Ideas - Defying haunting colonial history with literary imagination

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

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.

Hi, Donovan Woods here. Hey, hey, it's me, Tom Power. We're here to tell you about our brand new podcast. It's called The Big Five. So Donovan, what is the Big Five? Yeah, exactly. What is the Big Five? That's what the Big Five is all about.

Every week, Tom and I will sit down with a special guest and dive into new topics, debating things like, what are the Big Five farm animals? The Big Five types of hat. The Big Five guys named Paul. Martin, Revere, Mezcal, McCartney, John Paul. The debate is settled by a listener from somewhere across the country. It's like a game show. It is a game show.

The Big Five, available now, wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Love is a burning house we built from scratch. Love keeps us busy while the smoke clears. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ahead. 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. This is right.

writer Billy Ray Belcourt from the Drift Pile Cree Nation, reading his poem Ode to Northern Alberta. Cree girls gather in the bush and wait for the future. In the meantime, they fall in love with the trees and hear everything. 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 than that. For him, the literary imagination is fundamental to creating a better world.

I believe that the literary imagination is a space to insist on a different relation to the nightmare of colonialism, one not of defeat, but of defiance and liberation. This talk, part of Vancouver Island University's Indigenous Speaker series, is called My Mother's House, a story of haunting and colonial history. Belcourt tells the story of his mother's house in a small town in Alberta, a house that was once home to the nuns from the local residential school, and how his mother reinvented that house defying its past. From the Nimo British Columbia, here's Billy Ray Belcourt. Good evening, everyone.

Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to start with a poem, and then I'll tell you a bit about a small corner of the world in northwestern Alberta. Okay, this poem is called Sub-Arctic. Because it's the coldest December on record, I haven't left my mother's house in over a week. I love how simple it is to live right now. It so rarely is. How small and inconsequential my desires are, which rarely are.

It would be easy to continue on in this way, hemmed in on all sides by bright light. At last, Lord, the whiteness of the world doesn't frighten me. At last, Lord, I am not my anguish. Outside the window, a row of poplars sway at the edge of a tiny schoolyard. Each a statue of awe, each stunned by its own capacity for survival. Because I was so sad all the time, I used to think, like the famous poem, that I was in the winter of my life, but I was wrong. I saw the whole world and still ached for my childhood,

which was half mystery, half omen. It isn't that death is a resolution, but one day I too will be buried beneath snow. Somehow this explains everything. Billy Ray Belcourt reading his poem, Sub-Arctica, as he began his talk for Vancouver Island University's Indigenous Speaker Series. We'll hear the rest of the talk in a moment. Right now, Billy Ray joins me from Vancouver.

Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Billy Ray, you started your talk with a poem, Sub-Arctica. Why start with a poem and why that poem? Well, the poem Sub-Arctica was inspired by this one-week period I spent in my mother's house over Christmas when it was below 40 degrees Celsius, and we didn't step aside, and we were sort of somewhat, you know, trapped. Not really, but essentially we didn't want to go anywhere. And that's also the time with which I began this talk, thinking about the specificity of my mother's house.

It's complex history, which I'm sure we'll get into. But I thought that the poetic register might allow me to bring the audience, listeners, people in the room, into a specific. to a specific emotional space, perhaps. Yeah. How often do you resort to poetry for that kind of effect? I started as a poet. Like, my writing life begins with poetry. It was always appealing to me

because I think it allowed me to give expression to big feelings, complicated feelings that I didn't have any other avenue to express them through. And I know what if I know the effect that poetry has on me, like especially, you know, lyric poetry, poetry that engages with history, with intimate life. I know that it moves me and I think I hope that when I use it in my public speaking capacities, that it also will help readers or listeners engage with me in an emotional way. Well, this one is such a, what a powerful poem. It's such a powerful poem.

And one line that really stands out is the one about a row of swaying poplars, quote, each stunned by its own capacity for survival. I found that image really arresting and, and as you say it, very emotional. I suppose I was thinking about the, like, how intense the winters are in northern Alberta, how poplar trees and many of the other trees are reduced to some kind of bear form. They've shed their leaves. They look fragile, but nonetheless, they endure. And I'm no plant or I'm no biologist. I don't know the specifics of, you know, the biological, you know, reasons for that. But as a poet, I can, you know, see, I think something about that resonates with me as an indigenous person from the North, Northern Alberta, and how we aren't always alert to the ways we have and continue to survive history. And that is also something, I think, worthy of literary consideration.

It was late December in Northern Alberta, 2021. Because we were in the middle of a historic cold snap, which the media called a prolonged deep freeze, I had fortified myself inside my mother's house. Temperatures hovered around minus 40 degrees Celsius. I hadn't been outside since arriving in my small rental car from the Edmonton International Airport. To step outside, one had to respect the weather

as that which could harm you. From a recliner in the living room, I looked out at the snowy landscape. The world was so bright, I could hardly bear it. From the front window beside which I was seated, I could see the road connecting the hamlet to the Trans-Canada Highway, the parking lot outside the elementary school

I attended as a child, and most movingly the forest in the distance, all the bare trees jutting out of the street. immense whiteness. In a poem called Subarctica, which you just heard, I described the trees as statues of awe that were stunned by their own capacity for survival. I suppose I was also describing myself. I am a poet after all, someone who sees in the quaking poplars evidence of my own existential circumstances. That fall, my mother and stepfather, had moved into the house, which had been tinkered with and renovated by an amateur carpenter

until his recent passing. The exterior is entirely white. Inside, my mother has painted the walls a soft gray. It is located on a large plot and includes two separate garages, and nestled beside one of those garages is a modest garden in which they grow potatoes and carrots. The carpenter had built onto the original frame of the house, adding a bedroom in front where I sleep, in a dining area in the back. Its core, however, has remained the same since the middle of the 20th century. Shortly after the above-mentioned move, my kukum, my grandmother, informed me that the house had initially been built for the nuns who were stationed at the residential school about a kilometer away. My Musham, who was forced to attend the school, remembered walking by the house

as a child, seeing glimpses of the nuns in their domestic setting. I was relayed this information over the phone, as I had moved to Vancouver by then, no longer in the vicinity of my homeland, a geographic and emotional distance further compounded by the pandemic. At first I was stunned. I couldn't fully integrate the information as felt knowledge. It felt like a fiction from another time. But I too could be thought of as a fiction from another time, a Cree man on the West Coast, thinking and existing in English, the language of empire. I had the urge to rebel against the house, to refrain from occupying it. An indigenous life, though, is always already historical. We are always living out the consequences of the long 20th century. And so I did visit around October

to mark the occasion of my birthday. That first night, I dreamt of a woman shrouded in black standing behind the shower curtain. I awoke unsettled and disturbed. I reimagined this moment in a short story in my book, coexistence called Summer Research, in which a graduate student lives out the nightmare in the vein of a psychological horror. I wrote that story because I felt over a burden with the dream and the house. I thought about them endlessly. I worried over what it meant to inhabit a haunted architecture of colonialismality, an extension of the residential school,

that site of one of our primal wounds as a people. It felt that I had in some small, inelectable way, been defeated. But to write about the experience without adhering to the logics of reality was part of a longer act of historical revenge that is my life and my writing. I later realized that what I was confronting was an experience in which my capacity to imagine the world as capacious and loving and freedom bearing had been rattled beyond its usual extent. In writing, I reasserted the power of the literary imagination to remake the world so as not to be defeated by it. I believe that the literary imagination is a space to insist on a different relation to the nightmare of colonialism,

one not of defeat, but of defiance and liberation. What's more, I was struck by a second realization that reconciliation broadly construed as a mode of contending with the colonial violence of Canada's maintenance, but especially the residential school system integral to it didn't offer up the interpretive infrastructure to perform this act of reimagination. As a living crepe person whose life and family have been marked by the trauma of residential schooling, I want in this essay to sit with a living crepe person whose life and family have been marked by the trauma of residential schooling, I want in this essay to sit with my nightmare

in that house in rural northern Alberta to grapple with what it means to dwell inside the reverberations of the past and to narrate that experience from a still contested present. The claim I want to make then is that in engaging with the literariness of indigenous lives and places, I'm doing something different than what reconciliation makes possible

or asks of the Canadian public generally. This may seem like a minor distinction to outline, but what it amounts to for me is an understanding of history as embedded in our public and private consciousnesses and not merely a dark chapter that can be dispensed with to point to that ill-suited metaphor so often used in state-sanctioned discourse. Ultimately, I want to articulate and demonstrate what it means to hold in one's mind the pastness and futurity of indigenous lives and communities in order to better render or make visible

the possibility of indigenous worlds beyond the usual grammars of conquest and reconciled. You describe your mother's house in detail in this section. You talk about the exterior color, white, the interior, soft gray, the double garage, the modest vegetable garden. Why was it important to draw this kind of verbal portrait of these details? I think because in order to get to my somewhat more complicated argument about reconciliation and about colonialism as a kind of haunting, I wanted people first to be able to locate themselves in this place,

in northern Alberta, which I think is a place that very few people will experience in the flesh or have. And I think that's the case for a lot of indigenous communities above the usual cities of Canada. And to me, it helps to make concrete something that can, seem abstract to the regular Canadian. Do you think it helps kind of underpin the stark difference between how ordinary it seems, despite its extraordinary history? Yeah, absolutely. I think upon first glance, you won't be able to discern a whole lot about this house

unless, of course, you have the local knowledge or the local history, which I didn't even have access to myself until it happened to be mentioned by my grandfather. In a phone call, I understand. Yeah. How did it come up? Well, interestingly, and I've written about this in other forms as well, but I was on the phone with my grandmother, and we were talking about my mom purchasing this house

and moving into it recently. And then in the background of that call, my grandfather mentions that it used to be a nunnery, a place for the nuns who ran the local residential school, would have lived. And that to me was such a profound moment. And I have a poem in my book where I say, you know, sometimes history is, someone says something in the background of a call with someone else. It's sort of like there's this distance that history feels like this immense distance.

And then suddenly out of nowhere, unexpectedly, it appears. Do you remember what you said when you found that out, the fact that your mom's house was originally built for nuns at the local residential school? I think I was just stunned. I mean, I remember feeling a kind of a weight in my stomach, the way, you know, there's this physiological response that preceded any kind of verbal or linguistic response. And I think I just had to sit with that knowledge. And I didn't really do much with it. for a few weeks, I believe. And then I started writing about it

and grappling with it and talking to siblings and whatnot about it. It's hard to imagine sort of apprehending the fact, but also knowing that your grandfather had to go to that residential school. It would walk by that exact house when it was occupied by the nuns who worked there.

How did hearing that news affect the way you saw your grandfather? Well, it sort of, it was of a piece or continuous with the way that residential school experiences and narratives typically emerge, at least in my experience, which is unexpectedly and in, you know, private domestic settings. It's not something that is formally, we don't like formally carve out space to talk about it, in part because that history is so difficult. and emotional. But it made sense to me that that is how I would glean more knowledge about this community and my grandpa's experience. And also it made sense that I didn't necessarily feel like I could ask further questions. And I think part of my job as a writer is not only to,

contend with that feeling of an inability to ask further questions, but also to see that not as an obstacle to inquiry or creativity, but perhaps the sight of its production. You link the literary imagination not to the past and to defeat, but to defiance and liberation, to quote you. A skeptic might dismiss the idea as just a beautiful turn of phrase. But I'd like to hear about an experience or a situation that convinces you that literature really has this liberating power. Well, I know personally that it has transformed my life. I think I grew up in Northern Alberta. I felt throughout most of my adolescence that I had to exert a great deal of effort to imagine a life for myself beyond what tradition and history

seemed to make possible for me. And books were one way that I was able to do that. I think both in terms of indigenous literature and queer literature, they helped me insert myself into a future that I had no means to bring into being yet. So it was like, like this anticipatory experience. And, you know, reading is perhaps one of the few, like, deeply private exercises we engage in that necessarily take part in relationship to someone else or other people, either imagined or real. And in that space of private contemplation, I think, is precisely,

where this work of like radical imagination takes place. I was raised by my grandparents in the Hamlet of Jusard. It is named after a French Catholic priest who oversaw the founding of the residential school in 1913, also known as St. Bruno's mission. We lived on a small acreage surrounded by trees on the other side of the highway, than my mother's current residence. My Masham from the Sucker Creek First Nation was raised in Jusard, while my kookum grew up on the Drophal Khri Nation just a kilometer or so east.

My Mashem was always coming back to Jusard, despite it also being the site of his colonial education. In this practice of return, he made the Hamlet signified differently for himself and his kin. Upon first encounter, Ducard may not register as an indigenous space. Named as it is to evoke the religious project of colonization, located as it is between two reserves, Jusar is nonetheless ancestral Cree territory.

In my book, This Wound is a World, I published a poem called Ode to Northern Alberta that attempted to depict the hamlet in a poetic language not normally applied to it. And I'll read it. Here, no one is birthed, only pieced together. I tire myself out pretending to have a body. Everyone worships feelings they don't have names for, but no one is talking about it. Love is a burning house we built from scratch. Love keeps us busy. while the smoke clears. 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.

Cree girls gather in the bush and wait for the future. In the meantime, they fall in love with the trees and hear everything. In the 1950s, my not yet Musham ran away from a residential school in Jusard, Alberta. As an adult, he kept coming back, despite knowing heaven is nowhere near here. Since I started writing, Jusard has been one of my core settings, though I have seldom named it. I have drawn on Jusard to represent unnamed rural spaces in northern Alberta, where undiscussed and under-processed traumas have occurred. Perhaps I felt that Ju-Sard was too small to obscure a place to name,

that the information would be obfuscating more than it would be illuminating. Perhaps I didn't want to bring critical attention to a community I grew up in and love to spend time and still. But more profoundly, there wasn't a structure... Hi, Donovan Woods here. Hey, hey, it's me, Tom Power. tell you about our brand new podcast is called the big five so donovan what is the big five yeah exactly what is the big five that's what the big five is all about every week tom and i will sit down with a

special guest and dive into new topics debating things like what are the big five farm animals the big five types of hat the big five guys named paul martin revere mescal mccartney john paul the debate is settled by a listener from somewhere across the country it's like a game show it is a game show the big five available now wherever you get your podcast sure of apprehension intact in the Hamlet to make sense of its complex and complicated histories. What remains of the residential school is situated in a valley behind one of the community cemeteries. My first encounters with the abandoned school were as a child.

My brother and I would toboggan into the valley during the winter, for example. Teenagers also often hosted parties in that valley. large campfires blazing just steps away from the dilapidated building. I never attended one of these, but they were popular events that I often heard secondhand stories about. I knew that the building was part of the residential school, though I can't now recall how I knew that. People discussed the school in vague terms. I remember friends and relatives describing it as haunted or cursed. On the one hand, this description of it as haunted didn't lead to a more robust engagement with the violence that occurred there. On the other hand, it was also one way to gesture to that violence in the absence of a fulsome public conversation about it.

The cultural theorist Avery Gordon explains that, and I quote, Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with, slavery, for instance, or when their oppressive nature is denied, end quote. Haunting Gordon makes clear isn't the same as the original acts of subjugation. but is instead one way those experiences are felt as realities under the weight of their repression or denial. We were haunted by the presence of the school because it had so deeply transformed the inner and outer worlds of our parents and our grandparents, our communities at large. Our fear of that building, to use Gordon's language again, was one way we were notified. of something being concealed that was very much alive and present.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. This talk from Billy Ray Belcourt is called My Mother's House, a story of haunting and colonial history, part of the 2025 Vancouver Island University's Indigenous Speaker Series. Belcourt argues that literary imagination can make possible what history has denied and can help reimagine the process of reconciliation. From Nanaimo, British Columbia, here's Billy Ray Belcourt. I was in junior high school when the Truth in Reconciliation Commission was first established in 2008,

part of the landmark Indian residential school settlement agreement. According again to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the TRC was intended to be a process that would guide Canadians through the difficult discovery of the facts behind the residential school system. It was also meant, they write, to lay the foundation for lasting reconciliation across Canada. To be clear, the TRC's founding was indeed a transformational moment in Canada, and its work spearheaded by indigenous leaders, including the late Justice Murray Sinclair and Chief Wilton Little Child was necessary and reparative for many

survivors of the system. And it wasn't until high school, once the TRC had opened up discursive space to describe the residential school system, that the curriculum, as I experienced it, began to address indigenous peoples and our histories. Of course, this was still to a minimal degree and I still had to endure racist sentiments from peers in high school and later in university. By 2015, when the final report of the TRC was published, I had developed an admittedly ambivalent relationship to reconciliation as a key word for making sense of indigenous life in politics. Personally, my mushroom went through the monetary claims process. in which he had to discuss his experience at St. Bruno's mission in a courtroom in Edmonton

to establish his worthiness as a claimant. He hasn't discussed his experience from that era since. Conceptually, reconciliation became a mega concept that attempted to absorb disparate aspects of indigenous politics into itself, and thus in some ways flattened the terrain of possible responses to state violence past and present. A Cherokee scholar, Jeff Corn Tassel, and collaborator Cindy Holder, for example, argue that reconciliation may in fact be a politics of distraction

in which we are pulled into a political legal rights-based process that plays into the state's repair policies, which aren't concerned with the repatriation of land to indigenous nations. Likewise, Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson reminds us that the colonial project is very much ongoing and it still creates conditions of premature indigenous death and it still continues to seek out the elimination of indigenous political orders despite the emotional notes the state strikes about forgiveness. Sarah Dowling again also points out that the apologies that have been offered by politicians

in Canada and the United States regarding the residential school system have been aimed toward incorporation, assimilation, and containment, which means that indigenous nations' ongoing claims to violation and their calls for reparations struggle to hold as much political weight. The difference between the state's emotional and legal reactions to the quote-unquote problem of the desires of indigenous peoples can be seen in the recent court case between the Calvachian nation in British Columbia and the Crown, in which the Crown argued that Aboriginal title and private property couldn't coexist, an argument the basis of which is that private property should override Aboriginal title.

It is important to note that the Calvician nation opted not to displace the private property rights of those in the contested territory. Public outcry over the decision not only obscures this fact, but also contributes to a renewed anti-indigenous sentiment that is fueled by misinformation and rage baiting. Further, in 2023, the Yellowhead Institute out of Toronto Metropolitan University reported that of the 94 calls to action, only 10 of them had been fulfilled. The authors of the report write, and I quote, if the current pace holds 2.25 calls a year, it will take approximately 38 more years before all the calls to action are implemented. Reconciliation in 2057, question mark. What is at stake in

these conceptual debates about what reconciliation does in reality? and in public policy is how indigenous peoples and communities are imagined in the present. Yellow Knives Dene scholar Glenn Kulthard argues that reconciliation takes place on terms still largely dictated by the state, and that because of this, indigenous peoples have become, and I quote, the primary objects of repair,

not the colonial relationship, end quote. I want to suggest that in order to imagine indigenous peoples in excess of the colonial relationship, we need to marshal not necessarily or just the discourse of reconciliation, but also the power of the literary imagination. In her book, Poetic Justice, philosopher Martha Nussbaum describes the literary imagination as a public imagination that shapes what we understand. as proper ethical and moral conduct. She argues that literary forms, but especially the novel,

have a unique contribution to make because they entice us to, quote, imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstances, be oneself or one of one's loved ones, end quote. Nussbaum implies that the literary imagination is dependent on emotional experiences of connection and empathy with a possible life or possible world. This, she says, is different than what history does, which for her simply recounts the facts, which is a reduction.

But while I want to depart somewhat from Nussbaum's treatment, other phrase, what I will proceed with is this notion of the literary as an invitation into a collective act of imagining another possible world. The apparatus of reconciliation doesn't necessarily invite all of us to hypothesize about what kinds of worlds indigenous people want to live in, but instead insists on our current world as the main viable option, which is a good enough less violent state. To approach indigenous life and history in a literary way, drawing on the tools of the literary imagination,

is to suspend belief in the present as the primary or singular spear of political and ethical life. To see the literariness of indigenous lives is to acknowledge our complex personhood. A phrase of Avery Gordon's for the recognition that life is complicated and that we are beset by contradiction and that we suffer graciously and selfishly. It is to recognize that others are never truly that. What's more, Gordon explains, and I quote, complex personhood is about conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life in people's lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning. end quote. I want to ask us to move analytically between the past and the present and the future in a way that opens up the future for indigenization in a manner that demonstrates the future was always already indigenous.

You say that in northern Alberta, that future is here. What is it about northern Alberta that has beckoned and welcomed the future? where the rest of us haven't. Mm-hmm. You know, reserves are such complex places because they begin historically as what scholars have called open-air prisons. For many years, indigenous people, their movement in and out of reserves

was intensely scrutinized and surveilled. and they come into being in order to make settlement possible in order to make what we understand now is the sort of infrastructure of the country possible, the railroad, highways, etc. And so we were, you know, first nations people were seen as necessary sort of sacrifices. And so we could think of reserves

as these kinds of, you know, sacrificial zones. that made the country possible. And yet, well, reserves still exist, but also I think we as indigenous people as First Nations people have sort of reconstructed them. So I've said before, they're one of the few places where what's there is ours, and what's there is deeply indigenous,

deeply Cree in my context. And though we're very much still beholden to government funding, etc. I think that reserves. They're like the closest thing we have to something like our, you know, previous communities or previous ways of living and inhabiting the land and being in a relationship with it. So in some ways it feels if you kind of, you know, squint or, you know, think in a certain way, it feels at times like utopian. And I think that's what I'm sort of getting at, I think when I say that there's something futuristic about Northern Alberta. An incredible way to describe it. Utopian.

Yeah. I'm always thinking about Northern Alberta. I'm always going back. I remember that first semester I went to University in Edmonton. I was so homesick. I went home every single weekend, driving my little Pontiac Grand Am through Blizzards, risking my life probably. but just so insistent on being back home in order to sort of just weather the intense change that I was experiencing as a young person. How often do you go now? I go several times a year.

I spend extended time over Christmas. I go a few times during the summer and then sometimes I end up there at random points in the year. But that drive from Edmonton to Northern Alberta, it's like my favorite journey. And it feels like so much of just whatever, the world, you know, my, my job, etc., things kind of just fall away. And I'm back where I'm supposed to be. And I always say, like, I'm going to retire there.

You know, I might get back sooner, but I do have to make a living. In order to inhabit my mother's house differently, I had to make a living. I had to make use of the literary imagination. It proved difficult at first to see and experience it as anything other than a haunted house. But by the time I arrived, my mother had already remade the house entirely. Through gestures of decoration and space-making, the house transformed, I did not dream of the women shrouded in black after that first occurring. The nightmare was perhaps my body's way of processing the haunted legacy I was newly positioned within.

My mother's furniture and photographs and food and care dispelled the nightmare, the apparition. That she wouldn't be disturbed by the house's history should have been obvious to me. She could immediately envision remaking the space to fulfill her domestic desires. That, of course, was an act of literary imagination. In northern Alberta, the dream of a literary life wasn't necessarily a sociological given. I grew up with almost no books around the house. It wasn't until middle school that I had access to the kinds of books I wanted to read through the school library. I have an image of myself as a voracious reader, but when I think about the books I read at that time,

there were mostly those books assigned to me in language arts classrooms, as well as the dystopian and vampire novels I found on the shelves of Walmart and other commercial booksellers, which we had to drive to. It was in high school, and due in part to the burgeoning internet age I was more firmly rooted in by that point, that my tastes evolved, and I started finding in books blueprints for how to envision a different life for myself. I fell in love with ideas in literature because my desires were vaster than my physical environment. What at the time seemed like an inner lack, but was in fact an inner plenitude, that, to use the language of the late and great theorist Jose Esteban Munoz pulled me toward a future horizon

I couldn't name or describe, but I could feel the presence of in my body. I had to believe in that plenitude, despite not having obvious ways to decode it or to realize it. In ghostly matters, Avery Gordon writes, we need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there. Gordon wrote this in the context of tracing the contours of social, life in order to imagine otherwise. Presently, I evoke it as a description of what I have endeavored to do in my own writing practice. When I was working on my second book, I decided to

undertake an auto-ethnographic visit to the site where the remnants of St. Bruno's mission are located. It was summertime. The air was warm. I went a little. unsure of how I would have asked anyone to accompany me. To arrive at the site, I had to turn off the road, drive past the cemetery, and then onto a grassy expanse. I parked my vehicle in line with a farmer's no trespassing sign and tentatively approached. I remember inching slowly down the hill into the valley. I remember wanting to take notice of the grass, which was long, and the tree. in the distance, which were lush. I tried to listen for something, but all I could hear was the wind.

I stood in front of the building and tried to really see the frame which the year 1947 had been etched onto and the darkness that emanated from it. It felt disorienting. I didn't stay very long. I remember feeling disavowed or rejected by the sight. I do not want to remake or reimagine that site. It exists as it does in its terrible entirety, and it is indeed haunted. Haunted by the lives cut short, the children who died there, as well as those like my grandfather who survived but were marked by it forever. How we make sense of that space is of sociological and literary significance.

The Cree people of my homeland already live in ways that run counter to the worlds of those schools. It is not on us to remember what we cannot forget. In various and differently intelligible ways, the Cree people of Northern Alberta have already imagined otherwise and will continue to do so. As a literary act, I will rewrite the conditions of poverty. and impossibility for free people on the shores of the lake and in the diaspora. I will continue to write and rewrite the world I want to live in so that when it finally arrives, I will be able to fully recognize it. Thank you. The ending you say, I will continue to write and rewrite the world I want to live in so that

when it finally arrives, I will be able to fully recognize it. Is there one concrete experience that convinces you that literary imagination does have this kind of power? The very first reading I did in Edmonton of my poems in, I think this was also 2015, that was a really, a lot going on that year. At 2015, I read my poems for the first time in public. And during an intermission, this was at the arched. Gallery of Alberta. A woman approached me from the audience. She said that she had a queer indigenous son and she had not been able to raise him and he had passed away, but that my poems gave her a sense of the person he could have been or might have been in that they brought

her a kind of closure. And it was an incredibly like an emotional experience and I feel kind of lucky that that was at my very first reading that was something that I was able to experience because it so intensely reminds us of, you know, literature as a social undertaking a social experience, that it's something we do with one another. And I think much of its value lies in the fact that it makes possible ways of relating to each other that don't require immediate. proximity. You know, it's something that can happen abstractly, you know, in our minds, in our bodies,

through an engagement with the book. And I think that helps us get to, like, our true desires. It helps give expression to our true longings. I mean, anyone who's, like, been closeted, for example, who's read books before they've come out, like, you know, you know what this feels like. Like, I knew someone who told me, you know, when he was a young, a young, a young, person in reading queer books and had not come out yet, he would, he would like rip the covers of the books off because he didn't want to give away the fact that he was reading

queer books. And it made, so it made it feel like these were these, like, dangerous objects. And they're, you know, they are dangerous to the extent that they can help us, so dismantle the status quo or help us bring about something that feels hidden or locked away that we feel shame about. As a last thing, I want to, I want to just reread something you say in your lecture. I want to ask us to move analytically between the past and the present and the future

in a way that opens up the future for indigenization in a matter that demonstrates that the future was always already indigenous. Just as a final thought, where does that idea sit in your mind? Where does it reside in your mind now that the future was always

already indigenous? I think it's part of this thing I do in my writing, where it's called like Prefiguration I'm trying to like bring something into being that doesn't exist yet or like through the act of articulation

I can help make something more real like I think what motivates me as a writer but also as a person in the world is the belief that we are not doomed to repeat history. We are not

doomed to reproduce the conditions of living that make indigenous suffering a regular experience. And I think I've already seen,

like I've had the privilege of seeing in my own life, in my own community, the way that indigenous people, you know, think against the grain of the normative and, like, practice ways of living that make indigenous joy and care more possible. And I want to believe that that can happen continuously and to a degree that it will transform. Everyone.

Billy Ray Belcourt, I'm really pleased to speak with you. Thank you for this lecture and for your insights. And please do come back. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Billy Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Drift Pile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. He's also an associate professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He delivered his talk in 2025 as part of the Indigenous Speaker's series at Vancouver Island University in the Nimo, BC.

This episode was produced by Anne Penman and Greg Kelly with help from Matthew Laysen Rider. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Technical production Johnny Casamatta. Nicola Luxchic is the senior producer. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm now. La Ayd.