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Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition

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Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition critiques ways of approaching Indigenous texts that are informed by the Western academic tradition and offers instead a new way of theorizing Indi...
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  • 03 May 2022
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Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition critiques ways of approaching Indigenous texts that are informed by the Western academic tradition and offers instead a new way of theorizing Indigenous literature based on the Indigenous practice of life writing.


Since the 1970s non-Indigenous scholars have perpetrated the notion that Indigenous people were disinclined to talk about their lives and underscored the assumption that autobiography is a European invention. Deanna Reder challenges such long held assumptions by calling attention to longstanding autobiographical practices that are engrained in Cree and Métis, or nêhiyawak, culture and examining a series of examples of Indigenous life writing. Blended with family stories and drawing on original historical research, Reder examines censored and suppressed writing by nêhiyawak intellectuals such as Maria Campbell, Edward Ahenakew, and James Brady. Grounded in nêhiyawak ontologies and epistemologies that consider life stories to be an intergenerational conduit to pass on knowledge about a shared world, this study encourages a widespread re-evaluation of past and present engagement with Indigenous storytelling forms across scholarly disciplines

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Price: $36.99
Pages: 194
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Series: Indigenous Studies
Publication Date: 03 May 2022
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781771125543
Format: Paperback
BISACs: Indigenous peoples, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Indigenous Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / Canadian, Comparative literature
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Deanna Reder’s Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina is both humble and groundbreaking, weaving moments of personal revelation with profound theoretical insight in an important new work of literary theory. Reder centers her positionality as a Cree scholar and connects her own and her relatives’ storytelling practices with those of other Cree and Métis authors and intellectuals to firmly reclaim autobiography as an Indigenous intellectual tradition. Upending previous scholarly assumptions that autobiographical writing is antithetical to Indigenous literary traditions, Reder privileges Cree literary concepts and practices, in Cree language, to elaborate the generic conventions and paradigms of Cree life writing. Reder also demonstrates through painstaking archival research the ways that editors and publishers have often undermined the intentions of Cree authors and thus have obscured Cree autobiographical innovations. With broad implications for genre studies, Indigenous studies, language revitalization, archival methods, and literary history, this book makes a profound and original contribution.

Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) ) is Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and English at Simon Fraser University. Her research project, The People and the Text, focuses on the understudied archive of Indigenous literary work in Canada, and she has co-edited several anthologies in Indigenous literary studies.

Table of Contents
Glossary: Cree terms
Introduction: She Told Us Stories Constantly: Autobiography as Theoretical Practice
1. âcimisowina: Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition
2. kiskêyihtamowin: Seekers of Knowledge, Cree Intergenerational Inquiry
3. Interrelatedness and Obligation: wâhkowtowin in Maria Campbell’s âcimisowin
4. Edward Ahenakew’s Intertwined Unpublished Life-Inspired Stories: aniskwâcimopicikêwin in Black Hawk and Old Keyam
5. Contradiction and kisteanemétowin in Edward Ahenakew’s “Old Keyam”
6. Traces of âcimisowina left behind: James Brady and Absolom Halkett
Epilogue
Bibliography