Description
Native Writers and Canadian Writing is a co-publication with Canadian Literature of the 1992 double issue which focuses on literature by and about Aboriginal peoples and contains original articles and poems by both Aboriginal and non-Native writers. Essays examining the conventional portrayals of Aboriginal peoples in literature touch on works which range from the eighteenth-century journals of explorer Alexander Mackenzie, to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and to early writers in Canada such as historian-humourist Thomas Chandler Haliburton. Studies of Aboriginal literature focus on the oral literary traditions of the Haida and Inuit and their transcribers and on modern works by playwright Tomson Highway and authors Lee Maracle and Thomas King, Basil H. Johnston, Shirley Bear, Joan Crate, Rita Joe, Emma LaRocque, Wayne Keon, Daniel David Moses, and Alootook Ipellie. These commentaries illuminate the way in which First Nation writers view themselves and their disparate worlds, their gifts for pathos, humour, and self-parody, and their search for their own voices and distinct forms of communication.