‘These ones will learn it too’: transforming relationships with Chelsea Vowel's ‘kitaskînaw 2350’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reading representations of relationships in Chelsea Vowel's story ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ from the graphic anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold, I consider how portrayals of expanded relationships are a call to action – a generative lens through which settler-colonial studies may engage with anticolonial teachings. I aim to demonstrate how reading Indigenous literatures can expand and transform the settler-colonial imagination that has been taught to understand the world through a lens of exclusive ideologies like white supremacy and, broadly, the linear and the binary in relation to gender, time, and ways of being. Looking to Vowel's story as an example, I contend that such work is of particular significance to the ongoing surge of Indigenous literary and creative production and to the dismantling of settler-colonial teachings in so-called Canada. This analysis of ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ underlines complex connections between settler-colonialism, knowledge creation, language, imagination, power, and Indigenous literatures. Joining many other scholars who are showing how Indigenous literatures generate new imaginaries that can transform colonial behaviors and systems, I read representations of Indigenous-led worlds and anticolonial teachings as an urgent call to action to heal.