We visit our literatures for healing. Today is a day of remembrance and reflection to honour missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls+ and speak out against racialized, sexualized and gender-based violences. We encourage you to sit with these stories as an invitation to learn more about the 231 Calls to Justice.
Happy end of exams! We’re celebrating by taking a look back at our final Trinity Reads event this year with @waub@miiyaabin@indigenouslitlab@instagrahamlibrary and sharing some photos of our communities all coming together. We hope that over the spring and summer season, you continue to read books that challenge perceptions of what is possible and seek out storytellers who make this world a better place! Thanks for spending the year with us 📚
📸: @scottdionphotography
Members of our team were out in Winnipeg as part of our relationship building and knowledge mobilization phase of our larger study on envisioning Indigenous Cultural Safety and Ethical Encounters with Indigenous Literatures. We have so much to learn about the amazing work that is happening in Winnipeg and we are currently dreaming of ways we can continue building constellations of change. A satellite site for the Indigenous Literatures Lab at the University of Manitoba is one possibility. More to come!
I was truly humbled to be asked by Transmotion to write a book review of Alicia Elliot’s “And Then She Fell” ✨🥰 Happy to share the full review by email.
In “Sacred Territories and Dream Worlds: Encountering the Literary Imaginations of Black and Indigenous Feminist Writers,” Jennifer Brant and Kayla Webber trace their journeys toward “re-imagining collective survivance” by thinking alongside S. R. Toliver and Black and Indigenous feminist writing traditions.
Drawing on a theoretical framework that weaves together livingness (Diaz; McKittrick), matriarchal worlding (J. Brant), survivance (Vizenor), felt theory (Million), and analytics of the flesh (King), the authors outline a decolonial and anti-colonial praxis where aesthetics, poetry, memoir, and kitchen table talks are woven into a conversational embodiment of slowness as method (Quashie, 2022).
The analysis centres the post-apocalyptic writing of Lee Maracle (Ravensong, Daughters Are Forever) and Octavia Butler (Wild Seed, Kindred). Through slow, close, and aesthetic readings of the texts, Brant and Webber highlight the texts’ abolitionist visions of radical futures and their pedagogical significance as expressions of matriarchal worlding.
Taken together, slow method and close, aesthetic engagement with Black and Indigenous feminist literatures offer pathways for relational encounters that invite worldmaking oriented toward Black and Indigenous futurities and re‑imagine collective survivance as a curricular possibility grounded in anti‑colonial praxis.
Photo by Sebastian Unrau
#BlackAndIndigenousFeminisms #BlackAndIndigenousLiteratures #LeeMaracle #OctaviaButler #SlowMethod #ReadingAsWitness #MatriarchalWorlding #CurriculumStudies
Thank you everyone for a spectacular day of reading and community with our inaugural Trinity Reads author @waub ! We started off with a visit to @firstnationshouse with office hours in the lodge, then headed to Trinity for the lecture. Very appreciative to @indigenouslitlab and Dr. Jennifer Brant for grounding us in our relations to the land, and to @miiyaabin for enthralling the audience with a dialogue reading of “ai tried to code being indian” before Waub’s incredible keynote. Thank you also to @mohawksoda@oronhienha.wi@bobbileejournal for making this night extra special and to @instagrahamlibrary for arranging the reading rec table (and @queenbooksto for being our favourite bookseller). This was truly a special gathering and incredible way to mark the end of Trinity Reads this year. Safe travels to Waub on the way home and thank you for sharing your time and creative spirit with us!
