Indigenous Women's Writing and the Cultural Study of Law

In Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law, Cheryl Suzack explores Indigenous women’s writing in the post-civil rights period through close-reading analysis of major texts by Leslie Marmon Silko, Beatrice Culleton Mosionier, Louise Erdrich, and Winona LaDuke.

Working within a transnational framework that compares multiple tribal national contexts and U.S.-Canadian settler colonialism, Suzack sheds light on how these Indigenous writers use storytelling to engage in social justice activism by contesting discriminatory tribal membership codes, critiquing the dispossession of Indigenous women from their children, challenging dehumanizing blood quantum codes, and protesting colonial forms of land dispossession. Each chapter in this volume aligns a court case with a literary text to show how literature contributes to self-determination struggles. Situated at the intersections of critical race, Indigenous feminist, and social justice theories, Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law crafts an Indigenous-feminist literary model in order to demonstrate how Indigenous women respond to the narrow vision of law by recuperating other relationships–to themselves, the land, the community, and the settler-nation.

ISBN: 9781442628588
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: April 21, 2017

‘After reading Suzack’s finely crafted monograph, I am left with a sense of hope and gratitude for what indigenous feminist literature can teach us about the quest for justice, which often takes place far from the courthouse doors.’"Suzack shows how Indigenous women writers can render the damage legal cases do to women understandable at an affective, personal, and family level. Although literature has often been regarded as a 'frill' from both mainstream and Indigenous perspectives, Suzack demonstrates how literature works as a form of social justice activism.""Indigenous Women's Writing and the Cultural Study of Law is rare in confronting taboos of gender-related issues facing indigenous women in the context of legal battles for tribal sovereignty. The book takes a powerful stance to emphasize that an indigenous feminist approach does not undermine but is essential to inclusive and successful sovereignty. For Suzack, the role of indigenous women’s writing is a vital tool for imagining how this equitable sovereignty might be achieved."