Hailed by CanLit, poet Billy Ray Belcourt allies with Indigenous ‘resistance’

The 24-year-old Cree scholar — the youngest-ever winner of Canada’s richest poetry prize — says this hailing can feel “skewered” coming from the largely white arts-scene elite who have been so quick to laud his efforts. (File Photo: nakinisowin/Instagram)

The cultural cognoscenti rains down plaudits and praise on Billy-Ray Belcourt, but it’s not their approval he’s after.

The 24-year-old Cree scholar — the youngest-ever winner of Canada’s richest poetry prize — says this hailing can feel “skewered” coming from the largely white arts-scene elite who have been so quick to laud his efforts.

His ambitions lie with Canada’s flourishing Indigenous creative community, he says, even as he operates within the institutions that have so often reduced their stories to reinforce white-centric narratives.

In his new poetry collection, Belcourt turns this colonial gaze on itself to reframe the past, as he works in tandem with other Indigenous writers to envision a new future.

“It’s a disservice to try to understand us in a way that’s sort of easy or simple,” Belcourt said by phone from Edmonton.

“Sometimes, that means … you have to refuse legibility. You have to opt for a writing or an art practice that is sometimes obscure or difficult in the hopes that it also reflects both the difficulties or complicatedness of our lives.”

Belcourt, who is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northern Alberta, won the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize last year with his debut collection “This Wound is a World.”

In his followup, “NDN Coping Mechanisms,” the 2016 Rhodes scholar blends verse, photos and redacted texts to put forward a “counter-history” of Canada from an Indigenous, queer perspective.

“NDN” is an internet shorthand that Indigenous people use to refer to themselves, but it can also be an acronym for “Not Dead Native,” revealing that part of the work of being Indigenous today is to “refuse to die,” Belcourt said.

“I think that part of the work of the poet in the 21st century in the West is to not just bear witness, but to trouble and denormalize the way in which cruelty actually is a part of the fabric of life in Canada,” he said.

“(I) try to show that, as I say in one of the poems, an entire citizenry is implicated in ongoing colonial violence against Native people.”

Belcourt said a key historical marker for the book was the trial of Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley, who was acquitted of second-degree murder last year in the shooting death of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old member of the Red Pheasant First Nation.

He was struck by how the highly publicized case aligned with a long tradition of disregard for Indigenous life, particularly in the Prairies.

The threats can be as menacing as they are mundane, he said. Jogging through the streets of Edmonton, Belcourt said he’s been followed by suspicious stares, and some passersby will even cross the street to avoid him.

This makes for an “unlivable life,” and now a few years older than Boushie was when he died, Belcourt confronts the possibility he could be next in the poem “Canadian Horror Story.”

“It feels unethical to age,” he writes.

“If I die prematurely, forget burial/ just drop my body/ on the steps/ of the Supreme Court/ of Canada,” the poem continues, cascading down the page like a staircase.

Belcourt said he is keenly aware that non-Indigenous readers are drawn to stories of Indigenous suffering, while failing to reckon with their role in perpetrating it.

“I think it’s actually a part of the process of white personhood, to be confronted with all of this trauma and state-sanctioned violence, and continue to go about living normally,” said Belcourt.

“It actually reminds them again and again of their privilege.”

Belcourt, who is set to join the University of British Columbia’s creative writing faculty next year, said he’s trying to find a balance between recognizing the pain Indigenous people shoulder while emphasizing the ways they care for one another in striving towards freedom and joy.

He’s joined in this effort by a diverse cohort of Indigenous artists who are rebelling against imposed narratives to write their own.

“I like the idea of a critical mass of us sort of furtively building something that we don’t necessarily know precisely what will come of it, but that always is about resistance,” Belcourt said.

“The task will be on generations to come, I think, to figure out what precisely to do with that.

Whether to refuse Canadian literature altogether, to refuse to participate in sort of more capitalist aspects of book publishing, whether to do something that sort of breaches the border of Canada.”

“NDN Coping Mechanisms,” published by House of Anansi Press, hits shelves Tuesday.