In Indigenous North American cultural productions, bodies and embodiment are often central to narratives to consider the impact of settler colonialism. The term cultural productions applies to texts, films, and similar creations by Indigenous community members about Indigenous experiences. Many settler depictions of Native bodies dichotomizes either the pristine or a monstrous Native body (Teuton 211). As such, an examination of Native peoples of North America and their bodies which move beyond these binaristic perspectives while also situating each community at its own center is necessary. As shown in recent scholarly and creative writings on Indigenous bodies and embodiment, there is a need for an outlet to subvert colonial control and decenter white settler expectations. More specifically, in “The Indigenous Body in American Literature,” Sean Teuton writes, “The Indigenous body does political work in the very act of representing itself, resisting language that misrepresents its actual flesh with dominating words that attempt to define, contain, control, and thus colonize it” (212). This panel presents such representations while understanding the colonial structures which subdued such bodies.
The context and rationale of the panel cannot go without stating. Indigenous bodies are still fighting for non-racist, non-White representations in literature, history, and present-day society in the United States and Canada. For example, since January 2025, there have been several reports regarding the detention of Indigenous people by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States which gives rise to ideals of control of Indigenous bodies by the State (“Indigenous Peoples’ Rights are Non-Negotiable”). The movement to diminish and deny the sovereignty of Indigenous people in the United States are same moves since colonizers first stepped onto the continent. Such actions demonstrate the need for research on Indigenous studies and bodies/embodiment. In Canada, Indigenous people are overrepresented in the Canadian criminal justice system. In response to this awareness, officials are working to understand and combat such overrepresentation of the physical presence of Indigenous bodies in the criminal system. The juxtaposition of treatment between the two nations and the treatment of Indigenous bodies echoes the frustrations and illustrations within Native cultural productions. This panel situates itself in recent experiences of Indigenous nations within these two settler states and the contemporary cultural productions which represent Indigenous bodies and embodiment.
Therefore, this panel’s goal is to highlight research from and about the North American Indigenous nations by scholars who represent diverse viewpoints and diverse levels of expertise from an Associate to Ph.D Candidates. This panel will have four speakers who will speak for 12-15 minutes each leaving time for unstructured discussion and questions at the end of the panel. To demonstrate a variety of perspectives, there will be presentations on cultural productions from Indigenous nations across the North American continent.
For example, Ally Barber, a Ph. D candidate from Southern Methodist University, examines the ways in which Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008) exposes how participation in the American war machine functions as a means of further disseminating hegemonic ideologies, particularly surrounding race and gender. Allison Duque, a Ph. D candidate from the University of South Florida, considers Jeff Barnaby’s film Rhymes for Young Ghouls and asserts the film uses horror elements such as death and the undead to highlight the lives of the living which portrays new understandings of bodies and embodiment. Morgan Hunter, a Ph. D candidate also from the University of South Florida, considers Joshua Whitehead’s (Oji-Cree) character Jonny in Jonny Appleseed (2018). Hunter asserts Jonny’s body functions as a vessel for memories, a site of pain, a transformative costume, and a bearer of intergenerational trauma and stories passed down. Corrie Scott, an Associate Professor from the University of Ottawa, examines Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu by Innu writer Antane Kapesh which was ground-breaking due to its bilingual format and the main target of its critical analysis: white settler colonialism. Scott argues this inaugural repudiation of white authority both names and rejects whiteness, a befitting introduction to an essay that relentlessly interrogates the specificities of Canadian colonialism and its violence from a resolutely Innu perspective. Each of these presentations, while demonstrating the diversity of research of Indigenous cultural productions, posits a unique perspective on approaching considerations of how the bodies and embodiment of Indigenous people function in a settler context but within a world which works to resist settler colonial implications. They refocus the narrative back on the voice of the Indigenous creators, speakers, and characters decentering whiteness and settler colonialism.