Healing Intergenerational Trauma through Cultural Reclamation in David Alexander Robertson’s Cree-Centric Retelling of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Abstract:In this article, I argue that Cree author David Alexander Robertson’s YA novel The Barren Grounds retells C.S. Lewis’s war trauma narrative The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe from a Cree perspective. The “war” addressed in The Barren Grounds is that of the violent acts of colonization that have disconnected several Indigenous generations from their ancestral cultures. The compulsion to reimagine this British classic story in a way that focuses on his own cultural background shows that there was something missing for Robertson in the source text: his Cree identity. Using as a framework Suzanne Methot’s approach to complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), which results from repeated traumatic experiences over a prolonged period, I demonstrate that The Barren Grounds emphasizes the significance of cultural reclamation for the healing of intergenerational trauma, including trauma resulting from the foster care experience. The Indigenization of Lewis’s story recognizes children’s rights to an education that includes Indigenous children’s and YA literature and adopts nation-specific Indigenous knowledge as a framework for reading this literature.