Profile of: Amber McMillan

Award Received: SSHRC Postgraduate Scholarship - Doctoral

Awarded for the project: Inheritance, a poetry collection that wrestles with relational ethics in New Brunswick

Department: English

Supervisor: Dr. Sue Sinclair

How does the language we use reflect and reinforce colonial ideologies, and in what ways can it be transformed to challenge these power dynamics? How can poetry serve as a powerful tool for deconstructing colonial ideologies and reshaping our understanding of ethical relationships?

My doctoral dissertation includes a collection of new poetry and an accompanying critical essay. Both the collection and the essay centre Indigenous knowledge systems as a framework to analyze language, culture, and ethical relationship in New Brunswick, where I live.

I argue that English can function as a mechanism of control and discuss how language can perpetuate or challenge existing power dynamics, highlighting its role in sustaining colonial ideologies. As part of my analysis, I critique traditional frameworks that often fail to engage meaningfully with Indigenous communities and explore how the language of colonization impacts the perception and the representation of place and relationship.

Inheritance, the poetry collection, looks at the ecological and historical landscape of New Brunswick by centering indigenous knowledges like reincarnation, non-human personhood, and karma, cosmologies that have the capacity to radically reshape ethical responsibilities between beings, places, and things. The collection explores themes of familial relationships, identity, and the intersections of personal and collective histories including reflections on the inheritances of trauma, love, and resilience.

Centering Indigenous knowledges in these ways seeks to disrupt the pervasive structures of colonialism and colonial privilege that persist, often below the surface and without interruption. Recognizing the interconnectedness of things allows for an understanding of justice that contrasts sharply with Western notions that instead prioritize individualism and transactional relationships over communal and relational obligations. Centering Indigenous knowledges facilitates a critical engagement with the prevailing colonial narratives that continue to shape societal perceptions and policies. In addition, the act of centering Indigenous knowledges serves as a counter-narrative to the dominant frameworks that have so far dictated the discourse.