House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Deanna Reder

Deanna Reder (Cree/Métis) is an Associate Professor in the Departments of First Nations Studies and English at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in Indigenous popular fiction and Canadian Indigenous literatures, especially autobiography. She is Principal Investigator of a five-year SSHRC-funded project for 2015-2020 called “The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Northern North America up to 1992.” She has co-edited several anthologies including Troubling Tricksters (2010), Learn, Teach, Challenge (2016), and Read, Listen, Tell (2017). The most recent is Honouring the Strength of Indian Women, a collection of the plays, stories, and poetry of Vera Manuel, forthcoming from the University of Manitoba Press.

 

Article (co-authored with Alix Shield)
“‘I write this for all of you’: Recovering the Unpublished RCMP ‘Incident’ in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973)”

Abstract
In a 1989 interview, Métis author Maria Campbell complained to Hartmut Lutz that a section of her autobiography, Halfbreed, first published in 1973, was removed by the publisher against her wishes. During a chance meeting with Campbell in Dublin in 2017, and following Indigenous protocols, Deanna Reder and Alix Shield asked her for permission to search for early versions of Campbell’s text. With Campbell’s blessing, Alix Shield conducted an archival search for any early material, and discovered the excised passage that revealed that when Campbell was a teenager, she had been raped by RCMP officers. This article includes the found text and discusses the impact of its excision.

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