Participants à la table ronde

This roundtable features authors, illustrators, and performers from Indigenous communities within the colonial settler states of Canada and Mexico whose work explores the challenges and affordances of representing Indigenous experience in various media and texts for children and youth, as well as generative tensions in their work between local, national, and international conceptions of Indigeneity. Participants are Christy Jordan-Fenton, Margaret Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton, Drew Hayden Taylor, and Cuauhtémoc Germán Cuaquehua Calixto (Cuauhtémoc Wetzka).

Margaret Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton & Christy Jordan-Fenton

Margaret Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton is Inuvialuk from Banks Island (Western Arctic). She is best known for her stories of attending a far-away residential school in Aklavik, when she was only 8. These stories have been written by her daughter-in-law, Christy Jordan-Fenton in four award winning children’s books, including the best-selling Fatty Legs. At 81, Margaret remains lively, doing more than 100 presentations a year, and creating beautiful traditional handicrafts.

Christy Jordan-Fenton is the author of four award winning books about her Inuvialuk mother-in-law Margaret Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton’s time at residential school. She is also a mother, land and water defender, activist, Vital Voices Lead Fellow, and decolonizing advocate who sees the power of storytelling as the greatest tool we have to creative positive social change. She and Margaret do more than 100 presentations a year on residential school history, Inuvialuit culture, decolonizing perspectives, and resilience.

Drew Hayden Taylor

Ojibway from Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario, Drew Hayden Taylor has been a humourist; Artistic Director of Canada’s premiere Native theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts; an award-winning playwright; a journalist/columnist; a short-story writer; a novelist; and a television scriptwriter.

Drew Hayden Taylor has published two collections of plays for young audiences, Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock / Education is Our Right and The Boy in the Treehouse / Girl Who Loved Her Horses. In 2007, Annick Press published his first novel, The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel, a teen novel about an Ojibway vampire; a graphic novel version appeared in 2013. Most recently, Douglas & McIntyre published a collection of his Native themed science fiction short stories, Take Us To Your Chief And Other Stories. His new play, Crees in the Caribbean, brings his publication total to 30 books.

For more about his theatre, film, and TV productions as well as his books, please see his website.

Cuauhtémoc Germán Cuaquehua Calixto (Cuauhtémoc Wetzka)

Cuauhtémoc Wetzka is a Nahuatl speaker and illustrator from Zongolica, Veracruz, Mexico. He obtained a degree in Graphic Design at the Gestalt University of Design in Xalapa, Veracruz. He currently illustrates and collaborates for a variety of media, including books, magazines, newspapers and cultural projects. His work has been exhibited in Argentina, the Guadalajara Book Fair (2014), Spain, the United States, and the Taipei Book Fair in China (2015). In 2015 Cuauhtémoc obtained first place for the XXV Illustration Catalog of children’s illustration of Contalculta, Mexico. In 2016, he was selected for the Art Contest and Exhibition for Children by Hispanic Artists in Las Vegas and for the 2014-2016 14th edition of The International Biennale in Mexico.

His work appears in Picnic magazine (2012), Visual Beat: The Best Latin American Illustrations (2013) and the V Ibero-American Catalog of Illustration (2014). His work was also selected among the best Latin American illustrations in 2016 with his book Latin Colors. For some of his illustrations, please see his website.

Moderator, Professor David McNab

Professor David McNab is a leading authority on Indigenous Treaties, land, and resource issues in Canada. McNab’s scholarship has resulted in real impact on Indigenous communities. He was one of the first Metis historians to complete his doctorate on Canada’s policy towards Indigenous peoples in 1978 at the University of Lancaster. In the last 25 years, McNab has published 15 books and many other publications numbering well over 100. He is a champion of knowledge mobilization, exploring through community engagement the Truth about Canada’s Indigenous policy as it impacts on First Nations’ communities and on their lands and resources. He has always been guided by the Two Row Wampum, Indigenous Knowledge and Thought and by the true meaning of Canada as a place of Reconciliation.

Canadian artists discussing how working in their chosen medium and genre has helped balance two, sometimes competing priorities: first, to expand assumed audiences for their work, partly to guard against being tokenized; and, second, to continue reaching underrepresented, misrepresented, or otherwise marginalized audiences featured in their work. The roundtable hopes to demonstrate how intersections between "the local” and "the global" demand diversifying how we imagine “diversity” when exploring cultures of childhood, children, and youth. Participants are Zetta Elliott, Shauntay Grant, Rukhsana Khan, and Vivek Shraya. Moderator: Gurbir Singh Jolly.

Zetta Elliott describes herself as “a Black feminist writer of poetry, plays, essays, novels, and stories for children.” Raised in Canada, she has lived in the US for over twenty years. Her award-winning picture book Bird was followed by her YA novel A Wish After Midnight; Ship of Souls (2012) was named a Booklist Top Ten Sci-fi/Fantasy Title for Youth and was a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Book Award; her latest YA novel, The Door at the Crossroads, was a finalist in the Speculative Fiction category of the 2017 Cybils Awards, and her picture book, Melena's Jubilee, was named one of the Best Children's Books of the Year by Bank Street College of Education. Zetta was awarded the Children’s Literature Association’s article award for her 2014 essay, “The Trouble with Magic: Conjuring the Past in New York City Parks” in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.

An advocate for greater diversity and equity in publishing, Zetta has self-published numerous illustrated books for younger readers under her own imprint, Rosetta Press. See more information about Zetta and her books for children and young adults on her website.

Shauntay Grant is a writer and storyteller from Halifax, Nova Scotia. She publishes, performs, and teaches in several literary genres, and as Halifax’s third Poet Laureate (2009-11) she organized Canada’s first national gathering of Canadian Poets Laureate.

A descendant of Black Loyalists, Black Refugees, and Jamaican Maroons who came to Canada during the 18th and 19th centuries, Shauntay’s love of language stretches back to her storytelling roots in Nova Scotia’s historic Black communities. She is a multidisciplinary artist with professional degrees and training in creative writing, music, and theatre, and her homegrown artistic practice embraces African Nova Scotian folk tradition as well as contemporary approaches to literature and performance.

Shauntay’s awards and honours include a Best Atlantic-Published Book prize from the Atlantic Book Awards, a Poet of Honour prize from Spoken Word Canada, and a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Writing and Publishing from the Canada Council for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University, and as playwright-in-residence for 2b theatre company she is currently developing her stage play The Bridge.Her picture books for children are Up Home (2008), The City Speaks in Drums (2010), Apples and Butterflies (2012), and The Walking Bathroom (forthcoming in fall 2017).

Rukhsana Khan is an award-winning author and storyteller who was born in Lahore, Pakistan and immigrated to Canada at the age of three. She has twelve books published (one of which was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 greatest children's books in the last 100 years). Some of her books have been published in other countries and in different languages. She has appeared on television and radio lots of times, and has been featured at conferences and festivals around the world. She lives in Toronto with her husband and family.

Her picture books, short story collections, and novels for children and youth include King for a Day; Big Red Lollipop; Wanting Mor; A New Life; Many Windows; Silly Chicken; Ruler of the Courtyard; King of the Skies; Muslim Child; Dahling, If You Luv Me; The Roses in my Carpets; and Bedtime Ba-a-a-lk.

Vivek Shraya is a Toronto-based artist whose body of work includes several albums, films, and books. Her first book of poetry, even this page is white, won a 2017 Publisher Triangle Award and was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. Her debut novel, She of the Mountains, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books, and her first children’s picture book, The Boy & the Bindi, was featured on the National Post Bestseller List. Vivek has read and performed inter­nationally at shows, festivals and post-secondary institutions, including sharing the stage with Tegan & Sara. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached.

A four-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek was a 2016 Pride Toronto Grand Marshal, a 2015 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award finalist, and a 2015 recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize Honour of Distinction.

The organizers thank the Toronto Public Library, the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, and the Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy for their generous support. Reception and book-signing to follow. Books will be available for purchase on-site by the York University Bookstore.

IRSCL Congress 2017 is being made possible through support from the Faculties of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Graduate Studies, and Education; the Academic Vice-President and Provost and the Vice-President of Research & Innovation; the Departments of Humanities, History, and Communication Studies and the Children's Studies Program; the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean; Winters College; as well as Toronto Public Library, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the International Research Society for Children's Literature.

A film screening and roundtable at the internationally renowned TIFF Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto. This roundtable is co-hosted by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and will showcase 3 short films, highlighting the work from the TIFF Kids International Film Festival and Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase. The roundtable discussion will include Carol Nguyen (How Do You Pronounce Pho? and Uprooted), Julianna Notten (Earth to Avery), Haya Waseem (Shahzad), and Elizabeth Muskala, TIFF Director of Youth Learning and TIFF Kids. Facilitator: Natalie Coulter.

Carol Nguyen – How Do You Pronounce Pho? and Uprooted (Jumpcuts Young Filmmakers Showcase)

Carol Nguyen is a 19-year-old filmmaker based in Toronto and Montreal. She is a three-time winner of TIFF Jumpcuts and has had work screened around the globe including at Nashville Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival. Her films often concern themes of cultural identity and family. Currently, she is continuing her passion for filmmaking at Concordia University.

Julianna Notten – Earth to Avery

Julianna Notten is a Toronto-based writer and director who graduated from Ryerson University in 2015 with her BFA in film studies. Julianna has directed a number of documentaries and narrative projects including Sexpectations (2013) and The Beginner’s Guide To Suicide (2014), both of which won various awards throughout her time at Ryerson.

Her last film, Earth to Avery (2015) was featured in a number of film festivals including TIFF Kids, Montreal World Film Festival and the National Screen Institute. It also won a number of awards at the Ryerson University film festival including people’s choice, best film directed by a woman and best cinematography.

Her work often deals with everyday dramas and the impact of human relationships. She specifically likes to deal with female protagonists, having grown tired of a lack of well-developed female representation in mainstream movies. She is currently working on another short she wrote and will direct: Erin's Guide To Kissing Girls, which follows Erin, a spunky 12 year-old as she tries to woo the coolest girl in school.

Haya Waseem - Shahzad

Born in Pakistan and raised in Switzerland, Haya Waseem grew up with a fascination for people and places, igniting her passion for storytelling. Her work focuses on capturing honest characters and visuals that embark on an emotional journey, providing the audience a small window into someone else’s truth.

Waseem has directed four short films, including: Shahzad (BravoFact; TIFF ’16; TIFF Kids ‘17), Pull (NSI ‘16), Some Other Place (Cannes ’16; EnRoute ‘16), and the documentary Familiar (Berlinale ’16; Enroute ‘16).

In 2016, Waseem completed the Director’s Lab Residency at the Canadian Film Centre. She is currently interested in exploring honest portraits encapsulated in evocative imagery in Narrative, Documentary or Commercial works.

The organizers thank TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) for their generous support. IRSCL Congress 2017 is being made possible through support from the Faculties of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Graduate Studies, and Education; the Academic Vice-President and Provost and the Vice-President of Research & Innovation; the Departments of Humanities, History, and Communication Studies and the Children's Studies Program; the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean; Winters College; as well as Toronto Public Library, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the International Research Society for Children's Literature.