No abstract

David Bouchard bridges cultures in his dual language cultural books through the parallel lenses of cultural capital and cultural literacies. Through representations of the Canadian landscape, and in Indigenous, Michif, and European-descended languages, Bouchard creates narratives of place through poetry, storytelling, and descriptive chirography. The texts, which are complemented by prominent Indigenous artists' illustrations and music, embody a bridge to readers from a multiplicity of cultures. Bouchard's dual language cultural books, demonstrative of the reclamation of Indigenous and Métis history and narrative, can be used as texts of social justice to explore Indigenous cultures, language revitalization, and language maintenance. Bouchard negotiates the Indigenous/Inuit/Métis and mainstream cultures of his ancestry through the underpinning terms of landscape and language and, ultimately, finds a home within multiple cultures which he shares with readers so that they might find their home, too.

N’we Jinan, a group of young Indigenous artists who run a mobile production studio and an integrative arts studio, travel to different Indigenous communities, where they support youth in writing and recording music that involves the local community. N’we Jinan employs social media to articulate and protect Indigeneity through the sharing of Indigenous music videos, empowering youth to resist continued colonization. These videos serve to create a sense of connection in Indigenous communities in Turtle Island (Canada) as well as offer a means by which non-Indigenous listeners can learn about contemporary Indigenous cultures. Viewed in conjunction with Nunavut’s Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and the Northwest Territories’ Dene Kede and Inuuqatigiit, which provide a framework of traditional knowledge, values, and skills specific to Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic, the texts implicitly invite non-Indigenous listeners’ engagement in social justice activism as settler allies. The texts invite listening to and viewing the empowering songwriting and recording practices through the lens of social justice and wâhkôhtowin or kinship relations, which involves walking together (Indigenous and settler) in a good way and engaging with Bourdieu’s influential framework of cultural capital. The themes explored in the songs include cultural identity, language, and self-acceptance. The empowering songs of N’we Jinan are place-based articulations of identity that resist coloniality and serve as calls to action, creating embodied videographic, musical, and linguistic partnerships that serve as important articulations of Indigenous identity and which promote the decolonization of reading and listening practices and, by extension, education.

The article theorizes the possibilities of a decolonizing methodology in a reading of David Bouchard’s Cree-English dual language picture books Nokum is My Teacher and <em >The Drum Calls Softly. Paulo Freire’s (1971) call to educators to become teacher-learners and Luis Urrieta Jr.’s (2007) concept of figured worlds as they relate to forms of identity work to inform the reading. The article suggests that not only can dual language picture books be read as social documents, but also that reading these texts as a decolonizing strategy provides opportunity for dialogic engagement across cultural boundaries.Keywords: Cree; education; decolonizing pedagogy; dual language texts; picture books; language revitalization