Physicality, Landscape, Language … Home: Locating and Connecting to Place in David Bouchard’s ‘Cultural Books’

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.