Indigenize, Decolonize! Indigenous Writers' Roundtable
Event Details
Every day, Indigenous people across Turtle Island are building a more hopeful future, through community initiatives, storytelling, and more. Join us as we hold space to grieve the losses of this year, honour the struggles and successes of those dedicated to Indigenous resistance, and discuss the role that writing has in decolonizing our world: how do books and storytelling contribute to healing? How do we celebrate and protect Indigenous storytellers? How have current events changed the way we write?
Books featured:
- Black Water by David A. Robertson (ebook / paperback)
- it was never going to be okay by jaye simpson (ebook / paperback)
- Genocidal Love: A Life After Residential School by Bevann Fox (ebook / paperback)
Black Water
HarperCollins
The son of a Cree father and a white mother, David A. Robertson grew up with virtually no awareness of his Indigenous roots. His father, Dulas—or Don, as he became known—lived on the trapline in the bush in Manitoba, only to be transplanted permanently to a house on the reserve, where he couldn’t speak his language, Swampy Cree, in school with his friends unless in secret. David’s mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town that had no Indigenous people until Don arrived as the new United Church minister. They married and had three sons, whom they raised unconnected to their Indigenous history.
David grew up without his father’s teachings or any knowledge of his early experiences. All he had was “blood memory”: the pieces of his identity ingrained in the fabric of his DNA, pieces that he has spent a lifetime putting together. It has been the journey of a young man becoming closer to who he is, who his father is and who they are together, culminating in a trip back to the trapline to reclaim their connection to the land.
it was never going to be okay
Nightwood Editions
it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:
i am five
my sisters are saying boy
i do not know what the word means but—
i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,
the hollowness of the o, the blade of y
Genocidal Love: A Life After Residential School
University of Regina Press
Genocidal Love delves into the long-term effects of childhood trauma on those who attended residential school and demonstrates the power of story to help in recovery and healing
Presenting herself as “Myrtle,” Bevann Fox recounts her early childhood filled with love and warmth on the First Nation reservation with her grandparents. At the age of seven she was sent to residential school, and her horrific experiences of abuse there left her without a voice, timid and nervous, never sure, never trusting, and always searching.
This is the story of Myrtle battling to recover her voice.
This is the story of her courage and resilience throughout the arduous process required to make a claim for compensation for the abuse she experienced at residential school–a process that turned out to be yet another trauma at the hands of the colonial power.
This is the story of one woman finally standing up to the painful truth of her past and moving beyond it for the sake of her children and grandchildren. In recounting her tumultuous life, Fox weaves truth and fiction together as a means of bringing clarity to the complex emotions and situations she faced as she walked her path toward healing.
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