Loaded Speech: Between Voices in Indigenous Public Speaking Events

Abstract

This paper explores public podium addresses involving identified Indigenous speakers within the context of eco‐Indigenous alliances. In Montreal, the field site, Indigenous podium talk takes place with impressive frequency. These kinds of reflexive, discursive productions are part of a larger trend in staging ethnically reflexive voices in public discourse. Indigenous podium talks serve as important sites for Indigenous communities to engage and seek beneficial relationships from various Canadian publics. Yet, insofar as speakers speak from an identified cultural identity, perennial quandaries around the presentation of the “other” persist. In this article, I examine Indigenous podium talk as a discourse genre through which Indigenous identities and social issues are made recognizable and brought to the attention of non‐Indigenous publics. Through an in‐depth analysis of a single speaking event, focusing on reported speech and pronomial deixis, the interactional demands and possibilities of podium presentations are investigated and related to both the genre and the tar sands dispute that has brought the participants together. Analysis shows the fraught footings available and the sheer delicacy through which speaker and collective voices are presented and aligned to audience and issue, as speakers speak both as and for Indigenous people within the terms of podium talk.