Teaching the Talk That Walks on Paper: Oral Traditions and Textualized Orature in the Canadian Literature Classroom

Abstract

Did [the grandmothers] know our memory and our talk would walk on paper?—Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, “The Tears That Wove Our Songs” The call to include Aboriginal oral traditions in post-secondary English department curricula was among the urgings of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies’ roundtable on Aboriginal Literatures in 2000, and this paper considers ways of beginning to answer that call. Roy Harris has suggested in his book The Origin of Writi..