2019 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDS

May 14, 2019 (Vancouver B.C.): Seventeen finalists were announced for the second annual Indigenous Voices Awards (IVAs), administered by Indigenous Literary Studies Association. The IVAs were established in 2017 to support and nurture the work of Indigenous writers in lands claimed by Canada. The awards honour the sovereignty of Indigenous creative voices and reject cultural appropriation.

The finalists represent emerging Indigenous voices, both published and unpublished. A total of $14,000.00 (CDN) will be given out to the winners on June 4, 2019. The finalists are recognized in seven distinct categories, reflecting the diversity and complexity of Indigenous literary art.

FINALISTS

(award recipients in bold)

PUBLISHED PROSE IN ENGLISH

  • Lindsay Nixon nîtisânak (Metonymy Press)

  • Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth (Viking Canada/Penguin Random House Canada)

  • Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press)

PUBLISHED POETRY IN ENGLISH

  • Wanda John-Kehewin, Seven Sacred Truths (Talon)

  • Jules Koostachin, Unearthing of Secrets, Gathering of Truths (Kegedonce)

  • Smokii Sumac, You are Enough: Love Poems for the End of the World (Kegedonce)

PUBLISHED WORKS IN FRENCH 

  • Joséphine Bacon, Uiesh, Quelque Part (Mémoire d’encrier)

  • Pierrot Ross-Tremblay, Nipimanitu (Prise de parole)

WORK IN AN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE

  • Francine Merasty, Iskotew Iskwew

UNPUBLISHED PROSE IN ENGLISH

  • Francine Cunningham, selection from “Teenage Asylums”

  • Brittany Johnson, “Transit”

  • Blair Yoxall, “Little Bull”

UNPUBLISHED POETRY IN ENGLISH

  • Craig Commanda, “My Ghosts Roam this Land” and other poems

  • Elaine McArthur, “Brush of a Bustle”

  • Autumn Schnell, “FemmNDN Commandments”

WORKS IN AN ALTERNATIVE FORMAT

  • Kìzis, “Wàsakozi”

  • Tasha Spillett (with Natasha Donovan), “Surviving the City” (HighWater Press)

JURORS

Jeannette Armstrong is one of the most influential and renowned Indigenous writers in Canada. Poet, novelist, teacher, and artist, she was born and raised on the Penticton Indian Reserve, one of eight Syilx (Okanagan) reserves located in both Canada and the United States. She is a fluent speaker of the Syilx language, Nsyilxcn, and is a knowledge keeper of plant medicines, Syilx traditions, and cultural protocols. She is also a strong voice in Indigenous environmental ethics. In 1985, Armstrong published her first novel, Slash – a story about a young Okanagan man finding his culture after a life of racism and violence. In the same year, she became the executive director of the En’owkin Centre, and in 1989 she helped found the En’owkin School of International Writing, the first credit-giving creative writing program in Canada managed solely by and for Indigenous people. In 1990, Armstrong published a book of poetry titled Breath Tracks. She published her second novel, Whispering in Shadows, in 2000 – a story about an Okanagan woman navigating her cultural knowledges through colonial surroundings while also engaging in environmental activism across the continent. In 2013 she was appointed a Canada Research Chair in Okanagan Indigenous Philosophy to research, document, categorize and analyze Okanagan Syilx oral literature in Nsyilxcn.

Jordan Abel a member of the editorial board at Wolsak & Wynn’s Buckrider Books imprint, and holds a PhD from Simon Fraser University. His research concentrates on Indigenous poetry and intergenerational trauma. His creative work has recently been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation(Arbiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayword). His  body of work includes The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize).

Joanne Arnott is a poet, essayist, and arts/community organizer originally from Manitoba who has resided in Vancouver for over two decades. She is a founding member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast and The Aunties Collective, and she is mother to six children, all born at home. Her collections of poetry include Wiles of Girlhood(Press Gang Publishers, 1991), My Grass Cradle (Press Gang Publishers 1992), Steepy Mountain Love Poetry (Kegedonce Press, 2004), Mother Time: New & Selected (Ronsdale Press, 2007), A Night for the Lady (Ronsdale Press, 2013) and Halfling Spring(Kegedonce Press, 2014). Her non-fiction works include Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing (Press Gang Publishers, 1995).

Warren Cariou was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan into a family of Métis and European heritage.  Though he has lived away from Meadow Lake for many years, his art and academic work maintains a focus on the cultural and environmental questions that have preoccupied the people of his homeland.  His books, films, photography and scholarly research explore themes of community, environment, orality and belonging in the Canadian west, with particular focus on the relationships between Indigenous people and non-Native people. Cariou’s books The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs and Lake of the Prairies:  A Story of Belonging have won and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction and the Drainie-Taylor Prize for biography.  He has also co-directed and co-produced two films about Aboriginal people in western Canada’s oil sands region:  Overburden and Land of Oil and Water.  In 2014 he began a photographic practice called Petrography, in which he creates images using bitumen gathered from the Athabasca tar sands region near his home town. Warren Cariou teaches in the Department of English, Film and Theatre and directs the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.

Margery Fee is Professor Emerita of English at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent books are Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015) and edited with Dory Nason, Tekahionwake:  E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (Broadview, 2016).

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a Metis artist and writer from Vancouver, BC, located on unceded Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh territory. Hill’s sculptures and installations perform as both a material exploration of color and form and an enquiry into concepts of land, property, and economy. Her work has been exhibited at the Polygon Gallery, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Sunset Terrace, and Gallery Gachet in Vancouver; SBC galerie d’art contemporain in Montreal; STRIDE gallery in Calgary; SOMArts in San Francisco; and Get This! Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.

Francis Langevin vit et travaille en territoire syilx à la Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies de l’Université de la Colombie-Britannique (Okanagan). Il enseigne le français et la littérature en milieu francophone minoritaire depuis 2010. Spécialiste du roman contemporain, il s’intéresse au rapport entre le style et les valeurs, de même qu’aux représentations de la régionalité dans les fictions québécoises et françaises d’aujourd’hui. Sur ces sujets, il a fait paraître des articles et codirigé des numéros thématiques dans les revues Voix et images, Tangence, Spirale, Contre-jour, @nalyses , temps zéro (2013 et 2014) et Arborescences.

Jean Sioui (Wendat), né en 1948, est Wendat (Huron). Marié, il est père de trois enfants. Il a habité Wendake (Québec) pendant 32 ans avant de s’installer pour les 15 années suivantes, sur une ferme à Saint-Henri de Lévis.  Revenu à Wendake à l’âge de 50 ans, il a complété des certificats en études autochtones et en création littéraire à l’Université Laval. Il a publié son premier recueil Le Pas de l’Indien aux éditions Le Loup de Gouttière en 1997. Il est co-fondateur du Cercle d’écriture de Wendake, animateur d’ateliers de poésie au CDFM (Centre de développement de la formation et de la main-d’œuvre huron-wendat), formateur au Banff Center pour le Conseil des Arts du Canada dans le cadre du programme Écrivains autochtones en début de carrière, consultant et rédacteur du manuel de formation pour intervenants en milieu autochtone au Conseil de la santé et des services sociaux des Premières Nations du Québec et du Labrador.

2019 GALA

The First Nations House of Learning at the UBC became a dramatic backdrop as winners and finalists took to the stage and, sometimes in whispers and sometimes in shouts, often with laughter, delivered short performances of their work, showing the depth, breadth, and complexity of Indigenous literary arts. Significantly, not just the winners had an opportunity to read from their work—every finalist had the opportunity to share their work in the spirit of community building and collective celebration. A stand-out performance came from Smokii Sumac, a two-spirit member of the Ktunaxa nation, and winner in the category of Published Poetry in English for his collection, You Are Enough published by Kegedonce Press.

The evening began with Elder Larry Grant, who gave a warm welcome on behalf of the Musqueam Nation, while Miss Christie Lee Charles, Vancouver’s first Indigenous Poet Laureate, brought down the house with a hip hop performance incorporating traditional knowledge, stories, and Musqueam language (or hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓). The soulful mcee’ing team of Daniel Heath Justice and Tenille Campbell nurtured the evening’s celebratory tone with hilarious antics and their obvious affection for both the literature and the artists that create it.

The IVAs Gala capped off a day of mentorship, professionalization, and community building for the emerging Indigenous writers, who had opportunities to work with and learn from some of the biggest names in Indigenous literature in Canada, including jurors Jordan Abel, Jeannette Armstrong, Joanne Arnott, and Warren Cariou, as well as representatives of the publishing industry. The mentorship opportunities were supported generously by Penguin Random House Canada. (Other jurors for the Awards this year included Margery Fee, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Francis Langevin, and Jean Sioui.)

 The IVAs were founded in 2017 to support Indigenous literary art in all its diversity and complexity, carving out space for Indigenous literary expression and connecting writers across generations. Begun as a crowd-funded campaign seeking to raise a few thousand dollars to support emerging Indigenous writers, the IVAs have raised over $140,000 to date from over 1,500 different donors.

 We express our sincere gratitude to the supporters of the IVAs: Scholastic Canada; Penguin Random House Canada; Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA); Ontario Arts Foundation (OAF); Pamela Dillon; Robin Parker; and the countless supporters who have donated to the IVAs crowd-sourced fund over the past two years. Further donations are always welcome and deeply appreciated: please visit indigenousvoicesawards.org for more information.