Place-Based Readings Toward Disrupting Colonized Literacies: A Métissage

Abstract

Working from the premise that learning to live well in our places is quickly becoming a necessity of human survival, in this article we weave together divergent experiences of our shared place, the Wabanaki Confederacy or Eastern Canada, and literatures and literacies of that place. This article is methodologically framed using the concept of “métissage” as it has been taken up in Canadian curriculum studies as a form of intertextual life writing. Through our métissage, we are ultimately concerned with theorizing the idea of reading place—making sense of the ways in which settler colonialism has historically made, and continues to make, itself felt on Land. The idea of reading place, however, also demands that we actively engage in disrupting the normativity of settler colonial presence on Land—particularly as manifest through literature and literacy. Toward speaking back to the normativity of this settler colonial presence, the authors draw on divergent pedagogical and literary practices toward ensuring indigenous futurities.

 Keywords: settler colonialism; literacies of the land; literacy