Chapter 25 - Traditions, Communities, Literature

Summary

This essay reflects on how Indigenous communities have maintained their own literary canons, often outside the mechanisms that literary scholars tend to associate with canonicity: large institutional archives, formal publishing and republishing, placement in major anthologies and college syllabi. The essay argues that Indigenous canonicity is not a static tradition from which texts can be either lost or added; it is not a privatized or extractive business. Rather, it is a collective, contributive process in which tribal members share in the multiple functions of editing, archiving, writing, reading, interpreting, and publishing. These community-based processes and conversations turn up a wealth of essays, poems, recipes, and histories that haven’t typically attracted the attention of settler teachers, publishers, or collecting institutions – perhaps because they were not written for settlers. The Indigenous literary histories that Indigenous communities remember and cherish, instead, document and imagine who the people are, where they come from, and where they are going. The essay concludes with a reflection on Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’s notion of “the gathering place” – referring to any collective exercise of Indigenous cultural authority and exchange – as a model of Indigenous writing and canon making.