Introduction to Lesson 1: Reading Yourself: Identity and Interpretation 

Every writer writes from somewhere. Positionality is the term for that somewhere — the combination of identity, experience, and place that shapes what a writer notices and says. In this lesson, you read Anishinaabe writer and lawyer Andrea Landry and pay attention to how her position on the page shapes yours as a reader.

Perspective and Positionality

Every text is written from somewhere. A writer brings more than words to the page. They bring their identity, their history, what they have been taught to value, and who they have been taught to distrust. Those things shape every choice they make.

Positionality names that location. Your positionality is the combination of your identity, your history, your community, and your social position in the world. It determines what you notice and what you cannot see, and it shapes every decision a writer makes on the page: what to include, what to leave out, which details feel urgent, and whose experience the writing centers. Writers cannot step outside their positionality. Neither can readers.

Perspective is a related but narrower concept. Positionality describes the full social and cultural location of the writer. Perspective describes the vantage point of the narrating voice in a specific text. Perspective asks: from whose viewpoint are we seeing the events of this piece? Perspective is about the storytelling position, not the whole person behind it.

A first-person narrator uses "I" to tell a story, placing the reader directly inside one person's experience and consciousness. Writing in the first person puts the reader behind one particular set of eyes and asks them to trust what those eyes observe. The narrator is saying: I was there. This is what it looked like from where I stood.

Some writers name their positionality directly. They say who they are, where they come from, and why that matters, and their argument depends on those facts. Maria Campbell's memoir Halfbreed (1973) is a foundational Canadian example. Campbell is a Cree/Scots-Irish Métis woman from Park Valley, Saskatchewan. She writes about poverty, racism, and the violence of the child welfare system from inside her own life, as the person who lived it. That positioning gives the book its authority. The reader trusts Campbell's account because it comes from someone who carries the evidence in her own body. No outside perspective could produce that book.

Short personal essays can work the same way. Andrea Landry is an Anishinaabe writer from Poundmaker Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. In the essay you will read for this lesson, she names who she is, why she holds the views she holds, and what history and culture inform those views. Her positionality is the argument.

As you read Landry's essay in Lesson 1.2, notice the moments when she names her identity or her community. What does knowing where she stands allow her to say? What question can she ask that someone writing from a different position could not ask the same way?