ABSTRACT
The University of Alberta, where author teach Canadian literature, is situated in the territory of Treaty 6. This chapter explores how thinking about treaty space, literary geography, and geocriticism as mutually informing methods of spatial analysis can help to open up underappreciated aesthetic and political dimensions of early Canadian writing. For the geocritic, the place itself becomes "the ultimate object of critical attention". That is, rather than focusing on a single text, author, genre, or literary movement, the geocritic seeks to "come closer to the essential identity" of the place across which myriad texts, diverse in their forms, histories, and objectives, converge. Geocritical methods thus lead us away from the pervasive tropes of empty space, terra nullius, and trackless wilderness that erased the presence of Indigenous people and suggested that the land was an empty container, devoid of meaning until settlers arrived to inscribe it.
