A #PresentingACCUTE Interview

With the upcoming 2025 ACCUTE Conference at George Brown College from 30th May- June 2nd, we have been having an interview series of #PresentingACCUTE which focuses on some of the presenters in conversation with Gladwell Pamba, ACCUTE’s Coordination and Communications Assistant. Next up on the series is Raphaela Pavlakos who is a 3rd-year PhD student in McMaster University’s English and Cultural Studies Department. Her dissertation work looks at Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe creative texts in Southern Ontario. She is developing an ethical methodology for settler-scholars to do this work, called Critical Dispositioning.

Tell us about what you’ll be focusing on in your presentation.

My paper is titled Indigenous Poetry as Praxis, Reading Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Poetry as Power Tools against Colonialism in Southern Ontario. I talk about Indigenous poetry from Southern Ontario and how that gets used to kind of rupture these colonial genres like poetry and how this indigenous poetry actually functions as activism in these cases. I’m doing this work as a settler in southern Ontario. There’s also this other kind of aspect of how do I do this work and read this indigenous poetry ethically which is another big part of this project, but also my dissertation work.

Where did this work come from?

This paper is a small portion of what I’m doing for my dissertation research as a PhD student at McMaster University. My project looks at creative literary production from Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe authors. I look at poetry like I do in this paper, but I also look at drama and other kinds of texts by these kinds of authors. In this paper, I look at poetry from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Kateri Akiwenzie Damm and Beth E. Brant. I unpack some of the poems from these authors and we look at how they’re doing this kind of activist work. They’re writing against colonial forms, but through a colonial form. The other part is using this kind of methodology that I’m creating as part of my dissertation work, called critical dispositioning. It’s like a reading practice for settlers like myself to use and read indigenous texts ethically.

What have you been reading or watching lately that you can recommend to your ACCUTE colleagues?

It’s a critical text by Danielle Taschereau Mamers called Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing. It’s very different than like my discipline. It’s actually media studies and it looks at indigenous art. But Mamers is also a settler scholar and she’s been like looking at these artworks, but from her settler perspective, and she’s doing it so thoughtfully and ethically.

What do you love to do when you’re not researching, teaching, or studying literature?

Oh my goodness. We don’t always get so much free time when we’re doing all this research and teaching. But I teach Greek traditional dances and songs to ages 6 to 22 in my Greek community, mostly in the evenings after school.