Painful Landloss and Homeless Existence in Select Indigenous Novels

Abstract

Indigenous communities around the world have suffered in countless ways at the hands of the settler colonists and the mainstream communities. One of the major issues faced by these communities is loss of traditional lands. The natives were not only deprived of their access to their traditional lands but were also forcibly removed from there and later deprived of their rightful claim over these land parcels. The native understanding of land as a non-commodity that could never be bartered or traded contrasted directly with the European sense of land as a tradable commodity. The rate at which indigenous communities lost their lands is startling, especially in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Literary representations are one of the many ways the people tried to keep their memories of the lands intact for successive generations and the reading public. The present paper is an attempt to understand the painful reality of landloss as represented in four indigenous novels taken from different corners of the world.