The TC Race and Ethnicity Studies and Law and the Humanities Forums have selected for a collaborative session three presentations that address how the current era of reparations has been shaped by literary texts, especially texts concerned with the intersections between race, ethnic, and legal identity. The panel focuses on writing by Indigenous authors from the U.S., Canada, and India through a comparative, transnational lens that scrutinizes the trope of “Indianness” and its implication in settler-state practices of insurgency and reconciliation, as it considers how specific narrative forms participate in and complicate the question of reparations and their relationship to literary form.

Rowshan Chowdhury, in “Anticolonial rebellions in India, Inter-imperial Network, and Transnational Co-formation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature,” investigates the investment of the United States in the anti-colonial rebellions in India, particularly the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, to ask how US writers record and fetishize these Indian rebellions. While so many Americanist scholars have interrogated the co-formations of the notion of whiteness in relation to imagined Blackness, Chowdhury understands South Asianness, more particularly Asian Indianness, as constructed or imagined for establishing the exceptionalism of Americanness. Chowdhury explores how the terms “Sepoy” and “Mutiny” became a symbolic tool to refer to Indians protesting against white colonizers during the nineteenth century. This White-Other binary serves the interests of empire, emanating from the fear of rebellion that was shared among imperial powers as a conflation of identities that indicates the larger inter-imperial structure that facilitated the US interest in South Asia. Chowdhury considers Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountain” (1844), Whitman’s “Passage to India” (1871), Whittier’s “The Pipe’s at Lucknow” (1884) and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), along with nineteenth-century newspapers, as examples of works that perpetuated the Orientalist trend through the literary imaginary of anticolonial rebellions of the Other.

Bellamy Mitchell, in “‘As true as I can tell it’: Responses to and in Apologetic Form from Contemporary Indigenous Poetry and Performance,” examines the poetics of formal apologies by nation states to colonized populations, engaging both their potential for reparative interpersonal and narrative work. Treating apologies as part of a narrative genre, her paper focuses on US Public Law 111-118 and Stephen Harper’s “Statement of apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools,” to open up a way of reading these apologies not so much as empty gestures but rather as actively emptied reparative gestures which anticipate and fend off the possibility of material reparations. Her paper assesses works by Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Jordan Abel (Nisga’a) and the ongoing collaboration between settler artist AA Bronson and Adrian Stimson (Siksika) to show how the use of lyric and apologetic forms in these works refuses the historicizing gestures and narratives of progress that often structure the apologetics of multicultural liberalism.

Sigrid Anderson, in "Legacies of Violence and Reparations in Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughtermom," analyzes Angeline Boulley’s 2021 novel Firekeeper’s Daughter, a plot-driven, YA mystery in which an Ojibwe woman teams up with the FBI to discover who has been poisoning her community by circulating meth. A fast-moving story that concludes with a dramatic car chase, Boulley’s novel self-reflexively engages with the mystery genre’s ability to uncover systems of corruption and oppression that hide behind institutions and powerful corporations. In this way, Boulley writes in the tradition of Sara Paretsky, Barbara Neely, and Nevada Barr. This is not unintentional, and Boulley’s Author’s Note emphasizes her purpose in exposing historical injustices suffered by contemporary indigenous communities: “We exist and have dynamic experiences beyond history books or stories set long ago”(489). Boulley’s contemporary novel places her protagonist, Daunis, firmly in the center of issues of tribal sovereignty, community, identity, and violence against native women. Boulley deliberately draws attention to the intersection of legacies of violence against native communities and the crimes that Daunis investigates. Ultimately, Daunis’s immersion in Anishinaabe ceremonies and ways of knowledge-gathering act as a reparative act both for the federal government’s unconcern for her community’s well-being and the violence suffered by native women whose victimization falls between the cracks of federal and tribal oversight. Anderson's presentation traces the financial, legal, and social logics of reparations that thread through Boulley’s narrative.