Indigenous Survivance

Room Number: TRS 1-075

Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/99265439037?pwd=QitWdlBhZ1dveWFZU1p6QjNqYXdmUT09

Chair: Christine Lorre-Johnston (Sorbonne Nouvelle U)

Speakers:

Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U), “Upgrade life!” Rupture, Development, and Constellation on the “Oblates Land”

Michaela Moura-Kocoglu (Florida International U), “To Carry Pain, To Heal Through Ceremony: Genocidal Violence in First Nation, Métis, and Indigenous Australian Literature”

Shazia Rahman (U Dayton), “Disruptive Histories, Ruptured Places, and Indigenous Knowledges”

Paper Summaries:

Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U), “Upgrade life!” Rupture, Development, and Constellation on the “Oblates Land”

The Deschâtelets monastery is at the centre of 26 acres of land by the Rideau River called the Oblates Land, from which priests of the Order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were sent to run residential schools. Today, it is at the centre of an urban development called “Greystone Village,” for which the repurposed monastery is to provide an aura of ‘heritage’ architecture.

Michaela Moura-Kocoglu (Florida International U), “To Carry Pain, To Heal Through Ceremony: Genocidal Violence in First Nation, Métis, and Indigenous Australian Literature”

This paper examines genocidal violence as well as modes of un-silencing and survival in Indigenous literature. The storytelling of Indigenous Australian, First Nations and Métis women writers counters the pathologizing image of Indigenous women as victims by manifesting survivance (Vizenor) in the face of pervasive and systemic abuse and trauma.

Shazia Rahman (U Dayton), “Disruptive Histories, Ruptured Places, and Indigenous Knowledges”

Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019) represents nonhuman characters such as winds that speak for the island and promulgate a type of archipelagic thinking that opens up possibilities for thinking through Andamanese Indigenous notions of time.