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xi Iwas attending a conference recently when another academic politely asked about the nature of our book—the collection of essays, creative pieces, and interviews that Deanna Reder and I gathered and selected for Troubling Tricksters. When I characterized the anthology and gave a general description of its contents, he responded, “I hope someone is working on Sheila Watson and suggesting how ‘postmodern’ her use of the trickster is.” It was an interesting remark, both in its focus on a non-Native writer who had used a trickster figure in her work of fiction and in demonstrating the persistence of identifying a trickster through a decidedly postmodern lens. I refrained from comment, not out of a sense of judgment, but out of a sense that, unfortunately , I might have made precisely that kind of remark not so long ago. Indeed, my own work has not been free of these kinds of assumptions and connections, to which an article I had written on Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk some years ago would bear witness. At the time, I had made use of Allan Ryan’s The Trickster Shift, which was the most current piece of criticism on the subject—but which in its generality does not satisfactorily address the kinds of questions and issues that the contributors address herein. In feeling that there was yet more to be done on the subject, Dr. Manuela Costantino (Department of English, UBC) and I made a preliminary attempt on the subject by organizing a panel at the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2007, at which a shorter version of a paper that appears in this anthology was presented. In formulating the scope and nature of the collection, Deanna Reder then stepped in and gave it the shape it now assumes. To put it in vastly understated terms, I am most deeply grateful to linda morra A Preface Ruminations about Troubling Tricksters and appreciative of her: she is a most extraordinary woman from whom I learned exponentially in the process of working on the anthology and in putting the selected pieces together. She is the real force and intelligence behind this book. In reading over the anthology again, I am freshly reminded of some of our original objectives. Since the late 1980s, tricksters have been seen as emblematic of a postmodern consciousness rather than as part of specific Indigenous cultures, histories, storytelling; and since tricksters have often been used in the service of a predominantly white and colonial culture that characterized this figure as exotic, tricksters need to be relocated within specific Indigenous socio-historical contexts, and understood properly within those contexts. The conversation I mentioned at the outset of this preface merely reinforced my sense of rationale for our book and provided further justification about why it was so vital. Greater accountability, responsibility, and more finely developed, ethical criticism—these are the words and phrases that kept flooding over me as I read over the essays, interviews, and creative pieces selected for the anthology. I am deeply grateful to each of the contributors for making Troubling Tricksters what it is—a “troubling,” provocative, compassionate, savvy, and timely book that showcases the complexity of, and the need to ground the trickster in, Indigenous socio-historical contexts. I feel thoroughly honoured and privileged to be a part of it. I am also thankful to Lisa Quinn, the editor at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, who was enthusiastic about this project from the outset; to the readers of the manuscript, whose suggestions were extremely useful; to Bishop’s University for providing funding towards the publication process and for showing support for our work; to Sylvie Côté, a blessing in the form of the Director of Research Services at Bishop’s University; to the members of the Department of English at Bishop’s University for their kindness and support; to my students of English 352, especially Serena Trifiro, Tanja Schnell, Verena Jager, Katharina Forster, Taylor Evans, Ben Wylie, Whitney Carlson, and Pat Corney, with whom I shared many of the ideas from the manuscript and with whom discussions about the subject were a source of stimulation and pleasure; and to those friends (especially Mercedes Watson, Brendan Davis, Matsuo Higa, Barbara Richardson, Anna Sedo, Margaret Tucker, and Bruce Gilbert) and family for being so loving and kind as Deanna and I worked through the manuscript. xii a preface ...

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