Who hears the listeners : decolonizing the process of dialogue in First Peoples’ literatures

This dissertation questions and reimagines the reparative function of dialogue in settler-Indigenous discourse and in First Peoples’ literatures. Whereas dialogue is popularly imagined as an egalitarian process by which multiple parties may safely reconcile their differences, dialogue in everyday practice is founded in asymmetries of power and privilege that stem from the participants’ respective experiences of difference under settler-colonial capitalism. Taking the asymmetry of dialogue as a starting point, the dissertation turns to principles from the political traditions of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, including the Great Law of Peace and the Condolence Ceremony, as models for a critically positional, intersectional listening-reading practice that can better account for the problems of difference and power in conversation. In the complementary spirits of Haudenosaunee diplomatic practice and of Indigenous women’s writing, the dissertation proceeds by analyzing the forms of dialogue that are portrayed in (and provide the structuring principles for) examples of First Peoples’ literatures from the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Teetl’it Gwich’in, and Stó:lō nations. Of particular interest in these case studies are the expanded forms of listening that are modelled by the characters, authors, and other vocal presences in the texts. The dissertation understands listening not merely as an embodied sensate phenomenon, but as the center of a constellation of complex processes and (dis)positions that straddle the literary-discursive, geopolitical, socio-cultural, physiological, and spiritual registers. The primary texts chosen for this dissertation’s case studies reflect the breadth and nuance of this expanded concept of listening, which has resonance with public reading culture and Indigenous witnessing protocols more broadly.