The topic I would like to focus on is raising awareness to is indigenous literature. Words have always been a tool for people to learn, connect and empathize with each other.
Indigenous people use their literature to express their traditions and to communicate their understanding of the world. Each group has its literature, language and culture. For First Nations people, traditional storytelling was mostly based on spoken words. Their myths, folklore and legends shaping the everyday life of the community and the individual’s sense of identity and they transfer it from one generation to the next. They also used other methods to record their stories, such as rock paintings, birchbark scrolls and carving but the foundation was always oral narrative. This all changed when European invaded their land and forced them to abandon their language, families were separated and in many cases instead of getting the knowledge from their Elders, books had become the way to learn. Nowadays, there are so many Indigenous authors, not only write about their culture and record what happened in the past but they also dive into many other genres such as mythology, action, crime, sci-fi, comedy etc….
Knowing about what happened, I feel a strong impulse to spread awareness about first nation literature in general and I also want to break through the boundaries of the average people’s impression about Indigenous literature. First nation literature is more than victim narrative and historical narrative , there is so much more about it that people should discover.
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck29WsVhoSY
https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2014/Indigenous-Literature-Diversity-and-Importance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_literatures_in_Canada