Talking Back to History in Indigenous Picturebooks

Abstract

This article examines how Indigenous picturebook authors counter Canada's history of child removal. Drawing on Daniel Justice's mandate to read Indigenous writing as political, intellectual, artistic, and geographic self-determination, it analyses the ways in which these books critique the imperial practices of child relocation through the stages of the residential school experience, and the ways in which they work to educate all readers and counter the harm of child removal in Indigenous populations. This article demonstrates how, by offering representations of removal from healthy families and child resistance to residential schools, these books talk back to dominant, accepted interpretations of Indigenous peoples and colonial history.