Indigenizing the YA Canon

Angeline Boulley’s stated intention when writing her debut novel Firekeeper’s Daughter (2021) was to indigenize the YA canon and offer positive role models for Native American young women, not properly represented in literature. The novel—about an eighteen-year-old Anishinaabe girl who sets out on a mission to help her community—creatively integrates traditional Indigenous stories like the Seventh Fire Prophecy with western detective fiction and coming-of-age narratives. Underscoring its activist motivation, the text denounces structural problems that affect Native Americans, including sexist and racist violence, and it recovers traditional rituals and values—most explicitly, relationality—to suit contemporary experience and needs. The article aims at making a contribution to the conceptualization of Indigenous Young Adult literature, thus filling a gap in scholarly work, and to bring attention to the literary and political value of contemporary Native women’s writing. Additionally, it delves into the definition of Indigenous resilience as context-specific, political and simultaneously individual and communal, thus adding to the field of resilience studies and Indigenous/decolonial studies.