August 3 – 9: Sharity Bassett – Complicating Settler Narratives: Writing Our Stories toward Rematriation
Sharity has offered this extended commentary about her seminar this summer:
The truth about stories is that, in many ways, that’s all we are. This statement from Thomas King (Cherokee) speaks to the essence of human experience and the central role that storytelling plays in shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. In reflecting on my own work, I realize how deeply stories are woven into our lives and how they serve as a bridge across divides of history, culture, and perspective.
In recent years, I have developed a methodology in autofiction that brings together three key ideas. First, there is the idea of co-laboring across difference—a practice that involves working together despite, or perhaps because of, our differences. Second, fiction as a tool for building empathy, particularly across historical and cultural divides. And third, autofiction as a means to articulate the personal stakes of working across those divides, while also pushing forward decolonial futures through collective storytelling. These ideas are not abstract; they come from real-world engagements, from teaching, writing, and collaborating with Indigenous scholars like Michelle Schenandoah (Oneida Nation, Wolf Clan), with whom I co-labored for five years on a book about Haudenosaunee women lacrosse players. Our collaboration was not a simple or easy one; it required a slow, methodical approach that took into account the deep history of colonial violence and the complexities of representing Indigenous experiences from a settler perspective.
The key insight I took away from working with Michelle is that co-laboring across difference isn’t just about finding common ground or achieving consensus; it’s about acknowledging the richness and diversity of the stories that shape our worldviews. It’s about respecting the places where our perspectives diverge and finding ways to create knowledge that reflects those differences. This work is slow and deliberate—sometimes painstakingly so—but it is through this careful engagement that we produce something more authentic, something that carries the weight of history and lived experience.
In my own teaching of Indigenous fiction, I have witnessed the power of storytelling to help students confront difficult truths about settler colonialism. Fiction allows for a kind of emotional distancing, creating space for students, many of whom are of settler descent, to grapple with uncomfortable histories without feeling personally implicated. Through stories, they can engage with larger systems of oppression and reflect on their own positions within those systems. Fiction, in this sense, becomes a tool for empathy—a means of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes and, perhaps, feeling a desire to do something differently.
My own work in intergenerational autofiction has been a deeply personal exploration of how my family history intersects with the broader forces of racism, poverty, capitalism, and settler colonialism. Writing these stories has forced me to confront painful truths about my own complicity in systems of injustice, but it has also opened up possibilities for healing and transformation. The process of storytelling—whether individually or collectively—creates space for confronting difficult legacies, for recognizing the ongoing impacts of colonialism, and for imagining ways to move toward decolonial futures.
Ultimately, this time together is about more than just the stories we tell; it’s about building a community of people who are willing to listen, share, and understand the difficult truths of our collective pasts. By engaging in collective storytelling, we can confront the legacies of settler colonialism and work together to build more just and decolonial futures.