Proudly presented by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Department of English Language and Literature, the 2022-2023 Munro Beattie Lecture will be delivered by acclaimed author and journalist Waubgeshig Rice.
Waubgeshig Rice has written three fiction titles, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies. His most recent novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, was published in 2018, became a national bestseller and was selected for the Canada Reads 2023 Longlist. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002, and spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist and radio host. He left CBC in 2020 to focus on his literary career. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and three sons. His forthcoming novel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, will be published in October 2023.
Inspired by Anishinaabe history and culture within his home community of Wasauksing First Nation, Rice's talk at the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre on March 11 will explore how histories and experiences often overlooked by the dominant culture can make way for a deeper connection across our communities through sharing the richness of stories and the arts.
In the lead up to the event, Rice sat down for an interview with Sam Bean, an MA Student in English and the Department of English Language and Literature Student Blogger for 2022/2023. You can read Sam’s Blog here.
Sam Bean: You’ve titled your upcoming Munro Beattie lecture “Anishinaabe History and Writing the Future”. Without giving away entirely what you'll be talking about, what motivated you to pair these two concepts together?
Waubgeshig Rice: My life has been an ongoing journey of learning about my background as an Anishinaabe person, and particularly gaining insights through history — through the stories that have been shared through my community and passed down from my ancestors, specifically stories that have been neglected by Canadian history.
I have learned more about the history of my area, specifically the Georgian Bay area, through anecdotes shared amongst my community and in school on the reserve. By and large, when I went off reserves into the mainstream, there was so much that was lacking. This was back in the 1990s. Filling in those gaps, at a community level, really instilled a sense of pride in me and helped me understand that storytelling autonomy is so crucial for Indigenous peoples, as well as others who have been pushed to the so-called margins, who have been oppressed and neglected by the dominant narrative here in Canada that has really only told one story since Canada's inception.
I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I a prophet. I can't see the future. But the title of my talk specifically refers to someone like me learning about history — on a very micro level, at the grassroots — in order to determine what my own personal outcomes can be, and what I hope the people around me can be inspired to do as well.
SB: Do you find that the balancing of the more personal-scale community history and family history with national history was something that came naturally to you as a writer? Or was it something you worked on that developed over time?
WR: I think it probably came naturally, because I had that communal spirit of storytelling and learning from elders and family members. It was just part of our gathering process, growing up on the reserve — keeping in mind, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, back when there was no social or digital media. Even though we were in central Ontario, right beside a town, we were still off to the side; we didn't have cable TV on the rez, and radio stations were very limited. So, I think there was a real focus, in those times when we gathered together, to hear stories and to learn.
When I started learning more about Canadian history, and how it’s presented through a mainstream narrative, I already had that complementary knowledge within me, as an Anishinaabe person. So, I was able to think a critically about what was being presented to me, even at a very young age.
For example, I grew up as a kid during the Meech Lake Accord when Elijah Harper pushed back against it, during the resistance at OKA in 1990, during the onset of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal peoples, during the standoff at Ipperwash — all these very historic moments that I, my community and my family lived through. I would see how what was being presented in the media were not fulsome portrayals of what was actually happening.
I’m grateful for my community, and especially my parents, who encouraged me to question things and to have the courage to push back against the biased or inaccurate portrayals of Indigenous communities and peoples being spread through the media and through history.
SB: The beginning of your writing career and overall media production career was in journalism. I'm interested in what attracted you to journalism?
WR: It was a fluke. I wasn't considering a career in journalism at all when I was a teenager, though I did have a keen interest in writing. In my high school years, I was very fortunate to be presented with an opportunity to write for a newspaper. I was on a student exchange in Germany when I was 17, after my Grade 12 year, and was approached by a newspaper called the Anishinabek News, based here in Northern Ontario. They asked if I wanted to write about my experiences there: an Anishnaabe teen in a European country. They offered to pay me every time they printed one of my articles; it was the first time I realized you could get paid to write!
I had some monumental experiences when I was in Germany and I wrote about them. The feedback I received was really positive and, honestly, quite overwhelming, because it was also the first time I realized the impact that writing could have on people. I returned to Canada after a year in Germany and had one last year of high school to do, and that's when I applied to journalism school. I went in thinking I was going to be a print journalist, but about halfway through my time at Toronto Metropolitan University, I became really interested in broadcasting and got pulled in that direction.
SB: Do you see your fiction writing, like Midnight Sweatlodge and Moon of the Crusted Snow, as being informed by your experiences as a journalist? Or do you see them as separate?
WR: I think there's some interplay there, some interweaving of writing styles and stories, and so on. I always say that I was fortunate to have a journalism career prior to becoming a full-time author, because when you're a journalist, you get a front row seat to the human experience — especially if you're a general assignment reporter and you cover basically anything, from a tragedy like a house fire to bureaucratic mundanity like garbage day at city hall. You have to go out and get people's reactions to these things, and when you're interviewing somebody face-to-face you absorb their emotion, their insights, their experiences and sometimes their expertise.
Shortly before I left the CBC, I did the math and I had conducted something like 10,000 interviews over the course of my journalism career. When you meet that many people and are privileged to hear them express their feelings, you get to understand humanity on a pretty profound level. So, I can really draw on that when I'm writing fiction and be inspired or influenced by those memories. If I'm writing about a house fire, for example, I'll think back to a time when I interviewed someone who lost their home to a fire; I'll remember the flicker of the flame in their teary eye, or something like that.
Another way that my fiction career has greatly benefited from my journalism career is just that sort of stripped down, more active style of writing. With Moon of the Crusted Snow, especially, it's supposed to be a thrilling story, you know? It's supposed to have some action and good pacing and movement through the scenes. My earlier drafts were a lot longer and clunkier, and my editor, Susan Renouf, really encouraged me to think back to some of the writing that I was trained to do as a journalist: more action, less passive writing, focus on emotion and human interaction, and so on. That was a pretty profound eye-opening lesson for me to hear from my editor: "This is how you've been writing for almost 20 years now, use that in your fiction."
SB: Speaking of Moon of the Crusted Snow, it's quite a shift to go from writing about recent events to writing about dystopian futures. What were some of the new possibilities or challenges that you found in this genre?
WR: I've been really attracted to the genre since I was a teen. When I was in high school, we read books like 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, The Chrysalids — those classics in I guess what you would call the post-apocalyptic or dystopian canon. What I really liked about those stories when I was younger was the opportunity to speculate about the future. Because in a lot of ways, those books are a social commentary on our present. They portray potential negative outcomes if we don't work to correct the things that are going wrong today. I always thought that was an interesting way to approach stories and writing in general.
Later, as an adult, reading books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy really catalyzed me to try writing in that genre. Not just because I really enjoyed that story, but also because of what I felt the story was lacking. The Road is this grim and dark tale about a father and a son trying to escape a mysterious apocalypse. But there isn't really that much discussion in the story about partnering with others or creating community. And I thought, you know, the Indigenous experience of living in dystopia is a lot different. It's about trying to find community and relating shared experiences to create ways to heal. There's already knowledge around surviving the apocalypse, because the apocalypse has already happened to Indigenous peoples. How Indigenous nations have picked up the pieces and reformed and renewed themselves and their identities is inspirational, despite what has been lost as a result of being displaced and colonized. That's what I really wanted to highlight. It’s not unique or original what I've tried to with Moon of the Crusted Snow — many other great Indigenous authors have explored this same idea. To be able to contribute to that body of work is just a huge honour.
SB: Another project of yours which I’m interested in is the Storykeepers podcast that you host with Jennifer David discussing First Nations, Inuit and Métis authors and their books. As the podcast enters its third season, what are some of the reflections you have on the project, looking back from the beginning to now?
WR: It was Jennifer's idea, her passion project for a number of years now, and she asked me to help her make it a reality — and I was happy to do so! What she wanted to do from the beginning, which I fully supported, was just have an outlet to promote Indigenous literature — to highlight some of the books that are out there, the classics and more recent publications, and bring in other Indigenous people to talk about them. To have a book club-style discussion and invite listeners to take part in it as well.
I think getting into podcasting was a bit of a foregone conclusion for me, coming out of the broadcasting world — it was just a matter of what kind of podcast it was going to be. What I love about this podcast is it's very loose — we don't really script anything at all. It’s very liberating, especially coming from the CBC where everything has to be finely timed. I’m proud of the work we've done and I thank Jennifer for bringing me along for the ride, because it's been really fun.
SB: Thank you so much for your time today. Any final thoughts before we wrap up our conversation?
WR: I think it's a really exciting time for literature, especially the works coming from Indigenous communities. People have more opportunities to speak their truths and share their lived experiences and fiction. Another huge benefit that I've drawn from working in fiction now, having come out of the journalism world, is the opportunity to humanize and contextualize some very profound experiences, issues and realities in Indigenous communities. A novel gives you so much more space to work with, to really drive home the everyday things that impact Indigenous people. I was very fortunate to be able to do that as a journalist. But I've also found that with fiction, even though I'm writing made up people, it has been quite liberating and quite empowering to be able to pick what I want people to read about — the important experiences I want them to take away, not necessarily to learn about Indigenous realities, but to make that human connection if they've never been able to do that before.
And that's just for non-Indigenous readers. For Indigenous people who read what I write, it’s just the greatest honour to know that they see some familiarity in anything that I've written, that they feel at home reading a book of mine. I couldn't ask for anything more. If there's any measure of success that I could apply to whatever I'm doing, it's that people connect with what I've written because it feels authentic to them. It's all about authentic experiences and trying to relate them — even in fiction and even when speculating about the future.