Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina

by Deanna Reder

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

Genres: Indigenous

194 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2022

Reviews

[Michael Nest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Caveat: I’m a friend of Deanna and collaborated with her on her last book, Cold Case North (mentioned in Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition. Cree and Métis âcimisowina), but I swear my review is the whole-hearted truth. This book is hands-down the most interesting thing I’ve read in a decade. It is ambitious, setting out to show that life-writing is in keeping with Cree-Métis story-telling traditions (contrary to what is argued by others); to show how learning Cree-Métis philosophy, and the language through which it is best expressed, allows us to understand these texts in an new light; and it uses Deanna’s personal family stories as a thematic bridge into some classics of Cree-Métis literature. Two key things make the book a ‘fun read’ in addition to being a serious book. First, Deanna’s family stories themselves; I wish I could personally listen to her mom tell them! Second, and I never thought I’d say this about a book—the glossary. I literally looked at it every 10 pages to remind myself of definitions and loved curling my tongue around the unfamiliar syllables and saying them out loud. The ostensibly small inclusion of a glossary is the starting point of an adventure: learning the language, to become familiar with the philosophy, in order to know the questions that are relevant for understanding Cree-Métis culture, and therefore to appreciate fully texts by George Copway, James Settee, Maria Campbell, Edward Ahenakew, James Brady, Harold Cardinal, and others. (Inspired, I leapt online and started to read Ahenakew’s work). There is a particularly poignant story about clay pipes being buried on the prairies. As someone who has read decoloniality texts and struggled frequently with their clunky language, remedies that to my mind are unrealistic, and reiteration of ideas that seem to have been around since the eighties, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition is a breath of fresh air. While highly conscious of colonisation, it sidesteps the post-colonialism genre of criticism (which uses colonisation as the touchstone), as well as wretched debates around what is ‘authentically’ Indigenous (often interpreted as anything ‘pre-colonial’ and thus again making colonisation the touchstone). Like onion ink used to write an invisible message which is revealed when the paper is ironed, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition has the same effect: it gave me the tools to see and understand things I never realised were there. Five stars.

[Tenille Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book that lays out Cree theory and approaches to what is called autobiography or memoirs, in a straightforward and approachable read that still invokes Reder’s own personal history, putting into example her own theory of how personal narratives are foundational in Cree storytelling.