Alana Sayers will speak on “Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Literature”

Tuesday 6 December 2016
12 noon – 2 p.m.
First Peoples House, Big Classroom

Alana describes her presentation as follows: “Currently, there is minimal scholarship in indigenous literature that provides an extensive structural analysis of how power structures and relationships have created the field of indigenous literature, making it a colonial space. In Canada, Indigenous knowledges constantly need to combat the structural violence of imposed western logic in the on-going settler-colonial relationship. Assertions by indigenous scholars are happening in many disciplines in the western academy which have produced anti-colonial frameworks but have not yet been applied extensively to Indigenous literature and until it does literature will continue to be a colonial space that perpetuates what Hawaiian scholar Ho’omanawanui calls ‘the violence of translation.’ This talk will specifically look at selected examples of how settler colonialism and indigenous literature intersect as well as speak to how the ‘indian’ has been constructed and how this applies to literature.”