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Rêver ensemble un espace pour l’étude et la célébration des récits célestes autochtones

Caroline Nepton Hotte and Marie-Ève Bradette

De l’autre côté du bleu

Ka’nahsohon Kevin Deer

Les Aurores boréales et la notion de personne dans Split Tooth de Tanya Tagaq

Camille Roberge
This paper looks at the weakening of ontological borders in Indigenous literatures by way of the novel Split Tooth (2018) from Inuk multidisciplinary artist and author Tanya Tagaq. It studies how myths of the Northern Lights are transformed by their novelization and how this helps to rethink the concept of a “person” anchored in Inuit thoughts and knowledge. This paper mostly addresses the character of the Northern Lights through the novel’s narrator and territory where it is set. This interpretation is supported by texts from anthropologists and Indigenous authors with the goal to propose an Inuit conception of the “person” in Split Tooth.

Atcokoc dans le ventre du poisson : corps célestes et corps gras

Véronique Basile Hébert

Le temps de la Lune : de la représentation des violences genrées à la résurgence des savoirs menstruels dans les littératures autochtones contemporaines

Marie-Eve Bradette
This article examines Indigenous literary writings and how they become sites of situated and relational understanding that engage in a process of revitalizing female knowledge in relation to Tipiskâwi-pîsim, the Moon in Nehiyawewin. It addresses the connection between Tipiskâwi-pîsim and young Indigenous girls through the experience of first menstruation and its representation in literature, formulating the following question: how does literary work allow for a narrative and symbolic recovery of Indigenous feminine knowledge associated with menstruation, and what role does Tipiskâwi-pîsim play in the constitution and revitalization of this knowledge, which is both cultural and corporeal? To answer this question, the author analyzes Burning in this Midnight Dream by Nehiyaw poet Louise Bernice Halfe and the childrens’ book Moon Time Prayer by Red River Métis author Cindy Gaudet.

Winaqirik : ressaisir la « création » et la Terre en k’iche’

Renato Rodriguez-Lefebvre
The Popol Wuj is a major text of Indigenous literature in the Americas: it is one of the few surviving literary works having survived the Spanish invasion of Guatemala. The cosmogonic narrative it describes, together with the long history of its interpretations, from Spanish to French to English and gradually back to K’iche’, explains in part the multiple translations that have been made of it. This is where a major issue lies, since its cosmogonic narrative is often, for lack of a better word, likened to a creation ex nihilo. The richness and density of the K’iche’ text, however, suggests another horizon of meaning, which this paper will briefly attempt to identify, by citing numerous translations and commentaries, in preparation for a possible French translation project. Terms relating to the “creation” and “formation” of the Earth are particularly targeted, emblematic as they are of the literary and linguistic challenge represented by the translation of the Popol Wuj.

Racines et constellations : l’écriture cosmogonique de Natalia Toledo, entre réappropriation et revendication décoloniale

Clémence Demay
“Cosmogony is the oldest of literary genres”: these are the words, borrowed from the French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945), with which the bilingual Zapotec-Spanish collection Guie’ yaase’ / Olivo Negro (2004) opens by the poet Natalia Toledo. From the title and the opening quote, the collection places itself under the sign of roots – with the image of the tree – and the cosmos, questioning the founding myths of the history of the Binnizá Zapotec people from a poetic perspective. Although they originate from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the Oaxaca region of Mexico, the binnizá are also called “cloud people”. This cosmic link appears in the poetry of Natalia Toledo, associated with the recurring image of the fall that followed, as a metaphor for colonization and the uprooting: dispossessed of their land and forced to migration throughout History, but also to oblivion and shame, it is blindness that dominates. From then on for the poet, from the rewriting of traditional myths, it is a question of inviting a reconfiguration of the Zapotec gaze and representations, and of affirming the survival of her culture and her people. Far from disappearing, its roots have been nourished and propagated since colonization: based on the quote from Paul Valéry, she then draws a literary “constellation” in which she inscribes her poetry. We will see that from the image of roots and constellations, the rewriting of founding myths allows a decolonial reappropriation of representations and the affirmation of a cosmic, moving, and visionary poetry.

Xojobal jalob te’ / Telar Luminario”

Ruperta Bautista

Cloudscape

Hannah Claus

Des étoiles, des récits et des pixels : réflexions communes sur la démarche entreprise pour un projet de film immersif sur les savoirs astronomiques autochtones

Joëlle Rondeau, Mélanie Chaplier, Laurie Rousseau-Nepton, Karine Lanoie-Brien, Kim Picard, Francine Allaire and Élodie Pollet
For several decades, Indigenous filmmakers have been reclaiming a medium that has long been used to convey stereotypical representations strengthening settler colonialist discourses and power structures. Concurrently, Indigenous researchers have been working to recover and revitalize their peoples’ connections to Star Knowledges and their cultural, cosmological and epistemological significance. These projects can be seen as vectors of Indigenous resurgence. In this paper, we propose to reflect on the approaches and research processes of a project undertaken at the intersection of forms of narrative sovereignty expressed through Indigenous cinema and resurgent Indigenous astronomies through an immersive animated film, currently in production, about the relationships that the First Peoples of northeastern Turtle Island have nurtured with the stars, dreams and the land. In this multi-authored article – and in dialogue with the “storywork” approach initially developed by Jo-Ann Archibald – we describe the research carried out to develop the film’s script and the forms of resurgence that we have seen ensue. This article thus aims to show how celestial stories act upon us – and upon the project – as we seek to (re)interpret them in an Indigenous and collaborative cinematic work of unprecedented scope.

Les sept frères, les pléiades

Marjolaine McKenzie

Conversation about Language, Poetry, and Sky Stories: With Jesse Rae Archibald Barber/Interview by Marie-Eve Bradette

Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber and Marie-Eve Bradette

Re-Constellating lii zitwel pi l’syel

Matthew Tétreault

L’esprit voyageur

J.D. Kurtness