Entangled Belongings

The large number of submissions to this special issue of Canadian Literature, “How to Be at Home in Canada,” is a testament to the continued centrality and ever-evolving questions of belonging in lands claimed by Canada. Diasporic populations negotiate complex relationships between their ancestral lands of origin and adopted homeland of Canada, which, while it claims to welcome diversity through its multicultural policies, systemically excludes Indigenous, Black, and racialized populations. Indigenous communities struggle to escape the colonial project of Canadian nationhood while asserting their own sovereign affiliations and rights to land. White settler populations, meanwhile, undertake the contradictory task of acknowledging their history as colonizers while simultaneously finding a place of belonging. The articles in this double issue consider narratives from communities in Canada that assert or contest relations between land, story, ownership, and belonging—in both rural and urban environments, and in forms as varied as traditional Indigenous stories, religious documents, poetry, prose fiction, and government policy.

 

In the landmark 1997 Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en land claim brought before the Supreme Court of Canada, Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, the Court ruled that traditional Indigenous story was admissible in court as evidence of land ownership, legitimizing what settler scholar Margery Fee has called “a literary land claim.”¹ The essays in this collection examine the ways literary texts claim space and explore questions of belonging for Indigenous, diasporic, and settler populations. Processes of claiming or challenging narratives of belonging are clearly different for every community; what unites them is the urgency of finding ways to be at home in Canada. Syilx (Okanagan) scholar, author, and activist Jeannette Armstrong writes, “I am claimed and owned by this land, this Okanagan” (174). Here
Armstrong reverses and calls into question the colonial process of claiming land to demonstrate the way land claims us, and her poetry and prose embody the intimate process of living in relationship to the land. In Literary Land Claims (2015), Fee traces how texts use strategies to claim—or problematize the act of claiming—land, story, and belonging. Black scholar Rinaldo Walcott, in his essay “‘A Tough Geography’: Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada,” signals the importance of such an undertaking: “It seems that one of the challenges facing contemporary black Canadian art is to move beyond the discourse of nostalgia for an elsewhere and toward addressing the politics of its present location” (46–47). By centring the politics of the present, the authors in this collection demonstrate the ways writers address the politics of place through literary land claims. Connecting community to place both engenders and demonstrates belonging; yet the forces of unbelonging, with multiple national imaginaries working in tension with one another, continually undermine the ongoing process of finding, making, and feeling at home in Canada. The pieces we have gathered from among the strong and timely submissions consider the politics of claiming stolen land, and the ways that class, race, cultural practice, gender, and sexuality intersect with questions of territorial belonging, nationhood, and connection to place. Through the mobilization of decolonial, antiracist, queer, and ecological perspectives, these articles aim to resist settler-colonial claims to land, bodies, and homes; reckon with systemic racism and extractive methodologies; and make room for art, cultural expression, and conversation in open, inclusive spaces. The work of making and supporting these open, inclusive spaces is occurring at a crucial time when finding a sense of home and belonging in a broader world engaged in war and the wholesale destruction of homes underlines the high stakes of these debates. Questions of justice, complicity, and the politics of literary production in lands claimed by Canada are as urgent as ever.

 

As much as CanLit, as an institutional formation, maintains hegemonic structures of white settler-colonial society in Canada, it is also contested; writers have often been at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of protest and dissent. Their work is implicated in deep political and moral questions, ones that have become starkly relevant over the past year. We released the call for papers in September 2023, just before October 7, the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, and we have continued working on this special issue over the course of the war, which Amnesty International, among others, has described as a “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza” (“You Feel Like” 35).² Many writers and artists are speaking out at this moment of crisis and contestation and, in acts of protest, are refusing those institutional supports whose funding is directly connected to the total destruction of lives, homes, lands, and waters.³ Many activists, faculty, students, and organizations are suffering severe consequences for articulating their dissent in a chilled climate of fear and silencing.⁴ Meanwhile, the work we do as scholars in universities—like reading, writing, and teaching—takes place alongside the dismantling of knowledge systems in Gaza, amounting to what Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi has called “scholasticide,”⁵ including the destruction of all twelve universities in Gaza, as well as Palestinian archives, museums, and libraries. In this context, we have special responsibilities in speaking out as scholars who have classrooms and lecture halls in which to think, study, and teach, as well as books to read, discuss, and share. This heated moment has ignited a sense of urgency—how, indeed, does one claim home in the shadow of genocide?—but it speaks to the work that many have engaged in over decades.

 

Part of the impetus in creating this special issue were two panels exploring “How to Be at Home in Canada,” organized by co-editors Heather Macfarlane and Basmah Rahman, as part of the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures conference at the 2023 Congress in Tkaronto.⁶ We were inspired by the overarching themes of that year’s Congress, “Reckonings and Re-imaginings,” and the way that convenor Dr. Andrea Davis and the other conference organizers put energy into “centering the experiences, knowledges and cultures of Indigenous and Black communities as valuable and critical modes of thought fundamental to the realization of racial and climate justice” (“Congress 2023”). We heard some outstanding papers and, in developing these sessions into a special issue, we hoped to create a noisy, lively forum for diverse perspectives on literary arts in Canada. We pictured a mix of full-length articles and shorter, conference-length papers making sharper, more pointed political critiques. We imagined research creation and autotheoretical pieces side-by-side with scholarly articles. We hoped for a diverse engagement with literary forms, and we envisioned a robust dialogue between papers focusing on complex interrelationships within and between Indigenous, settler, racialized, and diasporic voices. We encouraged submissions from graduate students and junior scholars.

 

While we were gratified by many submissions that exceeded our expectations, we also faced challenges bringing our vision into reality. Though we received a large and diverse number of papers, many were written by settler scholars. By soliciting papers through our own community networks and students we work with, we received some powerful papers by Indigenous, Black, and racialized scholars; but these submissions remained few. The peer review process added further complexity, since the shorter papers, more experimental pieces, and papers written by graduate students did not always successfully get through the peer review process. The peer review process was also challenging because of the tremendous effort it requires from the academic community and the difficulty we faced in securing appropriate reviewers. We were reluctant to call upon over-burdened colleagues who were already doing so much. In addition, due to its funding terms, Canadian Literature requires a minimum of two positive peer-review reports in order to publish an article. We knew that we had to find ways to counter these structural barriers and we worked hard with the editors at Canadian Literature, especially Christine Kim and amanda wan, to mitigate the effects of these impediments.

 

With an issue focused on solidarities, dialogues, and fostering community, we were motivated to create space for junior scholars and to implement a mentorship program to help demystify the peer review process. At almost every meeting, we spoke about the experiences of isolation that new academics face as they seek to publish in increasingly competitive spaces while simultaneously navigating reviewer comments. These feelings of isolation are only amplified for those of marginalized backgrounds, whether it be because of race, sexuality, or social class. Junior scholars are still in the process of fostering bonds within their specialized fields; not everyone has a community to turn to once they’ve received reviewer comments. In working towards creating academic communities, having direct dialogue with reviewers then increases accessibility for new scholars. Such an approach supports a community-based model, creating a space of what feminist scholar and activist bell hooks calls “radical openness” (114), which helps break down ideals that maintain hierarchical structures of knowledge and empowers marginalized scholars. With this methodology of radical openness at the forefront of our minds, we prioritized synthesizing peer review comments for the submissions and encouraged ongoing dialogue in the form of mentorship groups.

 

In Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice addresses the challenges of articulating humanity within various social, institutional, and environmental structures. Justice urges his readers to take action in decolonizing and making academic publishing more accessible. He writes, “Multiplicity is inherent in kinship; good relations require acknowledgement and, importantly, mindful accommodation of difference” (38). These kinship principles are essential for fostering dialogue within the publication and review process, and they can help demystify academic publishing. With that in mind, we decided that once we had narrowed down potential papers for our special issue and anonymized peer review reports were submitted, we would write letters consolidating reader reports for the submissions while emphasizing which suggestions would be manageable to implement. After sending out the letters for recommended edits, we held a workshop for the authors of the papers under consideration for the special issue and organized them into paper clusters. In these clusters, scholars working on similar research topics were encouraged to read one another’s papers and map how to begin the editing process. Each group also included a co-editor of this issue or the editor-in-chief of Canadian Literature to guide the discussion and address questions about publishing practices. Drawing inspiration from Asao B. Inoue’s practice of labour-based grading (107)—which prioritizes the labour and reflexive nature of writing to create reciprocal classroom ecologies based on “compassion” (120)—our process sought to embrace the supportive potential of academic communities. By fostering reciprocal ecologies, we aimed to develop one another’s skills through dialogue and mentorship.

 

Encouraging dialogue between authors influenced our process of organizing the papers into the table of contents, in which our priority was to initiate provocative conversations through the papers. We created three groupings of papers in order to best facilitate such conversations. Parts 1 and 3 focus on essays that engage with Indigenous literatures and confront white settler-colonial privilege, while part 2 brings together papers that address questions of diaspora, make connections between diasporic and Indigenous literatures, and search for unconventional comparative methods to think across boundaries of identities, histories, and disciplines.

 

Part 1, “Terristories: Grounding Home in Story,” gathers three essays that show how narratives of belonging are deeply contested in lands claimed by Canada, particularly with respect to Indigenous-settler relations. Métis scholar Warren Cariou’s portmanteau, terristory, suggests that literary approaches that take stories and language seriously, and that ground these in a deep awareness of land and place, create alternative pathways that assert Indigenous peoples’ presence on the land (Cariou, “Terristory” 4). All three papers in part 1—by Kristina Bidwell, Isabella Huberman, and Sarah Wylie Krotz—pay close attention to the relations between land, stories, and language. Each one reads widely across genres and forms, from poetry, fiction, and drama; to documentary films, performance, and land-based art; to public hearings, testimonies, and oral histories. And all three argue for the importance of listening across differences, as Cariou urges in his landmark essay, “On Critical Humility,” including attending carefully to nonhuman ways of communicating from land, water, plants, and animals (6).

 

NunatuKavut scholar Kristina Bidwell’s “Soup Kitchen or Kitchen Table?” addresses how “debates over uses of the word ‘Métis’” have intensified conflicts between communities, and Bidwell makes the case for how “an Indigenous literary studies approach can bring nuance to these debates” (20). Meticulously researched, this paper relates a little-known history of coalition-building between Indigenous peoples, in which Métis organizers from the Native Council of Canada visited Labrador in the 1970s and encouraged southern Inuit to use the term “Labrador Metis.” Not only has this solidarity-building largely been forgotten outside of Labrador, but Bidwell also confronts how communities in Labrador with strong kinship ties have since become fractured. She makes a strong case for using a “kitchen table methodology” of visiting, sharing a meal, and recording oral histories, in order to help Indigenous people resist settler-colonial erasures and restore connections within and between Indigenous communities.

 

While Bidwell focuses on how alliance-building between Indigenous communities can become compromised by colonial forces of division, settler scholar Isabella Huberman addresses how deep divides between settler and Indigenous narratives become reinforced through the state’s single-minded pursuit of capital accumulation and resource extraction. Huberman’s “Reading the River” addresses how the clash between environmental and Québecois-nationalist arguments in public debate over a deeply controversial hydro project built on the Romaine River contributed to the marginalizing of Innu anticolonial, sovereigntist arguments. Like Bidwell, Huberman uses a literary-critical toolbox to illuminate divergent stories, this time of hydro in Québec. In analyzing a variety of narrative forms—including a play, a public hearing, a novel, a collection of poetry, and even an article said to be co-authored by the river itself—Huberman eschews comparing, evaluating, or reconciling the many differences between these productions. Rather, her hope is to dwell in their cacophony, thereby “destabiliz[ing] the dominance of a single hydro story that enables extractivist and colonial regimes to function” (52).

 

Settler scholar Sarah Wylie Krotz, in “Homely Entanglements,” searches for ways to conceptualize settler belonging that do not continuously reassert a white supremacist regime of property, exclusion, appropriation, and erasure. She does so by learning from and “thinking with caragana,” a bush introduced into the prairies to act as a hedge, windbreak, and property divider. From one perspective, caragana is an “invasive” species that displaces prairie grasslands, negatively impacts biodiversity, and facilitates settler-colonial transformations of land into property. On the other hand, it provides shelter, food, and a sense of home for a wide variety of human and more-than-human beings. Krotz sets herself the challenge of tracing caragana through its many representations in literature, art, and film, paying close attention to its natural history and reckoning with its complex role in settler-colonial discourses and practices. Through this process, Krotz’s own “sense of home and place expands, branches, and becomes more tangled alongside (and into) caragana’s own story” (78). Krotz asks herself: “With caragana as my guide, I wonder, can I learn new ways of understanding home, not as a palisade, but as a penetrable shelter—a passage—more like my own living, breathing, permeable skin?” (93). She resolves to learn how “to sit with the discomfort of unsettling my secure and comfortable sense of place” and “to consider the ways in which my love for my home is implicated in colonial white supremacy” (89). As difficult as this challenge is, the benefits are learning how to co-habitate and “shar[e] a space I call my own but that isn’t mine at all” (97).

 

Part 2, “Be/Longings: Liquid Movements,” brings together four articles that ruminate on finding “home” through acknowledging and honouring cultural traditions. These articles explain how “home” is not tied to a static space but is a fluid notion, much like water that flows with experience and is shaped by its surroundings. Black scholar and poet Jhordan Layne’s work of poetic autotheory, “Black Out,” traces colonial histories and decolonial possibilities through acts of literary creation. Offering an autobiographical account of his relationship to Kingston, Ontario, he interacts with Indigenous lands and treaties while intimately contemplating the layers of emotions that come with living on these lands, moving beyond superficial understandings of territory and instead “searching for the true skin” of place (107). Centring community and place, Layne offers glimpses of Kingston-based poets such as Sadiqa de Meijer, Carolyn Smart, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Dylan Robinson, and Armand Garnet Ruffo and their contemplations of intersecting discourses of colonialism and imperialism as they relate to “Kingly locales” (102). By acknowledging this community of poets, Layne conveys a sense of complex loneliness that intertwines with hopes for alternative futures. In practice, Layne encourages a slow reading that pulls readers into a sense of liminality and builds towards decolonial thought and research as it relates to Indigenous place, treaties, and responsibilities.

 

Expanding on themes of decolonizing place, Latina settler scholar Nicole Flores also discusses decolonial place in her article “‘The Sea Is History’: Anticolonial Place-Making in the Water Spaces of Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return,” which examines the decolonial possibilities of water as it relates to dialogues between Black and Indigenous communities. She suggests that water methodologies are “shared instruments of a collective, anticolonial possibility” (112). Centring Haisla and Black traditions, Flores asserts that water acts as a space of communication for the past, present, and future that transcends settler-colonial memory and understanding: “[W]ater is a place that addresses the trouble of inaccurate and limiting cartographies, static spaces, belongings, and national origins” (120). To find home is to respect knowledge and reciprocal exchange rather than asserting ownership.

 

Settler scholar Melanie Braith’s paper examines portals to different worlds in Canadian children’s literature through a comparative analysis of Cree author David A. Robertson’s The Barren Grounds and Vietnamese Canadian author Linh S. Nguyễn’s No Place Like Home. It explores the “interplay of place, story, and body” and highlights the relationships and responsibilities of immigrants in a settler colonial context (134). Offering a brief overview of the literary history of Canadian children’s literature, Braith critiques the genre for promoting multicultural ideologies without critical engagement and emphasizes the importance of reciprocity. Braith suggests that Robertson’s Cree protagonist, Morgan, finds home through Askí, or blood memory, while Nguyễn’s Vietnamese protagonist, Lan, understands home as a fluid multiplicity embodied gradually through respectful interaction with land and its caretakers. Home is not tied to a constructed nation-state; it can exist in multiple spaces through relationships with others and the land.

 

Turning to refugee literature, Bangladeshi settler scholar Basmah Rahman examines Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, in her article “‘Work Hard’ to Find ‘Home.’” Rahman suggests that homemaking is complicated by refugee subjecthood and uniquely implicated in Canada’s multicultural discourse because of an imposed and often compulsory narrative of gratitude toward the nation-state. Centring Vinh Nguyen’s seminal concept of refugeetude, which describes a “continued state of being and mode of relationality” (“Refugeetude” 110), Rahman argues that this consciousness can lead to prolonged states of loneliness within second-generation refugees. Rahman further asserts that despite this loneliness, Thammavongsa’s collection refuses “refugee narratives to be subsumed into a national fabric” (172). Indeed, refugee claims to anger, joy, silence, and living beyond survival are necessary to finding home in the nation-state.

 

Part 3, “How to Read Home and Imagine Otherwise,” demonstrates four scholars’ approaches to decolonizing literary analysis in order to promote ethical scholarship and ensure Indigenous cultural continuities. Olivia Abram models a settler approach to reading Indigenous comics that respects “positionality, location, and limits” (176), suggesting that settler readers step back from a typical close reading, which can impose meaning on a culturally different text and thus recolonize it through analysis, and acknowledge “the layers that exist between the story’s historical subjects, its multiple tellers, and its recreation” (197). By examining distance—spatial, temporal, relational, and constitutional—in an ethical-relational reading of Sonny Assu’s comic “Tilted Ground” from the collection This Place: 150 Years Retold, Abram suggests a movement away from what Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang call metaphorical decolonization and its associated, performative positionality statements, and towards a direct connection with the land and the people being studied.

 

Jaron Judkins, a settler scholar, also attempts to establish ethical distance and acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty in their analysis of Dawn Dumont’s memoir, Nobody Cries at Bingo. By breaking down their own complicity in colonialism in their former role as a Mormon missionary in the Plains Cree territory that is Dumont’s home, Judkins offers a personal perspective. From this unique position, Judkins reads Nobody Cries at Bingo as an assertion of territory that rebuffs “Mormonism’s literary land claim” (205). Through an analysis of the Book of Mormon, they demonstrate the erasure of Indigenous origin stories and reveal Mormonism’s attempt to justify land theft through its own story of Indigenous-Hebrew relations. Dumont’s text uses humour, Judkins claims, as an invitation to Mormons to be “better guests” in Cree territories (214).

 

Settler scholar Laurel Ryan, meanwhile, looks at the ubiquity of colonial renaming of North American spaces to reflect the legends of King Arthur in her essay “Locating Camelot in Canada.” Ryan examines the way North American settler populations are primed—through generations of co-opting the legends of Arthur in the name of English imperialism—to accept colonial mythologies imposed on the land. An analysis of the medieval imagery in British-born North American settler John Reade’s 1870 poetry collection gives insight into colonial erasure of Indigenous presence, whereby “Canada takes on the timelessness of Avalon, with its rulers inheriting the qualities of Camelot” (241).

 

The final article in this section, by Métis scholar Tianne Jensen-DesJardins, concludes our special issue with a turn to a discussion of Indigenous futurisms through an analysis of Chelsea Vowel’s Buffalo is the New Buffalo. Like the other articles in part 3, it outlines academic and personal approaches to decolonization in both the literal and metaphorical senses. The essay also brings us full circle to the articles in part 1 to highlight the way living is grounded in cultural experience and story, thus ensuring the same attention to and hope for Indigenous futurisms we see in Vowel’s text. Jensen-DesJardins looks in particular at the way Buffalo is the New Buffalo embeds Métis and Cree teachings into academic conventions, such as footnotes and reference lists, in order to make a place for Métis literatures in the academy. In the context of this special issue we, the co-editors, hope to make space for multiple conceptions of home in both the academy and in broader national discourses. We thank the authors and the editorial team at Canadian Literature for their efforts in ensuring this happens. Their dedication and intellectual vision have steeled our resolve to work harder to shift the culture of CanLit and to create meaningful spaces for making, being, and feeling at home.

 

Heather Macfarlane is an associate professor and settler scholar of English at Queen’s University. A comparatist by training, she works on questions of space and place in Canadian, Quebecois, Indigenous, and diaspora literatures.

 

Sophie McCall is a settler scholar in the English department at Simon Fraser University. Her main areas of research and teaching are Indigenous literatures in Canada from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the author of First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (U of British Columbia P 2011). She has published widely on a range of topics and she has edited or co-edited several collections of essays, stories, and visual arts. She is currently co-authoring In Collaboration: Building Futures in the Indigenous Literary Arts with NunatuKavut scholar Kristina Bidwell.

 

Basmah Rahman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Queen’s University. Her research, funded by SSHRC, focuses on Black, Indigenous, and people of colour literature based in Canada, with an emphasis on diasporic literature and intersections of identity representation within public education systems. Currently, her articles appear in Studies in Canadian Literature and The Conversation. As a former Ontario Certified Teacher and English Language Learners’ teacher, Basmah prioritizes inclusive literacy models to further student engagement and representation in classrooms. Her research uses an interdisciplinary framework of literary and pedagogical studies.

 

Notes

1. Delgamuukw v. 1. Canada [1997] 3 S.C.R. 1010. See especially paragraph 87. See also Napoleon; Borrows.

2. See Amnesty International’s report “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman,’” as well as recent rulings by the International Court of Justice, “Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024,” and the International Criminal Court, “State of Palestine.”

3. See, in particular, Canlit Responds canlitresponds.ca and No Arms in the Arts noarmsinthearts.com.

4. Across disciplines, censorship is being imposed systemically. See, for example, the report by Sheryl Nestel and Rowan Gaudet for Independent Jewish Voices Canada, Unveiling the Chilly Climate: The Suppression of Speech on Palestine in Canada.

5. Nabulsi is credited with coining the word scholasticide in 2009 (Moody). The term scholasticide describes the systematic destruction of educational institutions and the arrest or killing of teachers, staff, and students (United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights).

6. Thank you to the graduate students in the fall 2022 offering of Queen’s University’s ENGL 870 course, “Literary Place and Space in Canada,” for inspiring and contributing to these panels.

 

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hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge, 2003.

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