Displacing the Colonial Gaze in Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui’s Chroniques de Kitchike

In his collection of short stories, Chroniques de Kitchike. La grande débarque (2017), Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui criticizes the political structure of a small fictitious First Nations reserve while eluding prejudicial readings and judgements of readers from the dominant society. In the collection of short stories, three main strategies are used to prevent anthropological readings: the materialization, rather than psychologization, of the characters to foreclose what Dian Million (2013) calls therapeutic representations; displacing the readers’ gaze through layered representation of the characters’ relations with their material environment, their community and with power; and, finally, the problematization of the act of listening and reading to make the reader conscious of her participatory role and responsibility.