[Originally written as an appendix for Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, it didn’t quite seem to fit with the book, so the Press suggested we present it as a stand-alone piece that could be more easily shared with the writers to whom it was addressed. It was originally published on the Literary Hub website on 27 March 2018.] Dear Indigenous visionary: Writing in all its forms is a scary act; it makes us vulnerable and exposes our…
[Originally posted 13 January 2015] Among the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, the solitary North American species of badger, Taxidea taxus, is a primordial friend and ally; indeed, as Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko observes, it was a she-badger who made possible the migration of humans and other beings from the Fourth World beneath us into this, the Fifth World of our current existence: The people found the opening into the Fifth World…
I am grateful to be a visitor working on the lands of the Musqueam people, on whose traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories UBC is located and to be living as a visitor within the unceded ancestral territories of the shíshálh people.
@2026 Daniel Heath Justice. All rights reserved.