Page 11 [11]
EDITORS" FOREWORD
In fact, Gill-Lacroix’s paper introduces the reader to the second thematic
node of the book: the one dwelling on Native Peoples. Miklés Vassanyi’s
“Second Contact: Patterns of ‘Second Encounters’ with the Inuit in Early
Modernity. An Anthropological Analysis of the Cases of Henry Hudson and
William Baffin” provides an anthropological lens to discuss 17 century
European second contact with the Greenland and Hudson Bay Inuit. Using
sources on Henry Hudson’s voyage of 1610-11 and William Baffin’s voyage of
1612, this paper is a quest to better understand the nature of the conflicts such
encounters entailed. Applying post-colonial theory and drawing on the work
of necrogeographical scholars Laqueur and Francaviglia, through case studies
from interior BC (Cheslatta Carrier Nation), Southwestern and Southern
Ontario (Black communities), William Felepchuk’s paper, “Unearthing Racial
Necrogeographies: Burial Places and the Dispossession of Minorities in
Canada” stresses the importance of minorities’ “successfully reconsecratling]
spaces of acknowledgement, remembrance, and peace through tending to
burial places,” in the face of the challenges this endeavour may entail. Eric
Smith’s “Safely Embracing Culture: The Adequacy of the Cultural Safety
Paradigm in Canadian and American Indigenous Healthcare” investigates
how health care services for indigenous people could be improved through
providers’ better knowledge and understanding of indigenous culture(s)
beyond the current practice of cultural safety. The last paper in this block is
Denisa Krasna’s “Jay Treaty: Indigenous Rights of Free Cross-Border Passage
between Canada and the USA”, which examines how the implementation of
the Canada-US border has affected indigenous communities residing in the
area, and how Jay Treaty (1794) and the rights granted by it may be interpreted
in multiple and interculturally conflicting ways. Importantly, the paper also
presents several examples of indigenous cross-border cooperation.
The volume closes with two papers featuring literary reflections on the
inter- and transcultural influences affecting Indigenous identity. Written by
Krisztina Kod6, “Indigenous Humor and Transcultural Identity Shifts and
Mix-ups within the Timeframe of Past, Present and Future in Drew Hayden
Taylor’s Dramatic Writing” considers four plays, The Bootlegger Blues (1991),
The Baby Blues (1999), Education is our Right (1990) and Toronto at Dreamer’s
Rock (1990) and looks into their characters’ identity shifts realizing between
the dominant and the minority culture. The paper highlights the role humour
and Gothic features play in the process in Taylor’s works. Finally, mixed
ethno-cultural identity construction and indigenous interracial relations lie
at the heart of Judit Agnes Kadar’s “The Shifting Sites of Identity Negotiation
in Boyden’s Three Day Road”. Her paper analyzes the journeys paved by
rituals and ceremonies of transformation, Boyden’s protagonists Xavier and
Elijah take.