From Ishpadinaa to Ogimaa Mikana: Teaching Indigenous Literatures Online in Toronto

Abstract

According to Johnston, the word's composition "gives the sense of a person casting his or her knowledge as far as he or she can. By implication, the person whom is said to be dae'b'wae is acknowledged to be telling what he or she knows only insofar as he or she has perceived what he or she is reporting" (qtd. in Simpson 59). [...]in Anishinaabemowin "truth" is not an absolute, but is always contextualized within the knowledge and experience of the person who is speaking that truth.1 This relationality extends to the work of non-Indigenous critics of Indigenous literatures, such as myself. First came the house by Hillcrest Park to which my parents brought me home after I was born;then the house on Regal Road where my dad moved after my parents' divorce;and, finally, my mother's house, off Bathurst Street, where I returned during my first year back in Toronto to avoid the city's brutal rental market. During my first year back in the city, I would leave my mother's house and walk down the Baldwin Steps, crossing Davenport and continuing down Spadina to the English department at the University of Toronto, where I had begun my doctoral work.