The white Canadian woman writer’s problematic relation with appropriated land in Carol Shields’s Small Ceremonies

Carol Shields, in her debut novel, Small Ceremonies , covertly criticises white Canadian women writers’ hesitation to address the Indigenous peoples’ land rights. At a time when ecofeminism is taking shape, the protagonist, Judith Gill, attempts to establish a literary tradition that will liberate white women and help them save the exploited land. Yet in an aborted Gothic storyline, the Inuit carvings she remembers having seen in an eerie apartment serve as reminders of the unresolved colonial past and confront her with her guilt: prioritising white women’s relation with the land, she reiterates the white patriarchal canon’s erasure of the Indigenous peoples from the land and (literary) history. It will be argued that Shields implies that white Canadian women writers must adopt an anti-colonial position and reinscribe the Indigenous peoples and their land relations – but avoid speaking, in reiteration of imperialist policies, about and for Indigenous others.