Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark

What would Indigenous resurgence look like if the parameters were not set with a focus on the state, settlers, or an achievement of reconciliation? Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation explores the central concerns and challenges facing Indigenous nations in their resurgence efforts, while also mapping the gaps and limitations of both reconciliation and resurgence frameworks.

The essays in this collection centre the work of Indigenous communities, knowledge, and strategies for resurgence and, where appropriate, reconciliation. The book challenges narrow interpretations of indigeneity and resurgence, asking readers to take up a critical analysis of how settler colonial and heteronormative framings have infiltrated our own ways of relating to our selves, one another, and to place. The authors seek to (re)claim Indigenous relationships to the political and offer critical self-reflection to ensure Indigenous resurgence efforts do not reproduce the very conditions and contexts from which liberation is sought.

Illuminating the interconnectivity between and across life in all its forms, this important collection calls on readers to think expansively and critically about Indigenous resurgence in an age of reconciliation.

Reviews
"This book is an undoubtedly critical, original, and powerful contribution to the field of Indigenous studies and beyond. With sound scholarship, the contributors show us how disentangling from reconciliation discourses is not only a tool of critique, but also a methodology for understanding how settler concepts of territoriality and authority have shaped Indigenous peoples’ understandings of themselves, their governments, and their relationships to land and to one another." — Shiri Pasternak, Assistant Professor of Criminology, Toronto Metropolitan University

"The relationship between reconciliation and resurgence is a complicated and, at times, deeply contested one. This volume does an excellent job of situating itself within the wider literature on resurgence and reconciliation and their conflicted and/or complimentary relationship. This is an important contribution to a fraught conversation, and it provides many different perspectives that help to, if not resolve, then guide the conversation beyond its current roadblocks towards something better." — Joshua Nichols, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law, McGill University

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280 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

For the Anishinaabeg people, who span a vast geographic region from the Great Lakes to the Plains and beyond, stories are vessels of knowledge. They are bagijiganan, offerings of the possibilities within Anishinaabeg life. Existing along a broad narrative spectrum, from aadizookaanag (traditional or sacred narratives) to dibaajimowinan (histories and news)—as well as everything in between—storytelling is one of the central practices and methods of individual and community existence. Stories create and understand, survive and endure, revitalize and persist. They honor the past, recognize the present, and provide visions of the future. In remembering, (re)making, and (re)writing stories, Anishinaabeg storytellers have forged a well-traveled path of agency, resistance, and resurgence. Respecting this tradition, this groundbreaking anthology features twenty-four contributors who utilize creative and critical approaches to propose that this people’s stories carry dynamic answers to questions posed within Anishinaabeg communities, nations, and the world at large. Examining a range of stories and storytellers across time and space, each contributor explores how narratives form a cultural, political, and historical foundation for Anishinaabeg Studies. Written by Anishinaabeg and non-Anishinaabeg scholars, storytellers, and activists, these essays draw upon the power of cultural expression to illustrate active and ongoing senses of Anishinaabeg life. They are new and dynamic bagijiganan, revealing a viable and sustainable center for Anishinaabeg Studies, what it has been, what it is, what it can be.

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