Stories of Oka: Land, Film, and Literature - Paperback

by Isabelle St Amand (Author), S. E. Stewart (Translator), David Cree (Foreword by)

In the summer of 1990, the Oka Crisis--or the Kanehsatake Resistance--exposed a rupture in the relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples in Canada.

In the wake of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the conflict made visible a contemporary Indigenous presence that Canadian society had imagined was on the verge of disappearance. The 78-day standoff also reactivated a long history of Indigenous people's resistance to colonial policies aimed at assimilation and land appropriation.

The land dispute at the core of this conflict raises obvious political and judicial issues, but it is also part of a wider context that incites us to fully consider the ways in which histories are performed, called upon, staged, told, imagined, and interpreted.

Stories of Oka: Land, Film, and Literature examines the standoff in relation to film and literary narratives, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This new English edition of St-Amand's interdisciplinary, intercultural, and multi-perspective work offers a framework for thinking through the relationships that both unite and oppose settler societies and Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Author Biography

ISABELLE ST-AMAND is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French Studies and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen's University. Her research as a settler scholar focuses on Indigenous literary criticism in Quebec and Canada.