Abstract
With an analysis of Tracy Sorensen’s The Lucky Galah (2018), I ask how we can respect and acknowledge Aboriginal ownership and sovereignty without appropriation, exoticization, or trivialization. I suggest that Sorensen does this in her novel by imagining the unknowable voice of an animal. The novel uses the viewpoint of a galah and the story of an Aboriginal woman who adopts her. Using Gerald Vizenor’s idea of survivance, I discuss how animal voices offer a way to “walk with” other people and species through the devices of speculative fiction, continuing my work with science fiction that imagines ways of exchanging an acknowledgment of mutual personhood without perfect understanding of either one by the other, employing what I call the amborg gaze.
Recommended Citation
Gordon, Joan
(2022)
"Ventriloquizing Animal Voices to Acknowledge Indigenous Voices in Sorensen's The Lucky Galah,"
Antipodes: Vol. 36:
Iss.
2, Article 12.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/vol36/iss2/12