Childrearing in the Context of Settler-Colonial Genocide: A Literary Analysis of Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth

With growing discussion on the state of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis, Tanya Tagaq's breathtaking debut novel Split Tooth tackles the cultural implications of the crisis on Indigenous communities with striking literary prowess. Approaching this text from the perspective of contemporary scholarship on settler-colonial genocide, this article examines the presentation of Indigenous motherhood in the text, drawing connections to ethnographic studies on motherhood in the context of genocide and reproductive exploitation of Indigenous Canadian women. I argue that Tagaq's narrative is indicative of the scrutiny that Indigenous women face when they become mothers under this settler-colonial system through a foregrounding of intergenerational trauma and non-Western conceptualizations of “good motherhood.” Moreover, I analyze the figurative language Tagaq uses to communicate her experience, establishing that the narrative itself acts as a form of resistance through the decentering of Eurocentric constructions of idealized motherhood and nurturance.