Published Experience

In a personal essay published in 2016, “Colonialism Lived,” Emma LaRocque paints the vivid and heartbreaking scene of her first experience with racism. She was eight or nine years old, “sipping pink cream soda and looking at a comic book” in a small-town café, when a red-faced white man asked if she wanted to “go for a ride,” after sneering at her and calling her a slur. “The reality is that I can no longer count all the times I have either experienced or observed racism against Aboriginal peoples,” LaRocque writes.

LaRocque was born in 1949 near Lac La Biche, Alberta; she and her Cree-speaking Métis family lived in a one-room log cabin lit by kerosene. Her love of comics prompted a thirst for literacy, and not long after that unsettling moment in the café, she convinced her parents to let her attend school. There LaRocque would encounter further harm and a slew of stereotypes, spurring the need to confront colonialism in her work. She notes that when she started writing in 1971, there were few contemporary Indigenous authors active in Canada. In 1975, after completing three years of university, she published Defeathering the Indian, an early curriculum guide for public school teachers in Alberta and a response to the “prevalence of the stereotypes in school textbooks, classroom politics, and in society.”

Edited by her friend Elaine Coburn, a scholar at York University, The Emma LaRocque Reader brings together almost five decades of the University of Manitoba professor’s lively and groundbreaking prose and poetry, offering up a comprehensive body of work that delves into topics such as Indigenous resistance, sexism, and literary criticism. LaRocque’s writing is characterized by a rare balance between the erudite and the accessible, the personal and the universal, and her in-depth analysis is peppered with illustrative anecdotes.

Although she was reluctant to consider herself an academic in the early stages of her career, LaRocque proved herself adept at illuminating broader concepts with her first-hand experiences. Whether invoking details from her childhood or repeating classroom conversations, she reinforces abstract arguments with compassion and empathy. She is also unafraid to point to how this feature of her scholarly writing has been criticized. A colleague she held in high esteem stated in her reference letter for a doctorate, from 1990, that her work suffered from “too much introspection and the facts of her own biography.”

Challenging the notion that impartial scholarship exists and believing that such an idea is a colonial one, LaRocque argues that her refusal to alienate her academic voice from her personal life is key to her methodology. “Most of us have been led to believe that scholarship is objective,” she writes in “ ‘Resist No Longer’: Reflections on Resistance Writing and Teaching,” from 2015. “But in fact, knowledge is culturally and politically produced.”

LaRocque is equally unafraid to inject her criticism with activism, frequently highlighting problematic tropes within institutions as well as in history books, films, and literature. “Resistance is in me and in the literature I document and analyse,” she says in “Insider Notes: Reframing the Narratives,” an essay from 2010 that debunks the pervasive portrayal of “Native peoples as befeathered savages” and recalls the “endless string of White heroes” that filled her childhood comics and class materials. Here she points to men who were presented as great regardless of — or because of — the atrocities they committed: Christopher Columbus, the Jesuits, fur traders, the Pilgrims, Puritans, and beyond.

In the same essay, LaRocque recalls her early curriculum work, research that enabled her to develop that handbook for Alberta teachers. “I tried to be subtle rather than explosive, but I think such a concern was more a mark of my colonization than of my liberation,” she writes. She articulates the tensions inherent in writing in the language of the settler, stating that “literacy is a two-edged sword dependent on whether humans use it for oppressive or emancipatory purposes.”

The collection also captures how LaRocque has both celebrated and shaped discussions of Indigenous art and representation. In a 2009 essay, “Reflections on Cultural Continuity Through Aboriginal Women’s Writing,” she gives readers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary literary landscape, cataloguing influential writers such as Jeannette Armstrong, Beatrice Culleton Mosionier, Eden Robinson, and Lee Maracle. She also unpacks what she calls the “ ‘civ/sav’ ideology,” a phenomenon that “dichotomizes Native-White relations in terms of civilization inevitably winning over savagery,” and argues that a majority of Western authors have adopted such thinking throughout history.

By describing the disservice historians and their flawed depictions have done to both Indigenous communities and our collective understanding of the past, she reveals how language can be used as a method of control, dominance, and exclusion. In a piece from 2015, she expands on these issues within Métis literature. “When we employ a reading strategy that does not privilege theory over people, what is striking is the extreme racism (and sexism) and marginalization that Métis writers across the eras have experienced and confronted — not only because they were/are Native but specifically because they were/are ‘halfbreed.’ ” Here she looks at misrepresentation, dispossession, identity, and self-acceptance, specifically articulating how colonial notions and false dichotomies negatively influence Métis people and culture.

“It is imperative that White and other non-Indigenous peoples learn the truth about the colonization process and also about the cultural achievements and humanity of Indigenous peoples,” LaRocque writes in her afterword. “I believe only then will society really change, and only then can reconciliation truly happen.”

The Emma LaRocque Reader is an invaluable and thoughtfully curated project that celebrates LaRocque’s readable — and refreshing — approach to intellectual pursuits. “Our research must be rigorous but it cannot be aloof,” she argues. “Our research must be thorough, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and our scholarship must exude the highest of standards, but also be ‘transgressive’ and humanized with a compassionate voice.”