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.
Including Susan Glover's Voices of Ancestors (VOA) database; Christine Bold's content on Seneca Vaudevillian Go-won-go Mohawk, Rak/Martin/Cariou/Ruffo/Younging's Documents for the Government Agent, Literary Agent (GALA) Project, materials from the Hartmut Lutz collection, Alix Shield's work on Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and E. Pauline Johnson's Legends of the Capilano alongside Deanna Reder/Margery Fee/Daniel Heath Justice's TPatT 2015-2021 research, etc.