For centuries, the question of what constitutes great literature has been answered by a remarkably narrow slice of humanity. The literary canon, that supposed collection of timeless masterpieces, was never neutral. It was assembled by colonial administrators, university professors trained in European traditions, and publishing houses that saw certain stories as universal while dismissing others as merely regional or folkloric. Indigenous peoples across the globe watched their creation myths get catalogued as anthropology while settler narratives about their lands won prestigious awards. This is changing now. Not slowly or politely, but with a force that is reshaping how nations understand their own literary heritage.
The Canon as Colonial Architecture
Understanding why Indigenous writers are rewriting canons requires first understanding how those canons were built. In Australia, the national literary tradition long celebrated writers who romanticized the bush while treating Aboriginal peoples as part of the landscape rather than authors of it. American literature courses taught generations of students to see the frontier through the eyes of those who crossed it, not those who had lived on it for millennia. Canadian literature departments occasionally included Indigenous works but framed them as supplements to the main tradition. The architecture of literary value was colonial from its foundation.
What made this particularly insidious was how natural it all seemed. Canons present themselves as meritocratic. The best writing rises to the top. Except someone decides what best means, and that someone inevitably carried assumptions about whose language was literary, whose concerns were universal, and whose narrative structures counted as sophisticated. Indigenous oral traditions, with their cyclical time, communal authorship, and integration of song and ceremony, didn’t fit the novel’s neat parameters. So they were excluded not through explicit prejudice but through definitional sleight of hand.
Breaking Through in North America
The late twentieth century saw Indigenous writers in North America begin forcing open the canon’s doors. N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 marked something significant. Here was a novel steeped in Kiowa and Navajo traditions winning the most establishment of American literary prizes. Leslie Marmon Silko followed with Ceremony, a book that wove Laguna Pueblo stories into a narrative about a World War II veteran’s healing. These weren’t Indigenous writers trying to write like white writers. They were Indigenous writers demanding that Indigenous ways of storytelling be recognized as literature.
Louise Erdrich has probably done more than anyone to cement Indigenous fiction in the American consciousness. Her Ojibwe characters across multiple novels created a literary universe as rich and interconnected as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. And that comparison matters. Erdrich gets mentioned in the same breath as canonical American masters now. Her 2020 novel The Night Watchman won the Pulitzer, based on her grandfather’s fight against Native American termination policies in the 1950s. The book is an act of reclamation on multiple levels.
Then there’s Tommy Orange, whose 2018 debut There There exploded assumptions about what Indigenous literature could be. Urban, polyphonic, angry, and deeply contemporary, the novel follows twelve characters connected to a powwow in Oakland, California. Orange writes about Native identity in the age of the internet and mass shootings. His prose has a rhythm that owes as much to hip hop as to oral tradition. The book became a bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. Critics who had pigeonholed Indigenous writing as pastoral or historical had to reckon with something else entirely.
Australia’s Reckoning
In Australia, the conversation about Indigenous voices and the literary canon carries particular weight because of how recently Aboriginal peoples gained basic citizenship rights. The 1967 referendum that allowed Aboriginal people to be counted in the census happened within living memory. Literature has been one arena where this slow recognition has played out.
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria winning the Miles Franklin Award in 2007 was a watershed moment. The Miles Franklin is Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, and Wright became the first Indigenous woman to win it. Carpentaria is not an easy book. Its sprawling, mythic narrative about a Gulf Country community resists the conventions of European realism. Wright doesn’t simplify Indigenous cosmology for non Indigenous readers. She demands they meet her on her terms.
This demand for literary sovereignty characterizes much of the new Indigenous Australian writing. Kim Scott, a Noongar writer, has won the Miles Franklin twice with Benang and That Deadman Dance. His work excavates colonial history from Indigenous perspectives, showing how first contact narratives traditionally centered settler experiences while treating Aboriginal peoples as objects rather than subjects of history. Tara June Winch’s The Yield won the Miles Franklin in 2020, weaving together a Wiradjuri dictionary project with a contemporary story of land rights and family. The very structure of the novel, organized partly around Wiradjuri words, insists on the centrality of Indigenous language to Australian literary culture.
What these writers share is a refusal to be grateful additions to someone else’s tradition. They are not asking for inclusion. They are arguing that Australian literature without Indigenous voices at its center is fundamentally incomplete.
Canada and the Truth Commission’s Shadow
Canadian literature has grappled with Indigenous voices against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which documented the horrific legacy of residential schools. Literature has become one space where this national reckoning happens. Richard Wagamese, an Ojibway author, wrote novels like Indian Horse that brought residential school experiences to mainstream readers. His prose is accessible and deeply humane, which made him perhaps the most widely read Indigenous author in Canada before his death in 2017.
Eden Robinson writes differently. Her Trickster trilogy, beginning with Son of a Trickster, blends contemporary Indigenous life in British Columbia with mythological elements. A teenage protagonist dealing with family dysfunction discovers he might be connected to Wee’git, the Trickster figure from Haisla tradition. The books were adapted into a television series, bringing Indigenous storytelling to new audiences. Robinson refuses to make her Indigenous characters symbols of anything. They are complicated, sometimes deeply flawed people navigating complicated lives. This ordinariness is itself revolutionary when Indigenous peoples have so often been depicted as either noble savages or tragic victims.
New Zealand and the Maori Renaissance
The Maori literary tradition in New Zealand offers another model of canonical revision. Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, and Hone Tuwhare emerged in the 1970s as part of what became known as the Maori Renaissance, a broader cultural movement asserting Maori identity and rights. Their work entered school curricula and prize shortlists, though not without resistance.
Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider became internationally known through its film adaptation, but his earlier work like Tangi pioneered Maori English as a literary language. Grace’s Potiki won awards and controversy for its unflinching look at land development conflicts. More recently, Becky Manawatu’s Auē won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize with a raw, urgent novel about family violence and aroha, the Maori concept of love.
What distinguishes the New Zealand situation is how bicultural ideology, however imperfectly realized, created institutional space for Maori literature. The country’s literature is officially understood as comprising both Maori and Pakeha traditions. This doesn’t resolve all tensions, but it frames Indigenous writing as constitutive of national literature rather than adjacent to it.
The Politics of Recognition
Prizes matter in these conversations. They confer legitimacy. They get books into bookstores and onto syllabi. When Indigenous writers win major prizes, it shifts what publishers are willing to acquire and what readers expect to encounter. But prizes are also compromised spaces, often judged by panels that may not include Indigenous members or may evaluate Indigenous works through inappropriate criteria.
Some Indigenous writers and critics question whether canon inclusion should even be the goal. The canon is an inherently assimilationist structure, this argument goes. Fitting Indigenous works into it means accepting colonial frameworks of literary value. Perhaps Indigenous literatures should be understood on their own terms, through their own institutions, evaluated by their own communities according to their own criteria. This tension between working within existing structures and building alternatives runs through contemporary Indigenous literary politics.
What Gets Lost in Translation
A fundamental challenge facing Indigenous literature is the question of language. Many Indigenous languages are endangered or have already been lost. Writing in English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese, the languages of colonizers, inevitably shapes what can be expressed. Some concepts don’t translate. Some stories aren’t meant to be written down at all.
Writers navigate this differently. Some incorporate Indigenous words throughout their texts, with or without glossaries. Some invent hybrid literary languages. Some write entirely in Indigenous languages for Indigenous audiences, accepting smaller readerships as the price of cultural integrity. There’s no consensus on the right approach because there isn’t a single right approach. Each writer makes choices within specific contexts.
The Work Remaining
The rewriting of national literary canons is underway but nowhere near complete. University curricula still weight colonial literature heavily. Publishing remains dominated by multinational corporations with headquarters in former imperial capitals. Readers who encounter Indigenous writers through prize wins or bestseller lists often lack context for understanding what they’re reading.
And Indigenous peoples themselves are not monolithic. There are hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations in the United States alone, each with their own storytelling traditions. Speaking of Indigenous literature as a single category risks flattening enormous diversity. The Maori writer from Auckland and the Navajo poet from Arizona and the Aboriginal novelist from Sydney share certain experiences of colonization but come from radically different cultural traditions.
What seems clear is that the old model of the canon, a stable list of great books by mostly dead white men from a handful of countries, cannot survive this moment. The question is what replaces it. A more inclusive canon that adds Indigenous works to existing traditions? Multiple canons reflecting different communities and values? The abolition of canons altogether in favor of something more fluid?
These debates will continue. What won’t change is that Indigenous writers have claimed their place as central voices in their nations’ literatures. Not as curiosities. Not as representatives of dying cultures. As artists whose work is essential to understanding what these nations have been, are, and might become. The stories that define a nation were always political. Now more people are paying attention to whose politics they serve.
