ILSA’s 8th Annual Gathering, “kîhokêwin tâcimoyin: Visiting to tell Stories / Se rendre visite pour se raconter des histoires,” was a great success! Thank you to all the participants who helped make the gathering a nourishing, supportive, and memorable experience. Special and heartfelt thanks to the gathering’s hosts and partners, the Gabriel Dumont Institute and the Saskatchewan Ânskohk Writers’ Circle Inc., without whom it would not have been possible.

ILSA’s 8th annual gathering took place 16-18 June 2022 on the Métis Homeland and Treaty 6 Territory in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. We are grateful to have been given the Cree title for our 2022 gathering by Vince Ahenakew and Maria Campbell. “Kîhokêwin tâcimoyin” expresses the practice of visiting to share stories.  This gathering was an opportunity for scholars, knowledge-keepers, storytellers, artists, and community members to visit with one another after the isolation of the pandemic to renew and build relationships, and to tell and explore Indigenous stories. 

 The 8th annual gathering was hosted by and in partnership with the Saskatchewan Ânskohk Writers’ Circle Inc. (SAWCI), an organization committed to supporting Indigenous writers, and the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research (GDI), an institute founded to help meet the educational and cultural needs of Saskatchewan’s Métis community. In keeping with GDI’s mission, this gathering had a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on Métis literature and culture, an emphasis that has inspired the theme of visiting.  Métis writer Gregory Scofield has said “as Métis, we love to dance and we love to visit”[i], and indeed several Métis writers and scholars have described visiting as key to their work.  For example, Cindy Janice Gaudet uses the Cree term keeyoukaywin, “the visiting way,” to describe a methodology that means “to slow down, take time, make the effort, knock on the door, sit down, listen, share, go to the land, meditate, empty [one]self, and be present”.[ii]  Warren Cariou explores visiting as a form of “critical humility” that means approaching a text as one would approach “visiting a friend or relation . . . without an agenda, without a preconceived notion of what we want to gain.”[iii]

 With these thoughts on the ethics of visiting in mind, ILSA, GDI, and SAWCI sought via this gathering to create opportunities for us to take the time to visit. Keynote addresses by Maria Campbell, Deanna Reder, and Gregory Scofield, and the many conversations generated by the work of the gathering’s participants considered the linkages between our work in Indigenous literary studies and the practices and ethics of visiting – with relatives and friends, with colleagues, with communities, with the land, with ideas, and with stories and texts.

[i] Gregory Scofield and Sherry Farrell Racette, “Kitchen Table Talk – The Beauty of Beading,”  University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, June 3 2021.

[ii] Cindy Janice Gaudet. “Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way - Fostering an Indigenous Research Methodology.”  aboriginal policy studies Vol. 7 No. 2 (2018), pp 47-64.

[iii] Warren Cariou, “On Critical Humility,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 32, Numbers 3-4, (Fall-Winter 2020), pp. 1-12.

ILSA 2022 Annual Gathering Program

The Indigenous Literary Studies Association Council, 2021-2022:

Kristina Bidwell, President
David Gaertner, President Elect
Jenna Hunnef, Secretary
Marie-Eve Bradette, Treasurer
Celiese Lypka, Early Career Member
Johannah Bird, Graduate Student Member
Keavy Martin, Past President