Chapter 9 - Intergenerational Memory and the Making of Indigenous Literary Kinships

Summary

Indigenous women carry forward intergenerational histories of transmuting trauma into what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls “a gorgeous generative refusal of colonial recognition.” Drawing on methodologies by Indigenous scholars Dian Million, Daniel Justice, Leanne Simpson and Audra Simpson, this essay traces an intergenerational literary praxis that highlights models of critical kinship, felt theory, and refusals. More specifically, Indigenous relational frameworks bring greater visibility to intergenerational connections linking diverse Indigenous women writers and artists over a nearly two-hundred-year span. Such connections honor the power of intergenerational memory to confront and resist settler sexual and gender violence. Across a range of creative and critical expression, generations of Native women writers--both those well-known today in the US literary canon and others less visible--refuse and redirect violence to human and more-than-human kin, to lands, and to knowledges. At the same time, their persistent acts of intergenerational witness, memory, and story-sharing imagine alternative Indigenous futures.