ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to provide the redistribute attention to the political history framing the writing and reading of The Rez Sisters, a history that make us look differently at roads and the struggles for mobility in Tomson Highway text. One year after The Rez Sisters was published; Anishinaabeg residents from Manitoulin Island joined a blockade on a disputed logging road extension in Temagami, Ontario. The Rez Sisters is about conceptual borders that are no less real for the women: their immobility tells a counter-narrative about the spatialization of race, class, and gender identities in a cultural moment otherwise feted for its increased circulation of people, capital, and information. Highlighting the social bonds as well as solitudes that roads, vehicles, and motor travel engender, The Rez Sisters ultimately reveals ambivalence about automobility and the freedom associated with it.
