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This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson’s The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway’s A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers and address crucial issues related to contemporary Indigeneity. Both narratives are claimed to convey a fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival — a negotiation which is related theoretically to Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability, precarity, and resistance, particularly to her premise that vulnerability and resistance do not have to be opposed and/or mutually exclusive but rather work in intricate relationships. The article shows that while Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk) combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to both the precarity and resilience of Haisla cultural and ecological survival, Highway (Cree) presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to unsettle his audience through combining humor and confrontation. I ultimately argue that, if Indigenous writing has always expressed this duality of exposing vulnerability as well as inscribing resistance, then, it may serve as a model for transcending the binary structure powerful/powerless, a move that Butler sees as fundamental to her redefinition of vulnerability. In other words, through this optic the history of Indigenous writing is indeed a history of exploring the ways in which vulnerability and resistance relate and interweave, rather than stand in opposition.

The making of this book has been long overdue. Re-visiting the manuscript after several years proved to be a challenge as well as an exercise in resilience. Both places and people have shaped and contributed to the research and a way of thinking that informs my writing in the book. I am indebted to several fellowships provided by the Australian Government: Endeavour Research Fellowship (2006), Endeavour European Fellowship (2011), and Group of Eight Fellowship (2008) allowed me to spend considerable research time in Australia; John F. Kennedy Institute Library Research Grants offered a quiet space and excellent North American book collections, as did the UBC library in Vancouver, Canada, part of the ICCS scholarship program for doctoral students in 2004. My home institution, Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, and the Department of English and American Studies have also contributed to funding my research trips overseas through various smaller grants. I am grateful to the long-term Department Head, Jeffrey A. Vanderziel, who has always shown understanding and tolerance of my longer absences in the Department. Sydney has become my second home while in Australia and it is one of the few places that keeps growing on me. It is a privilege to be able to travel internationally and acquaint myself, more intimately and in an un-touristy capacity, with a place that is not my own-the city, the neighborhoods, the streets, the local pubs, shops, bookstores and beaches-and develop a sense of … well, comfort of fitting in, if not entirely belonging. I am thankful to people who made me feel less of a stranger, both geographically and intellectually, on these distant shores: Anne Brewster, for being such a generous mentor and for offering a friendship that is very dear to me; to