Through the study of Indigenous literary and artistic practices from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, Julia V. Emberley examines the ways Indigenous storytelling discloses and repairs the traumatic impact of social violence in settler colonial nations. She focuses on Indigenous storytelling in a range of cultural practices, including novels, plays, performances, media reports, Internet museum exhibits, and graphic novels. In response to historical trauma such as that experienced at Indian residential schools, as well as present-day violence against Indigenous bodies and land, Indigenous storytellers make use of Indigenous spirituality and the sacred to inform an ethics of hospitality. They provide uncanny configurations of political and social kinships between people, between the past and the present, and between the animate and inanimate. This book introduces readers to cultural practices and theoretical texts concerned with bringing Indigenous epistemologies to the discussion of trauma and colonial violence.

From the Canadian Indian Act to Freud's Totem and Taboo to films such as Nanook of the North, all manner of cultural artefacts have been used to create a distinction between savagery and civilization. In Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal, Julia V. Emberley examines the historical production of aboriginality in colonial cultural practices and its impact on the everyday lives of indigenous women, youth, and children.Adopting a materialist-semiotic approach, Emberley explores the ways in which representational technologies - film, photography, and print culture, including legal documents and literature - were crucial to British colonial practices. Many indigenous scholars, writers, and artists, however, have confounded these practices by deploying aboriginality as a complex and enabling sign of social, cultural, and political transformation. Emberley gives due attention to this important work, studying a wide range of topics such as race, place, and motherhood, primitivism and violence, and sexuality and global political kinships. Her multidisciplinary approach ensures that Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural studies, indigenous studies, women's studies, postcolonial and colonial studies, literature, and film.

Nowhere has the dispute over fur's meaning been more fervent than during the confrontations in the 1980s between animal rights activists and Native peoples of northern Canada, whose claims for self-determination include collective rights to engage in the selling and trading, consumption, and production of animal products. Using stories by Native peoples as well as other sources, Emberley traces the discourse from colonial fur-trading to the globalization of the fur industry in the twentieth century. The fetishization of fur, Emberley shows, has deep roots that can be seen in late nineteenth-century literary and psychoanalytical narratives of sexual fetishism and fur, such as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs, and in early modern paintings and etchings. She also looks at contemporary advertising, fashion photography, and films such as Paris Is Burning and Unzipped to uncover ongoing fetishistic practices and politics of the fashion world. (view table of contents)