Episode 3.22 Interfering with the Legitimacy of the Settler State with Chelsea Vowel

Secret Feminist Agenda

Hold onto your hats it’s a LIVE EPISODE! This one was recorded at the University of Alberta, as part of the Canadian Literature Centre’s Brown Bag Lunch series. I’m talking to the brilliant Chelsea Vowel, aka âpihtawikosisân. The ostensible topic of the conversation is Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (which I co-edited and to which Chelsea contributed), but we also talk about Indigenous futurisms and social media and lawsuits and how hard it is getting onto high chairs. And here are some links!

• If you haven’t already, you need to read Chelsea’s book, Indigenous Writes, and check out her very excellent podcast, Métis in Space.
• A lot of the points Chelsea makes could be paired with blog posts she’s written, like “Reconciliation in the time of pipelines” and “A little peek at what I’ve been writing” (an example of Métis futurisms) and “A storm of lawsuits.” Oh, and if you want to do something about that lawsuit she’s writing about, here’s the GoFundMe where you can do that.
• If you’d like to learn more about Indigenous futurisms, Lindsay Nixon has a wonderful piece on “Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms”
• For a great summary of how settlers’ expectations of Indigenous literature put authors in an impossible bind, read Alicia Elliott’s “Not Your Noble Savage: On Literary Colonialism and Native Writers”
• For more on what it was like watching the “appropriation prize” unfold in real time, read Scaachi Koul’s “On Glibness And Diversity In Canadian Media”
• And finally, here’s an article about a former poet laureate of Quebec being accused of plagiarizing Maya Angelou, Dylan Thomas, and Tupac Shakur!

Read Transcript

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Chelsea’s theme song is “Back in Black” by ACDC.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.