Survivance Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This thesis addresses a long history of colonization and intergenerational traumas still existing today, and the ability that Indigenous performing arts have in addressing sexual health barriers that Northern youth are facing. In this... more

This thesis addresses a long history of colonization and intergenerational traumas still existing today, and the ability that Indigenous performing arts have in addressing sexual health barriers that Northern youth are facing. In this year of Canada’s 150th celebrations there have been several arts initiatives that are working to build confidence and leadership amongst Indigenous youth. As Inuit are facing some of the highest suicide rates in the world, overcrowded housing, lack of mental health resources, high costs of living, intermittent access to reliable internet, intergenerational traumas, food insecurity, and high levels of sexual assault, it is easy to feel hopeless. This thesis focuses on the ability that the arts have in making tangible differences, bringing Indigenous youth into conversations that work through historical colonial suppression, paving new narratives to pass on to future generations, looking at how the arts are being used as a way to inspire what Gerald Vizenor termed as survivance. Focusing predominantly on Qaggiavuut!, an Arctic cultural performing arts group which promotes performance while highlighting non-colonial forms of Inuit self-identity and wellness—with a particular focus on some of the key members of this group whose interest in sovereignty and wellness specifically focuses on Inuit sexual and emotional health, exploration, expression and education. The arts are integral in helping future generations of Indigenous peoples gain confidence and break cycles of intergenerational traumas, thriving through survivance.

Journal essay published in Minding Nature Journal, Center for Humans and Nature, originally from new co-edited book, What Kind of Ancestor Do you Want to be? published by the University of Chicago Press, May, 2021. This essay answers the... more

Journal essay published in Minding Nature Journal, Center for Humans and Nature, originally from new co-edited book, What Kind of Ancestor Do you Want to be? published by the University of Chicago Press, May, 2021. This essay answers the title question through personal essay exploring mixed-raced identity, history of colonization, the decision not to have children, and the promise of land-based Indigenous education and cultural heritage.

From the moment small consumer cameras became available in Australia in the early twentieth century, Ngarrindjeri people embraced photography as a means to record their history, and represent their families, aesthetic traditions, and... more

From the moment small consumer cameras became available in Australia in the early twentieth century, Ngarrindjeri people embraced photography as a means to record their history, and represent their families, aesthetic traditions, and worldviews against the perilous times of attempted assimilation by the state, including the rampant forced removal of Aboriginal children that came to be known as the Stolen Generations. In analysing a collection of rare historical photographs from this period, taken by Ngarrindjeri photographers and retained in Ngarrindjeri families, we bring the perspectives of contemporary Ngarrindjeri Elders to bear. Significantly, the photographs can be observed to operate both as a rich counter archive to colonial representation and settler memory, and as esteemed cultural objects capable of drawing the weight of the ancestral past into the present moment, thereby tangibly enlivening cultural and spiritual connections generationally today. Our exploration in this article provides new theoretical perspectives and fresh historical insight into the ways in which photography has been substantially deployed by an Australian Aboriginal nation as a subtle and potent tool to assert self-determination, document survivance, and enact visual sovereignty.

Herman Melville called him Tashtego, a Gay Head Indian whose presence in Moby-Dick reminds us that Wampanoag men were the first whalers who helped build the region's offshore industry, were amongst those who contributed as it grew, and... more

Herman Melville called him Tashtego, a Gay Head Indian whose presence in Moby-Dick reminds us that Wampanoag men were the first whalers who helped build the region's offshore industry, were amongst those who contributed as it grew, and the only native-born whalers who persisted as the industry slowly declined after the Civil War. A recently-completed, two-year study of New Bedford-based, Indian whaling , and the development of a data base of more than 900 entries, has documented the lives and experiences of several generations of Wampanoag whalers from communities on the Cape and Islands while illuminating long standing patterns of cohort whaling in age-and family-based groups. As the links between whaling traditions and local community histories become clearer, we can begin building some middle-range theory for archaeological studies of 19 th -century Wampanoag settlements and sites. Concepts such as household cycles, cultural citizenship, and ethnic differences provide new entry points for fieldwork and data analysis, research aimed at deepening our understandings of the dynamics of community survivance in a maritime-oriented, Indian New England.

At the 2016 Midwest Archaeological Conference, a sponsored symposium titled “Encounters, Exchange, Entanglement: Current Perspectives on Intercultural Interactions throughout the Western Great Lakes” celebrated 50 years since the 1966... more

At the 2016 Midwest Archaeological Conference, a sponsored symposium titled “Encounters, Exchange, Entanglement: Current Perspectives on Intercultural Interactions throughout the Western Great Lakes” celebrated 50 years since the 1966 publication of George Irving Quimby’s seminal text, Indian Culture and European Trade Goods. The text divided time after European contact in the Great Lakes region into Early, Middle, and Late Historic eras, and its acculturation-based typology of diagnostic material culture remains a standard reference in Midwest historical archaeology today.
Since the 1960s, archaeologists, historians, descendant communities, and others have worked to investigate material outcomes of intercultural encounters in the Midwest from a variety of perspectives. This volume results from collaboration among scholars who presented at the conference.
In this introductory paper, we highlight theoretical frameworks, specifically the concepts of survivance and resilience, which thematically unite the papers in this volume. Such theoretical frameworks highlight the agency of individuals and communities and the historical contingency of colonial encounters. This postcolonial approach allows for more thorough discussions and expands on
Quimby’s oft-cited text. We emphasize new techniques and perspectives that both build on and revise our understanding of historical archaeology and Quimby’s historic chronology in the western Great Lakes region.

Conducted in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework in partnership with Tongva, Acjachemen, (Blas Adobe Aguliar Museum, Juaneño– Acjachemen Culture Center) and Payómkawichum (Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians)... more

Conducted in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework in
partnership with Tongva, Acjachemen, (Blas Adobe Aguliar Museum, Juaneño–
Acjachemen Culture Center) and Payómkawichum (Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission
Indians) peoples, this dissertation is an Indigenous Archaeology study of the California
Historic Landmark (CHL#217; CA-ORA-132 and CA-ORA-317) Black Star Canyon
Puhú Village site in the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County, California. The
landmark memorializes the 1832 CE “Battle in Cañón de los Indios”. Indigenous
occupants of the Puhú village were accused of stealing horses from local colonial settlers
over several months, after which, the village was razed by hired American frontiersmen.
I integrate perspectives from descendant collaborators, Indigenous survivance,
philosophies of historicity, guerilla resistance, Practice Theory, and Assemblage Theory
in the analysis of archaeological and ethnohistorical data collected from five years of
interviews, archival research, surveys, excavations, and laboratory research under the
Black Star Canyon Archaeology Project (BSCAP). The result of my archaeological and
ethnoarchival research reveals how the Puhú occupants exercised economic and political
traditions within and beyond the village to exceed a condition of bare survival or
micropolitical resistance after colonization. This study facilitates new attention to
enduring communal scale Indigenous traditions associated with macropolitical forms of
autonomy and prosperity in the Los Angeles Basin proximal colonial hinterlands. In
doing so, the archaeological study is envisioned as facilitating a mode of Indigenous
survivance-storytelling by challenging the foundations of colonial historiography
associated with the landmark.

This chapter considers the current state and future of archaeological studies of Native American diaspora and ethnogenesis. It begins with an exploration of the broader literature concerning diaspora and ethnogenesis, comparing these... more

This chapter considers the current state and future of archaeological studies of Native American diaspora and ethnogenesis. It begins with an exploration of the broader literature concerning diaspora and ethnogenesis, comparing these branches of scholarship with the specific conditions—epistemological, historical, and political—of archaeologies of indigenous North America. The challenges and benefits of studying Native American diaspora and ethnogenesis are highlighted. The future of such studies is explored in relation to recent moves toward post-humanism that challenge archaeologists to ask crucial questions on who and what constitutes a community. Drawing briefly upon several case studies throughout, the essay places most emphasis on the diaspora and ethnogenesis of the Brothertown Indians. It concludes that notions of diaspora and ethnogenesis stand to make important contributions to the decolonization of indigenous history in both academic and public venues.

This essay for the last documenta 14 issue of South as a State of Mind, reflects on contemporary processes of eco-genocide in so-called Florida, and on the 2016 struggle of Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota. It... more

At the core of this (re)coded comic holotrope are two concepts: game as world (re)mapping (rather than game as text) and the relationality and connections that reverberate through multiple realms. Indigenous use of digital media warrants... more

At the core of this (re)coded comic holotrope are two concepts: game as world (re)mapping (rather than game as text) and the relationality and connections that reverberate through multiple realms. Indigenous use of digital media warrants engagement of indigenous theorists and scholars to this digital realm - Gerald Vizenor and Mishuana Goeman’s work on political and literary analysis to explore the concepts of Never Alone (re)mapping the comic holotrope of survivance. The portmanteau kinnections is introduced here to further articulate emergences of decolonial relations and kin-making practices.

In his 1998 novel Kiss of the Fur Queen, Cree author Tomson Highway narrates the lives of Jeremiah and Gabriel Okimasis, two Cree brothers from northern Manitoba. Numerous stylistic, semantic, and temporal repetitions cycle back and forth... more

In his 1998 novel Kiss of the Fur Queen, Cree author Tomson Highway narrates the lives of Jeremiah and Gabriel Okimasis, two Cree brothers from northern Manitoba. Numerous stylistic, semantic, and temporal repetitions cycle back and forth throughout the book, following traditional Cree oral storytelling techniques. These repetitions illustrate different life cycles between conception, birth, and death of three generations of characters. The inter-generational trauma of residential schools is embodied by the Windigo, a traditional Cree cannibalistic monster. His presence is regularly countered by apparitions of the Fur Queen, a protective spirit who guides the characters through these cycles until their death. Although death is the end of the protagonist's generation, it also lights the spark of cultural regeneration for the upcoming one. The goal of this paper is to discuss the novel's complex composition, and Highway's use of loops and repetitions in episodes related to birth, death, and regeneration. I will explain the use of repetitions in the novel to illustrate the overlapping cycles of violence and trauma, and also healing and continuation. I will illustrate the relevance of traditional Indigenous storytelling in contemporary written literature, and demonstrate how it cycles back to the necessity for cultural survival.

In an effort to recast themselves as proponents of human rights, transnational conservation organizations increasingly look to Indigenous communities as sources of labour, knowledge, and legitimacy. In many cases, the resulting... more

In an effort to recast themselves as proponents of human rights, transnational conservation organizations increasingly look to Indigenous communities as sources of labour, knowledge, and legitimacy. In many cases, the resulting relationships are fraught with stark power imbalances and premised on flawed understandings of Indigenous practices. As a result, even the most 'peoplecentered' conservation interventions too often serve to accelerate the enclosure, commodification, and dispossession of Indigenous lands. In this article, we reflect on our respective collaborations with Indigenous communities in Sarawak, Malaysia, and Palawan, Philippines, who have contended with biodiversity conservation projects led by transnational NGOs. We have noticed that our collaborators navigate the projects' expectations by selectively performing, concealing, and obscuring important aspects of their lives. They do so, in part, in an effort to manage the NGOs, government agencies, and other actors vying for their cooperation. But more importantly, we argue, this is a way to defend their lands, livelihoods, and ecosystems from dispossessory pressures, including those exerted by conservation. As such, we theorize, these acts constitute a form of what Vizenor calls 'survivance' and raise important questions about the role of scholars and activists in rendering Indigenous lifeworlds (in)visible to conservation organizations and other institutions of neocolonial power.

In this paper, I consider the issue of change and continuity that was at the root of Quimby's acculturative models for understanding fur-trading relations in North America, and consider the usefulness of recent theoretical shifts toward... more

In this paper, I consider the issue of change and continuity that was at the root of Quimby's acculturative models for understanding fur-trading relations in North America, and consider the usefulness of recent theoretical shifts toward survivance and "residence" (after Silliman 2014) to offer a more comprehensive picture of social dynamics in the late eighteenth-century social and physical landscape of the western Great Lakes and the fur trade. Rather than focusing on terminal narratives associated with acculturation, I argue through the examination of archaeological and documentary sources that Anishinaabeg peoples performed "acts of residence." As a process of emplacement, such acts also empowered indigenous peoples. This performance was contested: Fur traders' own practices and geographic preconceptions also planted the seeds of an increasingly race-based colonial mind-set, in which Indians and their way of life represented an "Other" that was simultaneously desirable and repulsive. This tension played an important role in the creation of a contested fur-trade landscape, perhaps more so than the seemingly power-free concept of the "middle ground" would suggest.

Despite their marginalisation in mainstream Christianities after the European Enlightenment, the figure of the demon endures within modern literature and popular culture, its many artistic "lives" standing in stark opposition to its... more

Despite their marginalisation in mainstream Christianities after the European Enlightenment, the figure of the demon endures within modern literature and popular culture, its many artistic "lives" standing in stark opposition to its "deaths" in both the field and narrative frame of Christian theology. Perhaps two of the most famous and influential literary devils are Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Mephistopheles. Yet while the former rages against his defeat and strives to undo creation, the latter languishes in the half-life of damnation, half-heartedly tempting those deemed already lost. Using a poststructuralist framework drawn from Jacques Derrida, this chapter analyzes both Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Mephistopheles as occupying a site categorized by Derrida’s concept of survival—a spectral “living on” present both after and before actual death—one in which the sovereign decree of perdition marks both their "death" in theology and their "lives" in literature.

This essay is an autohistoria, an autohistory (Anzaldúa, 1999), in which I share my experiences and understandings of being Maya and an immigrant in the United States and the discrimination that other indigenous people like me experience... more

This essay is an autohistoria, an autohistory (Anzaldúa, 1999), in which I share my experiences and understandings of being Maya and an immigrant in the United States and the discrimination that other indigenous people like me experience from Latin Americans and Latinxs. One purpose of autohistorias is to speak from lived experience and create theories that help us understand our selves and those like us. I write this essay to my son and the many other children in the United States who are born to Indigenous immigrant parents. One purpose for sharing my historias is to heal from intergenerational trauma caused by colonialism (Brave Heart, 2000). It is my responsibility to share such stories in order to provide lessons and roadmaps for my son, other children of Indigenous immigrants, and future generations (Brayboy, 2005; Vizenor, 2008). I structure this paper to reflect the spiral (Grande, San Pedro, & Windchief, 2015) ways of sharing, learning, and storytelling that are often absent in linear accounts of history and storytelling (Deloria, 2004; Smith, 1999). There are many stories that I share and interweave with one another in this paper. I hope that my son and other children of Indigenous immigrants learn from them, as I too am learning by sharing them.

Si, selon Richard Ellmann, l’engagement politique/socialiste de Joyce n’avait été qu’une passade, à la suite de Dominic Manganiello, de nombreux chercheurs ont montré l’importance des années de Trieste et ses effets durables. Joyce... more

Si, selon Richard Ellmann, l’engagement politique/socialiste de Joyce n’avait été qu’une passade, à la suite de Dominic Manganiello, de nombreux chercheurs ont montré l’importance des années de Trieste et ses effets durables.
Joyce critique sans relâche le mouvement nationaliste irlandais, en particulier dans son attachement à une langue, le gaélique car, à ses yeux, il n’est pas tenable que les fils paient la dette des pères coupables de l’avoir laissé mourir. Or, dans le même temps, il s’entiche pour la cause nationaliste italienne : savoir si cette cause est un substitut à cet objet aimé et détesté tout à la fois, l’Irlande, nous importera moins que de réévaluer cette problématique de la langue morte. On sait que c’est la Grande famine qui a été presque fatale au gaélique. C’est donc à partir de là que nous reprendrons la question d’une langue perdue, perdue en même temps qu’ont été effacées tant d’existences dans la nuit et le brouillard d’une mort infâme et d’un exil incertain.
L’indicible de cet événement, de ce qui est éminemment pour l’Irlande « le cauchemar de l’histoire » dans toute sa pesanteur pour les survivants, nous en repérerons les traces traumatiques dans « The Dead », A Portrait of the Artist et Exiles et leur transmutation comique dans Ulysses et Finnegans Wake.

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We... more

In this paper, we take an unsanctioned academic network, a writing group, as a site of inquiry into both the broad given-ness of the norms of the neoliberal academy and our simultaneous compliance with and resistance to these norms. We choose to comply because we are invested in becoming academics; we continue to research and write for conferences and publication and to frame our scholarly work in terms of how it can be used on our CVs. We choose to resist by working collaboratively and towards remaining intelligible (both to ourselves and to those outside the academy) while becoming scholars. Here we put several concepts to work to think about the role of the writing group in our experiences as becoming-scholars, in particular ‘becoming-minoritarian,’ ‘schizoid subjectivities,’ ‘agential assemblage,’ and ‘institutional passing.’ Then, to think about how we (might) live through the process of becoming academic, we turn to the concept of survivance.

This essay investigates how the filmmakers of Igloolik-based women’s collective Arnait Video Productions invent and combine various techniques and strategies of spectrality and survivance to create a powerful, cinematic form of Inuit... more

This essay investigates how the filmmakers of Igloolik-based women’s collective Arnait Video Productions invent and combine various techniques and strategies of spectrality and survivance to create a powerful, cinematic form of Inuit cultural resistance and resilience. I borrow the concept of “survivance” from Anishnaabe literary theorist Gerald Vizenor who uses it to explain how Aboriginal literary and linguistic traditions continue to flourish in contemporary media despite and in response to colonialism’s systemic suppression of oral traditions. With this concept I analyze the way Arnait’s films re-enact and revive Inuit culture and oral tradition in the abiding voice and spirit of the dead whose creative art of living resists extinction. Arnait has to date produced three feature films: two fictional films Before Tomorrow (2009) and Uvanga (2013), and a documentary Sol (2014). I demonstrate that all three films exhibit this uncanny mix of spectrality and survivance with focus on Arnait’s debut film as a case study.

Alongside other Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cultural values, Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Nation) concept of survivance has become an increasingly popular interpretive perspective in Indigenous archaeology and related... more

Alongside other Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cultural values, Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Nation) concept of survivance has become an increasingly popular interpretive perspective in Indigenous archaeology and related fields of heritage management. Survivance is a powerful Indigenous condition that enables the rejection of Indigenous victimhood. Archaeologists are positively adapting survivance to work with archaeological perspectives on materiality and social practice to challenge false representations of Indigenous peoples as racially inauthentic and/or figuratively extinct in academic and public heritage discourses. However, questions linger over the depth and breadth of archaeologists’ engagement with Vizenor’s broader project of Indigenous healing (i.e., “socio-acupuncture”) given different but persistently generalized middle-range theorizations of survivance in archaeological research. In this chapter, I provide a brief summary of Vizenor’s survivance and other interrelated concepts, applications of survivance in archaeology, and an example of archaeological survivance storytelling that emerged specifically through my research partnership with Tongva, Acjachemen, and Payómkawichum peoples of the Los Angeles Basin (LA Basin) in Southern California.

Beat Nation--as it was staged in Halifax, Nova Scotia--is an exhibition that demands the viewer to act as a witness to histories of assimilation and survivance. Curators Kathleen Ritter and Tania Willard strategically create bleed between... more

Beat Nation--as it was staged in Halifax, Nova Scotia--is an exhibition that demands the viewer to act as a witness to histories of assimilation and survivance. Curators Kathleen Ritter and Tania Willard strategically create bleed between works, allowing sounds to be remixed within the space.

In this paper, I will present work from my newly started PhD practice-research project that deals with decolonial, quotidian futures through anti-oppressive, art and curatorial practice. I am specifically... more

In this paper, I will present work from my newly started PhD practice-research project that deals with decolonial, quotidian futures through anti-oppressive, art and curatorial practice. I am specifically interested in subaltern or counterfuturisms from mundane (not purely
utopian or dystopian) futures. I will share specific works by several artists (Kite, Mirabelle Jones, Oscar Santillán, and Cannupa Hanska Luger) working in these futurist veins that are creating, broadly speaking, everyday devices from the future, just not necessarily
devices in a techno-consumerist fashion. I will talk about the work of each artist in terms of connections to survivance and non-human beings.

What became apparent as we worked through our collaboration over four years is that Ernest and Amamda embodied narratives of what Gerald Vizenor calls " survivance, " which " confront the tragic closure of culture and engender a sense of... more

What became apparent as we worked through our collaboration over four years is that Ernest and Amamda embodied narratives of what Gerald Vizenor calls " survivance, " which " confront the tragic closure of culture and engender a sense of Native presence instead of historical absence. " And our work required Jaime and I, as non-Indigenous scholars, to work through what Britzman calls " difficult knowledge " that required us to un-learning much of our own common sense, particularly about our privileged positions in the academy, where research is an epistemologically exclusive commodity predicated on institutionalized knowledge that cannot bear any threat to what Taubman calls its " aspiration to scientific certainty, control, and prediction " lest its gaps become exposed. And what of the tensions associated with creating academic text? Michelle Fine critiques the academy's stubborn refusal to interrogate—as the inventors and suppressors of questions, shapers of the contexts we study, interpreters, and narrators—how we create texts under the pretense of objective distance. We struggled to represent our work in a way that satisfies the academy while raising critical questions about whose voices are privileged in academic discourses and what counts as " data. " We continue to grapple with our privilege to decide, for example, where to speak and where to remain silent. That power remains starkly visible to us in the context of work with students and communities who have struggled to sustain and revitalize histories, cultures, knowledges, and languages, which education institutions like those in which we work have attempted so systematically erase.

Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The ways that First Nations women in art & community speak Blak to the colony & patriarchy. APPENDIX A LIST OF WORKS Unconditional Love Space Performance Space Gallery FCAC. The exhibition occupied two... more

Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The ways that First Nations women in art & community speak Blak to the colony & patriarchy.
APPENDIX A LIST OF WORKS Unconditional Love Space Performance Space Gallery FCAC.
The exhibition occupied two separate spaces but related responses. Roslyn Smorgan Gallery held an epistemological space (the knowing), an active studio of a new body of photographic based works drawn from my matriarchal family stories; both past, present and future, that honour matriarchal knowledge and ways of being and respond to a broad body of Aboriginal women’s work. This knowing includes family reclamation of Wemba-Wemba language and associated archival materials. The Performance Space held an ontological place (the being) of memory and timelessness, respite, healing and repair with familial story, survival, language and knowledge that speaks to loss & the need for spaces of unconditional love.
The installation, titled ‘place of unconditional love,’ was created site specifically for the Performance Space at FCAC and was created through 'daily acts of repair' over six months in collaboration with and sharing with other Aboriginal women and family members in a new process of eco dyeing fabrics, clothing & rags to become 'healing cloths.' This is not to claim that these cloths hold powers beyond them, but that they are comforting and hold the potential for healing and naming a healing process. Healing is often an elusive and difficult process and lacks a visual guide. This body of work is an attempt to grapple with and resolve this process. Eco dyeing is also known as bush dyeing, and though I come from the bush, I did this work in the city where I live, in urban spaces so refer to this process as ‘eco dyeing.’ Some of the plants and eucalyptus was collected on up the bush in my hometowns of Echuca and Kyabram on Yorta Yorta Country, and on Boon Wurrung Country & Wurundjeri Country along the Maribyrnong River. Each place I gathered, I said thank you to the plants and trees I gathered from and to the Ancestors of that Country. I was careful to only take small amounts from each tree or plant and to spread the collecting out so as not to deplete each place.
These practices are based on my relationships with others, my matriarchy, family and chosen blak family in urban space and through networks across Mobs through digital pathways of social media, messaging, sharing, communicating and finding solid Tiddas-or Yaryins as we say in Wemba-Wemba-Brother Boys, Sister Girls, our gender fluid Siblings, our Queer and Trans relatives and Family. Through ‘relationality’ as termed by Prof Aileen Moreton-Robinson, based critical analysis, I hope my work is generating insight about how Aboriginal women are at the intersection of colonial injuries that include their gender, race, class and social positioning. By subverting various forms of art and resistance in diverse contexts of community and ‘cross spaces,’ like academia and public life and social media, Aboriginal women create and recreate strategies to respond and express ‘survivance.’ The exegesis shows that creating multiple strands of art and cultural practice emerges from thousands of years of connected practice as sovereign people; and speak back and blak to an ongoing coloniality with attempts at healing and daily acts of resistance and repair.

Eva Marie Garroutte in her Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America defines essentialism as those ideas that presuppose “a connection to ancestry rooted in the individual’s fundamental nature.” Some of the history of the... more

Eva Marie Garroutte in her Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America defines essentialism as those ideas that presuppose “a connection to ancestry rooted in the individual’s fundamental nature.” Some of the history of the mostly Mohawk and Abenaki individuals and families who chose to live in the Adirondacks of northeastern New York State amongst settler society during the long nineteenth century and beyond (at least part of the time) opted to work in the tourism industry which took advantage of their, or perhaps another group’s Indigenous ancestry. Even the history of Oneida, Mohawk, and Abenaki Adirondackers with obvious kinship and place ties to reserves, when focused on how they made a living might appear to essentialize them. However, I argue this previously concealed history does not essentialize them so much as it detangles and recovers their history in a place that was their homeland for centuries. I suggest that instead of an essentialist narrative, this is a history of survivance. I argue for the deliberation of the concept of rural indigeneity alongside the discourses of indigeneity on reserve and in urban spaces.

Mezura : survivance des troubadours dans Quelque chose noir de Jacques Roubaud par Manon Plante Département des littératures de langue française Faculté des arts et des sciences Mémoire présenté en vue de l'obtention du grade de maître ès... more

Mezura : survivance des troubadours dans Quelque chose noir de Jacques Roubaud par Manon Plante Département des littératures de langue française Faculté des arts et des sciences Mémoire présenté en vue de l'obtention du grade de maître ès arts en littératures de langue française Août 2017 © Manon Plante, 2017 Résumé Ce mémoire explore la parenté qui existe entre le principe poétique de mezura (résistance à l'éros mélancolique) élaboré par les troubadours et l'expression du deuil présente dans Quelque chose noir (1986) de Jacques Roubaud. Le premier chapitre vise à cerner comment le rapport aux photographies laissées par Alix Cléo Roubaud, photographe et épouse décédée du poète, mobilise un imaginaire mélancolique propre à l'univers des troubadours. On verra que la contemplation des images permet d'enclencher la mise en mémoire de la disparue. Le deuxième chapitre s'intéresse au dialogue impossible, conçu en termes d'écriture autant que d'oralité, entretenu avec la défunte à travers la reprise de fragments du journal intime d'Alix Cléo Roubaud. En faisant de l'espace poétique un lieu mémoriel, l'inexprimable du deuil se fait paradoxalement source de transmission. Enfin, le dernier chapitre explore les liens qui unissent la structure formelle de Quelque chose noir et la forme médiévale du partimen, plus particulièrement de la « Tenson du néant ». Afin de nommer le rien, la disparition, Roubaud convoque une vaste mémoire littéraire organisée autour des principes du trobar. Ce sont les apories, les tensions maintenues entre des pôles contradictoires, explorées dans chacun des chapitres qui apparentent le dit du deuil à la mezura médiévale, lutte des poètes contre le « néant d'amour ».