Defying haunting colonial history with literary imagination
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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 Ayed.
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 writer Billy Ray Belcourt from the Driftpile Crenation, 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.
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