Award-winning writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt will deliver the keynote address at VIU’s Indigenous Speakers Series event on November 18.
The impacts of Canada’s actions against Indigenous peoples continue to have far-reaching effects today and cannot be considered something that has happened in the past.
This is the message Billy-Ray Belcourt wishes to impart to Canadians during Vancouver Island University’s (VIU’s) 11th annual Indigenous Speakers Series on November 18.
“It’s a problem of the ongoing-ness of this history. It’s not over,” he said. “My talk is a call to acknowledge that the 20th century continues in various forms in the lives of Indigenous peoples. Any talk about reconciliation needs to consider that fact.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. His talk, “My Mother’s house: A story of haunting and colonial history,” will begin with his mother’s house – where the nuns who ran the local residential school once lived – in order to insist on new ways to make sense of the ongoing impacts of colonialism. He will share some of his community’s history, bridging the historical and the personal in addressing the question of how to tell the story of the afterlife of the 20th century.
“I’m speaking both about the house’s history and the history of the community in which it is located, which is a small hamlet in northern Alberta,” he said. “I’m looking at the residential school that was there, the founding of that community, how it’s all tied into the colonial project, and how it is the onus of people like me and my family to shoulder the memory and the history of that place. Because there isn’t public discourse about it in the community.”
VIU's Indigenous Speakers Series, delivered in partnership with CBC Radio’s Ideas program, began in 2015 to mark the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is held every fall at the Nanaimo campus, on the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. Nahlah Ayed, host of Ideas, will emcee the event.
Belcourt won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection This Wound is a World. He has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award – once in poetry for the debut and in non-fiction for his memoir, A History of My Brief Body. Both his works of fiction, A Minor Chorus and Coexistence, were national bestsellers. His latest book is THE ENTIRE OF AN ENTIRE LIFE: POEMS. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He’s excited to bring this background into his talk.
“I examine how literature specifically can help broaden our understanding of the country’s history,” he said. “I’m interested in how we are encouraged to talk about difficult histories and what is omitted from that permitted discussion.”
Belcourt will deliver his talk on Tuesday, November 18 starting at 6:30 pm in the Malaspina Theatre on VIU’s Nanaimo campus – and online. Following the talk, Ayed will host a live Q&A session with Belcourt.
For more information, visit the Indigenous Speakers Series homepage.
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Media Contact:
Jenn McGarrigle, Communications Manager, Vancouver Island University
C: 250.619.6860 | E: Jenn.McGarrigle@viu.ca | W: news.viu.ca
The VIU community acknowledges and thanks the Snuneymuxw, Quw’utsun, Tla’amin, Snaw-naw-as and Qualicum First Nation on whose traditional lands we teach, learn, research, live and share knowledge.
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