In a gesture toward traditional First Nations orality, Peter Cole blends poetic and dramatic voices with storytelling. A conversation between two tricksters, Coyote and Raven, and the colonized and the colonizers, his narrative takes the form of a canoe journey. Cole draws on traditional Aboriginal knowledge to move away from the western genres that have long contained, shaped, and determined ab/originality. Written in free verse, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is meant to be read aloud and breaks new ground by making orality the foundation of its scholarship. Cole moves beyond the rhetoric and presumption of white academic (de/re)colonizers to aboriginal spaces recreated by aboriginal peoples. Rather than employing the traditional western practice of gathering information about exoticized other, demonized other, contained other, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is a celebration of aboriginal thought, spirituality, and practice, a sharing of lived experience as First Peoples.

In a gesture toward traditional First Nations orality, Peter Cole blends poetic and dramatic voices with storytelling. A conversation between two tricksters, Coyote and Raven, and the colonized and the colonizers, his narrative takes the form of a canoe journey. Cole draws on traditional Aboriginal knowledge to move away from the western genres that have long contained, shaped, and determined ab/originality. Written in free verse, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is meant to be read aloud and breaks new ground by making orality the foundation of its scholarship. Cole moves beyond the rhetoric and presumption of white academic (de/re)colonizers to aboriginal spaces recreated by aboriginal peoples. Rather than employing the traditional western practice of gathering information about exoticized other, demonized other, contained other, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing is a celebration of aboriginal thought, spirituality, and practice, a sharing of lived experience as First Peoples.

Popularly thought of as a recreational vehicle and one of the key ingredients of an ideal wilderness getaway, the canoe is also a political vessel. A potent symbol and practice of Indigenous cultures and traditions, the canoe has also been adopted to assert conservation ideals, feminist empowerment, citizenship practices, and multicultural goals. Documenting many of these various uses, this book asserts that the canoe is not merely a matter of leisure and pleasure; it is folded into many facets of our political life. Taking a critical stance on the canoe, The Politics of the Canoe expands and enlarges the stories that we tell about the canoe’s relationship to, for example, colonialism, nationalism, environmentalism, and resource politics. To think about the canoe as a political vessel is to recognize how intertwined canoes are in the public life, governance, authority, social conditions, and ideologies of particular cultures, nations, and states. Almost everywhere we turn, and any way we look at it, the canoe both affects and is affected by complex political and cultural histories. Across Canada and the U.S., canoeing cultures have been born of activism and resistance as much as of adherence to the mythologies of wilderness and nation building. The essays in this volume show that canoes can enhance how we engage with and interpret not only our physical environments, but also our histories and present-day societies.

If the canoe is a symbol of Canada, what kind of Canada does it symbolize? Inheriting a Canoe Paddle looks at how the canoe has come to symbolize love of Canada for non-aboriginal Canadians and provides a critique of this identification’s unintended consequences for First Nations. Written with an engaging, personal style, it is both a scholarly examination and a personal reflection, delving into representations of canoes and canoeing in museum displays, historical re-enactments, travel narratives, the history of wilderness expeditions, artwork, film, and popular literature. Misao Dean opens the book with the story of inheriting her father’s canoe paddle and goes on to explore the canoe paddle as a national symbol – integral to historical tales of exploration and trade, central to Pierre Trudeau’s patriotism, and unique to Canadians wanting to distance themselves from British and American national myths. Throughout, Inheriting a Canoe Paddle emphasizes the importance of self-consciously evaluating the meaning we give to canoes as objects and to canoeing as an activity.

Orality and Literacy investigates the interactions of the oral and the literate through close studies of particular cultures at specific historical moments. Rejecting the 'great-divide' theory of orality and literacy as separate and opposite to one another, the contributors posit that whatever meanings the two concepts have are products of their ever-changing relationships to one another. Through topics as diverse as Aboriginal Canadian societies, Ukrainian-Canadian narratives, and communities in ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and twentieth-century Asia, these cross-disciplinary essays reveal the powerful ways in which cultural assumptions, such as those about truth, disclosure, performance, privacy, and ethics, can affect a society's uses of and approaches to both the written and the oral. The fresh perspectives in Orality and Literacy reinvigorate the subject, illuminating complex interrelationships rather than relying on universal generalizations about how literacy and orality function.

Native Studies Keywords explores selected concepts in Native studies and the words commonly used to describe them, words whose meanings have been insufficiently examined. This edited volume focuses on the following eight concepts: sovereignty, land, indigeneity, nation, blood, tradition, colonialism, and indigenous knowledge. Each section includes three or four essays and provides definitions, meanings, and significance to the concept, lending a historical, social, and political context. Take sovereignty, for example. The word has served as the battle cry for social justice in Indian Country. But what is the meaning of sovereignty? Native peoples with diverse political beliefs all might say they support sovereignty—without understanding fully the meaning and implications packed in the word. The field of Native studies is filled with many such words whose meanings are presumed, rather than articulated or debated. Consequently, the foundational terms within Native studies always have multiple and conflicting meanings. These terms carry the colonial baggage that has accrued from centuries of contested words. Native Studies Keywords is a genealogical project that looks at the history of words that claim to have no history. It is the first book to examine the foundational concepts of Native American studies, offering multiple perspectives and opening a critical new conversation.

Contemporary Studies in Environmental and Indigenous Pedagogies: A Curricula of Stories and Place. Our book is a compilation of the work of experienced educational researchers and practitioners, all of whom currently work in educational settings across North America. Contributors bring to this discussion, an enriched view of diverse ecological perspectives regarding when and how contemporary environmental and Indigenous curriculum figures into the experiences of curricular theories and practices. This work brings together theorists that inform a cultural ecological analysis of the environmental crisis by exploring the ways in which language informs ways of knowing and being as they outline how metaphor plays a major role in human relationships with natural and reconstructed environments. This book will be of interest to educational researchers and practitioners who will find the text important for envisioning education as an endeavour that situates learning in relation to and informed by an Indigenous Environmental Studies and Eco-justice Education frameworks. This integrated collection of theory and practice of environmental and Indigenous education is an essential tool for researchers, graduate and undergraduate students in faculties of education, environmental studies, social studies, multicultural education, curriculum theory and methods, global and comparative education, and women’s studies. Moreover, this work documents methods of developing ways of implementing Indigenous and Environmental Studies in classrooms and local communities through a framework that espouses an eco-ethical consciousness. The proposed book is unique in that it offers a wide variety of perspectives, inviting the reader to engage in a broader conversation about the multiple dimensions of the relationship between ecology, language, culture, and education in relation to the cultural roots of the environmental crisis that brings into focus the local and global commons, language and identity, and environmental justice through pedagogical approaches by faculty across North America who are actively teaching and researching in this burgeoning field.