The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Lands Claimed by Canada is collecting and studying one of the most neglected literary archives in English Canada, an archive neglected because settlers used literature to consolidate a narrative of Canada starring the British-descended resulting in university curricula that featured the British canon. Rather than subject this archive to the typical methods of a field that has ignored or appropriated Indigenous intellectual production, we ask how it might be possible to work out specifically Indigenous literary methods to study it.
Indigenous research methodologies and literary criticism have developed along divergent tracks, mainly because literary scholars typically do not work with or hold themselves accountable to the communities that produce the literature that they study. Our project bridges this gap to produce the most comprehensive literary history of the period and the new ways of training literary scholars by consulting and working collaboratively with specific Indigenous communities.
TPatT began as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded project (2015-2021), founded by Cree-Métis scholar Deanna Reder (SFU), settler scholar Margery Fee (UBC), and Cherokee scholar and writer Daniel Heath Justice (see the "ABOUT" tab at the top of the page for more details). While initially imagined as a community accessible resource celebrating often neglected writing by Indigenous authors in the past few centuries, TPatT has become a gathering space or a hub, where researchers for other projects have added to the TPatT collection as a way to generate attention for their work and to support each other's research.
For example, TPatT is now where researchers can access settler scholar Susan Glover's Voices of Ancestors (VOA) collection, an amazing database of texts by Indigenous authors written before 1870, the result of careful and painstaking archival research (see "Featured Collection" on home page or "VOA" tab at the top of the page).
TPatT also hosts work by settler scholar and team member Alix Shield on Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and E. Pauline Johnson's Legends of the Capilano. Shield has been a part of TPatT since 2015, when as a graduate student she began as a research assistant, eventually becoming TPatT's Drupal website developer and project manager. In 2017 Shield famously uncovered a missing passage that had been removed from Halfbreed just prior to publication and against the author's wishes. This allowed the author and publisher to release an intact version of the book in 2019. In 2020 Shield earned her PhD and continues to work as a team member. (see also https://alixshield.com/)
As well, TPatT hosts content by settler scholar Christine Bold on Seneca Vaudevillian Go-won-go Mohawk. Initially Bold uncovered Mohawk's plays as part of her research for her award-winning book Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s, published by Yale University Press in 2022. As she neared retirement she contacted Mohawk's Seneca community, asking where they would like the plays to be housed and they suggested that the plays remain accessible to current and future community members, which complies with our work towards longterm data preservation for TPatT content. Accompanying the archival material that Bold has uncovered are additional materials such as a biography of Mohawk by Seneca performer Rosy Simas and a conversation between Bold and Indigenous performing arts experts Michelle St. John and Monique Mojica, the second artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts.
Also in TPatT are materials from the Hartmut Lutz collection. In 1991 Lutz released Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors, one of the first works that focused on Indigenous writers in Canada. Towards the end of his career two TPatT research assistants, Iñupiaq philosophy student Rachel Taylor and Métis international studies student Treena Chambers, visited him in Germany to examine his papers. Lutz generously shared many documents and interviews on cassette tape with TPatT and eventually over 750 books that comprise the Hartmut Lutz Collection of Indigenous Literature, with the Simon Fraser University library.
Of note, TPatT also holds documents from members of the Government Agent, Literary Agent (GALA) Project, including Julie Rak, Keavy Martin, Warren Cariou (Métis), Armand Garnet Ruffo (Ojibwe), and Gregory Younging (Cree). This material joins others produced by TPatT, including archival research on such writers as Vera Manuel (Ktunaxa and Secwep'emc), James Brady (Métis), and James Settee (Cree), as well as a searchable database and short biographies of key Indigenous authors, complete with bibliographies for future reference. Our plan is to increase and supplement these materials as a way to support the teaching and research of Indigenous authors in lands claimed by Canada.
