Read, Listen, Tell & Learn, Teach, Challenge

 Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island is an anthology of Indigenous stories as well as accompanying critical essays to go with the stories. It's published by Wilfred Laurier Press. It's a great exploration of Indigenous literature across time. I read selections of it, with a focus on the section on Indigenous fantasy and science fiction. I found that it contained a lot of authors who were familiar to me as well as many new-to-me authors. I'll probably return to it at another time. 

Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures is it's non-fiction counterpart, also published by Wilfred Laurier. Also published, Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra. The book is huge, almost 600 pages, and contains essays from Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. It's an excellent curation of ongoing conversations in Indigenous literary studies. For example there is an essay by Sam McKegney on ethical engagement, and then there is a response to the essay by Robert Appleford. 

Several of the essays look at the question of how to engage with Indigenous literature, including how to do ethical engagement and ethical criticism. There is also an entire section on classroom considerations, presenting various viewpoints on how to responsibly teach Indigenous literature and pedagogy specific to Indigenous literature. 

I think that in the future, when I blog creative works, I am going to try some of these approaches to ethical criticism and ethical engagement. 

I wish that I had both of these books prior to teaching English First Peoples 12 because the essays provide a lot of food for thought. 

The books are part of an Indigenous Studies Series, and Jo-ann Archibald is one of the series editors.