Over the weekend, the Northwords group held their annual Writer’s Festival event to help share knowledge and opportunities with aspiring writers in the NWT, and among the plethora of discussions and readings, one event focused on the memoirs of Indigenous writers, and the unique strengths of the medium.
Entitled, Stories That Carry Us: Indigenous Memoirs and Memory, the event was hosted by Richard Van Camp, who led a discussion with noted Indigenous authors Niigaan Sinclair, Stephan Kakfwi, and Katłıà Lafferty, who each shared some of their personal experiences in creating their respective memoirs.
They explained that writing memoirs from personal stories can serve multiple purposes, such as helping to recover from addictions, collecting important life stories, and can even help highlight pervasive social issues.
Yellowknife’s Explorer Hotel. (CKLB files)
At one moment, Sinclair spoke about how his writings for a newspaper column eventually featured the same political and social topics repeating themselves. He felt that this served as evidence of whether or not issues were actually being solved, or were simply moved on from once attention died down.
During the Q&A section of the discussion, one audience member asked how the authors felt once they had finally published their memoirs. Kakfwi responded with “It didn’t change my life, but it changed how I remember things. I sometimes remembered things in a way that made them more romantic. It’s not the way that community or friends remember it.”
Lafferty answered the same question with “I don’t have to be ashamed for growing up as an Indigenous woman. It’s very validating that we can write and talk about these things without being shunned or silenced by society when we’re trying to tell our truths. Not everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows, but there’s something good that can come out of talking about hard truths.”
Richard Van Camp added to the discussion, as he shared an anecdote from Judith Drennan, who ran the former Yellowknife Book Cellar for more than forty years.
“Her greatest joy was when she first came to Yellowknife and opened the book store, there was a small shelf of Northern books, and none of them were written by Indigenous or Northern writers. They were written by other people who visited here, maybe lived here for a while, or did a pile of research here and left. Her Greatest joy, of course, was expanding to shelf after shelf after shelf of Northern and Indigenous voices.
“I really feel that this is our time to tell our stories our way. I’m over the moon that we have a Northern publisher now here in Yellowknife with Northern Quill.”
Van Camp added that Northern Quill has now put out an open call for Northern writers to submit manuscripts in any genre and format, and shared how excited he was for this development.
“I can’t wait to see who they’re going to publish. I think that life is about dreams coming true, and the beauty of publishing is you never know who’s going to come out of these communities. I love it, and I’m proud of everybody!”
