I Am a Damn Savage; What Have You Done to My Country? / Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu; Tanite nene etutamin nitassi? (Indigenous Studies)

Quebec author An Antane Kapesh's two books, Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (1976) and Qu'as-tu fait de mon pays? (1979), are among the foregrounding works by Indigenous women in Canada. This English translation of these works, each page presented facing the revised Innu text, makes them available for the first time to a broader readership. In I Am a Damn Savage , Antane Kapesh wrote to preserve and share her culture, experience, and knowledge, all of which, she felt, were disappearing at an alarming rate because many Elders – like herself – were aged or dying. She wanted to publicly denounce the conditions in which she and the Innu were made to live, and to address the changes she was witnessing due to land dispossession and loss of hunting territory, police brutality, and the effects of the residential school system. What Have You Done to My Country? is a fictional account by a young boy of the arrival of les Polichinelles (referring to White settlers) and their subsequent assault on the land and on native language and culture. Through these stories Antane Kapesh asserts that settler society will eventually have to take responsibility and recognize its faults, and accept that the Innu – as well as all the other nations – are not going anywhere, that they are not a problem settlers can make disappear. An Antane Kapesh's two books, which are translated here for the first time in English, alongside the revised Innu texts, are a testimony of the changes she witnessed during her lifetime due to land dispossession, assimilation, residential schools, intergenerational trauma, and environmental exploitation Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu I Am a Damn Savage Tanite nene etutamin nitassi? What Have You Done to My Country? Translator’s Note Recovering and Recontextualizing An Antane Kapesh: Translator’s Afterword Bibliography Acknowledgements "The book contains two works in English translation (the original Innu appears en face throughout), and these deal with topics such as loss of hunting territory, the residential school system, and police brutality."-- Provided by publisher