Two writers can tell the same story and leave you with completely different feelings. The difference is style: the choices about how a story is told, not what happens in it. A joke in the middle of a painful scene, a word left untranslated, a chapter that jumps back forty years, a dream that turns out to matter more than anything a character does awake — each of these is a decision, and each one changes how you read. This topic gives you names for five elements that appear often in contemporary First Nations, Métis and Inuit writing, and a four-part method for explaining what they do.
Humour and irony
Humour runs through a great deal of contemporary Indigenous writing, including work about serious subjects. The plays, essays and fiction of Drew Hayden Taylor, an Ojibwe writer from Curve Lake First Nation, are widely known for it. A joke in a text can disarm the reader, expose how absurd a stereotype or a policy is, build a bond with readers who get the joke, and let a character hold pain without being defined by it. Irony is humour's sharper cousin: a gap between what is said and what is meant (verbal irony), between what is expected and what happens (situational irony), or between what the audience knows and what a character knows (dramatic irony).
| Element | How to spot it | Effects it often creates |
|---|---|---|
| Humour and irony | Deadpan replies, exaggeration, a gap between the words and the situation, a joke at a tense moment | Exposes stereotypes, releases tension, shows resilience, invites the reader into a shared point of view |
| Words from Indigenous languages | Untranslated or unitalicized words, a glossary, dialogue that moves between languages | Centres the language as belonging in the text, marks identity and relationship, makes language loss or recovery a theme |
| Non-linear time | Flashbacks without warning, braided timelines, a story that ends where it began | Shows the past acting on the present, mirrors how memory works, makes the reader assemble the story |
| Dreams and multiple worlds | Dreams that give knowledge or warnings, ancestors or spirit presences sharing the scene with the living | Widens what counts as real within the text, connects characters to ancestors and place, gives guidance the waking world cannot |
| Shifting point of view | Chapters headed with different names, changes between first and third person, the same event told twice | Spreads authority across voices, creates dramatic irony, shows a community rather than one hero |
Words from Indigenous languages
- Leaving a word untranslated is a choice. When a writer does not italicize or explain a word, the text treats the language as at home on the page rather than foreign. Readers outside the language are asked to do the work, which reverses who is usually expected to adjust.
- Use context clues first. Look at what surrounds the word: who says it, to whom, in what situation, and whether it repeats. Often the meaning becomes clear within a page.
- Check the text's own supports. A glossary, an author's note or a pronunciation guide is part of the book, and using it is a sign of respect for the language.
- Different nations, different languages. Cree, Anishinaabemowin, Kanien'kéha, Michif and Inuktitut are distinct languages with their own writing systems; Inuktitut, for example, is written in syllabics as well as in the Roman alphabet. Name the specific language when the text does.
- Ask what the language does in the story. Is it spoken by an Elder, whispered in secret, being relearned by a young character, or missing where it should be? Each situation connects language to a different theme.
Non-linear time
In a non-linear text, events do not arrive in the order they happened. A narrator may slide from the present into a memory in the middle of a sentence, several timelines may be braided together, or the story may circle back to its opening image. This is harder to follow, and that is part of the point: the reader has to assemble the order, and in doing so notices how strongly the past is still present. Memory, especially painful memory, does not arrive in tidy chronological order, and a non-linear structure lets a text show that from the inside.
Dreams, multiple worlds and shifting point of view
- Take dreams seriously on the text's terms. In many texts a dream carries real knowledge, a warning or a connection to an ancestor. Dismissing it as 'just a dream' means reading against the world the writer built. Ask what the dream shows that waking life could not.
- Notice when worlds overlap. A text may place the living and the ancestral, or the everyday and the spiritual, in the same scene without explanation. Describe how the text presents this and what it adds, without assuming it follows any particular nation's teachings you have not been given.
- Track every narrator. Katherena Vermette's novel The Break (2016), set in Winnipeg, is told through several narrators. When a text shifts voices, make a note of who knows what, and where the accounts disagree.
- Look for dramatic irony. Multiple viewpoints often let the reader know more than any one character, which creates tension and makes the reader weigh versions against each other instead of accepting one as the truth.
- Ask why no single voice is enough. A multi-voiced structure can suggest that a story belongs to a family or community rather than to one hero.