Elements of Indigenous Style

Gregory Younging

• Publisher: Brush Education
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781550597196
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études amérindiennes

Elements of Indigenous Style offers Indigenous writers and editors—and everyone creating works about Indigenous Peoples—the first published guide to common questions and issues of style and process. Everyone working in words or other media needs to read this important new reference, and to keep it nearby while they're working.

This guide features:

• Twenty-two succinct style principles.
• Advice on culturally appropriate publishing practices, including how to collaborate with Indigenous Peoples, when and how to seek the advice of Elders, and how to respect Indigenous Oral Traditions and Traditional Knowledge.
• Terminology to use and to avoid.
• Advice on specific editing issues, such as biased language, capitalization, and quoting from historical sources and archives.
• Case studies of projects that illustrate best practices.

1

Chapter 1 Why an Indigenous style guide?

---

The need to Indigenize publishing

The paramount purpose of literature focusing on a specific cultural group should be to present the culture in a realistic and insightful manner, with the highest possible degree of verisimilitude. However, the body of literature on Indigenous Peoples mostly fails to achieve this standard. The failure has been a long-standing concern of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

The failure comes from a colonial practice of transmitting “information” about Indigenous Peoples rather than transmitting Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives about themselves. The anthropologist Franz Boas put a name on this perspective in the mid-twentieth century. He called it ethnocentrism, which he recognized as a barrier to cultural understanding. Cultural understanding, he realized, can only be achieved by a “perspective from the inside.” Indigenous and other scholars have since coined other terms for this perspective, such as Eurocentrism, and have written about, for example, the British-centrism of Canada.

Some members of the Canadian literary establishment have also long recognized the damage of this perspective. Margaret Atwood wrote in 1972, “The Indians and Eskimos have rarely been considered in and for themselves: they are usually made into projections of something in the white Canadian psyche.”¹

The need to Indigenize writing, editing, and publishing in many ways parallels the evolution of writing about African Americans and women in the late twentieth century, and the development of concepts such as “Black History” and “Herstory.” Indigenous writers, editors, and publishers have asserted that the experience of being an Indigenous person is profoundly different from that of other people in North America. Many Indigenous Peoples and authors have cited cultural appropriation, misrepresentation, and lack of respect for Indigenous cultural Protocols as significant problems in Canadian publishing. Indigenous Peoples have frequently taken the stand that they are best capable of, and morally empowered to, transmit information about themselves. They have the right to tell their own story. When an author is writing about them—even in established genres such as anthropological studies, history, and political commentary—Indigenous Peoples would at least like the opportunity for input into how they are represented on the page.

Indigenous Peoples add their voices to the argument that it is important for any national or cultural group to have input into the documentation of its history, philosophies, and reality as a basic matter of cultural integrity. In some respects, this is especially pressing for Indigenous Peoples in Canada and other parts of the world, because they have been misrepresented for so long, which has created a body of literature inconsistent with, and often opposed to, Indigenous cultural understandings.

In So You Want to Write About American Indians, Devon Abbott Mihesuah writes, “If you plan on writing about Natives you must know much more about them, such as tribal history, their language, religion, gender roles, appearances, politics, creation stories, how they dealt with Europeans, and how they have survived to the present day.”² Mihesuah further contends, “Can you secure tribal permission for your topic? If you are doing a serious study of a tribe, you can not do the work adequately without conversing with knowledgeable members of the tribes.”³

Some improvements in Canadian publishing have come from a slow awakening to the impact of colonial ethnocentrism on who has been writing about Indigenous Peoples, with what process, and in what words. But works are still being produced that contain old stereo­types and perceptions, and that lack respect for Indigenous Protocols and perspectives. In 2017, for example, I asked a well-respected Indigenous colleague, who works as a freelance editor and validator of Indigenous content in a variety of Canadian publishing contexts, for examples of projects that had gone well from her point of view. Her frustration showed in her answer, which was “really none.”

Many Canadian publishers have a sense that they’re not editing work by and about Indigenous Peoples as well as they could. For the most part, they want to do it right, but often they don’t know how to do it right. Part of the solution is to develop and train more Indigenous editors and publishers, so they can work in publishing. Part of the solution is also to train more non-Indigenous editors and publishers so they can better work on Indigenous titles. I take heart from the responses of the more than forty Indigenous and Canadian editors who attended the Indigenous Editors Circle (IEC) and Editing Indigenous Manuscripts (EIM) courses offered at Humber College in Toronto in August 2017.⁴ The IEC faculty (which I was part of until 2017) has been surprised by the increased number of Canadian publishers who are interested in attending the sessions.

Another part of the solution is to recognize work already in progress. Indigenous writers, editors, and publishers are developing and defining emerging contemporary Indigenous Literatures, and they are establishing culturally based Indigenous methodologies within the editing and publishing process.

This style guide aims also to be part of the solution—part of the process of instilling Indigenous Peoples in the heart of Canadian publishing.

Case study: University of Regina Press

University of Regina Press is an example, among several examples, of a Canadian publishing house with a deliberate mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff. This case study presents perspectives from within the press on this choice.

Wendy Whitebear, office manager and manuscript reviewer

Wendy Whitebear is Cree-Saulteaux^* from White Bear First Nation.

Honouring Indigenous ways of knowing, our stories, needs to be meaningful—more than a box checked off in a list of things to do for reconciliation. We know these stories: they are our stories, we have lived them. Mainstream society does not yet know them and does not yet value them.

Around the table at the press, I find the significance of Indigenous content can get missed. When Indigenous people talk to each other, we have our own ways of thinking and knowing. We understand each other. I can hear what an Indigenous person is really saying, what they actually mean. Non-Indigenous people don’t have that context. They need help to see through our lens. So, I’m often telling stories from my own family, and from my own experience as an Indigenous woman and activist working for the betterment of her own people.

The Education of Augie Merasty^** is about context, too. It doesn’t just talk about residential schools. It speaks to the human experience of it. You feel empathy as an Indigenous person, as the story is ours. Others have no real understanding. To them, abuse is just a word and they comment on our true history by saying “oh it was bad.” The book speaks to the fact that the experience was horrific for the ones who had to live it. The reader has a deeper understanding and can experience real empathy.

I have strong convictions about the Indigenous perspective being told. I have a problem when a book comes out “about us, but not with us”—when no one has consulted the family of the story or an Elder to ensure Protocols are being followed. So I check for that, and ask questions about that. Our team is diligent about ensuring that the authors are taking these steps—however, not all publishers are. Our history and our stories are continually being told from a colonial perspective and therefore lack the magnitude of the atrocities that happened and the resilience of our people.

I want to Indigenize the publishing industry. Indigenous ways of knowing and being should inform the work of publishing. I would like to see a future where this is usual and ordinary, like the pen on your desk.

Bruce Walsh, publisher

University of Regina Press currently has three Indigenous staff: a student, an intern, and our business manager. Every week, we have a staff meeting where everything is discussed, from timelines to manuscript development to marketing. Each book is pulled apart in terms of content and everyone weighs in on positioning, packaging, and how the books speak to our bran...