At first, I thought of arranging these four posts into categories—one for poetry and another for short stories, that kind of thing—but instead I have included an assortment in each post.

Hopefully there will be at least one book that interests you, suits your reading taste and sparks your curiosity, in each of the four posts that coincide with Indigenous History Month.

So, it makes sense to begin with a poet I mentioned in my previous post about Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”: Billy-Ray Belcourt. Most recently I’ve been reading his memoir, 2020’s A History of My Brief Body.

While I was reading, I recognised the feeling he describes in “Futuromania”: “I bore witness. No one asked this of me, but I wanted to keep watch of the dying everywhere, so I could figure out how to care for a bleeding sentence.”

His “Fragments from a Half-Existence” is another of my favourite chapters, wherein he writes about his struggle to write a novel, to reconcile different aspects of his creative self: “I believed the quirk that made novelists novelists was an ability to say no to the world. But as a poet, I couldn’t break the habit of trying to make the world and thus my lived life into an art object.” (Spoiler: it’s not that simple.)

Before all this, however, there was his debut poetry collection, This Wound is a World (2017), which won the 2018 Griffin Prize. His biography in it reads: “The poet is from the Driftpile Cree Nation and lives on the internet.”

There are many aspects of this collection I enjoyed: the titles (like “Notes from a Public Washroom” and “Love and Heartbreak Are Fuck Buddies”, the response to Tomson Highway’s “The Rez Sisters II”, and poems in the form of numbered lists (with points like “there are days when being in life feels like consenting to the cruelties that hold up the world”).

There is a poem that contemplates suicide “the act of opening up / to the sky?” and another that recognising painting his nails is both cute and an act of protest; what is ordinary and what is transformative, oppositional ideas are so entangled throughout the collection that binaries seem to simultaneously drop away and claim the foreground.

Two years later, NDN Coping Mechanisms (2019) is dedicated to “those who have survived history and those who haven’t.”

This time, he responds to Saidiya Hartman and presents epigraphs from Ocean Vuong and Anne Carson. There’s also a list poem in which all the verses are 1’s.

In one poem we have “I bet you fantasize about being carried away by a cliché” and, in another, “a holy place willed with NDN girls hair wet with utopia, who were caught between girlhood and a TV death.”

These Notes from the Field prod and provoke, they display and dissent: binaries refract and the wounds convulse. There are full-page colour photos, poems that play with form, and a page that lodges in my mind: “Melancholy: the hospice care of memory.”

One of my favourite elements of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s writing is his relationship with other writers’ work. He often cites their books specifically and, when I imagine him writing, I imagine a surface nearby littered with read and half-read volumes, some with markers in them and others turned upside-down to mark his place.

One of the most recognizable names in Indigenous literature is Sherman Alexie, a Spokane-Coeur d’Alene writer. He is one of my MRE authors (Must Read Everything) and Thunder Boy Jr. (2016) is for young readers, illustrated by Yuyi Morales.

In a bright, bold colour palette, this story of a boy—who longs for a “good name” (a “normal” name!) but is, instead, named for his father—unfolds as he imagines himself in many different ways. There are so many aspects of his identity that he believes would have made for a much better name.

It’s a fun, light-hearted story and I was especially fond of the double-spread in which a whisper on the previous page became a yell on the double-spread. The father-son relationship leaves me feeling warm and smiley. As does the artist’s dedication: “To the Western Addition Library in SF where, as a new mother and immigrant, I’d found my first home in the U.S.A. Nancy, I hope you remember me. You changed my life forever when you put books in my hands.”

This Place: 150 Years Retold is an ideal volume for teachers and young readers: all Indigenous authors, all Indigenous illustrators, all systematically working to fill the gaps in Canadian history classes. There is a short video here with Brandon Mitchell, a Mi’kmaq storyteller who recalls the raids on his community in “Migwite-tmeg: We Remember It” which briefly describes his creative process. He believed that he remembered the earliest tensions between Canadian authorities and Indigenous peoples over salmon fishing on their homelands, but he learned—first from family members and then from research—that the tensions went back further than he initially thought. Today the tensions continue (as reported, most recently over lobster, in the news).

My favourite piece is the first, “Annie of Red River”, which is also set the farthest into the past (before Confederation, which is to say, before Canada became a colonial nation in 1867), with each of the ten sequential pieces depicting another era chronologically, culminating in a futuristic story by Chelsea Vowel.

Most of these storytellers are familiar to me, but Katherena Vermette’s piece interested me particularly because I’ve enjoyed both her poetry (for which she won a Governor General’s Award in Canada) and her prose (especially 2016’s The Break). Here, the illustrations are by Scott B. Henderson and the colouring by Donovan Yaciuk, finely drawn and richly shaded; she also works with them on her own graphic novel series, which began in 2017 with The Pemmican Wars (set in a similar time).

“Annie Bannatyne was a formidable woman. Little-known outside of Winnipeg [Manitoba] and Métis communities, not even known to me until I was an adult. Mrs. Bannatyne is an inspiration who deserves more recognition.” There’s some historical documentation behind the incident that Vermette selects as her focus, but the emotional heft resides in her reimagining of the scenes and dialogue. The story seems incredible, but for all of that, it’s an astonishing beginning to this chronicle, and an astute reminder that how the past is presented fundamentally informs our understanding of present-day power dynamics.

Across each of the ten chapters, there is a simple timeline below the author’s commentary; alongside the dates that Canadian schoolchildren have been urged to memorize for decades, there are events described with just enough information to provide relevant context. For instance, in 1970: “The province of Manitoba is created, with promises to respect Métis land titles.” You can imagine which part of that phrase was left out of my social studies teachings in elementary school.

Some of the notes are concise and factual, others confront deeply rooted stereotypes and mischaracterizations. Like Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley’s note preceding “Rosie” from the 1930s:

“Please note this, if nothing else: shamanism is different from spirituality. Aangakkuit are specialists in the soul (of any life), a membrane where mind meets spirit. The mind is temporary, while spirit is borrowed from a greater All, eternal and beyond expression. Shamans, in this sense, are not spiritual people. One might instead call them practitioners of ‘psychotechnology’ (there’s a nice made-up word for you). Not the Inuit religion, but a system. An understanding.”

Anyone interested, but unable to access the volume in print, can enjoy the accompanying 10-part podcast. Its host, Rosanna Deerchild, also hosts Unreserved: another recommended series, for anyone interested in Indigenous culture.

Next time: a novel, a book of creation stories, an illustrated story about a crow, and some non-fiction.

Have you recently read something by an Indigenous author that you would like to recommend? Which of these would you be most likely to read?