Nighttime Invasions, Colonial Dispossession, and Indigenous Resilience in Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse

IF 0.1 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM

American, British and Canadian Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-01 DOI:10.2478/abcsj-2022-0004

Doro Wiese

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Abstract

Abstract This essay demonstrates how Richard Wagamese employs oral storytelling techniques to make the complex idea of Indigenous dispossession sensually and intellectually accessible to readers of his novel, Indian Horse. The Wabseemoong First Nation writer depicts the devastating effects of white entitlement when rendering character Saul Indian Horse’s experiences in Canada’s residential schools and the effect those schools had on his subsequent life. Using narrative analysis, it will be shown how Saul loses his ability to perceive places as being alive and resonant, and is thereby dispossessed on an individual, social, and spiritual level. Furthermore, Wagamese’s descriptions of the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of Indigenous children draw attention to the harrowing histories of Canada’s residential schools, thus laying bare the necropolitical potential of settler-colonial dispossession. This essay links Wagamese’s narrative to recent arguments brought forward in Indigenous studies. It aims to demonstrate that Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial states is part of modernity, and its overarching political economy, that is capitalism.i

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理查德·瓦加梅塞的《印第安马》中的夜间入侵、殖民地剥夺和土著复原力

本文展示了理查德·瓦加梅塞如何运用口述叙事技巧，让他的小说《印第安马》的读者在感官和智力上都能理解土著被剥夺的复杂概念。这位Wabseemoong First Nation作家在描绘人物Saul Indian Horse在加拿大寄宿学校的经历以及这些学校对他后来生活的影响时，描绘了白人权利的破坏性影响。通过叙事分析，我们将看到扫罗如何失去了感知地方的能力，从而在个人、社会和精神层面上被剥夺了权利。此外，Wagamese对土著儿童身体、情感和性虐待的描述引起了人们对加拿大寄宿学校悲惨历史的关注，从而暴露了定居者-殖民地剥夺的死亡政治潜力。这篇文章将Wagamese的叙述与最近在土著研究中提出的论点联系起来。它的目的是证明，在殖民国家，对土著居民的剥夺是现代性的一部分，它的总体政治经济，即资本主义

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来源期刊

American, British and Canadian Studies Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory

CiteScore

0.20

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

10 weeks

期刊介绍： Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.