Deanna Reder

Biography

Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) is a Full Professor in the Departments of Indigenous Studies and English at Simon Fraser University. She continues the lead a project, funded by SSHRC from 2015-2021, originally titled "The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Northern North America up to 1992". See www.thepeopleandthetext.ca.

Her monograph, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina, was released by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in May 2022; it was awarded the Modern Languages Association Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages in 2024; it was also awarded the 2024 Canada Prize from the Federation of Humanties and Social Sciences an in 2023 it was awarded the 2022 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian literary criticism (English section) by the Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL).

MLA Prize Juror Citation:
Deanna Reder’s Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina is both humble and groundbreaking, weaving moments of personal revelation with profound theoretical insight in an important new work of literary theory. Reder centers her positionality as a Cree-Métis scholar and connects her won and her relatives’ storytelling practices with those of other Cree and Métis authors and intellectuals to firmly reclaim autobiography as an Indigenous intellectual tradition. Upending previous scholarly assumptions that autobiographical writing is antithetical to Indigenous literary traditions, Reder privileges Cree literary concepts and practices, in Cree language, to elaborate the generic conventions and paradigms of Cree life writing. Reder also demonstrates through painstaking archival research the ways that editors and publishers have often undermined the intentions of Cree authors and thus have obscured Cree autobiographical innovations. With broad implications for genre studies, Indigenous studies, language revitalization, archival methods, and literary history, this book makes a profound and original contribution.

Gabrielle Roy Prize Juror Citation:
This landmark work in Indigenous studies and Canadian literary criticism challenges not just what counts as literature in Canada but also how Indigenous writing has been read and received to date. Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition compellingly demonstrates that Indigenous autobiographies are “examples of vibrant, innovative Indigenous intellectual production” (29). Driven by archival research and attentive to the specificity of cultural and linguistic contexts, it challenges conventional understandings of genre, authorship, and audience. It likewise challenges the pernicious view that oral and literary traditions exist in isolation from each other, the former consigned to be displaced by the latter. The book’s important shift in understanding Indigenous autobiography opens onto questions about agency, history, pedagogy, and relationships––questions that allow for an understanding of Indigenous intellectual traditions on their own terms. Returning to canonical examples, such as Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed, Reder also shows how the understanding of Indigenous autobiographies has been distorted by editorial and publishing decisions. The book’s astute, ethically-oriented discussions bring Reder’s own life narrative into conversation with the stories of her relations, and with crucial stories of Cree-Métis survival, resistance, and self-representation. Each chapter centers on a concept expressed in nêhiyawêwin and includes stories of Reder’s family and life as it illuminates a set of scholarly arguments through stories that

Reder has also co-edited four anthologies, including one of the first anthologies of Indigenous literary criticism in Canada (Learn, Teach, Challenge with Linda Morra in 2016) and an accessible anthology of short stories suitable for the early undergraduate classroom (Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island, with lead editor Sophie McCall in 2017). In June 2020 Reder and McCall co-edited the fiftieth anniversary edition of the journal Ariel: a Review of International English Studies, focusing on Indigenous and Postcolonial Studies. In 2020 Reder co-wrote Cold Case North: The Search for James Brady and Absolom Halkett with Michael Nest and Eric Bell. In September 2022 a special issue on pedagogy for Studies in American Indian Literature was released, titled “How Do We Teach These?”, co-edited by Reder and Michelle Coupal. Reder is a founding member of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association, serving on the council from 2015-2018. In 2020 she helped found the Indigenous Editors Association, and after serving on the executive in its inaugural year, continues to volunteer. Since 2018 she has co-chaired the Indigenous Voices Awards with McCall (see indigenousvoicesawards.org). In 2018 she began a seven-year term as a member of the College of New Scholars in the Royal Society of Canada.