IO #1 -- Basil Johnston (Anishinaabe, Ojibwe)

Okay, here’s my imperfect offering. I was posting these to my personal Instagram and then it occurred to me that someone over here might like to see them too.

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It’s Indigenous History Month, and I thought I might do a little series on some of the Indigenous authors I teach about in my classes and the role of these folks in cultural resurgence.

Mine is a pretty limited and flawed settler perspective, but I hope the awesomeness of these folks will shine through anyway.

First off is an obvious one:

Basil H. Johnston (1929 - 2015) -- Anishinaabe language revitalizer, author, scholar, storyteller, and teacher

Johnston is one of the breakthrough authors who, in the 1960s and 1970s, began to create space for Indigenous voices in Canadian publishing. Using his position at the Royal Ontario Museum, Johnston did incredible work in Anishinaabe language revitalization, gathering and saving traditional stories and creating language curricula.

Johnston’s two essential essays from Canadian Literature issues 124 (1990) and 128 (1991), “One Generation from Extinction” and “Is That All There Is?” are available for free online. In these essays, Johnston identifies and critiques the way settler scholarship fetishized physical objects while ignoring and/or belittling the profound knowledge and philosophy of the peoples who created them.

His clarity about the power and philosophy embedded in his language has been transformative for me as a reader and student of Indigenous literatures. Anishinaabe scholars and writers like Leanne Simpson and Louise Erdrich develop on his discussions of language and philosophy, and he was an influence on myriad Indigenous authors in the generation following him (Thomas King, Drew Hayden Taylor, etc.).

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When I posted this to Instagram, I found out that a friend of mine knew Johnston during the 1980s and had family connections to him (he used to babysit her brother). I wouldn't have known that unless I posted this little profile, so that was a fantastic outcome in itself.

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IO #2 -- Jo-Ann Archibald, Q’um Q’um Xiiem (Sto:lo)

For Indigenous History Month, an imperfect offering: some posts about Indigenous authors who have inspired my work and the students I teach.

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(Photo credit Alex Nguyen)

Joanne Archibald, Q’um Q’um Xiiem (Sto:lo)

Last week and this week some colleaguefriends and I are reading Jo-Ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit (2008), a book that has been foundational to my approach to teaching Indigenous literature and oratures — and that I would like to underlie my approach to teaching everything.

Archibald is of course part of a larger discussion among Indigenous thinkers about what oral knowledge is and how you do philosophy with it and in it -- Basil Johnston among them.

Archibald's Indigenous Storywork is a book directed specifically at educators and researchers. There are quite a few books now about Indigenizing and decolonizing methodologies -- my sense is that this is among the first, but I am not an expert. She is the one who coined the word "storywork" (3).

In the book, Archibald explores, but more importantly models, good practices in reading, researching, teaching about, and teaching with traditional stories.

What I mean is that she doesn't just list principles: she describes her whole process of thinking, interacting, asking, being, listening, reflecting, returning.

Inescapably, although we start from the idea of talking about traditional stories, if we are thinking about that in a serious way, it leads us towards a different paradigm of education, one that is embedded in relation -- not just ways of knowing, but ways of being ways of acting in the world.

Foundational to Archibald’s approach is the truth that knowledge can’t be separated from the relationship and situation in which it is transmitted.

To talk about traditional stories is always also to talk about the foundational philosophies of Indigenous cultures, which are -- if I am understanding Archibald correctly -- active philosophies, applied philosophies. That is, to study it is also to do it, or you’re not really studying it.

We talked Friday about many of her ideas, and especially a lot about teaching literature in relationship and as relationship, rather than as an object of study.

When I think about how to respond in my own practice to the truth of the violence “education” has perpetrated in this country — one small thing that comes to me is to try to be the opposite kind of teacher to those who collaborated in that violence — to be instead the kind of teacher who sustains life.

Archibald has a lot to teach about that.

I recommend this book to those, like me, travelling the long road of trying to decolonize our teaching and research practice.

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Note: You get a few more notes than Instagram because I perceive this format as more spacious. This mixes in some of my introduction from the book group with the Insta post.

I was lucky enough to see Archibald honoured at the STENISTOLW conference in, I believe, 2017.

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