Melanie Braith is the Project Manager and research coordinator of the Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak (Rocky Cree) Partnership Project, and the Research Coordinator for the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg. She holds a PhD in Indigenous literatures from the University of Manitoba, and her current research focuses on Indigenous storytelling and Indigenous children’s literature. As a settler scholar from Germany, she is grateful to be given the opportunity to live and work in Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation.
Article
Braiding Stories, Braiding Kinship: How Cree Storytelling Restores Relationships in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen
Abstract
This article argues that Cree author Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen celebrates Cree storytelling as a way to restore kinship relations that have been impacted by residential schools. In doing so, Highway’s 1998 novel re-thinks what it means to tell one’s life story and envisions a form of Cree residential school testimony. This article focuses on a part of the novel that has received surprisingly scant attention from scholars: the plays that protagonist Jeremiah creates toward the end of the novel. As I will demonstrate, an unpublished Highway play sheds new light on the significance of Jeremiah’s plays and the novel’s ending. My discussion of the unpublished play manuscript gives readers a more complete idea of the vision that Highway had when he created Kiss of the Fur Queen—and shows how central the role of Cree storytelling truly is to his novel.
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