When the Other is Me: Native Resistance Discourse 1850-1990

• Emma LaRocque
• University of Manitoba Press, 2010
• Paperback, 218 pages
• 9780887557033

In this long-awaited book from one of the most recognized and respected scholars in Native Studies today, Emma LaRocque presents a powerful interdisciplinary study of the Native literary response to racist writing in the Canadian historical and literary record from 1850 to 1990. In When the Other Is Me, LaRocque brings a metacritical approach to Native writing, situating it as resistance literature within and outside the post-colonial intellectual context. She outlines the overwhelming evidence of dehumanization in Canadian historical and literary writing, its effects on both popular culture and Canadian intellectual development, and Native and non-Native intellectual responses to it in light of the interlayered mix of romanticism, exaggeration of Native "difference," and the continuing problem of internalization that challenges our understanding of the colonizer/colonized relationship.

A Plains Cree Mtis originally from northeastern Alberta, Emma LaRocque is a scholar, author, poet, social and literary critic, and a professor in the Department of Native Studies, University of Manitoba. She is the author of the groundbreaking book, Defeathering the Indian, and has also written extensively on the mis/representation of "Indians" in the media and marketplace, Canadian historiography, racism, M tis identity, gender roles, contemporary Aboriginal literature, and post-colonial criticism.