Appropriate, or Appropriation?

 Hi folks! I really enjoyed presenting on Robinson's "Hungry Listening" today, and I wanted to thank everyone for sharing your thoughts; our discussion was illuminating! I just wanted to follow up with some ideas and resources I didn't get a chance to bring up in as much detail as I would have liked.


Firstly, we just barely touched on Robinson's request prefacing the "Writing Indigenous Space" section, which reads: "If you are a non-Indigenous, settler, ally, or xwelítem reader, I ask that you stop reading at the end of this page...The next section of the book...is written exclusively for Indigenous readers (Robinson, 2020, p. 25). The reason he makes this request is to create an exclusive space for Indigenous people unbeholden to the hungry 'settler gaze;' in effect, Robinson sought to create a sovereign space within his book where he, and his readers, can shed the expectations and restraints of those who listen (and read) hungrily.

The consensus we seemed to come to during our class discussion, however, is that no such sovereign space can really exist within the confines of the academy, since the Western educational system is predicated on hungry listening practices which seek to extract information in order to mobilize it toward certain ends. As such, we had some skepticism about the efficacy of Robinson's attempt. Aside from concerns about the apparent incommensurability between the principles of academic learning and non-hungry listening, there are a few practical concerns to note as well: Robinson wrote his book from a faculty position at Queen's University, the book was published by the University of Minneapolis press (and was presumably read and edited several times before publication, perhaps by an Indigenous person or perhaps not), and his book was written in quite inaccessible prose which, I think, would be incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent some time being educated in humanities and social sciences at a post-secondary level.


Another loosely related question -- I wanted to ask the class if my choice to present on the work of an Indigenous scholar as a xwelítem is problematic -- my hungry reading of Robinson's book, and the hungry listening which I encouraged with my presentation, seem to go against the ethos of his work. So, was it appropriate for me to choose to present on this work, or was I inappropriately appropriating Robinson's ideas into a communicative context for which they were not intended? I invite everyone to share your thoughts (Dr. Herman included!), I would love to read what everyone has to say on this topic! Lastly, here is a link to the cool Halq'emeylem language-learning website, as well as a second website with some terms of the language and their pronunciations. Feel free to look and listen around non-hungrily; they're pretty cool sites!

Language learning site: Stó:lō Shxwelí | Songs

Terms List:Coast Language Resources | Sq’éwlets - A Stó:lō-Salish Community in the Fraser River Valley




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