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 Metis, or nehiyawak, 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 nehiyawak intellectuals such as Maria Campbell, Edward Ahenakew, and James Brady. Grounded in nehiyawak 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.

About the Author
Deanna Reder (Cree-Metis) ) 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.

Reviews

"This fierce, timely, visionary book lives up to the 'obligations of stories' to which Reder commits. Reder is one of the most generous, brilliant scholars in her field, whose kindness and sharp wit radiate from each page. Bringing together essential texts in nehiyaw intellectual tradition over a span of two hundred years, Reder doesn't forget to place her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother within this constellation of storymakers. These writers and tellers of acimisowina, or personal stories, have motivated Reder's own lifelong work of words and inspired practice of 'autobiography as methodology.'" -Sophie McCall, Simon Fraser University, co-editor, Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island

"By contextualizing these nuanced acts of interpretation within the rich storytelling traditions of her own Cree-Metis relations, Deanna Reder presents a mode of reading that is vitally important: reading through wakohtiwin. The result is a grounded, relational, and ethically engaged form of criticism that provides a new path toward understanding classic works of Cree and Metis autobiography. With its attention to critical responsibilities and to the connectedness that stories generate, this work provides an important model for all students and scholars of Indigenous literature." -Warren Cariou, University of Manitoba, editor, mahikan ka onot: The Poetry of Duncan Mercredi



Book Information
ISBN 9781771125543
Author Deanna Reder
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Weight(grams) 151g