The trickster wink: storytelling and resistance in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen

This essay explores how Tomson Highway uses the narrative genre as a space to perform a speech act of resistance against colonialism through an approach that departs from contemporary discussions on genre theory and theories of storytelling. Highway′s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen reaffirms the process of adaptation that is intrinsic to Indigenous cultures and to the survival of the Trickster and promotes a healing experience through the recovery of Cree storytelling. John Frow's concept of genre as a performative structure that shapes the world in the very process of putting it into speech contributes to the focus on Indigenous storytelling rather than on Western literary categories.