This paper seeks to investigate concepts of wisdom in relation to native culture and proposes a literary reading of a concept frequently confined to psychology, philosophy and esoteric pseudo-sciences.

Wisdom sits uneasily among the issues explored in literary studies, as it erases the borderlines between textual and extratextual realities and deals with elusive, easily misapprehended universal themes in an aphoristic fashion. Wisdom moreover challenges a sequential evolutionary relation where literature inevitably supersedes orature.

Focussing on the trickster figure crucial in oral narratives by Native Canadians, I will examine literary reflections of indigenous wisdom in selected postcolonial North American writings (Wiebe, Reid, Divakaruni) to invite a dialogue contextualising wisdom and literature.