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Abram, Olivia

This interrogative essay identifies complexities associated with reading an Indigenous text from what I term a “secondary settler” perspective. I propose that settler readers’ ethical engagement with Indigenous works, specifically those intended primarily for Indigenous audiences, can be generative sites for decolonization. I reflect on my own experience engaging with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) Islands of Decolonial Love, in which Simpson prompts her Indigenous audience “to seamlessly identify with the characters, to see their own strength, love and humour reflected back to them” (“Falling”). By doing so, she categorizes Indigenous readers as an “in-group” that is hearing and heard in a space that often privileges non-Indigenous voices and positions settler-identified readers as an unintended audience. I hope to demonstrate an ethical, multifaceted, relational reading approach for Islands that might be extended to other Indigenous-authored texts being read by secondary settler readers. Rachel Flowers (Leeyq'sun) advocates for an active role for settlers in Indigenous Resurgence. Acknowledging and reflecting on one’s inherited position of power and willingly undergoing refusal, she suggests, is pivotal to decolonization. Settler readers can develop this willingness and contribute to decolonization, I argue, by engaging ethically with texts grounded in a refusal of settler-colonialism. Flowers maintains that “Indigenous peoples’ voices must be the breath of our struggle to end suffering, and our actions must direct its movement,” and I follow her guidance, seeking to demonstrate and celebrate reading approaches founded in Indigenous experience and knowledge (Flowers 37).

Text

University of British Columbia. ENGL 590

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0427414

Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/