House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Alix Shield

Alix Shield is a PhD Candidate and settler scholar in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research uses contemporary digital humanities methods to analyze collaboratively authored twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indigenous literatures in Canada, and is primarily focused on E. Pauline Johnson’s and Chief Joe and Mary Capilano’s 1911 text Legends of Vancouver. Alix is also a Research Assistant for Dr. Deanna Reder’s “The People and the Text” SSHRC-funded project, and the recipient of an SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her doctoral work.

 

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“‘I write this for all of you’: Recovering the Unpublished RCMP ‘Incident’ in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973)”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