Writing settlement after Idle No More: non-indigenous responses in Anglo-Canadian poetry

This article examines the representation of settlement in Canada in the wake of Idle No More in recent Anglo-Canadian literature. It argues that Idle No More engendered a new vocabulary for settler-invader citizens to position themselves in relation to this Indigenous movement, with non-Indigenous Canadians self-identifying as “settlers” and “allies” as a means of both orienting themselves with respect to Indigenous resistance to the settler-invader nation-state and signalling an attempted solidarity with Idle No More that would not lapse into appropriation. Four very different poetic texts by non-Indigenous authors demonstrate this reconsideration of settlement in the wake of Idle No More: Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains (2014); Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia (2014); Rita Wong’s undercurrent (2015); and Shane Rhodes’s X (2013). Although only the latter two of these collections make explicit reference to Idle No More, all four of these texts engage with historical and current colonialisms, relationships to land and water, and relationships between Indigenous peoples and settler-invaders, providing examples of new understandings and representations of (neo)colonial settlement in post-Idle No More Canada

Beyond the Brink: Indigenous Women’s Agency and the Colonisation of Knowledge in the Maid of the Mist Myth

The myth of the Maid of the Mist of Niagara Falls is a settler story of an Indigenous woman who kills herself by piloting her canoe over the cataract. This is presented not as a tragedy, but as a cultural necessity. So compelling was this settler myth that until recently it was the focus of settler cultural production at Niagara. I argue that the creation and subsequent fixation upon the myth attempted to displace Indigenous stories, and the centrality of Indigenous women to Indigenous epistemologies and in decolonial action. The recent move to banish the myth from tourist audiences does further violence by moving colonial cultural production to the fringes of visibility and away from critical interrogation. The myth and the ways it is called upon and subsequently banished indicates the normalizing practices of settler colonialism and must be pulled from the brink of unnameability and unknowability into critical discourse

Anti-racism and public spheres: an examination of the politicization of anti-racism at the Writing Thru Race conference, 1994

Bibliography: p. 142-14