Discursive Ecology: Tracing Indigenous Expression in Settler Prairie Archives

Abstract

Within the broader project of studying early Indigenous literatures in Canada, this dissertation attends to Anishinaabe and Nêhiyaw discourse in government reports, missionary letters and diaries, newspapers, and other forms written between 1815 and 1874 to trace the range of ways Indigenous people responded to changing exigencies in their environments from mihkwâkamîw-sîpiy, miskwaagaamiwi-ziibi (Red River) to kisiskâciwani-sîpiy (North Saskatchewan River). Informed by work in Indigenous literary studies that understands Indigenous literatures as interrelational, including with land and the broader physical world, and diverse in form and media, I approach discourse as a network of relations that also mediates those relationships, reading my archive as part of discursive environments within the broader shifting, contested discursive ecology of the nineteenth-century prairies when settler colonial discourse worked to establish itself. This approach enables me to read with a networked form of attention, taking my texts as contested, polysemous, polyvocal sites in which I account both for settler colonial constructions of “Indians,” which increasingly constrained Indigenous life, and for the ways Indigenous people asserted themselves, their thought, and sovereignty. I argue we can re-trace Indigenous expressions in colonial archive and settler texts, complicating them in ways that exceed their frames and revealing the multiple entries of assertion and creativity expressed in a range of Indigenous concepts, rhetorics, imagery, and forms. Indigenous discourse exerts a destabilizing energy in settler colonial archives, showing how colonial attempts at narrative and conceptual circumscription of Indigenous identity, sovereignty, knowledge, etc. inadvertently preserved, and thereby conceded, Indigenous autonomy, knowledge, and authority.