The trickster wink: storytelling and resistance in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2009n56p93This essay explores how Tomson Highway uses the narrative genre as a space to perform a speech act of resistance against colonialism through an approach that departs from contemporary discussions on genre theory and theories of storytelling. Highway´s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen reaffirms the process of adaptation that is intrinsic to Indigenous cultures and to the survival of the Trickster and promotes a healing experience through the recovery of Cree storytelling. John Frow's concept of genre as a performative structure that shapes the world in the very process of putting it into speech contributes to the focus on Indigenous storytelling rather than on Western literary categories