Creating Community: A Roundtable on Canadian Aboriginal Literature is a special book about imagination and challenge. We know that writers try to tell us things. We know that what they tell is culturally-based. But what exactly are Aboriginal authors trying to tell us? Fifteen writers and scholars discuss Aboriginal literature in its unique Canadian context. Their suggestions and experiences become warmly personal as they search for ways to understand and interpret Aboriginal imaginative writing in Canada. The contributors to this book are primarily both scholars, many at universities and colleges across Canada, and writers themselves. Their contributors will challenge readers and pace the way for further discussion and debate.
Introduction -- Natives on Native Literature: What do we rightly write? Or: Shot headfirst from the canon / Anna Marie Sewell -- Confluence: Confessions of a white writer who reads Native lit. / David Brundage -- Socially responsible criticism: Aboriginal literature, ideology, and the literary canon / Jo-Ann Episkenew -- Not just a text: "Indigenizing" the study of indigenous literatures / Renate Eigenbrod -- Begin with the text: Aboriginal literatures and postcolonial theories / Debra Dudek -- Storying the borderlands: Liminal spaces and narrative strategies in Lee Maracle's Ravensong / Karen E. MacFarlane -- Comic relief: Pedagogical issues around Thomas King's Medicine River / Renee Hulan and Linda Warley -- "You can't get angry with a person's life": Negotiating Aboriginal women's writing, whiteness, and multicultural nationalism in a University classroom / Jennifer Kelly -- A moose in the corridor: Teaching English, Aboriginal pedagogies, and institutional resistance / Sharron Proulx and Aruna Srivastava -- Teaching Aboriginal literature: The discourse of margins and mainstreams / Emma LaRocque -- "What about you?" Approaching the study of "Native literature" / Kristina Fagan -- "Fringes, imposture, and connections: Armand Ruffo's Grey Owl: The mystery of Archie Belaney and "Communist literature" / Jonathan R. Dewar -- Stories of destruction and renewal: Images of fireweed in autobiographical fiction by Shirley Sterling and Tomson Highway / Deanna Reder -- Contributors.
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