The Native in Literature

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In the fall of 1985, I attended a conference at the University of Lethbridge. English literature, postcolonial studies, and anthropology scholars, as well as a nascent Native studies crowd, attended the gathering from across Western Canada and the Northwestern United States. The conference’s official title was “The Native in Literature,” and I soon learned how that was interpreted and by whom. I wasn’t surprised; I was a little disappointed, because of Thomas King’s recent appointment to the University of Lethbridge’s Department of Native Studies, that only three Indigenous people attended: me, Viola Thomas (Terrace, BC), and one other woman whose name I can’t recall.

After sitting in the audience and listening to panels with speakers such as Rudy Wiebe, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and King for at least one and a half days (this was a weekend conference, and I had to return to work), I had never felt so ignorant about my own identity—primarily because the scholarly discourse “othered” the Indigenous subject.

This was the first time I had heard of Thomas King. I had lived in Alberta all my life, and here was a male—maybe Indigenous, I wasn’t sure. Time would tell. I and one other woman attendee left on the second day because we felt the discussion and presentations all framed Indigeneity as “otherness.” The outcome of that conference was a collection of essays entitled The Native in Literature: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives.

When King first wrote about landscapes and places that I was familiar with in southern Alberta, I was interested. I still had doubts about him being Indigenous, though. The last time I spent with King was on a trip to New Zealand in March 2005. We were a delegation of three Indigenous writers: me, Thomas King, and Sharon Shorty. We joined three Māori and three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers in Wellington and were hosted by Toi Māori. As a group of nine writers, we travelled to a marae—a customary Māori gathering place—and were treated with ceremony and feasted by the Māori people. We were able to attend events not open to most non-Māori people.

How do I feel about Thomas King? I have felt many things: anger, a sense of betrayal . . . But when I reflect on how the “institutionalization” of literature is built on the patriarchy, capitalism, and individualism, why am I surprised this ruse happened? As an Indigenous woman who has been writing and publishing since the late 90s, and who has had some success, I am aware how long Indigenous writers with lived experience have been denied publication.

Métis poet, writer, and professor Marilyn Dumont teaches for the faculties of Arts and Native Studies at the University of Alberta and is proud of Métis family lines from her mother’s Vaness/Dufresne families and her father’s Boudreau/Dumont families. She was awarded the 2018 Lifetime Membership from the League of Canadian Poets for her contributions to poetry in Canada. In 2019, she received a University of Alberta Distinguished Alumni Award and the Alberta Lieutenant Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award, and, in 2022, she was awarded the Alberta Queen’s Platinum Jubilee medal for public service. Her four collections of poetry have won provincial and national awards: A Really Good Brown Girl (1996); green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that tongued belonging (2007); and The Pemmican Eaters (2015). A fifth collection on the Indigenous history of Edmonton, called South Side of a Kinless River, was published by Brick Books in 2024.