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E I G H T Indigenous Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the 1990s: Critical Intimacy Michèle Lacombe This essay focuses on literary history, criticism, and fiction by Indigenous writers in the 1990s. It takes for granted Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen’s belief, citing Thomas King’s short story “Borders” in her 2007 book Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift, that in their capacity as “metaphors for multiple, complicated identities, borders between worlds—be they geographical, physical, political and/or colonial, racial, cultural, or any of these in combination,” are sometimes also “concrete, lived experiences” (Kuokkanen x). She uses the term “critical intimacy”1 for her understanding of the exclusions and silences in narratives, as well as for some of the ways in which our sense of scholarly distance is challenged. Her analysis stresses the university as a whole when she reminds us of Jacques Derrida’s emphasis on how criticism addresses the ethics of not speaking “in a language that is extraneous to what it seeks to contest” (Kuokkanen xiv).2 Jennifer Kelly, in a recent essay on using Indigenous literature in the university classroom, asks us to consider how “our adherence to notions of ‘objectivity’ reassert[s] itself through our failure to explore...culturally and nationally specific perspectives on the roles and responsibilities of listeners/ readers of indigenous literatures” (Kelly 118). Kuokkanen’s own preface comments on her relation to the Deatnu River, now on the border between Norway and Finland , a river experienced as a border but also as “a bond that connects the 1 9 9 2 0 0 M i c h è l e L a c o m b e families who live on its banks.” For Kuokkanen, now living in Canada, this becomes a metaphor for the complexities of postmodern situatedness: “Before roads were built along both its banks, the Deatnu was the main johtolat—a Sami word signifying passage, way, route, channel, connection —for people, news, provisions, mail, building materials, and so on.... Besides being a significant salmon river, the Deatnu has been a source of physical and spiritual sustenance for generations” (Kuokkanen ix). Kuokkanen adds that “had the vagaries of history, such as the drawing of the border between present-day Norway and Finland, taken place, say, ten or twenty years earlier or later, my family might have been living on the bank of the river that became Norway, and I might today be carrying a Norwegian passport rather than a Finnish one” (Kuokkanen xi). I am reminded of how some of my own French and Maliseet/Métis ancestors lived on both sides of the Saint John River before lumber interests and the 1842 WebsterAshburton Treaty, in the wake of the bloodless Aroostook War, arbitrarily drew the border in its current location in New Brunswick; some of my relatives are now Canadian citizens, others American.3 Migration and mobility , as well as rootedness, have long been physical and intellectual realities in the lives of Native people; many of their stories remain untold. While I do not by any means agree with everything said by Kuokkanen or indeed by any other critic cited in this essay, I believe that Indigenous scholars have important insights to offer, approaches that are under-represented and sometimes contested in our discipline and in the academy, and that merit greater attention. My comments should not in any way be taken as undervaluing the very important contributions of other scholars who have written sensitively about Native literature in ways that acknowledge their own situatedness.4 Rather, my contribution aims to restore the balance of Native and non-Native voices in critical debate, leaving ample room for both. My choice of literary texts is also necessarily selective; while I focus on two well-known “university educated writers,” to use Lally Grauer and Armand Ruffo’s term (507), it is important to acknowledge the richly diverse aspects of contemporary oral and written Native literature —literature that tends to be defined communally rather than as single author studies. Concerned primarily with Indigenous criticism, this essay very briefly makes use of two realist stories and two “meta-fictional” stories —for lack of a better word—from Thomas King’s and Eden Robinson’s collections One Good Story, That One (1993) and Traplines (1997) respectively . For me, these stories are a form of theory (and vice versa), and I use them in the classroom alongside more explicitly theoretical work in my upper-year courses on Canadian...

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