Doing Away With Settler Counterculture: For An Indigenous Counterculture
To this day, counterculture has mostly been studied from an occidental and colonialist perspective, without recognizing its cultural appropriation, whether it be the numerous superficial borrowings from oriental spiritualities (Roszak 1995 [1969]) or the artificial adoption of Indigenous lifestyles, wrongly qualified as a "return to the nature" (Deloria 2013). Counterculture in its true meaning challenges the oppressive structures of life (le Blanc 2014) and is intrinsically linked to Indigenous voices from the 1970s and 1980s. According to Emma LaRocque (Cree/Métis), since Indigenous literatures were not possible as a collective form of expression before the 1970s (2010: 19), Indigenous writings constitute the history of a strategic contestation. Furthermore, dissenting literature is the literary canon in Indigenous literatures (LaRocque 2010: 25). The colonialist devaluation provoked a countercultural response, an Indigenous counter-discourse that calls for a review of eurocentric knowledges (LaRocque 2010: 70 and 108). Through this contribution, I aim to deconstruct settler counterculture, and to provide an outline of what Indigenous literary countercultures are.