Presented in partnership with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
Join us for a reading by Dallas Hunt from CREELAND, a collection of poetry concerned with connections to home and language, even from great distances, and the power of these connections as part of a process of creating, living, and flourishing.
“The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the role of Indigenous aesthetics in the creation and nurturing of complex Indigenous lifeworlds. They aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree economies enable, and the words that try—and ultimately fail—to articulate them.”
Reading followed by moderated discussion and audience Q&A.
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative works published in Contemporary Verse 2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018. His new book, CREELAND, is out through Nightwood Editions. Hunt is an assistant professor of Indigenous literatures at the University of British Columbia.
Moderator
Esmé Decker is a second-year student in English Honours, minoring in Environment & Society. Her climate organization journey began with leading her high school’s climate strikes and has led her to organizing with Climate Justice UBC, coordinating the team for UBC Climate Hub's Youth Climate Ambassadors Project, and facilitating climate storytelling workshops.
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
UBC Reads Sustainability with Dallas Hunt will be followed at 7pm by a screening of films at the Norman Bouchard Memorial Theatre selected by Belkin artist-in-residence Holly Schmidt in collaboration with the UBC Film Society.
Schmidt has selected films that resonate with Vegetal Encounters, her slow residency in the Outdoor Art Program at the Belkin, and in particular her current project Fireweed Fields, which transforms the Belkin's lawns into a meadow.
The selected films, Wild Relatives (Jumana Manna), Fordlandia (Melanie Smith), and Indigenous Plant Diva (Kamala Todd) engage with questions of presentness, biodiversity, and learning from the relationships between human and non-human beings.
Part book club, part lecture series, and part learning outside of the classroom, UBC Reads Sustainability brings well-known sustainability authors to UBC to engage in a campus-wide discussion, creating a forum for students across disciplines to discuss sustainability issues.