Magic weapons : Aboriginal writers remaking community after residential school / Sam McKegney ; foreword by Basil H. Johnston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McKegney, Sam, 1976-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indians of North America--Canada--Ethnic identity.

Indians of North America.

Inuit--Canada--Ethnic identity.

Inuit.

Ethnicity.

Canada.

Physical Description:

xviii, 241 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Winnipeg : University of Manitoba Press, 2007.

Summary:

"I didn't realize until I read Magic Weapons that what Thrasher, Highway, Joe, and I had written about our confinement ... had a much wider and longer lasting influence ... than we could have anticipated.... For bringing this out, Magic Weapons needs to be read." The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and high suicide in many communities. Magic Weapons surveys Indigenous writings in response to the impacts of the residential school system, and provides readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi'kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit), and critical studies of better known life writings by Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree).

Magic Weapons examines the ways in which Indigenous survivors of residential school mobilize narrative for personal and communal empowerment in the shadow of attempted cultural genocide. By recognizing these life writings as carefully crafted aesthetic creations and interrogating their relationship to more overtly politicized historical discourses, Sam McKegney argues that Indigenous life writings are culturally generative in ways that go beyond disclosure and recompense, re-envisioning what it means to live and write as Indigenous individuals in post-residential-school Canada.

Contents:

1 Acculturation Through Education: The Inherent Limits of 'Assimilationist' Policy 11

2 Reading Residential School: Native Literary Theory and the Survival Narrative 31

3 "We Have Been Silent Too Long": Linguistic Play in Anthony Apakark Thrasher's Prison Writings 59

4 "Analyze, if You Wish, But Listen": The Affirmatist Literary Methodology of Rita Joe 101

5 From Trickster Poetics to Transgressive Politics: Substantiating Survivanace in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen 137

Conclusion: Creative Interventions in the Residential School Legacy 175.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780887557026

0887557023

OCLC:

156819020