- March 20, 2014
The Studies in National and International Development Series welcomes you to a lecture by Sam McKegney called “Shaming the Body, Assaulting the Land: Indigenous Masculinity and Reterritorialization” at 1:00 pm in Queen’s University’s Dunning Hall.
In this talk, Sam McKegney argues that the gender segregation, the derogation of the feminine, and the shaming of the body that occurred systematically within residential schools were not merely by-products of Euro-Christian patriarchy. Rather they served-and serve-the goal of colonial dispossession by troubling lived experiences of ecosystemic territoriality and effacing kinship relations that constitute modes of Indigenous governance.
The paper thus asks: If the coordinated assaults on Indigenous embodiment and on Indigenous cosmologies of gender are not just two among several interchangeable tools of colonial dispossession but are in fact integral to the Canadian colonial project, can embodied actions that self-consciously reintegrate gender complementarity be mobilized to activate not simply ‘healing’ but the radical reterritorialization and sovereignty that will make meaningful ‘reconciliation’ possible?
McKegney pursues this question through the study of autobiographical and fictional writings by residential school survivors and testimony from the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
About the Speaker:
Sam McKegney is a settler scholar of Indigenous literatures. He grew up in Anishinaabe territory on the Saugeen Peninsula along the shores of Lake Huron and currently resides with his partner and their two daughters in traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples where he is an associate professor at Queen’s University. He has written a book entitled Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School and articles on such topics as environmental kinship, masculinity theory, prison writing, Indigenous governance, and Canadian hockey mythologies. The present talk builds from McKegney’s current two-book project on Indigenous masculinities. The first of these, entitled Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood, is a collection of interviews with Indigenous artists, academics, activists, and elders published by the University of Manitoba Press in January 2014. The second is a critical monograph tentatively titled ‘Carrying the Burden of Peace’: Imagining Indigenous Masculinities through Story.
