ABSTRACT
This article calls attention to unexpected places Indigenous women’s writing has been supported. Using a framework of knowledge production as genealogy highlights the centrality of relationship to our understanding of what counts as knowledge and to what kinds of knowledge we have access. Alternative institutions are vital sources to find multiply marginalised work given the long history of colonial, racist, and sexist institutional exclusion by and through the mainstream. Because the academy’s structures of reward and support are thoroughly individualist and premised on racist, sexist, and colonialist norms; community-based work becomes un(der)acknowledged and devalued, as community-inspired programs become professionalised within the mainstream academy. Thus, it is politically and spiritually essential to support robust ecosystems of knowledge production emanating from imperatives of survivance, resurgence and recovery that may overlap but exceed the academy’s aims. This chapter details the impact of the US lesbian-feminist based ‘Women in Print’ movement from the 1970 to the 1990s grounded in community-based histories, remembrance of under-recorded events and publications, and connections between Indigenous women writers including Paula Gunn Allen, Beth Brant, Chrystos, and Deborah Miranda. Affiliations produced by the formation ‘Indigenous women’ can cross communities productively, allowing space for interconnectedness along with difference.
