Re-inscribing Indigeneity in The Secret Garden and Peter Pan: Cherie Dimaline’s Into the Bright Open and Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Sisters of the Neversea

By retelling Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan from Indigenous perspectives, Cherie Dimaline and Cynthia Leitich Smith address the importance of young Indigenous readers seeing themselves represented. Using decolonial narrative strategies, these Indigenous-authored texts suggest alternative ways of relationship building and celebrate queerness and sisterhood. The two Edwardian novels with their textual instabilities, which reflect the questioning of normative ideas about childhood and adolescence at the turn of the twentieth century, provide Dimaline and Smith with ample opportunity to present counter images to racist stereotypes demonstrating the transformative power of Indigenous storytelling. In the process, the two authors adopt Uma Krishnaswami’s idea of “prisms” and Debbie Reese’s notion of “curtains” to reframe the two classic texts in their novels Into the Bright Open and Sisters of the Neversea thus re-inscribing Indigeneity into story.