Sky Woman, Trickster, Windigo: Reflections of Traditional Storytelling in Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Novel

This work examines the way contemporary Indigenous writers of Canada work with the tradition of oral storytelling in their writing. It studies the role and importance of storytelling for Indigenous cultures and consequently for literature and then analyzes several novels by contemporary Indigenous writers. The analysis is centred around three characters significant and recurrent in Indigenous storytelling – Sky Woman, the trickster, and the windigo — and it observes the meanings created by their employment in the narrative, it studies the way oral storytelling shapes the narrative style, and the way Indigenous referential frameworks are manifested in this process. The work argues that the three examined characters do not only teach the principles of relationality — they embody them, and that oral storytelling and its reflections in written texts should not be taken as a special feature of Indigenous literature, but rather as a core element of it, which influences not only the themes, but also the structure of the text and the entire referential framework the text manifests.