« Une vie parmi les déchets »: Du racisme environnemental dans le roman autochtone canadien

Abstract

In his documentary There’s Something in the Water, Elliot Page met with Aboriginal and Black communities in Nova Scotia to explore with them the issues surrounding the destruction of their environment. The term “environmental racism”, coined by Benjamin Chavis and adopted by Page, now refers to the tendency of Western countries to stockpile toxic waste and to set up companies discharging pollutants near racialized communities. A whole “waste literature” is emerging, straddling ecopoetics, the post-Anthropocene and political activism. Native writers no longer sing the praises of the Canadian landscape and the traditional life of Amerindian hunters but turn their lenses on the “belly” of Montreal to bear witness to the lives of all those Aboriginals who represent 1% of the city's population, but 10% of its homeless. The article analyzes Michel Jean's novel Tiochtiá:ke, representative of the emerging genre of the urban native novel, and its relationship with “trash literature”.