Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition
Cree and Métis âcimisowina
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Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition critiques ways of approaching Indigenous texts that are informed by the Western academic tradition and offers instead a new way of theorizing Indigenous literature based on the Indigenous practice of life writing.
Since the 1970s non-Indigenous scholars have perpetrated the notion that Indigenous people were disinclined to talk about their lives and underscored the assumption that autobiography is a European invention. Deanna Reder challenges such long held assumptions by calling attention to longstanding autobiographical practices that are engrained in Cree and Métis, or nêhiyawak, culture and examining a series of examples of Indigenous life writing. Blended with family stories and drawing on original historical research, Reder examines censored and suppressed writing by nêhiyawak intellectuals such as Maria Campbell, Edward Ahenakew, and James Brady. Grounded in nêhiyawak ontologies and epistemologies that consider life stories to be an intergenerational conduit to pass on knowledge about a shared world, this study encourages a widespread re-evaluation of past and present engagement with Indigenous storytelling forms across scholarly disciplines
About this Author
Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) ) is Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and English at Simon Fraser University. Her research project, The People and the Text, focuses on the understudied archive of Indigenous literary work in Canada, and she has co-edited several anthologies in Indigenous literary studies.
Reviews
Deanna Reder's Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina is both humble and groundbreaking, weaving moments of personal revelation with profound theoretical insight in an important new work of literary theory. Reder centers her positionality as a Cree scholar and connects her own and her relatives' storytelling practices with those of other Cree and Métis authors and intellectuals to firmly reclaim autobiography as an Indigenous intellectual tradition. Upending previous scholarly assumptions that autobiographical writing is antithetical to Indigenous literary traditions, Reder privileges Cree literary concepts and practices, in Cree language, to elaborate the generic conventions and paradigms of Cree life writing. Reder also demonstrates through painstaking archival research the ways that editors and publishers have often undermined the intentions of Cree authors and thus have obscured Cree autobiographical innovations. With broad implications for genre studies, Indigenous studies, language revitalization, archival methods, and literary history, this book makes a profound and original contribution.
By applying personal understandings of stories to the research process, Reder offers a new, intensely personal method of examining Indigenous literatures, which emphasizes the experience of a text as a significant aspect of criticism and rejects Western appeals to objectivity. ... Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition presents an exciting new understanding of autobiography as an Indigenous genre.
This fierce, timely, visionary book lives up to the 'obligations of stories' to which Reder commits. Reder is one of the most generous, brilliant scholars in her field, whose kindness and sharp wit radiate from each page. Bringing together essential texts in nêhiyaw intellectual tradition over a span of two hundred years, Reder doesn't forget to place her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother within this constellation of storymakers. These writers and tellers of âcimisowina, or personal stories, have motivated Reder's own lifelong work of words and inspired practice of 'autobiography as methodology.'
By contextualizing these nuanced acts of interpretation within the rich storytelling traditions of her own Cree-Métis relations, Deanna Reder presents a mode of reading that is vitally important: reading through wâkôhtiwin. The result is a grounded, relational and ethically engaged form of criticism that provides a new path toward understanding classic works of Cree and Métis autobiography. With its attention to critical responsibilities and to the connectedness that stories generate, this work provides an important model for all students and scholars of Indigenous literature.
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