Teaching to Read as an Outsider: How I Created and Taught an Introductory Course on Indigenous Literatures in Quebec

Abstract

In 2009, when discussing the new course I was about to give on Indigenous literatures in Quebec, I was often met with doubtful questions: “But what books will you teach? Which authors? Is it really a literature?” A few years earlier, at the turn of the 2000s, Maurizio Gatti, one of the first researchers to study Indigenous literatures in French, faced similar disbelief from an employee at the Quebec documentation center in Paris, but also from the majority of professors he approached to supervise his PhD, some of them even challenging the very existence of Indigenous literatures (Littérature 18). At that time, Indigenous books in French were both rare and largely ignored. Librarians and other book professionals viewed Indigenous texts as purely ethnological (Gatti, Littérature 17– 19). Unlike Indigenous literatures in English, which, back in 2009, were already well established in English Canada, Indigenous literatures in French in Quebec were then still absent from the literary field. As Isabelle StAmand states,