Lexical Sovereignty and the Counter Archives: Reframing Colonial Dispossession in Tara June Winch’s The Yield

Abstract

This paper examines The Yield through a conceptual shift from land-based dispossession to what is termed lexical sovereignty—the reclamation of language as a form of territory and resistance. While existing scholarship on Indigenous literatures has predominantly foregrounded trauma, identity, and reconciliation, this study argues that such frameworks remain insufficient to capture the novel’s deeper intervention. Instead, The Yield constructs a counter-archive in which Wiradjuri language functions not merely as cultural residue but as an active, world-making force.Drawing on settler colonial studies and decolonial theory, the paper demonstrates that dispossession in the novel operates simultaneously at material and epistemic levels, where the erosion of land is inseparable from the loss of linguistic worlds. Through close textual analysis of the novel’s tripartite structure—mission records, family narrative, and the Wiradjuri dictionary—it is shown that language constitutes a parallel territorial domain that resists colonial modes of mapping and ownership. Memory, in this context, emerges not as nostalgic recall but as a relational and reconstructive practice, embedded within Indigenous lexicon.The paper further contends that The Yield refuses the closure implied by reconciliation discourse, offering instead a model of partial recovery grounded in linguistic persistence. By foregrounding language as both the site of dispossession and the medium of survival, this study proposes lexical sovereignty as a critical framework for rethinking Indigenous resistance beyond conventional postcolonial paradigms.