Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature

• Published in: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Main Author: O'Neill, Angeline
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Purdue University 2011
• Subjects: comparative literature; Arts and Humanities; Critical and Cultural Studies; Lorna; First Nations; inuit
• Online Access: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss2/4; https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1742; https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/context/clcweb/article/1742/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways in which Indigenous children's picture books represent the interaction between text and culture and challenge notions of literariness.