Comparing Indigenous Literatures in Canada and the United States

Abstract

As with any framework of comparison, setting out to compare Indigenous literatures in North America poses the question of what is being compared and on what grounds.¹ The seemingly simple answer—Native American literatures in the United States and First Nations’ literatures in Canada—is immediately complicated by the colonial histories that underlie the categories Native American and First Nations. “From an indigenous point of view, the border between Canada and the United States doesn’t exist,” writes Muscogee poet Joy Harjo in a commentary on one of her early poems titled “Crossing the Border.” “It is an imaginary line imposed by invader nations with governing laws that are arbitrary. Many tribal nations are slashed by the border…. Crossing the border is always hazardous for Indians. We are singled out and searched, detained, and questioned” (Harjo 2002, 205). Harjo’s comment (which similarly applies to Chicana/Chicano experiences and literatures in the borderland between Mexico and the United States; see ch. 10) points to the paradox of national borders from an Indigenous perspective. On the one hand, these borders are colonial impositions, overriding and overwriting earlier tribal inscriptions of space and separating, as one of the border guards in Thomas King’s short story “Borders” puts it, Canadian Blackfoot from American Blackfeet (T. King 1993b, 135). From this point of view, the border does not exist—it is irrelevant for Indigenous conceptions of North American space.²