Climate change and settler-colonials, redux

Image from the San Diego Free Press
So, I'm way, way, WAY overdue for ordering the texts we'll cover in my September 2016 course "Climate Change in a Settler-Colonial Environment," but these things happen. Here are the six likely candidates at this point, and I'd love to hear people's thoughts:

  • Maleea Acker, Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC's South Coast -- creative nonfiction, carefully researched, by a settler who gives lots of space to local First Nations voices
  • Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl - a near-future dystopic novel set mostly in the Lower Mainland, involving myth alive in the world, queer sexualities, and transgenic beings
  • Philip Kevin Paul, Taking the Names Down from the Hill - WSÁ,NEC poetry, anchored in place and thinking about time
  • Eden Robinson, Traplines - short stories, full of disaster and pain and humour, what the New York Times Book Review called proof that "Canadians are as weird and violent as anyone else on this continent"
  • Bertrand Sinclair, The Inverted Pyramid - a settler-colonial origins story about BC's rise into independence, via logging, financial speculation, and its role in the First World War
  • Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga - a graphic novel (illustrating the looseness of that term) that retells a Haida narrative about a vengeance-bent leader so focused on his lost sister that his community finds itself on the edge of devastation.
And we'll be working as well with excerpts from the reports of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to ground what we're trying to achieve.

If this all comes together, it's going to be amazing!

Comments

Paula Johanson said…
Good choices!
Salt Fish Girl has much to say for it as CanLit and CanSF.
Terrific that you've got a book of WSANEC poetry on the list -- I've got to read it!
The Haida manga has had some terrific reviews. I've only skimmed it, and as soon as I finish writing my current book I've been meaning to sit down and read it entirely.

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