ABSTRACT
Nationalist literary histories in Canada and the United States have identified Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769) as either the first Canadian or American novel. The novel might be more productively read for its participation in the process of firsting in light of its relentless assertion of Euro-western preeminence. One way through which Brooke forges these claims is by resting the social world of her novel upon a series of almost constantly redrawn distinctions between the animate and the inanimate. These distinctions draw attention to what the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a fundamental error in grammar—the limitations in vision that undergird English thought and verbalization, sustaining and furthering assaults on Indigenous epistemologies at the level of language. Using Kimmerer’s writing on the “grammar of animacy— as a point of departure, this chapter introduces and discusses the grammar of inanimacy—the system of classification through which settler-colonial readers compulsively strip Indigenous beings of selfhood and kinship, severing kin and treaty relationships and functionally reducing Indigenous place-worlds to collections of exploitable objects.
