Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada (review)

Since the late 1980s, the increasing visibility of indigenous scholars in academia has fundamentally shifted the critical contours of Native North American literary studies. As a departure from earlier criticism that focused on cultural themes and features in Native literature, much current scholarship has built upon and expanded those concerns to include the epistemological and political contexts of the criticism itself. These contexts are particularly important given the continuing colonialism in North America. The increasing attention to indigenous voices has been accompanied by deeper reflection on the role of non-Natives in the study of Aboriginal literatures, especially in this current decade. In 2000, Len Findlay exhorted scholars to 'Always Indigenize!' in an influential essay of the same title, while in 2001, Helen Hoy's How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada challenged universalist claims about the presumed cultural transparency of Native-authored texts. Now, in Travelling Knowledges, Renate Eigenbrod provides a thought-provoking study for non-Native readers of Aboriginal literature, grounding the analysis in the concepts and experiences of both Native and non-Native movement, motion, border-crossing, and subject position.

Interweaving her own conversational reflections of being a German immigrant to Canada with Aboriginal textual expressions of both migration and rootedness, Eigenbrod introduces her study with a deceptively simple statement: 'In this book, you will follow the different paths I took in order to come to an understanding of Canadian Aboriginal literatures.' Drawing deeply from a wide and impressive range of texts by both Aboriginal and non-Native writers, scholars, and theorists, she sets herself a number of ambitious goals: positioning non-Native readers in relationship to Aboriginal texts without displacing Aboriginal subjectivities; exploring Native contexts in varied texts while avoiding essentialized presumptions of a monolithic 'truth' of Aboriginal experience; engaging the texts as a thoughtful scholar while simultaneously challenging the assumed authority of the (outsider) literary critic interpreting Native literary expression.

Perhaps her most significant goal is the desire 'to demonstrate the complexities of Native literature – complexities one would expect from any other literature.' By reflecting on her own experiences – both successful and improvable – in reading, teaching, and understanding Aboriginal literatures, Eigenbrod makes manifest in her analysis the theory that she proposes. Rather than making sweeping judgments about both the cultural contexts and Eurocentric literary merit of these texts, Eigenbrod places her own personal and intellectual experiences into conversation with those of diverse Aboriginal writers on shared issues of textual relevance, such as migration, cultural literacy, decolonization, essentialism, and identity. In so doing, the analysis expands from a narrow lens of authoritative outsider interpretation to a multi-layered conversation between both insiders and outsiders, thus demonstrating the wide range of experiential, cultural, and expressive possibilities of Aboriginal literature. Such an approach is both unabashedly political and, at times, uncomfortable for those who are in the position of being outsiders to the cultural contexts of the texts. Yet, as Eigenbrod notes, only by attending to both the social realities of Aboriginal peoples and the ways in which scholarship might contribute to either liberation or continued colonization can scholars hope to come to an honest understanding of Aboriginal literatures and a respectful relationship with Aboriginal peoples.

On occasion, Eigenbrod's voice is almost entirely buried beneath excessive references and quotations from other texts, and this is a pity, as her sensitive discussion of both texts and contexts is quite engaging, and her close readings of texts by writers such as Maurice Kenny, Lee Maracle, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, Richard Wagamese, and Maria Campbell are particularly astute. Given her methodological commitments to privileging Native subjectivities, more sustained discussion of texts could only have enhanced the analysis.

Yet this is a minor concern about an otherwise impressive and ambitious study. Throughout Travelling Knowledges, Eigenbrod skilfully manoeuvres through the experiential, ethical, and intellectual complexities of studying Aboriginal literatures with a keen eye, a thoughtful mind, and an open heart. Such work offers much for both Native...