Chapter 3

Children’s agency in/through Canadian children’s literature

Representations of children in literature for children have always reflected the roles that children are seen to have in their local contexts. From the late twentieth century, in Canadian children’s literature, many children have been depicted as political and social actors with agency of their own whose actions can lead to positive change, whether within their own family, amongst their friends, at their schools, or within society more widely. This chapter considers how Canadian children’s literature has increasingly depicted children as having agency in their own lives. It will explore this increase in represented agency from multiple perspectives, from the invitation to agential reading made in postmodern picturebooks like Mélanie Watt’s Chester (2007) to the trans/queer agencies of Kai Cheng Thom’s From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017) and the networked resistance to bullying shown in Susin Nielsen’s We Are All Made of Molecules (2015). The chapter also considers how Indigenous children’s books encourage readers to become geopolitical agents through its consideration of Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), which not only encourages readers’ privileging of multiple perspectives and “coming to” stories but also centers an anticolonial Indigenous (geo)politics for our times.