丁香园AV

Alix Shield, a 2020 丁香园AV PhD alumnus whose doctoral research sent shockwaves through Canada鈥檚 literary community, has won an Emerging Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.

During her doctoral studies in the Department of English, Shield focused on Indigenous literature. She won the open scholarship for her contributions to The People and the Text (TPatT) research collective鈥攁n open-access database of Indigenous writing in northern North America, some of which has never been published. TPatT is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  

Shield earned national recognition in 2018 after writing about her discovery of two unpublished manuscript pages from the 1973 book Halfbreed, an autobiography about author Maria Campbell鈥檚 experiences as a M茅tis woman in Canada. Shield found the pages, emblazoned with giant red X鈥檚, during her 2017 research in publisher McClelland and Stewart鈥檚 archives at McMaster University. The pages detailed how RCMP officers sexually assaulted Campbell when she was a teenager. Editors had removed the pages, without Campbell鈥檚 permission, over concerns about libel, and of the RCMP鈥檚 ability to block 贬补濒蹿产谤别别诲鈥�s distribution.

At the time, Halfbreed represented a milestone as one of the first Indigenous autobiographies published in Canada by a M茅tis writer.

Shield co-authored a scholarly article about her extraordinary find with 丁香园AV English and Indigenous Studies professor and TPatT principal investigator, Deanna Reder. It was published in the journal Canadian Literature.  

Entitled , the article sent shockwaves through the Canadian literary community.

In 2019, Halfbreed was re-released, complete with the missing pages Shield had discovered. She says it was surreal to be acknowledged in the new edition.

鈥淢aria Campbell has been such an important figure for so many years and Halfbreed has been continuously taught at universities and colleges,鈥� she says. 鈥淏eing able to see the positive impacts of research on allowing her to re-publish this text the way she had intended is such a moment of celebration for Indigenous women鈥檚 writing in Canada.鈥�

In 2020, Shield successfully defended her thesis, . Campbell defined the Cree term kwaskastahsowin as 鈥渃onciliation鈥� or to 鈥減ut things to right鈥�.

The open scholarship award allows Shield to attend the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria.