Intersections of diaspora and indigeneity: the Standoff at Kahnesatake in Lee Maracle's Sundogs and Tessa McWatt's Out of My Skin

Whereas the official political discourse has focused on reconciliation, affiliation and solidarity in the struggle against oppression and colonization have been the objective of racialized minority groups in political and academic debates and in cultural and artistic production.3 In recent discussions of contemporary Canadian literature concerned with settler-colonial / Indigenous relations, the focus has shifted from treatments of the appropriation of Indigenous materials by mainstream writers- including the " stealing of Native stories" as Lenore Keeshig Tobias called it in 1990-to the exploration of cross-cultural alliances between Indigenous and racialized diasp or ic peoples. Critics today seem to agree that any discussion of intersections between diasporic and Indigenous peoples needs to proceed with an awareness of crucial differences between them, and that more work needs to be done to theorize the relationships between diaspora studies and Indigenous studies.Y By bringing Sundogs and Out of My Skin together in conversation, I hope to contribute further to unsettling the binaries on which the construction of Canada's diversity rests and to encourage new ways of looking at relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada.Z According to Rita Dhamoon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Canada is characterized by its unique combination of four major internal differences: that between an indigenous population and a settler population; that between whites and nonwhites; that between European groups (French and British origin or French speakers and English speakers); and that between immigrants and native-born.