To See Ourselves as the Other's Other: Nlaka'pamux Contact Narratives

Hieroglyphic Texting: Ideologies and Practices of Classic Maya Written Evidence

“…The positioned nature of texts may be most immediately apparent in spaces of contested or conflictual narratives (e.g. see Wickwire 1994, 18, for discussion of the impacts of differing ‘preoccupations and interests’ in the context of European versus native points of view in the Americas), but such positionality is about more than differing perspectives. In a larger sense, we might ask, as Barber (2007) articulates in introducing her study of African written culture, ‘What, then, does it mean to understand a text?’; Barber's response is to investigate texts vis à vis the ‘social relations, ideas and values in the cultures that produce them’ (2007, 2).…”

An English Language Teacher's Pedagogical Response to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

“…Drawing from disciplinary texts originally from political science, history, and human geography, the teaching materials I develop look at how language is used to construct meaning: not only such language features such as morphology and verb tenses, but also instantiations of active and passive voice to represent (or hide) participants, and evaluative language to position authors and their objects of study. To address the TRC Calls to Action (), and give the course materials topical coherence, the texts I use center around representation of Indigenous histories (Wickwire ), rights, land use, and activism (Belton ; Harris ; Iyall Smith ; Lightfoot ), with several discussing the “Idle No More” movement in particular (Morris ; Wotherspoon and Hansen ). While keeping my primary purpose and learning objectives within the field of language study, these readings have provided me with an opportunity to explore concepts of sovereignty, land use, human rights, governmental non‐compliance, and the limits of majority rule alongside my international students.…”

“…Students are typically familiar with how both the function and formatting of citation practices is tightly bound by conventions, but conversations about paraphrasing are more productive when held in the light of respectful participation in academic communities (rather than merely as a mechanism to avoid accusations of plagiarism). We discuss the ways in which the authors we choose to cite position our reading exposure and disciplinary affiliation (Wallace, Larivière, and Gingras ), and look at how Wickwire's () analysis of the referencing practices of the Nlaka'pamux reveals a similar sophistication of traditional Indigenous communities. Juxtaposing Simon Fraser's written portrayal of his contact with the “savages” richer, oral accounts, Wickwire describes how their “‘oral footnoting’ is richly contextual—in many ways far richer than our formal written accounts…These accounts have evolved over the course of almost two centuries of tellings.…”