Resurgent Reading Practices: Indigenous and Anishinaabe Literature Book Clubs in Northwestern Ontario

About the Event

Why do we read Indigenous literature and why does it matter? What does it do? In this talk, SSHRC post-doctoral fellow Dr. Adar Charlton will discuss how reading Indigenous literatures serves transformative, healing, decolonizing, and place-based resurgent potentialities. Her research on Northwestern Ontario Anishinaabe Literature and subsequent work with Indigenous book clubs in Thunder Bay explores the importance of supporting and facilitating various reading communities, in both Indigenous and settler spaces, that through their reading practices can confront settler colonialism, settler amnesia, white privilege, racism, and the continued dispossession of Indigenous land in the place now claimed as Canada. Charlton will also consider the methodological implications of supporting and holding space for these reading communities as a white settler scholar, while maintaining ethical and accountable, community-driven, insurgent research practices that support local community goals and avoid extractive research approaches.