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 postcolonial 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.

Dr. 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 contemporary Aboriginal literatures, Canadian historiography, and images of Aboriginal people in the media marketplace. She is a Plains Cree Metis from northeastern Alberta.

Emma Larocque's profile page

• Winner, Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction

“When the Other Is Me reviews a broad range of Native resistance literature and makes several valuable theoretical interventions. LaRocque’s bold acknowledgment and defense of her own positionality is especially notable. This book will interest scholars of Native literature as well as those wresting with the challenges of producing Native-centered scholarship.”

Studies in American Indian Literatures

“When the Other Is Me offers many important insights and analytical tools to continue the struggle for decolonization in Canada and the fight for a more humane, just world.”

Labour, Spring 2011