Defying haunting colonial history with literary imagination
4/23/202654 min
Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt's favourite place in the world is his mother's house. It's marked with a horrible, dark past — built for nuns who ran the local residential school in Northern Alberta. Belcourt grew up in the shadow of that school. But his mom drenched this home with love so powerful it surpassed the haunted context. Belcourt's mother's house provokes questions reconciliation couldn't quite answer: what does it mean to live inside history and how do you imagine your way out? In this lecture for Vancouver Island University’s Indigenous Speaker’s Series, he makes the case for literature as a more honest reckoning.
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First 90 secondsBilly-Ray Belcourt· Guest0:00
[upbeat music] This is a CBC podcast. [gentle music] Love is a burning house we built from scratch. Love keeps us busy while the smoke clears.
Nahlah Ayed· Host0:22
Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nahlah Ayed.
Billy-Ray Belcourt· Guest0:27
History lays itself bare at the side of the road, but no one is looking. History screams into the night, but it sounds too much like the wind.
Nahlah Ayed· Host0:38
[gentle music] This is writer Billy-Ray Belcourt from the Driftpile Cree Nation, reading his poem Ode to Northern Alberta.
Billy-Ray Belcourt· Guest0:50
Cree girls gather in the bush and wait for the future. In the meantime, they fall in love with the trees and hear everything.
Nahlah Ayed· Host1:01
[gentle music] Belcourt has won the Griffin Prize for Poetry and has twice been nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award. He earned his doctorate in English at the University of Alberta and now teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Literature is clearly his calling, but it's also much more