“I pass the talking stick to you”:
Sharing, Reading, Teaching Residential School Stories
SCHOLAR BIOS
Marie Alma Poitras is Nēhiyaw-iskwēw, (Woman of the people who believe in the four spirits of each living organism), whose Nēyhiyawīkāsowin (natural name) is Osāwastim-Otâhkohp-iskwēw, (blanket of the brown horse-woman). Alma is a descendent of a Signatory Chief to Treaty Six from Onion Lake whose name was Osāwaskwân, Yellow-cloud. Her grandfather was an interpreter for Settler People from Fort Pitt, Saskatchewan. His name was Kāhmāwâcihat, (He Who Gathers Them Together.) Her parents were Charlie Quinney and Mary Cecile Quinney. Alma holds a Class A Teaching Certificate and is an Elementary School Teacher. She also holds a BA in Indian Studies with a minor in Psychology, a Bachelor of Education After Degree (BEAD), and a Master's degree ECNI in Curriculum & Instruction. Alma is a Knowledge Keeper, Language Keeper, and Kēhtē-aya.
Marie-Eve Bradette is a francophone and settler scholar of Indigenous literatures. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Université de Montréal, and she is currently a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regina working on her research project Reclaiming Truth, Agency, and Affectivity through Writing: Reading the Trauma Legacy in Indigenous Women’s Residential School Literatures. Working between languages—studying Indigenous literatures both in French and in English—she wishes to contribute to an ongoing and necessary conversation between Francophone and Anglophone writers and scholars of Indigenous literatures across Turtle Island. Her reflections around Francophone Indigenous writings in Quebec have been published in the academic journals Captures and @nalyses. She is also the editor of All my relations: Comparative Indigenous Literatures and Epistemologies, a bilingual issue published in the journal of interdisciplinary research in texts and medias Post-Scriptum.
Melanie Braith is the Project Manager of the Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak Partnership Project, and the Research Coordinator for the Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg. She holds a PhD in Indigenous literatures from the University of Manitoba and her research focuses on traditional Indigenous storytelling and its contemporary manifestations and reinventions. She is from Germany and worked as a journalist for print, online, and TV before she came to Winnipeg for her PhD.
Warren Cariou is a writer, photographer and professor based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His work focuses on the environmental philosophies and oral traditions of Indigenous peoples in western Canada, especially in connection to his Métis heritage. He has published works of memoir, fiction, poetry and film, and his bitumen photographs have been exhibited and published nationally. He has also edited numerous books of Indigenous literature and storytelling. He teaches in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba.
Michelle Coupal is a scholar of Indigenous literatures. She is a Canada Research Chair in Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Literatures, and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Regina. Michelle is a former President of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association. She specializes in and teaches courses on Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island, Indian Residential School literature, truth and reconciliation studies, Indigenous media/film, and Canadian literature.
Photo credit: Sandra Harsidi
David Gaertner is a white settler and Assistant Professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Theatre of Regret: Art, Literature, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada, an avid reader of Louise Bernice Halfe, and the co-director of CEDaR, a community-oriented space for explorations in new media and immersive storytelling.
Photo credit: Neville Black
Dr. Aubrey Jean Hanson is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta and an Associate Professor in Education at the University of Calgary. Her ancestry extends to Red River Métis, German, Icelandic, Cree, French, and Scottish roots. Aubrey’s research spans Indigenous literary studies, curriculum studies, and Indigenous education, looking in particular at how Indigenous literary arts can precipitate relationships between non-Indigenous learners and Indigenous resurgence. Her book Literatures, Communities, and Learning: Conversations with Indigenous Writers was published with Wilfrid Laurier University Press in spring 2020, and she recently co-edited a special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures entitled Sovereign Histories, Gathering Bones, Embodying Land.
Sarah Henzi is a settler scholar and Assistant Professor of Indigenous Literatures in the Department of French and the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on Indigenous popular culture, futurisms, and new media, in both English and French. She is also a member of the editorial board of Studies in American Indian Literatures, and Secretary of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association. Her translation of the first book published in French by an Indigenous woman in Quebec, I am a Damn Savage (Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, 1976) by Innu author An Antane Kapesh, was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in August 2020.
Sophie McCall is a settler scholar in the English department at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on how Indigenous writers challenge the violent histories of settler colonialism and use forms of expression to imagine and bring into reality narratives of continuity and resistance. She has published widely on topics such as textualizing oral history, the struggle for Indigenous rights, decolonization, resurgence, and reconciliation. She is a co-chair of the Indigenous Voices Awards, with Deanna Reder and Sarah Henzi.
Sam McKegney is a settler scholar of Indigenous literatures and Head of the English Department at Queen’s University in the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe Peoples. He has published three books—Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities through Story (2021), Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood (2014) and Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School (2007).
Photo credit: Rachel Taylor
Deanna Reder is a Cree-Métis scholar, Chair of the Department of Indigenous Studies, and a member of the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on a SSHRC-funded project called "The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Northern North America up to 1992." See www.thepeopleandthetext.ca. Recently she has submitted a manuscript to Wilfrid Laurier University Press, titled Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina, due to be released in Spring 2022. She helped found the Indigenous Editors Association in 2020 and currently serves as the Past-President.
Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair is Anishinaabe (St. Peter’s/Little Peguis) and an Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba. He is an award-winning writer, editor and activist who was named one of Monocle Magazine’s “Canada’s Top 20 Most Influential People,” and he won the 2018 Canadian columnist of the year at the National Newspaper Awards for his bi-weekly columns in The Winnipeg Free Press. In 2019, he won Peace Educator of the Year from the Peace and Justice Studies Association based at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is an international media commentator as a part of the "Power Panel" on CBC's Power & Politics and National Affairs panel on CBC's The Current. He is also a former secondary school teacher who has trained educators and students across Canada, particularly on the issue of residential schools and the TRC calls to action.
Linda Warley is Associate Professor Emerita, Department of English Language & Literature, University of Waterloo. She has published research on residential school narratives in the journals Canadian Literature and Essays on Canadian Writing and in the edited collections Photographs, Histories and Meanings (eds. Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault and Linda Warley) and The Other Side(s) of 150: Untold Stories and Critical Approaches to History, Literature, and Identity in Canada (eds. Linda M. Morra and Sarah Henzi). She is also co-editor of Tracing the Autobiographical and Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives.