Seminar in Literary Interpretation - Trapline Narratives

We will read Duncan McCue’s The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir (2016), David Robertson’s The Theory of Crows (2022), and Anton Treuer’s Where Wolves Don’t Die (2024) to explore Indigenous ways of storytelling. All three texts demonstrate how Indigenous stories are deeply connected to place. The trapline, a designated area of land and waterways where a family has the recognized right to trap, provides a space in which traditional knowledge about wildlife and the land are passed on to the next generation. As we will see, the trapline and its tallyman, who acts as a guardian of the land and its stories, have specific discursive functions in all three texts.