writing
- 7 Canadian literatures and the postcolonial
- 8 Postcolonialism and Caribbean literature
- 9 Postcolonialism and Arab literature
- 10 Postcolonialism and postcolonial writing in Latin America
- 11 Postcolonial writing in South Africa
- 12 Postcolonial literature in Southeast Asia
- 13 Postcolonial South Asian poetry
- 14 Postcolonial writing in India
- 15 Postcolonial writing in Australia and New Zealand
- 16 Indigenous writing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand
- 17 Postcolonial writing in Ireland
- 18 Postcolonial writing in Britain
- 19 Postcolonial writing in France
- 20 Postcolonial writing in Germany
- References
16 - Indigenous writing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: postcolonial literature in a changing historical frame
- 2 Postcolonial fictions of slavery
- 3 Postcolonialism and travel writing
- 4 Missionary writing and postcolonialism
- 5 Postcolonial auto/biography
- 6 Orality and the genres of African postcolonial writing
- 7 Canadian literatures and the postcolonial
- 8 Postcolonialism and Caribbean literature
- 9 Postcolonialism and Arab literature
- 10 Postcolonialism and postcolonial writing in Latin America
- 11 Postcolonial writing in South Africa
- 12 Postcolonial literature in Southeast Asia
- 13 Postcolonial South Asian poetry
- 14 Postcolonial writing in India
- 15 Postcolonial writing in Australia and New Zealand
- 16 Indigenous writing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand
- 17 Postcolonial writing in Ireland
- 18 Postcolonial writing in Britain
- 19 Postcolonial writing in France
- 20 Postcolonial writing in Germany
- References
Summary
Words of power
‘Words are sacred’, Anishinaabe poet and editor Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm reminds us. ‘They can transform. Words can change peoples’ attitudes, their thinking, their construction of reality, their actions. Words can change the world. As can silence’. To understand the literatures of Indigenous peoples in Canada, one must recognize the power of words, especially when their source is rooted in the peoples who have called this land home for thousands of years, and whose voices have all too often been passively ignored or actively silenced since the onset of European invasion in the sixteenth century.
In the continuing colonial context of Canada, where Aboriginal peoples make up just over 3 per cent of the entire population, the very existence of Indigenous words is a reminder that this is, indeed, a colonized land, and that its first peoples have not gone away or resigned themselves to silence. If anything, their words – in writing as well as ceremony, song, and performance and visual art – affirm the growing representational strength of Native peoples in this land, a strength born of both expansive vision and continuing struggle. The resulting expressive archive – richly realized and diverse in form, purpose and content – constellates a very different understanding of Canada than that assumed by its settler citizens.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature , pp. 484 - 538Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
References
. Race and the Crisis of Humanism, London: Routledge, 2007.
, and . The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999.
. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. , trans. and , Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
. Dreaming in Urban Areas, St Lucia, QLD, and Portland, OR: University of Queensland Press, 1996.
. ‘Recollections of the early days’, in , and (eds.), Those Who Remain Will Always Remember; An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing, Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000.Google Scholar
. ‘Humour and the defamiliarisation of whiteness in the short fiction of Australian Indigenous writer Alf Taylor’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44.4(2008).Google Scholar
, ‘Deep nation: Australia’s acquisition of an indigenous past’, Aboriginal History, 20 (1996).Google Scholar
. Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950, University of Western Australia Press, 2001.
. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007.
. ‘Noonuccal, Oodgeroo’, in and (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997.
New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera, South Melbourne: Hyland House, 1995.
, and . Performance and Cosmopolitics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
. People Are Legends: Aboriginal Poems, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978.
. Writing along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction, Auckland University Press, 1998.
. The Bone People, Auckland: Spiral, 1983
. Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body, London: Routledge, 2005.
. ‘Urbanising Aborigines: the social scientists’ great deception’, Social Alternatives, 2.2(1981).Google Scholar
. ‘Countering Caliban: Roberto Fernández Retamar and the postcolonial debate’, in Janine Little Nyoongah, ‘Talking with Ruby Langford Ginibi’, Hecate, 20.1(1994).Google Scholar
. I, The Aboriginal, Adelaide: Rigby, 1962.
. Hard Yards, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999.
. Steam Pigs, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997.
. Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory 1880–1939, Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1997.
. Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry, North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008.
. ‘Is there any relevance in the women’s movement for Aboriginal women?’ Refractory Girl (Sep. 1976).Google Scholar
. ‘Stepping stones across a river in spate: images of language loss in irish writing in English and in the guerilla poems of Lionel G. Fogarty’, in and (eds.) Irish-Australian Studies: Papers Delivered at the Ninth Irish-Australian Conference, Galway, April 1997, Sydney: Crossing Press, 2000.Google Scholar
. Just Like That and Other Poems, Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2007.
. ‘White guilt, victimhood and the quest for a radical centre’, Griffith Review (Winter 2007).Google Scholar
. ‘Kin-fused reconciliation: bringing them home, bringing us home’, Australian Humanities Review, 42 (2007), www.australianhumanitiesreview.org.Google Scholar
. Spiritcarvers: Interviews with Eighteen Writers from New Zealand, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998.
, and . Kayang and Me, Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Press, 2005.
, Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), p..
. ‘Magic realism as postcolonial discourse’, Canadian Literature, 116 (1988); repr. in Zamora and Faris (eds.), Magical Realism, pp. 407–26.Google Scholar
. White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
. The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous/Asian Story, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007.
. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, New York and Dunedin: Zed Books and University of Otago Press, 1999.
Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, ed. and , Carlton, VIC: Miegunyah Press, 2001.
. Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006.
. The Kadaitcha Sung, Ringwood, VIC, and New York: Penguin, 1990.
. Smoke Encrypted Whispers, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004.
, ‘Globalising indigenes: postcolonial fiction from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific’, JASAL, 5 (2006).Google Scholar
. ‘Politics of exposure: an interview with Alison Ravenscroft’, Meridian, 17.1 (1998).Google Scholar
- 1
- Cited by