Topics in Indigenous Literatures I *Cancelled*

*COURSE CANCELLED FOR 2022/2023*

While archives might popularly be considered the domain of history rather than literature, they hold an important—albeit fraught—place in the study of Indigenous literatures. Scholars of Indigenous literatures turn to archives to research understudied texts, unpublished works, and re-examine the contexts for better-known texts. Archives have become places of meeting for Indigenous scholars who are studying stories from their communities or trying to access ancestral knowledge. Furthermore, archives themselves become key sites of study and contestation as Indigenous researchers consider their experiences of conducting archival research and the possibilities and constraints of being in relation to community knowledge and story.

In this course, we will study a range of creative and critical works by scholars, authors, and artists to learn how different thinkers use, relate to, contest, critique, and resist the archive in relation to Indigenous storytelling. For example, we may read a poem alongside a critical essay to help us consider a particular aspect of the archive or archival research: what can be found in an archive, how we locate Indigenous knowledge, whose knowledge is archived and why, the space and infrastructure of archives, how we deal with “silences” or “absence” in the archive, how archives relate to published texts. In this course we will also consider what constitutes an archive. Is an archive focused on the textual? Could a river be an archive? Finally, this course will provide opportunities for students to experience the archive for themselves.