https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1374-6972
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ABSTRACT
Reading representations of relationships in Chelsea Vowel's story ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ from the graphic anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold, I consider how portrayals of expanded relationships are a call to action – a generative lens through which settler-colonial studies may engage with anticolonial teachings. I aim to demonstrate how reading Indigenous literatures can expand and transform the settler-colonial imagination that has been taught to understand the world through a lens of exclusive ideologies like white supremacy and, broadly, the linear and the binary in relation to gender, time, and ways of being. Looking to Vowel's story as an example, I contend that such work is of particular significance to the ongoing surge of Indigenous literary and creative production and to the dismantling of settler-colonial teachings in so-called Canada. This analysis of ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ underlines complex connections between settler-colonialism, knowledge creation, language, imagination, power, and Indigenous literatures. Joining many other scholars who are showing how Indigenous literatures generate new imaginaries that can transform colonial behaviors and systems, I read representations of Indigenous-led worlds and anticolonial teachings as an urgent call to action to heal.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
Data are available upon reasonable request by contacting the corresponding author.
Notes
1 Chelsea Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri et al., This Place: 150 Years Retold (Highwater Press, 2019), 246–76.
2 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 251.
3 Ibid., 256, 261, 274.
4 Chelsea Vowel, Buffalo is the New Buffalo: Stories (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022); and Métis in Space, produced by Chelsea Vowel and Molly Swain, podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/zw/podcast/m%C3%A9tis-in-space/id921685195; and Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Issues in Canada (Highwater Press, 2016); Vowel's website www.apihtawikosisan.com specifies: ‘she is writing from a Métis perspective’.
5 Daniel Heath Justice, ‘Indigenous Wonderworks and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary’ (APEX Magazine, 2017).
6 Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter; Keavy Martin and Dylan Robinson, Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Wilfird Laurier Press, 2016); Sam McKegney, ‘Strategies for Ethical Engagement: An Open Letter Concerning Non-Native Scholars of Native Literatures’, Studies in American Indian Literatures 20, no. 4 (2008): 56–67.
7 See Dwayne Donald, ‘Forts, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Aboriginal-Canadian Relations: Imagining Decolonizing Educational Philosophies in Canadian Contexts’, in Decolonizing Philosophies of Education, ed. A.A. Abdi (Sense Publishers, 2012), 91–111; and ‘From What Does Ethical Relationality Flow? An “Indian” Act in Three Artifacts’, The Ecological Heart of Teaching: Radical Tales of Refuge and Renewal for Classrooms and Communities, 478 (2016): 10–16; and ‘We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination’, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 18, no. 2 (2021): 53–63; Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014); J. Adamson, Reading for the Planet: Environmental Justice and Indigenous Literatures (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2018); jaye simpson, ‘Land Back Means Protecting Black and Indigenous Trans Women’ Briarpatch Magazine, 2020; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Justice, ‘Conjuring Marks: Furthering Indigenous Empowerment through Literature’, American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 1–2 (2004): 2–11; and Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2018).
8 Donald, ‘We Need a New Story’, 53.
9 Ibid., 56; I replace Donald's language of ‘psychoses’ with an ellipsis in this essay's quote out of respect for disability justice and neurodivergent advocacy; however, the cognitive effects of colonialism remain real and worthy of further consideration.
10 Ibid., 256.
11 Donald, ‘We Need a New Story’, 56.
12 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 256.
13 Donald, ‘We Need a New Story’, cites métis author Maria Campbell: ‘wahkohtowin “meant honouring and respecting” relationships’; Sylvia McAdam, Nationhood, Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems (Purich, 2015); Matthew Wildcat, ‘Wahkohtowin in Action’, Constitutional Forum 27, no. 1 (2018): 13–24; Reuben Quinn, Personal teachings and conversations, 2016–2018; Angela D. Van Essen, Pêyâhtik (giving something great thought; to walk softly): reading bilingual nêhiyaw-english poetry, (University of Alberta, 2019), 1-239; Van Essen also quotes nêhiyaw poet Louise Halfe: ‘wâhkôhtowin is our crooked good and in essence we walk this path in a crooked bent over manner holding hands with every stranger we meet’ and connects this movement of body bending toward the land to many sacred ceremonies and practices (59).
14 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
15 Eve Tuck, ‘Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities’, Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409–27.
16 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 246.
17 David A. Robertson, ‘Meet the 20 Authors and Illustrators Who Made the Graphic Novel. This Place: 150 Years Retold’ (CBC, 2021).
18 Alicia Elliott, ‘Introduction’, This Place: 150 Years Retold (Highwater Press, 2016), v–vi.
19 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 246.
20 Rosanna Deerchild, Chelsea Vowel Interview, This Place: A CBC Podcast (CBC, 2020), 24:24.
21 Alongside many others who critique the term ‘ally,’ my ongoing doctoral research traces the conceptualization of ‘allyship’ and looks to responsible engagement with Indigenous literatures as one way to embody or enact the essence of the concept as one of ‘kinship’ or the ‘familial’; Consider a well-circulated zine from the Indigenous Action Organization released in 2014 titled ‘Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex, An Indigenous Perspective and Provocation’.
22 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 255.
23 Ciann L. Wilson and Ann Marie Beals, ‘Making Space for Afro-Indigenous Community’, Briarpatch Magazine, 2024; simpson, ‘Land Back Means Protecting Black and Indigenous Trans Women’; Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Fernwood, 2017); Desmond Cole, The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power (Doubleday, 2020).
24 Deerchild, Vowel, 12:30.
25 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 274; several writers discuss the relationship between wâhkôhtowin and kinship including: Sylvia McAdam (Saysewahum), Cultural Teachings: First Nations Protocols and Methodologies (Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre: Saskatoon, 2009); and Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems, (Purich: Saskatoon, 2015); and ‘The Pipe Laws’, YouTube (YouTube, July 28, 2014); Van Essen, Pêyâhtik.
26 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, ‘Constellations of Coresistance’, 211.
27 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015); see also, The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 2019.
28 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 251.
29 The ‘One Book’ movement began in 1998 out of the Seattle Public Library and several institutions across the world have followed their example. The University of Winnipeg's 2019 iteration, named 1BUW (One Book UWinnipeg) focused on the anthology This Place; 1BUW also included a traveling art exhibit When Raven Became Spider from September 19 to November 30 that featured art by Indigenous creators, exclusively, and explored popular culture like the superhero comic: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/1b19/index.html
30 Justin Rempel, Prairie History Journal no. 4 (2021): 81.
31 Anonymous, ‘This Place: 150 Years Retold’, Review, (Publisher's Weekly, 2020), 89.
32 Vowel, Indigenous Writes; I have personally witnessed questions like this being asked by settlers at many events at which an Indigenous person speaks regarding truth and reconciliation; the ways we seek out information matter.
33 Wayne Arthurson, ‘History Retold’, Quill & Quire 85, no. 4 (May 2019): 30.
34 Collette Poitras, ‘This Place: 150 Years Retold’, Review, (Canadian Children's Book News, Fall 2019), 39.
35 Arthurson, ‘History Retold’, 30.
36 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 251.
37 Ibid., 250.
38 Tuck, ‘Suspending Damage’; Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matters; Donald, ‘We Need a New Story’.
39 In an article from March 2016 for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives titled, ‘Reconciling in the Apocalypse’, Erica Violet Lee refers to, Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence Gross, who ‘writes about ‘Post Apocalypse Stress Syndrome’, acknowledging that Indigenous people have already lived through multiple attempts at our mass destruction. As Gross writes, ‘the Anishinaabe have seen the end of our world’, and we have lived through it, returning stronger than ever.’ https://policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/reconciling-apocalypse; also, Julian Brave Noisecat, ‘How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse’, Emergent Magazine, 2021; also, Kyle Whyte, ‘Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises’, Environmental & Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (2018): 224–42; to name only a few.
40 Tuck cites ‘Sondra Perl (1980), Ann Anlin Cheng (2001), Julia Kristeva (1980), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), Joan Didion (2005), bell hooks (1990), Patricia Williams (1992), and Toni Morrison (1987), among others’.
41 Tuck, ‘Suspending Damage’, 421.
42 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 270.
43 ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, This Place (from CBC, 24 August 2021). https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1020-this-place/episode/15862270-kitaskinaw-2350.
44 Ariadne S. Montare, ‘Standing Rock: A Case Study in Civil Disobedience’, GPSolo: Civil Disobedience 35, no. 3 (American Bar Association May/June, 2018).
45 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 273.
46 Vowel, This Place, 15:11.
47 Vowel, Buffalo is the New Buffalo; Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Audre Lorde, ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (Random House, 1980), 114–23.
48 Jas M. Morgan, ‘Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms’, GUTS Magazine, issue 6, 2016, http://gutsmagazine.ca/visual-cultures/.
49 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 246.
50 Ibid., 246.
51 Vowel, Buffalo is the New Buffalo, 122.
52 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 251.
53 Ibid., 250–1.
54 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 261.
55 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 256.
56 Aristotle, ‘Rhetoric’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (W.W. Norton and Company, 2010), 749–78; Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction: Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press, 1961).
57 McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Paradox Press, 1993), 7.
58 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 254, 276; ‘The Santa Maria’ is a replica of one of Christopher Columbus's ships that sits in the middle of West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
59 McAdam, ‘Tobacco’. Cultural Teachings: First Nations Protocols and Methodologies; I am indebted to my attentive reviewers for this reading – thank you, again!
60 Eve Tuck's 2017 Twitter as one example: ‘To watch the white settlers sift through our work as they ask, “Isn't there more for me here? Isn't there more for me to get out of this?”’ and ‘I forgot that people read extractively, for discovery. I forgot that all these years of relation between settler and Indigenous people set up settlers to be terrible readers of Indigenous work’.
61 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 253, 274.
62 Chelsea Vowel, ‘Redrawing the Past, Reimagining the Future: Indigenous Comics Today’, One Book UW Panel (Univeristy of Winnipeg, 2019), 28:00; https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/1b19/video-archive.html
63 Justice, ‘Indigenous Wonderworks and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary’.
64 McCloud, Understanding Comics, 28.
65 James Makokis, ‘Understanding Sexuality and Gender from a Nehiyô maskihkiwiyiniw (Plains Cree Physician) Perspective within Treaty Number Six Territory’, The Messenger Special Edition (College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, 2021); Vowel, ‘Names and the White Possessive: Information for Creatives’ (âpihtawikosisân, August 2022), https://apihtawikosisan.com; ‘Where No Michif Has Gone Before: The Form and Function of Métis Futurisms’ (Thesis, University of Alberta, 2020).
66 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 257.
67 Vowel, ‘Redrawing the Past, Reimagining the Future: Indigenous Comics Today’.
68 Deerchild, This Place.
69 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Zed Books, 2012); even, Plato, ‘Allegory of the Cave’, in The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy, 3rd ed., edited by Richard McKirahan and Patricia Curd (W.W. Norton and Company, 2015), 237–42.
70 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 252.
71 Vowel, This Place, 21:26.
72 Vowel, ‘Giving My Children Cree Names is a Powerful Act of Reclamation’, CBC News, 2018.
73 Jordan Abel, Injun (Talon Books, 2013); Cole, The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power; Neil Diamond, Reel Injun, (Rezolution Pictures, 2009); Daniel Morley Johnson, ‘Colonialism, Cops, and Chaos: Reframing the Discourse of Indigenous Homelessness in Edmonton’, Presented to Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness National Conference, 29 Oct 2013, Ottawa, Ontario; Sarah MacKenzie, ‘Community and Resistance in Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women’, Settler Colonial Studies, 11, no. 2 (2021): 118–33; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, etc.
74 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 256.
75 Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity of Canada, (University of Toronto Press, 2002); Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (UBC Press, 2010).
76 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minnesota Press, 2017).
77 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 266, 267.
78 Ibid., 275.
79 Rempel, Prairie History, 81.
80 Vowel, ‘kitaskînaw 2350’, 274.
81 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2015), 195.
82 Judy M. Iseke, ‘Importance of Métis Ways of Knowing in Healing Communities’, Canadian Journal of Native Education 33, no. 1 (2021): 83–97; Vowel, Indigenous Writes.