Understanding Cree Protocol in the Shifting Passages of "Old Keyam"

Voices of The Plains Cree, compiled and published in 1973, was actually two separate works authored by the Cree Anglican cleric Edward Ahenakew approximately fifty years earlier. While the first section is ethnographic and preserves cultural stories of the past, the second section, entitled “Old Keyam,” is contemporary for its time. The title character, Keyam, is a conflicted personality, allied both to Cree cultural and political rights and to white standards of success. Ahenakew presents these impulses as distinct throughout the text, and does not offer a way to resolve them via the expected means of hybridity, fusion, or creolization. Resistant to typical postcolonial readings of Indigenous subject formation under colonization, “Old Keyam” reflects Ahenakew’s complex position as a colonized subject with an intimate understanding of Cree protocol. Works by critics such as Marie Battiste, Lorraine Brundige, Stan Cuthand, Olive Dickason, and Joel Pfister are useful when exploring Ahenakew’s primary narrative concerns