Chapter 10

Emotion and the work of decolonization

This chapter takes up a moment in the production of the Rocky Cree picturebook, Pīsim Finds Her Miskanaw (2020), when a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing was made evident to team members involved in the project. In thinking through this event, which centred on the portrayal of dignity in a key scene of the book, we turn to Dian Million’s conceptualization of felt theory (2009, 2013) to consider the extent to which the work of emotion must be understood as part of larger discursive structures of colonization and the uses of emotional knowledge for decolonial practices, specifically including the decolonization of the academic sector. Building on Million’s work in the second part, we use Sara Ahmed’s theorization of repetition and accumulation in the work of emotion (2004) to demonstrate more precisely the ways in which representations of dignity in the picturebook contribute to the project’s goal of decolonizing education.