It is National Indigenous History month and I’m delighted to share this conversation between myself and Metis scholar and poet Marilyn Dumont. During this episode, we talk about discovery of self and place, colonization and survival, the evolution of identity, the strength of Indigenous narratives as part of honouring healing and witnessing through story vs settler shame, and the importance of being you in your writing.

A professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, Marilyn Dumont is a Métis writer and scholar and is the author of four collections of poems: A Really Good Brown Girl (winner of the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award) and now in it’s 13th reprint, green girl dreams Mountains (winner of the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s 2001 Stephan G. Stephanson Award), that tongued belonging (winner of the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and Aboriginal Book of the Year Award) and The Pemmican Eaters (published in 2015 by ECW Press). Selections from A Really good Brown Girl are widely anthologized in secondary and post-secondary texts. Marilyn Dumont has been Writer-in-Residence at the Edmonton Public Library and in numerous universities across Canada. In addition, she has been faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Writing with Style and Wired Writing programs, as well as an advisor and mentor in their Indigenous Writers’ Program.

This podcast also comes out as we learn more about the heartbreaking discovery of 215 murdered indigenous children who were forced into being part of the residential school system. As a settler, I will continue to listen, learn, and act. My family is donating to the Indian Residential School Survivors Association. I am also including a link for those who also wish to donate and to learn more. https://www.irsss.ca/?fbclid=IwAR3fsVTI3RLbQf-mNZyBHqdcpE0OLzO10GJkDWXHL5dUg85bAmQwyxM3zPo