In 2017, I attended the Indigenous Editors Circle, where the late Dr. Gregory Younging was one of four faculty; and during my graduate studies in publishing at Simon Fraser University, I enjoyed a project placement at Theytus Books where Greg was publisher. With Greg’s mentorship, I created a qualitative research project to identify emerging best practices in editing and publishing stories by, for, and about Indigenous Peoples. I interviewed publishing professionals and Indigenous community members and researched three case studies of “destructive editing” (Shield and Reder). I also drew on my experience as a research assistant for Deanna Reder’s Indigenous literatures project The People and the Text. All of this experience was combined in my graduate thesis “Gathering Knowledges to Inform Best Practices in Indigenous Publishing,” and I was honoured to have this paper selected for publication in Indigenous and Postcolonial Studies, the fiftieth anniversary issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature edited by Deanna Reder and Sophie McCall. Read “Gathering Knowledges” in full here.

“[Taylor] has picked up the mantle that belonged to her mentor, Younging, who passed away unexpectedly in April 2019. While Taylor sets out to talk about ‘[the] lack of access’ to publishing for Indigenous writers, she realizes that the real difficulty is ‘a lack of knowledge … about Canada’s ongoing colonial history and about Indigenous experiences and rights’ … Publishing needs to change so that Indigenous stories can be better understood and appreciated. Stories are often undervalued even though they reflect Indigenous intellectual traditions, enactments of sovereignty, and intergenerational legacies. If publishing was revamped to include ‘proper acknowledgment’ and attention to Indigenous protocols … Indigenous scholars could unveil connections to each other, ancestors, and descendants.”
—Deanna Reder & Sophie McCall