Rachel Bryant, The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic

Abstract

"Can literary criticism help transform entrenched Settler Canadian understandings of history and place? How do nationalist historiographies, insular regionalisms, established knowledge systems, state borders, and narrow definitions continue to hinder the transfer of information across epistemological divides in the twenty-first century? What might nation-to-nation literary relations look like? Through readings of a wide range of northeastern texts -- including Puritan captivity narratives, Wabanaki wampum belts, and contemporary Innu poetry -- Rachel Bryant shows how colonized and Indigenous environments occupy the same geographical areas while occupying distinct epistemological worlds. Her analyses call for a vital and unprecedented process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent for centuries. And in 'The homing place', Bryant heeds her own advice. She creates a model for listening and for incorporating those stories throughout. This commitment to listening is analogous to homing -- the sophisticated skill that turtles, insects, lobsters, birds, and countless other beings use to return to sites of familiarity. Bryant adopts the homing process as a reading strategy that seeks to transcend the distortions and distractions that were built into Settler Canadian culture across centuries."--Dustjacket