Located in the places of creation : indigenous women's location within the academy and community imagining, writing, and enacting community survivance

Baker, Emerance (2010) Located in the places of creation : indigenous women's location within the academy and community imagining, writing, and enacting community survivance. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

This Master's thesis is an Indigenous research project with a purpose of better understanding Indigenous women writing as a critical site of what Gerald Vizenor refers to as "liberation, imagination, talk, [and] play" literatures, which I understand as fundamental to envisioning, articulating and enacting the survivance of Indigenous peoples and our communities from within the academy and the community ("Manifest Manners" 4). Using an Indigenous methodology--informed by both qualitative grounded theory and feminist woman-centered methodologies--this project examines two (of many) simultaneously occurring phenomena within the spaces of the academy and many Indigenous communities. An ongoing synthesis of theory from within Indigenous women's narratives and stories will better allow the reader to understand the connections between these phenomena as "relationality" in that they relate to the cultural survivance of Indigenous peoples in Canada (Wilson 152). This project examination begins from the positions of what I refer to as 'the evidence of absence' and 'the dissonance of discovery' in relation to Indigenous women's writing and its prior place in the academy. A paradigmatic shift marks the focal move into the synthesis of Indigenous theory. Identifying Indigenous cultural survivance as coming from within Indigenous women's writing is the result of this shift. The focus on the academy and our Indigenous communities, as places of creation, in this research is fundamental to addressing the need to create harmony between the academy and the community and to restoring balance in these relations and closing the gap between these two spaces.

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